News Avalanche!

Zero-K:

Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :)

It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back

IrrRPG Builder

IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua.

There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functions yet, which crashes the game) and adding some sort of api refference along with autocompletion would really make it a fully fledged IDE :)

Ryzom:

We've been giving Ryzom quite a bit of love recently, with their Linux native client and all, but they just announced an In-game competition for a Linux netbook and got accepted for the Google Code-In initiative. Here's hoping they have lots of success!

Warlock's Gauntlet:

Warlock's Gauntlet is a highly polished Gauntlet/Diablo/Hack'nSlash mashup. A nice interface, smooth gameplay and lots of spells make this a very nice find.(Thanks archl from the comments :) It even has co-op!

Egoboo

The Egoboo team just released their version 2.8.1 beta, it adds randomized loot, special effects and lots of bugfixes. Check it out!

FreedroidRPG

Freedroid recently had their website redesigned(aww I liked the old one :(), and also released version 0.14 which included the Summer of Code work. This added better randomized dungeons, a better interface for the level editor and replaced magical weapons with a more sci-fi addon system (the last addition was done by Nekotaku from Lips of Suna, which also had a release recently :)

Quick & Dirty FLOSS Game Updates

== Insert introductory text here ==

Strategy games

Civitas city

Civitas is a project of a colaborative educational game, where children from schools can cooperate in a network for the construction of cities.

This sounds/looks like a multiplayer OpenCity. Civitas is a GPLed project written in Java.

Thumbs up to kid/education-related game projects whose creators are brave enough to use standard free licenses!

Clippers

Clippers is a board game designed by Alan R Moon that is an abstract island connection game based on clipper ships and the south pacific. This computer version is written in Java 1.5 and includes AI players.

Just like Civitas, I wasn't able to give it a spin. Sorry, Java issues. :(

The Spring Engine has a nice new homepage and a pleasantly clear list of games. (This is probably very old news but kind of new to me.) I was told that Kernel Panic is a 100% open source game for Spring, but unfortunately I am either too stupid or too lazy to make it work. :|

Role-playing games

FreedroidRPG 0.12.1 has been released [download]. The main game map has been re-organized to make more plot-sense. It does, but too many gameplay-useless rooms full of stasis chambers have been added. To my feel, the game is now a lot harder too. However, the controls feel slightly better compared to the last time I tried it. Unfortunately I experienced annoying laggy map-loading and a few crashes from playing too many sounds at once (might have to do with my sofware mixer though). Check out the full changelog for more details.

Rigged FreedroidRPG armor

I noticed that FreedroidRPG's image sources (.blend and .svg files) have been uploaded. an unsorted heap of everything visual that is used in the game [archive tree]. I must say that I like the graphics much better in high resolution. 3D game developers eying this pack will be glad to hear that everything that needs rigging is rigged. For 2D game devs, there is a rendering guide.

Cheese Boys [remember?] is still in development - and still looking for artist help... though maybe someone to scout OpenGameArt would even be enough?..

Ardentryst is being constantly developed - the 1.7 release was added three weeks ago.

Eating daggers in Radakan

Radakan 0.0.1, which can be currently described as "young Qt GUI-driven text RPG", was released. Future plans include graphical clients and such. Creating a system to allow writing the story/gameplay before starting work on a graphical engine is a playing-it-safe decision. IMHO a good idea.

The WorldForge client Ember now has real-time shadows [announcement].

Worldforge Ember, real time shadows

By the way, WorldForge is in the Google Summer of Code 2009. [GSOC page] as are some other game or gamedev-related projects, as seen in this list.

Game makers/tools

Dungeon Mapper

Dungeon Mapper is yet another tile map editor.

Mokoi Gaming 0.4 was released. It now supports OSX and contains a Tetris variant [changelog].

Development on Opensource Game Studio has started. Features: 3D, Qt, Lua. It contains a small glxgears-like demo [video]. Nothing to see here yet. :)

The rest

The two-day game programming competition Ludum Dare #14 has ended a while ago. Unfortunately nobody except arcticum's and Flood of Air's authors cared to release their game as open source software (or I couldn't find them).

Armagetron Advanced 0.2.8.3_rc2 [download] fixes color filters and crashes. [changelog].

Some things on my radar

"Damn Free Gamer is popular." So says the L-echo developer, as well as posting graphic illustration on the project home page. L-Echo is a free and open source clone of the game Echochrome (aka Mugen Kairou). Version 0.4.3 arrived in early February, although performance was unplayable on my non-hardware-accelerated laptop.

Freedroid RPG version 0.12rc1 - a 2D isometric RPG, a bit like Diablo, but not like it at all. There's lots of bug fixes, a new tutorial, a new starting level, lua scripting, and more! Help them playtest it so that version 0.12 is solid.

"Tesliz", a 3D turn based strategy game, inspired by Wesnoth, written in Python on top of OGRE. Early days here.

Speaking of Wesnoth had lots of updates over the Christmas period, building up to a stable 1.6 release. That game has some amazing artwork these days, like these wizard portaits. They have lots of playtesters already. If you don't know what Wesnoth is, crikey, just click the link already.

Globulation 2 version 0.9.4 (changelog) which is a lot of balancing, bug fixing and enhancement of existing features, from what I can tell. Globulation 2 is an innovative 2D RTS where you lead autonomous blobs into battle. Innovative, yah. Blobs, meh.

Java Classic RPG version 2009-02-28 (announcement) which has a rather large amount of changes since the previous release. Highlights include moving to jMonkeyEngine 2.0, new monsters, area dependent music playback, new portraits, and optimizations. I hope to see this project become a completable game this year.

Freelords tech release 0.03 is out. Freelords is a Warlords-inspired 2D strategy game written in Java. This release introduces simultaneous movement and improves the graphics and dialogs. Freelords was originally a C++ project - the C++ codebase lives on in LordsAWar. Recently the developer posted a video of a city history report (ogg) on the LordsAWar homepage, which I thought was quite neat. It's the kind of feature usually missing from Free games.

Tennix 1.0 is available. Tennix is a very simple pong-like Tennis game, but the amount of polish going into it shows how nice a simple game can become. All it takes is a little passion.

Gearhead2 version 0.540 (announcement) continues the spate of game rule adjustments. I like it that there's a lot of thought going into giving the game depth.

Kazama, Retribution Engine, LPairs, OpenAnno and Mono.XNA

Kazama

Kazama is a Pygame-based fighting game engine. [video] It's young and performs rather slowly and the license status of the media included in it's first release is somewhat dubious.

In case you had problems following Freedroid(RPG)'s development: they now have an RSS-feed for their updates, which we added to the FreeGameDev news planet.

Retribution Engine's level editor

There has been an update of the First-person shooter Retribution Engine: Some weapon tuning and two maps. To my knowledge the game still only compiles on windows machines which is unfortunate, as it appears to include a map and a model editor, which might be worth a look.

LParis

LPairs is a memory game which uses graphics of the Tango Desktop Project. It's just as exciting as every other memory game and I must say that the best thing about it is the user interface library (pretty fading menu fonts). This is something all the LGames shine in.

I also just found out via the news planet, that OpenAnno appears to have it's first playable release! And they made a video!!

OpenAnno 13 Sept 2008

Mono.XNA is an open source, cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's XNA gaming framework. So far I had to ignore the 84 SourceForge.net-hosted XNA-related projects. This might change now. Thanks to SiENcE for the tip!

[Edit] On the other hand, the project doesn't seem too active really. Last SVN commit Jul 25, 2007.

TORCS = fun, Dungeon Hack = beauty

TORCS 1.3.1

It has been a while since the last time I gave The Open Racing Car Simulator a try and this time I had unexpectedly much fun with it. Though some things are strange about it: the game generally runs smoothly, except for some rare, sporadic lags which make controls problematic for a second. There are great textures in the game but some of them are just bad (probably heritage from darker times.) I like the track's layouts but I wish there was an environment artist who would spice up TORCS' landscapes. Still, I think it's great.

There is a lack of a damage model, but it's still fun to practice an aggressive driving style sometimes. :) Oh yeah, I nearly forgot to tell you that I made a stupid little gameplay video.

I tried to compile the racing simulation from CVS and failed, but fortunately it is available in binary forms for Win/Lin/Mac and is easy to install.

One unusual aspect of the game's installer is that you can to choose to not install the unfree car models (although I don't know for sure how free the TORCS team's definition of free media is.)

Dungeon Hack landscape

Dungeon Hack, a spiritual remake of Daggerfall, will be blessed with an editor some time soon. Hopefully they will make the jump from awesome landscape generator to kick-butt role-playing game!

I also hope there will be a GNU/Linux version available soon. The only other application of which I'm eagerly waiting for a GNU/Linux port is FxGen.

Other than that, there's not much to say about Dungeon Hack. The current aim is programming and not already bother with gameplay/visual details. I think this is a good sign: they're not trying to rush things or to do everything at the same time.

You can get version Alpha build 23 of Digital Paint Paintball 2. The game is one of those, which I never figured out how to play. Problem was with the last version I tried, that I was unable to disable the too-much-for-my-gfxcard-water/reflection-effects.

FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 town's new look

FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 has lots of new features:

• Level changes and additions
• Weapon additions and balancing
• Programs (spells) balancing and a new skill
• New music!
• Engine improvements (for example performance)
• Editor improvements (for example undo/redo functions)

I need to find some time for checking out that editor thingey!

CatchemRPG detail

CatchemRPG is supposed to become a Pokemon games-like game.

Can't say I'm very interested, but the sprites do like rather nice (wonder where they are from. RPGMaker XP?) Also it's written in Java, so you don't loose much time giving it a shot.

PS: Apricot aka Yo Frankie! (sight) would very much like you to animate a character for them.

Shadow game prototyping challange, FreedroidRPG lifesigns, recording GNU/Linux games with glc

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc

Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge. Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums!

There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG. The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG.

Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available.

Video of Slune, made with glc

glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap, istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that manages to records audio on my machine. It's also easy to install! (Hints: cat /proc/cpuinfo to find out what flags to use, O2 is written with an uppercase o, if you don't know where to install to install it to /usr/ and also execute the install script as root.) Using it is easy too! Just run glc-capture game-name and press Shift+F8 to start/stop recording. There is even a script provided, which will convert the glc files to mp4 (attention, non-free), the preferred format of Vimeo. If you know how to use ffmpeg to create an Theora/OGG video, you can probably export to that format instead.

glc is great! I want you to use it! I've used it a lot already. It is to my knowledge the first Linux direct rendering capturing tool that does not suck! If you have any trouble whatsoever with it, you're invited to ask for help in this thread. (There's also #glc on irc.freenode.net.)

Edit: Many thanks to Pyry for writing glc and making me aware of it!

Speaking of game videos, I discovered some game-exclusive video hosting services! GameVee even supports OGG/Theora!

One more thing: Apricot is looking for animators!

A Day With Charlie Junior

I had an opportunity the other day to do some game playing with my son - so I had the constraint that the games had to be playable by a 7 year old, meaning favourites of mine like Fish Fillets were generally ruled out.

First up was the ever-popular Super Tux. The young lad was an experienced campaigner at this so it didn't hold his attention for too long. However, whilst we were playing, I did notice a number of things that I think need addressing in the game:

• Complete lack of originality
  
  They have copied Mario down to the core. It's a clone with different graphics. Every Mario aspect (gameplay, enemies, etc) has a "skinned" equivalent in Super Tux. Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard. I especially don't like the fire flower; can't we come up with some good alternative upgrades?
  


• Very unbalanced levels
  
  The first level is really easy - as it should be. However that quickly changes. After 3 or 4 levels I'm starting to struggle to complete them. After 7 or 8, I find myself quitting the game in frustration at missing another long-jump-to-narrow-platform. The game is completely unbalanced and way harder than it should be at an early stage. One of the reasons the Mario games worked so well is because they were very well balanced. The game never really got hard until about half-way through (and that's a lot of levels). There is far too much acrobatic jumping required in Super Tux. They need more levels where the acrobatics required are compensated for by having a floor to catch you so you don't die repeatedly. The level designs are just too unforgiving.

Moving on, we went with Super Tux Kart. This went down quite well with the young'un initially but interest quickly waned. Again, the culprit is the design of the levels/tracks, which are generally atrocious. One of the keys to the addictiveness of Mariokart was the simplicity of the majority of the tracks. They had straights and few tight corners, meaning you zipped around them, the nuance being in how to get around them with minimum slowdown. Super Tux Kart levels have no straights (none of them) and are all mazes. Just staying on the track can be a challenge. The AI itself is not challenging at all. The physics is diabolical (but this has been fixed in STK SVN which now uses the bullet physics engine). Still, a lot of work needs doing.

Funguloids

Going for something simpler but more complete, I installed Barrage and Those Funny Funguloids. I was having a great time but then I got a jab in the ribs and a stern look, so we moved on.

Bomb Attack (happypenguin entry) was the first game we played that he really got into. It is a well executed bomberman clone with cute graphics, although it is still a bit incomplete.

NJAM also was popular. It manages to give Pacman depth, an accomplishment in itself. Whilst he played those two games I had enough time for a nap!

Next up was Freedroid RPG. This game has some really lovely graphics - although the main character graphics look awful. It was a good game but there's a lot of reading required, a lot of talking. Also it's not exactly obvious what you need to do - places are mentioned but are not easy to find. The level of gaming knowledge required was just a level too high to retain the attention of a 7 year old.

The final and most popular game of the lot was Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid. This 2D platform game looks nice, is fun to play, and is not so difficult that you find yourself repeating the same few seconds of gameplay over and over again - yet isn't so easy that it is boring to play.

All being said, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't come up with more good Free gaming options. Other than stuff like GCompris and Tux Paint which he is starting to grow out of, it was difficult to find him a good Free Software game that held his attention yet didn't require a degree of experience beyond the reaches of a typical 7 year old. In the end, he spent most of his time on the Play Station 2 with Lego Star Wars (which was actually a lot better than I expected it to be).

Are there any obvious open source games I missed out? Suggestions welcome. :-)

Briskly Brief

I'm really quite strapped for time right now so again this is brief.

Stargus, the Stratagus-based project to get native Starcraft on Linux, is close to release. If the screenshots are anything to go by then Stargus will be pretty playable with this release.

The latest Freedroid RPG release looks nice. The project seemed to have stalled earlier in the year but there's lots of contributors these days which is nice to see.

Want to make games but not a programmer? Maybe Mokoi Gaming is for you. The project is in it's infancy but it's already usable although the documentation is a little sparse. Still, it all seems well done so a bit of user feedback I'm sure will be warmly received.

Tennix now has SVG graphics. A very concise concept is turning into a nice little game to while away the occasional onset of boredom.

Also another simple game shaping up nicely is Qonk, with 5-minute galactic conquest gameplay.

No screenshots. No time to find any. :-(

Edit: also the FIFE developers are celebrating their project's 2nd birthday. Always a good milestone to have had 2 years ongoing development.

Bos Wars and Glest with ATI

There's a preview version of Bos Wars 2.4, an RTS in the style of Red Alert, available for download for Linux and Windows (and should compile on other OSes). This version introduces...

"a completely new rate-based economy. Energy is produced by power plants and magma by magma pumps. Building also consume resources continously instead of requiring an upfront payment.

It sounds interesting. Bos Wars development is very active although the majority of developer communication happens on irc instead of the mailing list, which can make it look - to the casual onlooker - as if not much is happening. They could probably do with a devblog too!

Freedroid RPG

FreedroidRPG 0.10.2 final got released as well - well, renamed from 0.10.2rc4, whichever way you prefer to call it. One thing I didn't mention yesterday was that I really like FreedroidRPG's graphics. They are very distinctive and quite good. :-)

The SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 release is tantalisingly imminent. Announcement will be any day now, perhaps over the weekend? A lovely new island track and Hexley the platypus character are two highlights of a significant improvement over the previous version. This game has a lot of potential, so hopefully this release will get a few more people interested in helping out with the development.

Speaking of project communities, Glest, the rather well done 3D fantasy RTS, has quite an active one despite the seeming inactivity of the main developers. This guy has released a final version of his Indian faction for the game. The faction has involved, including learning, some 500 hours of work so is worth checking out. Another guy has a blog dedicated to Glest and there's more WIP factions happening in the Glest forums. Admittedly some of these fan efforts are more enthusiastic than they are well executed, but everybody starts somewhere so good luck to them. ;-)

On a side note, if you are a Linux user with an ATI graphics card and have problems running Glest, this tip might help out.

The return of Freedroid RPG

Good morning to open source game enthusiasts and any normal people reading. I feel a bit refreshed after getting back to the Internet having spent nearly 48 hours offline. I know, I nearly died, the withdrawl symptoms were horrendous, but it's ok as I am back online now and have been for nearly 12 hours.

So a few things today. Freedroid RPG development has become really active and a string of new releases has occurred in the last couple of weeks. It is a cross platform isometric RPG game similar to Baldur's Gate Diablo only, instead of swords and scantily clad heroines, you have cattle prods and robotic penguins. It's good to see development pick up and they are focusing on making development easier and fixing bugs, so it's looking like a bright future for the game. The latest release is available for Linux and Windows.

Another game that shows off some of the originality that you can find in indie and open source game projects is Which Way Is Up. A platform game with cute-but-not-bad retro graphics, you have to reach a lever which, when activated, rotates the game world. It's quite an intriguing concept and I'm interested in how much mileage can be gotten out of it. There's lots of interesting touches, like enemies that jump when you jump, making for some tough gameplay. It's a lot of fun and development is ongoing. Written using PyGame, it's available for basically any OS that can run Python.

Project Diaspora is a 2D MMORPG space game. I haven't researched it much but it looks like it used to be a commercial game that was shut down a couple of years ago and some fans (or the original developers?) have gotten the (deceased?) company to release the game code under the GPL and set up their own server. Anyway, most game information and screenshots can be found on the Nightsoft.net forums that seem to be especially for Project Diaspora. You can play it on both Linux and Windows.

Busy day today since I was AFK all weekend! Warsow 0.31 is out. I like the project description on Freshmeat:

Warsow is a standalone, eSports-oriented FPS game. It is based on Qfusion, an advanced modification of the Quake 2 engine. It features fast-paced gameplay focused on trix (trick jumps) and art of movement. War§ow features a complete power-up system, including weak and strong fire mode for each weapon in all "normal" gametypes as well as Warshell (battle shield) and Warshock (quad damage) for team-based gametypes. Its cartoonish graphics use cel shading with a style that is similar but not identical to Manga.

I haven't been able to load happypenguin.org since I got back. That site has been up and down like a yo yo lately. Oh well, people have Free Gamer to read so that's ok. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm thinking of procuring a domain name (as suggested in the FG forums) and then possibly migrating the lists to a host outside of Blogger - probably a sourceforge.net project. I'm wary that having the lists on Blogger will mess up RSS and that maintaining the lists in HTML is just not scaling. If I move the lists (not the blog, the blog stays) to Sourceforge, then I can use a proper database and have user ratings and comments etc. Saying that, all this talk of game lists is a bit weak when I've left them in a mess for the last couple of months but, hey, I'm a busy guy. :-)