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.

Bos Wars and Globulation2

Bos Wars 2.5 has been released. Beautiful particle explosions are the highlight. I couldn't find screenshots of this online yet. I downloaded and had a very brief go. It seems to be the standard RTS fare, reminiscent of the classic C&C games. I'm not sure whether I just completely missed it, but the game lacks a story element, something that personally I really look for in this type of game. Bos Wars itself isn't sufficiently spectacular or innovative that it can be just a multiplayer RTS and attract a lot of plaudits.

Also the project does not have a web forum. When I spoke to the devs about this, they were adamant that a forum would just be inactive and hence make the project look inactive, and that they preferred just irc / mailing lists. My opinion is that a forum is an ideal place for players to talk about a game and report bugs or make low level contributions (guides, screenshots, feature requests). Now that Bos Wars is close to being a complete game, a forum could be a great place to foster a community which might otherwise look at the spartan web page and otherwise move onto other things. At the moment it, glancing at the website gives the impression of a game deep in development rather than one that is relatively feature complete.

Globulation2 0.9.2 is also available for download (changelog). Globulation2, like Boswars, also now has a particle engine although they are using it more for smoke/damage effects. There is also plenty of stability, optimization, and networking improvements in this release. A new feature of the 0.9.x releases is a much improved AI called Nicowar. Whilst looking for information on changes I spotted that they now have a full time programmer working on the game. It should be interesting to see where it goes. However, I do have one reservation.

I like the gameplay ideas behind Globulation - but one thing makes it a hard game to like. The globs. I mean, really, what were they thinking. Globs are so... bland... uninteresting, impossible to relate to. As a game theme they inspire no passion, have no character, which in turn grates against all the good aspect of the game to make it look and feel dull. There's 101 things they could have chosen (medieval or fantasy theme, aliens, plants, animals, fictional creatures, robots, whatever) and they went and created the dullest thing I could possibly think of. Little blobs of nothing. A re-skinning of that game could massively increase it's appeal. You may think that's a harsh comment, but part of the fun of games is escapism, and if you can't relate to the game in any way, it greatly reduces the appeal.

This sounds like quite a negative post but it's not. Black is the new white. Seriously though, these are both very promising games with some very well done elements and those two issues aside (Bos Wars story, Glob2 theme) the projects have a lot going for them and if you like RTS games then I strongly urge you try both of these and if possible contribute too.

When it comes to a 2D RTS, what do you look for? Which is your favourite of the open source RTS games? Comments welcome.

Singing in the rain

Ok, ok, I know, I've been a bit rubbish lately. I'm struggling with the same problems that afflict many, many Free Software developers. Firstly I over-committed myself and the blog is lower priority than the various Free Software projects I should be working on. The blog is, if you like, the end result of far too much web surfing indulgence. If I can't indulge, the blog material quickly dries up. It's why nobody else does it; you can't do it if you don't do a lot of research and research takes a lot of time. Fortunately, over the last year a few other sites have come up. Libregamewiki, the FreeGameDev site (the forums, the awesome art search site and wiki) have materialized and the Linux Game Tome has been somewhat resurgent now it has reliable hosting. I like to think that in some small way I somehow caused the new waves of Free Software gaming that's hitting the beaches lately. Butterfly on freegamer, tornado on alpha centurai or something like that.

I don't believe in making dramatic statements, but if there's no new material here it's because I'm out conquering the world so you should leave some comments of worship so I look upon you favourably when I'm in power. Er...

Somehow I forgot to mention it before, but Glest 3.0 is in beta. Info is scattered around the Glest forums. Here's SVN instructions for the brave. Glest is now on moddb which gives convenient listings of the main mods.

Do you like Globulation2? One of the main contributors is offering 6 months of full time development at a very cheap price (as developers go). Details from the mailing list where one guy has offered to double all other offers in order to make it happen.

Are you making a 2D game? Want a level editor without having to write one? Tile Editor.

Want a simple 2D pixel art program for making sprites? JDraw is for you.

How Original

I really shouldn't be posting right now because I have a million more important things to do but I love you guys so...

There's a preview version of Vega Strike 0.5.0 up for download for Intel Mac users. The VS devs need some feedback on most notably sound due to porting issues. Users of other platforms will have to use subversion for the time being but Windows users don't need to compile as there's a .exe in subversion.

Want to know what OpenTTD will look like when the new graphics are ready? Well there's some interesting screenshots in the Ubuntu forums. I know this guy has riled the OpenTTD community by posting work there that they don't approve of. Issues to do with language barriers and badly put-together mockups / inserted graphics. Still, it seemed a bit harsh to me but for some reason he doesn't understand English. Anyway, this babble is digressing too much.

Globulation2 and Bos Wars got updates. Hopefully C&C being released as freeware won't dent the efforts of the developers of those games by taking players away from their communities.

I hate Westwood and the C&C series. Why? It's the most unoriginal piece of crap. Ever played Dune II? Awesome game for it's time, truly awesome. So awesome that the entire C&C series was just a rehash of it. I was so disgusted when I played Dune III, over 10 years after Dune II, the gameplay was pretty much identical and even the same gameplay / stupid AI bugs still existed. You could still select units, click on the floor, and watch whilst a few enemy units systematically wiped them out and your units continued to attack nothing. I vowed never to play a C&C game again after that - it's just the same but with shinier graphics. This probably isn't the first, and probably won't be the last time I mention this. I still remember watching a video of one of the game designers talking about how "original" Dune III was and feeling sick to my stomach that I helped line their pockets with gold. Dune II was original. Dune III had nothing original about it - it's not like 3D graphics were even a new phenomena. The evolution between Dune II, through the C&C series, to Dune III, was purely superficial, which for a multi-million-dollar franchise was pretty poor going if you ask me.

Never fear, open source is here! FOSS games are often original, contrary to what many people think. Originality goes beyond the conceptual. Originality is about project direction, about improving gameplay. Free games may often be reimplementations but they usually take a proactive approach to addressing gameplay and game balancing issues. You can be sure that the same AI bugs that afflicted the initial versions of Freeciv 10+ years ago have been addressed in the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 - which already has patches for the issues I mentioned the other day.

Hey, how topical is this. Whilst searching for a Dune III link (unable to find one easily - obviously a completely unremarkable game unlike it's predecessor) I came across two active Dune II remakes; Dune II: The Sleeper Has Awakened, which was only updated on the 3rd of September, and Dune II: The Maker, updated in August with gallery additions even yesterday. Intriguing.