The Best Way To Play

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release.

FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development.

NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!"

Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their own game engine, which seems a little superfluous given the myriad of Freely available game engines. Anyway, there's a long way to go with TTNA but the goal was so endearing, I just had to mention it.

Open Source representatives in mod-of-the-year awards 2007 on MODDB. It's one of those annoying pages that tries to make you watch a video you probably don't want to watch. Press 'next' (beneath the video) a couple of times to get to the results. Tremulous (#5), World of Padman (#4), and Warsow (#4) are the open source representatives while BSG: Beyond the Red Line (#1) is a standalone freeware game that uses the freespace2 source code project. Quite a domination and vindication that open source engines make a big difference to mods that would otherwise struggle to survive the changing times.

Two popular open source games that have gone a while without a release are close to release - Vega Strike 0.5.0 and Scourge 0.20 are imminent.

A quick thanks to everybody who submitted information for todays post, in comments and emails and the forum. This is probably the first time that most of the information was provided by others and I'm just putting it in a post. Perhaps one day Free Gamer can be evolved to be more community-driven but for now it's good to have people feed information because it means I can post even if I don't have much time to look things up.

Beyond The Red Line

Welcome to post number 100 on Free Gamer. Slowly I am finding out how to push blogger to it's limits. The list is starting to look much better, now that the layout is getting there. The tedious work of populating it with real information is looming. Once that is done, several more mini-lists will sprout up.

Anyway, back to the daily grind of talking about Free Software games. It's a hard knock life, it is. ;-)

Starting with Freeciv, which saw 2.1beta4 released (download) over the weekend. (Not sure how I missed that yesterday.) It fixes many crashes so hopefully should be a lot more stable than 2.1beta3 which, in my experience, was fairly ropey. Initial feedback seems to be pretty good.

I created some Ubuntu packages for Freeciv-2.1beta4. I felt like doing a good deed for the day, or something like that.

Beyond The Red Line

Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line is a game being developed by fans for fans of the series and is based on a modified version of the open sourced Freespace2 engine. It looks fantastic! They just released a demo of their work so far.

Since it is a total conversion (i.e. not a mod) you do not need the origianl Freespace2 game [media] to play, making this game Free! Another cool 3D arcade space shooter joins the mix. Awesome. :-)

I've not mentioned Open City for a while. This 3D Sim City inspired title is slowly taking shape. The last release was showing a lot of promise and I'm hopeful the next release (thriftily labelled 0.0.5) should have all the essential elements of a city management game.

Iris2

Another game that saw a release over the weekend was Iris2. This is a complete rewrite using the OGRE 3D engine. It looks very tasty indeed. Whilst you do need the original Ultima Online files, you can download a trial version for free and use it to play unlimited on free shards as it only locks you out of official shards (shards being servers).

Music tip:

Rooster & Peralta - Pornokopia (Kobbe & Leeds mix)

PS. Please comment on the new list format. Good feedback early on means less work later on fixing it!