Coldest, LinWarrior, Metallblech - Mech Combat Action Games

I stumbled upon an older release of Coldest while making space on my HDD for game video recording, Metallblech popped out of nowhere recently on our forums with awesome art and I still haven't tried Linwarrior's latest release. Time for a mech games post!

Mechs are big robots and they make sounds like this and you can have great fun assembling them and then blowing stuff up!

Metallblech

Mashup of Metallblech's art

Planned as a game for Syntensity, there are many models ready for usage in Metallblech, but (IIRC) not one line of code has been written yet and the project is desperate for programmers. ;)

Coldest

Coldest: mech stomping, super weather, lasers overheating

Coldest actually allows you to assemble the weapon systems of your mech. That's quite an important part for this genre: first, carefully assemble your mech, then brutally disassemble enemy mechs! A readme would be quite a good addition.

The command `svn co https://www.nemebean.com/svn/coldest/` will allow you to pull the latest code [EDIT: and for more instructions check out this wiki page.]

Coldest code is under GPL, art is under who knows what. (Actually I do know that both textures and sounds wouldn't qualify as free-as-in-freedom free. :) )

Coldest's mech configuration menu

Coldest solo test [tinyogg]

LinWarrior 3D

Unfair 4 vs 1 at level start? Check!

Since the last time Free Gamer reported about LinWarrior, the 2010_03_20 "Hadron Collider" version was released (download here). Besides the fact that textures and models have been licensed under "good" CC licenses, code tweaks and visual fixes, the MD5Mesh format is now supported.

Mouse control is definitely the one thing I would like to see implemented ASAP.

Say hi to these rockets!

LinWarrior gameplay [tinyogg]

For some reason any video I recorded of LW3D would not show the dirty and brown ground texture, I'm sorry for the distorted view on the game caused by this!

Conclusion

I like mech games alot!

alot!

What do you people think of this genre? Do you prefer tactical, turn-based over action 3D mech games? What's the one thing you want to be able to do in following versions of the games I introduced here? (I want to be able to shoot off legs!)

HE'S ALIVE

*Qubodup's eyes shift left and right*

Qubodup mutters, "I smell death."

*Charlie jumps out from behind a tree*

"No! It's me!"

Or maybe Q meant death by a thousand of Charlie's bad jokes? I got jokes, man.

Ok, ok... games stuff. Enough inane joke stuff. Games...

FreeOrion 0.3.14 came out with a fairly mega changelog. A preview of the 3d space combat is in there, as well as lots of fixing and balancing and content enhancing. It's becoming a very deep game and once the 3d combat is done it'll be one of the stand out open source games you can play, and only getting better. Hats off to the developers for their dedication to realising their dreams, it's been a long haul. Here be a video:

FreeCol 0.9.3 just came out. Fixes ahoy! Good game, that, although I still don't understand how to play it. One day I'll swallow my pride and ask how the hell you assign hammers and build things.

Danger from the Deep 0.4 preview release for those who are a bit brave. It might torpedo your computer, yuk yuk yuk =). It's got great graphics, although is more of a simulation than a game - but that's a good thing in my book. Part of the fun in a submarine game is in the challenges that befell those unfortunate enough to end up in a watery grave. Ah, video ahoy:

XreaL. It's not dead. Actually there's a video in that link that will blow your mind, it looks so good. You won't be able to see the forest for the trees (that'll make sense if you see it). No youtube though here's a [rather dark] video showing off a few XreaL levels:

Looks like YAOSCSC (Yet Another Open Source Counter Strike Clone) is underway although this one is probably more likely to succeed than some of the other rather limp efforts. This one is called Code 43: Urban Warfare and it uses XreaL. It is formed by the people associated with the ET Mod True Combat: Elite which could never really be open source.

And now for something completely different. And I'm not talking about breaking English grammar rules by starting sentences with 'and'...

Runesword II is a 2D RPG made in 2001 and now open source. They released version 2.6 recently, which can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Bizarrely the 2.6 release announcement never seems to have been made outside of the forums. Sadly it is made in VB *ew* and can be run on Linux via Wine. Still, it looks like a fairly involved RPG game.

I eagerly anticpate Egoboo 2.8.0, which has been a year in the making. They got a new website.

Which reminds me. Nothing to do with it, but I haven't yet tried UFO:AI 2.3...

DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition

Squamulus in the forums has pointed us to the DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition, a competition for complete-ish open source games, wherein the winners get ported to their new all-encompassing content delivery/creation system WorldKi



Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you want to nominate your own games..



Voting begins as soon as nominations close, so check back at their page if you want to be heard.



My thoughts on the competition:



It's definitely interesting to see another entry into the sparsely populated Open Source( Gluon[alpha], OpenCDS[dead], and to a lesser degree DJL[also dead]) /densely populated Proprietary (Steam, Desura, Impulse etc etc) game content delivery arena.



There's not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..



As for handing out porting as a prize? I'm not totally sure if that's the way to go about doing things, especially if no one has heard of the platform before. Mentioning the possible monetization through the platform might have made it a bit more appealing, but then again, such things also cause dispute.



OpenGameArt Weekly Competition




On another note, the OpenGameArt Friday Challenge got renamed to "Weekly Challenge" and still starts on Fridays but ends after ten days (Mondays) so on during the weekend there are two topics to contribute to. :) The challenge art submission count is now at 77 (17 new + 60 old).



The current theme is Public Treasure Hunt and involves scouting the web for public domain game resources and is due June 28th.

BOFH: Servers Under Siege

BOFH title screen: NINJAS AND PIr.. SERVERS! (and whips and guns)

BOFH is a top-down shooter that takes place in a school. You're a mean administrator and have to shoot bad guys, take their weapons and disarm bombs attached to server stacks by finding notes that tell you in what order to cut the wires!

Now this might sound overly simple, but the enemy AI make the mindless shooting interesting enough by reacting to gunshots sounds and having non-naive movement patterns. I haven't progressed too far in the game so far, so I can only say that there is a new enemy type on a higher building floor, maybe there's even more, probably at least a boss battle.

Music and sounds are just excellent, although I sometimes wish there was more than one in-game track.

The game was originally (.exe here) made for c64 and then ported to PC. I tested neuromancer's version which contains fixes and compiles with no problems on my Linux flavor of choice.

Forks (and suggestions) are welcome by the way, besides new maps and objects it might be nice to have alternative resolutions (via scaling) implemented and also having the flickering gray shadows fixed.

Sign of a good game: the plot is no more than one screen long!

Oh, and bazookas!!!

Besides the 'save the servers' scenario, there is a mini level in which you just have to clear a room of computers. Along with workstation computers, glass is also destructible (and their shards hurt the player and enemies).

BOFH gameplay [much better quality: .ogg | .mp4]

A level editor allows easy to learn level creation. If you come up with a cool new level, let us know via comment or forum thread! I'll do the same. Here is the complete editor documentation in one screen.

Basic BOFH level editing (track #1: Crystal Space [BY-SA] by maxstack)

If you like BOFH, Shotgun Debugger most likely will suit your taste as well! And remember... It's always the blue wire first!

Well, maybe not

Ufo:AI and A3P updates

A long awaited update of one of the flagship FOSS games has just been released: UFO:AI! UFO:AI (for those not in the loop) is a turn based strategy game very similar to the classic X-COM.

The improvements of the new version are multi fold; Besides big improvements to the render engine, game-play was also overhauled, but head over to their full change log to get the full picture.

Speaking of pictures, here a nice one showing the new glow effects on the world map:

(Maybe qudobup will be so nice and make a video of it too *hint*)

A3P 1.0

A3P (we mentioned it before) was also updated to its first non beta release today. You can check it out directly in your browser (a feature of the Panda3D engine used) or download it as a normal version (currently Windows only).

A3P Gameplay

Summering Wars and Mac OSX

Recently modeled & textured SumWars character by Evil_E

While the sun warms my body, Summoning Wars' development activity warms my fossy heart: icons are being created by hal9000, sounds are being mixed by artisticdude, music is being composed by West. And of course the 3D model, see the image on top of this post.

A new release (0.5.1) has been recently uploaded and the next release is being discussed.

One quite important planned feature is an OSX port, as there are at least two (if I recall correctly) who use that operating system to produce art for the game. CMake is used for compiling on Linux, so I suspect that porting might be in fact trivial. If you can help with the task, please report to their forums/irc! :)

Free as in F..Dragon History.. and cyberpunk

Some of Dragon History's GPLv2-ed assets

You might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here.

The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you could work on cleaning up the English translation. The contact information of the maintainer is on his homepage. If you want to turn this into a team project, feel free to use FreeGameDev's general forum for a thread.


Speaking of free assets: The current OpenGameArt friday challenge is "Near Future" and I have no idea what to.. hm.. cyberpunk?

To the six finished challenges, 50 pieces of game art have been submitted. It's quite fun to follow new art and picking the best pieces, so don't let the submission forms discourage you from joining in. ;)


Oh, and speaking of cyberpunk, the quite awesome soundtrack to the hacker game Endgame: Singularity has been uploaded in .ogg and source form to OGA. And the minimal-graphics single-player HTML5 turn-based strategy game Evil Cult has a great feel to it when you play it while listening to that (kind of) music.


PS: Silly me forgot to include my source of information for the art licensing of Dragon History. It's email communication with the project maintainer. :)

Penumbra engine open source (non-free 32bit library dependancy)

Penumbra 1's engine now FOSS

The engine of the best proprietary horror game in existence (Penumbra Overture) has been released under GPLv3, and some parts under even more liberal licenses. The engine features a physics interaction system, which is extremely well-balanced between complexity of possible interactions and intuitive usability. A few test maps and some objects and textures were released under By-Sa-3 (in comparison: Lugaru comes with no freely-licensed assets).

The textures that come with Penumbra

There is a guide available on how to compile Penumbra and you can get some help on #penumbra or on the official forums. The biggest task is to get rid of the legacy Newton Dynamics dependency and replace it with Bullet. This 'procedure' has been applied to DungeonHack a year ago or so.

About Lugaru: there is a thread that contains some thoughts on adding free (faif free hopefully) content to it.

Of Summoning Wars and RakNet

When I found out that Summoning Wars, it in fact uses a freely licensed network library, I wanted to test it, but failed at compiling. Today, with fresh Subversion checkout, I succeeded and was surprised by a Diablo-rules-style RPG with 3D graphics (OGRE) a lot of dialog (hours and hours of tutorials ;) ), choices, different character classes and various spells and items.

Sarcophagus open up! (And let me take precious loot!)

Enlightening zombies in a dark cave with fireballs

Leaving loot behind

Why am I  even writing these captions?

Action-RPG GUI layout 101: Left: Character, Right: Skills or Inventory

Scaring goblins to death with a lovely mask

4-way dialog sequences make plot confusing fun!


Video: Rescuing some NPC [.ogg (shorter)]

I wonder what the network part is all about. I could imagine cooperative plot-games to be fun.. Anyways, about the net lib:

The popular network library RakNet is neither open source nor free software, as defined by OSI and FSF. However, version 2.451 (Feb 18th 2006) is GPL-licensed. It can be found via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine [zip mirror]. The developers of Summoning Wars mirrored some version as well and even created an Arch Linux AUR package.

The owner of RakNet commented on GPL in commercial game development.

Combing Github for Games

I am bored. SF.net doesn't produce many new foss game findings, so I say: "Let's try GitHub's search function!"

Searching "game" quickly turned into "game -warcraft -framework -iPhone -life -cocos -Invaders" and I gave up such a general approach. Next up "fps".

1. maroxe/fps - Soya3D-based shooter. Doesn't run, so I write a report. Project probably inactive, the history tells me. Next.
2. ctmammoth/mammoth - "Tactical/strategy CTF-style FPS". Contains just a .sln (Visual Studio) file and dlls in the repo. Is written in C#. Obviously non-Linux. Next.
3. 
   treeform/simple-fps - "Simple fps demo for panda3d". Last action October 2009. It runs! Let's make a quick video, even though it's nothing, but the texture is kind of interesting. Lagging in the video [YT, TO] because of recording app I think. Next.
4. mlambir/Pygame-FPS - "Wolfenstein style fps in pygame". It uses original Wolfenstein's gfx too. Nothing to look at, still recorded a video [YT, TO]. Last activity September 2009. Next.
5. Michael-mrg/Sauerbraten - "Fork of the sauerbraten fps with a variety of convenience patches". Not going to test it, but nice to know there are Sauerbraten improvements on GitHub..
6. gitpan/SDL-App-FPS - What a compelling... name. But then again, behind lame names, there sometimes are quality games! Requires SDL-Perl. The test suite tries to fullscreen and kills X.org in the process. Next.
7. danopia/quak - "Implementation of duckinator's weird FPS idea". I don't know who duckinator is, but this sounds swell! OGRE-based. Won't start, let's rebuild OGRE. Doesn't help. Write report.

Okay, no more "fps" search results that I could care about. Let's try "rts".

1. 
   spring/spring - Spring. Oh hi, I didn't see you there! And you brought a friend: the GPL/BY-SA game "Project Recoil" which seems to have at least some 3D & concept art going on.
2. mrpouet/chenilles - "RTS worms-like". Can't say that I like those, the original is the best Worms-like game so far for me. No activity since > 1 year. Okay, we have terrain and a worm which won't stop walking. Not mucht, but have a video [YT, TO].
3. shawn42/snelps - "Rubygame RTS" which is now over three years periodically in development. I was unable to test it this time however, due to rubygame problems on my side.
4. dragly/loose_cannon - "Simple Qt's OpenGL RTS". I accidentally wrote an incorrect report but then got instructions for compiling the game. (Didn't manage to do it ye though.)
5. 
   Acedio/craft - "A simple RTS". This is a WarCraft 3-style WarCraft 2 clone (at least it feels like that)! Too bad it has nothing more than unit movement and animations. No more development since May 2009. Blender files of models are in the repository, so if somebody found out the license, they might become useful to some other project. Have a video [YT, TO].
6. jvranish/SpaceWars - "RTS with an emphasis on gravity". It seems not to work. Bug report. Next.

Let's try "rpg".

1. Can't run | can't run | can't run | can't run | a renderer [YT, TO] | not pretty but functional [YT, TO] | too complicated to set up, no convenient package of pybox2d for Arch Linux | a little something [screen] | A pre-alpha Panda3D RPG [YT, TO] | tiled map, I could watch this guy all day | no content [screen]
2. 
   foxostro/arbarlith2 - Finaly something more 'robust'! Charlie once mentioned the game in a post. Rather complicated to compile (see readme) and fails too, so I created a report and hope for support.

That wasn't much fun... Um, "adventure" anyone? I'll ignore games I can't run for the rest of this post.

1. 
   kallepersson/subterranean - This one is playable! (Only one quest to solve but it has music.) One great thing about it is that wheels are not being re-invented for it, it uses an adventure engine that was the product of a PyWeek challenge. Here's a little video [YT, TO].
2. 
   codingisacopingstrategy/ countryoforigin [homepage] - This one is a ScummVM adventure, where dialog and philosophy appear to be the key to winning the game (does it even matter?). It looks so retro but breaks its visual predecessor's habits in a way, that reminds me of Mr. Rohrer's games.
   
3. 
   Droggelbecher/Grail - An adventure engine with parallax drawing, noir graphics and no interaction as of yet. A video shows the effect and animations [YT, TO]

What a clusterfoo! I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! The next post I'm going to write will hopefully be a one-game one. :)

Port and Configure - Specialists Wanted for Diablo-like and 3D and cute pixels!

Holyspirit is a good-looking hack & slash game with (rendered?) 3D graphics, which I unfortunately was only able to run using wine (and it wasn't very stable either: entering some areas and saving would cause it to freeze).

It appears however, that it should be very simple to make it compile on Linux, somebody will just have to figure out how to make Code::Blocks (.cbp files is provided) find SFML, a SDL alternative that is used by Holyspirit and provide compile instructions.

DotModeler is a 3D pixel editor which could use non-AZERTY language keyboard bindings and a little bit of English-language documentation (or anything that can be easily translated).

Kwest Kingdom is a Kwute roguelike which even a Nethack-hater like me can love! Here's a YT video [TO] of the kewtness.

I haven't been able to compile the game (I think) but it apparently has 64bit Linux binaries in its GIT repository and Windows binaries for download. Still, I think the Makefile might use some cleaning up. Volunteer! For cuteness in FOSS games! EDIT: My fault, see comments for clarity!

Summoning Wars is the third Diablo-like in the last two months you read about here. It uses OGRE but unfortunately also the non-free RakNet and could use some alternative library support. (Hintedy hint hint.)

EDIT: Apparently the version used is an old GPL-compatible version of RakNet. I will report, as soon as I know more. You can follow the discussion here.

Formula Retro

Formula Retro is an actively developed "Sega's Virtua Racing look-alike". I found it to be somewhat buggy (but stable) and I like the look.

Windows releases are available for download and here are GNU/Linux compile instructions, you will need to have irrlicht installed:

svn co https://formularetro.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/formularetro/trunk formularetro
cd formularetro
find . -exec sed -i 's|../irrlicht/include|/usr/include/irrlicht|g' {} \;
make
./dist/Debug/GNU-Linux-x86/formularetro

If you like the art style, you might want to give SimCar a go.

PS: I recorded a short video of the action and found out that the art license (CC-BY-SA 3.0 ES) is compatible with the international version of that license.

tinyogg

Ryzom FOSS: The Art

Ryzom has been released under AGPLv3 for server, client and "content creation tools" and BY-SAv3 for 17463 png image files and 7553 max 3d model files (see ). The 3D format is problematic, as .max is a proprietary format, but art is also available in the NeL shape format in ryzom's media browser (maybe not all of it, I'm not sure).

"Porting the art" is one of the tasks for which Ryzom will welcome developer support. Finishing porting to GNU/Linux is another goal and I'm sure there will be a little more coverage about the game here on Free Gamer and on other blogs once it runs. :)

(4 MB 24x24 preview of about 14000 of 17463)

I think most ground textures I saw were rather small (128x128) but of high quality and also include to-transparency alpha-blend tiles that are helpful for transitions between ground types. There are also in-game icons and GUI elements.

Here are the most popular resolutions, if you're curious:

files resolution
   5493 256x256
   2243 128x128
   1864 256x512
   1422 32x32
   1337 64x64
   1142 512x512
    646 24x24
    613 128x256
    316 40x40
    238 64x128
    199 256x128
    137 1024x1024
    121 4x4
    116 16x16

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.

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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.