Double 0.7.4: Pingus and M.A.R.S.

No screenshot of Pingus 0.7.4

Version 0.7.4 of Pingus introduces an array of changes:

Content:

• New levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign" (27 new levels in total)
• This is the first use of the desert and factory graphics in official levels

Gameplay:

• Deadly fall height increased
• Digger/Miner/Basher paths cleanup

Features:

• Demo recordings/playback re-implemented (32bit/64bit not compatible)
• --usedir parameter added (useful for portable play)
• Unicode support added
• Option menu added

Usability:

• Window can be resized in-game
• Soundcard dependancy removed
• Man page added

Look:

• Level dimensions now suit 1920x1200 resolution
• Anti-aliasing added to bitmap fonts

Performance:

• Software rendering improved
• OpenGL rendering option added

Other:

• Editor enhancements
• Fixes

Good Old Colorful M.A.R.S. (0.7.4)

0.7.3 and then 0.7.4 of M.A.R.S. were relesed:

• New speacial
• New weapon
• Dutch, Mongolian and Norwegian languages added
• In-game speed settings

Freeciv 2.1beta6 Grips

Since I'm a bit tight on time today I'm just going to post a few gripes I have with Freeciv 2.1beta6. Don't get me wrong, I think this is shaping up to be a really, really nice game, but the SDL interface has some very annoying usability issues to address.

• If you run it in windowed mode, you can't resize the game by resizing the window. The game display logic should be independent of the resolution, an absraction that many games fail to make.


• Auto-scrolling is annoying. It is especially annoying when playing in windowed mode when you are often moving the mouse cursor in and out of the game window. It would be better to scroll when pressing the right-mouse-button since the RMB is already used for manual movement.


• There is no UI to save/load games in the SDL client. A work around is to open a chat dialog and use the /save and /load commands.


• Freeciv dialogs have a red X with the tooltip "Cancel" to close them. Not only is 'cancel' a horrible word - implies losing any changes but it simply leaves the dialog - it is also innaccurate. "Close Dialog" is better. A better icon may be the circular arrow commonly used to represent returning to a previous screen.


• There's no option to undo changes in a city dialog. Combine this with the "Cancel" situation and you have a very confusing UI.


• If you click on a group of units, a unit selection dialog pops up. If you the do an action with already-selected unit and the dialog does not close itself.


• I could see no obvious way to end the turn with the mouse - annoying for a mouse-driven game. After being told there is, I looked a bit harder. It's an icon on the minimap panel, alongside various information icons. Hardly obvious - in a heavilty iconified UI like Freeciv SDL is aspiring to be, placing is important. They need to think a bit harder about this one. I would have placed it somewhere at the top near where the year is displayed since the turn and the game year are strongly associated and importantly you won't be clicking on it by accident if it is up there (something easy to do currently as a small icon placed amongst a bunch of other small icons).

There are many positives to this Freeciv update, too many to mention. Lovely graphics, much more stable, classic-yet-balanced Civ gameplay. Freeciv 2.1 is going to be a showcase Free Software game.

I also downloaded the 0.7.0 release of Pingus. It's shaping up nicely although some of the sounds fail to capture the cuteness of Lemmings. It was solid though.

Revival of the fittest - sourcing art

Pingus 0.7.0 is available for download. With revival work complete, Pingus now uses SDL and comes with lovel anti-aliased fonts. There's no new levels yet but with development seemingly back on track hopefully the level editor will return and some good levelsets will get contributed. It has a lot of potential as a game because the Lemmings series kinda, well, was more fun when it was 2D. If enough level makers could get together, I'd love to see a release inspired by "Oh no! More Lemmings" which was my favourite of the series and also incredibly challenging.

Another game with a major update is Egoboo Resurrection. There is a new fully working music system and major graphic enchancements - antialasing, shading, dithering and prespective correction all supported. (A long list of buzz words there.) Most importantly the lead developer Zefz is trying to get the game in SVN so others can contribute more easily and, speaking of contributions, somebody is already having a crack at porting it to Linux. At the moment it's only available as a Linux download but "watch this space". Well, not that precise space as that'll only ever say "watch this space". But in a more abstract sense I will hopefully be able to report a Linux port in the near future. ;-)

My post the other day, "Free this free that O_o" (catchy title eh?) sparked a lot of debate about the need for consolidation of Free Software game development efforts. You can read it there so I won't repeat it all, but one comment did make me think and it is something I had thought about in the past as well - there is a tremendous amount of artistic and game design talent poured into making mods for commercial games. Whilst this comes good if the engine subsequently becomes open source (think Tremulous, World of Padman, and other iD game mods) there are many more examples where the game engine remains closed source. Take Air Buccaneers for example. It's a jaw dropping mod for UT2004. What a shame it will only ever be a mod for a commercial game. Could these mods be a source of art if we proactively approach projects asking them to make their efforts Freely available? Maybe it could just work...

One of the productive conversations spawned by the above debate was the notion of a common media project. Take a target genre - Ben (the thread poster) suggested fantasy - and develop a set of decent media for it that games can use as a base before branching out in their own artistic direction. I think it's a great idea.

Also there was a desire for a good quality Free art portal - there are already several efforts but they seem to just fail to capture the niche, to become that place that people say, "Hey, this is a great resource for good Free art!" Is a new one needed? A new idea, a new design? Or maybe just identify the best efforts and back them unequivocably to get the word out there? This is also something Ben touched on... it'll be interesting to see where it goes. There's already a lot of information collecting in the Game Media Creation section of the Free Game Dev forums.

One thing is for sure - the forums at www.freegamedev.net have proved there is a need for a consolidated Free game development community that was not previously being filled and there is a desire to provide a nexus where Free game developers can work together instead of in their disjoint and often isolated worlds that currently populate the open source game universe.

Testing Testing Testing

200 posts to this blog now. :-)

Pingus

Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it.

Also looking for testers is iteam, the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted.

There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs.

Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

More on CSPop

A while ago I mentioned cspop, a 3D populus clone. Whilst the game itself hasn't yet gotten a website - the author is waiting until it's playable before really marketing it - there has been progress:

CSPop

Work is still going on on the project, it is quite advanced already, but still some work on ui and some finishes on logic are needed to consider it playable.

Anyway I have a couple of EXCLUSIVE screenshots - to be seen nowhere else on the web. (Oh yeah, I make blogging sound more like magazine writing every day!) This is a very exciting looking project and I'm hopeful that it'll be "out there" sooner rather than later.

The daring can grab it from SVN. You'll need Crystal Space and CEL too. :-)

Speaking of exciting projects linked to Crystal Space, there's more details on Project Apricot following a CS conference last month. Project Apricot is going to be a high profile effort to create an open source game using Blender and Crystal Space.

Pingus revival efforts seem to have made some headway but there's still a few tasks left to do before it gets "re-released" as a more manageable project i.e. no new features yet but [supposedly] more maintainable code so less chance of it stagnating again and a greater likelihood of new features / levels in the future.

Something like that. ;-)

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... ? ;-)

Oh No More Pingus!

I'm happy today. No, not just because Arsenal signed a quality striker, but also because it looks like a Pingus revival is on the cards. :-)

The game has been mostly ported to SDL but the SDL port is unplayable. The stable version depends on the aged and not well supported Clanlib 0.6 and it seems there is not enough interest or expertise in upgrading Pingus to Clanlib 0.8 which was released earlier this year. Anyway, a few people have expressed interest in working on the codebase so we can only hope that interest can be turned into tangible progress.

JCRPG continues to get new features, now featuring day and night cycles among other things. If that project keeps up the current development pace we'll have a tidy game come out of the JCRPG framework before the end of the year.

Orbiter. A mature 3D project for contemporary space flight simulation. No explosions.

Snowball is an interesting looking platform game. No development for two years but perhaps it does not need it? Next development is "on ice" - I'm going to inquire to see if that is still the case.

I'm running a little experiment in the FG forums. I've set up Project Open - a place to organise efforts for open sourcing games that would benefit from it, essentially freeware and abandonware games. I'm not going to make much of it until I've managed to successfully encourage somebody to open up their game, but the idea was not mine so it is obvious that there is a desire for this.