Hedgewars, JCRPG, and 0AD

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts.

Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer:

That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all the available Worms/Artillery clones.

JCRPG

The ever-promising JCRPG has been ported from one Java 3D technology (jMonkeyEngine) to another (Ardor3D). The latter is a newer engine from the creators of the former, and seems to have taken several lessons on board with the design. The motivation for the port was difficult to debug crashes, but a number of nice enhancements have been discovered along the way and JCRPG really looks sumptuous.

Hopefully soon the game will start to get a bit of a storyline as well as beautiful scenery!

Finally, a pre-alpha download of 0ad is available. This utterly gorgeous looking historically-based RTS has so much potential. They have struggled to get more developers involved since originally going open source. I have been encouraging them to make a release and follow up with regular releases in order to expand the pool from which they may discover new contributors.

Here is a 2 year old trailer for 0ad.

Maybe they should make a new one, that could also be a marketing boost for the project.

Contributors, contributors, contributors

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.

Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.

Programming

Rocket Race in Syntensity [more]

Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript.

latest UFO:AI world view

I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues.

PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.

Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.

Current PARPG status

I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)

Assets/Media/Art

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Racer r242 screenshots

Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.

A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.

jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.

irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.

Open source 3D RPG updates

There has been some activity in the most prominent free (as in freedom) software 3D role-playing games DungeonHack, jClassicRPG and Radakan.

DungeonHack

Green, water and village in DungeonHack [more]

DungeonHack (DH) 0.10 has been released in form of win&lin 32bit biaries and a few commits later I was able to compile the game on my 64bit Arch Linux machine. It is the first release of DH that does not rely on non-free libraries.

I played the game for the first time and I was positively surprised. Not only can I move around in the nice-looking (endless) landscape but also fight, cast magic, pick up items, enter houses and dungeons as well as talk to npcs. Physics also work (see barrels video below). On the downside: the current code is crash-happy and there is little content: In toto three houses, two dungeons, two enemy types, two items, one non-player character, one spell).

Zombie roasting á la DH

The next DH aim is to create a typical RPG village, add some inventory and status GUI and to write a dialog system (the current one runs on boxes). Maybe you feel like giving them a programmer's or artist's hand at achieving one of these or other goals? Then enter the DH chatroom and/or forum (which I find one of the most entertaining floss game forums to read).

Q's first gameplay - DungeonHack svn rev 520

Fun with barrels!

When test-playing DH, it appears weird to me that enemies' bodies disappear when eliminated and wish they would drop and also drop loot, which I could then collect into the (also not yet accessible) inventory. When playing the latest release or watching the videos, is there something you feel is missing?

jClassicRPG

Shrine and road in jClassicRPG

There has been much activity lately in jClassicRPG's Subversion repository. There are texture-roads now, the map not only shows terrain type any more but also infrastructure (roads and settlements). Shrines and Igloo buildings appear in the game world and a yeti creature has been added to the game's repertoire.

Usability has increased a lot through mouse menu integration and addition of buttons for map, character status etc. Though the drop-down menus don't act as the ones most of us are probably used to, the GUI-usage learning curve has dropped a lot. I especially like the tool-tip system, which shows usage instructions for the different controls or details about fields in the map. If only the font was better readable...

If you would like to help jClassicRPG grow, I can think of at least one Blender-modelling task: give attack animations to this gorilla. Apart from that you can find ways to help on this page and in this thread. And if you're hardcore, also read the TODO! (Search for "[ ]") :D

New game & character creation jClassicRPG r1849

Travel and battle

What I would like to see in jClassicRPG are cloth/armor items and a menu for equipping my party members with them. (EDIT: already there - left click character portraits.) Also the shiny flowers scream to me "pick me" and I hope that will be a gameplay option some day. Can you think of content or features that would enrich the game?

Radakan

Panda3D integration in Radakan

Radakan's developer announced a while ago, that the 3D view of the game will be postponed and a text/GUI interface would be developed first. Now Panda3D, a fun, BSD-licensed, python-powered game engine is being integrated.

What Radakan's developers could use help with now is exporting their already available media [.7z archive] and some media from OpenGameArt to the Panda3d .egg format. Instructions here (press "next" multiple times to see instructions for various 3D applications).

Radakan's 'behavior' editor

I do not care too much for the 3D part of the game (at least not yet). I would prefer the engine to be more stable, so I could try out the quest and add some detail to it using the behavior editor. What do you think? Is implementing 3D worth the time or would you rather prefer the gui/text-based framework to get developed further?

Off-topic

A little hint if you ever feel like making a gameplay video yourself: I prepared the videos for this post (and other posts) using glc to record and mencoder to encode. Sometimes (for non-OpenGL games) I use recordmydesktop to record. Feel free to ask in the comments or forum if I can help you with making videos.

Another little hint: If you are unable to use YouTube but curious about the videos and can play back mp4 files (vlc and mplayer can handle them), use youtube-dl to download videos for off-line playback.

Commerce & Open Source Games: Libre Music, Tremulous Shirts

Here is some commercial free software gaming news, which I partially failed to deliver on time.

Paul's Music Liberation Experiment is a product of jClassicRPG's lead developer following his passion for composing music. He releases music tracks under the gratis but non-free BY-SA-NC license and visitors can donate to specific tracks, which in return will be released under the free BY-SA license.

The money earned from this will be covered to cover Paul's expensive music software purchases and hopefully a proof that at least small bucks can be made with freely licensed media. It's called "experiment" after all. :)

I am a big fan of this project! I detest the non-free Creative Commons licenses, but this method is perfect to illustrate just how many people think that being free is more important for media rather than just being gratis.

Tremulous T-Shirt Logo

Ministry of Frag (MoFrag) sells a Tremulous T-Shirt and 25% go to the Tremulous team. That's the short story.

The long story is that the project was first thought of 2006 and finally realized in December 2008. It started on the wish to «find some way to support open source games». Most of the people behind MoFrag are from the Tremulous scene.

Powered by the visual awesomeness of Plutocracy's [remember?] lead developer Garoth, it's sure to make you feel sexy about supporting the open source game development.

The MoFrag definition of "open source" is slightly loose: «If your game "feels" open source to us, that is pretty much the only requirement» I was told on IRC. Also I feel a tiny bit insecure about supporting Tremulous, as there might be issues regarding the legality of some of its assets.

LÖVE mousepad

Never minding that, I hope that it will thrive and get involved with lots of cool projects (qubodup's list of cool open source game projects still pending). Do you have any suggestions? My instant thoughts are "LÖVE" (Which by the way has a Merchandise discussion going on) and "SuperTuxKart" (by the way, did you know that the project has an awesome new homepage look?) although last time I checked out STK, this little bit |___| of polish was missing for me to call it "polished enough for merchandise".

EDIT: Supposedly, the Blender Game Engine (BGE) will receive development support from a company using it to develop a commercial title.

I was super skeptic at first, due to Entertainment Arts Research Inc.'s flash page and its subsidiary Twilight 22 Studio's empty page. I Couldn't find anything online but the same press release and compared it to the EVO console scam. Now I'm just confused. Time will tell.

BGE looking awesome

So this turned out to not be a commercial blender update, eh? Aaanyways, about the Blender Game Engine (BGE).. I always thought the BGE was a weak, slow placeholder. I appear to be wrong: its power has recently been shown off in this sunrise thread. Note that this is not a Blender render, it's real-time Blender Game Engine action! Though I bet it's real slow. But hey, I haven't checked it out live yet. ;P

Thanks to Lamoot for the heads up!

Scott's satellite dish model

Newfound Room is Scott's continuation of the Low Poly Cooperative blog.

part of the intention of this blog will be to make some money for me and my family. I’ll be trying out any number of different ways of doing this, but the core of what I am doing here is providing you all with free stuff. The more I make off of it, the more time I can devote to making more.

So far, no sight of any revenue-gaining measures and no post for three months. Ads would make some sense, though not create much profit. Paul's "release-gratis, pay-to-free" method could be used. Although it does have an unfortunate non-free element in it.

Good night! And remember to brush your vaporware-sensors boys and girls!

Some things on my radar

"Damn Free Gamer is popular." So says the L-echo developer, as well as posting graphic illustration on the project home page. L-Echo is a free and open source clone of the game Echochrome (aka Mugen Kairou). Version 0.4.3 arrived in early February, although performance was unplayable on my non-hardware-accelerated laptop.

Freedroid RPG version 0.12rc1 - a 2D isometric RPG, a bit like Diablo, but not like it at all. There's lots of bug fixes, a new tutorial, a new starting level, lua scripting, and more! Help them playtest it so that version 0.12 is solid.

"Tesliz", a 3D turn based strategy game, inspired by Wesnoth, written in Python on top of OGRE. Early days here.

Speaking of Wesnoth had lots of updates over the Christmas period, building up to a stable 1.6 release. That game has some amazing artwork these days, like these wizard portaits. They have lots of playtesters already. If you don't know what Wesnoth is, crikey, just click the link already.

Globulation 2 version 0.9.4 (changelog) which is a lot of balancing, bug fixing and enhancement of existing features, from what I can tell. Globulation 2 is an innovative 2D RTS where you lead autonomous blobs into battle. Innovative, yah. Blobs, meh.

Java Classic RPG version 2009-02-28 (announcement) which has a rather large amount of changes since the previous release. Highlights include moving to jMonkeyEngine 2.0, new monsters, area dependent music playback, new portraits, and optimizations. I hope to see this project become a completable game this year.

Freelords tech release 0.03 is out. Freelords is a Warlords-inspired 2D strategy game written in Java. This release introduces simultaneous movement and improves the graphics and dialogs. Freelords was originally a C++ project - the C++ codebase lives on in LordsAWar. Recently the developer posted a video of a city history report (ogg) on the LordsAWar homepage, which I thought was quite neat. It's the kind of feature usually missing from Free games.

Tennix 1.0 is available. Tennix is a very simple pong-like Tennis game, but the amount of polish going into it shows how nice a simple game can become. All it takes is a little passion.

Gearhead2 version 0.540 (announcement) continues the spate of game rule adjustments. I like it that there's a lot of thought going into giving the game depth.

jClassicRPG's and Howitzer Skirmish's donation histories

While the the tank simulator game Howitzer Skirmish is 300 USD (222 EUR) away from being GPLed, jClassicRPG's developer is getting a donation-funded 42 USD ATi card to fix some ATi-specific problems.

I made a pretty graphic of the donations sum for Howitzer Skirmish over time.

The diagram definitely contains wrong data because of the following two reasons:

1. Some modern websites have the fetish of using "5 months ago" dates (only some elite sites provide exact dates additionally or simply stick with normal date format where appropriate, it seems)


2. microPledge is not able to accept two donations from the same person at different points in time. If you donate twice, the first donation will get the sum added to it

Here's the link to the pd-licensed diagram source.

In jClassicRPG's case, it took five hours to reach 130% of the wanted ammount. Timong stated on his blog that the fundraising was an experiment, to show that donation-driven development is possible.

Well, it is. Though maybe not enough to cover the expenses of a non-minimalistic lifestyle.

I hope Howitzer Skrimish will get the 300 USD. And that the possible troubles of microPledge won't destroy the donation progress so far. Now give me money, that's what I want! *sings*

PS: In case you think that Howitzer Skirmish looks like a tech demo and less like a game or in case you weren't content with Stormbaan Coureur; Bram made following statement on the comment section of this post:

once I release my source code, and the community considers it to be a tech demo and not a game, then there will be no pay out. Everybody keeps their money, and Howitzer Skirmish and its data will be GPL.

PPS: What would you pay for? Kiba brought that interesting question up in our forums and I'd love to get more replies to that.

Sandbox becoming free, more free hardware: aurora

Levelhead

I don't really know yet how to play Levelhead, but it has GPL-ed code and CC-BY-SA-ed art assets. This means it's good, right? Right? Well, I'll try to find out whether or not you can play it without having to cut a LCD display in mouth-sized pieces first.

Sandbox co-operative map editing

There's news regarding Sandbox, the child-friendly Sauerbraten-based 3D game/engine/editor. A completely freely licensed version is in the works. (Code and media.) So, hopefully we'll have a release soon, which will be includable in Debian for example. I'm very interested in this project, as it's obvious aim is to make content/game-creation a child's play!

MonkeyWorld 3D

MonkeyWorld 3D is a BSD Licensed scene editor for the jMonkeyEngine which I found through a thread on Radakan's forums.

Radakan's WorldTool is currently frozen as the energy is now aimed towards the general MonkeyWorld 3D editor. Maybe even jClassicRPG will benefit from it. :)

Speaking of Radakan: There's some tasty new gui design and concept art going on.

aurora: not only sexy but also with free inner values

Cool, I searched for "open source" on flickr and found a new toy: The aurora open source mixer. It's specifications and driver appear to be CC-BY-licensed. I'm not sure if the license is well suitable for hardware, but it does make the device attractive. I wonder if I can get enough motivation to get my soldering iron out. A GNU/Linux driver seems to be missing.

jClassicRPG's major breakthrough in the field of playable!

jClassicRPG detail

jClassicRPG 'Vigilante Eye' is out for us to get. The game engine is nearing completeness, dialogs and a quest system need implementing. Then we'll be able to slay our first 15 foxes for the lazy shepherd Osgar Lindquist. The following features all-ready work:

• Fighting: Bash (monsters) and be bashed (by monsters)!


• Items: Collect gold and pieces of wood from slain foxes!


• Camping: Rest to regenerate health, energy and mana!


• Leveling: Spend hours deciding on what stat to increase!

And this is where you come into play! Get the release. Timong is waiting for your bug reports, patches and feature requests! =D

The visual (and aural) and performance improvements that happened lately are pretty much wow. The terrain now looks very natural compared to earlier versions, there are new animated models, there is a tropical background sound loop. I created a rather long video that shows off some of the new features. (Direct download, 118 MB, recommended)

SF.net data mining (har har)

I'm currently working on a simple categorization of all the stable and or mature game-related projects hosted by SourceForge.net. Not fun. But the results will hopefully be.

I will try to learn from Edwart Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which should have shipped today) to create some nice graphical overviews. If you can recommend me a statistical data visualization application, please do!

Block Attack b.q. (before qubodup)

I started a theme for the Tetris Attack-clone block attack. The current status can be seen in this video. Criticism is welcome. :)

The LÖVE smiley competition, in which you can win an awesome comic book, will end in two weeks.

PS: our new-found friends at TIGSource are having a remakes competition. This contestant appears to be willing to release her Bootlet Bash's code and media as free code and art!

Ludum Dare 12 and jClassicRPG updates

Ludum Dare 12 starts in three hours. There are three lists of hints for python game programmers who are going to join the competition: SolHSA’s, mrfun's and GBGames'. Hints that help you be resourceful, constructive and alive before, during and after the contest.

jClassicRPG is getting bigger, prettier and cooler.

By the way: Orbit-Hopper does work on my machine. Only the 1.16 build creates segfaults. 1.15 works fine. (Though suffers from extreme slowdown when I try to record it.)

OpenArena 0.8.0

Post Scriptum: OpenArena 0.8.0 has arrived in a bigger than 300 MB archive. It contains some new media and "mission packs"

Missionpack is basically the trademarkless codename of Quake III Team Arena game code and since we've completed the minimal essential assets for it in this version it's 'playable' to the extent where you can score points in Harvester, Overload and One Flag CTF nicely. Among the game types is the 'annoying voice system' where you press a key and it says stuff audibly.

I don't really understand, but will check it out in 2.5 minutes.

Post Scriptum 2: The Uzebox will apparently be completely free as in freedom. As this note appeared yesterday on the project's homepage:

Following many requests, all sources and schematics will be published by August 24th '08. That's pretty soon so stay tuned! And everything will be released under fully free, open source licenses...open software, open hardware...hope you enjoy!

Back from dusmania, right to RubyWeekend...

Surt's goblin

Surt contributed the first model to OpenDungeons (and it looks good!) The model also was quickly incorporated by Timong into jClassicRPG.

Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb) released the first version of Choria, which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest.

Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux!

RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :)

The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ).

lalalove at dusmania

Part of the dusmania was a overnight games creation competition. Our result (made with LÖVE) is lalalove (working title), a game inspired by Lost Garden's Celestial Music. Basically you connect stars, asteroids and planets, to create musical compositions. The current state isn't polished but playable and fun for some seconds. We're definitely going to make it kick ass!

Also: No more game videos on Vimeo allowed. Not sure if they permit videos of games you did yourself.

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...

News salad

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music.

The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. Whatever it will turn out to be, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :)

Last post I told you about Ardentryst. There's a mute gameplay video, I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it.

Bear Factory

A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games.

l-echo, an open source clone of the abstract puzzle game Echochrome, is now 0.1.0 versions old. I haven't given it a try yet. I will. Because it does look very nifty.

tank simulator game

The 1000 USD expensive tank simulator game is stuck at 52.8% of it's financial goal. I think sooner or later some generous comrades will throw their pennies in.

No sign of apricot opening it's repository yet, but in a recent video some features of apricot's blender branch are shown off: object snapping and shadow map baking. These improvements are supposed to ease game/level-design and are likely to find their way into the main blender branch sooner or later. You can get pre-built blender builds of all kinds and colors on GraphicAll.

There's also this YA2DGE LÖVE. What is impressive about it is the homepage's look and it's realistic roadmap. A clean look and decent sense of humor sure are a good way to catch my attention. LÖVE made me find Face Me and Scream. Thanks, LÖVE.

Oh by the way, have you noticed the blog's new look? :) Let us know what you think.

"We already got headless lizards"

PS: (How could I forget?) jClassicalRPG has had it's first birthday! Paul aka Timong delivered a grand speech! (Worth reading!) The project is in "urgent need of 3d Mythic Monsters!!" though!

I also want to thank everyone posting to our game announcements forum! I wasn't expecting to provide news for more than 3-5 games today but then took a second look in said location..

PPS: OpenArena 0.7.7 for hardcore bug fixing is in the house!

PeeEss: Charlie just mentioned that I forgot to serve the news of Glest's new website and new 3.2 alpha 1 patch, which finally features scripted maps aka missions! Yehaw!

Radakan is pretty

Radakan's devs have decided to use the jME aka jMonkeyEngine, just like JCRPG does! Neat! I admit that I was expecting the project to evaporate, it just had too pretty a website and some team member was very concerned with picking the right wiki and installing a flash audio player on the site, while there was nothing of the game in sight. (I also was afraid the team would come up with some idea like "Hey, let's make our own 3D engine! Right?")

I'm glad I seem to be wrong, the first tech demo video has been uploaded. (I'm not sure if that's not just some engine-bundled terrain and model, but even if it is, what the hell! They're grappling with it! Enough proof of interest and engagement for me!) I just hope they won't let the plans for game story get in the development's way. But I might be wrong worrying about that - Radakan is a "single-player sandbox 3D RPG". Sounds like something that is free of the bug feature "storyline" and like something one can have fun with, without touching any code. Yay for spawning 1k melons mid-air and abusing rag doll physics!

Radakan - Prototype #1

La Croix Pan, some game made with AGS

I tried to find an open source 2D adventure game engine and also was given some recommendation in the last post's comments. Wintermute Engine (WME) and Adventure Game Studio (AGS) caught my attention, both are closed-source freeware. What surprised me, was that AGS has been ported to Linux and MacOSX! Thanks to .Net and Mono (the open source .Net implementation) I suppose.

SceneEdit, one of WME's tools

I visited WME's IRC channel and asked Mnemonic (the only developer, since the beginning of the project) about his views on open sourcing the engine. He said approximately "not now and not anytime soon". These are his reasons: Leading an open source project means stress, because people whine about your code. It requires work, because the code has to be put in a readable state for others. It requires even more work, because submitted patches have to be tested, to make sure that they don't 'feature' new bugs.

"Simply dumping the source on SF.net" was right out, a decision which seems logical. After all, why should you make a project open-source, if you're not able to manage foreign development to take place in it? But on the other hand: If one has not enough time for maintaining an open project, maybe "dumping" the code isn't so bad a thing? In the end it shouldn't do any harm to the project and if someone decides to fork it, it can only be good for the gene pool.

I haven't talked to anyone in the AGS team. I hope I'll get round to catching up on that.

Update: (thanks to the comments) There is only a client, no editor of AGS for linux. Also there is Adventure Game Goddess, something about being an open source adventure game engine. I don't know, read it yourself ;).

Adventures, art, design...

New art for Adonthell

There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash, an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".)

Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks

Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions, the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo.

Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games situation. Compared to RTS or FPS, the situation is: "there aren't any." At least not of the point-and-click kind of type. Steve says the reason is that making adventure games isn't fun - since the story/surprise/suspension of your work won't work on you.

There is however the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine, an apparently simple-to use visual interactive fiction engine. It sure is and all and the engine's logo is the obligatory girl entangled by a tentacle monster python snake, but I'd rather prefer a decent point-and-click engine and community. I simply am a sucker for more interactivity and less text and more animations and less relationship novels and more (audible) speech and less *blush* in adventure games. It's great to see that the open source gamedev community appears to be useful for lots of prepubescent girls though!

Back on the adventure games issue: Tranberry proposed, that instead of creating games, game developers should create game frameworks for non-developers. O_o Of course it makes sense from the perspective, that it's no fun to know the story of the game for the game programmer, but on the other hand someone will have to know the whole story and won't be able to play the game as a player, this way or another. I think he's correct though that the role of the game designer should be separated from the role of the programmer for great justice better game quality. Excluding some naturals I guess.

BTW: Tranberry is the guy, who created the friggin-awesome looking current style for the JCRPG blog (see old style for comparison.)

Ulroth Axe, one of the kick-ass awesome models from OpenFrag

Again back to the game design issue: Creating the story and assembling the game's code and media should be done in a specific order. I am the fan of the "functionality-first, story-second"-method. OpenFrag's dev team is walking such a way at the moment, as I was told on #openfrag yesterday. In the beginning of the project, there were discussions about the story, but it became too complicated and now they concentrate on getting the orcs and swords and the slaughtering and bloodsheds to work and will worry about story later! Awesome!

Metropolis game menu

PS: Something seems to be happening regarding Micropolis' port to *nix systems... But I'm not sure what. I can start the game menu, but fail to actually play it. See screen.

Where are my buildings?

PPS: Anonymous just told me to deactivate NumLock, which helped :) But I am unable to see anything besides the map. O_o

PPPS: Gah, all the info is in the comments, if you want it. ^^

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.

Match of the Day

Open Football

Open World Soccer

Open Football development has resumed lately. I downloaded from svn and compiled, and whilst it's not a game yet, it looks very nice and the author clearly knows his stuff if you see the planning and structure that is going into e.g. the animation side of things. Still, if you are a soccer fan and want an ace 3D football game then get in touch the project.

Open World Soccer, a Sensible Soccer inspired game and the successor to Yoda Soccer (which required the proprietary Blitz Basic), is also starting to take shape. Whilst not yet playable, it's not far away from a playable demo release according to the developer.

JCRPG has a new "contributionary release" which introduces a very nice UI as well as a few other world features. What has been, up until now, just a framework is now starting to morph into a game.

Not to be outdone by Teewars which has recently exploded onto the 2D deathmatch scene, the OpenLierox team have been hacking away and released 0.57_beta5. Looks like a large changelog from 0.56 so you'll have to look yourself (on the homepage), but better bot AI, lots of new smaller features, POSIX compatability and a large number of bug fixes and gameplay enhancements.

Freeware Wing Commander fan game WC Pioneer has some mouthwatering models. Free Software purists should check out Privateer Universe which is a nicer community and very active at the moment.

Wesnoth Battling Onwards

Battle for Wesnoth

Well the big release of the weekend is Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 (changelog). Not too much to say about this game that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. It's simply the best open source game project going. Hundreds of contributors, graphics rivalling contemporary commercial 2D games. Over version 1.2, Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 brings 7 new campaigns, major UI improvements, major multiplayer improvements, many improved graphics (the portraits are stunning) and many bug and balance fixes.

Wesnoth is so popular that the response to this release seems to have overwhelmed parts of their website. The wiki and forums are unable to cope.

I'm wondering where they will draw the line with this project though. The main developer has since moved on to SilverTreeRPG. Obviously they could keep adding campaigns, refining the graphics etc, but surely at some point you want to say "this is it, this is the final v1 of Wesnoth" and look at making v2 which is a significantly different game (be it improved or different storyline or whatever). They surely just can't keep on evolving this version because then, well, it seems to be a bit of a waste of resources that could be used to create a different version. Once a game is complete, development is of diminishing returns. Sure, you can make it a bit shinier, but it's of much less value to the game playing community who [I think] would rather see major strides made on a new game rather than the same game have relatively small improvements.

OpenFracas 0.4 (currently just for Linux and Windows), "a free, open-source game that is similar to Risk." There's more gameplay features than in standard Risk, and it's also well done, so check it out if you like that kind of strategy game.

SuperTuxKart 0.4 is now up for download. No screenshots of 0.4 on the website, although it looks the same as 0.3 for the most part.

Space Exploration v5 - a fun little 2D space exploration and trading game. This version greatly enhances the UI, but I think the Java detractors will love this version because it's very very slow. I suspect the author isn't too experienced on Java graphics programming and as he learns more it will speed up greatly. Anybody who believes Java is slow should try out the rather spiffilicous JCRPG which not only looks beautiful but is very fast too. A bit of perseverance and Java "force" is all that's needed.

Ultra Fickle Overtones

UFO:AI

There's beta installers for Linux and Windows for the popular open source game UFO:AI. The changelog for version 2.2 is impressive. The download link is a bit hard to get to - a ploy to stop too many players mistakenly downloading the beta when they didn't realise it might have bugs. Anyway, grab it here, and help them make UFO:AI 2.2 a great release. :-)

There was an interesting comment on the observation I made regarding the version number of LordsAWar:

0.0.3 for the lordsawar version doesn't mean 3% done. The game has most aspects of Warlords 2 implemented, where as freelords only has a few.

Well why version 0.0.3 then? Ok, I admit, version numbers are probably one of the least important aspects of game design. But, come on, really, if your game has lots of features and close to what you consider "1.0" for your game, then label is as such. People who are casually looking for a game to play will see 0.0.3 and think, "not even alpha." They won't play it. Players are fickle like that.

Version numbers imply the amount of progress towards the author's vision of the game. To me, 1.0 is the original vision and past that are evolutions of that vision.

JCRPG

Speaking of vision, I'll also give a quick mention to JCRPG whose author seems to be relentless in his efforts to bring a quality classic RPG framework with all the modern trimmings. Some of his trees are not to far off being life-like in quality. If somebody had the drive to start making a game based on his work so far, thereby pushing things even further, we could see some amazingly atmospheric games.

My brother alluded to an interesting point when commenting on the state of modern gaming. FPS games are monotonous, they are rarely atmospheric. It's just the same sprint shoot sprint cycle except with different weapons and backdrops. The gaming genre has become boring as the limitations of games have eroded away. Complete freedom to move often has the undesired consequence of making the world less interesting as there is no longer a challenge to navigating it - just find the next gap and run through it, all guns blazing. CRPGs used to be mazey, claustrophoic ordeals where you constantly had to plan to avoid getting into too many consecutive battles as monsters were quite fatal. The game worlds were not massive, but they were hard. The gaming industry seems to have forgotten that an enclosed but well defined world is more intriguing than a a massive open one which just looks pretty and has no substance.

Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't played many commercial games in the last 5 or 6 years, but when I have it reinfoces the above feeling. Just a thought.