Outlaws on Interstates

A little bit late today, but that's ok because tomorrow is Sunday, a Holy day, a day of rest, so I don't have to post. :-D

Eek, where to start?

Tilt-n-Roll is an innovative open source project that uses the tilting mechanism in modern laptops to recreate the classic wooden labyrinth experience. GPL, runs on Lin, Mac, and Win. What more could you ask for?

Version 1.4 of the semi-open source 3D RPG game SoulFu is available for download from Aaron Bishop's homepage. The page only lists .exe downloads but I'm sure Linux versions will appear in the official forums sooner rather than later.

SoulFu minivid

Soul Fu creator Aaron has responsed to the general querying of his "unique" distribution methods for the game:

I wanted to make a good game, and I do want people to improve it -- I simply don't have the time or desire to do it myself. Getting millions and millions of people to play the game is a goal, but SoulFu is a lot of things... It's a little experiment in creative marketing, an object lesson in morality, a nice résumé, and a tool for would-be game makers. I personally think SoulFu is more fun than most games you'd buy in the store -- they sell the sizzle, not the steak. And it has the potential to be much more, especially if you get a couple of friends together...

The game has a lot of interest and support. If, from the get go, he'd released it as open source, set up merchandising with cafepress and added Google ads to his sites, he'd be making more money than he is now and SoulFu would have many more people contributing to it and helping him market it.

So, yesterday I commented on how similar Automanic and Interstate Outlaws were. The main author of IO dropped me an email:

Just letting you know whats going on with Automanic, as you seem to be hanging out for it. I'm the guy that was working on it, but I've since dropped Automanic, and am now coding Interstate Outlaws. That's probably why they seemed similar to you :) You should try IO, i think it is better than Automanic was, and is probably similar to what Automanic 0.3 or maybe 0.4 would have been.

D'oh.

After posting I did think to myself this could be the case but was busy with other stuff so didn't go back and post a note saying as such. Still, not much to say other than, "Common Sense 1 - 0 Charlie". That and Interstate Outlaws is a way cooler name than Automanic. ;-)

Java Classic RPG project has another snapshot release, showing off day-night cycles and lots of foilage. It's starting to look quite cool although a long way off being an actual game, but every step is a step closer. :-)

Also version 2.2.0 of Bygfoot Football Manager has been released. Not much change from the 2.1.x releases other than stability and translations. I still don't like the UI but haven't had time to work on my own creation yet... *evil grin* soon, my children, soon...

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. ;-)

Marching Onwards

Bygfoot Football Manager development has been resumed. *Cheers!* The latest unstable release is 2.1.1 and contains updates to the UI, the addition of a "luck" factor to make long term success more challenging, and new country definitions.

Bygfoot is a good game. I played version 2.0 a fair bit because I've always been partial to football management games. However, the UI is atrocious. It's clumsy, it does things you don't expect, it forces you to do things you should not have to. For example...

In football you tend to have a first team - that is, your 11 best players - with substitutes to cover that first team. So typically, assuming no injuries or tiredness, you always start with the same 11 players. This is by far the most common approach. However in Bygfoot when you make a substitution in a game, the "team change" is carried over past the game. This forces you to manually undo substitutions after every game. Being a management simulation, this makes the game more tedious than it should be.

Another example; in every single football management game I have ever played, hitting the "next match" button takes you to a screen where you verify your team selection before playing. It's the last thing you do - since just before the game you know who is fit to play etc. In Bygfoot, "next match" jumps straight into the match. If you forgot to undo a substitution, or just bought a new player and forgot to adjust your team sheet, or just got a player back from injury but did not check your team sheet, (there are a 100 cases where you need to check your team sheet) then too bad because the game has already started. So, since checking your team before a match is something you almost always want to do, why does the game not facilitate this need instead of presenting a situation of potential frustration?

Once a bit of intelligent thought is put into the UI then Bygfoot will be a very fun game. Now development has restarted, I am hopeful. :-)

Also seeing a new release recently is Secret Maryo Chronicles. This Maryo-clone is improving with each release although performance on my Windows machine is still appalling for a 2D game. I will try it at home on my Linux box later.

I tried the latest beta of Freeciv today. The SDL client looks neat but was sluggish and unstable, crashing very easily after 20 or so turns each time I tried it. The GTK2 client was much more stable but not as nice looking. Anyway, I'm guessing there's a long time before the final 2.1 release so hopefully the SDL client will improve because it looks much nicer than the GTK2 client. Again there were UI issues, but it's improving with each release. :-)

I wonder if there's anything more I can moan about today? Who made this cup of tea? It tastes horrible! Oh, wait, I made it. Oops!

Actually a quick request. I want to do an isometric FreeGamer logo as part of the ongoing farcical saga that is the redesign of this site. If anybody knows of a good isometric font that I can snaffle, or a good tutorial on creating isomtetric 3D text, please speak up!