Stunt Rally 1.0 plus Pioneer and LambdaRogue

I thought I'd come out of the desert back to this oasis of fun for the evening. Some emails to the freegamerblog gmail account (yes - I check it, sporadically) prompted this post. I do try to respond to everybody, even if sometimes I leave it a few weeks *cough* or months *cough* between logging in to the account.

Stunt Rally

Stunt Rally is a modification of VDrift which takes the VDrift physics engine and adapts it to the Ogre3D graphics engine. Add in a few really nifty Ogre3D-based components (terrain etc) and you have a very cool FOSS rally game! Since it was originally mentioned on the blog a few months ago, progress has continued unabated and the game has improved a lot.

In fact, the 10th public version - Stunt Rally 1.0 - just got released! 35 tracks to drive on, in 6 sceneries, and 7 cars to choose from. There is also a fully functional Track Editor to create your own tracks or modify the existing ones.

Above is a gameplay video of Stunt Rally. There's also a track editing tutorial (part 1, part 2) and more videos on the authors YouTube page.

Rigs of Rods

Another cool driving/flying/anything game is Rigs of Rods and development activity continues with the project more than ever since it became open source. Here is the 2010 RoR tech demo video:

Another cool, if less exciting Rigs of Rods video is this showcase for a hill climbing map. It does include some dodgy physics and trees, but the damage to the overturning cars is impressive and some of the views are spectacular.

I do wonder, so very publicly, if RoR suffers from being a bit too flexible. I mean, I don't see much 'game' in there. Lots of simulation, but the idea of loading crates or driving articulated lorries over hilly terrain... it just doesn't appeal to me. Racing on Stunt Rally does. Perhaps that's a challenge for the RoR team in 2011 - to present a more fun side to the game in addition to the simulating nature of it. Then again, simulating is fun for some.

...this post is turning out a bit longer than I planned. Let's be a little less ponderous.

LambdaRogue

LambdaRogue 1.6 just came out. This graphical rogue like looks fun. If you like RPGs but can't get into the ASCII nature of most rogue-likes (i.e. like me) then this is worth a download. It comes with both hi-res and lo-res tilesets.

LambdaRogue

Pioneer Space Sim

Pioneer. This is wicked. Dynamic planets. Check out these gorgeous screenshots (lifted from this thread). 'Nuff said.

Pioneer Space Sim

I'm off before I start to write an essay on the latest Free Software games...

Political Space Warfare

Political Space Warfare is an ambitious, multi faceted space based strategy in-progress game. Still far from achieving it's full vision, PSW wants to offer gameplay ranging from long-term strategy gameplay as seen in browser based empire building games such as Travian all the way down to a RPG where you play as a single unit in the greater picture.

Unfortunately, its Windows only at the moment, but the team are planning to port it to Linux/other platforms as soon as possible, which will be a lot sooner if there are any of you willing to help :)

PARPG

In a quick aside, PARPG is looking for a Lead Writer/ So if any of you are in the mood for writing some Post Apocaliptic fiction, be sure to have a look

Wagic

Yes I have to admit... I spend waaay too much money back in the nineties on that crazy trading card game MTG ;) But hey, I am a changed man now and I beat that addiction ;)
So I don't think I should actually touch the game I am about to present to you with anything but a 10 ft pole, but well... it is probably a damn fun game ;)

Anyways...Wagic is obviously an only half-heartily hidden Magic the Gathering implementation on your favorite gaming device (including the neat Linux driven N900, which is actually a FOSS dream compared to all those Android smart phones... no, I am not getting paid for mentioning it ;) ). And with that we have already the main problem with Wagic... it's data and media can obviously not be really free, even if they don't actually use any copyrighted pictures from that game as far as I can tell.

But the rest of that game looks actually really nice, and with the source under the BSD you can't make much wrong, right?

Wagic gameplay

But maybe the engine could be combined with the really FOSS Wtactics card game? (Edit: yay, they seem to consider doing so in the future; see comments!)

Simple & Polished

 Avoision

 Falling Block Game 2

Avoision is a simple collect-dots-avoid-blocks game.

Falling Block Game 2 is a Tetris clone.

Both are simple games. Both are very polished! I avoided them at first, assuming they would be of the yet-another-hello-world-game type but luckily got over that arrogant moment. :)

Neither forces full-screen, they scale to any resolution, controls are crystal clear and feedback is great.

Both games use Radius Engine, which is a Win/Lin OpenGL/SDL/Lua engine. Kind of like LÖVE.

For Arch Linux users: I made AUR packages for Radius Engine, Avoision and FBG2. I use clyde for managing packages.

PS: Sometimes polish is worth more than complexity. Can you name free open source games that are polished to the max?

Changes in Hardwar development

Possible Hardwar main menu scene

Hardwar is a long-term project to remake the 1998 Hardwar - a science fiction flight simulation game. There have been two recent changes:

The code hosting switched from Launchpad's bazaar to GitHub.

The in-game editor was dropped and instead Ogitor will be used. While in-game editing is awesome, I'm glad that a general tool is being used and time is being saved.

Ogitor 0.3

Ogitor is a Plug-In based WYSIWYG editor environment for OGRE.

OGRE is on a hunt for illogic in its API as a preparation for releasing 1.8 and every coder is invited!

Spring RTS bugfix and games list

There's a new Spring version, available as windows build and source package.

License info in spring games list

FOSS-advocate Gallaecio clarified the license status of the "open source" Spring games and now the Spring game list features detailed license information. None of the games have 100% free for commercial usage media.

Gallaecio has (a quite empty) blog (in Galician [english translation])

Coldest Cleaning Up

Re-textured base in Coldest

A few days ago LinWarrior 3D r18 got released, today there's news regarding Coldest! Re-texturing (license related) is in-progress. The current SVN revision looks ..interesting with missing textures :) .

 Coldest SVN r629 screens

I also recorded a video, but YT made it lag (glc-recorded, ffmpeg-encoded using this method)..

OGRE3D History: 2010

There's a retrospective of 2010 post on OGRE's blog. Here are some interesting FOSS projects they mentioned:

Project Name	Type	License	Description
Gorilla	Library	MIT	GUI library
Hovercraft	Game	GPL*	Racing *Depends on non-free fmod, havok and zoidcom
Island Hopping	Game	WTFPL*	Platformer *Depends on non-free irrklang
MOGRE	Library	MIT	Bindings for .NET
OgreKinect	Library	MIT	Input library for Kinect
OgreProcedural	Library	MIT	Procedural geometry library
OpenSpace3D	Tool	LGPL*	Scene Editor *Depends (?) on non-free newton physics
QuickGUI	Library	LGPL	GUI library
Spacescape	Tool	MIT	Create space skyboxes with stars and nebulas
Zen Engine	Library	ZLib	3D game engine client framework

Spacescape running in Wine

I wasn't able to build Spacescape SVN but the 0.3 release runs fine in Wine.

Island Hopping's game over screen

Island Hopping's dependency on irrklang is probably easy to replace, so I gave it a try using Wine with success (broken sound though, go figure).


OpenSpace3D wouldn't start in wine and I don't know if it's build-able on Linux.

PS: Statistics!

Better late than never

Doesn't seem like the other authors of this blog are big FPS fans, so I guess I have to keep you updated about the other nice releases of last week ;) Too bad my current PC is not capable of running any of those though :(

Xonotic 0.1 preview release

So people have been nagging about this in the comment section already... and I agree, the first release of the Nexuiz fork Xonotic is a pretty cool thing:

Xonotic 0.1

For more videos head over to this Youtube page.

Graphics are really a big improvement over the patchwork that was Nexuiz, however the player animation (blending) is still somewhat lacking. Sources tell me that this is actually a current limitation of its Darkplaces engine, but since everything of that game is GPL, someone should take up the challenge and change that ;)

World of Pandman 1.5

Not quite as FOSS (because of un-free media), but still fun is the new World of Padman 1.5 release:

World of Padman 1.5

Their website just says that there are a lot of changes, so be surprised ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7

Errmmm, well and there has been also a very nice SuperTuxKart release over X-mas:

SuperTuxKart 0.7

I have to admit though that given the fact that their forums are actually hosted on our website, we are reporting about this neat game way too little. Well... I promise more coverage, ok? :)

LinWarrior r18 "Hazy Blur"

LinWarrior 3D r18

There's a new LinWarrior 3D source release [download link above first screenshot on this page].

• Enhanced look of landscape and sky
• Location markers and zones
• Mission messages 
• Jump-jet-thruster vibrations (quite awesome!)
• Blueoading screen:

There's a to-do list and I see collaboration options in procedural city generation: Current cities are textured blocks of different size aligned on a flat grid and created manually. The textures of roads and buildings are procedurally generated though.

There's supposed to be a git repository for the project soon.

HackCraft's OGA contributions

HackCraft, the developer of LW3D, has made many small-but-useful contributions to OpenGameArt in the last few months.

PS: Aw, yeah, mech games.

PPS: I'm curious what kind of suggestions people come up with after test-playing this release, so feel welcome to comment!

Remembering and discovering some adventure and role playing games

Blood and Iron menu

Blood and Iron "is a dark low fantasy tactical RPG where you attempt to lead a mercenary company to fame and fortune." This sounds like a Mount & Blade demake [EDIT] but it's not!

• Dark low fantasy theme 
• You play the owner of a mercenary company, the characters on the battlefield are just employees 
• Your goal is to make your mercenary company the most famous one in history, and to complete various special challenges (achievements) 
• Yes, you really won't save the world this time 
• Tactical (actual combat) and strategic (resource management) layer 
• Turn-based, of course 
• Ironman only, no girlie man reloading whenever something goes wrong here 
• Yes, when characters die they are gone - forever 

It is written in SDL and supposed to be portable.

So far (the project is one day old at time of writing) there is only a win32 binary (runs on linux using wine) available for download which features an incomplete menu and low-pixel art.. I would love to see this project ripen.

Pages of Adventure dialog

Pages of Adventure is a lovely "puzzle adventure in a strange world" which so far features one puzzle. I tested the game on Arch Linux.

Game testers are wanted for the SVN version of the game, different resolutions need to be tested for example. Testers and people who can recommend game/map/dialog editors for tile-based rpg/adventure games, please report to the PoA thread on our forums!


Dawn RPG makes progress. They use MediaWiki for posting news, which makes following development not too comfortable. SumWars is progressing as well. Both games have gained new team members and released new versions.


Hmm.. remember Hero of Allacrost, Silver Tree and Adonthell, FLARE, Arkhart, Radakan and PARPG ? I wonder how many open source non-roguelike role-playing or adventure games are out there and how many are playable and how many are finished..

Happy Aðfangadagskvöld!

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ):

Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress

OGA's presents

There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example.

Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared.

Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

News Avalanche!

Zero-K:

Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :)

It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back

IrrRPG Builder

IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua.

There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functions yet, which crashes the game) and adding some sort of api refference along with autocompletion would really make it a fully fledged IDE :)

Ryzom:

We've been giving Ryzom quite a bit of love recently, with their Linux native client and all, but they just announced an In-game competition for a Linux netbook and got accepted for the Google Code-In initiative. Here's hoping they have lots of success!

Warlock's Gauntlet:

Warlock's Gauntlet is a highly polished Gauntlet/Diablo/Hack'nSlash mashup. A nice interface, smooth gameplay and lots of spells make this a very nice find.(Thanks archl from the comments :) It even has co-op!

Egoboo

The Egoboo team just released their version 2.8.1 beta, it adds randomized loot, special effects and lots of bugfixes. Check it out!

FreedroidRPG

Freedroid recently had their website redesigned(aww I liked the old one :(), and also released version 0.14 which included the Summer of Code work. This added better randomized dungeons, a better interface for the level editor and replaced magical weapons with a more sci-fi addon system (the last addition was done by Nekotaku from Lips of Suna, which also had a release recently :)

An early Xmas?

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p

So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors.

Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here. They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :)

ZeroBallistics 2.0

So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game!!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here.

War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011

Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will make it short: War§ow 0.6 (BIG and very nice release) and AlienArena2011 (now with ODE physics for rag-dolls).

From Open to Free, visual programming, new SumWars RPG and Berlin game dev summoning

FLARE logo

OSARE is now FLARE. From an OGA tread:

I sent an email to Richard Stallman asking if he's interested in supporting Justin Nichol's Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Project.

He pointed out that the difference between "open source" and "free" or "free/libre" and noted this:

"However, if you decide to describe it "free" or "free/libre" instead of "open source", then I would be honored to participate."

Stallman's lectures are what convinced me in the first place to use the GPL for my work, and to be interested in copyleft licenses in general. I'm quite honored that he answered my email at all, and I agree with his reasoning.

IOSKETCH visual programming

IOSKETCH is a cross-platform visual authoring tool for games. It is written in Common Lisp.

Summoning Wars 0.5.3
The new version

SumWars 0.5.3 is out:

• Upgrade to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7
• More art and story content
• Russian translation

See the arrow?

There's a little meeting this Saturday for making little games in Berlin. Artists, programmers, designers and whatnot are welcome! We speak English. Wir sprechen Deutsch. At least one speaks Spanish, at least one speaks Russian.

You might want to bring a multiple outlet strip (don't forget your converter if you need one).

Berlin Game Developers Meet-Up #5 on Facebook.
Where:   Cafe Osswald
When:    Saturday, December 18 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm

Lithosphere - awesome visual procedural 3d terrain map generator with shaders

Forget my last post about terrain generators! I'm just going to let the screen/video talk for themselves.

Lithosphere is a GPU driven terrain generator. It allows you to create and export material textures and heightmaps intended for use in realtime graphics applications.

All terrain algorithms are implemented as GLSL fragment shaders operating on floating point textures. This allows realtime modification of the terrain. A graph of nodes is evaluated in order to arrive at the terrain output.

License: AGPL

Requirement: 32bit python2.6 (:|), a modern graphics card

Tested on: Windows, Linux

The creator's blog might be of interest to you as well. The last few articles cover OpenGL and HTML5/JavaScript Canvas.

Portrait Marathon got $1500, could use $1500 more :)

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update and Reddit Game Jam #4 in a few hours!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA:

$1500

by December 28th

30 portraits

$2000

by December 28th

35 portraits

$3000

by December 28th

35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection

I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves..
You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit.

In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d!

Contributing to FPSs, RPGs and other games by sharing thoughts and spreading words

I* joined PARPG to work on game interaction (controls and GUI). This decision was made after taking a look at some projects and talking with their members about what tasks are available. Now I want to tell you about the 'open source jobs' available out there.

Radakan (RPG) is currently a solo project that uses the Python 3D engine Panda3D. Project lead Taldor would like help with the game design, GUI design, Writing (dialog & quests) and content creation (creating and converting models, managing the content pipeline). Warning: Radakan's website is currently down, best way to get in contact is irc.freenode.net#radakan.

CubeCreate (FPS + Editor) will be a Lua-driven Sauerbraten-based engine. It could use some design help for editor accessibility improvements and thoughts on asset management (model/texture import) while the developers port to Lua.

0 AD (RTS) has a a well-compiled list of tasks.

Megaglest (RTS) would like to have somebody find more players for the game. In my humble opinion it could use the help of an audio designer to take a look at some files' volume levels as well. :) A re-work of their homepage is being discussed as well.

Ryzom (MMORPG) still needs to port the world editor but also would be interested in designers to work on a 3D editor.

LinWarrior3D (Mech Action) will soon have a new release. There might be a git repository soon. I got a list of possible tasks:

• Homepage enhancing, either with Drupal or static (portions of the website should have the feeling of you-are-in-the-world rather than you-are-reading-the-website). There needs to be resemblance to the current homepage for keeping identity.
• The HUD-Displays could use an overhaul.
• Concepts for a world setting, places, factions for (GTA-like) emerging gameplay - to enhance and populate the game world.
• Concepting a tutorial at the current state of interaction

Suggestions, problem/bug reports, performance reports and fan-mail are always welcome with LW3D. Contributors should be aware that LW3D is a slow-paced "lifetime" project. :)

*remember, this is a collaborative blog, I'm one of currently 4 posters :)

Quoting releases: Bitfighter, Love2d, OpenClonk

Bitfighter

There's a new version of the retro-style multiplayer top-down action game Bitfighter and a well-readable changelog:

This version features new Soccer rules, and a verified user name system protected by your forums password. Many other improvements, including important stability fixes and enhancements for all platforms.

love2d 0.7 no-game-screen

LÖVE 0.7 "Game Slave" has finally been released! This is a Lua 2D game engine also known as "love2d". Oh, and it's on Indie DB. Oh, and Indie DB allows to sort engines by license!

Framebuffers, for rendering to places other than the screen. Threads, for true multithreaded programming. New callbacks, like love.quit and love.focus. A text-origin change from lower- to upper-left. And about a million different bugs have been squashed!

You'll find games and toys and demos to try out in this forum and you can give my stupid little game a try too.

"The Guardians of Windmills" OpenClonk scenario

OpenClonk 1.0 hass been released and I just noticed that I love how their main page contains all the info important to people who don't know the project.

This milestone focuses on some fast paced melees, races and a few experimental scenarios to choose from. All scenarios are meant to be played multiplayer through the internet. It features completely new controls, a new HUD and many weapons and tools to choose from. Also included are four tutorials that guide new players and veteran clonkers through the new controls.

I feel like giving OpenClonk a try soon and hope the tutorials are any good. Here's a game description, if you never took a closer look at the project like me.

OpenClonk is a free multiplayer action game where you control clonks, small but witty and nimble humanoid beings. The game is mainly about mining, settling and fast-paced melees. OpenClonk is also not just a game but also a versatile 2D game engine that offers countless possibilites to make your own mods.

Freely Licensed Fantasy Portraits Financing!

The style

Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes:

1. Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies
2. Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE
3. Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games

The cash

$1500, Dec 28

The target

Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers).

The artist

Other works by Justin

Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA. He has a portfolio.

The portraits

• GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits
• Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details)
• The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility

I can only say: invest in this one! And spread the word too, for example on reddit.

M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Can a game that has "ridiculous" in the title be bad? No. It can not!

M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Even though I'm no fan of the multiplayer (zero-)gravity-shooter genre, I enjoy playing M.A.R.S., which features AI enemies and wingmen, various weapon types, upgrades and a pretty cool game mode, where a huge cannon will shoot at the planet of the enemy team of whoever is holding the remote to it. I also think it's darn pretty.

BAM!

M.A.R.S. uses shaders (but does not require them). The game menu is well-made in both look and feel too. The media license is not specified. Code is GPLed. M.A.R.S. runs on Lin/Win (get it here) and uses the SFML library (2.0, I had to get it from SVN).

BOOM!

If you want to help the project out, you can do so by translating it. English and German translations are available so far. Since SFML 2 has recently been ported to OS X, it probably would be welcome if someone could provide a build as well.

A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

Well, screw this...

We need contributors, contributors, contributors to misquote a famous internet meme ;)
So if you want to be a new author writing wacky (or wicked) articles here on FreeGamer, contact us! Don't let this Blog die! And hey it's a good excuse to be lazy and not work on actual open-source games :D

FOSS game news

So what kind of gaming related news have piled up in my list during the last month (yes it has been nearly a month since goat's post :( )?

Freeroid recently got a major update, bringing it up to version 0.14. Another major update was given to us by the great Hedgewars team, so who needs worms if he can have hedgehogs? They also make better splashes under my car...*hust*.

Forget what I just said, FreeGamer minion! Concentrate on the news I bring regarding the the FOSS MMORPG Ryzom. You might remember that this game has gone free as in freedom (but not as in beer) some time ago, and besides various improvements, it now resulted in a working Linux client. So go and try out their free 21 day trial if you are on Linux (you better be ;) ).

Older Ryzom Linux vid

On the FPS side of things I have both good and bad news: First the bad ones... the very promising project Axis Revenge has closed down again for unspecified reasons. Some of their stuff will be going towards the also very nice looking Xreal based Weaver project. But no, that wasn't the good news yet... I recently came across another promising project based on the Cube2 engine, called CLONE, a rather funny name given that they want to make a CS like game ;) Not much to see yet, but the guys involved seem quite dedicated and experienced. So lets wait and see.

Hmm... what else? Ahh yes, the creator of the great AlienArena recently showed up in our forums to give us a peak at a new trailer for the upcoming AlienArena2011:

AlienArena 2011 trailer

Another Cube2 /Syntensity based project I am currently closely following, is CubeCreate. It tries to become a really polished FOSS game engine and distribution platform, and so far I like their approach (like LUA scripting).

Oh year, for the RTS fans... the new Warzone2100 3.0 Beta looks rather nice, and also has a test build with an improved netcode now. Personally I can't wait to see the Art-Revolution models integrated however. So watch this space for updates on that!

I guess that's it for tonight, hope you all stay a loyal readers even though the blog has slowed down a lot lately. And please... consider contributing as explained in the beginning!

Atonement (or Goat's Monthly Post)

Julius' endless poking has sent me over the cliff of post-guilt, fortunately, lots of projects have been jumping up and down for attention of late, so I have quite a bit of content to redeem myself with.

RPGs

OSARE

OSARE showing off powers

Pfunked and recently released an update to the promising OSARE This brings "powers" to the game, the classic Hack 'n Slash abilities that encompass magic, melee and ranged special attacks. No skimping on them here either, intricate systems such as block-counter based attacks and time stopping magic spells definitely differentiate OSARE's powers from the more generic "Do x damage" spells more commonly found. The new powers do bring in a bit of a balance issue though, but such is the nature of RPGs

Dawn RPG

Dawn RPG

Dawn-RPG has also been updating steadily throughout the year; I kind of forgot about the project and should be punished appropriately :P Main recent additions are sound an music (from the illustrious OGA, more on that later), and "characteristics" that diversify its abilities system. Dawn is definitely a project to watch, they are a bit more "traditional" than OSARE in a few ways: Larger amounts of inventory slots and more numerous actions and abilities (albeit more generic in the terms I described earlier), along with quests (although that may be added to OSARE in a future release).

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna hit the 0.1.0 milestone as well, recently. 240 days since the last release means that lots has changed. So much, in fact, that nekotaku didn't even have enough time to list it all, so sorry if I cannot give a concise overview (the game doesn't run on my system because of GFX problems :\). From the screenshots though, one can see that the models have been improved significantly, albeit at the expense of a couple m2 of cloth ;) --edit-- Scratch that, after interrogating nekotaku with a comfy pillow in IRC I managed to pry this out of him "I worked a lot on the graphics engine, as can be seen from it not working :-P I also wrote a new AI, worked on combat, implemented a faction system, a quest system, a crafting system, etc.".

RTSes

Warzone2100

Warzone2100 going BOOM

Warzone 2100 released v3.0-beta1. Another release that keeps its changes close to the heart, it seems that v3 mainly consists of graphical and gameplay improvements and fixes rather than slews of new features. Kick the Goat if you find that his journalistic integrity doesn't meet up to the standards of your average blogger though.

0 A.D

0AD's new Celtic Faction

0AD dropped their second Alpha release "Βελλεροφῶν" (or Bellerophon). Their change log is as beautiful as the game itself; and it had better be after having recently acquired a development manager, and they're always looking for more team members so if check their open positions list and join up if you're man enough. A new faction, gameplay improvements such as fog of war and unit formations, performance improvements... Oh, and victory conditions, sothat you can finally beat your opponent!

Racing

SuperTuxKart

According to my googling, it has been over a year since SuperTuxKart has been mentioned on Freegamer! Scandalous! Anyhow, they recently released Alpha 3 of their 0.7 Irrlicht engine revision, lots of new things has been added like ODE physics and a bunch of new tracks and racers. I'd love to post some screenies/videos, but they're all of the old version. You can find a recent video here, on a German fan site :)

Odds and Ends

Wesnoth Tactics

WTactics wiki

Wesnoth Tactics... Now here's an interesting one, a collectable card game based on the Wesnoth art and universe. Loads of cool art originating from there, which is available at OpenGameArt. The game is also playable on PC using a closed source CCG game client, LackeyCCG, but they plan to produce their own cross platform client in the future. This is a very interesting example of the flexibility of open source settings instead of code; Wesnoth has spawned quite a few shared setting (Or "commundo" as a circa '09 #freegamer channel would have said) games, and hopefully the trend continues

OpenGameArt

Finally, OpenGameArt has received quite a few mentions in this post; they are still alive and very much kicking with quite a few large developments done to the site, namely: Flattr integration, sothat users can recieve micro-donations for their art, and the freeing up of quite a bit of funds for commissions due to serving costs being covered by GameBoom

A few interesting things

Hello again from the dark side of the moon (at least it's equally remote ;) ).

Today I have some assorted news of projects previously featured and one new one. Lets start with the latter:

ArcanumAlive or OpenArcanum is a engine re-implemention and assets replacement project for the game Arcanum. It somewhat recently also got a Linux port, and seems to be progressing nicely so far/again.

ArcanumAlive

Some RTS news

Totally unrelated, the previously featured MegaGlest has been updated to version 3.3.7 which brings a series of nice improvements to the game (including a MacOSX port). Some time ago a much improved version of the WW2 themed RTS Spring1944 was released, and the engine it is based on also got a bunch of updates lately.

Finally some FPS news

For the readers with a short attention span, I left the FPS news for the very last (so that they don't read it :p). Recently Irritant the creator of AlienArena released some news about the upcoming version, called 2011. The main feature is probably ODE physics integration, but the new maps look nice too as seen in this video:

AlienArena2011 promo

But that's all for today. Hopefully we will see an update by the other authors of this blog soon ;)

An update out of nowhere!

Quite literally, as I am posting this via a satellite connection from the other side of the world ;) But if those lazy co-authors spend all their time playing games instead of bringing you the latest FreeGaming news, then I have to come to the rescue no matter what!

For those that are disappointed that the blog isn't updated more regularly... well tough luck :p There is our planet feed though, and you can also hang out on the forums... or *gasp* try to get involved in a project yourself!

Mission X, side scrolling action

This pretty nice, old school, side scrolling shooter (written in Java) can be found here. Check out the video below:

Mission X

Lots of eye-candy over at the 0 A.D. webpage

Amazing amount of nice looking stuff, and progress updates (f.e. implementation of the "shadow of war" feature) has been recently added to the 0 A.D. website. I know you are probably following that game anyways... but a quick reminder can hurt ;)

0 A.D. landscape

Red Eclipse

Sadly I can't make a video or post screens of it from this PC I have here, but only a short while ago I checked out the latest version of Red Eclipse, and it is really starting to be a quite fun game. It's even includes real player models now, and quite good looking weapon models are currently added.

It's rather easy to compile on Linux (automatic script), so don't shy away just because it is not released as a binary yet. There are even quite a few people online playing it already.

Neotron Games: Treasure Trove of 2D Games

Neotron Games

These guys have compiled quite a selection of quality, complete games. Actually, to such an extent, one could say that they are one of the most prolific open source game devs out there, even if not all of their works are completely "open".

Most of their games are compatible with the GPX-Wiz, and hopefully the Pandora once Bennu, the language they use for developing their games, gets an official port.

Before we were Dead : Under the sea RPG

Play as one of 4 fishy characters, all with their own individual abilities and personalities in an atmospheric underwater world. Explore the multitude of scenic aquatic environs and immerse yourself in the lore presented through branching NPC dialogue and interaction, the choices you make being apparent as the game progresses. This of course means that there is a lot of text to read, so I wouldn't quite recommend the game if you just want a quick blast of arcadey action...

Nether Dimensional Runner : Trippy Platformer

Falling under the category of Alt-Arty-Jump-Shoot game, Nether Dimensional Runner has an interesting visual style that is something only truly appreciated when seen in motion. A selection of guns is at your disposal, along with a powerful dash ability that allows you to bounce up walls and through enemies. Gameplay mainly consists of differing levels of either crystal collection or boss battles, but they are cleverly composed as to pose a challenge to the player. The game definitely deserves the recognition it got from the Pandora Angst 2010 Competition

Apocolypso : Post Apocolyptic Shooting Gallery

An interesting and seldom seen genre nowadays, Apocolypso is shooting gallery/platforming cross genre game with RPG elements. You play as the iconic lone wolf who has been tasked with defending cities from rampaging robots; gameplay consists of shooting enemies coming at you from the z and x acis, and defending yourself with a shield from bombs and missiles dropped from planes. You also have to ensure that the city you are defending doesn't take overmuch damage either, or else it's game over as well. After completing a level along with its boss, you get to choose from a number of upgrades to help you on the next level. Not an especially long game, only covering 5 levels, but it is of pretty high quality and fun to boot, and being foss, you can always hack on a couple more if the mood takes you :)

RailRoad Rampage : Fresh take on the Tower Defense genre

And last, but not least, Railroad Rampage, the mandatory Tower Defence. Some might sigh at the genre, but Railroad Rampage definitely contains enough of the Neotron secret sauce (not a very fitting metaphor, in retrospect, if the source was secret, it wouldn't be on this blog!) to make it palatable if not rather tasty. Play as an engineer tasked with getting a train from point A to point B via a bunch of enemies. Defend said train from the relentless attacks of aforementioned enemies, using a bunch of humorous implements. Simple, and fun

And that's all for now, lets hope Neotron stay inspired, keep up their good, and pump out many more cool games