Gaming Daily A-Z

Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released , with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation ( changelog ). Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift. A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release: Also recently updated is Irrlamb . Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its developm...

The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results. Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often. Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN: So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes. It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro. Code: #define SIMD_PI           btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029) #define SIMD_2_PI         btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI #define SIMD_HALF_PI      (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5)) #define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0)) #define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD  (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI) The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie. For the answer visit the thr...

Stunt Rally 2.4 ... talk about feature creep, but I am not complaining ;) See more pictures of the release here , and don't forget to give some feedback on our forums . Oh and you can now browse cars and tracks online.

I'm a big advocate of the phrase, "Release Early, Release Often." I think it is by far the best way to keep or gain community interest in a project. Of course, that simple phrase doesn't quite sum up what you actually must do - simply uploading a release and announcing it on your mailing list is unlikely to attract interest. For example, who knew about Lincity-NG 2.9beta in lieu of the intended Lincity-NG 3.0 ? Lincity-NG is in a bit of a mini-crisis. A victim of the shutdown of the Berlios developer services , all the web material is in a bit of a mess. Its home page is now on fedorahosted.org but still links back to the defunct Berlios page. There are entries on Google Code and Github that are up to date with the source, as well as an imported Sourceforge project * which is the only place you can currently find the beta , however all are unofficial / back up for now. (* Not to be confused with this redundant redundant project ) Another game project which suffer...

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now: More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here , and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log . Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;) Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now: Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1 A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here . All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ). Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games: There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally , and I guess I can quote Twain here too: The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated! Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold , but even increased in pace :) Anyways, here is a great video: And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs": And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release . This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine , brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!

Just released today, there is a new version ( 1.9 ) for Stunt Rally : Stunt Rally 1.9 It has a few nice new features, but probably the greatest update is a major change in the car handling physics, including an "easy" mode for those of us not wishing to practice for a career as a professional rally driver ;) and the guys would like feedback in the SR forum so let them know what you think. A big collection of (partially quite crazy) screens can be found here . Another great release that surfaced just today is Warzone2100 version 3.1.0. It cumulates all the changes made during the last 2.5 years, however if you tested the RCs already then there isn't too much new. Most notably they mention the new and fully fixed netcode, so that "out of sync" is a thing of the past (unless you have a crappy net connection like me :( ). Have fun playing!

Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here . It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games. In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally . Join the discussion here . Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;) One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here . Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D

So... you might have followed the lengthy discussion in the comment section of this blog entry of mine from last week... if you didn't don't worry you didn't miss anything important :p However I was corrected in quite a few things (besides all the disagreements), so I though it would be good to post a sort of "counter statement" to clear up some recent mess-ups by me: First of all, the developers from Q2W informed us that in fact most ( but not all ) of their art assets are CC-by-SA or GPL, which is great. They have also released a Linux installer now, so feel free to check it out if you are gaming on this platform (like me). Oh and I have also updated the video to a newer one, in case you didn't notice yet. Also, and I am to be honest quite surprised by this, OverDose does in fact have an open source-code repository since some time now, where you can download the source to the engine and some of the cool in-house tools they have developed. No clearly vis...

We are getting a lot of nice mails from developers lately... not sure yet if I am annoyed by the spam or pleased that I don't have to do any research of my own :p These must be the benefits of real journalists who always get these nice offers from lobbying firms to write fair and balanced articles for them (yeah, I included some social commentary in this blog!). So... what was in my spam folder lately? Stunt-Rally got an version 1.5 release ( changelog here ) which a prominent new feature: multiplayer! Multiplayer test in Stunt-Rally 1.5 You can find a small guide to set up a multiplayer game here . Not sure if player collision is also implemented... it would be cool however ;) In general I really think the physics are too bouncy however... not sure if that hits the nail, but something feels off about them. Also... "LOD popping" trees is soo last century :p

(video) podcast FLOSS Weekly #202 A (video) podcast show called FLOSS Weekly interviewed Crystal Hammer of Stunt Rally about the project in their issue #202 . I only recently discovered the vast spaces of open source and Linux podcasts. If you know of open source games podcasts, please let us know in the comments! :)

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p New to the feeds is our revision control planet , for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward. However, recently they released an auto-builds update script , which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released: Stunt Rally 1.2 Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode. Other things to mention? Mage is a open-sou...

Hallow thar Free Gamers! Warmux , the project formerly known as Wormux, is dying. (It amuses me how "formerly" sounds like "formally", doesn't it? Or is that my colloquial pronunciation?) The current development version has rather minor changes: improved game mode (ie including weapon), new "squad" play (teams can ally). But there's little more coming. What this means is that the next version - if any - of WarMUX, might be the last. At least, it is most probably over for the author of these words. Who knows. It was not long ago that the PARPG lead was calling that dead (and I scolded him for it, did I). The great thing about Free software is that it can live on. Moving on to more vibrant projects, and ToME4 beta 29 30 31 is in the wild. The current development pace is quite astonishing. More graphical tiles, bug fixes, play balancing, and some useful optimizations - don't get addicted! zzoxx In a similar vein, the author of Sco...

Stunt Rally 1.1 looking awesome Stunt Rally now compiles on Linux! There is a two-part text-commented video tutorial for making new tracks on youtube [ p1 | p2 ]. Check out this channel if you want to see more videos of the game. Technology-wise the game is VDrift + Ogre + Pagedgeometry (also used in DungeonHack) + MyGUI. Thumbs up to the project website following the "big screenshots on main page"-philosophy!

I thought I'd come out of the desert back to this oasis of fun for the evening. Some emails to the freegamerblog gmail account (yes - I check it, sporadically) prompted this post. I do try to respond to everybody, even if sometimes I leave it a few weeks *cough* or months *cough* between logging in to the account. Stunt Rally Stunt Rally is a modification of VDrift which takes the VDrift physics engine and adapts it to the Ogre3D graphics engine. Add in a few really nifty Ogre3D-based components (terrain etc) and you have a very cool FOSS rally game! Since it was originally mentioned on the blog a few months ago, progress has continued unabated and the game has improved a lot. In fact, the 10th public version - Stunt Rally 1.0 - just got released! 35 tracks to drive on, in 6 sceneries, and 7 cars to choose from. There is also a fully functional Track Editor to create your own tracks or modify the existing ones. Above is a gameplay video of Stunt Rally. There's also a ...