Ripping off Open-Source-Engine Games: Lugaru

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL. The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license. Here's an explanation by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository.

Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say:

"we have every legal right to market and sell the software"

"the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge."

Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down.

The implication, according to Wolfire:

"While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it is apparently enough to make scammers think they could get away with it, and that may be enough to discourage other developers from risking it."

STK on ebay

SuperTuxKart is the project I first knew about is being sold by third parties although I can't find any discussions on that topi any more (see comments for info from their side). SuperTux' archives contain a bit of reading material about what problems they had.

ILLUSION MAGE!!! THIS IS NOT BLENDER!!

Blender is also having problems with scammers. (Thanks to Peragro Tempus for the info)

Quite a few foss software on ebay too. This seller seems to be specialized in selling foss games and apps while trying to hide their name. Assuming all they do is sell open source software for $6.65, then they earned $14,277.55 in at least 2147 sales since November 2009 (about $950/month). That'd be kind of lame.

Side note: I just found a Lugaru fork, which claims the animation data is CC-BY-SA'd, which according to file size (didn't do a diff check) is the original data. The original Lugaru repository's license file states no such thing.

I wonder though, would have Lugaru's incident have happened, if they did not put code and data in the same repository? What do you think? And do you know of more incidents of this kind?

Platformer roundup

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

Mole Invasion

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

The Legend of Edgar

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

Widelands

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

Dreaming of a Sensi Xmas

Yoda Soccer

Yoda Soccer 0.73 came out at the start of November - looks like that one slipped past most of the open source community. However it looks like 0.73 will be the last release for this Sensible Soccer clone. Whilst they have gone most of the way to recreating the classic game, the limitations of the platform used to create it (the proprietary BlitzMax) means the authors have created a new project, Open World Soccer, which will be a Sensi clone in C++. There is already an alpha release (very alpha) which shows off higher res graphics although not much more. For those people pining for a bit of Sensi nostalgia, try out Yoda Soccer which is relatively complete.

The Castle 0.8 is available for download. It's still a bit of a tech demo, but the initial level looks promising. It's nice to see somebody making progress with a single player FPS game, although there is still a long way to go with this one.

Dream Chess

Dream Chess 0.2 is pretty amazing as far as chess games go. I can't wait for them to add FICS [Free Internet Chess Server] support although that could spell doom for this blog as I'm short on time as it is! ;-)

I tried out Secret Maryo Chronicles the other day, checking it out as a potential game for my son. I couldn't believe how good it has become. Just 6 months ago gameplay was dodgy, sprites and sounds were ripped. It was a mess. Now, it makes Super Tux look like ordinary Tux. It takes a classic and gives it high res graphics and a cute facelift and everything just seems to be better done than Super Tux. At least SMC doesn't pretend to not be a Mario clone and just indulges in it's heritage. I hope the Super Tux developers see it and use it as a cue to make Super Tux not so Super Mario.

A Day With Charlie Junior

I had an opportunity the other day to do some game playing with my son - so I had the constraint that the games had to be playable by a 7 year old, meaning favourites of mine like Fish Fillets were generally ruled out.

First up was the ever-popular Super Tux. The young lad was an experienced campaigner at this so it didn't hold his attention for too long. However, whilst we were playing, I did notice a number of things that I think need addressing in the game:

• Complete lack of originality
  
  They have copied Mario down to the core. It's a clone with different graphics. Every Mario aspect (gameplay, enemies, etc) has a "skinned" equivalent in Super Tux. Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard. I especially don't like the fire flower; can't we come up with some good alternative upgrades?
  


• Very unbalanced levels
  
  The first level is really easy - as it should be. However that quickly changes. After 3 or 4 levels I'm starting to struggle to complete them. After 7 or 8, I find myself quitting the game in frustration at missing another long-jump-to-narrow-platform. The game is completely unbalanced and way harder than it should be at an early stage. One of the reasons the Mario games worked so well is because they were very well balanced. The game never really got hard until about half-way through (and that's a lot of levels). There is far too much acrobatic jumping required in Super Tux. They need more levels where the acrobatics required are compensated for by having a floor to catch you so you don't die repeatedly. The level designs are just too unforgiving.

Moving on, we went with Super Tux Kart. This went down quite well with the young'un initially but interest quickly waned. Again, the culprit is the design of the levels/tracks, which are generally atrocious. One of the keys to the addictiveness of Mariokart was the simplicity of the majority of the tracks. They had straights and few tight corners, meaning you zipped around them, the nuance being in how to get around them with minimum slowdown. Super Tux Kart levels have no straights (none of them) and are all mazes. Just staying on the track can be a challenge. The AI itself is not challenging at all. The physics is diabolical (but this has been fixed in STK SVN which now uses the bullet physics engine). Still, a lot of work needs doing.

Funguloids

Going for something simpler but more complete, I installed Barrage and Those Funny Funguloids. I was having a great time but then I got a jab in the ribs and a stern look, so we moved on.

Bomb Attack (happypenguin entry) was the first game we played that he really got into. It is a well executed bomberman clone with cute graphics, although it is still a bit incomplete.

NJAM also was popular. It manages to give Pacman depth, an accomplishment in itself. Whilst he played those two games I had enough time for a nap!

Next up was Freedroid RPG. This game has some really lovely graphics - although the main character graphics look awful. It was a good game but there's a lot of reading required, a lot of talking. Also it's not exactly obvious what you need to do - places are mentioned but are not easy to find. The level of gaming knowledge required was just a level too high to retain the attention of a 7 year old.

The final and most popular game of the lot was Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid. This 2D platform game looks nice, is fun to play, and is not so difficult that you find yourself repeating the same few seconds of gameplay over and over again - yet isn't so easy that it is boring to play.

All being said, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't come up with more good Free gaming options. Other than stuff like GCompris and Tux Paint which he is starting to grow out of, it was difficult to find him a good Free Software game that held his attention yet didn't require a degree of experience beyond the reaches of a typical 7 year old. In the end, he spent most of his time on the Play Station 2 with Lego Star Wars (which was actually a lot better than I expected it to be).

Are there any obvious open source games I missed out? Suggestions welcome. :-)

Bored Gamer

There's very little of note happening. I should use the opportunity to work on some more interesting content for Free Gamer (fixed lists? awards? etc) but instead I have a new laptop (shiney!) and so will spend time fiddling with it.

Want to know what the Linux Game Tome looked like 10 years ago?

Where is FreeCiv 2.1? Patience is a virtue, but an updated beta would be nice. I'm contemplating checking out latest SVN to see where it's up to.

I played SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 a bit. Lots of potential but still rough around the edges. Some very dodgy collision detection, very annoying instant deceleration if you go slightly off the road, and only 1 really decent track (island) plus a couple of OK ones. Most of the tracks, IMHO, are not worth including.

There's an interesting list grumbel's grumbles; things grumbel thinks are wrong with SuperTux. I think he's spot on with most of them, he's an astute game programmer (Free Gamer interview) and fixing most of what he says would make SuperTux a very, very nice game.

The www.freegamedev.net forums (still need to rebrand them - still looks like the Free Gamer forums) are doing well at our new host after the [old host] freeforums.org data loss forced us to start over - nearly 50 users and nearly 500 posts in a few weeks. Hopefully it is a sign of things to come with the Free Software game development community consolidating it's efforts and improving on the fractured nature that afflicts Free game development. There's a lot of duplicated effort, lots of good small projects that don't get recognised and don't make it, and projects missing artists and projects missing programmers that could work together better. Hopefully www.freegamedev.net can serve as a place to solve these kind of problems.

Counting the Days

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess.

I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1, and SuperTux 0.4, and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles.

Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum.

Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my current location has such a poor net connection that it can't upload to blogger. Anyway, the game is 2D isometric mech turn-based strategy.

Pi Armada, a Wing Commander Armada clone, has a new project lead. His first priority is to make it work on Linux and Macs since currently Pi Armada only runs on Windows. Since it uses Python/Pygame and Vega Strike, all of which are cross platform, porting shouldn't be too tricky. It's quite impressive how games are based on the VS engine.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to day dreaming. May I return with more newsworthy content tomorrow... ? ;-)

Interview: Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel

In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview.

Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-)

Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q.

Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?"

My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy

Q. And what do you do for a living?

I am going to end my studies soon, not yet sure what I will do after that, I thought a bit about turning into the independent game business, but not sure if I will actually do it in the end.

Q. What is your favourite open source game(s)?

Adonthell, since it happens to be one of the very few open source games that actually has story, characters and dialog, it also happens to have the best music of any open source games rivaling even that of many commercial titles. The gameplay of the game is very basic, but story, characters and stuff are just so good that its simply not an issue. Its not the longest game around, but the most interesting one.

Q. What is your favourite commercial game(s)?

That would be Another World and The Longest Journey.

Another World because it was and still is absolutely revolutionary in so many aspects. Its a very short game, but one that basically never repeats, every moment in it is uniq, the story, even so told without a word is absolutely stunning and the polygon based 2D graphic was something very different then everything else at its time. Its a game that simply lacks what makes video games look like video games and instead turns them into an interactive experience. And as if that wouldn't be already enough, its also a game that got created from start to finish by only a single person.

The Longest Journey on the other side is much more a classical adventure game, but one of the best. It improved on what LucasArts did in terms of interface and added an epic sci-fi/fantasy story into the mix like there is no other. I like games that feature interesting characters and worlds and The Longest Journey simply has tons of both.

Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?

At the moment not much, I don't yet own any of the next generation
consoles (still waiting for a price cut on the XBox360) and there
simply aren't much more games coming out for the current generation.
So I am kind of stuck there. My PC also happens to be not in the shape
any more for commercial PC games and that Vista Beta I am running
beside my Linux isn't exactly in the best shape either. However I
recently replayed AstroBoy Omega factor on the GBA, since thats my
favorite game for that machine and I also plan to have a deeper look
into my linux version of X2 soon.

In terms of FLOSS I don't really play much of those at all, I enjoyed
Adonthell a lot, had some fun with Neverball, but beside that I am not
interesting in most of the games

Q. What open source games have you worked on, preferrably in chronological order?

Lets see if I can get that figured out without forgetting anything:

In the very beginning I did some C64 Basic and QBasic applications,
most playable was a simple clone of that motorcycle game of the Tron
movie, another thing was a labyrinth/dungeon game, but that never went
anywhere and didn't got finished. All that stuff is available on the
net, but not very interesting for most people I guess:

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...qbasic.html

After those I moved on to C++ and coded Retriever, it was meant to be
an adventure game and written under DOS with DJGPP and Allegro, it
never went beyond a little demo in which you could walk through a few
screen, but I am currently recycling a few of the concepts for
Windstille.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-retriever.png

Closely after Retriever came Vect, a simple vector graphics editor,
that might be used to create the graphics for Retriever. Its kind of
usable, but not exactly very confortable, it again was coded primary
for DOS with DJGPP and Allegro.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect2.png

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect.png

Then I moved onto Linux and switched from Allegro to ClanLib, my first
game then happens to be Pingus, a rather straight forward Lemmings clone with penguins, its
quite playable, but to this day not exactly finished.

http://pingus.seul.org/

Sometimes after that I did a tiny little bit work on TuxRacer, nothing
big, just a script for Gimp to make level creation a bit easier, a few
levels and a few bug reports.

The next game that I wrote from scratch was Feuerkraft, it was
somewhat inspired by the old Amiga game Firepower, but not a direct
clone, it has plenty of influence from games such as GTA and Operation
Flashpoint, as with most of my stuff, I never really finished it.

http://www.nongnu.org/feuerkraft/

Feuerkraft on video.google.com

Sometimes in between I did start Advent, which was basically a rewrite
from Retriever. I was trying to give it a proper scripting interface
and make it properly extensible, which Retriever really wasn't. One of
the results was Cosmos, a little demo game build on top of the engine,
due to library and binary incompatibilities it however might no longer
be playable today:

http://www.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/advent.new/

Then came Freecraft aka Stratagus, a real time strategy engine along
the lines of Warcraft2. Its again a project where I didn't really
contribute much and only joined in rather late. For most part I simply
organize the rename from Freecraft to Stratagus that was needed after
the cease and desist letter from Blizzard, I picked up the bits and
pieces, did a new webpage and some stuff like that. I didn't ever
touch the engine itself.

http://www.stratagus.org/

In the follow up of the Stratagus rename came Robovasion, it was meant
as a little demo game to show that Stratagus can be used for other
games beside Warcraft2. While the basic design got quite finished, it
never got properly implemented due to some missing core features in
Stratagus. Since in the meantime there followed other games that made
use of Stratagus as an engine there soon was no longer a need for
Robovasion, so it never got finished.

http://www.nongnu.org/robovasion/

Construo is again a project I started myself and did most of the
coding. Its a simple particle+spring engine/editor, the game doesn't
have any goals, its more like LEGO bricks where you can just toy
around with and build your own stuff. Its one of the few games I did
that ever become fully playable, its not 100% feature complete, but
what it does, it does quite well:

http://www.nongnu.org/construo/

Sometime after that came Windstille, it started as a little recreation
of Turrican style gameplay, but soon moved on to became something very
different. A little demo with Turrican style gameplay was however
released:

Windstille on video.google.com

netPanzer was kind of interesting, one day I got a email of one of the
original creators who asked me if I had some use for the code in
Feuerkraft, since Feuerkraft was a 2D action game, not a stratagey one
I declined. Since the netPanzer project didn't went anyway after a
year I contacted them again if they still want to do anything with the
code, they agreed that it would be ok to OpenSource it and so I build
a little webpage and announced it on happypenguin.org. Soon after the
announcement was done some people picked it up and ported it to Linux,
I again didn't really touch much of the code, but simply did a bit
organisation here and there.

http://netpanzer.berlios.de

A while after that Happypenguin GoTM was born, it was a project meant
to pick every month a open source game and improve some key aspects
of it. We started with SuperTux and joined an already ongoing effort
to bring the old SuperTux into a clean shape. I did most of the
graphics, some code and around half of the levels of the reborn
SuperTux Milestone1.

http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1243

http://supertux.lethargik.org

After SuperTux was done, some people moved on to TuxKart, we didn't
manage to turn it into a playable game and had to fork it due to some
issues, but plenty of new graphics got done and some unfinished
improvements where done. A while after the SuperTuxKart code was
picked up by some other people and the project is quite alive know
gain:

http://supertuxkart.berlios.de/

Then GotM picked LinCity and we gave that game some new graphics and
user interface, I modeled most of the 3D buildings, while other people
worked on the code and interface graphics. The project got mostly
finished, however I still consider it a failure since one of the key
problems wasn't addressed, namely the game still misses a proper
tutorial and some game elements just don't make any sense.

Windstille also got picked up by GotM, while we didn't manage a
release, it got a large over vault and its the game that I am
currently still working on. Beside from that I am also a little bit
working on getting SuperTux Milestone2 done.

Q. Of the above, do you have a favourite?

Construo is probably my best game that nobody knows about, its plain
and simple and actually fun to play, while many of the other projects
never went that far and got stuck somewhere earlier. It happens to be
the only of my games that I can actually enjoy playing. Beside from
that there is also Windstille, since that game is in some part based
on Retriever and I am kind of working on it for like 10 years I have
grown pretty attached to it.

Q. What attracted you to developing & contributing to open source
games rather than selling your efforts as shareware or commercial
titles?

Rather simple: Money means trouble, no money means a smooth ride. If I
open source it I don't have to care about advertising, publishers and
whatever, I can simply concentrate on the game and do whatever I like
instead of trying to figure out what would actually sell. Open Source
also gives the freedom to recycle bits and pieces from other project
much easier. Its also much easier to accept contributions when no
money is involved.

That said, all this is of course only true as long as you don't need
the money and do it in your spare time, when you actually want to make
a living out of writing games Open Source doesn't seem to be much of a
good choice.

Q. From your experiences, what would you say are the best tips for
making a successful open source game?

I think the by far two most important things are this:

Figure out what exactly you want to do before announcing the game to
the public. Sounds simple, but many Open Source games completly fail
on that, people tweak around an engine for month and years without
anybody having a clue where the whole game is actually going. So they
never really go anywhere with their project, but just running around
in circles forever.

Don't expect anybody else to help you, be prepared to do everything
yourself. When you do a Open Source game you won't magically get
contributions, you might get none at all, so you shouldn't depend on
them to get the job done, but instead be prepared to do everything
yourself.

Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game
development fail?

One simple rule would be to not start a new project, ever. Try to join
one of the already ongoing Open Source projects, if you don't see them
going anywhere, hijack them and give them some direction. A goalless
project can often be very easily turned into a different direction, it
just requires that you actually know exactly where you want to be
going.

Another thing: Don't aim to low. Of course you shouldn't try to do
Doom3 when you don't have a clue about 3D programming, but there
simply isn't a need for yet another Tetris clone, we have by far
enough of that. If you try something new, try to actually make
something new, don't just recreate something for which there already
exist dozens of recreations.

Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's
development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?

Liquidwar, that game has a pretty cool concept, but rather ugly
interface and graphics, it could definitvly need some additional
polish and improvements.

My favorite Adonthell also needs a new release, it has been going
forward very slowly in the last years and could definitvly need a
solid push.

Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your
games do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

I currently do a lot of work on Windstille, a lot of which actually
isn't even very relevant to the game itself (i.e. history, ship
design, etc.). I am more or less trying to create a little universe
instead of just what I would need for a simple 2D action adventure.
If I ever get done with Windstille itself, I probably turn some of
that additional material into a game of its own. One thing I always
wanted to do was a realistic mech simulation, kind of an Operation
Flashpoint in space type of game. However knowing that such a game
would require a loooonnnggg time I prefer to stick for the moment with
my simple 2D game in the Windstille universe, since even that is
already hard enough of a thing to get done.

Interview Notes

• Adonthell:
  
  http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/


• Liquid War 5:
  
  http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5


• Development of Liquid War is ongoing - the game has been rewritten from scratch and become part of the GNU project as Liquid War 6:
  
  http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/

My Favourite Day Of The Year

Well, not really, I never enjoy reading rubbish people try to make up to be funny. Honestly, if I want a laugh, I'll go to a comedy store. Anyhow...

World of Padman. 3D, Toy Story esque setting and freeware. It's a deathmatch game but comes with bots, it runs on Linux and Windows, looks fantastic, and even has a promo trailer. Released today, surely this is not an April Fool's as it is too elaborate. Or maybe it is just a promotion for a commercial game, released as freeware for today only? Who knows. This is why I don't like April 1st. Anyway, download it and see. It's not open source though.

I've been whining about a lack of good platform games, but I found a few on GetDeb.

The Goonies

I came across The Goonies just after posting on Friday. It's a remake of a classic NES game, but with better graphics and sound. It's quite tricky to play but a good time waster.

Then I tried to play Magicor which looks fun, but it crashed on my Feisty Fawn setup. There's a tip for getting it to run in the comments on GetDeb but I only just saw that now.

Looking at the list though, there's quite a few platform games. There's Nikwi, which I've mentioned before. There's Secret Maryo which is enjoying sustained development and increasingly nice graphics. Of course we have SuperTux, and there's Fuzzy Adventure which was looking promising although development seems to have stagnated. Still, my point is there's options.

Since it's a Sunday and I'm feeling lazy, I'm just going to give a general non-electro music tip. (I'm too partied out to listen to electro right now.)

So... music tip: Goldfrapp

Lastly a few people have commented to me directly that the games list is a bit broken. I know it is. I'm slowly fixing it and restoring it to it's former glory, but even better. Only I can't do it offline because I'm not that clued up on how Blogger works, so I have to fiddle with it live.

All I'll say is that I have grand plans [or delusions of grandure] for turning this into an award winning blog. So I either just made a glamourous prediction or made myself look foolish. Who cares? ;-)

Go With The Flow

Firstly a quick update on FreeTrain. The main game has now been translated, so should compile and run on Windows. At the moment, though, there are a few things to be addressed before it can be officially released and also it probably needs porting to SDL to run on Linux as - although Mono is implementing WinForms - it makes a few DirectX calls. That and I'm too lame (in combination with VS2005) to even make it compile on Windows.

FlowFlowMania, a Pipe Mania clone, showed up on Freshmeat today. Sadly there's only 2 playable levels and graphics for a resolution of 320x240 but it's early days yet so hopefully development will continue. I loved Pipe Mania when it came out on my ZX48+.

Since I was commenting on FLOSS platform games (or lack of) the other day, "Steve" brought to my attention his game - Danger Man. I gotta say, although it's early days for this game (don't expect much), it was a fun to play for a few minutes. It's only v0.1 and there's no real animation but the essential gameplay elements are there. Danger Man reminded me a bit of Abuse [SDL] (Freshmeat link due to homepage not working) with the mouse/keyboard combination, although it has a long way to go before it reaches a similar level of polish.

SuperTux

Continuing the platformer theme, I played SuperTux 0.3.0 for the first time yesterday. It felt sluggish and generally not-as-fun (on my 1Ghz laptop) compared to SuperTux 0.2.0. Maybe I'm just getting old or something? It is labelled a "preview" release so I also had a look at their progress towards a full Milestone 2 release (v0.4.0 I presume) and noted a complaint about a penguin that can't swim. Does anybody else see an opportunity for a Mario meets Ecco the Dolphin clone? Now that would be something special. :-)

Of course to do that well, you might want 3D characters instead of 2D sprites. Perhaps an adaption of the Windstille engine? I'm an idea-a-minute at the moment!

I love Fish Fillets. If you haven't played it, go to that link IMMEDIATELY. I like it that much, that I'm going to mention it's commercial follow up - Fish Fillets II. The graphics are, as usual, much improved. Anyway, I mention it only to see if people can bug Altar Games to either make a Linux port or perhaps GPL the engine so people can do it themselves aka Fish Fillets NG.

There's a rumour that UFO:AI 2.1 will get released before the end of the month. They got bored backporting changes from SVN trunk to the 2.0 branch so skipped an official 2.0 release altogether (after 6 RCs). I've no complaints with that - at the end of the day open source developers have limitted time. If something is actually detracting from development then sometimes it is better to forget about it. At the end of the day players want the latest, greatest stuff so generally will prefer a quick 2.1 release to a 2.0 release that delays v2.1 of the game. Besides, the developers can just argue that 2.0 was just a preview of 2.1 anyway! ;-)

Music tip:

Conamore - I've Got This Feeling (Ben Macklin Mix)

SuperTux 0.3.0 released

SuperTux 0.3.0 was released is now out in the wild. This is a preview of milestone 2, so expect something a little rough on the edges. Still, it should be fun to play and hopefully attract a bit more community help to the project. Go grab it whilst it is hot.

My favourite game Fish Fillets got a minor update to version 0.7.4, including the final level.

SuperTuxKart development has not slowed. Recently there was the contribution of an island level. With improved physics - and wheelies! - I think the next SuperTuxKart release is shaping up to be an awesome little game.