Gaming Daily A-Z

Well there was some, but let's tidy it up for a bit. These days following Free Software game news is much easier, since we have planet.freegamedev.net . That place is ace but it means that the motivation to post here has dwindled. Still, for addicts, I suggest you tune in to there. I know I do. For instance, if you did, you'd know that there's an updated version of Yo Frankie! (of Apricot project fame) available for download. Funnily enough, the post is no longer up as there was a problem with it (at least there was for me). Still, here is the download URL , and it uses 0launch which I'm afraid to say I really dislike. You can also check out FreeCol 0.8-alpha2 . I like that they are releasing early, releasing often. Future maintainers pay attention! Another project that adopts that practise is Battle for Wesnoth . 1.4.x and 1.5.x updates are out with lots of polish. One wonders how much polish will go into that game before it loses momentum. There was hope t...

SilverTree, buggy and ugly but stable and promising! SilverTree RPG dead? It's forum full of porn (nsfw) spam (nsfw)? Today I got a letter from Anok (name not changed), asking about the whereabouts of SilverTree's devs and whether the project did evaporate or not, and I say "Stand back lady, I'll handle this!" ;) Well, I have to say that the inconsistency between the google code project , the forum , the web page and the Gna! project is a bit confusing, but SilverTree seems to be pretty stable and working. There are lots of sensible-gameplay-impossible-making bugs , but as I said, the game is stable and the major problem seems not to be the code, but rather the media. It definitely needs more 3D models and prettier textures and sounds and music. Very nice about SilverTree is how easy it is to compile it. Here's a little introduction set for ya'll: Getting the source? Easy as pie! svn checkout http://silvertree.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ silvertree ...

I have a few things to do - notably: Integerate the planet feed Integrate the announcements feed Integrate the forum feed Organise another interview or two Finish my half finished articles that are steadily building as a backlog of drafts We have all this shiney new infrastructure after some brilliant work by notably Ghoulsblade and Hagish, and I'm dragging my toes including it. Sorry guys! The planet and the announcements really could get included in any site which would really help to push Free Game development to another level in terms of being accessible and reaching it's audience with minimum effort. On the Free game side of things, my multiple commitments (notably work and Fortress which I'm trying to get the codebase moving properly) mean I'm not really following the open source game scene as closely as I used to. Silver Tree The open source RPG scene is looking quite healthy at the moment. Silver Tree is shaping up well and seems to be shifting away from ...

Two big releases in the last 48 hours - SilverTree 0.2, the RPG by Wesnoth developers, and FIFEngine that comes with a CC-by-SA licensed techdemo. Starting with SilverTree , the main gameplay aspects have all now been implemented: you can explore, talk to NPCs, fight, learn skills, gather equipment, and so forth. There is a simple adventure included which can be played through to completion. Version 0.2, which should run on the 3 major platforms and be portable to others, is still an unpolished game but the development momentum is there and since it is now playable you can get a very good idea of the direction the game is going in. I wouldn't be surprised to see a much nicer 0.3 release before Christmas. FIFEngine Tech Demo Turning our attention to FIFEngine , version 2007.2 comes with a very nice looking techdemo which has a syndicate-ish feel to it. There are major changes to the engine which brings with it a host of cool new features: SWIG binding so more scripting languages a...

The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre - the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists - that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge , JCRPG , Xarvh , 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there. Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIF...

The forums are moving - I'll come back to that after a few game snippets. 8 Kingdoms 1.1.0 has been released, with bug fixes and minor improvements over the previous stable release ( release notes ). They have yet to update their website but the new version is on the download page. 8 Kingdoms is an open source 3D TBS game with nice graphics, and can be downloaded for Linux and Windows. Dave, the author of Battle for Wesnoth , is making a new 3D RPG game with the working name Sliver Tree . It is very early days but Dave has an unusual position in the open source game development world - he has a lot of artistic resources at his disposal. If he really pushes this game, Wesnoth contributors (of which there are many) will back it with artwork, so it is going to be an interesting one to watch. Also I like Dave's approach of keeping games simple. He resisted many calls to add lots of features to Wesnoth which may have taken away from the pure simplicity of the game. So, back t...