CivCool, TremFuture, WineOne, WarzoneFree

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FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...)

I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5.

FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released.

Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing!

The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community. These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos!

OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound.

After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not a windows emulator.

Remember Mars - Land of No Mercy? I at least twice mourned it's death. It seems that the game likes to revive a lot. Animations seem to be the aim at the moment.

Little video showing off what the engine can do right now

PS!!!: Warzone 2100's music and videos are now licensed under the GPL! I am so excited! Warzone 2100 is a great game that long ago was a proprietary one. The real-time strategy game is much fun, though I felt that long gameplay was dull without music and that the story wasn't very touchable without videos. Joy!!! I also discovered the Warzone 2200 project. It appears to be aiming for improving the game engine.

OpenArena 0.7.6

OpenArena likes furries

OpenArena 0.7.6 is out. (direct link to Win+Lin+Mac zip archive) More maps, more models/skins, more game modes and a new tagline!

OpenArena is a violent, sexy, multiplayer first person shooter

For 0.8.0 also planned: more music! (There isn't any right now.)

If you're hosting an OA server, you might want to upgrade. And if you know someone who hosts a server, tell them to upgrade, will ya? The general tendency seems to not know about the new release. O_o

Robot-looking stuffs are cool

The site has a new look (you might want to keep your eyes closed though.) Also, there seem to be some troubles with the new version. I didn't experience any problems, except for the low amount of up-to-date servers.

Nexuiz on the other hand, behaved badly, when I tried the then-fresh 2.4 release for the first time. Fortunately an emergency hotfix thread was opened and patched versions posted. If you encountered problems with the game and didn't bother to try to find a cure, simply download the most recent patch.

Turrets. Yepp.

Tremulous 1.2 will never be released. Or maybe it will. Whatever. Does it read like I don't bother too much? Yes. Why? Because I recently discovered that some servers had configurations, which allow a very different gameplay. For example: PornServ. The teams get many many building points, build buildings faster and more frequently, which allows for totally new strategies. For example: The tower rush, a tactic usually known from Real time strategy games.

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.

Revival of the fittest - sourcing art

Pingus 0.7.0 is available for download. With revival work complete, Pingus now uses SDL and comes with lovel anti-aliased fonts. There's no new levels yet but with development seemingly back on track hopefully the level editor will return and some good levelsets will get contributed. It has a lot of potential as a game because the Lemmings series kinda, well, was more fun when it was 2D. If enough level makers could get together, I'd love to see a release inspired by "Oh no! More Lemmings" which was my favourite of the series and also incredibly challenging.

Another game with a major update is Egoboo Resurrection. There is a new fully working music system and major graphic enchancements - antialasing, shading, dithering and prespective correction all supported. (A long list of buzz words there.) Most importantly the lead developer Zefz is trying to get the game in SVN so others can contribute more easily and, speaking of contributions, somebody is already having a crack at porting it to Linux. At the moment it's only available as a Linux download but "watch this space". Well, not that precise space as that'll only ever say "watch this space". But in a more abstract sense I will hopefully be able to report a Linux port in the near future. ;-)

My post the other day, "Free this free that O_o" (catchy title eh?) sparked a lot of debate about the need for consolidation of Free Software game development efforts. You can read it there so I won't repeat it all, but one comment did make me think and it is something I had thought about in the past as well - there is a tremendous amount of artistic and game design talent poured into making mods for commercial games. Whilst this comes good if the engine subsequently becomes open source (think Tremulous, World of Padman, and other iD game mods) there are many more examples where the game engine remains closed source. Take Air Buccaneers for example. It's a jaw dropping mod for UT2004. What a shame it will only ever be a mod for a commercial game. Could these mods be a source of art if we proactively approach projects asking them to make their efforts Freely available? Maybe it could just work...

One of the productive conversations spawned by the above debate was the notion of a common media project. Take a target genre - Ben (the thread poster) suggested fantasy - and develop a set of decent media for it that games can use as a base before branching out in their own artistic direction. I think it's a great idea.

Also there was a desire for a good quality Free art portal - there are already several efforts but they seem to just fail to capture the niche, to become that place that people say, "Hey, this is a great resource for good Free art!" Is a new one needed? A new idea, a new design? Or maybe just identify the best efforts and back them unequivocably to get the word out there? This is also something Ben touched on... it'll be interesting to see where it goes. There's already a lot of information collecting in the Game Media Creation section of the Free Game Dev forums.

One thing is for sure - the forums at www.freegamedev.net have proved there is a need for a consolidated Free game development community that was not previously being filled and there is a desire to provide a nexus where Free game developers can work together instead of in their disjoint and often isolated worlds that currently populate the open source game universe.

Dedication's What You Need

...if you wanna be a record breaker! Oooo ooo... </singing>

One of the great things about Free software games is that people are free to dedicate themselves to whatever makes them happy. Check out this ship, the Atlantia, created for a Vega Strike mod [not yet published].

Speaking of Vega Strike, the musings over the last couple of weeks suggest a new 0.4.x release [the current engine] later on in the year. I don't think the real juice [the 0.5 OGRE-based engine] will come until 2007, but when it does it will be good. Check out the screenshot to the right, a sample of planet shaders that VS developer klauss is working on. More images here.

That's simply beautiful.

There's a new dungeon game in town. Sadly it is a Doom 3 mod so it's not really free, but we know what happens with iD engines so there is hope! The game is Dungeon Doom and hopefully it will evolve into a stellar Free game in the future.

Another interesting mod [UT2004 this time] is Air Buccaneers. It looks innovative but again is based on a non-free engine. I wish people would create mods for free engines like Sauerbraten. Can you imagine the syndicated power of mod developers being focused on Free Software engines? If only I could control people's minds, the world would be a better place.

I tried a few games today.

Secret Maryo Chronicles is a high resolution remake of old-school Super Mario. It's fun for a bit but I don't have the patience to learn levels like I used to when I was younger. The game has no music and the way Maryo responds to controls doesn't quite feel right. Some parts of the game look great while others look distinctly amateur, but it has a lot of potential.

Ri-Li is a cross between a wooden train set and Snake. It's probably more aimed at kids, but the gameplay seems to get very hectic very quickly. Also I could swear that the train does not always go the direction you tell it to go. I tried pressing before junctions, pressing at junctions, pressing both before and at junctions, or just holding down the direction, and it felt hit-and-miss.

Then I tried Pang Zero and Don Ceferino Hazaña. The gameplay of both games revolves around throwing up a dagger or spear to pop balloons (?) that bounce around the screen and kill you on-touch. It's like a simpler version of asteroids. Don Ceferino is the more entertaining and polished of the two, even if the gameplay is essentially the same, with a nicely presented story despite the awful spilleng mistakes.

The Don Ceferino website is all in Spanish. I hate to say it, but the language of the Net is English. If you want maximum recognition and traffic, you had better translate your musings. Otherwise obscurity and International exile loom for your project.