SCOURGE2: first steps

SCOURGE2 development has started. It uses jME and LWJGL. Easy portability is the promise (low-level-of-detail SCOURGE2 version on Android anyone?).

All you can do in the latest Subversion revision is walk around on an island:

SCOURGE2 early alpha - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3go1axCwCoI

One great thing about SCOURGE2: it's not called S.C.O.U.R.G.E.2! ;)

I took this opportunity to record some S.C.O.U.R.G.E. gameplay. The first fight starts at ⅔ of the video.

Scourge gameplay (downloadable if you login on Viddler.)

I like the game very much: many items, many fights, not too hard, leveling, skills and missions. I did not progress far, but as far as I got it appeared to be a solid slash-and-hack RPG!

At my first attempts of playing the game I was confused by having a vast amount of hire-able NPCs and items lying around in the game start area and I had troubles finding out how to get started with the action (get a mission and bash some monsters), so there is a slight entry hurdle.

Another problem is that the mouse-to-game-objects interaction of S.C.O.U.R.G.E. is very sludgy: I find it hard to aim at items and enemies, often I'm not sure if my next click will cause my character to move or to attack, often the cursor is above an object but the object is not highlighted. Camera control is also a bit painful, the rotation speed is overly sensitive and in battle, the camera jumps instantly to active characters instead of a quick but smooth sliding camera movement. I of course hope that transporting content and gameplay to the new engine will be trivial and that the new engine will bring smooth controls.

To those more experienced with the game: how far did you get in the storyline? How far *can* you progress?

Turn up the juice!

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

• cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now


• AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider


• off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)


• support for H-gate shifters


• improved performance


• lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

• Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.


• The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.


• A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

Fellow adventurer, turn back while you can!

Crikey, it's been a while. What can I say, life gets busy, and games sometimes just can't be a priority. I know, it's crazy talk. I meditated long and hard, facing many demons, moments of utter despair, but I couldn't get past the conclusion that sometimes Free Gamer won't be on my list of things to do. Fortunately Q has been on top of things so it's not silent when I'm off the radar.

Today is a temporary reprieve, brought on somewhat by enjoying the current development pace of the Scourge project. Timong, of JCRPG fame, has been taking a break from Java coding to indulge in his new found passion for music composition. You can listen to the new main theme music he has composed for Scourge, one of many he has contributed lately. I think it sounds pretty damn good. Meanwhile you can now roam around a massive persistent outdoor world in Scourge, with generated villages and NPCs as well as varying climate and weather conditions. It all sounds quite impressive.

IVAN

On another dungeoneering frontier, Iter Vehemens ad Necem (aka IVAN) is probably the most challenging and addictive nethack variant I ever played. (Although I only ever played a couple.) It has surprisingly good 2d graphics, which aren't done justice by the screenshot, but alas development stalled after 2005. The IVAN community seems to be filling the void left by the developers who[se motivation] seem[s] to have met some kind of gruesome demise - perhaps their brains turned into banana flesh by a vindictive god.

There is the IVANX project which seems to pull together a lot of the popular community contributions, and should be more likely to compile on Linux. There's also LIVAN which stands for Linux IVAN, thus should compile on Linux. Neither compiled for my Fedora laptop, somewhat thankfully as it means I can't play it and thusly be more productive! \o/

IVAN 3D

Of extra interest is IVAN 3D which turns it into a bit of a funky pixelated adventure. There's obviously quite a few challenges to overcome when transposing a totally 2D described game into a 3D world without it looking a bit other-worldly. Still, I don't think pixels are a bad thing. After all, it's a game, not a life simulation!

OWS

Hey look, Open World Soccer is moving steadily towards being a modern Sensible Soccer clone. Impressive looking! However the AI doesn't do too much yet, just keeping the two teams level with the ball.

Raidem is one of those vertical scrolling shooters, a nice classic pixel explosion fest. It is surprisingly well done, but it's also bloody hard - I never survived more than 20-30s. From the intro screen, it looks like the author needs an additional graphic designer but other than that it's a very nice looking game. No development since 2006 though so I guess it's to be taken as-is.

Another game that is surprisingly well done is Abe's Amazing Adventure. It looks weird, really weird. However the animations are very smooth and the game plays pretty well, far better than it looks. Still, I couldn't quite get over the game's oddness.

Extreme Tux Racer, Smokin Guns, etc

The somewhat stop-start development of the various Tux Racer projects continues, but it looks hopeful that the latest incarnation of the iconic downhill penguin racer will not disappear like its predecessors. Extreme Tux Racer has finally released an updated 0.5 beta (Windows, Ubuntu, source for other Linuxi) after several months of inactivity. It's getting a bit of optimization love after I (yes, me, important mega me) unleashed my wrath helped a new developer by putting him in his place realise that ETR is not too detailed, as he incorrectly surmised, but ratyher suffers from some poorly implemented features that could be done a lot more quickly. Amazingly, I was right. :-)

I'm always right and I will rule the universe soon! At least, once I've been to the doctor about this over-active procrastination gland of mine.

Smokin' Guns, a total conversion of Quake 3 to recreate the feel of the Wild West is probably undermentioned here, although the graphics are starting to look very dated. Features:

• A full arsenal of weapons with historically correct design. Check the weapons page for more information.

• A variety of western styled maps and player models.

• A realistic damage system with different locations (head, chest, neck, etc) and height-dependant falling damage.

• New western styled gametypes for more fun: Bank Robbery and Duel Modes.

• A money system allowing for equipment purchase with money from rewards & pickups.

• Easy to use graphical user interface and HUD.

• Other small improvements for better gameplay and enhanced fun.

Lemming Ball Z

Another undermentioned and very cool project is Lemming Ball Z. Features include:

• Destructable 3d terrain

• Ability to add your own levels/characters/moves to the game

• Multiplayer with 2-4 players online or local

• Good old-fashion HotSeat play

• Slowmotion, like in "The Matrix"

• Fancy graphics, like cellshading and stuff

• Netplay, without configuring or hamachi

• Stupid AI to practice with

• Blood! lots of it! :)

I used to wonder where the FreeCol project got some of its fancy artwork - now I know, you can grab CC licensed (by-nc-sa) from David Rumsey's collection of ye olde maps.

VDrift

VDrift gets closer to a new release after a massive refactoring and lots of enhancements. Starting to look really, really cool. Still, not as playable as TORCS so if you want a quick fix I recommend you go the TORCS route for now, but VDrift looks set to eclipse TORCS as a spectacle in the course of 2009.

Scourge gets nicer towns, with houses created by combining sections to create more intricate villages. See the latest Scourge Weekly (volume 17, on the website frontpage) for more details and a humorous explanation of why developers should work rather than work on open source, should the choice be forced upon them. :-)

Hrm, other new releases like Teeworlds (0.5.1), Battle for Wesnoth (1.6 beta1) bleh too much blog stuff must go KTHXBYE.

Freedom is Fun

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.

Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.

NYC in Sauer

I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.

There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.

Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.

UFO:AI Starchaser

I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.

Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!

Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.

I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?

Late nights and leftovers - Scourge 0.21

Scourge 0.21 is out. It's been optimized and stabilized considerably and now has a full 12 chapter storyline. Each release of Scourge gets closer to being a really good game - there are still a few issues that need addressing such as the character models - and that is reflected in the increasing activity of contributors. Until a year or so ago, Scourge development was mainly a 1 man effort, but 4 people put a lot of work into this release. A new model format (they are looking at [the unfortunately named] assimp for 0.22) and some better character models (think Glestimals, some JCRPG models, and a few of their own) and Scourge will offer some real immersion as well as a platform for creating new Free Software 3D isometric RPGs.

Talking about optimizations, VDrift is getting back on track after a ground-up rewrite to address key weaknesses in the codebase. Most features are now back and working better than before. I'm going to give the SVN version a go, but the vdrift-data check out takes a while. I think I started it 40 minutes ago.

Cube on the iPhone? No, really. Yes, really. Video:

Talking of cube-things, in Sauerbraten land I thought this idea was a good one. The Intensity Engine is a... well, it's ambitious. I won't go into that bit. However it brings procedurally generated content to Sauerbraten and that's pretty awesome. Video:

[i]Oops, forgot to link to the [arguably more interesting] counterpart video which shows how a bit of Python generates the above.[i]

Yo Frankie! Or yo, what's the deal Frankie? I guess when something gets so much hype, the expectations are high. The screenshots look lovely. The game? Well, the BGE version (which came with 0documentation and meant I had to ask in irc how to actually start the game since the Yo Frankie website gives as much info as the 0documentation) performance was terrible and the Crystal Space version I couldn't play because 0launch* is just about the worst way of distributing a game I have ever encountered. All hype and a totally cute techdemo. Good effort though.

* As if web browsers weren't already overburdened, apparently now they should be installers for things too. I hope the next release they at least provide a tar.gz download alternative.

I'm a bit off-radar at the moment with work. Thankfully Q is filling in brilliantly. He's the next-gen Free Gamer dude because he actually does stuff like create videos rather than just linkify interesting things.

On Scourge AI and Widelands

Widelands

A quick one today. Firstly, I forgot to mention Widelands yesterday. A new version, a release candidate for build13, is available for download. The changelog is immense, so it should be large improvement over build12 which, for me, felt a little unpolished. Some of the highlights of build13 are:

• More stable multiplayer


• FPS regulation for less CPU usage


• Improved economy routing


• Many new sounds


• Many new graphics and animations especially for the Atlanteans


• Balancing work for all tribes

Not to harp on too much about Scourge, but I find the recent AI updates fairly fascinating. Developer lordtoran describes the effect of the change to a decision matrix from the crude system that used to be in place before:

Creatures that can't reach a location behave a lot more intelligent now: For example, if a monster can't reach you because you are surrounded by other monsters, it will loiter a bit and then throw a damaging spell or heal someone. When one of your attackers falls, it will engage in melee if there is enough space. I find it quite fascinating how the creatures have a "life of their own" just by using a simple decision matrix.

That sounds better than a lot of commercial game AI - which in general is notoriously bad considering the resources that go into some titles.

The Morning After The Night Before

Something important happened last night. Something transformational. Qubodup designed a new forum logo.

:-)

For those that don't follow the planet, which is titled "news" in the link bars ^^, there have been some great game updates lately.

Vega Strike ship: MK32

This update on Vega Strike is a great read with some screenshots of the many gorgeous new models that have gone into the game. They also have a new gallery system since the old one was fairy broken after the Sourceforge web hosting service updates.

Scourge gets plenty of planet-time these days with a (now 7 week strong) weekly update. Over the last few months there's been an AI overhaul, lots of optimization and leak fixing, an item model/artwork overhaul, and lots of miscellaneous small improvements to the game. Short of a nice animation system and character model pipeline (most of the character models are assorted free[ware] md3 models) the game is looking very good indeed. Once better support for animated models (probably using assimp and obj/md5) is tackled, Scourge will be a very strong project indeed and hopefully a few adventure RPG game projects will appear, using Scourge as their base/engine.

Hedgewars 0.9.7 is out. The video is so reminiscent of classic Worms gameplay, it's uncanny. If you swapped the hedgehogs for worms, I wouldn't have known the difference. It looks great and has much stronger multiplayer support in the new version. The artillery clone scene is probably one of the strongest open source game genres with strong competition between Hedgewars, Wormux, Scorched3D and (the more action oriented) Teeworlds, among others.

CGMadness

I was impressed by CGMadness, which has smooth graphics and potentially good gameplay. It like Trackballs but has a nicer feel which is difficult to really quantify. Intriguingly there is CGPortals which promises to take CGMadness and add portals to it - that should be an interesting combination although I didn't try out the early versions.

The number of projects that extend Sauerbraten seems to be growing all the time. From the cubedev blog (another listed on the planet) I came across the Plexus project which looks to take Sauer and turn it into a more flexible game system. They've already implemented a much nicer mouse handling system and the ability to import Dwarf Fortress maps, and more. "Socket level control of Sauerbraten" sounds especially useful, giving developers the freedom to control Sauerbraten from their programming language of choice.

The planet and the forum are great for the FOSS gaming scene as it means that the community can communicate much better with the world around it. It's bad for this blog though because I don't feel the need to post much, but that's good for me since posting used to take up way too much time. These days it's much easier to post too.

Colonel Mustard with the pipe in the study

Mystery semi-solved. Whilst the domain appears gone, the Open Racer forum and wiki are still online although just a bit (a really big bit) harder to find. Oh and it's still not open source, which is kinda lame.

Meanwhile check out a racing game that is good and exists and Free Software. Like TORCS (solid game, upcoming 1.3.1 release), or Ultimate Stunts (freeform driving fun), or VDrift (potential amazing). There are a few others, but I'd recommend those 3 first. What's your favourite Free Software driving game?

Curiously, also, Open Racer was the name of a dead fork of Tux Racer, which now lives on as Extreme Tux Racer, which itself was a fork of PlanetPenguin Racer, also a dead fork Tux Racer. Fork that. You may be forgiven for thinking that the Tux Racer project is cursed, but fortunately the ETR guys are doing a bit better and the game has landed in Ubuntu. A new physics implementation is in progress, and 0.5 should be around sooner rather than later. See developer discussions for more details.

Leadgolem's Inventory Concept

Scourge Outdoors

Ilya's Inventory Concept

Scourge development has been a hive of activity lately. There's proposals on a new inventory system, lots of optimizating, and in general the game is looking very cool. Does anybody know much about animation systems? Think having a human model and dynamically overlaying parts of armour or clothing and how that would all tie together with animations etc in 3D. If you know about that, contact the Scourge team as they are looking for advice.

There's been a lot of nice new features added to Scourge this year - outdoor areas, cutscenes, new storyline, graphical enhancements galore, and lots of cool models of armour etc. The one bit limitation at the moment is the limitation in model format support, especially character models - currently just md3 is supported. The whole armour-character combination could be a compelling enough reason to see a move to a better format. I like the project a lot and hope to see a few more contributors when such limitations are overcome.

Tikiwiki does suck though. Usability nightmare.

On a related note, Scourge contributor Ilya created a lovely 2d inventory system which won't be used in Scourge but is really nice. Screenshot on the right, more information and images here. If you have an alternative project please suggest because it'd be a shame to see such lovely pixel art go to waste.

Development of netPanzer has been active lately and the current developer is looking for input on the development direction. If you have any affinity for the project, it would be a good time to chime in! Me? I'd love to see single player. I downloaded it... multiplayer only... off. That's a cold and simple truth.

Writers Block (or should I say LOADS OF NEWS)

Well, no blog in a while so I'll pitch in.

The big release was Scourge 0.20 which is really turning into a nice game. It's one of my favourite projects, not least because of the regular releases and the RPG theme and it's a complete game (12 chapters of storyline). It's surely worthy of being listed on the FreeGameDev complete games page! Version 0.20 was probably the biggest feature packed release yet, and the game now has numerous active contributors.

Open City 0.06dev1 got released in April, which I didn't see mentioned anywhere. Nice to see the project continuing at a steady pace. Grab it from the project downloads on Sourceforge (the website does not link it directly) and see what new features are going into Open City on the project's development page.

Howitzer Skirmish now has a website. It's the tank game with full physics simulation of the tracks:

In the physics simulation, a motor drives the sprocket, which in turn collides with all the links in the track. Each link in the tracks, is a fully simulated rigid body.

Blocks is a fun and free software 3D Jump n' Run for Linux and Windows. A youtube is worth a (frames*1000) words.

Looks very cool although perhaps a bit floaty for my liking. Definitely a great addition to the open source game scene though and it's complete and playable. Download and enjoy.

Not so complete and playable is Dungeon Hack (project page). It started out as an effort to bring Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall into the 21st century but due to copyright concerns has become a game in it's own right merely inspired by Daggerfall. The original releases were only targeting Windows but now it's getting ported to Linux. Definitely one for the future and it has been in development for some years - some nice screenshots - now so looks like it shouldn't be disappearing.

Oh noes, there's more news... too much for one post? Nah... let's get on with it...

Update: Corrected PureBasic reference - it said FreeBasic before, and that is Free Software!

Lost Labyrinth is an awesome graphical roguelike. It's really a cool game and a great time-waster. The only problem? It needs PureBasic which isn't free and as such it can't be included in your favourite Linux distributions. Well, that's about to change:

Yes Lost Labyrinth can be packaged for Fedora/Debian now, as a Free purebasic compiler has been written named elice.

Great news for lazy sods everywhere!

If you like maths and cricket, try this! Ta ta!

Egofoo with Egoboo and a Tank Pledge

Egoboo 2.6.1 (stable) is ready for consumption (go there for download links). Go kick some ego ass with this revived classic. For braver souls there's also the development version but the Linux effort lags a bit behind the Windows effort with that one.

There's also a great overview of the upcoming Scourge 0.20 release. The features for version 0.21 sound very promising. Scourge is very close to having enough features and contributors to make it a very, very nice game and if support for the Worldforge model format gets done, I can see some nice new models making it into the game and it finally getting some credit.

Here's pictures of Project Football, an exciting project to create a soccer management game. The site is mostly in Spanish though the author posted a thread in the FGD forum.

Finally, the author Stormbaan Coureur of has posted the following request for pledges towards a game he has been creating that fully simulates a tank with tracks. If he gets enough pledges, he'll make it open source, and it's certainly a very cool prospect. He's going for $1000 which, when you think about the megatons of money some rather rubbish commercial games make, is very little given how cool it is. How cool is it? Have a look at the video below. Here is the the pledge page.

The Best Way To Play

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release.

FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development.

NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!"

Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their own game engine, which seems a little superfluous given the myriad of Freely available game engines. Anyway, there's a long way to go with TTNA but the goal was so endearing, I just had to mention it.

Open Source representatives in mod-of-the-year awards 2007 on MODDB. It's one of those annoying pages that tries to make you watch a video you probably don't want to watch. Press 'next' (beneath the video) a couple of times to get to the results. Tremulous (#5), World of Padman (#4), and Warsow (#4) are the open source representatives while BSG: Beyond the Red Line (#1) is a standalone freeware game that uses the freespace2 source code project. Quite a domination and vindication that open source engines make a big difference to mods that would otherwise struggle to survive the changing times.

Two popular open source games that have gone a while without a release are close to release - Vega Strike 0.5.0 and Scourge 0.20 are imminent.

A quick thanks to everybody who submitted information for todays post, in comments and emails and the forum. This is probably the first time that most of the information was provided by others and I'm just putting it in a post. Perhaps one day Free Gamer can be evolved to be more community-driven but for now it's good to have people feed information because it means I can post even if I don't have much time to look things up.

Updates Galore

Iris2

There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days:

• Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes


• FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features (announcement)


• Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances (announcement)


• SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download (announcement)


• Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor (news page)


• Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something)


• Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project


• Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info

NewCol

NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine displaying forests, rivers, mountains and seas with a textured relief map, gaussian random number generator and z-buffer like algorithm." It's obviously inspired a bit by colonization, but it looks very original in it's design. I wasn't able to find a direct link to the screenshots page so you'll have to go their yourself.

Finally, one of my favourite projects Scourge has seen some great improvements lately. There's a lot more people contributing to the game and, thanks to the increased visibility of Free media out there, has gained some impoved models. The SVN version of Scourge is pretty damn good and the game only really needs some decent character models to become one of the more impressive Free Software games available.

Do you want to find some open source media for your game? Then these are the two places you should start:

• Free 3D and 2D art and audio resources on the FreeGameDev wiki


• Free Art Search, a tool for searching for open source images

Uh... I posted way more than I intended to... I need a cup of tea!

Scourge-erific

Time flies when you're forgetting to do things, like update this blog. Damn, I make a post, have a nap, get distracted, and 6 days later I remember I was supposed to be posting again. I have umpteen drafts of half-finished opinions; games get released and I don't know about it. I need to invent an army of workers that will mine the web and report for me.

The Free Gamer forums got a facelift thanks to Qudobup, the guy also behind the look for Free Gamer. It looks really cool and since the forum supports RSS you'll see a few forum-related things going into this site in the nearish future.

Scourge 0.19 got released! Yay! No changelog on the site? Boo. Seems like binaries will eventually be available for all major platforms and will appear on Sourceforge. Despite the lack of information about this release on the site, having monitored Scourge development for a while, I can say 0.19 contains some really cool new features - outdoor environments and more storyline - and some important improvements - much better AI for route finding. It's on the cusp of being a really good game. All it needs is some slightly better artwork.

UFO2000

UFO2000 have had a major new release. Also their website got a facelift and it's probably one of the best looking FOSS game project pages you'll see. Beautiful. Somebody (fan? developer?) commented on a previous post that the community is struggling for players. UFO was (is?) a great series but it's primarily a single player game. I don't see how the multiplayer version can be quite as fun as a big part of the game was building up your team and researching new technology as you waged the war against the alien onslaught.

If the UFO2000 team could focus on a single player version I think they would see their community grow significantly, but they've got a lot of catching up to do with UFO:AI which has focused on SP from the beginning. Still, I do have a soft spot for UFO2000, having observed steady progress for many years on the project. Seeing the gameplay video on the UFO2000 site made me yearn for a single player edition. I want a game I can tackle at my own pace, y'know, multiplayer games tend to favour those who play a lot.

Battle Tanks is another multiplayer-focused game that looks great, and version 0.6 was released the other day. I'm tempted to try it, but again that multiplayer angle just doesn't appeal to me. Even if they offered a simple single player edition where you fought bots, that'd be fine. Please, let me play with myself. I mean, er, um...

I want to say more but no more time. I'll try to be more regular, perhaps doing shorter posts if I'm in a rush rather than no posting at all.

Common Media Project and loads more

The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre - the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists - that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge, JCRPG, Xarvh, 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there.

Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIFEngine as a platform. More on this tomorrow.

The guys attempting to revive the Tux Racer / Planet Penguin Racer project under the new moniker Extreme Tux Racer are, despite not meeting their own scheduled expectations, keeping at it. They have a spiffy new logo!

Well, well, what have we here... the inaugral release of Silver Tree, brainchild of Battle for Wesnoth creator Dave White. Given the "resources" he has at his disposal - some of the core Wesnoth developers and artists are also set to contribute to Silver Tree - this really has to be a project to watch. Still, it's early days for this 3D RPG and it's hybrid real-time and turn-based gameplay. I couldn't get it to compile (admittedly not trying to hard) so I'll wait a bit.

I wonder if Silver Tree signals the "end" of Wesnoth development - in that it has gotten as far as it can really get as a game, besides bugfixes, new campaigns etc - as the core team are essentially moving on.

I see Auteria on the game tome. Not Free but freeware, YA3DMMORPG. (Yet Another...) 'Nuff said. (The name makes me think 'autism'... nothing to do with the quality of the game, just the the name.)

An up-to-date Linux port of Egoboo Resurrection is almost a reality. It is buildable although there's a few reported issues. It looks like a public SVN is going to be made available, good news for the project, so helping out with development should be easier. The lead developer Zefz has been working hard on it in an unintentionally private manner.

FreeOrion and Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue is a:"

a real-time 3D naval and air warfare simulation game similar to Fleet Command and Harpoon. The goal is a scalable single player and multiplayer game that can handle scenarios ranging from simple engagements playable in 30 minutes to massive campaigns contested over weeks.

It's only available for Windows but it's open source and a lot of it is written in Python so that can change. Intriguingly it has been adapted by the Thai Navy for for training purposes although sadly they haven't made their changes availalbe to the wider public.

There's a Linux binary of FreeOrion available for download here. I'm not sure whether it's the latest stable version or latest from SVN but it should provide an opportunity for people who hadn't previously played the game to get an idea of what it is about. It is confirmed as working on an i386 Unbuntu Feisty system.

Development of FreeOrion continues at the same steady pace it has done for several years, which is promising. Some nice new graphics and features are coming. It's a well designed and well thought out game that will have a lot of depth and longevity when fully realised.

Scourge

Scourge development continues steadily as well. The next release of this RPG game game will feature outdoor environments and traps. If a couple more people would contribute to Scourge it could rapidly become an absolutely amazing open source RPG, so hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later. It is starting to look pretty good though, as you can see in this screenshot.

It is sometimes a slight shame that some projects get very laden with contributors - to the point that much effort is discarded because of the high standards of other contributions - whilst the developers of other projects slug it out with only token help.

Finally, as expected FreeCol 0.7.0 got released on Friday. :-)

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!

Scourge and SoulFu

Scourge 0.18 (download) has been released. :-)

If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult. Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there.

Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online.

It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find the ideal balance for development. I have contemplated setting up a site where open source games can make calls for help with programming, artwork, or modelling, since at the moment it's just a case of hoping somebody with the right skill and interest eventually finds your game project - there is no centralized resource for organizing open source game development and I think one is increasingly needed as the number of people creating free software games keeps rising.

SoulFu

Aaron Bishop, the original author of Egoboo (see Egoboo Resurrection for current versions) has finally finished his latest game after 4 years of development. SoulFu is currently only available for Windows but he is planning Linux and Mac versions of the game. The game is freeware but maybe after some time he'll open source it like he did with Egoboo.

You can see the graphical similarities between SoulFu and Egoboo, the chunky cutesy character models, but the graphics look a little more refined in SoulFu. It looks fun but my Windows machine is too pap to play it so perhaps a few readers could comment on what the gameplay is like. There are a couple of gameplay videos [1, 2] from earlier on in development just to give an idea of what how SoulFu plays.

Edit - hey, you have to pay money for the full SoulFu experience :-( that really sucks (no mention on the webpage) and I'm frustrated that I mentioned it now!

There's been some interest on the Ubuntu forums about making a Gunbound-like game. For those who don't know, Gunbound (gameplay video) is kinda like Worms only with fancier graphics and weapons. If this project goes ahead, I hope they look at working with the Wormux crew who have an engine capable of 90% of the needs of this project-in-planning.

UFO:AI 2.1

UFO:AI 2.1 was released (changelog, download) yesterday.

This is turning into an incredible game. It takes the best elements of the original UFO games and builds on them with contemporary technologies to produce what really has to be one of the leading - if not the best - open source games available. If you want to see how cool it looks, just go over to their screenshot gallery.

Importantly this version adds the foundations for a storyline. So subsequent releases will include a story to compliment the gameplay. Awesome! :-)

3D RPG game Scourge has seen quite a lot of development since it's last version. Notably, the game has been localized and translated to Italian, and the UI is being overhauled with a completely new inventory screen that is more traditional i.e. similar to games like Diablo.

With those new features and lots of bugs fixed, hopefully a new release will follow soon.

The 3D post-apocolyptic RTS Warzone 2100 Resurrection team snook out a 2.0.6 release (changelog, download, screenshots) at the weekend as well. It is mainly bug fixes, but shows that they are working away at improving the game - which these days is also another really good open source game.

Another small release for Those Funny Funguloids. It is still Windows only but, GPL and all, hopefully a Linux version will be out soon.

And I came across Memonix the other day, published by Viewizard of Astromenace fame. It is a polished game for kids that is freeware on Linux. It's really good fun for those young'uns. And me. :-)

In oher news, I'm happy because there's a whole year before we have to suffer the next April foolish idiots day. ;-)

Music tip:

RLP & Wise - On Your Side (Electro mix)

Scourge 0.17

Scourge

Up on scourgeweb.org is the announcement for Scourge 0.17 which introduces proper save-game support, earthquakes, more storyline and game media, as well as bug fixes. Scourge is a 3D adventure game, similar to Baldur's Gate with a Nethack flavour. Earlier versions were frustrating to play as there were problems controlling your party but these problems have pretty much all been ironed out in the last two versions.

Cultivation 7 is also available. This is an interesting and original game, but I don't think I can beat the Freshmeat description so here's a quote:

You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise. Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words, game objects are "grown" in real-time instead of being hand-painted or hard-coded. Each plant and gardener in the game is unique in terms of both its appearance and behavior.

This is the type of game that just couldn't be made commercially as it's not going to sell [where's the violence or thrills?] but at the same time it is completely fascinating and full of potential.