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...

Warfork Gameplay  (livestream - skip ahead 1m20s) Last updated 2019-08-22 (see bottom of this article). The title says it all. War fork is the revival of Warsow. Warsow is cool (and super hard to master) but does not have servers running and no development ongoing . Warfork is an ironically-named fork of Warsow, has CC0 art assets and is for now only released on Steam. The source supposedly is mostly based on qfusion , the source code is supposed to be available as a DLC. I recognized one of my own CC0 sounds in the game (dong.wav) without attribution (which is totally fine both legally and morally) but it's too bad that assets (especially the nice announcer voice) can't be re-used/re-shared with voluntary attribution without digging around for it first. Some art is limited by containing trademarked logos. Would be cool to have clean versions if anybody plans on packaging Warfork for official distro packages eventually. Shortly after launch time there were around 50 people ...

Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND). Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0 You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here . Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included. So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now... Happy fragging :p

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...

First off as a rather fast follow up on the last post: New version of Alien Arena out , boasting a 300% increase in render speed Small, bugfix release of War§ow out now Otherwise, as previously mentioned, Garage Games has now also released their 2D game framework under the MIT license: Their 3D game engine also saw some nice updates lately, however sadly their crowd funding push to port Torque3D to Linux fell (not totally unsurprisingly) short of their 30,000$ mark (with about 10,000$ pledged).

Yesterday the long awaited version 0.7   1.0 was released and thus after 7 years of development War§ow has gone out of beta. For those out of the loop, here is a short description of it by the developers: Warsow is a fast paced, deathmatch game. It has your classic things like bunny hopping, rocket jumping, and general mayhem. There's many game modes, including, Bomb & Defuse, CTF, Instagib, and the classic 1v1 Duel. You can see the full changelog (including many nice screenshots) here , and if you want to give it a try, head over to their download page . They also made a nice release trailer : For those wondering, there is some discussion here with War§ow developers trying to justify their decision to keep the art assets non-free and why there isn't a open source-code repository. Personally I am not convinced, but at least they release their engine code and promise to keep the overall game always freeware... However besides that, it's a fun FPS! So try some crazy ...

The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order... But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60 ; because as you should know... a higher number is always better :p New alien spider bots! Obviously it wasn't just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release. Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan: Open Sourced. Ever Evolving. Which has a certain ring to it ;) Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War§ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice ...

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news! And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2). The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World , which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta , which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet). Edit: Updated to newer video But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well). So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar: AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements : What's new in AlienArena Ya3dag , also released a new version recently and I s...

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates: Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;) Another new release ( 7.53 ) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings. Alien Arena 7.53 Quick rundown of other news: War§ow got a new website , and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine ( OpenWolf ) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here ( and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more ).

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors . Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here . They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :) ZeroBallistics 2.0 So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game !!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here . War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011 Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will mak...

Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking... and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games! For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome ;) Further more the UFO:AI team is making some great progress after their highly acclaimed 2.3 release two months ago. Besides a a lot smaller changes, various new sounds have been added since then and the rockets got a nice new explosion effect: Kaaaboom! Oh and maybe this is of interest for some of you (personally I never really understood the need for it though): War§ow can now be played in a browser window via a Firefox plugin! Check out their development blog for more details. Yet another 3D adventure game A rather interesting Project I was unaware of until recently is Ya3Dag . It has quite a lot of rather unique features not found in any of the other Qua...

Today we have a small biology lesson ;) Have a look at this screenshot: A nice warehouse TeamFortress2, right? Well WRONG ;) It is actually a screenshot from one of the maps from the upcoming War§ow 0.55 release ! War§ow is a open-source game based on the updated Quake2 engine QFusion , and has already seen some quite successful previous releases. They focus on a fast, e-sports style game play and their general art direction is a pretty nice cell-shaded comic world. Lately their their style has been for sure party influenced by TeamFortress2 however, which at least in my opinion is not a bad thing :) For a whole bunch of other screenshots and an update on what else you can expect from the new version, check out their newest blog post here . Overall there will be some pretty nice improvements, and probably a significant performance increase with VBO integration into the engine. But maybe most interestingly, they will also include a new game play mode, Capture the Flag: Tactics . And...

Winning a game of NO NO is a fun little puzzle game [ video ]. It is built on top of LÖVE , which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted ! I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed. The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet. The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release. An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht , a TDE -based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it...

Tired today. Sorry for lack of details. Daimonin (2D MMORPG) got a new website. Spiffy. Warsow 0.42 . It's a fast multiplayer FPS. Ace video on Nexuiz , looks fancy FPS. There's an RC out for VDrift release 2008-02-23, the "next gen" car game. (I don't quite get the notion of an RC for dated releases. Vega Strike needs nvidia users to test before release due to an unknown number of cards affected by a buggy driver (boo for closed source). I'm... Zzzzzz...

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick. Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release. FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development. NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!" Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their o...

The forums are NOT down, they are still up here: http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/ I'm moving admin of the freegamedev.net domain over to tuxfamily.org so it can be more useful than a simple redirect. [watch this space!] On top of that, if your Free Software game project includes non-Free art then you need to be careful. Why? Because this could happen to you. Sure it's a setback that the Warsow team will recover from, but by using an appopriate license or agreeing terms this situation could be avoided. For instance I'm accepting some non-Free contributions to a project of mine but I made sure the author agreed the graphics had irrevocable usage rights for the project. So he can't rip his graphics out if he has a change of heart. Anyway, the whole purpose of creating games is to play them, right? Well, Nuxified and Cluesoft have come together to put together a tournament using solely Free Software games. They haven't yet chosen the exact games for the to...

Good morning to open source game enthusiasts and any normal people reading. I feel a bit refreshed after getting back to the Internet having spent nearly 48 hours offline. I know, I nearly died, the withdrawl symptoms were horrendous, but it's ok as I am back online now and have been for nearly 12 hours. So a few things today. Freedroid RPG development has become really active and a string of new releases has occurred in the last couple of weeks. It is a cross platform isometric RPG game similar to Baldur's Gate Diablo only, instead of swords and scantily clad heroines, you have cattle prods and robotic penguins. It's good to see development pick up and they are focusing on making development easier and fixing bugs, so it's looking like a bright future for the game. The latest release is available for Linux and Windows. Another game that shows off some of the originality that you can find in indie and open source game projects is Which Way Is Up . A platform g...

No, Free Gamer has not met a premature demise! I am merely temporarily really, really busy . Still, there were a few notable releases in the last week. ScummVM hit version 0.9.0 which brings GUI enhancements and support for [at least] two [new] games. Legends jumped 0.0.0.1 versions to 0.4.1.40, and you should see the changelog . I've already ranted about discussed versioning debacles issues. Warsow bumped out another release and really seems to be picking up momentum both as a game and a community. They have started up a development blog . This is a great idea and it would be cool for every major Free game to have one; then we can have Free Game Planet! I spotted yet another 3d engine on Freshmeat : Nelit2 . Information is sparse but the screenshots show off some fancy features. It has a long way to go to compete with the heavyweights of this division like OGRE and Crystal Space . I also saw Carworld as well. It looks like it could be a very cool driving simulator...