Friday, May 16, 2008

Writers Block (or should I say LOADS OF NEWS)

Well, no blog in a while so I'll pitch in.



The big release was Scourge 0.20 which is really turning into a nice game. It's one of my favourite projects, not least because of the regular releases and the RPG theme and it's a complete game (12 chapters of storyline). It's surely worthy of being listed on the FreeGameDev complete games page! Version 0.20 was probably the biggest feature packed release yet, and the game now has numerous active contributors.



Open City 0.06dev1 got released in April, which I didn't see mentioned anywhere. Nice to see the project continuing at a steady pace. Grab it from the project downloads on Sourceforge (the website does not link it directly) and see what new features are going into Open City on the project's development page.



Howitzer Skirmish now has a website. It's the tank game with full physics simulation of the tracks:



In the physics simulation, a motor drives the sprocket, which in turn collides with all the links in the track. Each link in the tracks, is a fully simulated rigid body.


Blocks is a fun and free software 3D Jump n' Run for Linux and Windows. A youtube is worth a (frames*1000) words.





Looks very cool although perhaps a bit floaty for my liking. Definitely a great addition to the open source game scene though and it's complete and playable. Download and enjoy.



Not so complete and playable is Dungeon Hack (project page). It started out as an effort to bring Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall into the 21st century but due to copyright concerns has become a game in it's own right merely inspired by Daggerfall. The original releases were only targeting Windows but now it's getting ported to Linux. Definitely one for the future and it has been in development for some years - some nice screenshots - now so looks like it shouldn't be disappearing.



Oh noes, there's more news... too much for one post? Nah... let's get on with it...



Update: Corrected PureBasic reference - it said FreeBasic before, and that is Free Software!



Lost Labyrinth is an awesome graphical roguelike. It's really a cool game and a great time-waster. The only problem? It needs PureBasic which isn't free and as such it can't be included in your favourite Linux distributions. Well, that's about to change:



Yes Lost Labyrinth can be packaged for Fedora/Debian now, as a Free purebasic compiler has been written named elice.


Great news for lazy sods everywhere!



If you like maths and cricket, try this! Ta ta!