Top 10 Projects To Revive

The great thing about open source is a project can never become extinct - there is always a chance of it being brought back to life either by the original authors who re-find their motivation, by new contributors who see the potential, or a mixture of both.

Here are the top 10 games, complete with cliches, I'd like to see return to the development scene and back on the road to completion.

1. Bloodmasters

home • project

This gorgeous 3D top-down action game was released as open source last year after indie developer Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden found he'd lost motivation to continue with the project. It's a complete game with great graphics and needs a good C# developer to pick it up, port it to Mono, and help restore the community.

2. Project Citadel

home • project

A very nice looking turn based strategy game set in World War II.

The game reached a playable state before it's development team ByteWare stopped playing the development game.

3. Windstille

home • project

This project isn't technically dead - lead developer Grumbel occasionally bumps it with more concept work - but it's definitely in hibernation and progress is frustratingly slow.

Grumbel is actively seeking writers and developers so the prospects of reviving the project are quite good - no organizational work required.

4. Emilia Pinball

home • project

Come on, who wouldn't love a great Free pinball game? Emilia Pinball is a fairly solid 3D pinball game that is playable, if a little "bare bones" in it's current form. A better table editor, some more tables, and a bit of love to the user interface and ball physics and this game would be a corker.

Hopefully one day a pinball wizard will resume improving this game and add another table or two as well as a few more features.

5. Labyrinth of Worlds

home • project

Ultimate Underworld is my favourite ever game, and this is a project to create a new game based on it the 2nd instalment of the popular series. Since these days the world of Ultima is somewhat abandoned by it's foster parent company EA, I hoped projects like this and Underworld Adventures would have gained more support.

6. Boson

home • project

The promising 3D RTS came a long way but never quite snowballed despite having nice graphics, original gameplay, and most of the hard work already done. I think the dependency on KDE libs was hurtful to attracting contributors.

It is original, playable, has a full set of units for two sides, nice graphics. It has everything going for it except momentum. Oh but to borrow a bit of enthusiasm from the Spring project, and Boson could spring back into life.

7. MyLink / MyNet

home • source

MyLink is inspired by the rather cool game UpLink. After encountering difficulties the author started from scratch with the name MyNet, but after hitting difficulties again (with motivation this time) the project got abandoned. The author is waiting for a new maintainer to step up to the plate. Until that happens, consider this project disconnected.

8. Civil

home • project

Civil is a cross-platform, turn-based, networked strategy game, which allows players to take part in scenarios set in historical battle theatres. The U.S. Civil war was the primary focus before they started losing the battle and development stopped in 2005. Written purely in Python/Pygame, there should be plenty of people able to help out.

Battle simulations, how could that fail to be fun? When development dies, that's how!

9. Slickworm

home • project

An innovative FPS where the terrain was deformable. It went through a few rewrites before the lead developer went silent. He was obviously talented and probably snapped up by a commercial company - a shame for the open source game community as it blows a big hole in the future for Slickworm; this potentially brilliant game looks like it'll never be more than a tech demo.

10. Battle for Antargis

home • project

An original game that mixes elements of strategy and role play, this project enjoyed sustained development for several years and looked very promising before development tailed off as 2008 began. Hopefully somebody will pick things up again as this is one of those projects that counters the 'open source can only copy' popular criticism.

It had another original edge to it, it was probably the first significant Ruby game project, which probably doesn't help when it comes to attracting developers.

Honorable Mentions

Here's a few that I thought also had potential:

• SilverTree RPG
  
  The lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth started to make an RPG! There was joyous celebrations and wide eyed expectation as SilverTree was unleashed on the public. Then he moved on to another project and the with it so went the development activity of the RPG.


• Mars: Land of No Mercy
  
  A 2D mech strategy game that could be nice if development had no slowed to a near stand still. Every now and again something seems to happen that nearly equates to activity, so it didn't quite make the list.


• GalaxyMage
  
  It once looked like a great new strategy game but the developers and the website went AWOL. Enthusiasts resumed development under the moniker Galaxy Mage Redux but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere other than the archives.


• 
  FreePop
  
  This was an attempt to recreate and improve upon the iconic Populous games of the early nineties. It never quite got to a playable state before the developer declared the project dead and moved on.


• Legacy of Magic
  
  Another very promising war strategy game with very nice 3D graphics that never managed to emerge from abyss of alpha releases.


• Fuzzy Adventure
  
  It came about at a time when the only platform games on Linux were SuperTux and XEvil. A quick burst of activity was never turned into long term development. I suspect that Fuzzy Adventure was just SuperTux with different graphics (gameplay was nearly identical) but that's never been confirmed.


• Reaper3D
  
  A space shoot-em-up, this game was neary completed before it stalled.


• OpenParsec
  
  This 3D space combat game was the darling of its time but very dated now. The developers declined to open source it for several years, and by the time they did the times, and with it the community, had long since moved on.

Another games you wished were still going?

Update: some more games that would be cool to revive:

• Dark Oberon is an original 2D isometric RTS whose graphics are created by taking images of melded plasticine models.


• Cspop, a Crystal Space populus-inspired game (svn, no homepage) previously mentioned (twice) on Free Gamer and announced on the happypenguin forums.


• Zugspiel, a 3D train tycoon game (forum) which never quite made it after the author became inactive.


• FreeTrain, a 2D isometric city & rail network building game. It needs an enthusiastic C# developer (contact me directly or post in the FreeGameDev Help Offered forum if you are interested).

Names, Games, and 150k Wardrobes

Unnamed Game

This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid".

Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum. Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?) after I registered and pointed out this problem. So until things change I'm probably not going to be able to give an update on any TPB3D progress. They do seemed to have designed a lot of flat rides (youtubes) but no roller coasters yet, and certainly nothing close to a playable game. Still, a good one for theme park or Theme Park (I loved that game) enthusiasts.

Bloodmasters

Hey, Windows guys, go download Bloodmasters. Fast, furious fun. It's Free Software and C#. Hey Linux dudes and dudettes, go find some Mono expert to get it ported. I should mention this game more...

Tim "mithro" Ansell from the Thousand Parsec project got in touch recently:

...It is a framework (and games) for
building turn based space empire games. You can find out more at
http://www.thousandparsec.net/

We have recently been part of the Google Summer of Code and have written
up an announcement about the success of the project. You can find that
announcement here -
http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/news.php/2008-10-16-1400...

In a follow up email he goes on to say:

At the moment I am actively trying to get more people to actually play
Thousand Parsec games. The lack of players is reducing the motivation to
do releases and fix bugs (instead of tinkering with some random
feature). It also means that the quality and quantity of our output can
be quite low.

Thousand Parsec

The thing is, TP is introduced (by him, by the TP website) as a game framework. As a player looking for a game to play, a framework is not that interesting to me. You can play TP, so it is a game, but I think they have a perception problem. For example, Freeciv is a game and a framework. But it's a game first, and then when you get drawn in, you see all the different tilesets and mods. TP needs to sort out it's image and have a default game that is presented first if they want to catch more players. People looking for a framework will find it just as easily.

Qubodup wants to switch off blogger comments - we got some spam lately - and simply have a link to the forum after each post. Opinions welcome.

Develicious

SuperTuxKart 0.4rc1 has been released. It replaces the physics engine with bullet for collisions, and subsequently is far more fun to play. Some track improvements, a new character, better AI, music, and other features. I'll be honest, I thought 0.3 was unplayable because of the terrible collisions. I had a quick go of 0.4rc1 and it's much more fun. I still think the tracks are generally lacking but the game being more fun should encourage more contributors so hopefully we'll see some good tracks contributed this year.

If you love MarioKart or just love SuperTuxKart, and have some good ideas for tracks, sketch them down and contact the STK team who are very receptive. Also they are looking for original gameplay ideas to give STK it's own identity, so contribute those too if you have any.

FreeTrain

Bloodmasters

There's been a major development with the FreeTrain project. For those who don't remember, I ran a campaign asking for help translating FreeTrain to English. It's a mature open source game but was, until last year, only available in Japanese. We got it translated, but it was very Windows/.NET dependent and porting to SDL/Mono proved tricky. With the effort stalled, I asked on the Mono mailing list if anybody might be able to help. Within a few days a Mono developer provided a patch to make FreeTrain build against Mono! It still doesn't run, but things are a lot easier already and a Mono/SDL version should run on Linux and MacOSX, which will breathe new life into the project and it's community. Looks like 2008 could be a good year for FreeTrain. :-)

The FreeTrain project is looking for able C# developers (there are plenty and not-so-many C# games) to make it rock on Mono/SDL so don't be shy if you are a C# guy. ;-)

I reported yesterday that Bloodmasters was going to be released under an open source license - well developer Pascal vd Heiden was not just true to his word but very fast to act, and it can now be found in SVN on the Sourceforge project. The game is licensed under the GPL. It's 400mb though, not for the feint hearted. Note to self: this game needs a review.

I also mentioned yesterday we have a great new theme for the FreeGameDev forums (aka Free Gamer forums). I forgot to mention that it's not yet the default skin. You need to login (registration required) and switch to 'qubodup2' to see it. Edit: Due to an admin issue the new theme is currently not working. D'oh! Third time lucky tomorrow, eh?

Community Updates

Lots of activity amongst the FreeGameDev crowd. Qubodup has created an amazing new forum skin, so participating in the forums has never been a more pleasant experience than it is now, and he's still tweaking away. A new feature, Wikiwatch, a sort of planet for wikis, was added.

Now I just need to improve the blog (include announcements rss, update links, generally nicer layout) and FreeGameDev is go. 5.... 4.... 3... etc. ;-)

In terms of game news, it's gone a bit quiet, fortunately for me.

Glest with shadows

Bloodmasters

Glest got shadows. Purty. :-)

The OpenClou! team have put up their first model concepts, as seen on the Sourceforge project. Lovely!

Bloodmasters will soon be open source. It's a 3D top-down arcade shooter with plenty of blood. Will report on it more when it is. Yay for me. :-D

I wanted to put a screenshot up but Blogger is being lame... will put it up later. Edit: Done!

Bridge Builder 2006 is now available for Linux from here. It's only freeware (it'll be "eventually open source"). I spoke with the authors briefly so I'll strong arm them into believing. I'm sure I can think of a suitable way to coerce them into accepting Free Software is best. ;-)

For purists, there's still Construo and Bridge Constructor but the former isn't really a game and the latter is way behind in features, and both are somewhat abandoned.

Is your game violent in Rambo-esque proportions? Well you can label it with a suitable rating. Check out TIGRS and PEGI. Discuss in the forums here.