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.

OverDose on Free Software

OverDose is pretty

What is OverDose? Edit: correct link

OverDose is a Multiplayer team objective based game with online and offline play. Two sides, Earths Confederate Marine Corps. and the evil alien Marauders, battle for control of locations on Earth. Based in a first person, the two conflicting teams must battle not only each other, but large open terrain areas. Every class has his own strong and weak points, but every class is a vital role to the game.

On a technical front, it uses a highly evolved Quake II iD tech 2 engine which renders better than Doom 3 iD tech 4, as evidenced by this video and that video. The gameplay sounds quite good too.

FlightGear

FlightGear 1.9.0 got released. The actual announcement is buried in the mailing list. (For those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, the Sourceforge list archives are about as user unfriendly as you'll find, so you should appreciate me having found it! This release is a major overhaul of the graphics code, FlightGear now makes use of the
OpenSceneGraph library, and work on this has been going on for 2 years, since well before the FlightGear 1.0 release. Some highlights include dynamically configurable 3D Clouds, wingmen AI, particle-based rain, read the announcement for more.

SuperTuxKart 0.6 is out, hot on the heels of 0.6rc1. Here's a video showing some STK gameplay and some of the new levels. Given the level of activity, I'm optimistic that we'll see STK 0.7 this year (prettier graphics, better features with Irrlicht replacing PLIB) and that it'll be really impressive. There's still some level design work to be done though - the new levels are significantly nicer looking compared to the old ones you, the contrast stands out to me in this video.

Generally pygame entries are a bit naff. There are, however, a few nuggets. Like this World-of-Goo-inspired sandbox, the Gauntlet-style zombiefest Plague-like (pygame entry) or this interesting looking RPG engine Dead Creatures Rising (pygame entry). Still, it really needs a rating system to sort out the wheat from the chaff because there is far too much chaff to wade through these days.

L-echo, an open source implementation of the popular game Echochrome, seems to be coming along nicely. Version 0.4.1 released recently. Here's a video of l-echo in action:

Did I mention Naev before? Doesn't seem like it. Anyhow, it's a 2D space RPG in the mould of Solar Winds (like anybody actually knew what that was, other than me). It looks nice, but the controls take a bit of getting used to. You'll need to have a longer attention span than me if you're going to be able...

I wonder if we'll see an executive order closing down Windows. It's like a virtual detention centre where open source [game] developers are subjected to unspeakable things when forced to support it. On another note, I got to OverDose via the Haiku website. Perhaps Haiku can be a future gaming platform? I wonder if that skinny guy with a funny name even knows what Haiku is?

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!