Gaming Daily A-Z

Top ten FPS that are FOSS Time for another overweening list - the SEO godesses demand it! Tremulous has 1.1 stable, 1.2 dev and 1.3 third party dev versions. It's a mess. Getting bots to run is a mess. Yet I love this game. I am only capable of playing 50% (can't handle moving aliens at all) yet I had the most fun building bases in Tremulous. So you want to download and play Tremulous? HA! HA I SAY! Pick your poison: 1.1 stable from 2006 1.2 beta from 2009 1.3 inofficial alpha from 2018 I still don't know which is the most useful for either finding servers with bots or humans. ( 1.3 has zombie game mode servers with bots is all I know ). Unvanquished is Tremulous 2.0 and a little more complex and hardware requirements. If you can find a better-looking FOSS game I'm all ears and eyes. Uvq has bots built-in. OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with strictly freely licensed assets, some of which likely satisfy niche fetishes. Who doesn't know OpenArena ? Rexuiz is really i...

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch ( via the autobuilds ), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps. From the user "Antibody" ( known for his duel commentary videos ) comes this nice video overview of the new features: (please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings) On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread . Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily fo...

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour ): You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances. Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt. Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart. At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot... Source-code is available here for those that wonder... *stalkes slowly away* But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly: Unvanquished Alpha 19 -BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound l...

*hrmmpf* New FreeOrion 0.43 release . Unvanquished Alpha 18 . Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake . Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again. OpenMW 0.25.0 released. New Ya3dag 1.42 release. Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0. tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

Given the often quite small online communities around FOSS games, one has to become creative on how to keep players and attract new ones. Regular tournaments are one of those good ideas, albeit one that is a lot of work organizing. One of the games that is still struggling to attract a stable player base is Unvanquished , even though the game is based on Tremulous and thus quite well developed game-play wise. Don't hide from the Aliens However for those complaining about it being the "same old" just with fancy graphics, they have implemented an all new resource and base building system, which will be also used in the tournament! To quote them: Your tactics may need to change to compensate for this, but you can always test out the new gameplay on our development server beforehand, as well as by attending and observing our weekly development games on Saturdays. An explanation of the differences between our gameplay and the classic Tremulous variety will be explained in...

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

Some of you might remember Mega Lo Mania back from the days when you could be amazed by PC speaker voice output... so if you spend way too much of your childhood playing that game (like me) you should probably stay clear of the FOSS remake called Gigalomania ! Gigalomania now using LPC sprites As the creator recently stated , it now uses the cool Liberated Pixels Cup contest sprites, but there is still the need to replace the castle graphics with nicer ones. Maybe *you* can help out with that? On a related note, the LPC coding results are finally in , congratulations to the winners! I hope Bart will make a nice review on the quite awesome games here on FG soon. Other recent updates not to be missed: Today a new Alpha 13 of Unvanquished was released , marking the one year aniversary of their first alpha release. As usual it comes with a bunch of new nice features and fixes. You can now download automatic snapshots of the development version of Megaglest . And there seems to be final...

So it seems like it is up to me again to keep this blog alive ;) Not too much to report though... therefore I present you Red Vs Blue Unvanquished edition: Well at least that could be fun... anyways, as they explain in their last two weekly updates ( 1 , 2 ), their Demon Engine has seen quite a few graphical updated an bug fixes lately. Furthermore they highlighted an upcoming major change in game-play compared to Tremulous , as Unvanquished will be using a real resource gathering system. Also a cool new screen comes from the "Modern Warfare" mod for 0 A.D. : Tanks in 0 A.D. In their WIP thread on the 0 A.D. forums they have also confirmed that the mod will be "open source" however did not specify this further. It also seems like they have plenty of good artists, but are lacking a bit on the coding side. So if you know your way around Javascript and XML hacking, give them a hand (and secretly lobby for a full FOSS release ;) ).

UPDATE: Here is a nice video of the ( Note: Alpha ) gameplay: Yesterday (following their monthly release cycle) a new alpha from Unvanqished was released . For those with bad short term memory: Unvanquished is trying to revitalize the RTS/FPS hybrid Tremulous . New Unvanquished human player and weapon model Besides the changes already mentioned previously , they have also replaced some more weapon models and now also have a really nice new webpage! Still lots of things to do... but big thumbs up for the progress so far!

I have to apologize for the recent lack in FG updates, but at least *I* have a good excuse as first my Internet broke down, and now I am preparing to relocate to another continent (extra points for guessing which in the comments ;) ). Anyways... it seems like there is now a "winner" out of the total breakdown and split-up of the efforts to revitalize Tremulous earlier this year. I will not go into details, but I can assure you it was not pretty, and I decided to skip any news coverage on it until the dust had settled. I hope this is now the case, and for now it seems only one of the projects really shows some progress... that is unless the other is not working in stealth mode. Lets see... at least Unvanquished is actually releasing alphas of their game, so I am leaning toward them when it comes to which will actually become a nice, playable game soon. You can follow development quite well on one of the team-member's blog here . In the most recent post , some nice screen...

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February. However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)... WIP Unvanquished playermodel But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;) Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)