Happy new year & Congrats to the LGA January 2014 winner!

Hello 2014 and happy new year to everyone!

One of the new things for this year will be the regular Linux Game Awards done by various Linux and FOSS gaming site (and which has been spearheaded by the great LGDB).

And the first winner is:



The votes have been quite clear, but our friends from SuperTuxKart got a very respectable 2nd place:

You can expect some further promotional news coming up this month for 0 A.D. so stay tuned :)

December RTS updates

Merry Christmas from FreeGamer!

As a nice present from the 0 A.D. team, the new Alpha 15 Osiris was released today:



Lots of great new features and especially multiplayer games should be now much easier to do with hosting improvements and a lobby for browsing available games.

Another open-source RTS engine (using Mono/C# though) has also released a new version: OpenRA. Currently it is still geared toward running an assortment of older Command & Conquer based games, so you need to own these for the data. But this release adds lua scripting for the creation of custom missions, so maybe someone will come up with a libre game to run on this engine.

Last but not least, a new version of Warzone2100 was released about a week ago. This one actually includes some higher resolution textures, which is hopefully the first step to officially integrate all the awesome new art assets from the art revolution project.
Speaking of WZ mods: There is also an interesting new tower-defense mod currently being developed.

Alpha 14 and a crowd-funding campaign for 0 A.D.

Pretty interesting news from 0 A.D. today: They are having a Indigogo crowd-funding campaign.



Note that this is a flexible funding campaign, so even if they don't reach their goals all money donated will go to the project.

They also released a new Alpha version, codenamed Naukratis. Change-log would be too long to list here (which I consider a good thing ;) ), but here is a picture of some high-quality newly added building models:

New blacksmith buildings

So check out the new version and please consider donating to this top of the crop FOSS game project.

Updates from Rogue Republic, that modern warfare 0 A.D. mod

The really nice looking modern warfare mod for 0 A.D. is steadily improving:

Rogue Republic's Russian buildings

You can now also check out their blog and facebook page, and to quote one of the main developers:

With hope of finding a proficient 0 A.D. coder

So please help out these guys, if you know some Javascript and are willing to learn how to code for 0 A.D.!

0 A.D. Alpha 13 and other less fanboyish updates

Ok I admit it... I am a bit of a 0 A.D. fanboy! But the new Alpha 13 release is also great again, and deserved an update post:



Also pretty cool is the new OpenMW 0.22 release, that finally features player and NPC animations, and thus starts to look more like a functioning game:



Other unrelated news:

• To progress on their standalone version, the developers of The Dark Mod are looking for support in their sound department mostly.
• That non-stop programmer "TheDushan" has started porting the Torque3D engine to Linux. Pretty amazing progress if you ask me :)

Julius out!

Gigalomania, LPC and updates

Some of you might remember Mega Lo Mania back from the days when you could be amazed by PC speaker voice output... so if you spend way too much of your childhood playing that game (like me) you should probably stay clear of the FOSS remake called Gigalomania!

Gigalomania now using LPC sprites

As the creator recently stated, it now uses the cool Liberated Pixels Cup contest sprites, but there is still the need to replace the castle graphics with nicer ones. Maybe *you* can help out with that?

On a related note, the LPC coding results are finally in, congratulations to the winners! I hope Bart will make a nice review on the quite awesome games here on FG soon.

Other recent updates not to be missed:

• Today a new Alpha 13 of Unvanquished was released, marking the one year aniversary of their first alpha release. As usual it comes with a bunch of new nice features and fixes.
• You can now download automatic snapshots of the development version of Megaglest. And there seems to be finally some progress in updating the graphic capabilities of the engine.
• O A.D. continues to amaze with news updates about development progress and music creation.
• And last but not least: the awesome Xonotic mod Overkill now has a website!

That's all for now :)

Some nice screenshots...

So it seems like it is up to me again to keep this blog alive ;)

Not too much to report though... therefore I present you Red Vs Blue Unvanquished edition:

Well at least that could be fun... anyways, as they explain in their last two weekly updates (1,2), their Demon Engine has seen quite a few graphical updated an bug fixes lately. Furthermore they highlighted an upcoming major change in game-play compared to Tremulous, as Unvanquished will be using a real resource gathering system.

Also a cool new screen comes from the "Modern Warfare" mod for 0 A.D.:

Tanks in 0 A.D.

In their WIP thread on the 0 A.D. forums they have also confirmed that the mod will be "open source" however did not specify this further. It also seems like they have plenty of good artists, but are lacking a bit on the coding side. So if you know your way around Javascript and XML hacking, give them a hand (and secretly lobby for a full FOSS release ;) ).

Hedgewars, JCRPG, and 0AD

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts.

Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer:

That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all the available Worms/Artillery clones.

JCRPG

The ever-promising JCRPG has been ported from one Java 3D technology (jMonkeyEngine) to another (Ardor3D). The latter is a newer engine from the creators of the former, and seems to have taken several lessons on board with the design. The motivation for the port was difficult to debug crashes, but a number of nice enhancements have been discovered along the way and JCRPG really looks sumptuous.

Hopefully soon the game will start to get a bit of a storyline as well as beautiful scenery!

Finally, a pre-alpha download of 0ad is available. This utterly gorgeous looking historically-based RTS has so much potential. They have struggled to get more developers involved since originally going open source. I have been encouraging them to make a release and follow up with regular releases in order to expand the pool from which they may discover new contributors.

Here is a 2 year old trailer for 0ad.

Maybe they should make a new one, that could also be a marketing boost for the project.

FOSS RTS games

Hey FreeGamers!
I know, news are a bit slow here lately, but all three of us are a bit busy with real-life issues, I guess. So if you are interested in becoming a contributor to this blog drop us a line in the forum!
We have also recently gotten some readers feedback concerning this blog entry. I have to admit that our background search was a bit short concerning the Hypertension game... and it turned out that this game is surrounded by some controversy concerning the (probably illegal) use of the original Blood art assets (which were only granted by Monolith to the Transfusion project).

Are there any good FOSS RTS?

Well that depends on what you think is good :)
We have had a small discussion in our forums which resulted in a lot of links to all sorts of FOSS RTS. So if you are looking for some obscure (often unmaintained RTS) have a look.
Overall I would say however that currently there is none that can be recommended without doubt. This might change soon however!

0-A.D. Commercial grade FOSS RTS?

We have mentioned this great project before, and especially since they have gone fully open-source earlier this year all eyes of the FOSS community are probably on this gem.
So far a consumer ready release seems to be still distant however, even though some parts of the game look quite playable already:

0-A.D. Gameplay

Development is progressing though and you can have a look at this interview with the current project leader for some background infos and nice new screenshots. Further news can be found on Moddb.com.

Upcoming Warzone2100 developments

Warzone2100 is one of the few really playable FOSS RTS games out there. There are steady improvements and sometimes you can even find someone to play online ;)
With it's Playstation 1 art assets it is quite a chore to look at however. There is light on the horizon though; A new terrain renderer was recently developed for it and is expected to be released with Version 3.0.

New Warzone2100 terrain renderer

Let's hope this will reach us gamers ASAP!
Their forum has also some other nice upcoming features to offer. There are plans to update the GUI, with some really nice mockups.
Furthermore MaNGusT is working on new units:

And there is a nice mod project involving mechs :)

0 A.D. Now Open Source

Some breaking, amazing news related to one of the most exciting freeware Free game projects on the indie scene:

What is 0 A.D.?

0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game.

What are you doing?

Switching from a closed development process to open source: making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions. We've been working on 0 A.D. in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we've achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved.

How can I get started?

See the Getting Started guide to find more information about the game, forums for discussion, instructions for building and running the game, and links to further details.

For the full announcement, see the dedicated page for explaining why they moved to open source from the closed development model. For more media and information on the game, go to the official 0 A.D. website.

This is, of course, an exciting development. This game has been in production of some form for nearly 8 years, has 150k lines of code in the engine, and hundreds of dedicated (and now shared) models. It will be very interesting to gauge the impact this has on the open source game community. The game itself is not yet complete but it's definitely more than a tech demo, so it will also be interesting to see if the move to open source galvanises the project and gives it the push that it needs to get to a more complete/playable state.