Gaming Daily A-Z

Assorted news from the vast realm of open-source FPS games: Sadly Warsow , despite recentish good news of open asset re-licensing, seems to have come to an end, with the lead engine developer stepping down and general chaos in its wake. Initially I thought it would sort itself out somehow, but after a few months things look still bad. And an forking attempt also seems to have fizzled. So, maybe YOUR chance to step up and take over a brand new fork? It includes nice relatively unknown game modes similar to Team Fortress and Counterstrike "bombing", so one could try to refocus and re-brand everything. Maybe old news, but it seems people finally got sick of the lack of development and restricting assets licenses of Sauerbraten , and decided to start a nice fork called Inexor. From the looks of it, engine development is quite active and new asset licensing should make the result fully FOSS. They even plan to back-port some nice stuff from Tesseract (sadly also very low prof...

The Godot Engine ("the open-source answer to Unity3D") continues to make exciting progress with the recent stable release of version 2.1 . Besides lots of small usability improvements to the GUI, the main new feature is a asset sharing store build right into the editor: This should hopefully result in a lot of extremely easy to use assets, and I am looking forward to seeing a lot high quality assets from OpenGameArt.org transferred into it ;) In related news, it was recently announced that there is work going on to allow C# (a extremely popular game scripting language also used in Unity3D) scripting in Godot besides the current Python based custom language. So this should lower the entry barrier for indie developers significantly, and maybe we will even see a conversion utility for open-sourcing simple Unity3D games? Furthermore they are also working on a visual scripting system akin to Unreal's Blueprint or what you can use in the Blender Game Engine. Yeah, visual pro...

Gosh that tumbleweed is clogging up the blog! I logged into github today and saw this highly active project in my feed called The Yearning .  A hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer game about spider drones and the meaning of life. If that doesn't mean too much to you (it didn't to me!) then fortunately you can check out this gif of some gameplay.  Lots of other projects continue on strongly. Then there's others that need a bit of TLC. Somebody is having a bit of a go with reviving Open City , which could hopefully lead to making it a bigger project with more contributors later down the line. Then there's somebody reviving Lips of Suna . That's the great thing about open source - there's always a chance somebody is interested enough to take on the mantle should the original developer move on to other things.

Great news from our friends of the SuperTuxKart project! Read all the details on their latest blog-post here . They also made a nice new trailer showing off a more unusual game-mode: Clearly this project has come a long way and looks better with every release! So grab your copy over at their fancy new website .

Seem like some people want to revive the old QuakeExpo tradition this year, which is after all the 20th anniversary of Quake1: https://qexpo2016.com/ Booth pre-registration started on the 18th of June, and the for those that wonder what it is all about: If you are a qexpo old-timer:  The format is virtual ‘booths’ set up for a limited number of days just like the past.  But unlike the past, this site has a built-in comment and messaging system.  The site-wide stream of discussion is available on the ‘Activity’ tab.  However, any booth owner may disable comments on their particular booth page by checking the ‘Comments Disabled’ category. We also have a fancy event calendar to be populated.  Events occurring prior to the Expo days may be posted, but it is requested that there be an event coverage booth, news, or other tie-in available during the Expo itself. If you’re a new-timer wondering what the heck this is:  The Quake Expo concept is base...

Check out this interesting (somewhat recently GPLv3 re-licensed) game Blackvoxel : As you can see it has some interesting mechanic which they call " Molecular Voxel Interaction Engine ". As seen in the trailer above, it basically allows you to automate crafting, resulting in interesting "programmable" factory setups. Of course this might sound a bit too much like actual work and not fun... but given the big fan scene for the closed source game Factorio , I would say it can be more fun that it looks at first ;) Blackvoxel itself probably needs to be a bit more of a game instead of "just" a sandbox, but there is big promise in the overall concept, so give it a try :)

Remember  Justin Nichol's amazing Portrait Kickstarter ? He's up to no good again: Horde of Cuteness! is an ongoing crowdfunded high resolution character icon collection and the indiegogo campaign will add 2 heroes, 5 monsters, and 3 boss monsters chosen by the backers. All the characters will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license, and will be made available as .pngs with transparent backgrounds, and will have include .kra or .xcf source files for editing the characters yourself. All new images will be 2000px by 2000px.  There's a month left and only 590$ out of 1000$ missing. Back the icon collection on indiegogo .