Releases - Teeworlds, GearHead2, FreeCol, more

These days there's a flurry of open source game development activity and I don't have time to blog or follow it closely, but here's a highlight of some of the most recent game developments.

Teeworlds 0.5.0 is out. Everybody's favourite game about tea, where you have an entire world of tea bags and... wait, Q is whispering something to me... *listens*

Oh, it's not about tea. The clue was the double-e apparently. Still, despite the disappointing news that there still isn't a game dedicated to my favourite beverage, Teeworlds 0.5.0 is the largest update to the game yet. New features to everybody[ who doesn't love OpenLieroX or another game I can't think of]'s favourite 2D deathmatch Free project include demo recording, a revamped server browser and in-game voting, as well as a a gazillion changes under the hood. There is also a new, shiny 16-player limit.

FreeCol! The game where you get to free Colin! Right?! No? Dammit.... !

Ooooh, the col is short for colonization, which has nothing to do with turning the things into colons but everything to do with creating a new country on new land. Aaah, so, FreeCol 0.8.0 brings lots more polish - bugfixes, music, gameplay tweaks, graphical enhancements - to a project that seeks to embody and improve upon the original game (and succeeds).

Warzone 2100 2.1.1, bugfixes, and it's about war in a zone! I knew it, at least one game had to be guessable from the name!

There's some really interesting posts on the Worldforge dev blog these days. All aggregated on the planet - which isn't actually a planet, or technically attempting to be one, so don't visit it and be disappointed at finding a collection of feeds on Free Software game development. Anyhow, here's a video showing the compass in Ember (note: website is out of date, currently releases is 0.5.5), one of many recent Worldforge developments:

Whenever I see people saying, "Hey, let's create the next world of warcraft or an amazing 3D single player RPG!" I think, why don't you guess help with the Worldforge project. And nobody ever does. And they end up ditching their dreams to become an alpha mud. Like Radakan did.

Back to Worldforge, it's quite impressive these days. Whilst it is client-server based, it has a nicely featured persistent AI server, and the focus seems to be somewhat on non-MMORPG features even though it is an MMORPG toolset. So, if you want to make an RPG or MMORPG, unless you're a blood relative of John Carmack, stop thinking you can do it all yourself when these guys have been designing and implementing it for 10 years and thought through all the problems you don't yet know you have yet to face. Instead, start by prototyping your game on Worldforge. That's an official Free Gamer blog mandate / recommendation. :-)

GearHead2 0.532, lots of bugfixing.

I know I'm missing something other than screenshots and good jokes... there's a game release I've forgotten to mention. Sadly, for comedians everywhere who get relatively funnier when I'm typing, I have to go.

Happy Gnu Year

Well, it's belated, but better late than never. :-)

The Warzone 2100 team released version 2.1 of their continuation of the formerly-commercial RTS. The news link is broken for some reason. EDIT: And here is the fixed one. Well, the big 'hole' in WZ2100 has been the FMV that was in the original game, that comes in 2.2 I am told, but 2.1 is more stable and playable than ever (although I'm don't know the specific improvements over 2.0).

AssaultCube got a new website and a new release, version 1.0.2 which fixes a few glitches and brings some extra polish to the 1.0.x series of AC. Apparently Cube 2 (aka Sauerbraten) dev Eihrul has been backporting enhancements to AC, so looks much better than Cube 1, but I can't say for sure.

Speaking of Free FPS games, I thought this SuperTuxKart track, Sub-sea, being ported to Nexuiz was quite intriguing:

Speaking of SuperTuxKart, I can't remember if I mentioned or saw the 0.6rc1 release anywhere. By all accounts it's a massive improvement over 0.5 and the game is starting to realise a bit of it's potential. Version 0.7 will bring an overhaul of the graphics engine (port to Irrlicht from PLIB) and that plus all the new track development that is occuring, 2009 should be the year that STK becomes a showcase Free Software game. Still, the competition is getting tougher, but I hope that serves as motivation. :-)

Here's two questions for you, the readers, answers in comments please!

What was your favourite new project from 2008?

Mine was JCRPG - just from Word War Vi.

Which project do you look forward to new releases from this year?

For me, definitely Scourge (0.22 brings support for new model formats, which I think will make people pay more attention to it), with Vega Strike and UFO:AI releases also something I look forward to checking out.

Warzone 2100 Liberation Day 2008 & Interview

Happy Warzone 2100 Liberation Day! Four years ago Eidos released Warzone 2100 under the GPL (see this announcement).

Warzone 2100 GUI proposal

There has been more progress with the new texturing system, but also a GUI system is in the works (both a library called betawidget and an interface proposal) which looks quite impressive compared to the current look. And hopefully the feel will improve too - there are some small unergonomicalities with how assembling tanks currently works.

Warzone 2100 GUI proposal also

Also read this interview if you want to know more about betawidget (it has SVG support!) and future plans for the project. There's also a German translation available.

The WZ wiki has now a page that explains how people can contribute to improving the wiki. For all the MediaWiki-fetishists out here.

Speaking of MediaWiki and fetishism, there's now a LÖVE wiki. Let's see and hope it brings much use!

Warzone 2100's new terrain

Warzone 2100's new look

Development of new, experimental terrain renderer for Warzone 2100 has started. It blends textures depending on terrain and it looks freaking awesome. For comparison: an example of the old terrain.

Four CGTextures-textures (at 1024x1024 pixels) were kindly permitted to be used under GPL terms. But more are needed. If you happen to have some mad texturing skillz up your sleeves: Warzone 2100 needs you! You can see the current tile sets, that need replacement, here.

Eye of the Tiger

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you.

Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details.

It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video:

Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track.

There's a new development release of Oolite, the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 (announcement, changelog) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project.

FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say.

Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video:

Open Octane, announced in the forums, aims to be a fast paced car combat game where you can destroy most things in the game world. You can see the car crashing through trees and fences in the demo below:

Open Octane physics demo 2 from The Oracle on Vimeo.

It reminds me of another open source game that I can't remember right now as it's late and I have other things to do. I'm sure I'll remember later or somebody will post in the comments the game I'm thinking of...

CivCool, TremFuture, WineOne, WarzoneFree

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had!

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.

Times of War

Warzone 2100 2.1-beta1 is out, with plenty of new features (changelog). Internationalized, improved/additional AI, 64-bit support, in-game video options, and multi-turret support are the picks of the bunch.

"Additionally there are many parts of the game that have been completely or partially rewritten. So old bugs may have been made completely irrelevant and new ones most certainly have been introduced. So new bug reports are most certainly very welcome, even [for] bugs that where present in 2.0.x already. Any suggestions are welcome as well of course."

You'll have to compile the beta yourself. Here's a slightly out of date youtube showing what the fuss is about:

LordsAWar

Freelords

LordsAWar 0.0.8 is also available to download. The LordsAWar homepage is a bit spartan. It's a continuation of the C++ version of FreeLords, which has since been rewritten in Java and recently released 0.0.2 of the Java version. The games are not going their different ways graphically with many new tiles and other artwork added in recent LordsAWar releases, which has a top-down view. FreeLords is now isometric. This is what is good about Free Software. From one project, we now have two; after the original author changed direction, others could continue the initial effort.

Both games share the goal of creating a modern Warlords style of game.

Anyway, it's a sunny day, no time for computer games!

Updates, updates, updates... woha!

Just a tiny snack this time!

One of the Christmas presents this year was Battle Tanks Xmas Edition. It introduces more interactivity (very GTA-like stuff) and a lot of fixes.

No kidding, this is the biggest update we've ever done to our little game.

Sounds promising.

Warzone 2100 2.0.10

Warzone 2100 2.0.10 was released shortly before 2008. It fixes ATI 3D graphics and Vorbis 1.2 sound support and should make the game fully playable for some who were not able to run it with sound or at reasonable frame rates. Also terrain rendering is supposed to be faster and produce prettier results.
The ex-commercial project is for me the best free strategy game available. It was GPL-ed, excluding videos and music and I hope that it will soon feature some cool tracks to make the click-action even more pleasant.

Stormbaan Coureur 2.0.2 is available for linux systems. It features a new model, which I think is sexy, although I don't understand how the rear axis is physically possible (you'll see what I mean.) Another feature is a terribly low frame rate in comparison to former versions. =( Anyways, take a look at the official video!

Dead Justice

It's quite impressive what you can find when browsing SourceForge's project list... quite impressive... What I found is Cat Mother Dead Justice, a Directx-only 3rd-person shooter, which is a stopped and open-sourced commercial project. It has good graphics and does run stable. The best part for me is: The art is under GPL. This hopefully means that we can expect some imported pretty/prettier models/maps/textures in games like Nexuiz or OpenArena, though I think any 3D game could profit from it, for example JCRPG, which could use some fully-animated models - new textures would do the trick! Maybe even someone would care to port the currently windows-only Cat Mother Dead Justice...

Privateer Parallel Universe

Parallel Universe, a modification of Privateer Remake, has gotten itself a rather smart website and community forums. There's a good bit of work going on over there and the feedback on PU is generally pretty good. Definitely worth a look for space game fans. It is also part of a rather complex development scene based around Privateer & Wing Commander games. I'll get back to that in a bit.

A couple of Ubuntu users have posted their first serious effort at a game, Slingshot. It's a fairly simple 2D affair, take it in turns to shoot at each other, your shots being affected by the gravity pulls of planets.

I've mentioned Egoboo Resurrection a few times - a continuation of the classic game Egoboo. I've not really mentioned that it's only released for Windows despite the original predominantly being a Linux game. It just comes down to a lack of Linux based contributors. However there's another "branch" called Egoboo 2.x which has binaries for Mac OS X and Windows. I'm sure eventually a Linux guy will pop up and help out but until then it seems us Lusers are a bit stuck when it comes to getting an Egoboo fix. I guess there is always SoulFu. Anyway, to encourage contributors one of the Egoboo Resurrection devs posted a development bundle which comes with game editing tools as well as the source.

There's now a Mac OS X binary up for the latest Warzone 2100 release, 2.0.7. Good day for Mac users, eh? :-)

Back to PU and a bit about the scene which PU comes from, and it's all a bit complex, rotating around the Vega Strike engine. Some of the VS devs (herein called the 'devs') made Privateer Remake. This got noticed by the Wing Commander nuts at crius.net (herein called the 'canons') who are dedicated to their cause. Some less fierce but equally obsessed WC fans (herein called the 'non-canons') at the same time started forming Wing Commander Universe, a super-mod that encompassed all things WC, a lot of which started making it's way into PR. Unhappy at the way PR was not completely true to the original Privateer, the canons - with help from the devs - created Privateer Gemini Gold, a fork of PR. The canons publicly denounce WCU. The non-canons decided that not only was the limitations imposed on gameplay in PGG not conducive to a fun game, but they did not go far enough, so created Parallel Universe, something even less true to it's WC heritage that embraces fun over accuracy.

So you now have a triangle of groups - the devs with VS and PR, the canons with PGG who gets help from the devs, the non-canons with WCU and PU who collaborate with the devs on PR. It's quite an interesting thing to follow. It's quite a caustic atmosphere between the canons and the non-canons. At the end of the day, not everybody can always get along, and the canons are abrasive at best, with questionable forum policies and immature moderation the last time I encountered them.

Anyway, my point was that PGG is the most well known of all the projects. However, feedback isn't that great on the latest release 1.02 which new players are finding incredibly hard with a high starting difficulty. The PU team could flank PGG in terms of community by being a more fun game to play so attracting more players and contributors. And there's PR in the middle that will no doubt continue to, well, be in the middle.

I hope I got that all correct. Whilst it was a stormy path to the projects we have today, I think each project serves a niche and they can coexist harmoneously. It may even turn out to be one of those situations where the existance of one is what spurs on the other - Yin and Yang etc. :-)

King's Quest

I'm not a big fan of just repeating what I see on the Linux Game Tome so I'll be brief about these two: Warzone 2100 version 2.0.7 and X-Moto 0.3.0 got released. The former is a bugfix release (which was sorely needed) and the latter quite a lot of new features (notably hotseat multiplayer) and a new maintainer.

A few days ago I lamented about Adventure Game Studio not being available for Linux. I really should do my research before making such assertions... it is. Not only that, there's this groovy project to take all the hassle out of finding and installing AGS games - the Adventure Game Goddess.

Forget about boring hand tasks and enjoy the games ... One click: the game is downloaded, installed and set up. One click: you are playing

How cool is that? You can even run Kings Quest VGA I using the AGS Linux version, with a few tricks. How cool is that as well? I wonder if the same process works with KQ VGA II? So many questions...

For those unfamiliar with the King's Quest series of games, it is probably the most promininent series of the genre. There's a lot of history and a lot of hardcore fans, many of whom were disappointed when Sierra was consumed by Vivendi Universal which eventually caused a rift with the lead author and the demise of the series after 8 games.

The Silver Lining

Some fans felt so strongly that they went on to create the The Silver Lining, a spectacular looking fan-made project to create a 3-game (or 3-chapter) continuation of the series. It was formerly entitled King's Quest IX before Vivendi Universal made them ditch the official affiliation. Sadly, The Silver Lining is closed source (but freeware) and Windows-only. I did lobby a while back to make them open source it and use OpenGL instead of DirectX but it fell on deaf ears. I must say, I was not enamoured by The Silver Lining tech demo either, whilst the stills look great the animation and scene transition was shakey at best, and there was a lot of aimless wandering around with very little to interact with. Still, it's just a tech demo, so I shouldn't be too harsh.

There's even a remake of KQ III (complete but Windows only and freeware) and KQ IV (in progress - although I'm not in the mood to read up on it but I bet Windows only and freeware). Project X looks interesting - produced by the same people behind the KQ III remake, Infamous Adventures.

I would do a KQ article with more information on and screenshots of each game, but it's too much freeware and not enough open source for my liking, so this little ramble will suffice and you'll just have to take my word for it that everything I mentioned looks at least ok or possibly even rather lovely. I reckon there are enough links to keep keen adventure gamers happy. ;-)

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)

Brutal Chess, Warzone, Balder2D

Does anybody remember Battle Chess? I loved that game. I think it was one of the games that really got me hooked on using a PC after years of dedication to a spectrum. Well, great news Battle Chess lovers, there's an open source modern equivalent: Brutal Chess. It obviously needs better models and there's plenty to do (current release is 0.3 alpha) but it's an exciting find nonetheless!

There's a new Warzone 2100 release - 2.0.5rc1 (changelog) - which addresses a number of problems people had with 2.0.4, especially single player games. If you downloaded Warzone and found it buggy, it may be worth trying this update.

The author of Balder2D is looking for help testing packages for Debian/Ubuntu. The game is an overhead 2D shooter. I can't really comment on the gameplay because I don't have time to try it right now.

I just came across FreeAllegiance. If I ever hand out awards, this game will win an award for the most uninformative web page - no screenshots or information about the game? Thank the Lord for Wikipedia. It was originally developed by Microsoft Research around 2000. After failing commercially and being abandoned by Microsoft, they eventually released the source code in 2004 to the dedicated fan base. A 3D space game, it is a mixture of space combat and RTS with deathmatch based gameplay. Sounds interesting!

Thats enough for today.

Niwki Deluxe

These days my conscience starts playing up when I don't update FG. Here I am, sat at work, fretting over not having posting an update for a few days. I may have to change format to just blog about things as and when I encounter them rather than building up entries... still, I'm digressing.

Nikwi Deluxe

Nikwi Deluxe, by Slashstone, is now available under the GPL. This cute 2D platformer is very old school but still well done. It's also a bit silly [you collect sweets, birds poo on you, etc] and therefore suitable for kids, but still isn't easy to don't let the "kids" tag prevent those mega tough macho men amongst you from checking it out. I even made my own screenshot of it, coincidentally of the level where I gave up because it was too hard.

Sadly it is a Windows only game but should work on WINE. Perhaps now it is GPL somebody will port it? Edit - there appears to be a Linux binary. Thanks Mr Anonymous for the tip.

The latest VDrift release seems to have been the critical mass one. Now the community is building and creating content for the game. There's a cool 69 Dodge Charcher which should be in the next release, as well as a parking lot for practicing drifting. It's really nice to see VDrift flourishing after the open source racing scene suffered a serious setback a few years back when Racer became closed source.

Warzone 2.0.4 is now ready. I hope this fixes any problems people may have exprerienced with it. The guys working on Warzone are fans-turned-developers so are learning all the time - things should get smoother with each release.

Finally, the commercial Freelancer has spawned an ambitious fan project, Openlancer. It will no doubt take years to complete and be freeware, but for fans of Freelancer it's worth following. (I only mentioned this because I got Freelancer and Freespace2 confused so thought it may be a fork before I realised my mistake.)

Snippets and Tidbits

Due to personal reasons Free Gaming has been a bit slow lately. Here's a few snippets...

• Next version of True Combat: Elite will have HDR lighting making it the first Free Software Linux game to ship with HDR lighting (thanks Albert Santoni)
• VegaStrike gets network deathmatch support - go register and play on the online server
  
• ManiaDrive 1.2 bugfix release "no more crashes"
• Warzone Resurrection 2.0.4rc2
• OpenArena 0.5.0 - btw it's now a standalone download (and has been for a while, I think)
  
• Scourge! 0.15 which should be much more playable than previous releases with lots of work on making the character movement better
• Frets on Fire makes guitar playing fun ;-)

I'm off to suffer having lost my gal to her desire to be free! If only the female mind were open source...

Some Cool Game Updates

UFO:AI

Hot off the press is the 2.0 rc3 release from the UFO:AI team, which is shaping up as a flagship open source game after it briefly floundered due to developer desertion last year. This is another example of why indie games being open source is a Good Idea (tm). Had this been closed source, the promising initial release (tech demo 1) would have the end of the line. Fortunately it was the beginning of an era.

Another important Free strategy game was updated today - Warzone Resurrection. If you haven't played this yet, I don't know what you are waiting for. It's about as polished as you will come across for an open source game, mainly due to it's commercial roots.

When it rains, it pours. TA:Spring, the advanced Total Annihilation engine, was updated on the 17th to version 0.72b1. The changelog is impressive, with the main new features being a new shield system and custom explosions, both mainly for modders. I'm hopeful that TA:Spring will turn into a respectable standalone game in it's own right based on some of the budding mods. I know you can play it without the original TA but I hope they really back and bundle some officially.

There was also another major update to TA3D, a friendly competitor to TA:Spring. I haven't researched the difference between the two but I get the impression the latter is at a more advanced stage of development.

Automanic

In a departure from the tactical flavour of this post, the promising Carmageddon-alike Automanic saw it's second official release, achieving version 0.2 earlier in the week. I'm really enjoying the progress of Automanic, especially after seeing promising games like Slickworm and DIE stagnate and, er, die. I hope that a community builds around it and keeps development alive and kicking.

The original Carmaggedon was awesome and it would be great to top it and improve on the genre with a Free game. I hope the Automanic developers avoid the dreaded rewrite bug that tends to kill off a lot of open source games. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Deadly Soccer in a Warzone

A rather topical title has just been released, Slam Soccer 2006 (a.k.a. Bolzplatz 2006), a 3D soccer game with cartoon-style players. It requires Java 1.5 but don't let that put you off. With some half-decent hardware, it looks like fun. It did not perform well enough on my machine to be playable - however I blame my GeForce2, so do not let the Java tag put you off. Quite a few decent games are appearing in Java recently. There's even a Java port of Quake 2 - Jake2.

Warzone 2100

The not-so-well-known Free game Warzone 2100 continues to be updated. Importantly, for me, it looks good and runs good on older hardware.

It is a 3D RTS game that was originally a commercial title. One of the contributors is an Ubuntu user and, over in the forums, gave an overview of the state of Warzone. It looks like it's coming together nicely. Even though a bit of the original game content still isn't working in the Free version (notably the cut-scenes), it still feels like a very complete game and is definitely worth trying. There is a very dedicated community and such dedication only forms behind decent games.

DROD

Thanks to Evil Mr Henry for pointing out where to find the freeware version of DROD v1. It's DROD v2 that's not freeware, although the DROD engine is released under the MPL.

A bit of a short one today; I must do some work before I turn into a blog-junkie and lose everything dear to me.

Edit: Uploaded the screenshots to blogger to stop the berlios.de pestering for https confirmation. Apologies for any inconvenience.