Ugh... Missing Title

Following up the recent release of Thunder & Lightening, the action flight combat game, the author has posted a video on the website showcasing a major feature of the next release - an aircraft carrier. It looks cool and TnL is looking like an excellent game. Definitely close to the top of my games-to-play-when-I-upgrade-my-PC list.

What do you get whewn you cross-breed Elite and Space Invaders? Scum of the Universe: "a space trading game that combines two genres: arcade and strategy." It is open source and runs on Windows - but if you are feeling charitable, interestingly, you can still buy the game. From the screenshots, it looks fun. Bah, too many games, not enough time for Charlie to play them!

The other day I mentioned Damnation of the Gods, a Dungeon Master clone. Sadly I jumped the gun a little as development has been inactive for a year or so. However one diligent reader attempted to get it running and overcame a few compilation problems but has yet to get the game in a playable state.

Blocks 5, a challenging freeware puzzle game. Windows only. Check it out if that's your thing, it looks very good.

Ok, enough disjointed messages... I post to FG everyday but my time is limited meaning I don't get the opportunity to do everything I want with the site. Therefore I'm looking for a bit of feedback on what people think I should focus on. Firstly the current content, and secondly what extra feature I should prioritize. Voting will encourage me, if nothing else, so do your bit for the community let me know what you think. :-)

Sonic Robo Blast 2

Now here's an interesting 'new' (read: new to me) open source game... Sonic Robo Blast 2! A 3D-with-2D-sprites Sonic-inspired game, it seems fairly complete and, whilst not earth shatteringly good, the graphics look fun. There's even a full mod for the game called The Mystic Realm, among other addons.

Of course any game which uses commercial IP for it's content (i.e. the characters, like Sonic, are owned by Sega) is on a dubious legal footing but the game has been in development for nearly 10 years now and is essentially complete and still not been shut down. I also couldn't establish, at a glance, whether it is open source but I'd be surprised if it wasn't. However it is only available for Windows :-( but thanks to FG forum member NoMorePros for pointing it out nonetheless.

Back to more definitively Free Software matters, and the PlanetPenguin Racer revival effort is ongoing - they are trying to decide on a new name for the project to disambiguate their efforts from the now-defunct PPR project. I can't say I'm enthralled by the 4 names they are choosing from but to be honest I couldn't think of much better. Perhaps you - yes, YOU, you good looking son of a gun - could inspire them with a better alternative.

One of 3D Realms' older titles, Alien Carnage, is now available as freeware. Download link plus random blurb here, announcement with other download link here. It's an old school platformer and, from my youngers years, pretty good fun. Dosbox required but that's ok since Dosbox works on pretty much every platform going including my mate's 11 year old waterproof Casio digital watch. Y'know, one of those blue and grey plastic monstrosities. Ok, maybe dosbox doesn't work on it, but I bet it could if the developers tried - dosbox runs on everything! ;-)

I rambled a bit about the CuteGod challenge on LostGarden the other day. Well there's a bunch of prototypes to toy with, most of which come with the source code. Why is it that Java Web Start never f***ing works? Even on Windows. I don't know how Sun messed that one up so bad but I don't think it's worked more than 1 in 5 times for me on any machine I tried it on. Perhaps now Java is open source that might change? Who knows.

Finally for today, I don't think I've yet mentioned an article on Liberty Gaming about making money from Free Software games. It's a good article with some interesting ideas, but to me I think the way to make money from Free Software games is simple; produce your own games (don't be too reliant on giant community efforts), produce good quality games (original, innovative, not too complex), and you will get good steady web traffic. Then you have adverts and merchanising and you have a steady income stream without imposing much on your players or contributors. I really don't like the notion of premium content or asking for donations. I don't think it's necessary if you are creating quality of innovative content. For example, the Desktop Tower Defense game is very simple and free to play but the guy pulls in a high 9-figure revenue (after costs, I believe) from Google adsense and merchandising alone (up to 20 million hits a month). A simple, well executed idea will get you enough visitors to make a decent steady income from a game - and if you keep churning out good games, you'll be able to make a lot of money without ever charging your players.

netPanzer Development Resumes

netPanzer

netPanzer development seems to have resumed. "New" developer Krom Xp issued an update back in April that I'd not seen until now. He seems to have focused on making the game more stable, which is a Good Thing (tm). This action-strategy war game (doesn't action-strategy sound better than RTS?) is available for Windows and Linux and looks rather cool too - helped by formerly being a commercial game.

The other day I was whining about the lack of single player open source FPS [or FPS RPG] games... well, d'oh, I forgot Eisenstern. A collaborative fork of Sauerbraten, the design for Eisenstern makes for very interesting reading. It will be one huge map with 5-50 hours worth of gameplay, very few limitations on what the player can do, with most story and quest work being done through the guidance of NPCs - although they can be ignored and you can slaughter everybody if that's what makes you feel good.

That's not the only SP-focused mod appearing for Sauerbraten. Somebody has started on a sci-fi horror mod. It's early days but my gut instinct says we'll see more of this due to the ability to rapidly create content for Sauerbraten and the relative eagerness (and decent looking screenshots) of this fella.

There's been a lot of progress in the OpenCity codebase since it's last release. *twiddles thumbs impatiently*

I came across Street Rods 3 yesterday. It seems like it is dead although there is talk in the forums attempting to revive the game. An open source attempt to create a sequel to the Amiga classic Street Rods 2, you buy and modify cars and illegally race them to earn cash. The current incarnation only runs on Windows and development has been abandoned. However there still seems to be enthusiasm amongst the people in the forums, just it's offset by frustration at lack of progress. I get the impression it's all artists and no coders - funny how most projects seem to have either one or the other abundance of the two talents, but rarely both.

Anyway, I hadn't heard of SR3 until today and it's been in development for 6 years. Either they were doing something wrong or the Gods hate them. Time for them to sacrifice a few virgins, I think.

Third FreeTrain SE Release

There's another binary version of FreeTrain available, with additional translations, plugings, and fixing a serious bug in the previous release. It still is Windows only although the next step for the project is to make it run on SDL/Mono instead of DirectX/.NET therefore making it cross-platform.

Simutrans development continues, 0.99.12 now available. I wish they'd open source the game. The original reason not to open source it (by original developer Hajo) was to prevent loss of control of the game (which is a daft reason IMHO - if game development is going well, there will be no fork apart from to take the game in a completely different direction). Lately, since Hajo stopped working on Simutrans and gave the choice to lead developer prissi and other contributors, they declined to open source it because they see no additional benefits from changing the current development model. You can't argue with that, as long as they don't stop working on it, but when they do I guess it will be a case of 3rd time lucky asking for the game to be made available as Free Software.

Onto other topics and I now have the code to RG Pro Hockey (Linux Game Toom link), thanks to a comment on FG. I should upload it as a new Sourceforge project.

Also on the Tome I saw Pix Bros. A cross between Bubble Bobble, Tumple Pop, and Snow Bros. Almost as interesting as this guy mastering the Mario music on the piano. (Can you spell 'obsession'?) However the Pix Bros game and website seem to be purely in Spanish (I think) which put me off trying it.

Check out this glowing comment on Scourge:

With the new .18 update, there was some improvements made to the GUI, I must admit I tried to play it before, but could not get familiar with this game. I like it very much now. Reminds me a bit of Diablo, with the items and magic system, and on the other side of Jagged Alliance with its round based strategy. Five points for it.

A game everyone should give a try if he likes JA-2 or Diablo. Gives you sure some days/weeks of play...

Finally, slightly off topic but related to FLOSS gaming - pictures of a Dell coming with Ubuntu preinstalled, something that will boost the open source gaming scene that is predominantly based on Linux. The open source desktop reality moves ever closer!

Ain't Fate A Funny Thing

So here I am lamenting the lack of free (well, open source, but free is good enough) single player FPS games, and up pops this on Freshmeat; Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge:

EMR 3.0 is a unique scenario based upon the Aleph One (Marathon) engine. It is a first-person action adventure game, featuring an epic and in-depth story line.

The Aleph One engine is hardly cutting edge (originally powering the Marathon trilogy of games, circa 1996-1998) as you can tell from the EMR screenshots, but it takes a long time to produce a fully fledged single player FPS. EMR boasts 42 SP levels and a decent storyline. The game works on all 3 major platforms (Lin, Win, Mac) and is downloadable from their Sourceforge project page. I don't have time to verify how open source this game is but the source code is listed amongst the downloads.

Another free single player game based on the same engine is Tempus Irae, which is based in the Marathon universe but adds a lot of new content. The original Marathon games are freely downloadable too according to this page. So if the slightly retro graphics (sprites instead of models for NPCs) does not phase you, then there is plenty of content to work through there.

Eternal Lands

There's also an update to Eternal Lands, the MMORPG that once had a rather wierd license to it's source code although I believe it is properly open source these days. Version 1.4.0 of the client brings new effects, maps, and monsters. I always found the game to be plodding whenever I tried it but these days I'm quite fussy and I know a lot of people who have lost a lot of time to EL by becoming quite immersed in it. It is more graphically rich than Daimonin and more complete a game than Planeshift, the other two main open source MMORPG games.

A plumbing game called Vodovod showed up as well on Freshmeat. Taking inspiration from the Pipemania style of games, it reminded me of FlowFlowMania. Checking out the FlowFlowMania website, there was a sobering news update to be found. From the website:

Just a little news to inform you that FlowFlowMania is slowing down a little due to the fact that I'm hospitalized since May 02 2007 for a leukemia at Paris.

I think I'm going to have a lot of time during next weeks to continue FlowFlowMania, but the poor network of the hospital does not allow me to use FlowFlowMania SVN ...

So don't be affraid by the SVN inactivity. The things will go better when I'll be back home ;o)

Well, I hope you get well Bobsky. Isn't that something to remind us of our mortality and how important Free Software games really are? To some people, they represent a passion and a dream.

Time Catches Up With Us All

One of the principle reasons any open source [game] developer should use a service like Sourceforge is longevity and posterity. If you host your own stuff, likelyhood is that you will move on in life and said self hosting resource becomes unavailable. Such has happened to RG Pro Hockey, a rather amazing looking open source 3D ice hockey simulation that is no longer accessible on it's former homepage. Now it is up to people like us (me?) to chase down the author or find somebody who has a copy of the code, and then get it on Sourceforge before it's lost to the winds of time.

EDIT - somebody has since gotten RG Pro on Sourceforge. :-)

If hockey is your thing then perhaps Ice Hockey Manager (Java) might be up your street. It's not mine so I'll leave it at that.

Speaking of 3D... there is a 3D client in the works for Daimonin. I had heard about it before but never looked deeper into it, but I found myself browsing the Daimonin forums today and the 3D client has it's own dedicated section! However development is slow so it's more intrigue than interest that brings it to my attention. There are screenshots, a brief gameplay video (the significance of which it is client and server), and of course code - so it's not vaporware - but definitely needs more impetus if it is ever going to become a replacement for the current Daimonin client.

Lemming Ball Z might get a new release soon. Dragon Ball Z meets Lemmings - destructable terrain, multiplayer, AI, lots of blood, it is fun by all accounts although I have never played it myself. The next version adds decapitations... that sounds interesting. :-)

I had something else to say but I forgot it... damn!

Nexuiz 2.3

Nexuiz

I guses the major event for today is, er, yesterday's release of Nexuiz 2.3 by Alientrap. Massive performance improvements due to an overhaul of the game engine, new maps, tweaked maps, tweaked weapons, sharper graphical effects, it sounds like a fairly extensive and very cool update to what must be one of the best deathmatch games around these days - and it's all Free Software. :-)

A russian list of open source games points out that Enemy Engaged: The Comanche Hokum is available under a GPL license, however it's just the engine and not the data which means you still have to buy the game to play it. It's a helicopter combat simulation and would be a really cool addition to open source combat simulations if they extended that coverage to the rest of the game (or at least made the data freeware). Otherwise I can't see the open sourcing of the game engine really making any kind of difference - it's not like it has massive exposure and a huge mod scene like the various games which iD choses to GPL the engines.

There are very few efforts to create single player FPS open source games. In fact, beyond Crystal Core, I'm not sure I can recall any noteworthy games.

Alientrap are working on a game, Zymotic, but I'm not sure it's going to be open source like Nexiuz although it will use the Nexuiz engine. There's some nice info on the storyline on that site but little else - other than a link to the curious 3D Element which seems to be a collection of game design tutorials. Note to self: investigate further.

Industri looked really promising a while back when Tenebrae (then Tenebrae 2) also looked promising, but both seemed to stall quite badly. There was an update yesterday to the Inudstri webiste though, and now it is being built on the Doom 3 engine but the screenshots seem to use a lot of Doom 3 models and Industri looks a lot less free than it used to - advertising for closed beta testers. I'm not sure it was ever open source though.

It requires a lot of effort to create the media (levels, characters, AI etc) to create a quality single player FPS game. I remember spending days, no, weeks designing single player levels for Duke Nukem 3D and requirements in terms of detail have escalated massively since then (and back then I was a kid with nothing to do except school and fun). The proximity of players to 3D models in FPS games means the detail has to be much higher than in other types of games; this genre does not lend itself well to the open source development model. I hope Crystal Core progress continues.

I got a request to reduce through-put on FG as apparently some readers can't keep up. And to think that I feet bad when I miss a day! Amusing. :-D