Monday, January 10, 2011

Stunt Rally 1.0 plus Pioneer and LambdaRogue

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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.