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! :-)

VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!

Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

More Upcoming Releases

There is a release imminent for Mars: Land of No Mercy, which got it's own .org domain name recently. This isometric strategy mech game is developing at a steady pace and sees version 0.1.2 released next week.

New Ecksdee Level

The next version of Ecksdee is shaping up nicely. There's some preview screenshots of a new level for the next version (0.0.9) one of which can be seen here. There's another level in development which is more ambitious and targeted for the 0.1 release of Ecksdee. The Ecksdee developers will be at the Crystal Space conference this weekend in Aachen, Germany. An Ecksdee talk should take place on Sunday at 1pm local time.

There's another stunt-like Free game on the horizon: Sturmbahnfahrer. The game describes itself as, "Simulated obstacle course for automobiles." As such, the gameplay is oriented around using physics to complete the levels rather than racing.

There's a curious new freeware game based on OGRE. The Blob sees the player taking on the role of a blob of paint who must, it seems, paint the city of Utrecht. There are screenshots galore in the OGRE featured projects section. Sadly it seems to be Windows-only and you'll need a 2ghz PC.

Finally I'll round by with the Planeshift release. This iteration on the 0.3 "Crystal Blue" version squashes many bugs, adds optimizations, and introduces features such as improved item crafting, item decay, new spells, and improved character handling. Read the 0.3.015 changelog for more details.