Zero-K PlanetWars meta game

Not sure how recent this news is, but the website of the SpringRTS based FOSS RTS Zero-K states that their online campaign metagame PlanetWars is now in BETA.

This is a screenshot of the webbased planet overview, which shows how well you (and your clan-mates) are progressing in taking over the galaxy.
Game-play of Zero-K does not change much with this game-mode, but it puts each game into a greater perspective so to say ;) But check out their own description of what PlanetWars is here.

OpenDungeons 0.4.8

OpenDungeons also jumped on the release wagon, with 0.4.8. This adds an actual menu system, a new gui, working traps, and normal maps. The team needs more modelers to add to the already large bestiary, there's a lot of faction creatures still unimplemented. Also, a shoutout to Venn from LinuxGameCast for contributing voice acting snippets

Naev 0.5 beta

Naev, the excellent 2D space combat and trading game, recently released a huge milestone (0.5 beta). It adds a far larger universe with more planets, more gameplay aspects such as electronic warfare, gui improvements and lots more. It also added new features to the game's engine giving developers more tools and features to play around with.

Vertigo Beta

Vertigo is a rather awesome and visually stunning 3d tunnel racing game. It has multiple gameplay modes that give the game quite a bit of variety, although the core gameplay still essentially consists of rolling down a tunnel and dodging/colliding with things :)

Humble Indie Bundle's Source Releases

The Humble Indie Bundles (HIB) have a tradition of at least part of the bundled games releasing their source.

While four of five games released source code under FOSS licenses in HIB1, only one released the source in HIB2 under a FOSS license (according to this comment, a license similar to LWJGL's).

No assets were released under Free-Art-compatible-terms, except for demo objects in Penumbra.

In HIB: Frozenbyte, two (or three) games have source releases, but all of them are non-commercial only.

This is not a complaint/demand/whine and I discourage any whiny behavior reactions. :)

I have no mind-reading ability or technology but I do have a theory, that shy source releases are missing out:

1. When a game has a source release, which is not FOSS-compatible (shy source), contributions will only come from people with high interest in the game. This will improve the game.
2. When a game has a FOSS-release, in addition contributions will come from people who think that the game enriches the community. This will improve availability and usability of the game.

#2 might be perceived as a problem by a game studio if they plan another sequel, because the prequel might become a stronger competitor to it.

Frogatto: open game & editor, closed art

Another game which is commercial (on iDevices) and has FOSS code and closed art (old art has been donated to OGA!) is Frogatto.

Star-filled Sky: 100% public domain

A revolutionary breakthrough were all of Jason Rohrer's commercial games, which are 100% public domain. My feeling is that assets are less of a focus for him, which makes releasing everything less of a risk.

Nikki and the Robots: open & closed

On the middle path is Nikki and the Robots, which is foss-code and has a functional foss-art version and will have a closed/for-pay-story. For now they activated paypal donations, flattr and T-shirts.

Panda Engine Book, Blendswap Upgrade, Avoision Ad

Available as Paper, PDF, epub or PacktLib

Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook has been published.

Blendswap UI: Who needs links when I can do a screenshot?

Blendswap has more features now. Artists have more control for one thing and can edit their submissions for example.

I suspect that many visitors use Adblock, so let me share this ad that appears on Free Gamer today:

Avoision

STK 0.7.1, CC to OF, SaRII 2.2.0,jCRPG, CC TXT, OSM and TitA

1. SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 released! [great changelog!]
2. Former CubeCreate lead dev will now work on OctaForge (so far #octaforge chat is the only piece of infrastructure)
3. Search and Rescue II has improved sound and uses OpenAL now
4. jClassicRPG's developer wrote short-term goals for the project (also forum registration now works)
5. Creative Commons licenses are now officially available in .txt format (for easy inclusion in Your Game Project)
6. Adam Drew of Red Hat will webcast about Linux/Open Source music production April 20
7. Steampunk MMO project Tempest in the Aether will have an OpenGameArt-featured art contest during Weekend of April 30th - a todo list will be released on April 20th

Maquetta, IBM's open source WYSIWYG HTML-5 editor

Short quick news related to (more game focused HTML5 editors and game creators) tools we discussed earlier:

Our all beloved corporate overlord IBM, has handed over their internal WYSIWYG HTML-5 editor Maqetta, to the open-source dojo foundation so that it will thrive and be expanded by the community.

The feature list is already quite impressive, and even though I am no HTML-5 programming expert I assume it could be used for game creation already. But of course some extra specific extensions, pre-made game code and easier java-script integration would probably go a long way in making this tool even more user friendly for the game-dev. crowd.

Nikki and the Robots

Nikki and the Robots is an incredibly cute platformer developed by people with exotic taste for revision control [Darcs repo] and programming language (Haskell). Read more on joyride's code page. There's a nikki wiki and a bug tracker.

A story mode is in development, which will be proprietary and for-pay.

Code is under LGPL and free-version-art under CC-BY-SA.

Development Video #03: Final Platforms

I made a little level pack:

celldropping 1-4 levelpack

[download | alt | backup]

Also: t-shirts!

SDL.License = "zlib"; SDL.License != "LGPL"; TRUE

Everybody likes images!

SDL is now zlib-licensed [announcement].

Galaxy Gameworks will no longer be selling licenses to SDL, but will continue to support our existing customers.

SDL development will continue, but will largely be community driven and Ryan and I will continue to coordinate patch integration and SDL releases. We will be working to make it easier to contribute in a variety of ways, and are looking for people interested in helping out.

This piece of info came from @icculus and by the way: I didn't even know that SDL originated in Loki Software before icculus' talk. Wikipedia's SDL history is an interesting read (two paragraphs only too :) ).

The company behind SDL's commercial licensing has been Galaxy Gameworks for the last 2-3 years. The company will close doors to enhance a family's life if I read this post correctly.

(Have fun complaining about my source code title. I don't even know how to C. ;) )


PS: Would anyone like to contribute (to) a post about GSoC? I know how to compile a list of game projects that are involved but have never been involved with it in any form or even talked about it much with a participant about it.

icculus' "Gaming on Linux" (adjusted for open source context :) )

A 1-hour talk. By a pretty cool guy called @icculus called Ryan C. Gordon. About games and open source.

Teaser: "We only did this because Linux gives us a woodie."

Gaming on Linux by Ryan C. Gordon

Download [.ogv | .m4v] (use context menu to surpress in-browser media player)

More talk recordings from the Flourish conference 2011 are here. If you have trouble with playback in the browser, you can always download the .m4v or .ogv files.

I enjoy watching Machinima's All Your History series. The 5-part id Software history is slightly relevant here, since you know.. open source fps engines.

Part 1 of id Software All Your History

Myst Online Finally goes Open Source

After years of waiting and gamboling, Myst Online / Uru has opened the source to their client and 3d max plugin. At the same time, an open source replacement server has also been made available, so it's basically the whole package, minus the artwork.

They also re-opened their servers for anyone to play for free, so sign up, check it out, and donate! Unfortunately no Linux support at the moment, but hopefully a porting effort gets started soon (linux client here: http://plasmaclient.info ?)

To contribute, check out their development site here: http://www.openuru.org/

Edit: Kaelis, a long time community member, asked people to check out https://github.com/H-uru/Plasma as well, being run by a different group of people

Search and Rescue I 1.3.0 and SaR II 2.0.0

SaR2

The 1.3.0 release of Search and Rescue mostly contains improvements from the fork SaRII and I'm not sure why the forking happened but I'm glad to read that it happened without bad blood. :)

SaRII aims for better looks and ease of use and it seems that SaR will take improvements from the fork but will also try to maintain backwards compatibility.

There are many ways to collaborate with the project [SaRII]:

• Designing new scenario files (no deep programming knowledge required)
• Designing some new missions (no deep programming knowledge required)
• Designing some new graphics and backgrounds for the menus.
• Finding and fixing bugs
• Improving documentation
• Adding new features
• Porting SaR II to other OSs
• Donating some cash 

It'd be great for SaR to be easier to get started with.

I will use page2rss.com to track changes of these two projects.

Stunt Rally 1.1

Stunt Rally 1.1 looking awesome

Stunt Rally now compiles on Linux!

There is a two-part text-commented video tutorial for making new tracks on youtube [p1 | p2]. Check out this channel if you want to see more videos of the game.

Technology-wise the game is VDrift + Ogre + Pagedgeometry (also used in DungeonHack) + MyGUI.

Thumbs up to the project website following the "big screenshots on main page"-philosophy!

Free Gamer = Freeware Gamer

I was thinking of writing an April fool's post but then started thinking over how confusing the terms "Free Software" and "Free" and "FOSS" often prove to be and after a quick chat that included all the authors of Free Gamer we will turn to Freeware because there are many more games in freeware space and it's much easier to deal with games when you don't care about licenses too much.

Our future logo

So I present to you: Freeware Gamer (site redesign and re-branding pending).

Stay tuned for lots of updates on games we played on Newgrounds and Facebook!