Kazama, Retribution Engine, LPairs, OpenAnno and Mono.XNA

Kazama

Kazama is a Pygame-based fighting game engine. [video] It's young and performs rather slowly and the license status of the media included in it's first release is somewhat dubious.

In case you had problems following Freedroid(RPG)'s development: they now have an RSS-feed for their updates, which we added to the FreeGameDev news planet.

Retribution Engine's level editor

There has been an update of the First-person shooter Retribution Engine: Some weapon tuning and two maps. To my knowledge the game still only compiles on windows machines which is unfortunate, as it appears to include a map and a model editor, which might be worth a look.

LParis

LPairs is a memory game which uses graphics of the Tango Desktop Project. It's just as exciting as every other memory game and I must say that the best thing about it is the user interface library (pretty fading menu fonts). This is something all the LGames shine in.

I also just found out via the news planet, that OpenAnno appears to have it's first playable release! And they made a video!!

OpenAnno 13 Sept 2008

Mono.XNA is an open source, cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's XNA gaming framework. So far I had to ignore the 84 SourceForge.net-hosted XNA-related projects. This might change now. Thanks to SiENcE for the tip!

[Edit] On the other hand, the project doesn't seem too active really. Last SVN commit Jul 25, 2007.

Slow Weekend?

Well not much really to talk about. I get back online after the weekend to see nothing newsworthy so today I will just talk about a few FOSS things related to moi.

Although first, budding FOSS artists, check out this rather awesome animal print patterns pack that should boost your creative texturing efforts! It's CC share-a-like attribution licensed so basically no restrictions as long as you credit the creator. They are photoshop patterns :( but I'm sure there's a way to get them into el Gimp.

I imported FreeTrain CVS (from sourceforge.jp) into SVN (on sourceforge.net) and set up a basic website:

http://freetrain.sourceforge.net/

The next step is to get the thing compiling and have a dig around to see how deeply rooted all this Japanese stuff is, and to find somebody who actually knows Japanese. The game is written in C# and uses WinForms. However Mono recently got improved WinForms support so hopefully this will make FreeTrain run on Linux. :-) However that's the latest version of Mono and the Ubuntu Edgy version is the previous one... installing these things on Linux is a hassle and a half if something is not "officially" in a distro and probably why Linux adoption is as poor as it is. I guess I'll just have to take a gulp and get a little feisty.

If you fancy whipping together a few tracks into a compilation, I suggest you check out Mixxx. It's a great FOSS DJ application and cross platform.

That brings me to today's music tip, which is unbelievably good. I actually forgot where I was when listening to this the first time on my headphones and drifted into some kind of dream world:
Robbie Rivera - Floating Away (Deep Dish Dubfires Casaplex)

Is anybody checking out this music? Opinions are always welcome (as are suggestions).

Anyway, on a final note this is the 86th post to the Free Gamer blog. That's quite a lot - how time flies. Anyway I promise to completely overhaul this website before post #100 and, if I fail, I expect vitriol and abuse from disgruntled readers. ;-)

Seriously though, I need to move the list into a sortable table on it's own page because I just got fed up updating the nasty mess you see on the right. There's a bunch of games missing from it too. On top of that this theme sucks and there's no logo and generally too much crap on any 1 page. Anyway, enough that's ranting for now...