CivCool, TremFuture, WineOne, WarzoneFree

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FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...)

I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5.

FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released.

Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing!

The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community. These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos!

OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound.

After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not a windows emulator.

Remember Mars - Land of No Mercy? I at least twice mourned it's death. It seems that the game likes to revive a lot. Animations seem to be the aim at the moment.

Little video showing off what the engine can do right now

PS!!!: Warzone 2100's music and videos are now licensed under the GPL! I am so excited! Warzone 2100 is a great game that long ago was a proprietary one. The real-time strategy game is much fun, though I felt that long gameplay was dull without music and that the story wasn't very touchable without videos. Joy!!! I also discovered the Warzone 2200 project. It appears to be aiming for improving the game engine.

Read All About It

Mars: Land of No Mercy, it was looking dead, but it's back! The website is back online and hopefully so is development. I would point out that it was always available on Sourceforge but an offline website can be a death knell for an open source game, so it's good to see things running again.

Ad Infinitum

Ad Infinitum, a 2D space strategy game that looks very promising although is very early on in development and, other than the Sourceforge project page, doesn't have a website yet. It is also currently Windows only (Linux support done using WINE) but it is licensed under the GPL so there's always a hope that will change.

Whilst there's a few online space strategy games, there's not too many singleplayer Free Software space strategy games out there (FreeOrion and ?) so I hope to see this one establish itself. There's alpha releases available for download.

A3DX

There's a new 3D artillery battle game about, called A3DX. The website, like the game, is in it's early stages of development. It looks very similar to Scorched 3D -- so much so that omebody suggested it was a fork but it's not. However, looking at the screenshots I'd say it's definitely not as Scorched 3D looks much more advanced (as is to be expected).

Hrm, what else...

The FreeCol team updated their website design - the previous design was over 5 years old.

No, that wasn't it. Erm...

Ah! ASC 2.0(.1) [Advanced Strategic Command] was released a couple of weeks ago. I think I missed it. This release is the culmination of years of work since the last stable series was introduced, and the community looks to be as strong as it has ever been. There's a multiplayer universe where you can pit your military wits against other players, and the AI isn't too bad either. There's a reasonable singleplayer element, although it's a bit short of being able to qualify itself as a singleplayer game. If the classic hex strategy games are your cup of tea, then definitely look at ASC as not only does it draw on the classic Battle Isle series, but it also has several years of steady development. It's available for Linux and Windows.

Galaxy Mage Redux

Just as I was about to start lamenting the loss of a promising game, somebody steps up with a call to arms to resurrect development efforts.

Galaxy Mage Redux (placeholder site) will continue where the original Galaxy Mage team left off. They need pythoners and pixel artists so if that's you then make Santa's life cheaper by restoring a good Free game. There is already a forum and the game code is still available here.

His request for help has cropped up in a few places -- happypenguin.org and the FG forums are just two of them.

Another project in the doldrums is Mars: Land of no Mercy (website down). It is still available from the Sourceforge project and there's a post (from August) explaining the website downtime. SVN activity indicates that whilst the site has been down, so has development.

And... what's this... 0AD, the uber-looking freeware RTS game, may actually be released under an open source license? Too good to be true? It is, really, they won't release the whole thing, "for security reasons." (I'm not a fan of security through obscurity.)

I'm being lazy, no screenshots. There are some cool shots on the 0ad website though.

Counting the Days

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess.

I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1, and SuperTux 0.4, and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles.

Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum.

Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my current location has such a poor net connection that it can't upload to blogger. Anyway, the game is 2D isometric mech turn-based strategy.

Pi Armada, a Wing Commander Armada clone, has a new project lead. His first priority is to make it work on Linux and Macs since currently Pi Armada only runs on Windows. Since it uses Python/Pygame and Vega Strike, all of which are cross platform, porting shouldn't be too tricky. It's quite impressive how games are based on the VS engine.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to day dreaming. May I return with more newsworthy content tomorrow... ? ;-)