ET:Xreal 0.3.0 released

Just as a quick follow-up to last weeks post about ET:Xreal:
Version 0.3.0 got released today!

ET:Xreal 0.3.0

As you can see, it is still a long way to go to replace all the non-free assets, and graphics sure don't look quite as great as all the features of that engine would make you believe (which proves again: it is the artists making a game look good :p ), but it's a start and you can begin brushing up your ET skills again ;)

Trigger Rally 0.6.0

Testing Trigger's Physics [source video]

Trigger Rally 0.6.0 for Linux (source portable) brings following new features:

• New (and old) contributed tracks and events
• New Practice Mode
• Paging on the Single Races screen to show all the available tracks
• Option to show speedometer in KPH or MPH
• Option to show digital speed on the speed dial ('hybrid' style)
• Fading track comment and GO at race start
• Freezing course time when passing through a checkpoint
• Tweak menu colors for more contrast

PS: If I understand this tweet correctly, this means high-quality motor, drift and crash sounds for Speed Dreams that hopefully will also be usable in Trigger, SuperTuxKart and other racing games.

Phlipple - Unique 3D Puzzle

Phlipple

Phlipple is an original puzzle game which could be useful for training thinking in 3D.

It's available for Linux and Windows with 50 levels and there is a 100-level version for Android (EUR 1.70 / USD 2.30) and iOS (was it taken down? License drama senses tingling!).

I don't know anything about the availability/license of the build instructions/scripts for the portable platforms and of the additional level files but assume they are closed.

Phlipple is by Remigiusz 'mal1ce' Dybka, who also made Zaz (including a [proprietary?] version for Android).

Video: Phlipple promo

Enemy Territory source related news

About a year after the Wolf:ET source release, significant advances to the original game (in a playable and easily obtainable form) are sadly still MIA :(

The quite promising ET:Xreal engine enhancement project is one possible exception, even though they just had to sadly announce that they wouldn't make their Nov. 5th first release date (I was originally waiting for news about this until then...).

ET:Xreal with some Free high quality textures

As you might have guessed, this project takes the advanced id-Tech3 (Quake3) renderer from the now defunct Xreal project and brings it over to the Enemy-Territory engine (also id-Tech3 based). But besides that it also aims to give the engine a general overhaul and possibly add additional advanced features like real physics etc.
Additionally work has also started to replace the free-as-in-beer media from the original game, with much higher quality CC-by-SA textures to make use of the advanced engine features.
To qoute one of the developers (Eonfge) regarding their plans to go fully FOSS:

"The project we are working on consists of multiple parts. First we have a renderer, which is now fairly stable and pretty looking. Then we have the assets, new high quality assets that make the environment come alive. Then we have the official part from Splash Damage. It's our goal to go independent one day, but until we have all the assets replaced, we will remain a mod. After we replaced them all, we'll be an independent open source game."

Lets see how that turns out... alternatively the developer of the awesome looking (but totally non-FOSS) ET mod True Combat: CQB also did express interest in porting his game to ET:Xreal some months back.

On the other side of things it looks like the ET:Xreal fork OpenWolf is turning more and more into a wild mix of different id-Tech3 engines.
Its developer recently announced full compatibility with the id-Tech3 based game Tremulous, and is making his roads towards a quite fully featured general id-Tech3 compatible engine based on ET.
I suspect this is also somehow related to the very similar engine enhancements promised for the quite awesome looking Tremulous fork TremZ:

New alien model in TremZ

But information on that project are quite scares right now, as there seemed to have been some community drama related to it and they are waiting for their own official page to be published now.
But rumors are running wild (in face of the log awaited but more or less vapourware Tremulous 1.2), so I can't confirm if the proposed release date before the end of the year is true or not ;)

Multitouch RTS gaming

Back from holidays... and no new post on the blog in the mean time??? qudobup is getting lazy :p

So before we lose all our loyal readers (e.g. the blog authors themselves *chirp* *chirp*), here a quick update:

Zero-K, the Spring-Engine using RTS game, got a bunch uf new releases lately... all the way up to version 0.8.13.1 by the time of writing this. Try it out if you liked Total Annihilation back in the days :D

However, the main reason for me writing about this is the cool multi-touch (tablet) interface someone coded for the spring engine and showcased with Zero-K:

Zero-K multitouch

Still a bit rough around the edges as you can see... but this shows that RTS games might have a bright future on tablet-pcs!

A Garden of colorful projects

Found this nice abstract shooter over at LGDB a few days ago:

Garden of coloured lights gameplay

As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*).

In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called "Free Game Alliance" to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this!
Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages...

Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena, which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here.

Double 0.7.4: Pingus and M.A.R.S.

No screenshot of Pingus 0.7.4

Version 0.7.4 of Pingus introduces an array of changes:

Content:

• New levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign" (27 new levels in total)
• This is the first use of the desert and factory graphics in official levels

Gameplay:

• Deadly fall height increased
• Digger/Miner/Basher paths cleanup

Features:

• Demo recordings/playback re-implemented (32bit/64bit not compatible)
• --usedir parameter added (useful for portable play)
• Unicode support added
• Option menu added

Usability:

• Window can be resized in-game
• Soundcard dependancy removed
• Man page added

Look:

• Level dimensions now suit 1920x1200 resolution
• Anti-aliasing added to bitmap fonts

Performance:

• Software rendering improved
• OpenGL rendering option added

Other:

• Editor enhancements
• Fixes

Good Old Colorful M.A.R.S. (0.7.4)

0.7.3 and then 0.7.4 of M.A.R.S. were relesed:

• New speacial
• New weapon
• Dutch, Mongolian and Norwegian languages added
• In-game speed settings

Ren'Py Visual Novels

So a while ago we were asked on our forums why we never featured any games done with the open-source Visual Novel engine Ren'Py... which I pretty much dismissed in my mind with "prfff... those are not games anyways" :D
But well... a small competition over at the very nice Linux Gaming News blog asking which game engine actually had the most Linux compatible (and often at least freeware) games released so far, got me thinking about this again as with literally hundreds of games available on-line, we shouldn't simply dismiss this genre outright, I guess.

Screen-shot from the Ren'Py game Katawa Shoujo

Luckily, I do watch Anime from time to time, so I wasn't completely "out of the loop" so to say and thought "if tentacle p*** didn't kill me, I am up for anything" (except for 4chan's /b/ :D ). And at least in Japan, Visual Novels are a pretty big thing, with "next-gen" console releases, high quality movie adaptions and millions of players/readers (as an rather good example "Stein's Gate" could be mentioned).

However Visual Novels do have a certain prejudice attached to them, that most are all about school-girl dating sims or worse e.g. so called "eroge" surprisingly often also meant for a female audience, including boy-boy scenes o_o
And after digging into the scene a bit, I have to admit those prejudices are somewhat correct *slowly wanders off and wonders why he even bothered*

Screen-shot from the FOSS Visual Novel @Camelia Girls

But, that doesn't mean there aren't some good/interesting ones (for example this one), and the Ren'Py engine allows for some pretty awesome interactive storytelling (also on your Android powered device)... so lets not judge a tool by some of its user.
Besides that... it is perfectly feasible for a one man (or woman) team to succeed in creating a great Visual Novel, which can't be said for most other game genres. So if you have an awesome story to tell, and writing a book isn't your thing... well maybe making a Visual Novel is (the programming involved is rather simple... no worries ;) ). Interested? Well head over to the LemmaSoft Visual Novel development forums and dive right into this rather strange sub-culture :p

GunFu Deadlands 1.01: Performance Up!

GunFu Deadlands title screen

GunFu Deadlands, a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated (1.01) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to Git.

The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again!

Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls.

This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago.

Video: GunFu Deadlands 1.01 gameplay

By the way, did you know that GunFu Deadlands is one of the 250 Indie Games You Must Play?

PS: I got word from the developer about the performance increase:

Just for your interest, I made some measurements and it seems that the speed increase is indeed dramatic: 55% faster.

I computed the mean FPS rate by measuring the time it takes to render 1000 frames in-game and dividing 1000 by this number. The formula (FPS_faster_version - FPS_slower_version) / FPS_slower_version is what produced this 55%.

Summer Shorts #3

"Summer?" you ask? Well.. I'ts warm in Berlin.*
Also a warning: this article is 80% development, 31.5% art and 18% games.

Cross-language forums so far

FreeGameDev Forums now have Spanish and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian subforums. Should we add some more? Read this then write here.

OpenClonk old and new terrain rendering

The 2.0 OpenClonk release brings higher resolution for the terrain, which makes the game look a lot better. Read the full changelog here.

Blendswap entries. Amazing.

Check out the Blendswap Military Vehicles Contest entries:

I'm amazed. But that's just me. I have a thing for mechs. Alot even.

WebGL lessons. Freely licensed too.

Did anybody know of these CC-BY-SA-licensed WebGL tutorials? This dog told me about them.

"Hacking" 8-hour prototypes: Hubwar and Nodehack

* Speaking of Berlin, Germany. There was a little game dev jam in Berlin . Two of the prototypes are open source! (Hubwar and Nodehack)

Cross-Language Community(?)

It recently came to my attention that over 24% of Simutrans forum posts are in languages other than English. Some posts (including a few jokes) later FreeGameDev had its first non-English board.

Simutrans Forum Post Languages

Should we really have a section on our board for non-English languages?


Pro:

• Lurkers who would not post in English would have the chance to contribute in the international forum
• Engaged non-English-speakers are likely to improve English skills over time, attracted by the larger community

Con:

• People who might give English a try to contribute will use the international forum out of comfort instead, decreasaing growth of the English-speaking community
• People who use English now, will use the international forum and contribute less to the English-speaking community
• Moderators need to be found

It could also be that there will be no effect at all. We will add non-English forums if we find volunteer moderators as an experiment for a while and see where this leads us (few more details here).

If you would like to help moderate a language forum, please let us know in this thread.

English language map of the non-primarily English-speaking world [source by-nc-nd]

GJID

GJID's first level

I have a hard time playing puzzle games when their only reward is getting to the next one. Consequently I'm usually not a fan of Sokoban games. Having a little or a lot of story bundled with the puzzle helps though.

In GJID you control a brave robot of the name GJID, who volunteered to recycle dangerous weapons from a cold war. In 14 levels you have to dispose of nuclear and disruptor weapons.

Movement controls reacts instantly and you are allowed to skip levels. There is no save function and no sound. The game runs in full-screen but thankfully does not resize the screen and scales instead. License: MIT

This version seems to be made for *nix only. ./configure && make allows to easily run the game.

From the README:

This is a clone of the eponymous DOS shareware game written in 92 by John Remyn. I spoke with John in 95, when the first version of this clone was made. He admired the 8-bit graphics (original game was done in 4-color CGA) and did not object to its existence. His email address has since expired and the few contact attempts I've made recently hit dead ends. The DOS game was $10 shareware and I include the original registration form in the README, in case you want to track John down and give him money for the excellent level design that make this game what it is.
Aside from being an entertaining puzzle, I also release this game as an example of using the XCB library for making X applications. XCB is the new lightweight replacement for Xlib that suffers from lack of documentation. This game demonstrates how to create small applications with it and also how to use RENDER for drawing text, tile sprites, and for hardware scaling of the 320x240 backbuffer.

GJID reminds me of another, even more story-driven Sokoban-style game with simple graphics: The Villany of Cat Food Inc.

Totally missed the Annex Beta 1 release :(

Wow... can believe this myself, but after hyping this cool Megaglest mod a few times here on FreeGamer I totally missed their first release last month :(

Here as a reminder how cool Annex-Conquer the World looks:

Annex - Conquer the World

Currently there is only a Windows port available, but a Linux version is promised for the next release... Edit: I was confused about the media licensing... more or less all the new assets are CC-by-NC-SA, which is as you might know not considered FOSS due to the NC clause. A pity really :-/

So... how was I reminded of this gem? Well check out this cool interview with the Megaglest developers from the Greek site OSArena (in English though) ;)

Now I am off booting into windows to have another round with Annex ;)

0AD Alpha 7 Geronium and more

Act 1

In case you've been hiding under a rock or you rely on Free Gamer for your open source game updates (and we love you if you do), there has been another release of 0AD (announcement) the 3D historical RTS game.

Lots of improvements, including an all-new and unique Carthaginian civilization, a new main menu that moves, new music, new sound effects, new maps, and likely (although not mentioned) a lot of development and the fixes and subtle improvements to go with it.

This is going to be one of the marquee open source games soon. It has the potential for mainstream appeal that is missing from a Battle for Wesnoth, no matter how polished it becomes (and it is very, very polished these days).

Since becoming open source to help save the project from an ignominious end, development seems to have gone from strength to strength with a series of alpha releases each bringing the game one step closer to being a playable title.

Act 2

Also big news coming out of the Dungeonhack Godhead project - a new release! This is the first since a tech demo over 2 years ago. This release marks the beginning of a different direction for the project. They now use the Lips of Suna engine. It is early days but the new engine already has a lot of what a now-defunct rewrite was trying to achieve in that it is server-client based, and it is 3D and the world is deformable, and there is now a workflow to get ideas straight in to a game world, giving writers and artists more possibilities to see their work immediately applied. Still, early days, it was just a black screen for me (but this was Windows 7 x64 - boo) so we'll see if this can reverse the fortunes of a project that has struggled to maintain momentum from one release to the next.

Free Gamer approves of inter-project cooperation. Huzzah!

Act 3

Finally, lady and gentlemen, for your entertainment, a fun ninja platformer!

Shinobi Densetsu is created using the OpenSNC engine, proving it is not just limited to hedgehog-based games.

I used to leave a plate of milk out for hedgehogs when I was a kid. I also had to shift through mucky half-rotten piles of leaves to make sure none were hibernating in the base of a bonfire-to-be. True stories! I digress...

Video!

Huzzah!

FPS news

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ).

So FPS news only from me today ;)

Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week.

Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above.

Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums.
More cool WIP screens can be seen here. Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently.

Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project.
So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure (and more) open sourced

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure

The quadruple-A block-style story-based, sneaky-action pandora game Adamant Armor Affection Adventure is now GPLed. Along with it some other games for that platform by the same author (AAA for one [video]) were open sourced.

Sources can be downloaded here (AAAA) and here (other games).

 

Video: 13 minutes of AAAA on OpenPandora

 Much more info about the releases along with some internet drama history can be read in this post.

I'm not sure about the assets and their license, there seem to be none included in the tarballs.

/me requesting Linux desktop ports

Slipstream Vehicle Simulation

The author of Techne has a new project:

Slipstream is a free racing vehicle simulator trying to be physically accurate and fun to play at the same time! Contrary to most simulators out there it's not designed around a single type of vehicle. It should be able to support anything from a bicycle to a car or anything else that can be driven around on a racetrack for that matter.

Help is requested on the content-side:

 The graphics are still very primitive I'm afraid but they get the job done at least. Making Slipstream pretty is still a high priority but I doubt I'll be able to create decent track and vehicle models myself. If you're an artist and want to participate in making a great racing simulator please drop me a line [dpapavas@gmail.com].

 

Video: Showcasing Slipstream

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Quadruped in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.


The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.


IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.

DungeonHack/Godhead Demo Ultimatum

DungeonHack aka Godhead imposed an ultimatum on itself: two weeks for finishing a gameplay demo using the Lips of Suna engine.

Should the demo not be finished by that time, the development team will commit Seppuku.

Just kidding. :)

It's refreshing to see an open project put some pressure on itself. I'm looking forward to the results of this.

GeneticInvasion : a brand new Tower Defence

Hi! I'm here to show you a new game that I'm working on: GeneticInvasion

It's Tower Defence game, but it has something special: it uses evolutionary algorithms.
The idea of evolutionary algorithm is to use darwin theory to solve problems:

• We generate random solution to the problem.


• We evaluate them.


• We take some of the better ones, apply random mutations to them, and generate an offspring from them.


• The child replaces their parents in the solution population to form a new generation.


• And we do this, again and again, until we find a solution that is good enough.

Well, in GeneticInvasion, the problem, is you. So enemies evolve in order to crush you.

Download the .webm video

We used a real evolutionary computation library called EO to make this game. The library is being used for many serious projects.

So, you heard me, an army of colorful enemies are trying to eliminate you, don't just sit here, fight!

Some notes:

• For the first time since we began to develop it, the game is now interesting to play. That means that it's neither too easy nor too hard to play.


• I also added 3 levels that are supposed to be sorted by difficulty.


• There is a medal system, so you can try to get gold on all 3 of them. (I failed to get the gold medal on the third one through :P)


• There are no binaries, if someone is feeling like doing some, please contact me.


• The game is theoretically compatible with at least GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS but has only been tested on GNU/Linux. You'll need SFML, EO and Glu to build it.


• Please send us your remarks and comments.!

Also, I'd like to thanks OpenGameArt and the artists that contribute it, without them our game would probably had hand-drawing art, and we suck at it. (Also many thanks to ozzed who did the music on Jamendo)

Official website: GeneticInvasion   Controls for playin the game

Flightgear 2.4 plus something cuddly and something fishy

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 (announcement) has been released.

The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt:

• Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more.


• Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain surfaces, 3-dimensional cityscapes, water moves realistically and sunlight is reflected from its surface.


• Many improved planes/models and additional cockpit systems - a choice of nearly 500 different aircraft, from historical to bleeding edge, from ultra-lights to the ultimate flying heavy metal.

Still no combat (see open source flight combat article) but I think that's probably a bit off topic for Flightgear.

The Flightgear project has reached what I call "critical mass" in that it no longer depends on a few active developers to maintain progress. A thriving contributor community outgrows the original development crew and it becomes owned by the community. Usually when a project attains critical mass, development accelerates massively. There are more people contributing to Flightgear than has ever been the case, it is flying. Pun intended.

In fact I can't think of many other FOSS games that have attained "critical mass" status. Battle for Wesnoth of course. Possibly Freeciv and OpenTTD (I wish they'd rename that). Some projects got close but never quite made it, such as Glest and Vega Strike. Others are knocking on the door, such as Pioneer, Speed Dreams, 0AD. (If I am being dozy and missing any such projects, point out in the comments!) The vast majority of projects never get close and usually only are actively developed as long as their originators / principle supporters are motivated.

What could be cuddly? Plee the Bear 0.6 has been released (announcement, forum thread). It features the first big boss. It is a very nice looking game with a lot of potential, and seems great for a younger player.

And the something fishy? Avid readers, those worth their salt, people who are true followers of the blog, those who will enter through the gates of St Peter before all others, they will know I am a big fan of Fish Fillets NG. Somebody has made a clone called, imaginatively, Fish Fillets Clone (screenshots). Whilst I don't like that it is an outright clone, I do like that it uses vector graphics. I think there's promise there.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Oh, yeah, hiiii to my Cuban female fanbase!

Planets are a nice thing...

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p

New to the feeds is our revision control planet, for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p



It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward.

However, recently they released an auto-builds update script, which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p



Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released:

Stunt Rally 1.2

Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode.



Other things to mention? Mage is a open-source MTG client, but not as nice looking as Wagic. But it might convince you with other features (of which Mage has a lot ;) ).

Unknown Horizons has a nice news update with all the improvements Google's Summer of Code gave them and the Zod engine is set out to improve the multiplayer part of the (back then really nice) game Z (using the unfree media from the original it seems).

PyWeek 13 (And PyWeek 12 Winners)

It's time PyWeek #13 soon!



The dates of this challenge are are 00:00 UTC 2011-09-11 to 00:00 UTC 2011-09-18.

Timetable
Friday 2011/08/12	Registration underway
Sunday 2011/09/04	Theme voting commences
Sunday 2011/09/11	Challenge start
Sunday 2011/09/18	Challenge end, judging begins
Sunday 2011/10/02	Judging closes, winners announced

Check out PyWeek 12's winners by the way:

Loopback: Asteroids + Tower defense. Retro Look. Permissive code license.

Loopback - PyWeek #12 Team Winner

Lemming: Enough Plumbers + Canabalt??? Hand-drawn horrible ;). Permissive code license.

Video: PyWeek #12: Lemming Speed Run

The PyWeek guys seem to have figured out the license part of game prototyping well: Lemming for example contains a list of all used art pieces' urls and licenses. Neat!


PS: Ludum Dare got 600-1 entries last weekend.

BZFlag Tournament hosted by Ohava Open Computers

BZFlag

There will be a tournament of the CTF game BZFlag.

When: September 30th, at 5pm EST

Where: Online(?)

How: Visit ohava.com/gametourney for sign-up.

Prize: An Ohava OpenBook BE awarded to the MVP of the winning team. More prizes will be given to all of the winning team's members.

News Shorts

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one.

OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too.

Alex the Allegator was part-ported to HTML5 using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D

DusteD, maker of Wizznic! is not dead.

Blendswap now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying.

Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS. Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

Keeping up a tradition...

Yes, I post only seldom, but when I do it I keep up the good old tradition of mixing totally unrelated projects in one big post :p



So where to start today? Ahh yes:



The puzzle type game Berusky 2 was recently FOSSified (code and art GPL) as pointed out in our forums (but I have to admit I saw it first on LGDB). And as out great founder was quick to point out, it follows the great tradition of the first part with was also released under the terms of the GPL.



In totally unrelated news, Lips of Suna version 0.5 got released last week, with a bunch of nice graphical and game-play improvements (change log and discussion here).



For those living behind a rock, Lips of Suna is a crazy mix of Minecraft, slightly adult themed anime and a more classic RPG. Definitly worth a try, even though still under heavy development!



Hmm and now a quick run-down of other (I'd say less important) news:

Q3 Rally (now stand alone with the ioQuake3 engine) is nearing another release and OpenXcom is making good progress in the "battlescape" AI. In WarZone2100 land, you can now test the cool new models with a test mod (is supposed to work with the latest snapshot release). The fork of the W:ET, OpenWolf is also progressing with a fix of the Mod support (while the more ambitious ET:Xreal seems to have gone in a hiatus again), and while talking about id software source-code, I have started this small anticipatory id tech 4 project which needs contributors ;)



The end.



Oh wait, did we ever mention the source release of Cities3D (a Setters of Catan like game)?

On OpenGameArt 2 and FreeSound 2

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :)

OpenGameArt 2 submission form

FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!

FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash...

A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:

FreeSound Bulk License Change

If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY.

I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:

Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site

Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!

Open Source in Humble Indie Bundle #3: Haaf's Game Engine (HGE)

HGE's Particle Editor

The proprietary games sale Humble Indie Bundle has a tradition of including open source engine releases.

In all of the other humble bundles there has always been at least one game that opened its source (in #2 it was revenge of the titans. in #1 it was penumbra, lugaru, aquaria and gish).

- Fer C.

Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages: hge, hge-unix.

The non-free BASS audio library was replaced with OpenAL.

The hge-unix readme states "10 I don't know anything about the Windows version of HGE.", which might mean that developers have to juggle two engine versions and audio libraries if they want to support the three main platforms. Or hge-unix needs to be ported back to windows systems.

You can read more about the port in the blog post HGE comes to Mac and Linux by Ryan Gordon aka icculus. Or perhaps watch his talk about Linux/open source gaming (again?).

LinWarrior r19+

LinWarrior r19+ Test Video

I tested and recorded the latest LinWarrior git revision (a few changes since release19). Some of the new features in r19 and after include:

• Atmospheric daytime setting


• New units (Flopsy, Scorpion and Tank)


• Cockpit frame in first-person view


• Trees, trees, trees

The LinWarrior engine is still being developed, for example mechs are still hardcoded rather than configured in textfiles right now.

PS: A video of actual gameplay, rather than just testing the controls. Unfortunately no sound but 1920x1200 resolution...

Playing LinWarrior r19+ [mute]

Cubosphere: First Beta

Cubosphere 0.1 Beta testing video

The first beta release of Cubosphere is available.

The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

Some random FPS engine news

Fast games for slow summer news weeks... but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p

To start out... yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums, but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users.

Noteworthy news related to that (albeit not strictly FOSS related): RedEclipse also got included into Desura now (Moddb's indie friendly answer to Steam, even with an upcoming Linux port). To avoid complains in the comments... I mention this here even though it is a closed source game distribution platform, simply because it can be a great way to promote (and maybe even sell?) FOSS games, and if we would finally be able to attract the modding community (which is largely represented on Moddb) to work with FOSS engines instead, it would be win-win for everyone involved.

Despite its unfree content War§ow is also worth a look now and then. According to their somewhat recent blog entries they have made great progress in speeding up the Quake2 based renderer, and plan to include a matchmaking and statistics system in the maybe not so distant 0.7 release. It's actually a pity that the engine isn't used for other projects, and given that it is Quake2 based, it could probably be ported to mobile platforms like Android rather quickly (since there is a full and fast Quake2 Java port).

Talking about mobile platforms... the engine behind Xonotic (formerly Nexuiz) Darkplaces, seems to have gotten an iOS port judging by a quick look at the very recent new source release. No news post about the most recent changes, but slightly older news tell us about a much higher frame rate then before :) Would be nice if Xonotic would see another Beta release soon also ;)

Oh and I know I will get flamed for this again (e.g. for mentioning a commercial game on this blog; but I stand by my opinion that commercial isn't != FOSS), but the Darkplaces based and GPLed source-code containing SteelStorm: Burning Retribution, has been added as a free bonus to the latest HumbleBundle (at the time of writing this, with still 5 days remaining to get this "pay what you want" indie-game-bundle including some really nice games all running on Linux). Just to quickly mention... no news about source releases from that source this time (but they added all of the games from the 2nd bundle if you pay above average)... but given the somewhat lukewarm source releases last time (not really FOSS) I guess that is not a big loss :-/

Hmm what else? World of Padman was somewhat recently updated, and its engine ioQuake3 is moving to a modularized renderer.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST (hot news coming in while I am writing this)... John Carmack just confirmed in his keynote on this year's QuakeCon, that the Doom3 source code will be released this year (probably shortly after the Rage release scheduled early October)... which will be a really nice addition to the FOSS engine pool (finally a somewhat modern single player FPS engine). I am especially looking forward to see some of the existing high quality Doom3 mods to go stand alone, and maybe even FOSS!