Gaming Daily A-Z

Knights , a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements . Tales of Gydia , a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC , was started on SourceForge.net. Unknown Horizons , a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor. Black Dog , an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released . Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s). ctdabomb , an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support. SuperTux , a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics. FLARE , a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested...

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [ video (00:57@YouTube) ] TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [ .ogg  (05:50/7.1MB) ] Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [ description ] Humm and Strumm  is an in-dev co-op game engine [ design .pdf (156kB) ] SuperTux ' level contest has four entries so far [ submission thread ]

SuperTux level design mistakes to avoid SuperTux just got a forum on FreeGameDev.net and started a level contest. Rules: A snow tileset theme  Submit your levels here until the 27th of January, when voting will start Voting on levels will end on the January 30st Winners will be announced January 31st Have fun One level per person Top few levels will/can be made into an add-on or If admins are okay with it top levels will get added to incubator island (if winners are okay with it - pick cc0 or cc-by-sa for your level) One entry per person Please make a new level. (not from and existing worldmap/levelset) Don't vote for your self. Voting will take place in a new forum topic. Feel free to comment on peoples levels, most people would like to hear what was wrong or good with their level. Get the  editor , read the editor guide (and just play around, as the guide is incomplete ;) ) and check out the style guide . You can upload submissions in  this thread .

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL . The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license .  Here's an explanation  by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository. Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say: "we have every legal right to market and sell the software" "the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge." Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down. The implication, according to Wolfire: "While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it i...

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game . I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback. Mole Invasion One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion . The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page . The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well,...

Yoda Soccer Yoda Soccer 0.73 came out at the start of November - looks like that one slipped past most of the open source community. However it looks like 0.73 will be the last release for this Sensible Soccer clone. Whilst they have gone most of the way to recreating the classic game, the limitations of the platform used to create it (the proprietary BlitzMax) means the authors have created a new project, Open World Soccer , which will be a Sensi clone in C++. There is already an alpha release (very alpha) which shows off higher res graphics although not much more. For those people pining for a bit of Sensi nostalgia, try out Yoda Soccer which is relatively complete. The Castle 0.8 is available for download. It's still a bit of a tech demo, but the initial level looks promising. It's nice to see somebody making progress with a single player FPS game, although there is still a long way to go with this one. Dream Chess Dream Chess 0.2 is pretty amazing as far as chess g...

I had an opportunity the other day to do some game playing with my son - so I had the constraint that the games had to be playable by a 7 year old, meaning favourites of mine like Fish Fillets were generally ruled out. First up was the ever-popular Super Tux . The young lad was an experienced campaigner at this so it didn't hold his attention for too long. However, whilst we were playing, I did notice a number of things that I think need addressing in the game: Complete lack of originality They have copied Mario down to the core. It's a clone with different graphics. Every Mario aspect (gameplay, enemies, etc) has a "skinned" equivalent in Super Tux. Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard. I especially don't like the fire flower; can't we come up wit...

There's very little of note happening. I should use the opportunity to work on some more interesting content for Free Gamer (fixed lists? awards? etc) but instead I have a new laptop (shiney!) and so will spend time fiddling with it. Want to know what the Linux Game Tome looked like 10 years ago ? Where is FreeCiv 2.1 ? Patience is a virtue, but an updated beta would be nice. I'm contemplating checking out latest SVN to see where it's up to. I played SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 a bit. Lots of potential but still rough around the edges. Some very dodgy collision detection, very annoying instant deceleration if you go slightly off the road, and only 1 really decent track (island) plus a couple of OK ones. Most of the tracks, IMHO, are not worth including. There's an interesting list grumbel's grumbles ; things grumbel thinks are wrong with SuperTux . I think he's spot on with most of them, he's an astute game programmer ( Free Gamer interview ) and fixing most...

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess. I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1 , and SuperTux 0.4 , and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles. Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum . Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my ...

In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview. Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-) Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q. Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?" My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy Q. And what do you do for a ...

Well, not really, I never enjoy reading rubbish people try to make up to be funny. Honestly, if I want a laugh, I'll go to a comedy store. Anyhow... World of Padman . 3D, Toy Story esque setting and freeware. It's a deathmatch game but comes with bots, it runs on Linux and Windows, looks fantastic, and even has a promo trailer . Released today, surely this is not an April Fool's as it is too elaborate. Or maybe it is just a promotion for a commercial game, released as freeware for today only? Who knows. This is why I don't like April 1st. Anyway, download it and see. It's not open source though. I've been whining about a lack of good platform games, but I found a few on GetDeb . The Goonies I came across The Goonies just after posting on Friday. It's a remake of a classic NES game, but with better graphics and sound. It's quite tricky to play but a good time waster. Then I tried to play Magicor which looks fun, but it crashed on my Feisty F...

Firstly a quick update on FreeTrain . The main game has now been translated, so should compile and run on Windows. At the moment, though, there are a few things to be addressed before it can be officially released and also it probably needs porting to SDL to run on Linux as - although Mono is implementing WinForms - it makes a few DirectX calls. That and I'm too lame (in combination with VS2005) to even make it compile on Windows. FlowFlowMania , a Pipe Mania clone, showed up on Freshmeat today. Sadly there's only 2 playable levels and graphics for a resolution of 320x240 but it's early days yet so hopefully development will continue. I loved Pipe Mania when it came out on my ZX48+ . Since I was commenting on FLOSS platform games (or lack of) the other day, "Steve" brought to my attention his game - Danger Man . I gotta say, although it's early days for this game (don't expect much), it was a fun to play for a few minutes. It's only v0.1 and th...

SuperTux 0.3.0 was released is now out in the wild. This is a preview of milestone 2 , so expect something a little rough on the edges. Still, it should be fun to play and hopefully attract a bit more community help to the project. Go grab it whilst it is hot. My favourite game Fish Fillets got a minor update to version 0.7.4, including the final level. SuperTuxKart development has not slowed. Recently there was the contribution of an island level . With improved physics - and wheelies! - I think the next SuperTuxKart release is shaping up to be an awesome little game.