A bunch of updates

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK.

So, where to start?

Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown, which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates, a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself:

Octaspire:Crates Tutorial

A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare), which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world".

If you are following the development of the promising turn based colony game Unknown Horizons (aka the artist formerly known as OpenAnno), their new development blog might be of interest. Oh and did I mention that FreeCol also got a bunch of updates lately?

Very neat is also the recent release of FreeOrion, a turn based space colonization game. It still lacks some important features to be really playable (combat and diplomacy), but otherwise it is already a pretty good looking game:

FreeOrion

Another game currently heavily updated game (engine) is OSARE, which aims to be a fully featured base to build Diablo like story lines/games with. An already slightly outdated (v0.08, newest v0.09) shows what can be done already:

OSARE loot drops

Another interesting project I came across lately is the Darkplaces based Blood Omicide, which is of course sadly based on copyrighted material. Overdose, a recently already mentioned open-source "in engine but not in media" (and even the engine code has yet to be released) game has recently shown some rather nice enemy model screen-shots. Furthermore their newest video is quite amazing in regards to the light rendering.

A game-engine and the games based on it that is probably vastly under-reported here on FreeGamer, is the Spring RTS engine. I guess it might be due to my dislike of Total Annihilation like RTS, but there is actually one (with public domain licensed media) that strays from that kind of RTS concept: Kernel Panic puts you right inside of a PC, and has quite a bit of nice uncommon game modi that break up the usual RTS grind.

Kernel Panic promo

I guess that's all for today... my link-list is not yet completely empty, but the rest will have to wait for another day ;)

HE'S ALIVE

*Qubodup's eyes shift left and right*

Qubodup mutters, "I smell death."

*Charlie jumps out from behind a tree*

"No! It's me!"

Or maybe Q meant death by a thousand of Charlie's bad jokes? I got jokes, man.

Ok, ok... games stuff. Enough inane joke stuff. Games...

FreeOrion 0.3.14 came out with a fairly mega changelog. A preview of the 3d space combat is in there, as well as lots of fixing and balancing and content enhancing. It's becoming a very deep game and once the 3d combat is done it'll be one of the stand out open source games you can play, and only getting better. Hats off to the developers for their dedication to realising their dreams, it's been a long haul. Here be a video:

FreeCol 0.9.3 just came out. Fixes ahoy! Good game, that, although I still don't understand how to play it. One day I'll swallow my pride and ask how the hell you assign hammers and build things.

Danger from the Deep 0.4 preview release for those who are a bit brave. It might torpedo your computer, yuk yuk yuk =). It's got great graphics, although is more of a simulation than a game - but that's a good thing in my book. Part of the fun in a submarine game is in the challenges that befell those unfortunate enough to end up in a watery grave. Ah, video ahoy:

XreaL. It's not dead. Actually there's a video in that link that will blow your mind, it looks so good. You won't be able to see the forest for the trees (that'll make sense if you see it). No youtube though here's a [rather dark] video showing off a few XreaL levels:

Looks like YAOSCSC (Yet Another Open Source Counter Strike Clone) is underway although this one is probably more likely to succeed than some of the other rather limp efforts. This one is called Code 43: Urban Warfare and it uses XreaL. It is formed by the people associated with the ET Mod True Combat: Elite which could never really be open source.

And now for something completely different. And I'm not talking about breaking English grammar rules by starting sentences with 'and'...

Runesword II is a 2D RPG made in 2001 and now open source. They released version 2.6 recently, which can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Bizarrely the 2.6 release announcement never seems to have been made outside of the forums. Sadly it is made in VB *ew* and can be run on Linux via Wine. Still, it looks like a fairly involved RPG game.

I eagerly anticpate Egoboo 2.8.0, which has been a year in the making. They got a new website.

Which reminds me. Nothing to do with it, but I haven't yet tried UFO:AI 2.3...

Non RTS strategy games

An update so quickly? Behold the Free Gamer world is coming to an end. :p

So, we mentioned some promising RTS games in the last update. OK, I forgot to mention Spring1944, but I am also a bit reluctant to mention Spring and its mods since it is such a pain in the backside to get it running correctly. :(

Back on topic... there a quite a few really great non RTS FOSS strategy games. I guess I don't really need to mention the classics to the typical reader of this blog, but Wesnoth, FreeCiv, FreeCol and UFO:AI are all very playable and good looking games! However there are others that get less attention and also some that show great promise!

Advanced strategic command

Advanced strategic command is one of those that gets relatively little news coverage, even though it is a really playable game. Granted, its graphics are pretty much the same as its big inspiration, the classic Battle Isle series, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right?

A new version was just released a few days ago, which finally also includes a tutorial for those new to this type of game.

Also interesting is the (German) Project: Battle Planets, which could be described as a MMOTBS based on ASC. It is not quite what you would expect from this description as most of the MMO part is done manually by human game moderators, which exchange ASC games states between players (sorry, it is a bit hard to explain exactly ;) ).

A similar game to ASC is Crimson Fields by the way, which has found its way to many mobile platforms.

Widelands

Another often neglected game is Widelands, which is obviously based on the classic game the Settlers (no not the Settlers of Catan, check Pioneers for that).

Widelands game play

The graphics could still be improved a bit, but it is shaping up to be a very faithful and fun re-implementation of that great classic game.

Unknown Horizons

While we are at FOSS re-implementations of great games... Unknown Horizons is continuing to become a Anno1602 clone of epic proportions. ;)

UH game play

It is not quite at the point where it could be described as a fully playable game yet, but you can expect it to become one relatively soon, I guess! (Another not quite playable but really promising game worth surely mentioning is FreeOrion by the way).

8Kingdoms

Last but not least, there is 8Kingdoms, which really is one of those games people don't even try after having a short glance at the screenshots. Yes, it's programmers art, albeit one that at least tried to hide it by having a plastic-like style for the figures. ;)

But if you actually try it, you will realize that even though it is a bit rough around the edges (why can't I set a custom wide-screen resolution :( ), the game play and the engine is already quite advanced.

What this game clearly needs is an artist taking over the graphical matters, and then this could quite quickly become one of those true FOSS strategy game gems!

What planet are you on?

Wesnoth Knight

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG Weapons

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

Simutrans Subways

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

January Sales

Everything is so cheap after Christmas. I mean, look what you can get for FREE! :-)

The FreeOrion project just released version 0.3.11, which comes with some polish of existing features and a few small new ones. Here's the announcement. Only a Windows binary is up at the moment, bah, source only from SVN. I complained. (I'm good at that.) There are statically compiled SVN binaries for Linux but you have to go digging to find them. Still, when digging you can find treasure, like this ship development thread. Purty!

UPDATE: here's the Linux binaries and here's a quick play guide - which you really do need, there's so many clicky thingamajigs.

Platinum Arts Sandbox, the game design tool based on the Cube 2 engine, saw version 2.3 released a few days ago. From the announcement:

Here are the awesome new features!

* New 3D sidescroller Mario like mode! Also there is a seperate RPG project, check the wiki! [link - note it is aimed at kids and in concept stage]

* Hotkeys that make it easier to save games, add materials, and lots more!

* New in game help section that displays all of the binds/key commands!

* Snow has been tweaked and updated :) Be sure to check out the new version of house :D

* Maps now generate cfgs on save! Also many various map tweaks.

* New main menu theme! To try other themes check out the options menu.

* Loads of new textures and new player skins.

* Tons of under the hood bug fixes and features.

* Thanks to ZKAT of virtualdarkarts.net there is a brand new great looking launcher!

Here's one of the developers, Mike, talking about different aspects of developing Sandbox, along with gameplay clips. Quite interesting.

The DungeonHack team has been active lately and it is finally starting to pay dividends with a reorganized and improved codebase now coming back to life. Early days, still, so I'll leave it at that.

Vikings is an open-source RPG, presumably based on Vikings. This model of theirs is mighty nice!

Pyweek. It's one of those contradictory things in life. Some nearly-cool games get done in a short space of time, but then when those efforts can't be put into bigger and fuller versions of the concepts you see in Pygame is somewhat frustrating. Still, some nuggets in there like AFF:City, a city building game based on the Angels Fall First universe. If they can get that much done in a week, why not spend a few months on the game and it'll be awesome, surely?

A less serious but more mind-bending game is the imaginately titled 4D Maze Game. Play it online in an applet or browse the source. I didn't really conceptually understand how the maze works, thus I failed to escape after going in random directions in 4 dimensions for a few minutes. I hope I never get stuck in a real 4D maze, I'll be in real trouble!

Game & engine news cluster

Nebula from FreeOrion

So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today?

On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae. Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds!

I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE. You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic!

OpenDungeons' map editor

OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome...

So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS!

There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer. But I have two problems with the game: 1. The controls are explosively sensitive and I was so far unable to overcome the first platform sequence in the first level. 2. The turning speed of my character is depending on the distance between bob and the camera, so when bob is standing back to a wall, it will be impossible to aim because the turning speed will be 40 degrees per 1 point mouse movement...

This apparently will not change:

Please note: the camera is not going to get much better than this. Minor niggles, etc. can be ironed out, but a full blown, intelligent and dynamic camera, as found in many multi million dollar budget games is not going to happen.

You can take a look at the first level of the game and at my issues with it in this gameplay video.

Also let me tell you that I appreciate very much, how Parallel Realities gave Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid a nice story and setting, and made it a fun to play game. So I'm not giving up on the 3d platform/shooter just yet!

I just found out that ja2-stracciatella, is based on the unfree (although open) Jagged Alliance 2 source code. :( Thanks to Lightkey of Holarse (de) for giving me the license link!

FIFE's map editor

FIFE 2008.1 has been released! The flexible, isometric 2d game engine has seen many changes: It is now licensed under the LGPL (GPL before), dependencies have been removed (no more tinyxml), it features a small example game and muuuuuuch moooooooore.

What *really* makes me interested in this release, is the inclusion of a map editor! I unfortunately haven't been able to compile FIFE (apparently due to an error in the unstable Debian sid distribution), so as soon as I install Arch Linux, I'll be bombarding you with mapping videos again!

FIFE Is no Fallout Emulator btw!

Nice render for OpenAnno

Speaking of FIFE: OpenAnno 2008.0 was completed (the game uses FIFE as an engine.) There have been some art and code and documentation additions. And new teammates also! :) OpenAnno will be represented at a german indy game dev meeting that I'll be visiting this weekend.

This just in: Simutrans 100.0 (r1867) has been released! Last time I checked it, the game was a Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone with pretty graphics and a deadly/unfair AI.

Good Morning Free Gamer

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world.

Blood Frontier, the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release.

Boarman in JCRPG

Woman by Grumbel

There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think).

There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, this and his other portaits are available under an open source license (CC-by-SA or GPL3) and you can find out more information, lavish praise, or even make requests (!) in this topic in the FreeGameDev forums.

In other fantasy-game news, DungeonHack progress continues and they finally have the project in SVN (direct link) so interested people can check out their progress which is apparently pretty good. It's a Daggerfall-inspired game, which can only be a good thing.

Did you know FreeOrion will soon have 3D combat? Check out this topic on the Ogre forums for some preview screenshots. In the meantime, they released 0.3.10 with the usual raft of bug fixes and minor improvements. Downloads are available, from different places, for Linux and Windows.

The White Chamber

Studio Trophis have released the source for their very lovely looking game The White Chamber. It's an anime themed 2D point and click horror adventure game. It requires the WinterMute engine and I'm not sure whether that's Free Software although it seems the source is available but under no specific license EDIT: - it's not open source at all. The White Chamber source is at the bottom of the Studio Trophis downloads page. It looks like it's all Windows-only =( but I could be wrong.

A while back I made some hullabaloo about Portalized, a perhaps-to-be-open-source better-than-Portal engine. Well, the guy working on it (who, by the way, is only 16 - shame on us all who are older and less productive than him) now has a blog with some interesting commentary on his efforts as well as some gorgeous screenshots. It doesn't look like it'll be open source any time soon but I don't think he's ruled it out either, and now he has help so it'll be worth watching. Version 0.1 is on the way, so there's something to look forward to.

Well, hopefully that satisfies your Free game news needs for another day or so...

FreeOrion 0.3.9 and SuperTuxKart 0.5

FreeOrion star map detail

Cheer, for a new release of the awesomely pretty FreeOrion has seen the light! This time both Windows and GNU/Linux builds are provided. Here are the features:

• New and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.)


• Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape


• Reworked drag-and-drop design screen


• New ship parts


• Python AI interface improvements


• Minor UI improvements


• Bug fixes

Check out the Roadmap to see what to expect from future releases!

FreeOrion icon art

OpenGL will be required in coming versions (currently it's semi-required). While I know that there are people who have old machines and countries where it's non-trivial to get reasonably fast hardware, I can't say that I blame anyone for using hardware acceleration and even making it a requirement. I think it's rather the job of Libraries to allow programming games which make use of OpenGL and will automatically disable effects and use software rendering when no acceleration is available.

SuperTuxKart 0.5

SuperTuxKart 0.5 has been released. Along with new and improved tracks, a new game mode, some new music and translations have been added (German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Swedish). Mac/Lin/Win binaries are available.

track-editor

I only realized SuperTuxKart's activity after their forum was created on the FreeGameDev forums. One example is the creation of the tile-based track-editor by Baskervil. There's also interest in making SuperTuxKart switch accessible.

A switch is an assistive technology device which replaces the use of a mouse, keyboard, controller or joystick which severely physically or cognitive disabled may find difficult to use.

In other news: New versions of Alien Arena, Everborn, LordsAWar and Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer. My compliments to nath for being very report-active on LGT. :)

Adonthell-artwork, FreeOrion Linux builds

Adonthell's broccoli bushes.

James Nash has kept working on vegetation sprites for Adonthell's art repository (which is quite meager right now.) He is using layers for producing the images.

What you don't see is the fact that in the original image I have the outlines and surfaces separated as individual layers so I can easily re-colour them to make variations. Equally I can hide some layers such as the leaves.

This way it is much easier to manipulate the images and to create a richer variety of objects. Layered images can be seen as "source" files for flat/"compiled" bitmaps. Great to know that people actually use this editing-friendly layered-images technique for producing game art.

Good news for Linux-users! Automatically built binaries of FreeOrion's latest SVN revision are available from psitronic.de/div/FO. They will allow you to play the game without having to build it, which isn't that easy on some distributions. Best thanks to kroddn! Windows builds are also available, but they are not as fresh... Sorry dear Win-users, but I see no other way for you, but to switch to Linux ASAP. ;) Anyways, here's a gameplay video while you download:

FreeOrion rev2473 gameplay

Cruise Control

I was close to putting some kind of melodramatic title like "the beginning of the end" but it would have been, well, melodrama so opted for something more accurate. The blog is going into cruise control. Less posts, less frequently. Some time in the next week or so the forum RSS feeds will get integrated into the blog and this will basically mean the community gets to post news here and the blog itself will be more article focused.

My part in this, other than the actual integration work, will be that any game updates I find I will now post in the Game Announcements section in the forum. People who want to make a fuss about their games can post in the Game Showcase section. Projects that need help can post in the Help Wanted section. All three threads will be the focal point of the blog frontpage.

These days there's a lot of activity in the forums and it's a better place to go for info than the blog. Also there's plenty of project-specific news to be found on the FreeGameDev planet.

So, here's the last "game update" throw of the dice from the various places I've visited in the last 2 weeks.

There's tons of action in the Apricot game blog. There's not much point in me summarizing it, there's lots of screenshots and explanations of the cool things they are implementing that should make creating 3D games using Blender much easier (relative to how easy it is now).

Teeworlds, formerly known as teewars, is now fully open source having released under a homebrew license that they wrote with consultation from some of the legal team at Fedora.

There is some really cool artwork being created for the really cool space strategy game FreeOrion, which is now at version 0.3.8 (renamed from 0.3rc8). There's more than just that one thread, but you'll have to look around a bit.

Cave 9 (freshmeat page) is a nifty looking 3d cave navigation game.

Developers are needed to port strategy game The Kings of the Dark Age to Linux. They will only make it open source if it can be ported first, and the project is current written in VB (ouch) so the port is basically a rewrite of the game in C++ or Python or anything other than VB.

Everything else I have is related to freeware games. Space Exploration dev 6 (fun little space exploration game), new Portalized video (that is just so f'ing awesome - more info on Portalized), Throw In 0.86 (kick-off inspired game in Blitzmax)

I'll finish up with a lovely video of one of the projects of the moment, JCRPG.

java classic RPG - animation and new char creation demo from Paul Illes on Vimeo.

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.

Saucey

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him.

FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely.

Sauer NYC

Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style.

Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is. It is, however, by far the best open source FPS technology and platform, as evidenced by games like Blood Frontier and Eisenstern. If they can polish the default gameplay of Sauer itself, it's a bonus. Blood Frontier has seen a number of feature additions that may or may not go back into Sauer SVN, but it'll be a great advert for Sauer when it's done.

Battle Tanks now has a level editor. It's a fun little game.

Short n sweet today. Adios!

Read All About It

Mars: Land of No Mercy, it was looking dead, but it's back! The website is back online and hopefully so is development. I would point out that it was always available on Sourceforge but an offline website can be a death knell for an open source game, so it's good to see things running again.

Ad Infinitum

Ad Infinitum, a 2D space strategy game that looks very promising although is very early on in development and, other than the Sourceforge project page, doesn't have a website yet. It is also currently Windows only (Linux support done using WINE) but it is licensed under the GPL so there's always a hope that will change.

Whilst there's a few online space strategy games, there's not too many singleplayer Free Software space strategy games out there (FreeOrion and ?) so I hope to see this one establish itself. There's alpha releases available for download.

A3DX

There's a new 3D artillery battle game about, called A3DX. The website, like the game, is in it's early stages of development. It looks very similar to Scorched 3D -- so much so that omebody suggested it was a fork but it's not. However, looking at the screenshots I'd say it's definitely not as Scorched 3D looks much more advanced (as is to be expected).

Hrm, what else...

The FreeCol team updated their website design - the previous design was over 5 years old.

No, that wasn't it. Erm...

Ah! ASC 2.0(.1) [Advanced Strategic Command] was released a couple of weeks ago. I think I missed it. This release is the culmination of years of work since the last stable series was introduced, and the community looks to be as strong as it has ever been. There's a multiplayer universe where you can pit your military wits against other players, and the AI isn't too bad either. There's a reasonable singleplayer element, although it's a bit short of being able to qualify itself as a singleplayer game. If the classic hex strategy games are your cup of tea, then definitely look at ASC as not only does it draw on the classic Battle Isle series, but it also has several years of steady development. It's available for Linux and Windows.

Free this free that O_o

Linux users can now get their hands on the latest version of FreeOrion, the turn-based space stategy project inspired by Master of Orion games, without having to compile it themselves. See this thread for details. It worked well for me, although the game is not easy to figure out and is incomplete - I couldn't work out how to do too much. However for fans of the genre the project is definitely worth following and I'm sure the FO guys would be glad of any extra help.

There's murmours over at the FreeTrain project - tangible progress on an SDL port is evident. One of the developers posted a screenshot with a basic UI much closer to the original A-Train games. Moving to SDL is the major hurdle for making FreeTrain run on Linux - currently it uses .NET and DirectX so can only be run on Windows. Forunately the project is moving towards Mono and SDL. :-)

Er, what else is happening? Not too much...

There's an opinion article on Linux Lookup discussing the problems with Linux/FOSS game development. On the face of things, the author seems to be spot on, but if you think about it properly I think he has completely missed the real problem with FOSS game development. It's not about lack of talent, artistic or otherwise. Or lack of good environments, or lack of anything for that matter. The single biggest problem with FOSS game development is the lack of consolidation. Duplicated effort, too many projects chasing similar goals, too many people solving already-solved problems. If we could harness just 25% of the wasted effort in FOSS game development we could produce some very high quality games. That has to be the community goal, to help eachother to help eachother because whilst competition is healthy, teamwork is powerful.

SoulFu 1.5 "Niceware"

There's a new release of SoulFu. Whilst the source still comes under a funny license that many would not consider true open source, I believe any restrictions previously placed in the game are now removed. Downloads are up for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you like the game concept but feel strongly about the source code license then the main alternative has to be Egoboo Resurrection - ironically also originally developed by Aaron and no surprise given the graphical similarities. [Edit - a better link, thanks Jacky. Also worth noting is that Egoboo Resurrection is currently available only for Windows although it should be compilable for Linux.]

Also the FreeOrion team snuck out another release - 0.3.1-rc6 - a couple of weeks ago. It's an explore, expand, exterminate [is that correct] kind of space strategy game with a very nice user interface and designed for a deep gameplay experience. I don't recall seeing this release announced anywhere. Also, it seems a strangely large update from 0.3.1rc5:

This release has many UI improvements, new art, bug fixes, and various minor and medium-scale backend changes. Notable major changes are the long-awaited OpenAL sound system (removing a non-free dependency) and Python AI scripting that can be modified without needing to rebuild FreeOrion itself.

Meh, who am I to argue but really, that's surely worthy of a 0.3.2 label at least!? Anyway, the game is available as a Windows installer but Linux users must compile from source.

Finally a quick note on the Open Football project. On the wiki is a small update saying that the game should be at a playable demo state before Christmas this year. Great news for a fantastic looking project. :-)

FreeOrion and Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue is a:"

a real-time 3D naval and air warfare simulation game similar to Fleet Command and Harpoon. The goal is a scalable single player and multiplayer game that can handle scenarios ranging from simple engagements playable in 30 minutes to massive campaigns contested over weeks.

It's only available for Windows but it's open source and a lot of it is written in Python so that can change. Intriguingly it has been adapted by the Thai Navy for for training purposes although sadly they haven't made their changes availalbe to the wider public.

There's a Linux binary of FreeOrion available for download here. I'm not sure whether it's the latest stable version or latest from SVN but it should provide an opportunity for people who hadn't previously played the game to get an idea of what it is about. It is confirmed as working on an i386 Unbuntu Feisty system.

Development of FreeOrion continues at the same steady pace it has done for several years, which is promising. Some nice new graphics and features are coming. It's a well designed and well thought out game that will have a lot of depth and longevity when fully realised.

Scourge

Scourge development continues steadily as well. The next release of this RPG game game will feature outdoor environments and traps. If a couple more people would contribute to Scourge it could rapidly become an absolutely amazing open source RPG, so hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later. It is starting to look pretty good though, as you can see in this screenshot.

It is sometimes a slight shame that some projects get very laden with contributors - to the point that much effort is discarded because of the high standards of other contributions - whilst the developers of other projects slug it out with only token help.

Finally, as expected FreeCol 0.7.0 got released on Friday. :-)

New Vega Strike in August

Typical. I stop monitoring Vega Strike for a week or so and everything starts happening. They get a new website, a devblog, and one of the developers commits to an August update for the game to bring the latest developments to players not prepared to dabble in SVN.

Vega Strike has never been a dead project, nor an inactive one, something the lack of a release since 2003 has betrayed for a game purportedly "in development". I think the devblog is an excellent compromise between showing activity and spamming the news page with not-newsworthy items.

VS is an strong example of the growing pains experienced by a popular open source project and how managing releases and resources should be considered as much a task as development itself. I would put the lack of releases down to a failure to manage contributions, but I think they have turned the corner with this.

For an excellent example of good resource management, look at the Battle for Wesnoth project. I'll also note it is easy to look in and criticise, but far harder to apply good practise to your own projects.

There's a Windows SDK available for the FreeOrion project to encourage developers who use Windows. I think this is another good practise, making it more than easy to get started with the source code. I would go as far as to say that the indimidating factor of downloading and using various development tools is probably as big a barrier than knowing how to program. You can learn programming basics from looking at source code and following the logic, but it's meaningless if you can't make a change and see what effect that has.

Other blog watch:

• There's another description of a game idea over at lostgarden.com although this time it's just a description and not a challenge to create the game (no graphics provided).
• There's the fourth part of an overview of Linux games here, this part covers MMORPGs and lists at least four open source games.