VDrift + Sonic Robo Blast 2 + RG Pro Hockey

VDrift effects

Firstly a quick mention about the progress of VDrift development. It continues at an impressive pace. To improve performance, amongst other things, they have been implementing their own scenegraph and refactoring the drawing code. Also implemented in this branch are shader-based effects (bloom & motion blur) and it looks sumptuous. All it needs is a few really nice tracks and the commercial racing games will be getting a run for their money from VDrift. Honestly, I played Ridge Racer 7 on the PS3 the other day and I was underwhelmed.

Given the ubiquity of cars, the general appeal of racing games, and the ability for lots of people to contribute content easily, I would go as far as saying that for once the open source model is potentially better than a commercial approach for developing this kind of game. I can't think of any other genre for which that might be true.

Anyway, there's a few loose ends to tidy up. Many thanks to the commenters who contributed the following valuable pieces of information... (and I promise to eventually go back and correct the posts.)

RG Pro Hockey does still exist online, as a Sourceforge project. And there has been commits since the last release, although development is currently inactive. Still, it means it's not lost, and thanks anyway to the other comment pointing to an alternative download site. Anyway, project page for the game is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rg-pro-hockey

Sonic Robo Blast 2 is actually cross-platform. Very cross-platform. It turns out the game code is based on the open source Doom engine Doom Legacy. It even has been ported to the Dreamcast. However I think the SRB2 team needs to rethink it's distribution policy - they only link to a .exe which is a self-extracting archive. I had little luck finding information on any Linux binaries of the game, although admittedly I did not look too hard. I think there's some here (lsdlsrb2 or lsdlsrb2beta) but I have not properly investigated.

I typo'd the Street Rod 3 game name and website. Although development seems dead, apologies to the developers and thanks to the reader who did what I should have done; verified the link. The actual site is here:

http://www.streetrod3.com/

And finally for today there's a relatively new site where you can find several open source multiplayer games being hosted, called Network Games. It's a nice idea to promote a community around playing a few of the better free games around.

Third FreeTrain SE Release

There's another binary version of FreeTrain available, with additional translations, plugings, and fixing a serious bug in the previous release. It still is Windows only although the next step for the project is to make it run on SDL/Mono instead of DirectX/.NET therefore making it cross-platform.

Simutrans development continues, 0.99.12 now available. I wish they'd open source the game. The original reason not to open source it (by original developer Hajo) was to prevent loss of control of the game (which is a daft reason IMHO - if game development is going well, there will be no fork apart from to take the game in a completely different direction). Lately, since Hajo stopped working on Simutrans and gave the choice to lead developer prissi and other contributors, they declined to open source it because they see no additional benefits from changing the current development model. You can't argue with that, as long as they don't stop working on it, but when they do I guess it will be a case of 3rd time lucky asking for the game to be made available as Free Software.

Onto other topics and I now have the code to RG Pro Hockey (Linux Game Toom link), thanks to a comment on FG. I should upload it as a new Sourceforge project.

Also on the Tome I saw Pix Bros. A cross between Bubble Bobble, Tumple Pop, and Snow Bros. Almost as interesting as this guy mastering the Mario music on the piano. (Can you spell 'obsession'?) However the Pix Bros game and website seem to be purely in Spanish (I think) which put me off trying it.

Check out this glowing comment on Scourge:

With the new .18 update, there was some improvements made to the GUI, I must admit I tried to play it before, but could not get familiar with this game. I like it very much now. Reminds me a bit of Diablo, with the items and magic system, and on the other side of Jagged Alliance with its round based strategy. Five points for it.

A game everyone should give a try if he likes JA-2 or Diablo. Gives you sure some days/weeks of play...

Finally, slightly off topic but related to FLOSS gaming - pictures of a Dell coming with Ubuntu preinstalled, something that will boost the open source gaming scene that is predominantly based on Linux. The open source desktop reality moves ever closer!