Gaming Daily A-Z

Zero-K , the probably coolest fully FOSS offspring of the SpringRTS engine has seen at least two new releases since it last crossed my mind to check their page... a pity actually as the new features of version 1.1.7.0 (and prior) seem quite nice. And for those not into the game (yet), there is now a channel with commented multi-player matches like this one: Just a pity that the game-play doesn't really allow much zooming in to see the graphically really nice units ;) In unrelated news: New release of Arx Libertatis (1.1.1) Tesseract is getting its own "base game" it seems There is a constant stream of new betas from Octaforge The Unvanquished summer tournament is under way , but matches so far have been a bit one-sided ;) Check out the new 3.8.0-beta1 version of MegaGlest Hmm, there is probably much more... so please comment below :D

An interesting mixture to "pay what you want" and "ransom funding" has recently surfaced with the Open Bundle : You can buy all the offered game art and use them under the CC-by license and if the total threshold is reached (10k, 1 day remaining, 9.3k already pledged) all the game art (2d sprites and music) will be officially released under the CC0. A split of the funds is btw. shared with the EFF and Creative Commons . For those wondering: no, it is not done by our friends of OpenGameArt.org , but they think it is a good project anyways . Interestingly the creator is also thinking of expanding the idea: Do you want to host your own "public domain ransom"? I'd love to help you! Email me at nick@commonly.cc P.S.: While we are on last day notices: Today ends the registration period for the Unvanquished summer tournament . Also check out their latest Alpha 17 .

The self described open-source rogue-like survivalcraft / driving game in a sci-fi zombie apocalypse has successfully reached its goal on Kickstarter , and one of the developers will now be able to work on it full-time for a few months to implement for example a back-end for proper graphics. But see and hear about it yourself: The first stretch-goal is close too, with 12 days remaining to pledge money towards this cool project. Less rosy does it look for the previously featured Data Dealer project . With only 48 hours to go, but still about 10k missing it will be a close finish if at all. They got some remarkable press lately though and jumped up about 10k in the last days, so it is still possible . So if you haven't done it yet, pledge here .

The beauty of open source is that projects never officially die as long as the source is available. Some classics simply keep moving forward because of this.  They get written off, domains expire, progress seems non-existent, but then somebody with a bit of knowledge and drive does something and the project is alive again!  That is the beauty of Free / Libre & Open Source Software. Super Tux The last Super Tux release was 0.3.3 in March 2010 ; that isn't even labelled stable.  The last stable release was, y'know I couldn't even find out.  It was before 2007, that's all I know. Progress is slowly made though behind the scenes - something more obvious since the project recently acquired a forum with FreeGameDev .  There are several 'clones' (a GIT term) that have been worked on in the last year or so, with the master branch receiving plenty of love this year. One of their problems is that some things are hard to find out without quizzing the developer(s)....

The the last Kickstarter game project we featured was sadly not successful and with only 11 days to go it doesn't look too good for Data Dealer either. But this HTML5 and CC-by-SA licensed game project comes with a pretty cool idea and is quite playable already. It centers around the idea that services like Facebook & Google really arn't in the business of bringing you a good service (aka "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold") and makes a ironic game out of that. Here is game-play trailer to give you an better idea: Or try the current demo on their webpage . Now of course as we have all recently learned (or at least got confirmation about), the reality is even more twisted than just the private business side of things. But over the revelations of the mass surveillance by the NSA & Co., we should still not forget that all those big internet companies arn't victims by far either. P.S.: My best wishes...

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...