Gaming Daily A-Z

...FreeGamer? No not this time :p It's rather that the Spring RTS engine ran into some trouble with their long overdue 0.83 version and now decided to release 0.84 instead ;) Along with it comes also a new Zero-K release (0.9), which prompted one of their players to make a nice new trailer in anticipation: Zero-K fan trailer So...that's it for today ;) P.S.: Check out Zero-K's Planetwars metagame too. P.P.S.: Also Spring related... someone on their boards is looking for people to take over the development of another quite nice RTS game: Conflict Terra .

Not sure how recent this news is, but the website of the SpringRTS based FOSS RTS Zero-K states that their online campaign metagame PlanetWars is now in BETA. This is a screenshot of the webbased planet overview , which shows how well you (and your clan-mates) are progressing in taking over the galaxy. Game-play of Zero-K does not change much with this game-mode, but it puts each game into a greater perspective so to say ;) But check out their own description of what PlanetWars is here .

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines. They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay (take that Julius :P). So yeah, check it out!

Another game from the well of innovation that is the SpringRTS community, Contact aims to be an Open-Source squad based RTS . It uses models from the DOTA-like attempt "Engines of War" which unfortunately never really got anywhere, other than a couple of nice mechs. The Contact team released a beta on the 25 Dec last yea r, so it's not exactly breaking news, but the project is still moving forward and could use a couple of eyes if anyone is interested in it. Forum Thread with more screenies

There's a new Spring version , available as windows build and source package. License info in spring games list FOSS-advocate Gallaecio clarified the license status of the "open source" Spring games and now the Spring game list features detailed license information. None of the games have 100% free for commercial usage media. Gallaecio has (a quite empty) blog (in Galician [ english translation ])

Hello again from the dark side of the moon (at least it's equally remote ;) ). Today I have some assorted news of projects previously featured and one new one. Lets start with the latter: ArcanumAlive or OpenArcanum is a engine re-implemention and assets replacement project for the game Arcanum . It somewhat recently also got a Linux port , and seems to be progressing nicely so far/ again . ArcanumAlive Some RTS news Totally unrelated, the previously featured MegaGlest has been updated to version 3.3.7 which brings a series of nice improvements to the game (including a MacOSX port). Some time ago a much improved version of the WW2 themed RTS Spring1944 was released, and the engine it is based on also got a bunch of updates lately. Finally some FPS news For the readers with a short attention span, I left the FPS news for the very last (so that they don't read it :p). Recently Irritant the creator of AlienArena released some news about the upcoming version, called 2011. The...

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK. So, where to start? Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown , which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates , a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself: Octaspire:Crates Tutorial A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare) , which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world". If you are following the development of the p...

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...

Complete Annihilation Apparently the Spring mod Complete Annihilation is rather good, although it's about to be renamed and not quite fully free of its ties to the original Total Annihilation content. The goal is to be totally Free. And it's pretty complete(ish) as a game already. There's lots of lovely screenshots . Glest Advanced Engine 0.2.12 got released . They also got a Sourceforge project for GAE . Q3Rally Fun racing games are always, er, fun. Well, in demand as well. So maybe Q3Rally can strike a chord with the Free gaming public? Apparently the original Quake Rally was the best Quake mod ever, although it was never completed and all that is left of it is Quake Rally: Leftovers . There's plenty of maps and cars and it is billed as a mod for OpenArena so should be totally Free. \o/ Here's a promotional video for Q3Rally that makes it look rather ooo aaah: Dark Phear, a classic Phantasy Star-like RPG, as reported in the Ubuntu forums . Go there ...

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...