LibriVox Hacked

The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post] but as a forum user I received an email:

A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our completedatabase including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them outof the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have ourdatabase.
In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information:(1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through theforum, including all private messages. This information is now in thepossession of the hacker.
(2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if yourpassword was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break theencryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactlythis, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, youshould immediately change your password at those services.
We are very sorry that this happened, and once this is sorted out as bestas it can be, we’ll be doing a more thorough security review.

Well, I'm glad they are open about this. A great time to update the passwords I use to more secure ones. :)

I would like to appeal to the community to look out for each other and report strange activities like spam posts or random content deletion to site admins, pointing out this recent hacking. Everybody who had a LibriVox account and used their password elsewhere should change it ASAP, especially if moderative or administrative accounts are involved!

... Let me just add a little bit of positive open content news though: I was looking for car blinker sounds, contacted three Freesound contributors and got permission from all of them to re-distribute under CC0, which I did on OpenGameArt. j1987 even added a "all my sounds are public domain" note. :)

PARPG Infrastructure Sprint: Content Creation Refactoring

A PARPG Content Creation Refactoring Sprint was announced on May 23, 2011. Here are instructions on how to join and help:

1. Register at Assembla
2. Add and resolve tickets
3. Join the #parpg channel each Sunday at GMT 8PM

Let pixel maps do the talking

New Pages of Adventure graphics.

OpenGameArt is looking for a hosting sponsor. The target is a dedicated server with following min. specs:

• Quad core, 64 bit CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB hard drive space
• 1TB monthly transfer
• 1 gigabit connection
• 64-bit CentOS, RedHat or Fedora
• Root access and Autonomy

Assorted strategy game news

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


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

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

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

Newton Physics Open Source!

Funto's edit of the FGDWiki* made me realize that Newton switched to the free-as-in-freedom zlib license

I did not follow development on the HPL1 (Penumbra: Overture) engine but this might mean that there are no closed dependencies any more.

*having a forum account will allow you to edit this wiki!

LanPower Game Key v2

On 2. July, the second Free-as-in-freedom USB Game Key will be released by the French-language based team LanPower.

The GameKey light serie 2 is a compilation of portable FOSS games, mostly compatible with both Windows and Linux.

English, German, French, Italian and Spanish translations are available for the GUI. If you would like to add your translation to the mix, here are the translation files: English | French. (contact: asso.lanpower A✜T free.fr)

Sound Walk #1: BOFH

This is a 0:46 soundwalk of BOFH. Music not turned off.



[download ogg vorbis]

Naev Sound and Xonotic Map Devolution

Spoiler alert regarding a video of a NAEV mission that shows off the sound capacities of the game. The project relies on OpenAL Soft.

You should come for the sound [10MB vorbis rip]* or for the HD version.

Effects to notice:

• Positional sound (basic for OpenAL)

• Doppler Effect (depends on velocity)

• Air absorption factor (sounds like you’re under water)

• Reverb (also helps make it sound like you’re underwater)

• Speed of sound changes (depends on nebula density – also for sounding underwater)

* It'd be great if more project took so much care of audio licensing so there could be f-a-i-f game sound walks. Great distraction from urban noise. Game soundtracks are disturbing though mostly.

An amazing screens-video of the different stages of modernizing/Xonoticisizing CBCTF1 - Space CTF to Newtonian Nightmare was posted.

FlightGear at LinuxTag 2011

I took a quick look at the Gluon Talk and the games booth at LinuxTag 2011 and thought I'd share some pictures at least. :)

Remember Iris2?

Iris2

We haven't typed a word about Iris2 in over two years! There are quite some new bugfixes to the 3D UO client.

The latest stable release (rev 3395) is one week old.

Iris2 was updated to use Ogre 1.7.2, it now runs stable on Windows.

This old video is still pretty much up-to date

The project mainly suffers from lack of community interest and aid in creating or converting free assets or hosting servers. :) A few trees seem to be hard enough (but there's more).

RunUO appears to be a popular server suite.

I made a feed of the Iris2 wiki news.

Open Source Games Still Alive

Octower!

BAM! Word War Vi runs on Pandora! (Have a feed!)

Split-screen!

BAM! Egoboo alive, kicking and now has a pretty website! Lazza made a feed!

Code!

BAM! jClassicRPG development continues!

Gluon Creator

The Gluon project is

1. A 2D game creation IDE
2. A game player which is supposed to become cross-platform, including mobiles and tablets
3. A site/community/server which will feature ratings, tags, avatars, achievements, etc.

Read more about the vision here and about the history in this Amarok blog post.

Gluon team member Leinir will appear at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany with his English-language talk Social Game Distribution. Hm... anybody got spare tickets? [got some thanks to ben!] :)

Goblin Camp

Goblin Camp is a roguelike citybuilder, inspired by Anno 1404, Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper.

0.15 is the most recent version (April 23).

I looks cute and fun and there are Win & Lin releases. I also watched part of the well-done tutorials:

To be honest: I'm shyed away by the apparent deep micromanagement and by my prejudice against roguelike controls.

AGS: Adventure Game Studio open sourced

Better late then never they say... so today I bring you the news that the grand-daddy of point and click adventure game creation software, AGS, has been open-sourced recently.



For AGS there are literally thousands of fan made games available (picture taken from this one), and even though most of them (all?) are not FOSS, it is definitely nice to have the engine and the editor now under the pretty liberal and GPL compatible Artistic License 2.0.

Cashflow for Open Game Projects via Flattr without investment

Flattr allows you to place a "click me because you appreciate me" button on your site and when somebody clicks it, you get a bit of money.

So far you had to invest at least 2€ to be part of the service. Now you can use it for free.

So every project that is a one-person project or has a donation infrastructure: please add flattr to your site.

If neiter fits: start thinking about how you would share donations with the team if you got any and add a flattr button when you're done. :)

Thanks to Grumbel for reminding via his post.

Pax Britannica: One-button RTS!

Pax Britannica

Somehow I found out about Pax Britannica a while ago and found it to be an addicting game, even though I only played it agains AI so far.

The resource is time and your task is to decide what to build, while fighting happens automatically and no movement controls are given. In fact all you can do is press a button and the duration of that press will result in different actions. Up to four players or 1-vs-AI are supported.

Good Pax Britannica review

The license is MIT although I don't know whether it applies to art as well.

Libre Graphics Meeting 10-13 May 2011, Blendswap v3, OpenArt

I'm looking forward to the LGM this year. Bart, admin of OpenGameArt will talk about running libre graphics projects.

You can view previous year's talk videos here.

Version 3 of Blendswap is live! But the site has some server load problems.

OpenArt, Moosader's own take on game resource sharing has been updated and has content under CC0 and CC-BY v3 licenses. It received a visual update a while ago.

Graphs & Virgins: Evil Cult

Evil Cult [latest version]. One of my favorite games. A 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) turn-based game with little micro-management so far (I consider this a huge plus).

The developer recently posted a blog update. You can follow him on Twitter. Much development discussion is going on in this thread.

I made two videos of the gameplay: a 5x time lapse and an Let's Play for your pleasure.

Evil Cult 5x speed
Music by (c) Natlyea

Evil Cult Let's Play

Regarding 4x games: There's an ongoing Master of Orion 2 rewrite. Latest activity in the repository: Mon Apr 11 11:55:42 2011 +0200. Here's a custom news feed if you want to follow the project. (I won't be adding custom feeds to the planet for now).

I also created a news feed generator for FreeOrion.

CC Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update!

Remember Justin Nichol's CC Portraits Marathon? There's an update [kickstarter|justin's blog]!

I had an injury earlier in the year which kept me preoccupied, and then school started. The pace should be much quicker from this point on and I apologise for the delays. In any case, I have these 10 and about 23 others to complete (with 2 additional portraits of my choice to finish the 35 I guaranteed). I intend to complete the bulk over the next month and a half, and will try to post the fruits of my labor every Wednesday from this point forth, so if you don't see anything from me one wednesday, feel free to bug me.

Zero-K PlanetWars meta game

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

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

OpenDungeons 0.4.8

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

Naev 0.5 beta

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

Vertigo Beta

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

Humble Indie Bundle's Source Releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frogatto: open game & editor, closed art

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

Star-filled Sky: 100% public domain

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

Nikki and the Robots: open & closed

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

Panda Engine Book, Blendswap Upgrade, Avoision Ad

Available as Paper, PDF, epub or PacktLib

Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook has been published.

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

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

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

Avoision

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nikki and the Robots

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

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

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

Development Video #03: Final Platforms

I made a little level pack:

celldropping 1-4 levelpack

[download | alt | backup]

Also: t-shirts!

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

Everybody likes images!

SDL is now zlib-licensed [announcement].

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Gaming on Linux by Ryan C. Gordon

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

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

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

Part 1 of id Software All Your History

Myst Online Finally goes Open Source

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

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

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

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