Top Futuristic Open Source Racing Games on Linux

F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers.

Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code:




H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software with freeware data.

While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre.




CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version.

Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible. Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases.




Racer is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfortunately it does not compile on current Arch Linux.

Of our four projects, this is the only that has the classic drive-over boost fields.




Ecksdee is the oldest of the bunch and has challenging time trial single-player gameplay.

There are weapon pickups but without AI or human competitors they serve no purpose yet.



Project Comparison

	H-Craft	CoreBreach	Racer*	Ecksdee
Latest Version	2015-02-23 (1.3)	2012-11-30 (git)	2010-10-10 (r349)	2006-11-24 (0.0.9)
Campaign Mode	yes	yes	no	no
Split-Screen Multiplayer	no	yes	yes	no
Weapons	no	yes	no	yes
AI	yes	yes	no	no
Gamepad Support	yes	yes	yes	no
Menu UI Look	good	ok	good	ok
Music	yes	yes	no	yes
Sounds	yes	yes	yes	yes
Linux Builds or Compiling	not tested, build used	complicated but compiles	fails	fails, win32 build/wine used
Art Asset License(s)	Mostly no-modify-no-distribute	no-distribution, GPL, CC-BY 3.0	CC-BY-SA 3.0	GPL, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND
Is It Cool?	yes	yes	yes	yes

* Could not build racer, reviewing from long term memory



Related projects


Stunt Rally has a F-Zero-esque antigrav vehicles and futuristic levels but primarily it's a car racing game. The default physics don't seem to be working for a futuristic racing style.




The cool Blender Game Engine project RGP has it's .blend file available but it does not have license information. The .blend contains no audio and only one level without AI.




HexGL is pretty but has no sound, no ai, only one level and is CC 3.0 BY-NC licensed (including code) at the moment. If anybody is interested in contributing: the developer indicated interest in the MIT license.

TheRush seem to be Windows-only and does not run in Wine.

Linux Game Awards: PotM March 2014 VOTE NOW!

It's time for another installment of the somewhat bi-monthly Linux Game Awards:

The list of nominees is again quite interesting, so choose your favorite.

This months winner was 0 A.D. by the way... I guess we need to increase the promotion efforts a bit in case you weren't aware...

Linux Game Awards voting open now!

Quietly in the background a group of open-source and Linux enthusiast websites (full disclosure: including FreeGamer ;) ) has developed a new platform for promoting open-source games: http://www.linuxgameawards.org/

One of its regular features will be a monthly award and a related promotion drive for the winner on all affiliated sites.

As a start, our community came up with the first 10 nominees for the January 2014 award and you can now vote for your favorite game of those here.

P.S.: One of the nominated projects, SuperTuxKart, had a new release today also. Don't forget to check it out and vote for them if you like it.

DevCorner: Blender Game Engine

While Blender3D is one of the premier FOSS projects out there, its integral part the Blender Game Engine (BGE) is often belittled as not a serious game engine.

While the criticism is certainly not completely unfounded  and the integration of limited "non-programming" game code creation (via logic bricks) gives it a bit of a "RPG maker" image, it really is a quite interesting platform to work on it seems.
Ok, probably as of now the BGE is really more of a rapid game prototyping engine, but previous experience during the Yo, Frankie! project has actually shown that at least compared to some other well known FOSS engines, it is a serious contender (that Blender Foundation project originally started on Crystal Space, and after many problems was implemented in the BGE in a few weeks only).



So what makes it so interesting? Well for one there is the full integration with a creation tool (obviously Blender3D) so that getting your content into the game is only a matter of making it. No exporters or anything needed... it just works. Then of course there is the fully scriptability via Python, also integrated tightly. Basically you never have to exit Blender, and testing your game can be done right in the editor with one click (no compiling etc. necessary). Oh and did I mention the great physics capabilities via Bullet, also build right in?

In addition your created game will be immediately available on any platform the Blender Game player has been ported (all major desktop operating systems, with an Android port under development and a browser plugin, too). In addition you can choose to publish your game as a single .blend file, giving the users a direct access to all the source files of the game; a wet dream of any true FOSS game developer!
The tight integration with the GPLed Blender Player, has been a major source of discontent with the predominately propitiatory game developing users of the BGE however. Thus there now exists also a few options to encrypt your game and/or run it on an external engine that can be kept close source (but I will not go further into that here). 

You can find a lot of (sometimes really awesome looking: 1, 2, 3) game projects on the Blenderartists.org forum. Now as I said, most of it is sadly closed source with propitiatory artworks, but I also have the feeling that some simply don't know or care about the legal implications of their "freeware" game (which sadly shows that even many people who use a great FOSS tool, mostly care about the "free as in beer" aspect of it). 

One of the more interesting projects right now (which might or might not become a full FOSS game) can be seen in this video:



It shows the most recent work by Martinesh, who is basically BGE's resident game art guru. Two years ago we already featured previous awesome work by him, but sadly that Air Race project is by now canceled.
What he is now working on is however rather a show-case for the really nice new graphical features in the BGE which he and others are developing in the so called "candy" development branch (on his blog there are also more details and nice videos from some time ago).

Another cool recent project it the rewrite of the the logic bricks visual programming idea via nodal logic blocks called Hive.

While not completely integrated into Blender yet, you can already try it via an external editor (the created python code works fine inside Blender). There are also some tutorials and a documentation for it.
Since my programming skills also lack somewhat, I find that an interesting tool... however most likely it is rather a nice way to do some level scripting, than actually programming the real guts of a game with it.

So where can you get started with developing your own game using the BGE? Well, the blenderartists.org sub-forums are always helpful, with some nice beginners video tutorials linked here, here, here and here ;)
There are even some books available (this one in particular is quite recent, which is a plus given the fast development of Blender3D) and there is of course the official Blender documentation.
Oh and a good source of content is (besides our friends opengameart.org of course) Blender Swap (nice interview with one of the creators here).

If you have further questions please comment below or ask over at blenderartists.org!

MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.


MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 6.


And believe it or not, qudobup and me tried to play a round (extreme n00b alert :D ), which we recored and commented here:

Megaglest Multiplayer: Julius vs. qubodup [HD .ogg (485M) | tinyogg | no-commentary .mp4 (364M)]

All done with Free software by the way :D (MegaGlest, glc, Audacity, PiTiVi and Mumble)!

Interview with the Megaglest team

For this Megaglest special we are also lucky to had the chance to make a short interview with the two main heads behind this Glest fork.

FreeGamer: For a start, could you please give us a short introduction into your team structure and what your motivation was to fork Glest in order to make Megaglest?

titi: Well teamstructure is... I started and Softcoder joined :) I have been working on glest mods for 2 years now because I like the game and there was so little content available back then. For Megaglest I also do some programming, but Softcoder writes more of the code than me.

Softcoder: But we also have contributions from time to time from others (like the GAE team).

titi: Concerning our motivation, I think we both work on glest because our kids like it :) Right from the start my children were involved in Glest modding. For example my son made nice tileset and helped me with my first mods; especially the Indians (as in native north Americans / the editor ;) ) we made as a coop production!

Softcoder: Yes titi & family are the heart of the community! But my boys also made a number of factions. Elimnator and Tiger are big into mods, and call their mods vbros packs :)

FreeGamer: Interesting to see that FOSS game development can really work as a family hobby! Not really the typical cliche of the lonely bed-room programmer in his teens ;)
But lets move on to the next question: Glest is for sure heavily influenced by Blizzard's Warcraft3, and thus caters to a similar type of gamer. Have you though about bringing some of the popular elements from that game over to Megaglest? Examples would be hero units, and of course the later added game-play modes like DOTA and Tower Defense.

titi: I think we both don't even know Warcraft3 :) I didn't played many RTS games up to now... well I think I played something called Dune2 on the Amiga before ;) Actually I'm more a FPS player.

Softcoder: I'm not a gamer at all. But yeah, the forums are filled with people who ask for features from those games. In short we will therefore likely bring lots of features that people like from there into MG.

titi: Personally however, I don't like all this special hero feature people talk about. Things get too complicated with this, and I think these heroes kill the usual RTS fun. But there are some fun ideas we will follow for sure :) But I see Glest as its own game; I don't want to build a Warcraft clone.
Concerning DOTA, well I guess HON is much better then we can ever be :) But there are mods who do this and when they grow we will support them if it fits to the game itself. Right now we have the current RTS game type in focus, however.

FreeGamer: Ok next question: Megaglest seems to have evolved out of a number of independent factions and tile sets, so the overall game design is lacking a bit. Are there plans to take a more "tighter grip" in order to get the balancing etc. right? Or do you consider Megaglest more of a "playground" and let someone else develop a "pro-mod" for balanced multiplayer?

Softcoder: I think the answer is a challenge of the community and the age groups. Many young people are working on techs, factions, maps etc, but we might need to be more careful to keep "themes" together. So we try to only allow consistent content as part of the shipped product.

titi: Well there are the Tech and Magic factions from the original glest, but the rest was basically made by me. It is something what I called Megapack before. But I learned more while doing this and so they look a bit different :)

FreeGamer: What I actually meant was not the art style but the game balancing and game design. Are there plans to restructure the factions, maybe limit them to 3 or so to be able to get balancing right?

titi: I think the balancing is quite good! Ok, some are better some are not so good, but thats like the players. It is meant like that, good players choose bad factions bad players choose good factions. But what's good or bad depends on the map too!
But I discuss with others in the forums and hear what they say... especially beginners always say this or that faction is too good, but after a while they often come to the conclusion thats its not as they thought :p

Softcoder: I also think the base MG install has that, e.g. a core game-play with good balancing. It is the add-ons etc... that create the "playground".

titi: But for me competitive game-play is also not really the focus. I want to make a game thats fun to play, not competitive! Especially coop gaming against the computer is a big part of the fun playing MG.

FreeGamer: Ok lets move on: With the current release focusing on getting the multiplayer working correctly (and hopefully getting a big enough online player-base), what are your future plans regarding the single-player part? Do you plan on implementing a campaign editor in the already much improved level editor?

titi: Well for me the next focus are graphical improvements. We need better terrain splatting (made by the gfx card), more lights and so on. And we will start to put in lots of new features once we proofed to be stable in multiplayer :)

Softcoder: I think its hard to answer! There are TONS of great ideas in the community, we will talk with our community and see what things are most desired. My focus is more for making my boys happy :) We want MG to be 'mega-fun'!

FreeGamer: Ok so what about editing & modding? Right now the units are rather limited in their special abilities. Do you think stuff like (air) transporters, non attack magic spells, stealth mode etc. (insert other cool units features from Starcraft/Warcraft) could be easily implemented? Or is that already possible with scripting, but not done yet?

titi: I wrote so many wiki entries , made so many forum posts to let people know how to mod glest, I think its quite easy now. The special unit abilities not implemented yet however, but when we think it is fun we will think how hard it is to do and then we do it :)

Softcoder: We plan to add many things like this, but slowly so that we don't lose stability and keep people happy. One example... we added better network play, masterserver AND cross platform play all in this last round of beta! That was TOO MUCH! But things will get done (faster if we have more help) just at its proper pace.

FreeGamer: We already had some remarks on the technical side of things, but lets get back to that again: The Glest engine sure looks a bit dated by today's standards... do you have plans to upgrade the graphics engine to support shaders and such?

Softcoder: Yikes! We agree with you! But I think we have to give hats off to Martino and the rest of the original Glest team that a game written in 2005 still is acceptable today!

titi: We need more speed and many of these features will bring us better speed and better graphics, since the GPU will do alot of the work.

FreeGamer: Ok, but to extent that: with normalmaps and such it often looks more realistic in style. Do you want to go more in that art direction, or stay with a more comic style?

titi: Normal maps are not the main priority, there are other more needed features. And normal maps need new textures, and that is really a lot of work :) So for now we are looking into things that can be done with mostly code which is easier to do.

FreeGamer: So but what weight would you give the development focus right now... more towards improving graphics, or more toward extending game-play?

titi: Both :) But we try to make small steps.

Softcoder: Game development is totally new for me (and Linux programming is fairly new), so priority also depends on how long it takes to learn and do it right! MG is my first graphics code ever, and also and my first Linux open source project.

titi: It is all new for us, no one of us did something like this before. I even learned C++ in the beginning of this year for this project! Same with php, the masterserver is the first thing I ever wrote in php.

FreeGamer: Well I think it turned out pretty well so far never the less :) I think this concludes our short interview. Thank you very much for answering our questions! Ahh, last but not least: Do you have anything you want to tell your players and/or our blog readers?

Softcoder: Yes, our #1 goal for MegaGlest is 'FUN'!

titi: Please come and play MegaGlest ;)

A short introduction into Glest modding

(Mega)Glest has an incredibly easy modding setup. Almost everything in the game can be easily changed with simple XML files, and the 2D map editor is very easy to grasp. Especially with the recent usability improvements in Megaglest (and included Linux editor binaries) it is possible to create a simple but nice map in a matter of minutes!

Edit: I was made aware that those editor improvements come mostly from the GAE project. Very good additions!



(Ok this was not done in minutes :p It's one of the new 8 player maps that come with MegaGlest)


But luckily all these editing features are also very well documented in the Glest wiki.


Last but not least, all single-player and co-op scenarios can be fully scripted right in the XML files with lua, a pretty powerful yet easy scripting language commonly used in computer games. Sadly it is not possible to create full singleplayer campaigns yet, but lets hope that gets added soon too!

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 :)

Interview: Stephen Carlyle-Smith aka Me_Programmer

In the second Free Gamer interview - over 2 years since the first with grumbel - serial Free game developer Steven Carlyle-Smith (UK) aka Me_Programmer Games aka Steve16384 was kind enough to take the time to reply in detail to my questions about his development activities.

Steve has created a plethora of Free games over the years. Whilst they have struggled to gain mindshare - usually he moves on at speed to new projects before completing others - there's a lot of content to peruse and I thought his experiences were more than worth tapping for advise to budding game developers. He has created all his games with little or no community help other than occasionally reusing resources from other projects. He also maintains blog on his development efforts which is often witty.

You can ask questions / get support / give feedback for Steve's games in the new FreeGameDev forum for Me_Programmer Games. There you can also find an exhaustive list of his playable game projects, including several not mentioned here.

He is also responsible for coding/creating the site Online Game Planner - which he uses to host his projects - which is a fairly new portal for organizing multiplayer gaming sessions.

The game that originally got my attention was Laser Tactics - previously called Nuclear Graveyard, which he talks about later in the interview. So, without further ado...

The Interview

Q. Please introduce yourself...

I'm a 30-something professional applications programmer, amateur games programmer, married with one child and another on the way.

Q. What do you do for a living?

I work for a small company writing software for businesses. Everything from web applications, social networking sites, VB apps, web filters, stock control software, networking tools, and the odd game. Whatever people will pay for!

Q. What notable games have you created?

I don't think any qualify as notable -- editor is impressed with the humility, some of the games are good they just haven't hit the right public spot yet! -- but these are probably my best:-

Xenogeddon (home)

This is a simple FPS based on Space Hulk, but I'm very pleased at how the graphics turned out. I didn't do any of the models, but overall it captures the Space Hulk imagary quite well. It is small and simple however, and needs a lot more scenery and features adding to keep the player's interest.

Laser Tactics (home)

The less said about the graphics the better, but this is my attempt at making a pseudo-realtime verson of Laser Squad and have tried to recreate the original graphics in 3D. It uses what I think is a unique system where both side's "action points" are replenished in real time which can make for interesting gameplay. I'm also particularly pleased with the AI as well. The overall presentation could do with a damn good polishing though.

Island Commander (home)

This is my most recent game and I'm still working on it, but it's fully playable and I enjoy playing it. I've always liked strategy games, and this one is a simple RTS/RTT where the player builds units and then watches them do battle. I'm interested in games where you only have indirect control. I've got loads of ideas yet to implement, like different races, more unit types, and maybe a better name!

Q. Of your game projects, which is your favourite?

At the moment it's Island Commander, because it's my newest and I still enjoy playing it. I'm probably most proud of Xenogeddon though, in that if someone asked me to show them one of my games, that would be the one.

Q. Excluding your own, what is your favourite open source game?

I don't spend that much time playing games, but the one I used to play the most is Tremulous, probably because it's multi-player with a big player-base. I'm crap at it though.

Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?

Definitely FLOSS, as I haven't bought a game since X-Com for the Amiga! My home PC isn't up to playing modern games and I don't have time anyway. I'd much rather be programming games than playing them. When I do play games, it's usually simple but addictive Flash-type games. And if they're very simple, I then have a go at writing my own version.

Q. How did you get into games programming?

Way back in 1984, my dad bought a ZX Spectrum, and the book "First Steps with your Spectrum" to go with it. Ever since then I've been programming, for the Spectrum, Amiga and then PC. I like to think my games have improved since then.

Q. What are your best games programming tips?

Re-use your own code as often as possible. Have something playable as quickly as possible. And use descriptive var/function names. I don't agree with people who dislike verbose var/function names; if you're sharing code with others (or coming back to your own project after a 6 month gap) you need as much description as possible. With tools like code-completion, long names aren't a problem.

Q. What draws you to open source, what is your Free software philosophy?

I particularly like the way that we all provide each other with programming help and actual source code, which enables everyone to learn and produce software much faster than they would be able to otherwise. It's a shame that in the corporate world, when somebody learns something, it's top secret and usually patented. Just think how advanced technology (not just software) might be if everyone shared their knowledge and skills with everyone else.

Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game
development fail?

The biggest problem is not getting something playable as quickly as possible. Whether its a one-man project or bigger, people soon get bored of discussing and planning everything to death. You need to show yourself and everyone that you are actually doing something practical that is actually possible and progress is being made. There are a million "Status: 1-Planning" projects on Sourceforge as a testament to this.

Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's
development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?

I don't really know any off the top of my head. I sometimes browse Sourceforge to see if there's anything I can help with, but I usually end up with ideas and inspiration to write a game of my own! Unfortunately, trying to understand someone else's source code and designs (especially the larger ones) is often harder than just writing my own project.

Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your games
do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

My dream is to have a game (and more importantly, a community) as popular as, say, Starcraft. This is my ultimate (and obviously unattainable) ambition, but if one of my games can get a thousandth of the popularity of that, then I'll be more than pleased!

Steve's Other Game Projects

You can ask questions / get support / give feedback for Steve's games in the new FreeGameDev forum for Me_Programmer Games. There you can also find an exhaustive list of his playable game projects, including several not mentioned here.

Danger Man




HoloRacer

Danger Man (home)

This is my contribution to the saturated market of platformers. It's reasonably complete, but requires more levels designing and it's own set of graphics. It has a few good features though, like different weapons.

Metal Glove Solid (home)

This is a playable but limited version of Gauntlet. The advantage of having this in my repotoire is that if I want to make any other top-down 2D game, I can just start with this. I do that with a lot of my games, meaning I can usually knock something up very quickly. I just need to improve the graphics and create more levels.

HoloRacer (home)

I'm quite pleased with this one, and I sometimes go back and have a quick game. I just wanted to write the fastest racer that I could, and it was my first game using OpenGL. It's deliberately quite simple (in gameplay and graphics) but fun in short bursts. I seem to remember that when I uploaded it to Sourceforge, it got about 200 downloads on the first day. They'v trailed off a bit since then!

Realtime Chaos (home)

This is a remake of "Chaos - The Battle of Wizards" for the Spectrum, where wizards do battle with various spells, but converted into an RTS. I've written countless version of Chaos over the years, but this is by far the least-worst. The only drawback is that it has no AI, so you need at least one other player and a LAN to play a game.

Simwar (home)

This is an RTS in the style of C&C. It's quite simple, and also multi-player/LAN only, but is designed to be quick and fun to play. It has some features like proper line-of-sight (unlike just fog-of-war), so you can only see the enemy if you have a clear view. Prizes for guessing which game the soldier sprites came from!

GTA-MUD (home)

As the name says, this is a MUD. I liked the contemporary setting of GTA, and thought a MUD in the same setting would be a good idea, where you could do anything in a modern-day realistic setting rather than either medeival fantasy or futuristic. It's quite small, but gets about 5 logins a day. It's also quite "adult" in some sections, just like GTA.

Online Game Planner (home)

This is a website I produced. I think this was inspired by me trying to get more players on at the same time on GTA-MUD. The premise is simple - you select an online games that you play, and then organise a session by date and time. Everyone else who has also marked that game as one they play then gets informed of the date and time, so everyone plays the game at the same time. It also hosta a few of my simple applet games. I think I should rename it "MultiplayerGamePlanner".

The Last Word

I'd really like to see Steve polish some of his older games a bit more and be more astute with advertising them. Some of them are very hard to come by unless you go through his blog, so posting announcements/showcase/help-wanted threads in the appropriate forums (starting with the FreeGameDev forums) should increase their visibility.

Xenogeddon looks full of potential and it'd be good to see what people make of it. I don't have functional 3D so couldn't try it myself yet.

Metal Glove Solid could become a popular game if he worked on performance (it was unplayably slow on my graphically-unaccelerated 2ghz laptop) as well as used the better graphics available in the Gauntlet Resurrection thread from the FreeGameDev ideas forum.

There's a lot of projects that he didn't mention because he feels they're not complete enough, e.g. this Shadowfire remake. It makes me curious to know if there's a complete list of Steve's projects anywhere! See update!

Sometimes the life of a Free game developer can feel a bit lonely because of the lack of exposure. Hopefully some of you will go away and try his games and, even if you don't end up playing them for long, at least give some decent feedback so he can work to make them better and increase player retention.

Update: Steve has posted a complete list in the forum. Two games he has made that he didn't mention in the interview but are worthwhile projects are Passenger and Last Remaining. I think he needs a bit of modelling help to really realise the potential of Last Remaining.

Open source Artillery / Worms clones

So it seems that Scorched 3D, Wormux, Hedgewars, and Atomic Tanks are all clones of inspired by... Worms? No. Scorched Earth? Nah. Gorillas? Nope. Tank Wars? No. That's right, their roots go all the way back to a 1980 on the Apple II under the name Artillery. Even earlier ascii versions from as early as 1976 are reported. Now that's real history - all other games (pong and chess excepted) are modern upstarts. ;-)

Atomic Tanks

home • screenshots • download

One of the older and more mature open source Artillery clones, with version 0.5 first available in January of 2003, Atomic Tanks doesn't seem to have the online presence of it's contemporaries. This is probably because it doesn't look that nice, with garish colours, coarse widgets, and almost badly drawn sprites.

Update: Markus comments, "I am sure that the graphics and such in Atomic Tanks are intentional. It is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Scorched Earth, and for those of us who grew up playing that game quite a bit, that is where the real appeal lies." I'm not sure I can agree with you there [on the intentionality of the bad graphics] after inspecting the original graphics.

What it lacks in the graphics department, it makes up for in features. The sheer range of weapons is overwhelming. You earn money, which you can use upgrade features and improve your tanks, making the game a much more appealing single player experience. Also the land behaves differently, falling to fill and holes created by explosions.

The latest release was 20th March 2009, which gives it a spot at the top of the article. :-)

Scorched 3D

home • screenshots • download

Scorched 3D has been in development since 2001 with build 1 released on 29th April of that year.

The first thing to note about Scorched 3D is that it looks beautiful. It is the only 3D game in the article, but it is especially well done. The islands deform as they get pounded by missiles. Battleships stay moored offshore, the waves lap against the beaches, and jet fighters fly overhead the tanks. It looks as good as a commercial game.

Scorched 3D build 42.1 arrived on 3rd March 2009.

Hedgewars

home • screenshots • download

Hedgewars is the youngest of the four projects, in development since 2004 and first released on 13th November 2006.

If I had to sum up Hedgewars in 3 words, I would say, "Worms II with hedgehogs." (Hey, II is a number!) With it's yelps and ows, and faithful recreation of many of the popular Worms weapons, it makes for a very similar gaming experience, arguably even better.

Hedgewars 0.9.9 was released 19th January 2009 and version 0.9.10 is imminent. I think the video successfully gets across just how Worms-like Hedgewars is:

Wormux

home • screenshots • download

Wormux looks very nice, and gameplay deviates a bit more than Hedgewars from the original worms experience, but is still very heavily inspired by it. It includes all the popular Free software mascots, so there's plenty of characters that you should recognise or should learn to recognise - making it almost educational! ;-)

The last few years have seen the developers work towards a new engine that will massively enhance the game with features like integrated physics (they created whysics engine just for this). I expect Wormux will continue to depart in a good way - by adding new interesting features that enhance gameplay - from it's Worms foundations whilst retaining the spirit that inspired the project originally.

Version 0.8.3 was released on 5th March 2009 and included some backported enhancements from the development version.

Incoming!

Looking to the future, there is also the iteam project, inspired by Gunbound. It seems like it could combine the graphical panache of Wormux with the upgrading fun of Atomic Tanks, but development has been very slow despite a wave of initial enthusiasm.

OpenLieroX

Teeworlds

Alternatives

If you like things to look Worms-like, but be more frantic, you should check out the games OpenLieroX or Gusanos - both inspired by a freeware game Liero(X). It has the character of old-school Worms but plays like 2D Quake. Gusanos (based on the classic Liero) development is inactive, last release occuring on 31st January 2006, whereas OpenLieroX (based on LeiroX) development is ongoing at a slow pace, with version 0.57_beta8 released 9th October 2008.

(My Liero-foo history may be out there, I'm not 100% sure how the different projects relate to eachother.)

Similar in gameplay style, but more modern and less retro-pixel, perhaps Teeworlds is your cup of tea. At version 0.5.1, the game is already solid, polished, and playable and has an enthusiastic, growing player base with many regular players. Development is very active and the last release was 25th January 2009.

Conclusion

The Artillery genre of open source games is possibly the healthiest genre of open source games with 4 very good, polished, playable, and actively developed projects, as well as other similar games, inspired by the classics. With 2D games increasingly neglected by the commercial sector, this genre is arguably one where a few of the open source projects have surpassed their commercial counterparts.

So, which (if any) of the Artillery-inspired open source games do you prefer to play? What's best about it? Or are you hardcore and only accept real clones and none of this contemporary rubbish? :-)

Top 10 Projects To Revive

The great thing about open source is a project can never become extinct - there is always a chance of it being brought back to life either by the original authors who re-find their motivation, by new contributors who see the potential, or a mixture of both.

Here are the top 10 games, complete with cliches, I'd like to see return to the development scene and back on the road to completion.

1. Bloodmasters

home • project

This gorgeous 3D top-down action game was released as open source last year after indie developer Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden found he'd lost motivation to continue with the project. It's a complete game with great graphics and needs a good C# developer to pick it up, port it to Mono, and help restore the community.

2. Project Citadel

home • project

A very nice looking turn based strategy game set in World War II.

The game reached a playable state before it's development team ByteWare stopped playing the development game.

3. Windstille

home • project

This project isn't technically dead - lead developer Grumbel occasionally bumps it with more concept work - but it's definitely in hibernation and progress is frustratingly slow.

Grumbel is actively seeking writers and developers so the prospects of reviving the project are quite good - no organizational work required.

4. Emilia Pinball

home • project

Come on, who wouldn't love a great Free pinball game? Emilia Pinball is a fairly solid 3D pinball game that is playable, if a little "bare bones" in it's current form. A better table editor, some more tables, and a bit of love to the user interface and ball physics and this game would be a corker.

Hopefully one day a pinball wizard will resume improving this game and add another table or two as well as a few more features.

5. Labyrinth of Worlds

home • project

Ultimate Underworld is my favourite ever game, and this is a project to create a new game based on it the 2nd instalment of the popular series. Since these days the world of Ultima is somewhat abandoned by it's foster parent company EA, I hoped projects like this and Underworld Adventures would have gained more support.

6. Boson

home • project

The promising 3D RTS came a long way but never quite snowballed despite having nice graphics, original gameplay, and most of the hard work already done. I think the dependency on KDE libs was hurtful to attracting contributors.

It is original, playable, has a full set of units for two sides, nice graphics. It has everything going for it except momentum. Oh but to borrow a bit of enthusiasm from the Spring project, and Boson could spring back into life.

7. MyLink / MyNet

home • source

MyLink is inspired by the rather cool game UpLink. After encountering difficulties the author started from scratch with the name MyNet, but after hitting difficulties again (with motivation this time) the project got abandoned. The author is waiting for a new maintainer to step up to the plate. Until that happens, consider this project disconnected.

8. Civil

home • project

Civil is a cross-platform, turn-based, networked strategy game, which allows players to take part in scenarios set in historical battle theatres. The U.S. Civil war was the primary focus before they started losing the battle and development stopped in 2005. Written purely in Python/Pygame, there should be plenty of people able to help out.

Battle simulations, how could that fail to be fun? When development dies, that's how!

9. Slickworm

home • project

An innovative FPS where the terrain was deformable. It went through a few rewrites before the lead developer went silent. He was obviously talented and probably snapped up by a commercial company - a shame for the open source game community as it blows a big hole in the future for Slickworm; this potentially brilliant game looks like it'll never be more than a tech demo.

10. Battle for Antargis

home • project

An original game that mixes elements of strategy and role play, this project enjoyed sustained development for several years and looked very promising before development tailed off as 2008 began. Hopefully somebody will pick things up again as this is one of those projects that counters the 'open source can only copy' popular criticism.

It had another original edge to it, it was probably the first significant Ruby game project, which probably doesn't help when it comes to attracting developers.

Honorable Mentions

Here's a few that I thought also had potential:

• SilverTree RPG
  
  The lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth started to make an RPG! There was joyous celebrations and wide eyed expectation as SilverTree was unleashed on the public. Then he moved on to another project and the with it so went the development activity of the RPG.


• Mars: Land of No Mercy
  
  A 2D mech strategy game that could be nice if development had no slowed to a near stand still. Every now and again something seems to happen that nearly equates to activity, so it didn't quite make the list.


• GalaxyMage
  
  It once looked like a great new strategy game but the developers and the website went AWOL. Enthusiasts resumed development under the moniker Galaxy Mage Redux but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere other than the archives.


• 
  FreePop
  
  This was an attempt to recreate and improve upon the iconic Populous games of the early nineties. It never quite got to a playable state before the developer declared the project dead and moved on.


• Legacy of Magic
  
  Another very promising war strategy game with very nice 3D graphics that never managed to emerge from abyss of alpha releases.


• Fuzzy Adventure
  
  It came about at a time when the only platform games on Linux were SuperTux and XEvil. A quick burst of activity was never turned into long term development. I suspect that Fuzzy Adventure was just SuperTux with different graphics (gameplay was nearly identical) but that's never been confirmed.


• Reaper3D
  
  A space shoot-em-up, this game was neary completed before it stalled.


• OpenParsec
  
  This 3D space combat game was the darling of its time but very dated now. The developers declined to open source it for several years, and by the time they did the times, and with it the community, had long since moved on.

Another games you wished were still going?

Update: some more games that would be cool to revive:

• Dark Oberon is an original 2D isometric RTS whose graphics are created by taking images of melded plasticine models.


• Cspop, a Crystal Space populus-inspired game (svn, no homepage) previously mentioned (twice) on Free Gamer and announced on the happypenguin forums.


• Zugspiel, a 3D train tycoon game (forum) which never quite made it after the author became inactive.


• FreeTrain, a 2D isometric city & rail network building game. It needs an enthusiastic C# developer (contact me directly or post in the FreeGameDev Help Offered forum if you are interested).

Simulate This - City Building + Tycoon Game Reviews

Welcome to a Free Gamer special! People often accuse the Free software and open source game sphere of lacking depth, that there are few good games. In 2009 Free Gamer is dedicated to dispelling this myth. As part of a series of articles on specific genres, highlighting the games that people develop for the love of development in order for us to play, I humbly present a set of reviews of open source city building and tycoon games. I try to be fair and critical, and I note that these games are all enjoyable in their own way. They are all certainly worth a look.

OpenTTD

OpenTTD

I started with OpenTTD 0.6.3 - being the only formerly commercial game I'm covering today, it is good a metric for the others. Still, it is not quite Free software, you need the abandonware Transport Tycoon Deluxe to run it. The community has been working on a project called OpenGFX to create both drop-in and high-resolution graphics to replace the proprietary materials. They are getting there, but I don't think they'll be complete before the end of this year.

I've been playing Transport Tycoon since I was a kid. The gameplay comes naturally to me, and is easy to get into. (My 8 year old son was playing with it after only brief instruction.) The great thing about OpenTTD is that it is polished. Everything works, and works well. The user interface is very nice - although sometimes you do get overwhelmed with windows. Game performance is exceptional, with a lot going on it was consistently smooth and never laggy. Which it shouldn't really be, considering this is a 10 year old game and I'm on a 2 year old laptop, but suffice to say these days my expectations are low!

There is one big problem with OpenTTD though. Once you work out how to connect a couple of industries or cities, the game challenge disappears. Almost all non-fluffed transport links are profitable and the AI is awful (although this is getting remedied by a new AI framework due in OpenTTD 0.7). There's no end goal, nothing other than building your bank balance and big networks and cities (which you can only influence, not control). It all gets a bit repetitive after a while. Despite the "reality" setting, the game world barely comes across as real. Towns are evenly spread out, but not connected with roads (you have to build them). You basically mould the map by placing down transport routes. Other than industry locations, you don't have to accommodate the game world much; it accommodates you.

The game needs to be tougher. Industry connections should be specific to deals between individual industry companies. You should be able to drive your competitors away by competing with them for contracts. There should be more limits on where you can build (contracts with councils, perhaps), shaping land should be more costly, there should be an element of challenging to getting up and running highly profitably. There's no station management - all rail stations are the same, roofed or not - no additional parts, just stations. Also there is a lack of passenger chaining. Big passenger stations have a limited catchment area, if you have other vehicles 'unload' passengers at them then those vehicles basically run on a loss. The gameplay is simple, but it is too simple, and that is why I don't play the game any more.

Simutrans

Simutrans

Overdue Update: The Simutrams community constructively took onboard my criticisms. Whilst I should have looked harder - there was a Starter Guide and other documents available - they have made documentation more accessible and prominently placed. The Simutrans wiki is a good resource for learning how to play the game.

Next up was Simutrans. Unlike OpenTTD, it is totally Free software, which is a good start. This is a difficult one, both to play and review. Although the website lists version 0.99.17 as stable, the forum lists 101.0 as the stable download and is more recent so I went with that. There's plenty of nice graphics packs readily available although only a few are really playable. I tried pak128 and pak96.comic - both aesthetically pleasing and supposedly playable.

The main menu music is horrendous. I know Germans have famously bad taste in music (the original author is a German guy) but the tune that greets you at the main menu is grating and negative. It's obviously a classical track in a minor key, but I can't see how that epitomises tycoons and enterprise. The user interface is a poor man's version of the OpenTTD UI. Often unclear, with frequent trivial glitches (text overflowing etc), it's just a bit messy and thus not quite so pleasant to interact with. Game performance again was very good - I remember it being quite poor when first tried Simutrans several years ago - and comparable with OpenTTD for smoothness.

In the end, pak96.comic was not playable. I tried to create a passenger line and couldn't even build a train depot, it wasn't in the rail build options. No depot, no trains (no other way I could find to access a train building dialog). This is fine, pak96.comic is listed as alpha although the screenshots show quite a bit off so I hoped it'd be more complete. Update: I had chosen too early a start date, so no trains/buildings were yet available, but this was not clearly documented anywhere, you had to read the fine print!

However pak128, which is becoming the de facto graphics pack for Simutrans, is definitely playable. It looks good and distinctively different from OpenTTD. Towns are more dispersed, are connected with roads and have more character. People and cars appear on the streets. Industries appeared more diverse, with more types of goods to chain together and deliver. It made me really want to like the game. Then I tried to build some railways.

Actually laying the track was trickier than it should be, especially diagonally which was very fiddly. Also if you build a straight track, if you were not careful to overlap each section you created, tiny hard-to-see gaps would be left in the track. I assumed that these would be problematic for trains, but when it came to creating trains I was just lost. I managed to set up a depot and build a train. Frustratingly I could only build a train with a single passenger carriage. Any other combination didn't work. Basic dialog controls seemed to do strange things. Line management was unintuitive enough to make me start over. I made more progress with buses, and started to work out the line management.

If you can work out how to play Simutrans, and overlook some of the aesthetic flaws, it looks like it has more to offer than OpenTTD in terms of gameplay depth. There was more complex road management options, passenger networks, trams, station buildings, different types of stations. Less wash, rinse, repeat route building strategy and more adapting to the game world. It just lacks the polish that OpenTTD has, and lacks a good tutorial and an intuitive user interface.

FreeRails2

FreeRails2

FreeRails2 0.4.0 is a continuation of the FreeRails project (and Railz too?) as well as a spiritual successor ("clone") of Railroad Tycoon. I used to play Railroad tycoon as a kid - it's the original tycoon game. It's both challenging and fun, although you don't have to worry too much about your trains colliding and other formalities as your trains zip up and down and past each other without a hitch.

The graphics are basic but not bad. Performance is fair - it made my laptop fan run hard but the game itself was smooth. One of the nice things about the game is you can run it straight from the webpage, no messing about installing or updating. You can be up and playing within moments of visiting the homepage.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward. Create a rail network between cities and industries, assign trains to visit the stations. Trains can change their cars at each station, so one train can pick up livestock, deliver it to a factory, then return with the resultant goods. There even seemed to be an automatic option for trains - create a train without any cars and it will grab whatever is waiting at the station it arrives at.

It's a nice game but it misses some of the charm of the original Railroad Tycoon. I'll probably have another go at it another day but - having played the original a lot when I was young - I'm not driven to play it. I think it's a few features short at the moment. Fortunately development seems to be ongoing - 0.4.0 was released in August last year.

FreeTrain

FreeTrain

FreeTrain is billed as the "quintessential sandbox game". It has so much potential, the graphics are nice with a lot of attention to detail, there's hundreds of plugins and you can create amazing cityscapes with variable height skyscrapers and all kinds of buildings. It is a transport simulation and city building game combined. There's a reason I have championed development drives for it for so long.

However, being a sandbox is a big problem. You start with a big blank piece of land. Sandboxes work on wikis where you can test out features and not worry about it getting wiped out. Yet, you don't create an entire wiki in a sandbox. FreeTrain lacks a Linux port and a save game format (and thusly a scenario format) which means it is full of potential but more a toy / tool than a game at the moment. Hopefully development will pick up again soon.

If you know C# then please get in touch with me and help restore this game to the scene.

Micropolis

Micropolis

Micropolis is the original Sim City classic repackaged with a new name. Not much more to say, really.

Ok, I'll make more effort than that. It looks very dated, and the game world looks tiny when juxtaposed in a large window at today's resolutions. Still, it is the grand daddy of city building games although sometimes is quite basic in it's mechanisms. You assign residential, commercial, and industrial zones. You build power plants, connect electricity grids, and manage taxes, and decide how to allocate emergency services. Occasionally you get to fight off Godzilla. Possibly a good starting game for younger players as there is less to grasp.

The limited nature of the game is shown by just how quickly the official forum expired. The most interesting thing about this game is that it was released as Free software as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC / XO) project.

LinCity-NG

LinCity-NG

LinCity-NG is the GotM fork of LinCity. LinCity is a kind of Sim City classic clone. It looks equally dated but has a different slant on city management, which LinCity-NG builds upon. LinCity-NG has much nicer graphics, and many new features. The autopackage would not install so I had to build it from source.

Performance is pretty poor. Movement and animation was very laggy on my laptop, the music stuttery. The music was good and original although loops on the same track rather than cycling. The user interface is original but a bit messy with icons overlapping button borders and lots of scrolling required to read text that is presented in a huge font. Saying that, the help system is very useful. A description of pretty much any game item is just a click or two away, and tooltips are there for extra hints. This makes it much easier to get into than Simutrans where I was guessing at half the controls.

The game itself has quite a few angles to it. For once roads in a city building game serve a function other than being a requirement for buildings to exist. They enable greater transportation range of goods and materials between different types of buildings. You have to generate resources and jobs, and research technologies to gain access to new types of buildings. In some ways, it merges aspects of civilization building games with a city building game, which is a unique approach to the genre in my [limited] experience. You can even win the game by transporting your city population to another planet.

I couldn't quite overcome the poor performance. Moving around was just too slow to be enjoyable. LinCity-NG has come very far in the last couple of years, and it shows a lot of potential. Interesting gameplay ideas and nice graphics bode well, and with some tweaking, optimization, and improvements to the user interface this game could be a real Free software star. I hope they rename the game to an original name now it is departing from it's LinCity roots. It can't be Next Generation forever, and it's no longer really "Lin"City as it is ported to multiple platforms.

OpenCity

Open City

OpenCity is the only 3D game in this list. At version 0.0.6, it is still early on in development, you can create basic 3D cities in OpenCity, but the gameplay is limited and it won't capture a player's attention for long. Development has been steady for several years, and with more people showing an interest in contributing this is one for the future.

Afterword

Well I think you'll agree there's plenty of choice and lots of fun to be had. There's many different styles of game to suit many different player types.