Gaming Daily A-Z

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived. Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community. The scope of the Flightgear project is, as you might expect for a game 11 years in the making, nothing short of impressive. Whilst it does fall short in a few departments when compared to commercial flight sims, in others it is unequalled. Having no full time developers and being of such high quality is a testament to the dedication and organisation of it's development team. Flightgear has a pluggable flight dynamics model with 3 primary options, giving the enthusiast an opportunity to find a flight model that they feel is most accura...

OpenCity OpenCity 0.0.5 has been unleashed upon the wider public. The game is, well, not yet much of a game but it is progressing steadily. I would like to see the author approach maybe the Open Transport Tycoon project to see if there's any room for utilizing some of their many wonderous building models . I'm a big believer in project synergy, of which there isn't nearly enough occurence in the Free Software game world. People seem to fear a lack of identity to a game, but a game identity is foremost created by experience - of which graphics are only a part of the bigger picture. Also, just becasue two projects share graphical resources, doesn't mean they have to completely overlap. Getting back to OpenTTD , version 0.6 is around the corner and 0.6-beta2 was released a few days ago. 0.6 final, "will give you loads of new features, like newhouses, newindustries, signals and diagonal tracks under bridges, trams, autoslope, oneway roads, half tile slopes and...

Ok, I've been slacking. I could make excuses (please somebody tell me a cheat so I can complete level 50 of Kobo Deluxe ) but I won't. Another Hero of Allacrost release is up for grabs on their website. This version does bring a few new features to the current tech demo status of the project, but it's a major rewrite of several parts so versions will hopefully be coming thicker and faster in the next few months. I tried it out and it's impressive, although not very expansive yet. If they can keep up the production quality and go on to make a full game, it's going to be an amazing game indeed. Fortress WIP There has been plenty of work on the project that was started here earlier this year - Fortress . Check out the castle components courteousy of our very own povray magician, Rushhour. There'll be a playable tech demo soon so I'll post news of that when it arrives! Sun Dog Resurrection is a project to make a Free Software successor to the classic game...

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...

Glest has carried the accolade of being a leading open source game due to the relatively polished nature of it's graphics at the time of release a few years ago. Since then, sadly, the development pace has not matched the original hype surrounding the game. For the first time in quite a while, there's a major development push. This time, the emphasis is on making it multiplayer . There's a windows binary patch, and the code is in SVN for other OS users, although is largely untested on anything other than Windows. Also released today was Star Ship Troopers: Last Defense 2 , a mod for Glest. Updated models can be seen in this thread . The download is a whopping 130mb so there's plenty of new content to chew over in there. That's a lot of Glest goodness. Enjoy!

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...

Like a time machine, I go back to the days when Free Gamer brought you new games and exciting updates, bound together with poetic abandon that would make a scholar proud. Open Football The coveted Free Three Dee football game, Open Football , continues to grow. Like Wembley , a spectacular scene that so many doubted would ever come to full fruition, the developers battle on in their audacious endeavour and, against all odds, the project plods forward at a steady pace. Cast your eyes upon the first screenshot to show more than one player on a pitch! Not much, say ye? Nay, but more than those before it, and so continues the goal of creating a football game that isn't rubbish to play. Oh and they show off Mac/Win versions in addition to the existing Linux screenshots. What ho? A foe? Or could it be an ambitious open source single player RPG project that looks like it will go somewhere? Radakan , brought to my attention via a wandering adventurer in the local tavern , but art...