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

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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

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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

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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

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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? :-)

Releases on the Horizon

Well what would you know. There actually was plenty happening yesterday just I wasn't looking in the right places...

The assualt course racing game Sturmbahnfahrer has been renamed for reasons of political correctness. The new name is Stormbaan Coureur (dutch for "assault course racer") and there is a new release, version 1.5, which has save points, a half pipe, turntables, brakelights and more. It is currently only available as a source download, but hopefully that'll change soon. Whilst the game is aimed at Linux, it uses PLIB and ODE so is theoretically compilable on anything those two support (which is all major platforms).

Crashtest

Stormbaan Coureur is also the basis for another game - crashtest, the education crash test simulator for Linux. Interesting... :-)

There's also a new version of the Atomic Tanks. It's a worms clone and the project makes regular releases. Good stuff.

There's a lovely long post on the Vega Strike devblog from the project leader: version 0.5.0 looks a little closer! Basically the summer has given several core developers time to smash through bugs in SVN, implement some smart new features, and create an improved universe to roam about in. The only word of caution is that it seems VS SVN needs lots of memory. Hopefully they can slim that down a little prior to release.

There's an update in denial of project death on the Ecksdee wiki. It's been a while since the last release of this Wipeout-style futuristic racing game. There's been lots of development activity so hopefully that will result in a playable release in the near future.

And probably the best bit of news for the day - Freeciv 2.1beta6 is going to be out in the next few days. They built a 2.1beta5 release but it had a fatal flaw in it so announcements were shelved and a beta6 release is planned once the problems are ironed out. I look forward to it! :-)

Gate 88 to become open source?

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D

I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph.

The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0.

Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life...

The i-team project gets a new forum, meaning I have one less reason to browse Ubuntu's! Yay! It also got a wiki. By all accounts there has been quite a lot of coding going on by the i-team guys so I'm hopeful we'll see something fairly soon.

The rather more mature Atomic Tanks project, another game similar to Scorched Earth / Worms, just released version 2.4 of their game. The game is portable to Windows and Mac OS X although there only seems to be a Linux binary (rpm) for the latest version. According to the release announcement it also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)

It seems that the rather cool freeware abstract RTS game Gate88 has an open source future. I encourage people to lobby the author in a friendly manner to speed up the process. I got in touch yesterday although he has yet to reply.

Mechanized

Remember Mech Commander 2? Well, you might not, because I was originally thinking of Mech Warrior 2 when I saw it [I loved that game] but Mech Commander 2 looks cool none-the-less and Microsoft have released it [some time ago] under their own shared source license [whatever that means]. No free download on the page other than a source download so I don't quite get what the point of that is. The only place I know to grab the source is on the liberatedgames.com page for Mech Commander 2. So I guess this is only for fans to fix bugs as I get the impression the game media/data is not under a 'free' license. However there is scope for a Linux port if somebody were so inclined.

I did not know the original GTA and GTA2 were freeware these days. Grab them from liberated games. I don't know whether they work in WINE. It was quite nostalgic running over people in a stolen car in top down chases.

Atomic Tanks 2.0 final is out. Woo!

FIFE 2007.0 is also available. They are pining for a developer to focus on the level editor so that people can start making custom mods for FIFE rather than it being limited to just playing Fallout on Linux. Speaking of game engines, the GemRB team (for playing Inifity-based games like Baldur's Gate) keeps grinding away and released 0.2.8 recently. There's also a new Linux installer for GemRB so it should be a bit more conventient to use.

Freedriod RPG 0.10 came out a week or so ago. It's a good Tux-themed isometric RPG although I find it quite confusing in terms of what your purpose is other than wandering around fighting robots when I played it a year or so ago.

In another news snippet, one of my favourite FOSS games SCOURGE is heading towards a new release. It's starting to gather a bit of a community so starting to become a little less rough around the edges. There's a new official website - www.scourgeweb.org - and now 10 chapters of storyline to play through.

It's Been Brutal

Happy New Year everybody! I apologise for the lack of Free Software game commentary over the festive season but I was busy damaging my health in fun ways.

Anyway.....

Brutal Chess 0.5.1 is out! Brutal Chess is a game inspired by the ancient Battle Chess. A quick follow up to the strangely-not-mentioned-on-happypenguin 0.5.0 release which introduces a new codebase, AI of various difficulties, md3 support, and generally lots of other major-update-goodness. The simpler 3D chess game glChess released 1.0.1 on New Year's eve.

I am having a strange sense of de-ja-vu here because I have written this all before only I was under-the-influence of several substances and Blogger does not autosave drafts as I am accustomed to with GMail. Please implement this Blogger people!

Atomic Tanks 2.0-beta2 is also out. Despite the "2.0" in the version number, I don't believe there is that much different between the 2.0-beta2 and 1.5a but it got the game mentioned on Free Gamer so it must be worth it.

The ambitious Free Ryzom project failed to get the rights to the game. They were not able to compete with other commercially-rooted offers to take on the flagging MMORPG so were overlooked by the court deciding what happened to the company behind Ryzom.

The freeware and free-to-play MMORPG Eternal Lands released version 1.3.3 of their client with new monsters and maps. One of my friends played EL extensively. It looked very social but very boring. Lots of slow and repetitive menial tasks to level up seemed to be the order of the day but it could have been because he was playing the game in a daft way [risk-free levelling instead of fighting].

And finally in a move a tiny bit off-topic for this site, I'm going to plug musikCube. This music player/manager for Windows went 1.0 a few weeks ago and I've been enjoying it ever since on my work machine. I'd long been looking for a music player other than Winamp [I don't understand why people like Winamp so much - if you have more than 3 songs it's crap for managing them] or iTunes [barf]. The previous version of musikCube was good but had a few minor problems and development seemed to be stalled but it seemed the author was simply working away quietly instead of flagging noisily. Anyway, it rocks so if you have to use Windows then I highly recommend this Free Software music player. I think musikCube has a very bright future.

I'm sure I had some more games to talk about but I forgot..... :P