Tired today. Sorry for lack of details.
Daimonin (2D MMORPG) got a new website. Spiffy.
Warsow 0.42. It's a fast multiplayer FPS.
Ace video on Nexuiz, looks fancy FPS.
There's an RC out for VDrift release 2008-02-23, the "next gen" car game. (I don't quite get the notion of an RC for dated releases.
Vega Strike needs nvidia users to test before release due to an unknown number of cards affected by a buggy driver (boo for closed source).
I'm... Zzzzzz...
A good open source platform game that never gets a mention is The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition. This game is a remake of the classic NES / Master System version by Konami. The same team is also responsible two rather fun arcade top-down racing games, F1 Spirit and Road Fighter, which are also remakes. I'm not sure what the source license is for these (ack, there goes my Free Software credibility) but you can get the source and the games compile / run on the 3 major platforms (y'know, Lin/Win/Mac).
There's not-so-recent updates to Daimonin, the 2D isometric fantasy MMORPG that seems to play second fiddle to the likes of Eternal Lands and Planeshift due to it not coming with the fancy 3D 3Dness. I mean, everybody wants 3D, and those who don't play nethack. So there's no room for anything else. Especially not something as addictive as Daimonin. I'm not going near that game again, I barely escaped the first time! Anyhow, it's up to version 0.9.7.1 which means something to somebody, somewhere.
Egoboo has been travelling, but after several years finally returned home to egoboo.sourceforge.net where it's open source adventure originally started. Development is highly active, with lead developer Zefz having dragged it kick and screaming back from the depths of stagnancy. (My god, that's actually a valid [ab]use of the word... I mean, I typed it as a joke, and the spell checker didn't cry.)
Entropy found via the Ubuntu forums, is... I'll use their words, "Entropy is an open source game project the likes of which you have never seen. With what is currently a small team of modelers, texture artists, and programmers, development on Entropy (which just finished the final stages of design) is... brand new and revolutionary, in both its spirit and style of gameplay. Entropy will be a structured mix of First Person Shooter combat, with vehicles of all sorts, combined with Real Time Strategy, with a few Role Playing elements thrown in. However, the most important aspect of Entropy is that it is entirely online and immersive, almost every character in game will be an actual player."
Sounds very interesting. However, I believe their ambition far outweighs their ability to deliver on it, something I expressed. However, they are 'veterans'. Whether being veteran means 1 guy can program a commercial grade game in 2 years when programming Gods (think John Carmack) don't do that, well, who am I to be a party pooper. Still, I hope they succeed.
All I'll say is that, unless you have fairly modest requirements, programming your own engine from scrach is absolute madness with the likes of Ogre3D (and the plethora of other options) at your fingertips. (Note: we need to make a page for these on the FreeGameDev wiki.)
There's a couple of newish irrlamb gameplay videos. Worth watching if you want to see what the game is like and how devious some of the gameplay can be. For me, irrlamb is definitely one of the most exciting open source game projects around at the moment, being both innovative and challenging in it's gameplay.
Expect some really nice graphics in the next UFO:AI release. A few modelling maniacs seem to have gotten very interested in contributing, which is always good for an open source game project.
As of some time last week, an interesting major change landed in the OpenTTD development trunk - loading of 32bpp graphics and levels of zoom. It's one of the big steps along the road to getting high resolution graphics into OpenTTD. Also it provides a platform for the artwork contributors to see their art in game rather than have to paste it together to showcase it. A completely Free (no TTD required) and beautiful OpenTTD just got one step closer to reality. I'm hopeful that maybe a beta of this work might appear before the end of the year. The image to the right is an actual in-game shot! :-)
Java Classic RPG, the Eye of the Beholder & Dungeon Master inspired project, gained climates this week. If only the quality of the artwork matched the quality of the code developments! I was thinking about this, along with working a bit more on Fortress, and observing Scourge developments, and realising there are very few open source / free medieval and fantasy model resources going. Most projects with good artwork in this genre are either pixel art (like Wesnoth and Daimonin) or restricted (like Planeshift and Eternal Lands).
So, yeah, I think the scene needs a bit of dedicated medieval and fantasy modelling to happen so that all the exciting medieval and fantasy projects can pull quality artwork from a common base. Maybe there already is this kind of stuff available, do you know where? Or maybe there are people out there interested in modelling this kind of stuff. Do you know any? Spread the word!
I'll end today on a coding note. I was working on a layout engine (as part of Vexi, an open source project I lead) and came up against a problem where conversion between ints and floats and back (Java) was causing the assigned space between child boxes to be less than the parent box (box being a layout construct - don't worry about it). The solution was a bit of casting voodoo. I love it. :-)
// casting voodoo to make sure we don't have leftover pixels
diff = child.contentheight + (int)(slack+total) - (int)total;My attempts to explain that to my girlfriend were a spectacular failure! :-D