Gaming Daily A-Z

There has been some activity in the most prominent free (as in freedom) software 3D role-playing games DungeonHack, jClassicRPG and Radakan. DungeonHack Green, water and village in DungeonHack [ more ] DungeonHack (DH) 0.10 has been released in form of win&lin 32bit biaries and a few commits later I was able to compile the game on my 64bit Arch Linux machine. It is the first release of DH that does not rely on non-free libraries . I played the game for the first time and I was positively surprised. Not only can I move around in the nice-looking (endless) landscape but also fight, cast magic, pick up items, enter houses and dungeons as well as talk to npcs. Physics also work (see barrels video below). On the downside: the current code is crash-happy and there is little content: In toto three houses, two dungeons, two enemy types, two items, one non-player character, one spell). Zombie roasting á la DH The next DH aim is to create a typical RPG village, add some inventory and stat...

NAEV Items [ more shots ] NAEV 0.4.0 is out, a game of the space trading and combat simulator genre, inspired by the non-free Escape Velocity . Win32/lin32/lin64/mac binaries are available here . The new version has parts of the user interface changed and is better accessible, for example through in-game gui keybind editing. Three aspects of NAEV show that usability is a priority: 1) the tutorial is informative without overwhelming too much 2) most combats can be evaded through the run away -tactic (this might be unintended, but definitely liked by me). 3) The automatic jump system, that allows consecutive jumps to systems without having to manually repeat standard maneuvers gives much relief to the player. The changelog also lists better-looking visuals as well as new sounds and music tracks. As a bonus, all the art in the game is licensed under Debian-friendly licenses. [license.txt: audio , visuals ] Gameplay Wingmen fighters in action In NAEV the player starts with a small tradi...

Early OpenMW GUI implementation OpenMW is a re-implementation of the (non-free) TES3 Morrowind game engine, written in the D programming language. The engine makes use of OGRE and other open source libraries , features an own scripting language called "Monster" and the latest release has the version number 0.6. Out of curiosity, I asked Nicolay Korslund (the lead developer) one year ago what his motivation for writing OpenMW was. Later I decided to ask some more and now you can finally read the interview, in which Nicolay tells us about Git , OpenMW's development and whether or not to expect original games as a result of the OpenMW project. The interview Q1: What is your motivation for writing OpenMW? Initially the project was started a few years ago (somewhere around 2004-2005, don't remember exactly), out from desire to improve a game I loved and from frustration with bugs and issues that made it less fun than it could be. Having been a programmer for about a de...

Pink Pony 1.2.1 I wanted to write about Pink Pony for a long time, but never came around to it. It's a Tron-like racing game and features hearts, ponies (also ai-controlled ones), graphic shaders and split-screen multiplayer support. Your aim is to collect hearts and to not run into your foes' trails. Last pony standing wins! Download it for Win32 or as an easy-to-compile source tarball. Unfortunately, the game does not support older graphics cards. If you are capable and willing to add legacy support, you can find the source repository here . If you have ideas for more features, please post them (or just comment this blog article). Pink Pony development was not a one-man ride: While the game concept and code is by ginkgo , tornado created the pony model and textured it, then Skorpio added animation to the pony. A sky render by brisingre is used in the game and I contributed two textures to it. Edit: I forgot to add that MCMic programmed the AI and that Renich 's mu...

Zaz 0.2.6 Zaz is a puzzle game, a 'clonespiration' of Zuma, one of PopCap's notorious proprietary (casual) games. You are confronted with a stream of differently colored balls and have to put three of the same type next to each other to destroy them. There are power-ups, you're under time pressure, you have to aim, that's fun actually. The game has nice music and good sounds, though I couldn't find author information on any of the game data. EDIT: Ha, I looked in the source directory, but not on the menu screen! So gfx & sound is by Remigiusz Dybka (who also programmed the game) and I guess it's GPL3-ed. The music tracks are (remixed?) CC-BY-NC-SA Nine Inch Nails music. What I'm * very * much impressed with is that the game has a in-game menu to create a recording of a game you played! It even captures audio! Usually I use glc for recording video/audio in OpenGL games. When you record a game using Zaz' internal recorder, it creates a Vorbis/T...

Complete Annihilation Apparently the Spring mod Complete Annihilation is rather good, although it's about to be renamed and not quite fully free of its ties to the original Total Annihilation content. The goal is to be totally Free. And it's pretty complete(ish) as a game already. There's lots of lovely screenshots . Glest Advanced Engine 0.2.12 got released . They also got a Sourceforge project for GAE . Q3Rally Fun racing games are always, er, fun. Well, in demand as well. So maybe Q3Rally can strike a chord with the Free gaming public? Apparently the original Quake Rally was the best Quake mod ever, although it was never completed and all that is left of it is Quake Rally: Leftovers . There's plenty of maps and cars and it is billed as a mod for OpenArena so should be totally Free. \o/ Here's a promotional video for Q3Rally that makes it look rather ooo aaah: Dark Phear, a classic Phantasy Star-like RPG, as reported in the Ubuntu forums . Go there ...

Simutrans OpenTTD OpenGFX Why is OpenTTD now in Fedora 10/11 but Simutrans is not? The former has been only playable with Free media since some time this year - and the media is still incomplete - whereas the latter has been Free for years now? Is it because somebody requested it ? Digging (and by digging I mean Googling) to some it seems that Simutrans media is unclearly licensed . Download the official (currently r102) version of Simutrans and it comes with two licenses - one copy of the 'artistic license' and a 'copyright notice' that states: "Simutrans may not be sold or modified in any way without written permission by the author. Which license applies to which part of the game? I guess you can make assumptions but it really should be clearer. The artistic license applies to the source, the custom NC / no modification license to the media. OpenTTD is about to get many 1000s more players by being in big distributions. Simutrans is going to continue ...