jClassicRPG's and Howitzer Skirmish's donation histories

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42 USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems.

I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time.

The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons:

1. Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems)


2. microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it

Here's the link to the pd-licensed diagram source.

In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible.

Well, it is. Though maybe not enough to cover the expenses of a non-minimalistic lifestyle.

I hope Howitzer Skrimish will get the 300 USD. And that the possible troubles of microPledge won't destroy the donation progress so far. Now give me money, that's what I want! *sings*

PS: In case you think that Howitzer Skirmish looks like a tech demo and less like a game or in case you weren't content with Stormbaan Coureur; Bram made following statement on the comment section of this post:

once I release my source code, and the community considers it to be a tech demo and not a game, then there will be no pay out. Everybody keeps their money, and Howitzer Skirmish and its data will be GPL.

PPS: What would you pay for? Kiba brought that interesting question up in our forums and I'd love to get more replies to that.

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!