Updates from Rogue Republic, that modern warfare 0 A.D. mod

The really nice looking modern warfare mod for 0 A.D. is steadily improving:

Rogue Republic's Russian buildings

You can now also check out their blog and facebook page, and to quote one of the main developers:

With hope of finding a proficient 0 A.D. coder

So please help out these guys, if you know some Javascript and are willing to learn how to code for 0 A.D.!

0 A.D. Alpha 13 and other less fanboyish updates

Ok I admit it... I am a bit of a 0 A.D. fanboy! But the new Alpha 13 release is also great again, and deserved an update post:



Also pretty cool is the new OpenMW 0.22 release, that finally features player and NPC animations, and thus starts to look more like a functioning game:



Other unrelated news:

• To progress on their standalone version, the developers of The Dark Mod are looking for support in their sound department mostly.
• That non-stop programmer "TheDushan" has started porting the Torque3D engine to Linux. Pretty amazing progress if you ask me :)

Julius out!

Gigalomania, LPC and updates

Some of you might remember Mega Lo Mania back from the days when you could be amazed by PC speaker voice output... so if you spend way too much of your childhood playing that game (like me) you should probably stay clear of the FOSS remake called Gigalomania!

Gigalomania now using LPC sprites

As the creator recently stated, it now uses the cool Liberated Pixels Cup contest sprites, but there is still the need to replace the castle graphics with nicer ones. Maybe *you* can help out with that?

On a related note, the LPC coding results are finally in, congratulations to the winners! I hope Bart will make a nice review on the quite awesome games here on FG soon.

Other recent updates not to be missed:

• Today a new Alpha 13 of Unvanquished was released, marking the one year aniversary of their first alpha release. As usual it comes with a bunch of new nice features and fixes.
• You can now download automatic snapshots of the development version of Megaglest. And there seems to be finally some progress in updating the graphic capabilities of the engine.
• O A.D. continues to amaze with news updates about development progress and music creation.
• And last but not least: the awesome Xonotic mod Overkill now has a website!

That's all for now :)

Some nice screenshots...

So it seems like it is up to me again to keep this blog alive ;)

Not too much to report though... therefore I present you Red Vs Blue Unvanquished edition:

Well at least that could be fun... anyways, as they explain in their last two weekly updates (1,2), their Demon Engine has seen quite a few graphical updated an bug fixes lately. Furthermore they highlighted an upcoming major change in game-play compared to Tremulous, as Unvanquished will be using a real resource gathering system.

Also a cool new screen comes from the "Modern Warfare" mod for 0 A.D.:

Tanks in 0 A.D.

In their WIP thread on the 0 A.D. forums they have also confirmed that the mod will be "open source" however did not specify this further. It also seems like they have plenty of good artists, but are lacking a bit on the coding side. So if you know your way around Javascript and XML hacking, give them a hand (and secretly lobby for a full FOSS release ;) ).

Video updates (various)

Today I let the videos speak:
First of all a nice FOSS bullet hell SHMUP, called Shmupacabra:



Taisei Project is maybe also relevant if you like getting killed ALOT (hehe, insider joke for q).

Previously mentioned Cube Trains (based on Frogatto) has reached version 1.0:



You can support the developer of this nice puzzle game by buying the Expansion-pack for 2 Canadian bucks or more! Another option to try and fund FOSS game development... maybe there will be some sales figures published at some point?

Next on the list: open-source engine reimplementation project Corsix-th:



You will need the original game for the non-free artworks though.

And last but not least: 0 A.D. got a brand new website: www.play0ad.com! Celebrating this they also made some nice video tutorials for total beginners:



Have a look at tutorial 2 and tutorial 3 also.

Signing off :)

Edit: Small interview with the 0 A.D. developers.

0 A.D. and Megaglest updates

Some assorted news from the FOSS RTS thematic area.

First of all, Megagest saw another somewhat bigger release (3.7.x), and someone also made a nice cinematic for them:

Sadly no news on the planned graphical update, as the merger with GAE seems on hold, but the new version adds a lot of nice usability enhancements.

Much more active on the graphics front is 0 A.D. on the other hand. In their recent development update #9 they talk about completely switching to their new shader based renderer, and the guy behind these renderer improvements recently gave a short interview too.

Some other interesting news include this recent forum posts of some modders trying to switch to the 0 A.D. engine for their modern warfare RTS called Rogue Republic.
Asset integration seems to work already as you can see here:

Rogue Republic assets in O A.D.

The thread over at the 0 A.D. forums has a few additional details, but no significant info on the FOSS status they are aiming at in regards to their media.
Never the less, it looks like it might become a RTS project to follow more closely.

Shorts: LambdaCube + StuntCarRacer, Naval Warfare, 0 A.D. Alpha 11

video: StuntCarRacer/LambdaCube 3D demo

StuntCarRacer (last release 2006) got re-born as a demo for LambdaCube 3D, a Haskell-based rendering engine.

video: Naval Warfare Test

Naval Warfare is a game in progress being made at Universidade de Brasília, using Gear2D (Linux/Windows).

image: celtic settlement in 0 A.D.

0 A.D. Alpha 11 got released.

Some of these news have been powered by SourceForge's ability to sort games by update date.

Get 0.A.D For Free! (Historical RTS Real Time Strategy Role Playing Strategy War Combat Game)

Popular cover boxes for 0 A.D. on eBay

0 A.D. is an epic free and open source real-time strategy game.

Download 0 A.D. For Free Here
Download for Mac OS X and Linux.

You don't have to pay for 0 A.D. These downloads are completely legal.

About this post

As explained in a recent news post by the 0 A.D. team, You Do Not Need to Buy 0 A.D. on eBay.

It would be ideal if the teams behind open source projects would have people working on selling the game in an ethical way that would support their work and the people working on the project.

Ethical would for example mean that it would be clearly stated that the game can be downloaded for free, what kind of physical box to expect (if at all, I remember that SuperTuxKart would often be sold as a "digital download" product) and laying out the distribution of income transparently. This would turn the purchase into a donation (whether that is an acceptable word to describe it needs to be checked with eBay terms) and there are likely to still be buyers that don't have the skills or time to read the text or double-check the freeware status of the game or only look at the screenshots.

0 A.D. Audio interview and special effects

The premier FOSS RTS 0 A.D. has recently won (by an incredible small margin) the Sourceforge.net project of the month vote and now they have done a cool audio interview:

Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities?
Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.

Click here for the transkript of the full interview, but if you are to lazy to read you can also listen to it on that page in the original voices of the developers.

Besides this, they have recently implemented a lot of cool new graphical effects (I guess you could call it JUICE ;) ):

Distance fog and other new effects

For more nice screenshots of these effects, have a look at this post on their forums.

Good FOSS 3D action RPGs, nowhere to be found?

Today I got a small rant:
So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right?
Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got:

• Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development? 
• Check! (Xonotic, RedEclipse and several other with un-free media)
• Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development?
• Check! (0 A.D., MegaGlest, Warzone2100, Spring mods etc.)
• Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development?
• Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply.
• Flight simulators, turn based strategy?
• Check: Flightgear!
• Check: Battle for Wesnoth!
• Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight?
• Hmmm???

Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into development FOSS representative, but given the (current) popularity of action RPGs lets have a look at what we do have:

So, there is the really cool project FLARE, which besides being not really playable yet is also more of a nostalgic effort. More playable but also with a similar demographic of potential players is Freedroid (besides having a maybe too Linux centric style).

FLARE 2D graphics style

Maybe of interest seem to be DawnRPG and PARPG, but for both the above applies as well and they seem to be going into a rather different direction. Besides that, at least the latter seems to be not progressing well lately.

Then there are the obscure and/or non-isometric DNT and Lips of Suna. Which are both nice projects on their own (especially LoS seems to develop nicely as of late), but are not really suitable as the FOSS reference for action RPGs...

The only game that comes to my mind that would fit is Summoning Wars, which is somewhat playable and even has a single-player campaign, but development is really slow and it is still a long way off what I would call a recommendable game to non-FOSS enthusiasts.

Some new dungeon wall tests

All in all it is a very promising project, which is IMHO hold back by its lack of content creation tools (mainly, but not only a world editor). This is probably partially because of the intention to have randomly generated dungeons, but those are still really bland to look at, and should be complemented by parts or at least towns that are nicely designed by hand (those also exists, but must have been done in a text editor or such ;) ).

Part of the rather slow development I guess was the poor choice of the graphics engine, e.g. OGRE 3D which is foremost a programmers choice (due to nice features and good documentation), but a rather bad FOSS game developers choice in my opinion (due to the lack of a complete game-engine features and good tools).

There are still a few really talented artists trying to contribute (1,2,3), and I recently proposed a creative re-use of 0 A.D. assets, but everything seems to be hitting a road block when it comes to easy tinkering with the game and getting things to actually run in game... and that is really demotivating to potential contributors (FOSS development advise 101 ;) ).

So to sum it up? I think Summoning Wars is really not living up to what it could be, and the only solution I see would be the addition of a new and really motivated programmer to the team to solve the tool-chain problems and thus restart the active development again. Anyone interested???

P.S.: Not to forget mentioning it: There is also the IrrRPG builder, which could probably be a good base to build an action RPG too.

New RTS releases: 0 A.D. and Zero-K

Hot news of today is the Alpha 9 release of 0 A.D.:

0 A.D. Alpha 9 gameplay

Main additions are the Roman faction, a new combat concept and new trading system. The new combat concept allows for a strategic selection of your troops to counter certain units (spearmen are better against cavalry and so on) and the trading systems allows for setting up trade routes etc.
Oh and they are still looking for contributers ;)

A little bit less hot news, but still quite recent, is the new version 1.0.3.3. of Zero-K, a cool RTS set in the future (if you are a regular reader you should know it ;) ).

Zero-K gameplay

It now runs on the recently released 87.0 release of the SpringEngine and also features a new faction: the amphibious bots.
Sadly their interesting meta-game PlanetWars is currently closed for reworking, but the next round will happen at some point for sure.

Dev Corner: Crowdfunding, OpenGameArt and Kickstarter

Donations: Commercial use of Free Software and Libre Art

Kickstarter for Game Dev
I'm sure you heard the amazing Kickstarter news ;) Dusted, author of Wizznic! shared a short thought about the news I'm actually talking about.

FOSS Games and Donations Now
The FLARE RPG project page now has a PayPal donation button.

0A.D. uses Pledgie for funding.


There is a list of FOSS projects that accept BitCoin here and a more general list here.

OGA and Kickstarter Thoughts
OpenGameArt founder and admin Bart K, shared that he is considering Kickstarter, but could use some more inspiration about what rewards could be given to high pledge-givers.

OGA/CC/FSF Game Dev Contest Plan
There's also a game dev contest in the works, which will be organized this summer by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation and OpenGameArt. The details are still getting ironed out.

Donations on Free Gamer
By the way: here on FreeGamer, we have Flattr widgets below the posts of the authors who provided their Flattr IDs and other donation methods are available on the about page.


So far no "Donations" page on our wiki, where setting up of PayPal, BitCoin, Flattr and other services is explained for open source game dev projects. There is a rather long thread on the topic of making money with free/FOSS games.


Any donation statistics from open source (game) projects and expertise on the subject are highly welcome in the comments!

RTS updates (slightly older)

You probably heard about it already, but for the sake of updating this blog and in case you might have missed it over the holiday stress:
0 A.D. got a pretty massive update to version 0.8 "Haxāmaniš"!

0AD 0.8 video

The release news have all the details including the possibility to listen to the very nice soundtrack of the game. Oh and the developers are requesting to mention that they are still looking for contributors!

Otherwise? Well there are some even older news regarding the Megaglest project:
First of all, we didn't mention their new release yet: version 3.6.0.2. It's mostly a bugfix and various smaller improvements release, but they also significantly improved the modding support. In releation to that I guess they also made the .blend sources of much of the content available. Something they are not required by the CC-by-SA btw, so many thanks to those guys!
Other upcoming news for Megaglest are the inclusion into the official Debian repositories and an option to play scenarios in multiplayer mode. No real news on the merger with GAE yet though it seems... a pity really if this isn't progressing...

New websites, releases and competitions etc

Couldn't really think of a fitting headline, but here is the bunch of randomly collected news from the FOSS gaming realm:

First of all, OpenDungeons finally got a nice website and a blog (as mentioned previously). And in collaboration with OpenGameArt, the kicked off their art competitions again.

SummoningWars also got a new website recently, and they have also released version 0.55 a few days ago.

New Summoning Wars GUI

Last but not least, the pledgie donation drive for 0 A.D. seemed to have payed off to some extend, so one of the main developers is now working full time on the game for one month. See here for his first report on things newly implemented (most notable a save-game feature). But... you can still donate to keep him motivated longer ;)

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!

Assorted strategy game news

Quick Sunday afternoon rundown of recent strategy game updated...
0AD got a new beta 5 release, which improvements in rendering & AI code, a completely new faction (Iberians), and a new map:


MegaGlest also got updated recently (Version 3.5.1), bringing various fixes and performance improvements. Furthermore I can report that both the sable and the development version of Battle for Wesnoth have been updated, and I strongly recommend everyone (who has not played this game for a while) to retry this classic in the newest development version.

EvolutionRTS, a nice looking (but sadly CC-by-NC-ND licensed) game based on the SpringRTS engine also saw an update to version 1.3 this month (check out this gameplay video).

Hmmm, what else? Ahh, UFO:AI was ported to Android, and and the change of Warzone2100 from SDL to qt (which is not exactly a game framework) raised some eyebrows, but will probably make the game more easily portable and better integrated into your favorite desktop.

News from 0 A.D.

Well I certainly didn't see this coming, but 0 A.D. has decided to switch their game-play concept and turn the game into a Diablo like hack and slash RPG (while keeping the historical accurateness of course). For the first teaser pic see below:



Ok bad phun, I admit...in reality they decided to turn it into a FPS game, which I really can't understand at all :( I mean, just look at these horrible screen-shots they are putting out as a 'proof of concept':


However, unrelated to these shocking news... check out this boring new alpha 4 RTS release, code named Deadalus. It features a boring new AI, and a bunch of other boring stuff (including boring additional celts stuff)... so don't bother with it until the new and shiny 0 A.D. RPG, errm FPS arrives ;)

RTS: The Romans VS. the Greek (+Chinese)

I take it my comments regarding the Spring RTS engine were not taken so well... so I will present some (in my opinion) much better and less messy to setup RTS games ;)

One, I really like to come back to is Glest! The previously featured version/fork of that game, Megaglest (Edit: Now links to their awesome new webpage, how did I miss this ;) ), just released another version (3.4.0) with quite a lot of new features.

Newest Megaglest gameplay

It now got a new build-in IRC client for multiplayer chatting, can transfer missing files from the server (useful for all those custom maps you can find ;) ), some performance and stability improvements as well as the usual assortment of new maps and map-themes. Ah and to come back to the headline: A new faction, the Romans were added ;)

The Contestant

Of course, adding Romans to the game is poaching in an other's territory... that of the Greeks ;) So lets have a look at the recent developments in 0 A.D.:

New 0 A.D. gameplay

They are progressing quickly, and the game is surprisingly playable already, given it's early beta status. But you can still help them out even if you are not a real artist or a programmer:
Their previously mentioned donation drive is still running, and they are also having some sort of competition for creating a nice video trailer of the game.

The support crew

So who is going to win the battle about the Mediterranean? Well I fear the Greeks just got support by the fleet of the Chinese Emperor:

A mod team going by the name of Scion Development is making great progress in implementing a Chinese faction into 0 A.D.; Check out their development thread here. Oh and no worries, after some initial license confusion, they seem to have decided to go for a fully FOSS compatible media license :) Edit: Well it seems like they are still not quite sure, so I can't guarantee that they will go completely FOSS... lets hope they don't go for one of those atrocious CC-ND/NC licenses.

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).