Gaming Daily A-Z

Lugaid has Stand Alone in the FG forums. An RTS game for Windows, although I'm not sure if it is open source and able to download and play it yet. He says: RTS game inspired by defence games. Project is almost finished, it needs more maps and graphic sets, maybe some more units. At first Interface is quite cumbersome, but not after you get used to it. Fortress Logo I will also note that we have started making progress with Fortress , inspired by the classic DOS game Castles . We have a logo , a very early prototype , and a wiki . Yesterday I compiled this list of gameplay elements that basically describe the key concepts of the game. Somebody has started working on models for the game too. If you are interested, check out what we are doing and throw in your own thoughts in the Fortress forum . It will be an entirely open source project. A skilled artist or two would be really helpful. :-) Despite my involvement (at the moment it looks like I'll be the main programmer)...

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph. The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree . It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in ...

Did I not mention this Sauerbraten update ? I don't recall doing so, and I swear it was not a thread in their forum at the weekend despite being listed as posted on the 12th June. Anyway... it fixes a whole lot of bugs, adds graphical enhancements, and cleans up scripting support a little. Probably more of an update for people making mods/games with Sauer than players but, shucks, I love this project. Embarrassingly this was a 2006 release... *oops* There's the possibility of a StarShip Troopers: Last Defense , the Glest mod, becoming available for FreeBSD . The Java Classic RPG project has posted a snapshot for anybody who wants to play with it in it's very early stages of development. Work continues at an impressively frantic pace , soldiering away on features. Hopefully a modeller or two can start contributing to the project to make the artwork updates as impressive as those to the codebase. I keep pestering the Vega Strike team to make a new release. I, and ...

There are many significant indie game projects that are committed to creating a quality free game where the developers are afraid of the consequences of making the development public by publishing the project under an open source license. Now I'm not saying that open source is the only way people should choose to release their indie games - different situations do need to be evaluated on the merit of the benefits brought by being open source - but frequently, when asked, the reasons for declining to open source a project are usually bogus. One of the problems is that the topic of open source is a polarized subject - people are either strongly against it or strongly for it. Those falling into the latter category are almost always experienced with using and/or developing open source software, and in my experience those against open sourcing of their projects often do not fully understand the concept, do not appreciate the benefits it brings, and suffer irrational fears of what migh...

I'm not a big fan of just repeating what I see on the Linux Game Tome so I'll be brief about these two: Warzone 2100 version 2.0.7 and X-Moto 0.3.0 got released. The former is a bugfix release (which was sorely needed) and the latter quite a lot of new features (notably hotseat multiplayer) and a new maintainer. A few days ago I lamented about Adventure Game Studio not being available for Linux. I really should do my research before making such assertions... it is . Not only that, there's this groovy project to take all the hassle out of finding and installing AGS games - the Adventure Game Goddess . Forget about boring hand tasks and enjoy the games ... One click: the game is downloaded, installed and set up. One click: you are playing How cool is that? You can even run Kings Quest VGA I using the AGS Linux version, with a few tricks. How cool is that as well? I wonder if the same process works with KQ VGA II ? So many questions... For those unfamiliar with th...

There's a couple of newish irrlamb gameplay videos . Worth watching if you want to see what the game is like and how devious some of the gameplay can be. For me, irrlamb is definitely one of the most exciting open source game projects around at the moment, being both innovative and challenging in it's gameplay. Expect some really nice graphics in the next UFO:AI release. A few modelling maniacs seem to have gotten very interested in contributing, which is always good for an open source game project. OpenTTD Hi-res As of some time last week, an interesting major change landed in the OpenTTD development trunk - loading of 32bpp graphics and levels of zoom . It's one of the big steps along the road to getting high resolution graphics into OpenTTD. Also it provides a platform for the artwork contributors to see their art in game rather than have to paste it together to showcase it. A completely Free (no TTD required) and beautiful OpenTTD just got one step closer to r...

The FG forums seem to be experiencing more downtime, which sucks a little. Oh well, such is the risk ya take when using a free service. There's an interesting article on the state of Linux gaming (parts 1 , 2 , 3 online with more to come) and, although it covers both commerical and open source games, since the majority of good games on Linux are open source games (ok, that's flamebait, but still...) most of the games in the article are open source. ;-) Apparently Ubuntu is brilliant for gaming . Good to see people impressed by Free Software, even it's it is running proprietry stuff. Ok, back to Free game matters, and a 3rd release of irrlamb is out. It's cool to see regular updates to this new and innovative 3D game where you control a sphere and use physics to overcome obstacles and puzzles. I tried it out on my Linux laptop and it both ran well and was fun to play. The graphics are never going to be earth shatteringly great but they don't need to be - th...