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).

Shadey

Shaders seem all the rage these days. Now Thunder n Lightening has support for them too just days after Danger from the Deep implemented shader support. Wavey reflecty shiney water. I smell pretty FOSS games! :-)

Boson

Actually the first FOSS game I remember getting such fancy effects was Boson. A 3D RTS, the codebase suffers from KDE dependencies which limit portability somewhat as well as making it a pain to install on Linux systems without KDE. Given how cool it looks, I'm sure they'd be much further on as a community if it was easier to install on non-KDE systems. I'm sure they would get much more developer interest if the game were available for Windows and Mac OS X and available in a format other than tarball for Linux.

Somebody just pointed me in the direction of Qonk, a space strategy game. It's in the early stages of development but has a much smaller scope than typical space strategy projects like FreeOrion, so is already very playable. Games only last a few minutes, and it is billed as, "a small build-and-conquer strategy game with very simple rules."

Finally, Bygfoot 2.2.0 was released mid-May. Strangely it didn't appear on the Game Tome or Freshmeat. It seems that new developers have taken on the mantle of improving this FOSS football management game, which can be downloaded for Windows and popular flavours of Linux and probably compiled on Mac and BSD systems. This is the only well-featured open source football management game going although personally I find the UI to be counter-intuitive. Other than that I found it a lot of fun when I played it last year so it can only be better now.

As a recovering Championship Manager addict (that game destroyed my teenage years) I'll probably not try too hard to get into Bygfoot. ;-)

Oh So Evil

I don't know how this game isn't more well known, but I only just found out about XEvil. This game is a cross between Commander Keen and Quake and it's very fun, if a little dated. Action packed and chaotic, it's all about extreme violence platform-style. Be warned, this game contains lots of violence and lots of adult language so really is not one for your kids should you have any.

I'm keeping an eye out for the next release of Privateer Remake or Privateer Gemini Gold. In the latter they are busy taking the rather garish low-res base and npc graphics and overhauling them, so the next release should be much more pleasing on the eye. When I downloaded PGG, I found the low-res bases too much of a clash with the gorgeous 3D space flight and it put me off considerably.

There's also a new release of Battle for Wesnoth around the corner. The amount of people contributing to this game is phenomenal and as such version 1.2 will look absolutely gorgeous. There's a massive amount of graphical polish going into the 1.2 release - lush new terrain graphics, superb portaits, and many unit updates - and a lot of new features in the game that will make it an even more pleasurable experience.

Also scheduled for a newer release is Boson. Whilst the release plan seems to have slipped a little, this is one of those open source games which has just chugged steadily away, incrementally improving without really setting alight the open source gaming community. It'd be nice to see them focus on the single player element a bit more because I think people are generally fed up of having to find opponents and engage in constant deathmatch style competition.

My opinion is that single player games are probably more valued by players, but the industry MMORPG / deathmatch polarisation has tilted development goals needlessly in favour of multiplayer gaming. I like to play a game casually to unwind, not get whooped by some ultra competitive online obsessive!

ORTS - A Free Software RTS Game Engine

OTRS

Well, look what we have here. Joining the likes of Boson, Glest, and TA:Spring/TA3D is another Free 3D RTS game: ORTS.

The interesting thing about ORTS is the motivation - the AI.

ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games.

<snip> ...the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines.

<snip> ... the ORTS project [is] a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games.

<snip> Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate tasks to AI helper modules of increasing performance.

The game is not yet released as a download although you can grab a daily snapshot and build it yourself. Is it going to be released any time soon?

We have a working platform-independent server/client RTS [3D] game engine... We are working on a standard ORTS game... By autumn 2006 we hope to have a working system which is interesting for both RTS players and AI researchers.

This is definitely one worth watching out for. AI agents are already publicly available. It could be a game that's tougher and less predictable than usual. Most games challenge me but I'm, er, challenged.

What I do like about it is that the AI won't cheat. There's nothing that pisses me off more about a game than lazy developers giving the AI daft advantages because they were too inept [or short on time] to come up a decent AI. I like to be beaten because something has been clever, not because it can unfairly see all my units or build things for half the cost!