HE'S ALIVE

*Qubodup's eyes shift left and right*

Qubodup mutters, "I smell death."

*Charlie jumps out from behind a tree*

"No! It's me!"

Or maybe Q meant death by a thousand of Charlie's bad jokes? I got jokes, man.

Ok, ok... games stuff. Enough inane joke stuff. Games...

FreeOrion 0.3.14 came out with a fairly mega changelog. A preview of the 3d space combat is in there, as well as lots of fixing and balancing and content enhancing. It's becoming a very deep game and once the 3d combat is done it'll be one of the stand out open source games you can play, and only getting better. Hats off to the developers for their dedication to realising their dreams, it's been a long haul. Here be a video:

FreeCol 0.9.3 just came out. Fixes ahoy! Good game, that, although I still don't understand how to play it. One day I'll swallow my pride and ask how the hell you assign hammers and build things.

Danger from the Deep 0.4 preview release for those who are a bit brave. It might torpedo your computer, yuk yuk yuk =). It's got great graphics, although is more of a simulation than a game - but that's a good thing in my book. Part of the fun in a submarine game is in the challenges that befell those unfortunate enough to end up in a watery grave. Ah, video ahoy:

XreaL. It's not dead. Actually there's a video in that link that will blow your mind, it looks so good. You won't be able to see the forest for the trees (that'll make sense if you see it). No youtube though here's a [rather dark] video showing off a few XreaL levels:

Looks like YAOSCSC (Yet Another Open Source Counter Strike Clone) is underway although this one is probably more likely to succeed than some of the other rather limp efforts. This one is called Code 43: Urban Warfare and it uses XreaL. It is formed by the people associated with the ET Mod True Combat: Elite which could never really be open source.

And now for something completely different. And I'm not talking about breaking English grammar rules by starting sentences with 'and'...

Runesword II is a 2D RPG made in 2001 and now open source. They released version 2.6 recently, which can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Bizarrely the 2.6 release announcement never seems to have been made outside of the forums. Sadly it is made in VB *ew* and can be run on Linux via Wine. Still, it looks like a fairly involved RPG game.

I eagerly anticpate Egoboo 2.8.0, which has been a year in the making. They got a new website.

Which reminds me. Nothing to do with it, but I haven't yet tried UFO:AI 2.3...

Extreme Tux Racer, Smokin Guns, etc

The somewhat stop-start development of the various Tux Racer projects continues, but it looks hopeful that the latest incarnation of the iconic downhill penguin racer will not disappear like its predecessors. Extreme Tux Racer has finally released an updated 0.5 beta (Windows, Ubuntu, source for other Linuxi) after several months of inactivity. It's getting a bit of optimization love after I (yes, me, important mega me) unleashed my wrath helped a new developer by putting him in his place realise that ETR is not too detailed, as he incorrectly surmised, but ratyher suffers from some poorly implemented features that could be done a lot more quickly. Amazingly, I was right. :-)

I'm always right and I will rule the universe soon! At least, once I've been to the doctor about this over-active procrastination gland of mine.

Smokin' Guns, a total conversion of Quake 3 to recreate the feel of the Wild West is probably undermentioned here, although the graphics are starting to look very dated. Features:

• A full arsenal of weapons with historically correct design. Check the weapons page for more information.

• A variety of western styled maps and player models.

• A realistic damage system with different locations (head, chest, neck, etc) and height-dependant falling damage.

• New western styled gametypes for more fun: Bank Robbery and Duel Modes.

• A money system allowing for equipment purchase with money from rewards & pickups.

• Easy to use graphical user interface and HUD.

• Other small improvements for better gameplay and enhanced fun.

Lemming Ball Z

Another undermentioned and very cool project is Lemming Ball Z. Features include:

• Destructable 3d terrain

• Ability to add your own levels/characters/moves to the game

• Multiplayer with 2-4 players online or local

• Good old-fashion HotSeat play

• Slowmotion, like in "The Matrix"

• Fancy graphics, like cellshading and stuff

• Netplay, without configuring or hamachi

• Stupid AI to practice with

• Blood! lots of it! :)

I used to wonder where the FreeCol project got some of its fancy artwork - now I know, you can grab CC licensed (by-nc-sa) from David Rumsey's collection of ye olde maps.

VDrift

VDrift gets closer to a new release after a massive refactoring and lots of enhancements. Starting to look really, really cool. Still, not as playable as TORCS so if you want a quick fix I recommend you go the TORCS route for now, but VDrift looks set to eclipse TORCS as a spectacle in the course of 2009.

Scourge gets nicer towns, with houses created by combining sections to create more intricate villages. See the latest Scourge Weekly (volume 17, on the website frontpage) for more details and a humorous explanation of why developers should work rather than work on open source, should the choice be forced upon them. :-)

Hrm, other new releases like Teeworlds (0.5.1), Battle for Wesnoth (1.6 beta1) bleh too much blog stuff must go KTHXBYE.

Releases - Teeworlds, GearHead2, FreeCol, more

These days there's a flurry of open source game development activity and I don't have time to blog or follow it closely, but here's a highlight of some of the most recent game developments.

Teeworlds 0.5.0 is out. Everybody's favourite game about tea, where you have an entire world of tea bags and... wait, Q is whispering something to me... *listens*

Oh, it's not about tea. The clue was the double-e apparently. Still, despite the disappointing news that there still isn't a game dedicated to my favourite beverage, Teeworlds 0.5.0 is the largest update to the game yet. New features to everybody[ who doesn't love OpenLieroX or another game I can't think of]'s favourite 2D deathmatch Free project include demo recording, a revamped server browser and in-game voting, as well as a a gazillion changes under the hood. There is also a new, shiny 16-player limit.

FreeCol! The game where you get to free Colin! Right?! No? Dammit.... !

Ooooh, the col is short for colonization, which has nothing to do with turning the things into colons but everything to do with creating a new country on new land. Aaah, so, FreeCol 0.8.0 brings lots more polish - bugfixes, music, gameplay tweaks, graphical enhancements - to a project that seeks to embody and improve upon the original game (and succeeds).

Warzone 2100 2.1.1, bugfixes, and it's about war in a zone! I knew it, at least one game had to be guessable from the name!

There's some really interesting posts on the Worldforge dev blog these days. All aggregated on the planet - which isn't actually a planet, or technically attempting to be one, so don't visit it and be disappointed at finding a collection of feeds on Free Software game development. Anyhow, here's a video showing the compass in Ember (note: website is out of date, currently releases is 0.5.5), one of many recent Worldforge developments:

Whenever I see people saying, "Hey, let's create the next world of warcraft or an amazing 3D single player RPG!" I think, why don't you guess help with the Worldforge project. And nobody ever does. And they end up ditching their dreams to become an alpha mud. Like Radakan did.

Back to Worldforge, it's quite impressive these days. Whilst it is client-server based, it has a nicely featured persistent AI server, and the focus seems to be somewhat on non-MMORPG features even though it is an MMORPG toolset. So, if you want to make an RPG or MMORPG, unless you're a blood relative of John Carmack, stop thinking you can do it all yourself when these guys have been designing and implementing it for 10 years and thought through all the problems you don't yet know you have yet to face. Instead, start by prototyping your game on Worldforge. That's an official Free Gamer blog mandate / recommendation. :-)

GearHead2 0.532, lots of bugfixing.

I know I'm missing something other than screenshots and good jokes... there's a game release I've forgotten to mention. Sadly, for comedians everywhere who get relatively funnier when I'm typing, I have to go.

Eye of the Tiger

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you.

Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details.

It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video:

Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track.

There's a new development release of Oolite, the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 (announcement, changelog) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project.

FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say.

Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video:

Open Octane, announced in the forums, aims to be a fast paced car combat game where you can destroy most things in the game world. You can see the car crashing through trees and fences in the demo below:

Open Octane physics demo 2 from The Oracle on Vimeo.

It reminds me of another open source game that I can't remember right now as it's late and I have other things to do. I'm sure I'll remember later or somebody will post in the comments the game I'm thinking of...

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