Gaming Daily A-Z

Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released , with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation ( changelog ). Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift. A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release: Also recently updated is Irrlamb . Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its developm...

A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates. OpenDungeons , an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog : New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste Particle effects! Reworked library logic and made research order configurable New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood Customisable creature sound effects! Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies In-game settings menu support! New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements New minimap camera with real-time rendering Dedicated server support with command-line parameters There's plenty of screenshots in the announcement on the frontpage of the OpenDungeons website (but no direct link for the announcement, frustratingly).     Explosions! Spells! The research tree The project has some very regular contributors...

The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results. Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often. Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN: So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes. It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro. Code: #define SIMD_PI           btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029) #define SIMD_2_PI         btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI #define SIMD_HALF_PI      (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5)) #define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0)) #define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD  (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI) The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie. For the answer visit the thr...

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch ( via the autobuilds ), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps. From the user "Antibody" ( known for his duel commentary videos ) comes this nice video overview of the new features: (please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings) On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread . Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily fo...

Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings. To be a master is to spam en mass So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1. Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right. Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome! You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay. All the plot. Space to continue. Take that ...

Stealth development might not be very "open-sourceish", but it sometimes makes for some nice surprises in our project showcase forum . This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load , self described as: A cockpit flight game that is more of an arcade than a sim. The game is built on the Panda3D game engine . It is similar to the ancient games like the classic Wings or the very good Strike Commander. The story and the atmosphere are important elements of the game, so a lot of focus is placed on that too. Here is some in-game action and it seems quite polished already for such a new game: Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it: The game code is licensed under GPL 3, and custom-made game assets under CC-by-SA 4.0. Some of the assets were taken from "free" (as in "not sure in which way") sources on the Internet, so their licensing situation is unclear. Eventually these should be cleare...

We were kindly made aware by the main developer of the 2D RTS Wyrmsun that he is currently looking for support to get this game on the Steam platform (link includes a game-play video). Here is a description of the game we got from him: In Wyrmsun, humans, elves and dwarves all seek to carve a place for themselves on their different homeworlds, with humans living on Earth, dwarves dwelling on Nidavellir, and elves inhabiting Alfheim. In the game's missions, each world follows separate storylines, but the various civilizations can be mixed and matched in custom games. Wyrmsun features: Retro-style graphics 2 playable civilizations, and a number of non-playable ones 18 quests to play, earning technology points which can be used to obtain new units, buildings and technologies 38 units, 30 buildings and 14 technologies Units that can earn experience, being able to upgrade to new unit types or acquire new abilities upon level-up Persistent heroes, who carry over their level and abi...