Friday, March 14, 2008

OpenLander, Powerball


OpenLander


OpenLander (Forum Showcase) is a 3D lunar lander style game. Whilst currently more a tech demo than a game, it looks very interesting and strangely reminiscent of an old Mac or Amiga game that I just can't remember, although of course with much better graphics. It's written in Python with Soya3D, and could be the type of game to make me eat previous words about Python not being suitable for non-trivial projects.



Less talking, more youtube:





Anybody remember that old Mac (or Amiga) game that looks similar to this? Update: Thanks to reader Michael Reed who points out the 1988 Amiga classic Virus - that's the one!





Powerball

Powerball (Ogre Showcase) is an, "arcade game where you have the roll a ball into the target. Sounds simple? Yeah, now the cool facts: Items like beamers, Coins, switches, you can control it by holding a Chessboard at the bottom of your Webcam (even in Linux)." That last bit about a chessboard/webcam combo sounds great. The only non-cool bit about the project is that the media content is not under a Free license and hence not hosted on SF. Hopefully that'll change in the future.



FreeTrain is getting somewhere now. The author of SdlDotNet and Tao.SDL has taken up work on the project and is kicking ass. FreeTrain coming to a Linux/Mono platform near you Real Soon (tm)!



Update 1: Too early in the morning... had to publish this 5 times! No title, spelling errors, layout problems. Somebody must've watered down my coffee! -- Charlie



Update 2: Oh my... it's not OpenLancer, it's OpenLander. Maybe I should just go back to bed? -- Charlie