Open Source Survives Financial Meltdown

There's a few juicy updates to several great Free Software game projects over the last few days. I'm feeling too lazy to grab screenshots though. You'll just have to peruse yourself if you find something interesting.

We'll start with TA:Spring 0.77b3 - Linux and Windows binaries are up for download - with the comment, "After some people have stated that we should release more early and often*, we give you 0.77b3 here." I downloaded and installed it using the generic Linux installer - worked without a hitch - and it looks fan-bloody-tastic. Still, the state of licensing of some of the content is a little unclear - I don't feel reassured that I'm playing a totally Free game although I'm certain some of the mods are Free Software. That doesn't bother me like it might some of the purists out there.

OpenLieroX 0.57_beta8 arrived. Worms and blood and chaotic 2D action. It's a pixel dream.

Open City 0.0.6 beta can be found on Sourceforge. There's no release notice yet on the website but there's plenty of features in it. Open City is a largely unknown open source 3D city building game. It really deserves more attention than it gets IMHO. The fundamental gameplay foundations are already in place and it's a more in-depth game than Lincity[-NG] or Micropolis (aka Sim City classic), but lacks the polish and stability required to make it attract a larger playing community. Every release is a step closer!

Ok, hrm, how about two new [to Free Gamer] projects?

LBA Prequel (project) is a fan-made effort to create a Free game based on the Little Big Adventure universe, a prequel to the original games. The franchise is officially discontinued so unofficial intervention is required. They are taking the work of two previous projects - which partially reverse engineered the original games to create cross platform engines to play them - to create an engine capable of playing the original titles and the game LBA Prequel is essentially a total conversion that uses this engine.

Epic of Thalia is an RPG of the non-MMO variety. Woohoo! MMO has become the new shell suit, for those of us that don't like MMOs. Alas, I digress. The game is in early stages of development and the website is cryptic until you realise you have to click on the 'navigation' button. What is good is that they have an active source repository** and a few concept releases already, which is more than many aspiring projects make. The Epic of Thalia team is, like all good open source projects, looking for contributors.

* I firmly believe it is true: "release early, release often" is the mantra of a successful open source project.

** It's Darcs. Which reminds me of a new DRCS I saw called Fossil - it's an integrated RCS, Wiki, and bug tracking system. Think git meets trac. Anybody tried it yet?

EDIT: Just got emailed that Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.2.4 is out. The project is an attempt to make a version of Sauerbraten that's more kid-friendly and oriented around cooperative content. Lots of new features and there's been work on a Kid Friendly RPG (brainstorming) for it too, check out Cabzilla:

UFO:AI vs Apricot vs Glest vs... crikey

Quite a lot to cover, simply because there's a lot of small items that have backed up in my little "FG updates" list which I've been waiting to pool together.

Firstly, the "big" news in that UFO:AI 2.2 got released. There's plenty to write home about, tons of new features, and it's an awesome game. I'm not a great fan of some of the micro-management although it's part of the original X-COM games so understandably part of UFO:AI - I would like to see some automation aids (auto-assign ammo etc) - but that aside this is a really, really good game. If it was released as a commercial game it'd be respected, and because it's Free Software it's only going to get better. Here's a video:

So, the Apricot project is gaining pace. They have still to decide on what type of game they are making. I hope they make, out of their choices, a platform game. I must say, I really disagree with some of their assertions. If a platform game is "heavy on the engine" then I feel sorry for the engine - platform games have very little landscape on-screen at any one time and a good 3D engine should be able to isolate displayed content from off-screen content in order to retain speed. "Lots of work" to create levels? Out of all genres platform games really lend themselves to tile-based layouts with lots of reusable content, so with a half-assed level editor map creation should be pretty easy even if level design is a fine art (but isn't it with any genre).

Spring 1944

Glest: Domineonic

How cool does that look!?

Spring 1944 is a world war II mod for TA:Spring and it looks F<censored/> ACE! With Spring and Spring mod installation getting easier in recent releases and some mods really coming along with their content, there's a lot to be excited about. :-)

Talking of open source RTS games, Glest and it's mods are moving along nicely too. There's the 2nd SST:LD release (think I covered it a while ago, but no harm repeating it), a Norseman mod (beta), and an upcoming Domineonic mod (alpha). The Domineonic mod especially looks very, very promising.

Too much to go into detail with really... ;-)

Last but not least, Privateer Universe made a release and quickly followed it with developments meaning they no longer are a "mod of a mod", breaking away from the old Privateer Remake and updating to use the latest version of Vega Strike. That's all still in SVN (compilation instructions) but they are making good progress.

Privateer Universe aims to expand upon the original Privateer universe in contrast to the strict canon remake that is Privateer Gemini Gold.

TOOMANYCOOLTHINGSHEADABOUTTOEXPLO..........

(Think of a dead dial tone)

SimCity open sourced for One Laptop per Child

Remember me?

SimCity, open source. The news is nearly a year old, but now it has been released and you can try to compile it. Download the source or get it via git: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/
projects/micropolis-activity. Unfortunately neither version wanted to be built on my machine. =(

The name SimCity was removed from the game, along with the plane crash disaster. The new name is Micropolis. According to a text file in the release, child-friendly graphics are wanted for the OLPC version.

Update: Micropolis has now it's own home page.

There is a list of games for the XO, can you think of any, that would fit that list?

Spring surprise

In other news, Spring 0.76b1 has been released. The Changelog reveals that for example installing mods is now easier. Hopefully it'll work for me, until this day I was only able to run the engine tech demos. Let's go get it then!

79 - my birth year and something else

Air Carrier

The rather sumptious looking Air Carrier project - a 3D aerial combat game written in Java - has put up an install guide. Basically you need to get it from CVS at the moment and run it from Eclipse. So, if you don't like CVS and Eclipse, er, you are out of luck for the moment.

There's been a bunch of testing releases for TA3D as it approaches version 0.4.0 in style. Large parts of the codebase seem to have been rewritten and many bugs fixed. TA3D is an engine to play Total Annihilation but with better graphics and AI, so you need the original TA to play TA3D.

TA3D obviously shares a lot in common with TA:Spring, however there are some important differences. Firstly, TA3D is Linux centric - whilst there is a Windows version, it is developed on and released primarily for Linux. Also TA:Spring includes modifications to the gameplay and does not make use of some TA files like maps, facts which don't sit well with the TA3D author, so TA3D definitely has a niche.

Pok3D

One of my friends is a poker nut. He was playing away on a Windows machine near me, so I thought I would showcase the power of Free Software on my shiney new laptop with it's 3D capabilities... Pok3D here we come!

aptitude install python-poker3d

-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----

0 packages upgraded, 79 newly installed, 0 to remove

What!? 79 new packages!? Ok, I run Ubuntu so I already have a plethora of Python-centric stuff installed. I also have several games installed so the common game packages too are already installed. This was listing MySQL, web frameworks, and all sorts of other things as Pok3D dependencies. That's ridiculous... why the hell does a poker client require MySQL? If you want to use data locally use a simple embeddable database like sqlite. Anyway, needless to say, despite having lots of HD space and the automatic package management powers of apt, call me old fashioned but I wasn't installing that much stuff for one game. All I could think was, "bloat."

New TA:Sring Release

Star Wars: TA

Spring 1944

TA:Spring 0.75b2 is out (a few days after 0.75b1). These are the first releases under a new lead since the previous stable versions. TA:Spring is a spectacular 3D RTS based largely upon Total Annihilation, although these days you do not need TA to play Spring. It has a very healthy mod scene with some amazing looking mods.

One such mod is Star Wars: TA. It is, unsurprisingly, set in the Star Wars universe. It looks like the realisation of every 1970s kid's dream - commanding your own army of stormtroopers annihilating those rebel scum. (Yes, The Empire Strikes Back was by far the best of Star Wars movie. You are wrong if you disagree.)

Another exciting mod is Spring 1944 which looks really promising but is yet to be officially released so I don't know if you can play it yet. So this screenshot will have to do.

Do you like old school (NES) Zelda RPG and do you not really care about uber graphics? Monster should be good fun for you.

Worldforge keep up their steady progress. It will be interesting if all the years of work ever culminate in a playable game for this ambitious project. It's all about RPG and expansive 3D worlds.

Speaking of 3D RPG... the MMORPG Planeshift got updated as well. It still looks nice, it still has non-free media. Last time I played it was a while ago (it was a bit boring then - I ran around a town for 30 minutes then gave up) and it looks pretty sweet these days.