Gaming Daily A-Z

"Damn Free Gamer is popular." So says the L-echo developer, as well as posting graphic illustration on the project home page. L-Echo is a free and open source clone of the game Echochrome (aka Mugen Kairou). Version 0.4.3 arrived in early February, although performance was unplayable on my non-hardware-accelerated laptop. Freedroid RPG version 0.12rc1 - a 2D isometric RPG, a bit like Diablo, but not like it at all. There's lots of bug fixes, a new tutorial, a new starting level, lua scripting, and more! Help them playtest it so that version 0.12 is solid. " Tesliz ", a 3D turn based strategy game, inspired by Wesnoth, written in Python on top of OGRE. Early days here. Speaking of Wesnoth had lots of updates over the Christmas period, building up to a stable 1.6 release. That game has some amazing artwork these days, like these wizard portaits . They have lots of playtesters already. If you don't know what Wesnoth is, crikey, just click the link a...

Rigs of Rods is going open source . How cool is that? Rigs of Rods (also known as RoR), is a truck, car, airplane and boat simulator. You can drive, fly or sail in total freedom in an open environment. What makes RoR different to most simulators is its unique soft-body physics: vehicles chassis and wheels are simulated in real-time as flexible objects, giving the simulation an extremely accurate behavior, while allowing the vehicles to be simply specified by their structural composition, as a network of interconnected nodes (forming the chassis and the wheels). Crashing into walls or terrain can permanently deform a vehicle in a realistic manner. In addition to its unique soft-body physics, RoR also features an advanced flight model based on blade element theory, allowing the accurate simulation of any airplane, base on their physical dimensions and wing airfoils. It also features an accurate buoyancy model based on elemental pressure gradients, enabling boats with complex hulls to m...

I'm really quite strapped for time right now so again this is brief. Stargus , the Stratagus-based project to get native Starcraft on Linux, is close to release . If the screenshots are anything to go by then Stargus will be pretty playable with this release. The latest Freedroid RPG release looks nice. The project seemed to have stalled earlier in the year but there's lots of contributors these days which is nice to see. Want to make games but not a programmer? Maybe Mokoi Gaming is for you. The project is in it's infancy but it's already usable although the documentation is a little sparse. Still, it all seems well done so a bit of user feedback I'm sure will be warmly received. Tennix now has SVG graphics. A very concise concept is turning into a nice little game to while away the occasional onset of boredom. Also another simple game shaping up nicely is Qonk , with 5-minute galactic conquest gameplay. No screenshots. No time to find any. :-( Edit: a...