Tumbleweed

Well there was some, but let's tidy it up for a bit.

These days following Free Software game news is much easier, since we have planet.freegamedev.net. That place is ace but it means that the motivation to post here has dwindled. Still, for addicts, I suggest you tune in to there. I know I do.

For instance, if you did, you'd know that there's an updated version of Yo Frankie! (of Apricot project fame) available for download. Funnily enough, the post is no longer up as there was a problem with it (at least there was for me). Still, here is the download URL, and it uses 0launch which I'm afraid to say I really dislike.

You can also check out FreeCol 0.8-alpha2. I like that they are releasing early, releasing often. Future maintainers pay attention!

Another project that adopts that practise is Battle for Wesnoth. 1.4.x and 1.5.x updates are out with lots of polish. One wonders how much polish will go into that game before it loses momentum. There was hope that some of the community energy that goes into Wesnoth may move into the Silvertree project but at the moment it's somewhat stalled that did not happen and the lead developer is busy with some Frog-platform-like game called Frogatto (googlecode).

JCRPG

JCRPG looks ace these days. Lots of updates on the planet for that one. I love the pixelization on this shot :lookright: which enhances the "classic" (old-school) nature of the game experience. It's one of either a magic monkey brush or a depth of field shader. With loads of optimization lately as well means JCRPG won't need a mean machine to run.

Penultimately, why not take TORCS 1.3.1-test1 out for a test drive? There's a lot of momentum with TORCS development lately and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised how fun it was the last time I played it. It's a good game.

Finally, project admins, did you know that now Sourceforge offers a service called Hosted Apps - that is, they host MediaWiki and phpBB for you, all integrated with SF.net logins. Check out the announcement. Damn, all that effort of mine for nothing.

sil-ver-tree, arr-pee-gee

SilverTree, buggy and ugly but stable and promising!

SilverTree RPG dead? It's forum full of porn (nsfw) spam (nsfw)? Today I got a letter from Anok (name not changed), asking about the whereabouts of SilverTree's devs and whether the project did evaporate or not, and I say "Stand back lady, I'll handle this!" ;)

Well, I have to say that the inconsistency between the google code project, the forum, the web page and the Gna! project is a bit confusing, but SilverTree seems to be pretty stable and working.

There are lots of sensible-gameplay-impossible-making bugs, but as I said, the game is stable and the major problem seems not to be the code, but rather the media. It definitely needs more 3D models and prettier textures and sounds and music. Very nice about SilverTree is how easy it is to compile it. Here's a little introduction set for ya'll:

Getting the source? Easy as pie! svn checkout http://silvertree.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ silvertree and wait. Compiling? Easy as cake! ./configure, wait, install missing libraries, ./configure again, wait, make, wait. Playing the game? Easy as brownies! src/silvertree, play. Creating new content? Easy as muffins! src/editor/silvertree-editor (for the editor to work you will need to pay extra attention to ./configure's output, for example you'll need libqt-dev) Read the README and get additional info in the SilverTree wiki

The menus aren't pretty, please help, oh 2D artists out there!

The editor is cool, it's simple and just works! I played around with it, because that was satisfying for me. Now I share my hard, hard work with you. Enjoy! =D

SilverTree RPG editor

To do - do the to do

I have a few things to do - notably:

• Integerate the planet feed


• Integrate the announcements feed


• Integrate the forum feed


• Organise another interview or two


• Finish my half finished articles that are steadily building as a backlog of drafts

We have all this shiney new infrastructure after some brilliant work by notably Ghoulsblade and Hagish, and I'm dragging my toes including it. Sorry guys!

The planet and the announcements really could get included in any site which would really help to push Free Game development to another level in terms of being accessible and reaching it's audience with minimum effort.

On the Free game side of things, my multiple commitments (notably work and Fortress which I'm trying to get the codebase moving properly) mean I'm not really following the open source game scene as closely as I used to.

Silver Tree

The open source RPG scene is looking quite healthy at the moment. Silver Tree is shaping up well and seems to be shifting away from it's graphical ties with Wesnoth.

There's an update on the Hero of Allacrost website. There's good progress so it looks like they'll have another release before Christmas of this Final Fantasy style game. They also want to make a change to the current battle system because the current one is too demanding on the artists.

Also the Galaxy Mage Redux project is gaining a bit of momentum.

Damn, got to go, will try and be more elaborate tomorrow!

SilverTree and FIFEngine

Two big releases in the last 48 hours - SilverTree 0.2, the RPG by Wesnoth developers, and FIFEngine that comes with a CC-by-SA licensed techdemo.

Starting with SilverTree, the main gameplay aspects have all now been implemented: you can explore, talk to NPCs, fight, learn skills, gather equipment, and so forth. There is a simple adventure included which can be played through to completion.

Version 0.2, which should run on the 3 major platforms and be portable to others, is still an unpolished game but the development momentum is there and since it is now playable you can get a very good idea of the direction the game is going in. I wouldn't be surprised to see a much nicer 0.3 release before Christmas.

FIFEngine Tech Demo

Turning our attention to FIFEngine, version 2007.2 comes with a very nice looking techdemo which has a syndicate-ish feel to it. There are major changes to the engine which brings with it a host of cool new features:

• SWIG binding so more scripting languages are supported.


• New 3d geometry system. Camera supports now tilt, rotation and zoom.


• New event channel module. Scripts have full access to mouse, keyboard & widget input.


• Improved action-based animation system.


• A techdemo to give game creators a starting point. This is a common undertaking of the Zero-Projekt team and FIFE.

Author mvBarracuda posted more details in the FG forum.

I'm hoping that this rather awesome looking techdemo, licensed under the CC-by-SA after some lobbying by FG forum members, will be the starting point of a good game. Sometimes such a seed being sown can grow even if you didn't initially intend it to.

There's a new Snowballz release (0.9.5) that comes with some user requested features (grouping) as well as music and terrain elevation now affects gameplay, plus all the fixes that usually accompany a Free / Open Source Software game release.

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.

Forums Moving

The forums are moving - I'll come back to that after a few game snippets.

8 Kingdoms 1.1.0 has been released, with bug fixes and minor improvements over the previous stable release (release notes). They have yet to update their website but the new version is on the download page. 8 Kingdoms is an open source 3D TBS game with nice graphics, and can be downloaded for Linux and Windows.

Dave, the author of Battle for Wesnoth, is making a new 3D RPG game with the working name Sliver Tree. It is very early days but Dave has an unusual position in the open source game development world - he has a lot of artistic resources at his disposal. If he really pushes this game, Wesnoth contributors (of which there are many) will back it with artwork, so it is going to be an interesting one to watch. Also I like Dave's approach of keeping games simple. He resisted many calls to add lots of features to Wesnoth which may have taken away from the pure simplicity of the game.

So, back to the forum issue.

Our benevolent hosts freeforums.org have lost 3 weeks worth of data. I could stomach the copious service interruptions with this free service, but losing data is just out of order. They gave a bunch of techincal excuses but the reality is that the service they provided was a long way short of what they offered, and to lose 3 weeks of data like that just smacks of incompetence. They frequently afflicted us with downtime, each time with some excuse of how this downtime would lead to a better and more reliable service, but each time it was the same. Before you shout, "but it was free!" let me remind you they offer this free service to get a large community to whom they can offer paid services i.e. freeforums.org is a shoehorn into the hosting market for the people behind it. Ironically I was considering upgrading to a paid-for service with them to get better uptime and a few more features but do you think I want to pay to rely on them now? No, this was disgusting.

So now I'm sorting out new forums - will be done by tomorrow. Since another "feature" of freeforums.org is the inability to get your own backups or dumps, the new forums will have to be started from scratch. However with about 70 registered users and over 600 posts in only a few months despite the patchy service, I am convinced they serve a need for the free software games community so it was not a wasted effort and a good lesson for the new forums.