OGA challenges and snippets of games news

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.

Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!

The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.

The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)

And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)


By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.

The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.

I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)

I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.

Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.

Epiar, the foss space action/trading game that is not naev had a dev chat meeting for planning the next version and is now looking for new developers and art submissions.

It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)

Open Source RPGs coming up: Dawn RPG, OSARE, FreeDink, Hero of Allacrost, FoI

tinyogg

The future FOSS Diablo-and-more-like Open Source Action RPG Engine has an art style which I can approve of. (I do not approve of the Diablo-and-more-like FreeDroid RPG's art style.)

OSARE will be close to feature complete in Fall 2010.

I assume this means that it will be a working action rpg engine with enemies, items and skills, but no plot or story, ready to be turned into a game.

If you feel that you can contribute something matching high quality of this project, check out the tasks page!

login2download

Dawn has very nice graphics and a decent demo with items, a fetch quest, enemies and spells. It's hard to beat -- but easy to exploit, due to pathfinding/collision fun stuffs.

Communication seems to work via mailing lists.

There's a little list of things I don't like:

1. Slow walking speed (needs a run button)
2. Huge sprite masks/collision boxes
3. Two very Zelda™/Link®-like looking sprites..

tinyogg

Hero of Allacrost's release policy experiments result to a release early, release often philosophy.

There is a HoA subforum which is visible only to registered users, for discussion of the game's design. I find it irritating that a large part of discussions is hidden from non-registered lurkers, when it might attract participation. I wonder what other's think about such practice, which has also found its place in the DungeonHack project in this subforum, which is used for discussing a mini-plot/'module' called "Spider Forest". Please comment your experiences with partially hiding game dev discussions if you have any.

HoA also has forums that are developer-only, which feels very non-open to me (because it isn't :) ) but on the other hand the project is supposed to be 'closed' in the sense of 'dedicated developers instead of casual contributors'. What do you think about having part of the development hidden unless you 'promise' to become a dedicated developer?

Funnily enough, there are many projects which have 'closed' communication due to the simple fact that there are many users and developers who don't want to use mailing lists (in my opinion they are usually not usable for browsing, google groups should be acceptable for people used to forums, but GNU mailman is horrible in its default state, if you want to have an overview over existing threads.)

tinyogg

Fall of Imiryn: Hardly anything new about it. A few tweaks there and here in the svn.. If someone wants to test this, I'm looking into polishing the game so it can be 'finished' via a 'last' release. It is playable from start to end right now, but might be enhanced with a few content, without breaking any backs or endlessly continuing development. :) (suggestions welcome)

spoilers - tinyogg

The ..weird.. crazy action-RPG Dink Smallwood was released as open source (minus sounds and music) and is being developed as FreeDink.

I will try to spend some time for adding sfx to FreeDink - haven't started yet, even though I have quite the plan. I will use a github repository. Of course anybody is welcome to join in and there's probably nobody working on looking for music to add to FreeDink.

Hopefully there will be a 'full' release without missing audio soon.

Not a game, just an UI thought - gpl/bySa source - base

Let's have a little rant, shall we? X.org (the thing that makes Linux have graphics) often crashes, when a game force-fullscreens on me. This makes a sad qubodup D:. I wish games would have a 'select your video/audio configuration' window before game start or just start in windowed mode. :)

From death declaration to dragons and damnation... and two 2D map editors

youtube-dl: hyzOB92EuZM | tinyogg

The 2D RTS Bos Wars (BW) 2.6 has been released, after two years of release-silence. The new release includes

• Enhancements to the editor and map format
• New units, tilesets, maps, translations (italian and portugese)
• A campaign

About the campagin, which is called "swindler", I can only say that the story drawings are beautiful and that the first mission is unbeatable boring (which is why I can't say anything about follow-up missions, if there are any): you need to navigate a weak unit through a maze of high-damage towers - blind. You only have a chance when you have a good memory and accept having to restart the mission 20 times. The only other scripted scenario is the tutorial level, which has (computer-generated) mission voices even! You can see both missions being played (and the mentioned story drawings) in this video [tinyogg].

The new map format is 'patch-based', which is like 'tile-based' I suppose, only that it allows you to use tiles of any dimensions. The editor works well, it could only use a 'tile draw mode' which would continue to draw tiles while holding down the mouse button (this happens for units, but not for tiles). Here's a video [tinyogg] demonstration of the editor, make sure to skip if it gets boring, I show off tile, resource and unit placement and then test-play the map.

What I really really want BW to have is a tower defense map/mode. :)

Since I started talking about editors, I'll just go ahead and show the PARPG one:

youtube-dl: vXqojPwGYj4 | tinyogg

The editor is all right, it seems to be a bit hard to get existing resources into the game though: they need to have a xml definition file for each image (hand-written I assume) and then you have to import them into the map with multiple mouse clicks.

You probably know of the lack of a maintainer for PARPG but there are also coding and asset-making jobs to do for Techdemo 2 - enter "2D" and "3D" into your browser's search function to filter out the art tasks. A list of 'good tasks for new programmers' was written, you also ask for guidance here. The current programmer's hot topic is "inventory and objects".

youtube-dl: NFoGyph_Bc4 | tinyogg

Formido is a short top-down shoot-until-aliens-kill-you game. It is well-made, but I won't be coming back to it as I will be doing to Violetland.

youtube-dl: bRnHlyYJSlI | tinyogg

Damnation of the Gods aims to become an enhanced Dungeon Master clone. Right now it is an old-school engine with a pleasant GUI which relies on freeware DMJ's assets. Assets is what the project mainly needs.. and maybe some guidance for a plot?..

youtube-dl: a6q4X3ZxKNM | tinyogg

Dragon History is a Czech-language (with some horrible but fun text translations) adventure game for scummVM. Its code is GPLv2-licensed. I got no reply yet after asking for the gfx and audio's license..

Did I already mention that my Linux game video recording troubles were over the day I discovered this guide to use ffmpeg for it?

Remember my high praise of krank? Well now thanks to above post you can finally witness [tinyogg] visuals and sound in motion!

Also, dear Linux users: get youtube-dl if you're unable to use the youtube website. It owns. Look for it in your software repository.

Oh wait, I forgot one piece of news:

youtube-dl: 3B4GVILtzIw | tinyogg

Search and Rescue 0.9 was released. Contrary to FlightGear I was able to get my vehicle into the air (on the third try ;) ). Sounds would not work but I kind of like the low-resolution textures. I'll have to play it a little more to figure out if there's more fun things to do besides crashing helicopters. ^^

SuperTux 3D & Xdriller

youtube-dl: NPK4ZaWYkJU | tinyogg: EWuLa

SuperTux 3D is a 2½ years old idea that is now being turned into reality by using the 2D platformer SuperTux' style and assets and the Blender Game Engine (BGE).
 I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.

youtube-dl: OdV9cqdy49s | tinyogg: SRqm9

Xdriller is a falling-cubes-style puzzle game with nice colorful visuals and happy music. I found the game on SF.net a while ago and recently got reminded of it when I saw this tux model on OG.

Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.

Hedgewars, JCRPG, and 0AD

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts.

Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer:

That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all the available Worms/Artillery clones.

JCRPG

The ever-promising JCRPG has been ported from one Java 3D technology (jMonkeyEngine) to another (Ardor3D). The latter is a newer engine from the creators of the former, and seems to have taken several lessons on board with the design. The motivation for the port was difficult to debug crashes, but a number of nice enhancements have been discovered along the way and JCRPG really looks sumptuous.

Hopefully soon the game will start to get a bit of a storyline as well as beautiful scenery!

Finally, a pre-alpha download of 0ad is available. This utterly gorgeous looking historically-based RTS has so much potential. They have struggled to get more developers involved since originally going open source. I have been encouraging them to make a release and follow up with regular releases in order to expand the pool from which they may discover new contributors.

Here is a 2 year old trailer for 0ad.

Maybe they should make a new one, that could also be a marketing boost for the project.

ERROR 42: DEPRECATED DIMENSION; RESOLUTION NOT SUPPORTED

NOTE! YOU SHALL NOT FEED FROM THIS MESSAGE! REDIRECT BROWSER COURSE TO OUR INTERNET WEB PRESENCE NOW! CONTINUE

GREETINGS HUMANS WE COME IN PEACE AS LONG AS YOU OBEY! YOUR IRRELEVANT INHABITANCE OF THE SUPERFLUOUS THIRD DIMENSION WILL COME TO AN END! COLOR SPECTRUM REDUCTION WILL TAKE PLACE! CONTINUE

YOU HAVE THE CHOICE OF A MULTITUDE OH ANCIENT MODERN HISTORY. PROCEED! CONTINUE




WE HAVE COME TO LEARN ALSO! YOU MUST LEAD US TO 2D VECTOR AWESOMENESS IN THE COMMENT SECTION! vvv END

ps: you probably missed it.

One little bit of roguelike, One hint of click-n-point, One tiny bit of trade and then time for some things completely different

I make heavy use of YouTube and would like to know if this is an issue. Are you unable to play back YT videos? Don't you like videos and prefer more screenshots and text? Comment at the post's bottom or email me! If you do have troubles with YT video viewing, perhaps TinyOgg might save you. :) [example]

Doryen Arena is a real-time arena roguelike-like.. You buy weapons, you select and use skills, you kill and then you die. The end. :)

Note: This video is sped up by approx. factor 3 for technical reasons and does not represent actual game speed. So-orry!

Pyromancer, by the same developer, looks more fun to me, but I have not had the chance to test it yet.

Both projects are visually rather impressive. Pretty lighting and fading and moving health numbers... Both use libtcod, which is a "fast, portable and uncomplicated API for roguelike developpers providing an advanced true color console, input, and lots of other utilities frequently used in roguelikes". Yet again by the same developer. If you find interest in such specialized libraries, librtxy, a retro vector games lib, might be interesting to you as well.

What you see above is an example of how scenery images are structured for the adventure "Beasts". According to the project's French-language wiki [EN translation] the project uses the proprietary American Girl Scouts engine.

I would be glad if someone offered to program the game using something more open, but it is great to have a good-looking adventure developed in a foss manner. The license is WTFPL.

Note: this video might spoil you the experience of exploring the game! Play it instead.

Spice Trade is a trade-travel-explore and live-a-life game with wonderful graphics and music. You take the role of a young Baghdad farmer and have a life to master. Agriculture and hard work, religion and cult, trade and travel: these are your means of progressing. Marriage, supernatural encounters, fame and money are to achieve but there is probably much more which I haven't noticed yet.

The game has a beautiful point-and-click adventure and management interface, multiple-choice dialog and map travel. Unfortunately, there are some interface issues. Often it is not clear how much you pay for a transaction. At the start you have to pay attention and not skip the first dialog (which cannot be re-shown in a game) to know what the starting options are.

Many actions, especially "work" and "sleep" are accompanied by an animation, that takes way too long. On the other hand these drawbacks enforce a calm game style and serve as punishment for boring game play. Explanation: It is most effective to work in the harbor, as you get very much silver/day, but the animation steals much real time. Farming on the other hand is hardly profitable, but the accompanying animation is very short. The conclusion is that both forms of gaining riches are boring and that instead the player should only use these forms of earning money to be able to engage in travel and trade. That is, only if you do not like the player character to have a slow and calm life of course.

There is also battle in the game (it plays a minor role) and battle is very quick, so the feel is 'right' - boring activities bore you, because you have to wait for animations to finish, dangerous action has no waiting time.

There is at least one dangerous bug in the game. I recommend you to save the game each time before you talk to the doctor. Under certain circumstances, choosing a specific dialog tree path will result in not being able to say anything or close the dialog. So save often. :)

I have trouble with the audio system of the game, my solution was to mute it and instead play the wonderful music using a media player.

Knights is a multiplayer (there is a singleplayer mode) 2D dungeon game, in which the players have to fulfill one of many possible quests. The default is: find three gems and leave the dungeon.

I have so far only tried the tutorial level and imagine it would be great fun to play against a human player. An AI enemy would be nice too. As far as I understand, there is no such thing as of now.

It has nice graphics, effective sounds, a impressive and simple but at first confusing user interface (press-hold direction keys to execute context-sensitive actions).

Also: the following command might save you some confusion: './knights -d knights_data/'. If you care about licenses, this thread reveals a little about the content's.

Qonk is a minimal invade-all-planets time-is-the-only-resource RTS. Last developer activity was nearly 1000 days ago but latest SVN is stable. Qonk is a beautiful time waster.

Cuby is a very pleasant-looking and -sounding puzzle game and it has nothing to do with lame rubik's cubes! Cuby uses the Raydium engine, which has a weird build system. This post will aid you in your quest of compiling it well, if compiling is required.

WARNING: MUSIC!

Dusted's Wizznic! was introduced at our forums. It is a nice small puzzle game, a clone of Puzznic for Gp2X Wiz, Linux and Win. Contributors should be able to add levels and themes easily.

If you like this game's visual or controls style, you have to check out Dusted's other games: SDL-Ball and OldSkoolGravityGame.

Ethanon is a quite amazing 2D (I repeat, 2D) game engine in development. No Linux version yet but porting will become a priority sooner or later. You can discuss the engine in this thread or on their google group.

Blockling is a puzzle game with cute pixel art gfx and retro sounds. "You are a young blockling who must stack blocks to reach the exit in successive levels!"

Weaver: Magic FPS, OpenArena 0.8.5, Evidyon, Code Summers and web findings

Weaver

Weaver [introduction] is an objective-based ("invade checkpoints") team fps with a simple gesture sequence spell casting system. It uses the XreaL engine and is currently in an early development stage. Maps are under construction and a few spells are in place. Code is GPL-licensed, "Media will aim to use Creative Commons licenses."

Weaver concept art

Weaver's current spellcasting interface (Goethe's color wheel [1] ;) )

The level work I was able to witness is impressive. TRaK is the designer, which explains it.

Strolling in bow_block of Weaver - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh5NQ1iT3Gg

Weaver's introduction includes a simple game design document. Compilation instructions are located here, communication happens over forum and IRC.

OpenArena 0.8.5

OpenArena has a new website look and a new patch release. It provides new or improved weapon effects, player skins, menu UI (video, compare to old), icons...

OA 0.8.1 icons

OA 0.8.5 icons

...and maps. For example:

OA 0.8.5 Botmatch DM on am_underworks2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIrzGKL3zcg

Even though OpenArena is supposed to be a freely licensed Quake3 clone (with an anime theme) it also adds new weapons and game modes. I recently tested some of them, for example the Overload game mode, in which you have to destroy the enemy's base crystal:

OA 0.8.5 Overload on ps9ctf - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Cpfldgsso

Evidyon

The Evidyon MMORPG's developer expressed their interest for making the game run on Linux and finds it to be relatively simple task. More info in this thread.

Don't have much to add to that. I'm glad to hear that it's possible and I hope that somebody will want to take such a programming job. Here's the latest gameplay video of the game to make completing this task more desirable: :)

Evidyon Town Guards - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWcCH6Td0Q

Google and Ruby Summers of Code

Battle for Wesnoth, Blender, Crystal Space, FreedroidRPG, Thousand Parsec, Tux4Kids and WorldForge take part in GoogleStudentsOpenCash.

EDIT: I was just informed, that NeL will share WorldForge's GSoC permission.

By accident (I wanted to get on the Rigs of Rods IRC channel but found myself on a ruby one) I discovered the existence of the RubyStudentsOpenCash. Any FOSS game projects besides Rubygame that could benefit from this? :)

And.. some websites

Blendswap, the new blender file sharing site will probably use CC0, BY and BY-SA as available licenses [2] and that makes me glad..

I discovered SampleSwap (via this post), which has a CC-licensed music category. It is impossible to filter by license (non-free CC flavors are supported), but at least it is easy to identify it, if you care about the terms. It uses yahoo's handy proprietary flash audio player and lists individual tracks instead of the ancient album-model that Jamendo chose. This makes it much nicer to browse for me.

Last bit of info: GameBoom is a site that wants to bring foss games to the people. It tries to do so not by covering only foss games but by allowing gratis games, while promoting the free as in freedom ones.

They are looking for bloggers/game reviewers, so if you are not on a strict foss diet, maybe there's a game you would like to introduce over there? Always remember though, that guest posts are welcome on this blog as well. ;) Just contact us via forum, irc or email (I'm sure you'll be able to find the links up there :) ).

EDIT: Remember GameJolt, another games-thing, where open source games are given attention.

SCOURGE2: first steps

SCOURGE2 development has started. It uses jME and LWJGL. Easy portability is the promise (low-level-of-detail SCOURGE2 version on Android anyone?).

All you can do in the latest Subversion revision is walk around on an island:

SCOURGE2 early alpha - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3go1axCwCoI

One great thing about SCOURGE2: it's not called S.C.O.U.R.G.E.2! ;)

I took this opportunity to record some S.C.O.U.R.G.E. gameplay. The first fight starts at ⅔ of the video.

Scourge gameplay (downloadable if you login on Viddler.)

I like the game very much: many items, many fights, not too hard, leveling, skills and missions. I did not progress far, but as far as I got it appeared to be a solid slash-and-hack RPG!

At my first attempts of playing the game I was confused by having a vast amount of hire-able NPCs and items lying around in the game start area and I had troubles finding out how to get started with the action (get a mission and bash some monsters), so there is a slight entry hurdle.

Another problem is that the mouse-to-game-objects interaction of S.C.O.U.R.G.E. is very sludgy: I find it hard to aim at items and enemies, often I'm not sure if my next click will cause my character to move or to attack, often the cursor is above an object but the object is not highlighted. Camera control is also a bit painful, the rotation speed is overly sensitive and in battle, the camera jumps instantly to active characters instead of a quick but smooth sliding camera movement. I of course hope that transporting content and gameplay to the new engine will be trivial and that the new engine will bring smooth controls.

To those more experienced with the game: how far did you get in the storyline? How far *can* you progress?

Xonotic - Nexuiz the Free

The first piece of news is that console Nexuiz will be re-written from scratch, because some coders decided against giving permission for a proprietary port (Slashdot , interview). This means no code contributions to Nexuiz.

Secondly, Nexuiz has been forked under the name Xonotic. Because philosophy, because management, because change.

I can't complain! Git repository instead of Subversion, no more tikiwiki (I hope) finally a feed for news (has been added to our Planet)! Open management and content enhancements are on the list of plans and promises, perhaps a little too much even, which led to the creation of a critical thread on our forums.

I have had the pleasure to test the warpzone/visible-portal feature (which is available in Nexuiz' SVN as well):


youtube-dl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb4zk-31sVU

Currently, instructions to get Xonotic (using git) are here. Compilation is easy and right now the game starts using "./all run -nexuiz".

If you want to get involved, get on their forums and/or get on their IRC! The website is still in development, a public wiki is in the works.

So what do you think about the fork? I understand the "divided we are weaker" point, but console Nexuiz has caused much confusion and a new project (Xonotic) seems like a clear cut and new hope™. Also.. "Xonotic" sounds slightly better than "Nexuiz" in my most humble ears. :)

How Nexuiz did not become proprietary or: "Silly names in Games"

Some company will use LordHavoc's DarkPlaces engine (DPE) to publish a game on some game console(s). The development team includes "a number of Nexuiz developers, and previous Quake1 community developers". Nexuiz is a (or rather "the") FOSS FPS that uses DPE.

As far as I can tell, no assets of Nexuiz will be used. On the other hand, the soundtrack playing on the console-DPE-game homepage sounds like a remix of a Nexuiz track. I will just assume that the composer agreed to this and that the same might happen to other high-quality Nexuiz content and that it will all be legal. Lee Vermeulen (Nexuiz' lead developer) is no license-n00b after all. Also, the console game will be using Nexuiz' gameplay, which I assume means "game modes", "movement/physics" and "weapon functions/balancing".

There is one problem though: this console game has the name "Nexuiz" (please call it "console Nexuiz") and its homepage is nexuiz.com.

Why did the developers have to pass the name? Heck I don't know. Perhaps they thought every Nexuix player with a console would want to buy console Nexuiz if they gave it that name. Perhaps they wanted to use the resulting confusion to make the name known. Perhaps they just couldn't come up with a good name (very common problem you know). I can very well imagine that it will only be a development name and that the release version will be called something like Nexuiz: Frag of the Unknown. or maybe there won't be any "Nexuiz" in the final version of console Nexuiz.

Here is Vermeulen's news post about console Nexuiz (did you know that every news page that has no atom/rss feed sucks?). The essence of the post is this:

1. Nexuiz development will continue
2. Console Nexuiz' assets will not be open source
3. Console Nexuiz' code improvements will be open source
4. Nexuiz' developers ("Alientrap") will receive royalties if console Nexuiz creates profit. It is not yet clear who will get what percentage but Alientrap intends to be transparent about it.

Here is the announcement by the company behind the console Nexuiz and a long discussion. (The company's name is illfonic, but that hardly matters.)
Here is a blog post that provides much more information about console Nexuiz.

No more console Nexuiz talk below this line.

I noticed a nice feature of the Nexuiz 2.5.2 release announcement:

Some of the biggest changes are:

• New gamemode: CTS (get from A to B). With map "CyberParcour01" by sev, and a nexrun map "Piece o' cake" by FruitieX
• Aggressor and stormkeep retextured by FruitieX
• Tutorial map by FruitieX
• TraK4-mit and TraK5 texturepacks by TraK
• New HUD by FruitieX and -z-
• New Scoreboard style by terencehill
• Weapon accuracy statistics by Dib (ALT key by default)
• Rocket guidance by holding down the primary fire button (seeker removed)
• Level Of Detail on all playermodels
• Video settings only show the allowed resolutions reported by your OS
• (not availible in AGL)
• Motion blur and damage blur by Samual

Did you notice it? I'm talking about the names behind each feature item. It makes new versions so much more personal. Well, a little bit. What I really would like to have as attribution/credits features is having a game mode where author name, license name and optional short description flow above each asset in a map while playing it.. I know, crazy talk.. Or something like Half-Life 2's developer's commentary?... ah, a man can dream..

Ok, back to Nexuiz. "Tutorial map"? Well! This can only be disappointing, right? :D *watches video*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESt4rqG-BUQ

Well, that wasn't too bad! Even a bit entertaining! I was expecting some text-only hour-long explanation how to press the arrow keys for movement. Yay for voice acting! Yay for expecting player to know the basics! Yay Nexuiz tutorial!

One could enhance the tutorial by making audio tracks skip, when the player has succeeded in reaching the goal described in the current audio track. Also I'm curious what kind of sarcastic comments will result from death/suicide/failure (if at all possible).

First PARPG Techdemo

PARPG ("Post-Apocalyptic Role Playing Game") Techdemo 1 is out:

You can walk around, talk to other characters, change to different (placeholder) maps, listen to background audio tracks and play around with the settings.

There is a little more: container items and basic inventory functions work as well. Battle, quests, character development and interactive map objects (locks and traps?) are what is missing from allowing to implement a loaded rpg.

Another piece of news is that the project manager, barra, is leaving his position. The best place to discuss PARPG's management's future is their IRC. You can also read more about barra's stepping down in this IndieRPGs article or this PARPG announcement.

Of course the project is seeking a new manager to take over the management tasks. We shall hope for a brave and experienced sir or lady to claim that throne. (Did I mention that the decision-making process is rather democratic in PARPG?)

The developers are restless of course and are working on the plan for the next tech demo! Read this proposal of features and participate in its discussion!




Yet another piece of news: you can now listen to all game audio tracks on this page. (So far only one has been featured in gameplay videos). My current favorite is Timong's "Depths 1":

FlightGear eyecandy release (2.0)

The flight simulator FlightGear now has pretty clouds and lighting. I have not had the chance of giving the new release a try, so I decided to create a little gallery of the best-looking shots from the 2.0 gallery.

Looks neat. But following video looks even better!

(youtube-dl link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4oMOFnD6bw )

Game sfx maker tool ... sfxr in flash!

What's all this then? This is as3sfxr, flash port of sfxr. It makes sounds for your games. You only have to press buttons and listen and press buttons again.

This is great: no need to understand how sound synthesis works, ability learn a little about sound synthesis by pressing buttons/moving controls randomly, no need to download/compile/install anything either. Oh how I would wish for more tools of this kind, maybe specialized stuff like (non-8-bit) fire effect generators, ice effects, explosions... There are some sfx gens for pure data but it will take a little more time to get them running.

At the top of this post, there is an embedded flash applet. If you are a user of an open source flash player: do you see it? Can you use it? How many of you already knew of sfxr but only now did try it through as3sfxr?

I hope this 'no info about games' post does not shock you.

Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

Beautiful Open Source Puzzle Games

The beauty of a (puzzle) game is not only what we see and hear, but also what we feel when pressing buttons and moving the mouse. Controls are important and I prefer them crispy.

No free software puzzle game has more flavor than Krank. The player piece is a string of circles, which follow the cursor to collide with smaller pieces, which need to be connected to static pieces in different combinations. Unfortunately I fail at recording videos of the game and screenshots can't communicate the feel of the movement and sounds.. Speaking of movement, the controls are not as sharp as they should be, according to my ideal. However, this seems to fit the game very much, slow music, slow pace, 'swimming' controls. At first I was frustrated, because trying to do precise movements quickly leads to disaster (or just a harder time finishing levels than if you would do it slowly) but then I learned to relax.

Anyways, you have to try the python-based game for yourself! Just listen! :)



Cuboid-Clone is a nice and simple Panda3D-based puzzle game. If I understand correctly, the levels are cloned 1:1 as well, which would be rather disappointing. If anybody feels like braining some levels, here are instructions.

Cuboid-Clone download link here. The code license appears to be BSD (let's assume 3-clause).



I always loved Zaz' sound effects and now it has prettier backgrounds, and as I believe, freely licensed music (although author info is missing). The replay-video generation function now works without stealing focus, but I advise against uploading the resulting .ogv file to YouTube. :)

If you're a web designer, you could help the developer out with building a web page for Zaz.



In Waymark, you move a piece around in turns, your paths are defined by static blocks, that keep you from falling over the edge of the screen. Collect other pieces and reach the exit is the goal. Thanks to Danc's lovely pixel art (which is freely licensed under CC-BY) and the fitting sound effects (license unknown), Waymark is a pleasure to play.

There is one big problem with the game: movement is way too slow. This confuses me, because I am sure that I played the game a few months ago and movement was very quick. The current version number is 2009-01-10, perhaps the developer forgot it's 2010 and recently released a new version? Or am I having troubles with running Java apps once more?.. In any case, I'll try to convince the developer that this game needs quicker movement. :)

EDIT: If you have trouble starting the game (version mismatch) read this. If you happen to have troubles with Java apps in general (because you are perhaps using a tiling window manager) tell me so in the comments and I'll add a solution to that to this post.

EDIT2: It appears, that I first tried the windows version and that movement in the win version is faster, than the developer intended. The bug was a feature, and a great one. :( Also the developer confirmed that 2009-01-10 is the correct date.



PS: I totally forgot JAG! One of the zagillion connect-four-based block puzzle games, I don't even know what it is a clone of or if it is original! In any case, graphics and sounds are far from programmer art. I'm enjoying this great game from time to time and my only complaint is that the bonuses (pay points to destroy all blocks of one kind and similar) are not properly introduced. Maybe they are described in some readme, but for such a colorful puzzle game, the only proper introduction is having a shiny fat arrow pointing at them when I have accumulated enough points to use them the first time. :)

Contributors, contributors, contributors

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.

Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.

Programming

Rocket Race in Syntensity [more]

Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript.

latest UFO:AI world view

I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues.

PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.

Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.

Current PARPG status

I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)

Assets/Media/Art

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Racer r242 screenshots

Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.

A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.

jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.

irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.

A3P: Acquire, Attack, Asplode, PWN!

Hey FreeGamer crowd, I hope there are still a few people around ;)
Today there will be only a short update, as I simply can't believe this gem of a game (see below) has not been featured on this page!
EDIT: Do not miss qudobup's post about FOSS engine news directly below this one!

A unique arena shooter

So someone had the balls (pun intended) and released a completely unique arena shooter with many nifty features, described by the creator as a mix of TPS/RTS/OMG/BBQ ;)
Check out A3P, if that has sparked your interest! At it's current version (0.5) it can be described as a third person arena shooter with some small RTS/squad command elements, and it is definitely fun to play:

A3P gameplay video 4

The technical specs are rather interesting too: Based on the BSD licensed Panda3D engine (while itself being licensed MIT; the media license is unclear though) it has all the bells and whistles one can expect from a modern game (Full GLSL shader based rendering, networked ODE physics, even integration into your webbrowser).
Yet it was developed by ONE man in only ONE year! That makes us fellow free game developers look a bit bad, I guess :( Maybe that's because it was developed in Python!
Check out the development blog for further insight into this miracle ;)

Open Source 3D Game Engines Updates

Crystal Space 1.4 is out. Features include improved animations ("integrating vertex based animation with skeletal animation") and terrain ("improves rendering and handling of large outdoor areas"), OpenAL for sound and an internationalization plug-in.

Engine screenshots are very informative. This is Panda3D by the way.

Panda3D has a prettier website, it released version 1.7.0 and apparently has a web-plug in. The new version makes it easier to crash the computer, but also gives a performance boost - with the magic of 'pointer textures'.

I have a little crush on Panda3D, because it gives access to 3D and audio with no complicated setting up through a scripting language (Python). On the other hand it requires 3D models to be in its own format and I find converting not very convenient. For example there have been problems importing animations into Radakan.

OGRE mascot

Ogre has a mascot, and it might even become freely licensed, somebody just needs to confirm this (by posting in the thread). :)

Besides that, 1.7.0 RC1 has been released, which is licensed under MIT license (before, it was LGPL). Here's what seems like a changelog.

OGRE wikis

Furthermore, the OGRE wiki moves from MediaWiki to TikiWiki. I suspect that a main reason is because a nicer OGRE style was made for TikiWiki, while the MediaWiki OGRE style looks bad. That may be a strange reason, but as long as it makes people use the wiki more, why not? Here's the discussion if you have an idea.

Just for kicks: a simple comparison of OGRE, Panda and Crystal regarding lines of code. What does it tell us? Well, that OGRE has the biggest codebase (even though it only handles graphics), that Panda3D is the most compact of the tree and that Crystal Space code size had strange ups and downs. Nothing more really.

Kambi VRML v2.0 is soon to be released, as is the final version of the demo game Castle (which will only mean additional eye candy to the game). What is more important, as soon as Castle 1.0 is released, work will start on Castle 2.

Castle 1 is a three-level game and I consider it hard (easy to die) and its controls to be rough. On the other hand the level design is great: the layout invites exploration the levels are linear, each with a goal to be reached. This way the levels actually are part of a game, rather than an open-ended tech demo. This is why I have a good feeling about Castle 2.0 already. Depending on whether the developers decide to work on Castle 2 on their own or to ask the community for contributions, we might see some more use of their forum.

Morrowind scroll loaded in OpenMW

OpenMW, the Morrowind engine implementation in OGRE switched from D to C++ (because of compiler availability and language popularity) and from svn+git to git-only (because of git-svn problems). Git clone instructions here. The next feature to be implemented are animations. A video was promised as soon as they are ready.

Old news: OpenGameEngine development stopped in October 2009, until a project manager wants to take over. The form in which the project is left is described as "usable" and "still too much work to make it worth the time investment".

Enjoy another ridiculous comparison of 3D (game) engines: OpenMW, KambiVRML and OGE. I just love diagrams. :)

We have a list of 3D engines on our wiki, if you want to dig some more. Also all FOSS game engine blogs that have feeds are included in the FGD development planet feed aggregator.