Gaming Daily A-Z

Top ten FPS that are FOSS Time for another overweening list - the SEO godesses demand it! Tremulous has 1.1 stable, 1.2 dev and 1.3 third party dev versions. It's a mess. Getting bots to run is a mess. Yet I love this game. I am only capable of playing 50% (can't handle moving aliens at all) yet I had the most fun building bases in Tremulous. So you want to download and play Tremulous? HA! HA I SAY! Pick your poison: 1.1 stable from 2006 1.2 beta from 2009 1.3 inofficial alpha from 2018 I still don't know which is the most useful for either finding servers with bots or humans. ( 1.3 has zombie game mode servers with bots is all I know ). Unvanquished is Tremulous 2.0 and a little more complex and hardware requirements. If you can find a better-looking FOSS game I'm all ears and eyes. Uvq has bots built-in. OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with strictly freely licensed assets, some of which likely satisfy niche fetishes. Who doesn't know OpenArena ? Rexuiz is really i...

While the recent new release of Cube2: Sauerbraten didn't bring any really big changes, the network of friendly forks keeps expanding. But before I go into more details, here is a new feature trailer of Cube2: Sauerbraten: The maybe most prominent and fully FOSS fork RedEclipse is still working on the promised new 1.4 release, with them doing some silly and some cool enhancement projects in the meantime... so yeah: Red Eclipse in Valve Time tm Octaforge still has a few day to go in order to avoid missing their estimated release "this month", but when browsing OpenGameArt.org, I came across an interesting fork of the Sandbox Game Maker fork, called Lamiae with the RPG game Kelgar : Kelgar Gameplay 0.8 - Indie DB According to their github page, content seems to be libre (CC-by or CC-by-SA) but information is a bit scarce. Even less information is available for this other fork, called SabiCube , but you can download and test their alpha. Oh and a bit older, but also ...

Looks like we will get some nice x-mas presents this year: A bit delayed but probably right on time for the Mayan end of the world, we will see a long awaited new release of Cube2:Sauerbraten . Read about the release announcement here . Hmm, I wonder if it has already Occulus Rift support... Also on the FPS front, AlienArena is having a major engine update, with a claimed massive 3-4 times speed increase in BSP rendering and more VBO improvements. Mars meets CounterStrike? Furthermore they announce a new game-mode to be added soon, which tries to slow down the game-play of AlienArena a bit and add a more tactical appeal. Sounds a bit like selling out to the CounterStrike/ModernWarefare crowd to me, but lets see how it will play ;) Last but not least, GarageGames has announced that after the recent FOSS licensed release of their 3D engine Torque3D (see latest updates here , sadly no working Linux port yet), they will also open-source their 2D engine ! And in fact it will not only be a...

Give Cube 2 some tech! Vote  here  for Lee "eihrul" Salzman to receive an Oculus Rift for Cube 2 development! Oculus Rift is the much lauded VR headset that was Kickstarted recently, making almost 10 times the initial goal in pledges. Unfortunately, it isn't an open project, however, one of the big names in FOSS game dev, Lee "eihrul" Salzman has been nominated to receive a Rift dev kit in a giveaway competition, hosted by Oculus. Eihrul is the lead developer of the Cube2 "Sauerbraten" engine, that has had implementations other interesting technologies such as the " 3rd Space " force feedback vest implemented, making Cube2 an excellent project to provide Rift support. Vote for him here

The following is a guest post by  Lee Salzman , a contributor to several open source game projects and the lead developer of such projects as the ENet networking library and Sauerbraten, i ntroducing IQM (the Inter-Quake Model format), a simple model format designed to meet the practical challenge of animated content for Quake(-like) 3D engines and allow more sharing of modeling tools across various engines As much as players or fans of various open source FPS games might view all these projects as competing, isolated islands, the surprising and hopeful truth is, we developers actually get together and talk about development challenges a lot. And in past discussions, one of those issues that stuck out like a sore thumb was content, especially animated content such as player models. We were all using our own various custom model formats or cast-off commercial formats (like id's MD5 or Valve's SMD formats) with related third-party export or conversion tools, with varying degrees...

Bananabread is the spiritual successor to Syntensity (which added a Javascript scripting layer to Sauerbraten) only this time running inside the player's browser. It was ported using Emscripten, a C++ (LLVM) to Javascript compiler, and seems to have quite a lot of Sauerbraten's functionality ported over, including bots, multiple weapons, map editing, and even a Javascript api to control camera cutscenes. It currently runs in the development versions of Firefox and Chrome  and seems to get about 1/3rd to 1/4th of native fps. Get the source here:  https://github.com/kripken/BananaBread

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards. Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!                              You can find the sourcecode on Github  here EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox  / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

So it seems Red Eclipse is having a "contest" for creating an official trailer for their upcoming 1.2 release. Nothing to win (except fame), but the guys from Sauerbraten (also Cube2 engine based, like Red Eclipse) recently did the same with a quite nice result:   New official Sauerbraten trailer So if you want to participate, have a look at their rules and check out these nice open-source tools for video capturing:  GLC ( short tutorial by our qudobup ) and editing: PiTiVi or KDEnlive (sorry for being Linux centric here :p ). In other news I can report that the Xonotic team is following up on their promise to report more news and developments on their Blog :) Check out the latest entry for a log read and many nice pictures. Personally I am currently most excited about the mod "Overkill" with tries to take some features of the well loved instagib mode (sadly so much that it is sometimes hard to find anything but instagib games :( ) like right click laser jum...

Lets start with the big news for today :) A new version of Cube2:Sauerbraten was released today: Justice Edition ! Changes include two new player-models, 30 new maps, a mini radar and the new hold and efficiency game modes. For a full change log click here . The blue base! The new game mode "efficiency" gives you a set amount of ammunition and all weapons, and you can only "reload" when re-spawning and in the "hold" mode you get points when holding the flag for 30 seconds for your team Upcoming changes in AlienArena In this other open-source online arena FPS (sadly also with un-free media) some major changes in the rendering engine have been announced recently. Version 7.45 will include the new IQM skeletal animation format, which speeds up and increases the rendering quality tremendously on all somewhat new GPUs! Furthermore changes to the shadowing code have been made: Improved self shadowing Edit (07/29/2010): 7.45 was released today, get it here . ...

I am bored. SF.net doesn't produce many new foss game findings, so I say: "Let's try GitHub's search function!" Searching "game" quickly turned into "game -warcraft -framework -iPhone -life -cocos -Invaders" and I gave up such a general approach. Next up " fps ". maroxe/fps - Soya3D -based shooter. Doesn't run, so I write a report . Project probably inactive, the history tells me. Next. ctmammoth/mammoth - "Tactical/strategy CTF-style FPS". Contains just a .sln (Visual Studio) file and dlls in the repo. Is written in C#. Obviously non-Linux. Next. treeform/simple-fps - "Simple fps demo for panda3d". Last action October 2009. It runs! Let's make a quick video, even though it's nothing, but the texture is kind of interesting. Lagging in the video [ YT , TO ] because of recording app I think. Next. mlambir/Pygame-FPS  - "Wolfenstein st...

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago ? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured ! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.  Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^ LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have...

Ahh, qudobup and Charly are back and posting. Lots of interesting news even for me! So what can I add to this? Well first of all I forgot to mention this awesome TBS in my last post: UFO2000 , which is of course like UFO:AI a clone of a very well known series . And I should have also mentioned Stellar Forces which is a remake of Laser Squad :) Cube2 Engine So as you might have guessed todays topic will be the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, which besides being a mighty fine game on its own, has also spawned some great offspring projects lately. Blood Frontier has been mentioned before and since there have not been any new releases since then I will keep it short and just mention this video review which gives you an idea of the game play. But check it out if you have not done so yet! Platinum Arts Sandbox Plantinum Arts Sandbox has also been mentioned here before, and could be quickly described as a game development platform aimed at kids (and adults), utilizing all the nice in game ed...

Sauerbraten [ more screens ] Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [ download ]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier ), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls , new music , and so much more . Sauerbraten characters The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story . I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :) Mark IV The tank simulation engine Mark IV [ project , web page , blog ] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this ) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary . A little arcade Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plu...

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period. Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts. NYC in Sauer I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance. There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super. Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts. UFO:AI Starchaser I really liked ...

Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [ video ], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [ video ], satoshi's console-based footracer [ video ], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [ video ], ippa's Zombie Horde [ video ], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [ video ] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught . The submitted code had to be released under an OSI -approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame , which is a SDL -based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu . Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare ,...

Glest 3.1.2 has been released ( changelog , linux ). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this. SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge . It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed. There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer d...

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him. FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely. Sauer NYC Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style. Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is....

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year. I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too. Simutrans 128 Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com . And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can ...

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful. Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-) Blood Frontier Blood Frontier , a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine , has seen it's first alpha release become available for download . As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change. I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community...

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb , and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I'd give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at - now maybe I'm not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious. Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems - occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X - and I'm too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige. Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy :-( so I haven't tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely . Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided. There's also a new Thunder 'n' Lightning...