WIP "OpenFlashpoint"

Here is another post about a project I found in the far ends of the internet ("here be dragons"), but which seems really promising never the less.

But first of all a disclamer by the original creator:

The screenshots you are about to see are not yet an eye candy, they're rather to be seen as a 'proof of concept' with lots of crappy placeholders. Work so far has mainly been done on the internal mechanics of game handling such as object interaction (player can carry gun which again can 'carry' a mag and the like), realistic calculation of trajectories, hit testing etc.

So what am I talking about? A (most likely) open-source Operation Flashpoint type of game running on the Irrlicht engine with the current working title OpenFlashpoint:

All there is so far is a thread on the Irrlich forums (with a few more details and development screenshots) and sadly the main developer seems to be bogged down by "real-life" ATM. But it seems like a worthwhile project to support.

Oh and get this: it is developed primarily for Linux :D

Dead Morning, an open-source horror game

Today I bring you news of yet another rather low profile Darkplaces engine game (e.g. the same engine that runs Xonotic), called Dead Morning:



As you can see in these other, more game-play oriented videos (1, 2, 3), it seems to be quite heavily influenced by another recent 1st person horror game...

The website mentions a fully open-source release at the end of this year, so I am rather intrigued what they will come up by then!

Two times (0.)2.0

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ).

Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games:
There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally, and I guess I can quote Twain here too:

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!

Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold, but even increased in pace :)

Anyways, here is a great video:


And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs":
And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release.

This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine, brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!

Red Eclipse 1.4 and a missed birthday

Good news is that the long awaited Red Eclipse version 1.4 was released yesterday.
Read the announcement (with full change-log) here. Besides general polish the most notable features are:

• Vanity items and improved colours: dress up and frag with style.
• Visible legs in first person: know where you are kicking and parkouring.
• New and revamped maps: bringing you even more variety.
• Better viewing: level flythroughs, improved third and first person cameras.
• Better menus and other HUD elements: easier to see and read at a glance.
• New weapon: Mines add a new dimension to the existing gameplay.
• New mode: attack and defend in Gauntlet, competing for the most laps.
• Automatic demo recording: for those times you just have to watch it again.
• User Accounts: donate or contribute, and wear the in-game supporter badge.
• Improved weapon balance and gameplay rules, bugs fixed, and much more.

Especially the visible legs in 1st person view add to the parcour movements and overall the game feels much more "complete" now. Here are some impressions of a bot-match I had earlier on:

The bad news is  that we missed Xonotic's third birthday, but you can still congratulate here (where you can also read about some pretty cool updates to the game). To celebrate it, kojin made a nice frag movie:


Enjoy!

Various voxel engine ramblings

I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre).

Anyways... recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn't really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one) it pointed out an new project called Iceball:

Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot

Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).

Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:



Or Minetest, or the Ardorcraft API for that matter???

Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn't make my eyes bleed :p ).

Speaking of which... the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.

Force: Leashed - GPL First-Person Gravity Not-Like-Portal

Force: Leashed is a free first person gravity fiddler. To advance, you need to guide rockets to their targets using spherical potential fields. And no, it's not like Portal. That much.

Force: Leashed was started as one of the 2012 7DFPS prototypes. It is based on GPL-licensed Darkplaces which for example also powers Xonotic.

Force: Leashed is available for free download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows from its website.

The art asset license status is unknown. Watch this tweet for further information.

Video: Force: Leashed Gameplay

Major Unvanquished update (Alpha 8)

UPDATE: Here is a nice video of the (Note: Alpha) gameplay:

Yesterday (following their monthly release cycle) a new alpha from Unvanqished was released. For those with bad short term memory: Unvanquished is trying to revitalize the RTS/FPS hybrid Tremulous.

New Unvanquished human player and weapon model

Besides the changes already mentioned previously, they have also replaced some more weapon models and now also have a really nice new webpage!

Still lots of things to do... but big thumbs up for the progress so far!

Shorts: FreeOrion 0.4.1 and Xonotic Vehicle Gameplay

FreeOrion

image: Moving a fleet around in FreeOrion

video: FreeOrion testplay (best viewed at 720p HD)

FreeOrion 0.4.1 has been released a month ago. There still is no manual ship combat mode and there is a certain sluggishness regarding GUI responsiveness but the beautiful audio and graphics and consistent writing are definitely worth a try.

You can check out a preview of current 3d ship combat tech demo in this video (7m30s in).

Xonotic

image: Sniping a Hovercraft on Unsealed Trial 2 in Xonotic (more screens)

video: Unsealed Trial 2 Vehicle CTF longplay

I have been playing Xonotic on the [MoN] Vehicle Gameplay server and quite enjoying it lately. Just recently, a first version of Unsealed Trial 2 (screenshots) has been released there.

Some helpful vote commands:
vcall timelimit 600 (for when the time is draining too quickly)
vcall gotomap unseal (for when you realize that Unsealed Trial is the only playable map ;) )

If you'd like to record your own videos, all you need to know is on Xonotic's Democapture wiki page.

Intergalactic news (new Red Eclipse version)

Somewhat related to the previous blog post (don't forget to vote to give a VR kit to the Cube2 developers), I can bring you the news that you can now download a new release (1.3 Galactic Edition) of Red Eclipse. By the words of the developers this is mostly a bugfix release:

This release sees a semi-stabilisation of the gameplay in favour of implementing a variety of bugfixes and user requests. We've removed some old cruft and implemented a few new game types to replace them, like coop (humans fight high powered bots), and king-of-the-hill (control and defend one flag). Due to the popularity of the impulse/parkour system we have introduced a new "impulse vaulting", where you can hold down your parkour key to "vault" over low obstacles, making it that much easier to navigate around busy levels.

But you can read up on the full changelog in the release thread on our forums. Oh and maybe you can help them out and create a new teaser video for their website?

On our forums I was also recently reminded of a Red Eclipse based mod called MekArcade (see more infos on their Moddb site), which as you can guess adds Mechs to the game.

Some MekArcade mechs

Information is otherwise relatively sparse (I couldn't find any word on their media license for example... but given RE's CC-By-SA licensing scheme I hope they sticked to the same), but they plan to release a first version relatively soon (Maybe they waited for the RE 1.3 release?).
The screenshots released so far look quite nice also and first released video gives off a Mechwarrior like vibe too, so I guess I am looking forward to their first release ;)

Unvanquished development news

I have to apologize for the recent lack in FG updates, but at least *I* have a good excuse as first my Internet broke down, and now I am preparing to relocate to another continent (extra points for guessing which in the comments ;) ).

Anyways... it seems like there is now a "winner" out of the total breakdown and split-up of the efforts to revitalize Tremulous earlier this year. I will not go into details, but I can assure you it was not pretty, and I decided to skip any news coverage on it until the dust had settled.
I hope this is now the case, and for now it seems only one of the projects really shows some progress... that is unless the other is not working in stealth mode.

Lets see... at least Unvanquished is actually releasing alphas of their game, so I am leaning toward them when it comes to which will actually become a nice, playable game soon.

You can follow development quite well on one of the team-member's blog here. In the most recent post, some nice screenshots surfaced, and both their new modeling, GUI and animation work seems quite nice too.

Unvanquished: Human base preparing for an attack

Anyways, check out the other cool news from them, and maybe try one of their recent alphas... however don't expect a fully refurbished Tremulous yet.

War§ow 1.0 released

Yesterday the long awaited version 0.7  1.0 was released and thus after 7 years of development War§ow has gone out of beta.

For those out of the loop, here is a short description of it by the developers:

Warsow is a fast paced, deathmatch game. It has your classic things like bunny hopping, rocket jumping, and general mayhem. There's many game modes, including, Bomb & Defuse, CTF, Instagib, and the classic 1v1 Duel.

You can see the full changelog (including many nice screenshots) here, and if you want to give it a try, head over to their download page.

They also made a nice release trailer:



For those wondering, there is some discussion here with War§ow developers trying to justify their decision to keep the art assets non-free and why there isn't a open source-code repository.
Personally I am not convinced, but at least they release their engine code and promise to keep the overall game always freeware...

However besides that, it's a fun FPS! So try some crazy parcour-like moves yourself ;)

AlienArena reloaded edition

The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order...
But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60; because as you should know... a higher number is always better :p

New alien spider bots!

Obviously it wasn't just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release.
Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan:

Open Sourced. Ever Evolving.

Which has a certain ring to it ;)

Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War§ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice screenshots) what kind of changes you can expect here.

Screenshot from the War§ow 0.7 changelog thread

There is also an BETA release of the version 0.7 (which according to standard version naming schemes should be a beta itself I guess ;) ) which can be downloaded here.

OverDose now officially... hmm?... open-source?

Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed... however that was never officially announced until now:

This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools… Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don’t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers.
Whats more, the code is available… Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any budding coders out there who want to be part of the OverDose team be sure to get in touch, we always, ALWAYS need more coders ;)

In their recent news they also mention that they have realized that keeping the source closed doesn't help against hackers (a realization that comes better late then never :) ) and that their updated (GTK-Radiant based) level-editor is now available. That they add all their other (AFAIK Windows only) tools into the open-source mix too is an unexpected but very nice bonus!

Some recent automatic foliage tests

I assume by asking for code access they will point you to the "hidden" repository here, but giving them some positive feedback by asking for it, will probably be the "right thing"tm to do ;)

Oh and don't miss the long WIP thread with some nice (but over post-processed) screens here.

WIP weapon model

Last but not least: To avoid sounding too negative *again*, I think this is a great development and this could become a really nice open-source modding platform, specially if they make at least a base set of assets available under a more liberal license *hint* ;) So show them some support by helping out or maybe donating.

Xonotic and idTech4 news

Hello and welcome to slow summer news time ;)

But at least the awesome guys over at Xonotic took their time and wrote up what exciting new additions are on their way to version 0.7 in their latest edition of what they call WoX-Blox #4.

There you can read up up exiting changes to the Railroad tycoon mod they are working on... watch this video... pure exitement:

Xonotic's railway simulator ;)

Ok I was kidding about the last part... that is actually one among many cool small additions they are working on to make Xonotic an even better game.
Not mentioned in the blog yet, are the cool modifications to the Overkill mod and the vehicles tZork is currently working on and which can be tested already on a few servers.

Staying with the FPS Topic, it seems like the development of the GPLed Doom3/idtech4 code is finally moving somewhere. However iodoom3 (besides that they got a nice looking website recently) is not the center of development as it was the case with ioquake3 it seems.
The Doom3World forums are buzzing with activity though, with open-source commercial developers looking into porting their upcoming games to idtech4, people working on code and openSDK enhancements and an awesome code review of the idtech4 engine to jump-start potential developers.

Besides that, the previously mentioned Doom3 modification The Dark Mod (additional info here), a Thief inspired steampunk-stealth game is finally making some progress toward the long promised stand-alone version (Progress Wiki here).

Here is also some recent commented game-play video:

The Dark Mod gameplay introduction

Some more (uncommented) gameplay can be seen also in this video. The next version will still require a few Doom3 assets however, so if you are skilled in texture making, mapping (with their DarkRadiant) or such, offer them some help to get rid of those last remaining dependencies. However AFAIK most of the new art is also non-FOSS  and only freeware (or at least I can find any info on the art license... please comment if you know better) :-/

Last but not least there also seems to be another awesome looking Doom3 mod, aiming to go standalone at some point: Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer's Key. No idea when and how, but I guess they are just waiting for a more stable idtech4 community version.

Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

                            

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

The Big idTech 2 round-up post

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news!

And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2).

The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World, which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta, which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet).

Edit: Updated to newer video

But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well).

So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p

Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar:

AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements:

What's new in AlienArena

Ya3dag, also released a new version recently and I still think its cool in-game editing features should be picked up by some other idTech2 engines. Can't be that hard to port...
Especially for UFO:AI it might be a nice way to modify missions. Speaking of which... they are also preparing a new version 2.4 and released an RC (changelog) recently. Again no Linux download, so I am skipping it for now. They have however almost reached full FOSS status of their sound-effects... at least that is what they say, the graphic they posted says CC-sampling plus though, which is AFAIK not FOSS compatible :(

Now to the games that don't show any real visible progress: War§ow is just posting stupid stuff interesting trivia on their blog. However I don't consider the long awaited 0.7 release vapourware yet.
Another matter in the vapourware category is OverDose though... in development since what feels like at least a decade, and still no release anywhere near (which is also their excuse why they don't share their nice engine improvements or for that matter any source-code all together >:( ). However they recently posted a lengthy news on Moddb in what seems to be an attempt to jump on the current "Kickstarter" bandwagon. Think what you want of that... but they are for sure not getting any of my cash before there isn't a engine-source release...

April Snippets

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets.

A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread.

219 bytes tron is:

<body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload=
  z=c.getContext('2d');
  z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325);
  setInterval("
    0<x%n
    &x<n*n
    &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1)
      ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++)
      :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s
  ",9)
><canvas id=c>

Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post, is:

• A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file
• A small part of your build chain

Xonotic 0.6 released

For those not playing with the autobuild releases, I have good news! A new version of the totally FOSS, competitive multiplayer FPS Xonotic has been released.

Find the released announcement and download links directly here.

The two most important feature additions are a stats tracking system, which can be found via this webpage.

And the addition of client side scripted player-models, which probably doesn't say much to the regular user, but from a developer's point of view it is a pretty great thing ;) Expect many cool advances to come from this over the next couple of months.

Oh and try also the Overkill server, which runs a cool mod with totally new player-models and weapon mechanics, combining insta-gib with a more complex game-play etc. (in Xonotic, server admins can decide to hosts mods and players are automatically supplied with all needed files when joining the server).

Let's hope this new release will increase the player-base a bit, as this game really deserves more attention.

TremZ aka Unvanquished 1st alpha released

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February.

However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)...

WIP Unvanquished playermodel

But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;)

Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)

OpenArena 0.8.8: 13 Maps, 7 Music Tracks, 1 Player Model

video: OpenArena 0.8.8 - New Neko Model & Pxlfan Map

OpenArean 0.8.8 brings many additions and changes. See some of them below:

OpenArena 0.8.8 - hover for info - more images here

On a related note: OA's lead dev recently uploaded a Sorceress 3d model that did not make it into the game under GPL2 and CCBY(SA)3:

This is a rejected mystical elf sorceress for my game project OpenArena 3.x. It's rejected due to technical (2 surfaces, and too low poly) and anatomical reasons (regarding the hands and feet). The skin is muddy and low quality is well. This was done in 2009-2010.
Comes weighted to a standard rigify mesh. She has no actual fingers, her hands are mittens!
Might be suitable for a low poly distant camera dungeon crawl. Could even be suitable to produce other characters with in that dungeon crawl.
An alternative worse skin is also included. It's on the second UV Texture layer.