Coldest, LinWarrior, Metallblech - Mech Combat Action Games

I stumbled upon an older release of Coldest while making space on my HDD for game video recording, Metallblech popped out of nowhere recently on our forums with awesome art and I still haven't tried Linwarrior's latest release. Time for a mech games post!

Mechs are big robots and they make sounds like this and you can have great fun assembling them and then blowing stuff up!

Metallblech

Mashup of Metallblech's art

Planned as a game for Syntensity, there are many models ready for usage in Metallblech, but (IIRC) not one line of code has been written yet and the project is desperate for programmers. ;)

Coldest

Coldest: mech stomping, super weather, lasers overheating

Coldest actually allows you to assemble the weapon systems of your mech. That's quite an important part for this genre: first, carefully assemble your mech, then brutally disassemble enemy mechs! A readme would be quite a good addition.

The command `svn co https://www.nemebean.com/svn/coldest/` will allow you to pull the latest code [EDIT: and for more instructions check out this wiki page.]

Coldest code is under GPL, art is under who knows what. (Actually I do know that both textures and sounds wouldn't qualify as free-as-in-freedom free. :) )

Coldest's mech configuration menu

Coldest solo test [tinyogg]

LinWarrior 3D

Unfair 4 vs 1 at level start? Check!

Since the last time Free Gamer reported about LinWarrior, the 2010_03_20 "Hadron Collider" version was released (download here). Besides the fact that textures and models have been licensed under "good" CC licenses, code tweaks and visual fixes, the MD5Mesh format is now supported.

Mouse control is definitely the one thing I would like to see implemented ASAP.

Say hi to these rockets!

LinWarrior gameplay [tinyogg]

For some reason any video I recorded of LW3D would not show the dirty and brown ground texture, I'm sorry for the distorted view on the game caused by this!

Conclusion

I like mech games alot!

alot!

What do you people think of this genre? Do you prefer tactical, turn-based over action 3D mech games? What's the one thing you want to be able to do in following versions of the games I introduced here? (I want to be able to shoot off legs!)

Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

Update 379

Todays date is 07/08/09 if you're not a silly yank (m/d/y wha'?) and it made me think about how long the blog has been going. 379 posts... quite a lot! It's been a while since I started doing this blog. Who knows how far it'll go before life moves on, eh?

I originally started out to make a place that documented all the worthwhile Free software game projects. I stumbled a bit along the way - the original version of the blog (for those who don't remember) had a nice list down the side. Now we just have this broken old page that is too much of a PITA to edit and update. Hopefully one day I'll find the time and energy to sort it out properly.

Without a good central resource* of worthwhile projects, it can be easy for things to get lost in the Internet haze. People complain about a lack of polished FOSS games but there's more out there than you realise, even if some are still in active development. Then there's those that probably fell by the wayside because they just failed to penetrate the public view.

Update: as commentor Bram points out, Libregamewiki is a pretty decent resource, although not ideal - it misses comments, ratings, tagging, features to make it easier to get straight to the content you are looking for.

Update2: there is also the list of Complete open source games on the FreeGameDev wiki, but this omits many projects that are very promising and playable.

Shotgun Debugger is a fun, polished, top down GTA-style action game. It's well done, although I didn't get too far, because I'm a busy bee y'know.

People often lament the lack of FOSS single player 3D RPGs. Arbarlith II happens to be one of those although I haven't played it so have no idea how well done or how deep or how long the game is. It looks interesting though!

Lips of Suna is a very ambitious MORPG (not typo). If beautiful graphics and destructible voxel terrain don't appeal to you, then the developer focusing on gameplay must be applauded.

Grumbel's Mech

Linwarrior 3D is a mech warrior game that's been in slow and steady development since 1999. The mech models are a bit low detail, but it is a playable game. The website is one ad-ridden atrocity with no recent information on it, and no screenshots of the later versions other than some mosaic.

Qubodup put together a video of it.

I wonder if they know of and could make use of Grumbel's mech model and his other FreeMech concepts?

Speaking of long running projects, the Combat Simulator Project seems quite active at the moment (look at the project page and forums). Love planes? Love fighter planes? Get involved.

Knights (or Amiga Knights if happypenguin.org is to be believed) is a 2 player action/quest game. It looks fun, I might try to play it with my son some time.

Crimson Space

Crimson Space is a very interesting looking Elite-style 3D space trading game. Sadly development seems to have ceased circa 2002, but not before the developer implemented the ability to enter the atmosphere of planets and skim the oceans. This is the first time I encountered this game and purely by chance (linked as a 'similar project' on a Sourceforge project of mine). It's a shame development stopped and you have to wonder, if it had the kind of buzz Vega Strike has enjoyed, where it might be now had development been ongoing.

If I ever do a sequel to the Top 10 Projects To Revive (I'm collecting another list) then Crimson Space is sure to be in it.