Stunt Rally now comes with spaceships and cool ancient cities!

Stunt Rally 2.4... talk about feature creep, but I am not complaining ;)

See more pictures of the release here, and don't forget to give some feedback on our forums.

Oh and you can now browse cars and tracks online.

DevCorner: Underapprechiated game engines

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily.

The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3. There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function.
On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces, which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its nut-bolted & mostly undocumented client side add-on on the already a bit arcane script language QuakeC.

Interestingly the idTech2 based engines get little attention though. I have highlighted a few nice game projects based in it in the past, but it is probably due to the fact that each project is hacking on their own engine fork, that none has gained prominence as a game engine on it's own. But feature wise the engines behind AlienArena, Overdose and Warsow are probably the most advanced.
The last one of these, has been probably the most overlooked, with the game itself not exactly open-source friendly and the engine being developed more or less behind closed doors. It seems however that this has changed now, although given recent project news it is unclear what made them change their approach. But an all new version of it is now on Github with the main developer mentioning a few really nice changes here. Let's hope it isn't just a "source-drop" of a dying project, as after digging into it a bit (the documentation is really fragmented and lacking) I have to say that it includes a few really awesome features not commonly seen in other FOSS engines:
Besides being really performant, it is fully scriptable and has some quite unique multiplayer features like awards, friendlists and persistent game statistics. It also seems to make good process in having easy to edit GLSL shaders, which I have realized is a much rarer feature than I originally thought. Last but not least it has a really modern looking and fully scriptable menu and HUD.

Ah and before I move on to non-idTech based engines I should mention Engoo for those looking for a modernized software rendering engine based on idTech1 (there was some controversy over it, so I am trying to show some support for its further development here).

Ok, that covered, what are some maybe under appreciated non-idTech 3D engines?
First of all I should probably mention the well known ones for the sake of completeness: Cube2, Ogre3D and the new big player Torque3D. All of which are IMHO still failing to provide a good platform for easy game creation (mainly due, following the same order: in-fexibility & lack of scripting; huge mess of independent parts & bad toolchain; lack of Linux port & buggy and overly complicated toolchain).

One of the shining but lesser known examples of trying to improve the status quo is the jMoneky3 engine. Even though it is still a bit bare-bone (e.g. lacking game frameworks) the nicely integrated SDK and the great new node based GLSL shader editor keeps on attracting my attention. Similary the BlenderGameEngine sure has a few great advantages due to its tight integration. Sadly it seems to be the unliked stepchild of the Blender3D project though, which some quite serious limitations and awesome additions like the candy branch never reaching the the main release.

Then there are the still very much alive big names of the past: Irrlicht and Crystal Space. I am not exactly sure why those never quite reached the required mass to become the engines of choice, but I guess the license mess around Irrklang (and other non free but more or less required addons) and the CS Yo Frankie disaster might have to do with it. But at least Crystal Space was accepted as a hosting organization for this year's GSoC again, so they must be doing something right.

Last but not least, I would like to give a mention to a relatively new contender: Octaforge, which has supplied a steady stream of updated betas lately. The interesting things about Octaforge is that it takes all the good things from Cube2 and combines it with a much updated renderer (Tesseract) and full lua script support. But sadly it isn't quite there yet, and the move to a scripting language required the removal of all the nice game-code that it inherited from Cube2.

As closing remarks I have to admit that this article was rather lopsided towards FPS game engines (and more general purpose ones). Of course there are many great other game engines in the FOSS sphere that focus on RTS or (MMO)RPG games etc. I do however feel that many of the grievances voiced here probably apply there too, but maybe it isn't quite as frustrating there as in the FPS genre.
But if you have some better insights into those type of engines feel free to comment below!

tl;dr: the author (as an old school modder) is frustrated that after all these years there still isn't an FOSS FPS engine that can be modded as comfortably as the Half-Life2 engine or UDK. Don't miss the new qfusion stuff though.

SuperTuxKart accepted in GSoC2013!

Google's Summer of Code, is an annual sponsorship of programmers to improve selected open-source programs (or games :D ).
This year, quite a few interesting FOSS game projects got accepted (again) and one being our very own friends of the SuperTuxKart project.

Read more about their role as a mentoring organization here. So how about applying as a participant yourself and helping out this great FOSS game?

You can also browse other accepted mentoring projects here, if SuperTuxKart isn't your thing. Other notable FOSS game (engine) projects accepted are:

• Battle for Wesnoth
• WorldForge (Hosting also Ryzom Core & CEGUI)
• Crystal Space
• OGRE3D
• Blender 3D

Nice summer of coding ahead :)

Open Source Game Engines Updates

OGRE 1.6.0 aka Shoggoth is the newest version of the acclaimed 3D engine. I don't understand anything that's on the changelog, but it obviously goes beyond bugfixing and tweaking. :)

There are no recent pre-compiled packages available, so the source way is the way to go, for now.

The Infinity Engine's clone GemRB had some DONEs added to it's TODO, when version 0.3.1 was released a month ago.

OpenMW, an OGRE-based engine for TES3's game data, is now 0.5-versioned. Considering that the project started in this year's june, this number is quite impressive! Does this mean that we will have a final version of OpenMW by the start of 2009's summer? :D

However, animations, interaction and user interface are not yet implemented. Also: check out these videos that show the progress of the engine so far.

cocos2d-iphone is yet another LGPL-ed game framework and you can probably guess the platform it's designed for :). However, freedom freaks will argue that free software can not exist on an iPhone.

Ignoring all that, I find the Video presentation of the engine very spiffy. It demonstrates all the features in a more entertaining way than the raw text listing over here.

The Kambi VRML game engine now contains a demo of Precomputed Radiance Transfer. It has something to do with real-time lighting I think.

English transcription of "Hobby Game Development" (neues, 3sat)

Narrator: On first sight it looks like the commercial online role-playing game Ultima Online. On the second the viewer might spot one or another change. Maybe even something special, which doesn't even exist in the original game.

This game is named Iris 2, built on top of Ultima Online and is freely available online. It was developed by hobby game developers.

It's their hobby, just like others knit pullovers in the evening. Florian Fischer and Iwan Gabovitch develop games in their free time. What's the thrill of developing games on your own?

Florian: It's just fun to be creative and to express this creativity. Games are super for that.

Iwan: First I stopped playing commercial games and started searching for new, interesting games. I found many freeware games and then came across the open source scene, where also games get developed, where
it's easy to contribute, without having to get involved too much.

Narrator: Most developers are not professionals but they have lots of potential and ideas, which they want to share and to put into practice with others.

Free software is being used, which is available gratis online. For example to create graphics of special effects.

For the 3D visualization, Florian works with OGRE. OGRE is open source software, which can be copied, distributed and used without limitation. Working with free software excites the developers.

Florian: Others can download our code, can compile games on their own, can try own things and can improve the programm. The principle of open source is nice: I give something and, as I use open source tools, I also take something.

Narrator: Usually each developer works seperately on his computer but once a year the hobby developers meet live.

The event Dusmania was initiated so that developers could exchange experience, but of course there has to be some actual development too. In nine hours, they had to develop a game. The group of Iwan and Florian created "lalalove", a game in which sounds have to be generated to make people happy.

Iwan was responsible for the graphics in lalalove. First he sketches the images, before layouting them on the PC.

Somebody who invests so much love and free time into game development could work for commercial game producers, but this doesn't interest the community.

Florian: We don't have to follow any rules, we can implement every idea and we can throw it out too. We can be as creative as we want to be and this is fun. We can create prototypes of games and then say "we like this game principle" or maybe someone else in the community likes it and develops it thurther. I find this freedom fascinating.

Narrator: One who wants to experience developing games on his/her own, finds a lot of tips on the web. Beginners are also able to get into the scene easily.

Free Gamer is an online community for hobby game developers. It consists of a blog, a forum and a wiki. The forum is for discussions. On the wiki articles can be published and freely edited. For example there is a list of open source 3D game engines, which everyone can use for his own games.

If someone prefers to play rather than develop, won't be disappointed. Games of all sorts are available on the net. For example the cute SuperTuxKart. Instead of Mario, a penguin drives against the tree.

End of transcription. Please not that all text by the Narrator is not freely licensed and it's copyright is owned by 3sat.

Please note that simplification and generalization are unavoidable if you want to squeeze a topic into four minutes. There are of course people who are interested in commercial application of open source and there are open source game developers who would like to work in non-free, commercial game developer companies.