Foobar

iSoccer Concept

Open World Soccer

iSoccer ist und... wait... I'm English, why am I sprechen sie Deutsch? Must be Q's influence...

iSoccer is a promising project to create an arcade football game in the vein of Sensible Soccer and Football Glory. It was started in April by members of the iTeam project. It's early days but the concept (right) looks beautiful. I hope they can pull it off.

The "other" Sensi-like project is Open World Soccer (by the creators of the now discontinued Yoda Soccer project).

Fans of the genre should check out both projects and fans-with-skills (aka programmers) should contribute because an awesome little soccer game is sorely missed on the FOSS game scene.

On a more ambitious front, Open Football is alive and kicking and had a steady stream of commits over the summer. It's still in concept phase but it's not far from having the foundation to become a playable game. Trying out the SVN version is already quite interesting with quite a few different tests of the engine, although only 1 shows the signs of being a football game (you can run a player around and dribble with the ball).

Who is up for a solving a mystery? There's this game, Race Racer. It's a supposedly open source game, definitely exists, but any links of any use are dead (the forums, wiki, www.openracer.org, www.raceracer.org all down). Videos (eg1, eg2) were posted as late as October 2007. It's this promising open source game... just there's no source about? I'll donate a packet of chocolate chip cookies to whomever can get to the bottom of it.

Oooo almost forgot. There's a new Allacrost release. All the juicy gossip is on the website, hopefully this signals a recovery for the project that had somewhat stalled over the summer season.

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.

Glorious Days of Yonder

Like a time machine, I go back to the days when Free Gamer brought you new games and exciting updates, bound together with poetic abandon that would make a scholar proud.

Open Football

The coveted Free Three Dee football game, Open Football, continues to grow. Like Wembley, a spectacular scene that so many doubted would ever come to full fruition, the developers battle on in their audacious endeavour and, against all odds, the project plods forward at a steady pace. Cast your eyes upon the first screenshot to show more than one player on a pitch! Not much, say ye? Nay, but more than those before it, and so continues the goal of creating a football game that isn't rubbish to play. Oh and they show off Mac/Win versions in addition to the existing Linux screenshots.

What ho? A foe? Or could it be an ambitious open source single player RPG project that looks like it will go somewhere? Radakan, brought to my attention via a wandering adventurer in the local tavern, but artwork seems entirely conceptual at this stage.

Imperium: Sticks, a Real Time Strategy game from the dawn of history to the far future. The idea is a bit RTS meets civilization (the project name rtciv gives it away) and it's early days yet. This was another one posted in the forums which are becoming a really good place for Free Software game chatter and treasure.

I've saved the best for last. Iris2, the Ultima Online 3D client, gains tileless movement support. Anybody who had a look at previous videos (like this) may have noted the rather restricted movement - characters obviously constrained to a grid - similar to the way this post moved unceremoniously from slightly-cuckoo-ye-olde-english to normal, but that's the effect a time machine has on you. It plays with the mind, y'see. Er, back to Iris2 and it's starting to look really, really good. Check out the video!

More info and general open source taking over UO info in the Iris2 dev blog.

Hey, I know, I could... wait, that'd be spoiling you guys. You'll just have to wait until next time. It's a gem! ;-)

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. :-)

Strategic Importance

FreeSynd 0.2 is out! It's not yet mentioned on their site but you can get it from the project download page (Windows only, but 0.1 had a Linux version so hopefully it'll follow soon). I loved the original Syndicate (although the sequel Syndicate Wars was better). What a game that was. I can hardly wait for it to download... downloaded... playing... ok! That was a blast from the past. Only the first mission is playable but it's clear they have gotten through a lot of the harder work on this project. Future versions should be quite fun to play.

However they are using the art & media from the original - I would have thought that is of questionable legality (the game is classed as abandonware) but I can't comment properly without knowing the facts and they are not so easy to come by for a game with so little official documentation online.

Speaking of classic DOS games and open source efforts to revive them, UFO2000 no longer needs data files from the original to play it - a new fan-made set of graphics is included with UFO2000 by default. UFO: Enemy Unknown is probably one of the best games for it's time. Ever.

There's some more screenshots up on the OpenFootball website (although the rest of the website is somewhat barren). It's looking very, very cool. I can hardly wait for the first release. :-)

Dark Oberon

One of the lesser-known open source real-time strategy games is Dark Oberon. Ubuntu packages have been made for it so maybe now it'll get a bit more exposure. Dark Oberon has a fairly unique approach to graphics design - the images have been created from plasticine models giving the game a very distinctive and original look and feel. However I'm not sure that there is an AI included in the latest release as the roadmap states it has been removed, and it's reinstatement is part of an ongoing reimplementation of most parts of the game.

Speaking of free RTS games, Globulation2 alpha23 was released a week or so ago. The codebase is going to undergo a rewrite before the next release so I imagine alpha23 will be the last release for some time. Rewrites can be deadly for open source projects as a game can be in limbo for the duration of the rewrite and if the rewrite is never completed then the game often stagnates. It's happened to quite a few games over the years. Still the Globulation2 development has been steady for several years so hopefully it will not meet a similar fate.

Woo, all those games have Linux support. I was beginning to get worried I was mentioning far too many Windows only titles lately. ;-)

Harder Than It Should Be

Open Football

I'm really excited this morning. Go on, ask me why! Well, since you asked :-) it's because I came across a new football game project... Open Football. Ok, it's only available from SVN, the game is far from complete, but look at the screenshot. It looks full of potential! Project description:

"Open Football aims to become the new best multiplatform soccer game that everyone can enjoy. Providing arcade style playing while still mantaining the manager side of the game ensures hours of high quality, nail bitting fun."

I'm giddy just imagining it. I hope they set up some more infrastructure (think nicer phpBB forums, mailing lists etc) so people can get involved. As all you budding developers [should] know, infrastructure fosters communities. No infrastructure, no community! And the SF.net forums are a pile of stinking <censored> so don't rely on those. ;-)

So, yeah, I want to install Freeciv 2.1beta3 on my Linux laptop. What's this? I have to compile it myself? And people wonder why desktop-Linux take-up is so slow? I mean, for the love of Mary, I'm using Ubuntu... the most popular distro... yet I have to trawl forums looking for .debs of the latest release of one of the most popular Linux games, finding only broken links and "email me for it" posts. Why don't people embrace solutions like Autopackage? This is a topic I might have a big whine about someday here on FG.

Whilst searching, I did come across GetDeb. This is a nice idea, a community run portal for uploading unofficial packages for Ubuntu. There's quite a few games listed. (It amuses me that the 'games' category id is 1.) I think Autopackage needs something similar in order to bolster it's popularity. The way they list their packages is, well, rubbish.

Ok I ran out of things to talk about.

Music tip:

Jesse Garcia - Work This Pussy

*childish chuckles*