Can You Say Revival

The Widelands team put out a release candidate for their next release, Widelands build10, of their Settlers II inspired game. Check it out!

Egoboo

Now who remembers Egoboo? Or the continuation effort that fizzled out? You know, the cutesy 3D roguelike where your characters waddled around? Well, there's a new place to go for Egoboo development. Several individual efforts have been released and now those efforts are being combined. The most notable ones are Egoboo 2.2.4 and Egoboo++. Hopefully we will see a new release in very near future. :-)

Pingus, the Lemmings clone with penguins, which seemed to have died a death at version 0.6.0 - which was a promising release as well with a nice playable tutorial island - has seen development restart. The original developer, and general FLOSS game hero, grumbel has been working on porting Pingus to SDL away from Clanlib. Whether this work will culminate in a release any time soon is another matter, but it is always nice to see forward motion.

netPanzer

The community for netPanzer, the formerly-commercial-now-GPL RTS, seem to be attempting to revive interest in the game. A new community site and resource site have cropped up and activity is high. Maybe development will restart?

Another project that is threatening to revive itself is Transport Empire. I have been very vocal in my criticism on the tt-forums of the bureaucratic approach that has strangled any intended development. One of the developers has had enough too and announced a simple cut-the-crap code-first approach to make the game happen, because discussions and design documents and fine-detail-planning had drowned any previous attempts.

The exciting freeware RTS project 0 A.D., in development for over 3 years so far, has a newish gameplay video up on their site. Check it out, it looks so cool. I wish they would release a demo but patience is a virtue and this game will be a scorcher when it is eventually released. Still, the lengthy development process is frustrating some fans, to which one of the developers made this rather poignant response which is worth a read if you [as a player] want to understand what free/Free game developers go through.

I'm going to have to stop there before this becomes an essay.

Music tip:

Precioso & Libex - Xperimental Scratch

Gaming Goodness... Sorta

I'll start with a couple of interesting freeware titles...

A while ago I came across (but forgot to mention) Hidden and Dangerous which has been released as abandonware by it's commercial developers Illusion Softworks. Linux users will need Wine but other than that it's another free gift to the gaming community.

Clonk

Another game to highlight is Clonk This freeware puzzle game seems full of potential. However I found the controls unintuitive and the tutorial rather unhelpful - I couldn't get past the second tutorial level! Still it was interesting and had a nice old school Amiga-ish feel to it. Again it's Windows only but should work with Wine.

I did a little article on IVAN the other day. It appears that IVAN development has stagnated but, no fear, the power of open source is here! The community created their own forum found at attnam.jconserv.net. There is an unofficial 0.60 version of IVAN as well as a fork called VLAD. Thanks to blogger user noIse for the tip on that one.

I had something else to rant about but I'll leave it until tomorrow just in case I have nothing else to talk about then. (It'll be a nice long rant!)

Music tip:

Moby - New York New York (Tocadisco NYPD Vocal)

Also it appears that the rss/atom feeds are only publishing old posts from Free Gamer. It should get fixed at some point before 2011. Thanks to Stefano Maffulli for pointing that out!

Utilizing The Community

Before I get onto my main topic for today, I'll note that Kimboot 1.00 got released today. You swing a ball and chain around and bloodily annihilate stick men. Lots of violent fun without being too gross. :-)

I spoke to HellcatV today. For those who don't know, he's one of the original Vega Strike developers and pretty much the guy in charge of VS.

Vega Strike has not released an update for over 2 years. On the face of things that might be a sign of inactivity but that is the opposite of the truth. The community and developers have been continuously active and there is massive change between the last version (0.4.3) and the current version. I'm trying to push them to release an update.

"It's imperfect!" they lament. "It needs playtesting and bug fixing!" they decry. Commercial game companies have QA testers. Open source games have a community. Make a release, label it beta, and people will be happy to try it and report bugs. That's the nature of Free and Open Source Software.

I tried to talk HellcatV into labelling the next release 0.5.0beta instead of 0.4.4beta. There's been so much change in SVN and x.y.z is major.minor.bugfix and this is not a bugfix update. People are often far too conservative with version numbers (Torcs being another example). Let the version numbers reflect development activity! Not how perfect the game is. The utopia of a perfect 1.0 software release never, ever happens. It's better to aim at milestones and forget perfection as anything other than a distant goal. The only Free Software project I have seen pull off a decent versioning system with a lofty near-perfect 1.0 release goal is Inkscape and they keep it very, very simple - 0.x where x always increases 1 with every release - no point releases (well, ok, 0.x is a point release... but no 0.point.point releases) except for critical bug fixes. That works. The rest just make the software look less mature than it actually is and turn away fickle users and users are almost always fickle.

Perhaps I care about version numbers too much. :-)

Anyway... music tip:

Babylon Robot - Dop4m1n (Delicious & Errick mix)

By the way, almost all the music I (will) mention builds up. Don't listen for 5s then judge it, unless you want to miss out! ;-)

Slow Weekend?

Well not much really to talk about. I get back online after the weekend to see nothing newsworthy so today I will just talk about a few FOSS things related to moi.

Although first, budding FOSS artists, check out this rather awesome animal print patterns pack that should boost your creative texturing efforts! It's CC share-a-like attribution licensed so basically no restrictions as long as you credit the creator. They are photoshop patterns :( but I'm sure there's a way to get them into el Gimp.

I imported FreeTrain CVS (from sourceforge.jp) into SVN (on sourceforge.net) and set up a basic website:

http://freetrain.sourceforge.net/

The next step is to get the thing compiling and have a dig around to see how deeply rooted all this Japanese stuff is, and to find somebody who actually knows Japanese. The game is written in C# and uses WinForms. However Mono recently got improved WinForms support so hopefully this will make FreeTrain run on Linux. :-) However that's the latest version of Mono and the Ubuntu Edgy version is the previous one... installing these things on Linux is a hassle and a half if something is not "officially" in a distro and probably why Linux adoption is as poor as it is. I guess I'll just have to take a gulp and get a little feisty.

If you fancy whipping together a few tracks into a compilation, I suggest you check out Mixxx. It's a great FOSS DJ application and cross platform.

That brings me to today's music tip, which is unbelievably good. I actually forgot where I was when listening to this the first time on my headphones and drifted into some kind of dream world:
Robbie Rivera - Floating Away (Deep Dish Dubfires Casaplex)

Is anybody checking out this music? Opinions are always welcome (as are suggestions).

Anyway, on a final note this is the 86th post to the Free Gamer blog. That's quite a lot - how time flies. Anyway I promise to completely overhaul this website before post #100 and, if I fail, I expect vitriol and abuse from disgruntled readers. ;-)

Seriously though, I need to move the list into a sortable table on it's own page because I just got fed up updating the nasty mess you see on the right. There's a bunch of games missing from it too. On top of that this theme sucks and there's no logo and generally too much crap on any 1 page. Anyway, enough that's ranting for now...

Another Populus Remake

cspop

I wanted to mention it yesterday but held off... check out this post in the happy penguin forums effectively announcing a 3D RTS inspired by populus! Currently there is only an SVN repo and no official website but it looks like it's full of potential. I used to have high hopes for FreePop, a 2D populus clone, but sadly development fizzled out. This game - working title "cspop" - looks like it's actually further along in development than FreePop and is a much more exciting project. Whilst it looks a bit sparse, the author states (with grammar corrections):

Note I have been concentrating more on the logic to start with, so the look is still a bit cheesy, but that will be looked on soon also. Logic is close to finished though.

Random thought: I wish somebody would revive Emilia Pinball. I did suggest it as a GotM candidate at one point, but it didn't happen. Maybe when I've sorted out the FreeTrain stuff (*eyes look wearily up*) I'll focus on that.

FreeTrain

Speaking of FreeTrain, I registered a SF project. I just need to import SVN then make it build in MonoDevelop or VS2005. I'm waiting on some Japanese speaking help though since my Japanese extends to, "Konichiwa." Er, konichiwa!

There's another update to the Ghouls and Ghosts Remake! I like that game, although I wish the author would incorporate Scale2x and make it not so tiny. All that squinting hurts my eyes. :'(

So, todays music tip... Why have I decided to start giving music tips?

1. I love electro, dirty electro music and it's often not well known

2. Open source games often don't have sound so, well, durrr

3. Something else for me to ramble about, with a tenuous FOSS game link

Onto the tip:

Mark Romboy - The Club (Early)

Return of Glest?

Another game whose development appeared to have stagnated was Glest. This 3D RTS was widely acclaimed as a leading open source game when it came out, with high quality graphics and solid gameplay. Although it lacked features, it seemed like the ideal platform to build a game that had depth as well as eye candy. Sadly development just seemed to stop but it looks like it's restarting, with the release of Glest 2.1-rc1. Don't expect anything spectacular with this release but hopefully it's the start of a return of Glest development.

However a game that has shown very nice steady development activity (something that always makes me happy) is VDrift. And a new release is imminent. With a host of new features that really add to the gameplay, this release... well, I'll let their lead developer 'thelusiv' explain:

I'm pretty excited about the release...this will be our first in almost five months, and not only fixes a ton of problems but also adds lots of new things that have made the game several times more fun that it has ever been before.

So get your joysticks & steering wheels ready. ;-)

Dungeon Digger, an open source game inspired by Dungeon Keeper, is looking more and more fun. On Feb 25 a new demo became available with a menu among other things. If you look at the screenshots, it's starting to look like a nice little game. More resources and creatures and I look forward to building me some grotty horrible disgusting places to lure ye ole knights into.

I was also playing the GTK2 version of Freeciv 2.1-beta3. All I'll say is, "Niiiiiice!" Still, it crashed although was much more robust than the SDL counterpart, but it's beta, right? Freeciv 2.1 should be released in April.

There's more but if I keep going then I'll have nothing to report on tomorrow!?

Music tips... I'm gonna start giving them at the end of each blog, starting with an oldish one:

Umek - Posing As Me

Marching Onwards

Bygfoot Football Manager development has been resumed. *Cheers!* The latest unstable release is 2.1.1 and contains updates to the UI, the addition of a "luck" factor to make long term success more challenging, and new country definitions.

Bygfoot is a good game. I played version 2.0 a fair bit because I've always been partial to football management games. However, the UI is atrocious. It's clumsy, it does things you don't expect, it forces you to do things you should not have to. For example...

In football you tend to have a first team - that is, your 11 best players - with substitutes to cover that first team. So typically, assuming no injuries or tiredness, you always start with the same 11 players. This is by far the most common approach. However in Bygfoot when you make a substitution in a game, the "team change" is carried over past the game. This forces you to manually undo substitutions after every game. Being a management simulation, this makes the game more tedious than it should be.

Another example; in every single football management game I have ever played, hitting the "next match" button takes you to a screen where you verify your team selection before playing. It's the last thing you do - since just before the game you know who is fit to play etc. In Bygfoot, "next match" jumps straight into the match. If you forgot to undo a substitution, or just bought a new player and forgot to adjust your team sheet, or just got a player back from injury but did not check your team sheet, (there are a 100 cases where you need to check your team sheet) then too bad because the game has already started. So, since checking your team before a match is something you almost always want to do, why does the game not facilitate this need instead of presenting a situation of potential frustration?

Once a bit of intelligent thought is put into the UI then Bygfoot will be a very fun game. Now development has restarted, I am hopeful. :-)

Also seeing a new release recently is Secret Maryo Chronicles. This Maryo-clone is improving with each release although performance on my Windows machine is still appalling for a 2D game. I will try it at home on my Linux box later.

I tried the latest beta of Freeciv today. The SDL client looks neat but was sluggish and unstable, crashing very easily after 20 or so turns each time I tried it. The GTK2 client was much more stable but not as nice looking. Anyway, I'm guessing there's a long time before the final 2.1 release so hopefully the SDL client will improve because it looks much nicer than the GTK2 client. Again there were UI issues, but it's improving with each release. :-)

I wonder if there's anything more I can moan about today? Who made this cup of tea? It tastes horrible! Oh, wait, I made it. Oops!

Actually a quick request. I want to do an isometric FreeGamer logo as part of the ongoing farcical saga that is the redesign of this site. If anybody knows of a good isometric font that I can snaffle, or a good tutorial on creating isomtetric 3D text, please speak up!