Word War vi 0.24, Daggerwind Scrolls, jClassicRPG music, Yo Frankie! download

Word War vi 0.24

Word War vi is now downloadable as version 0.24. I'm having an awfully great time playing it (even if it took me some months to finally get over myself and resolve some dependency problems at first). I especially like how I can use my xbox 360 controller for playing and how it's rumble function is used. Word War vi is the most high-tech retro arcade shooter you can get your hands on right now.

One super thing about it is that development and tweaking is being influenced by player criticism a lot. So for posting feedback on the game, use this thread.

Daggerwind Scrolls

Daggerwind Scrolls is a traditional 1st/3rd person CRPG dungeon crawl game written using C# for Mac OS X. Its a fan based project inspired by 'The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall', Bethesda Softworks 1994.

I haven't given it a try (and won't do as long as there are no for-*nix instructions).

I now count four bigger The Elder Scrolls-related open source projects: Daggerwind Scrolls and DungeonHack (Daggerfall-inspired game projects), OpenMW and The Crystal Scrolls (Morrowind engines).

jClassicRPG's first soundtrack was released on Jamendo. The music was composed by the project's developer and there will be many more track additions in the near future, I presume.

Yo Frankie! logo, in case you missed it ;)

Apricot (aka yofrankie) is now available for download. Is your definition of a video game "video game engine plus media"? I think Yo Frankie! shows that this is not true. :|

Should you download it? Sure, why not? Do it at least for checking out how cool it looks (if your machine can take it) and to watch the video tutorials (if you're into Blender editing at all).

Eying Eisenstern And Eye Candy

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing!

Eisenstern

Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or, if you love acronym overload, a FOSS SP FPS RPG. Or FSFR if you love acronym acronyms. I'm digressing again... it's a bad habit!

The Apricot Project is coming to the final stages of it's effort, and thus the game Yo Frankie! nears it's official release. It looks really, really good. The graphics are fantastic and the gameplay looks fun too. Here's the video:

Blender 2.48 just got released, and it includes many improvements contributed by the Apricot Project during it's development of Yo Frankie!. (That '!' messes with my grammar, but I'll resist the temptation to digress.) It looks like a real boost to the Blender Game Engine as a platform for creating games:

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

Warzone2100 2.1-beta5 came out at the end of September, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere. Well \o/ it just got mentioned here! Erm, but, back on topic, WZ 2.1 is approaching "super stableness" which is always a good thing. Check it out if you love your 3D future war RTS games and open source. :-)

And to round off, lately there have been some awesome contributions to Vega Strike. There's some real eye candy to be had here. This alien space base or this massive space ship are two intimidatingly beautiful examples. There's plenty more to be found. (Disclaimer: I may have posted some of this before, I'm a big fan of the project.)

Spread the word! • digg • fsdaily

Tumbleweed

Well there was some, but let's tidy it up for a bit.

These days following Free Software game news is much easier, since we have planet.freegamedev.net. That place is ace but it means that the motivation to post here has dwindled. Still, for addicts, I suggest you tune in to there. I know I do.

For instance, if you did, you'd know that there's an updated version of Yo Frankie! (of Apricot project fame) available for download. Funnily enough, the post is no longer up as there was a problem with it (at least there was for me). Still, here is the download URL, and it uses 0launch which I'm afraid to say I really dislike.

You can also check out FreeCol 0.8-alpha2. I like that they are releasing early, releasing often. Future maintainers pay attention!

Another project that adopts that practise is Battle for Wesnoth. 1.4.x and 1.5.x updates are out with lots of polish. One wonders how much polish will go into that game before it loses momentum. There was hope that some of the community energy that goes into Wesnoth may move into the Silvertree project but at the moment it's somewhat stalled that did not happen and the lead developer is busy with some Frog-platform-like game called Frogatto (googlecode).

JCRPG

JCRPG looks ace these days. Lots of updates on the planet for that one. I love the pixelization on this shot :lookright: which enhances the "classic" (old-school) nature of the game experience. It's one of either a magic monkey brush or a depth of field shader. With loads of optimization lately as well means JCRPG won't need a mean machine to run.

Penultimately, why not take TORCS 1.3.1-test1 out for a test drive? There's a lot of momentum with TORCS development lately and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised how fun it was the last time I played it. It's a good game.

Finally, project admins, did you know that now Sourceforge offers a service called Hosted Apps - that is, they host MediaWiki and phpBB for you, all integrated with SF.net logins. Check out the announcement. Damn, all that effort of mine for nothing.

Apricot's aim, Battle Tanks and FreeCol map editing

Frank and mushroom from Apricot

There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping.

Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be.

The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space backgrounds, which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actually the only thing able to make the industry pay attention to Blender and Crystal Space. ) Nobody cares about story and depth and such after all, right?

However, the svn repository will be opened this weekend and who knows? Maybe with some community help, the project will reach a higher level of what is now intended before it's deadline of 31, July?

FreeCol map editor

FreeCol 0.8.0-alpha has been released. It features displaying of settlement names, soft unit movement and main menu music.

FreeCol and it's editor are both written in Java, which saved me some compilation minutes. The map editor is pretty simple and unproblematic to use.

Battle Tanks 0.8-rc1 has been shipped! Capture the flag! Team deathmatch! Internet play! The few existing servers are empty though, so why don't ya go and fill them up? Get it here in Windows-binary or source flavor! The team asks for feedback, which is pretty common with open source projects and might be even superfluous to tell, but it always gives me a good feeling when teams ask for criticism on their products.

In case you have never before seen Battle Tanks in action, I recorded a video of AI-aided defend-the-base-style cooperative gameplay.

Battle Tanks' maps can be edited via Tiled, as demonstrated below. The editor is a general-purpose tile-based map editor written in Java, which means that it's cross-platform and relatively easy to run. It's feature-rich but also pretty simple to use : there are layers and you draw tiles on them. Effective! It resembles RPG Maker in some ways, but as a map editor it is far more advanced.

Item placement in Battle Tanks is being done via a specialized, also pretty simple editor, which has no documentation as far as I can tell and which tends to crash a lot.

Using Tiled to edit Battle Tanks maps

Radakan's WorldTool and the importance of game content creation tools

WorldTool r3 for Radakan

Today I finally gave WorldTool (release 3) a try, which is a map editor for Radakan. To use the tool, one has to download it, extract it and then run java -Djava.library.path=. -jar WorldTool.jar.

The tool allows you to create a map and to raise and lower the terrain and paint textures on it via brushes. You can place objects on it, which will automatically be at the correct height relative to the ground.

It is fun to play around with (though not for too long, as the art asset is tiny and I don't know how to import additional media and because all I can do is make a map, not walk with a character on it or place items or monsters. - Mind you, the editor is in an early stage.)

While using it, I got the thought that if such tools were developed enough to be able to produce content to truly enrich games, their ease of use would attract many potential contributers and could turn a player into a contributor. Even if the advanced features (like creating characters with dialog options) would be more complicated, the simple things would be easy to do, which means that there will be motivation enough to learn how to do the more complicated work.

I haven't given much thought to game-specific editors before, but I will take a closer look at the ones I can find and figure out where their limitations are and if there are any faults with them and write my findings here. Please tell me if you know of any such tools (besides the ones for SilverTreeRPG, Sauerbraten, SuperTuxKart and FreedroidRPG that is. ;) )

In not so dashing news: you can vote for Apricot's official name now. The suggestions are kind of cute ("point blank frank", "frankie’s reign of terror") but I really would prefer "Apricot". Do you like the name "Bick Buck Bunny"? I don't too much..

Playing the first Apricot demo

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll, then download this .blend file, open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :)

Apricot, first demo

Edit: An unofficial OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release was posted. Testing it is encouraged, so that the official release can become a great one. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new maps and models.

The GearHead 1/2 homepage has been updated a while ago. It now looks pretty pretty and has a sexy RSS feed. The GearHead games are Roguelike titles (which I find not that cool) involving Mechs (which I find cool) of the Japanese kind (meh). Totally unrelated: a webcomic based on the games' setting has started.

PS: In case you are interested in using glc as a game recording tool on GNU/Linux systems, this Arch Linux newsletter contains some usage hints for the cool application.