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.
Battle Just Started 0.1.0
Battle Just Started is a fun multiplayer 3D tank game. It has slightly cartoonish graphics and a basic AI (so you can play single player) and is in the early stages of development, but there have been several releases this month already - "release early, release often!"
Also Stendhal 0.56 was released, adding a new city among other things.
Interesting FLOSS game news is a little slow on the ground at the moment.
*Charlie crouches down and puts his ear on the floor*
Also Stendhal 0.56 was released, adding a new city among other things.
Interesting FLOSS game news is a little slow on the ground at the moment.
*Charlie crouches down and puts his ear on the floor*
Free Ryzom
The Free Ryzom Campaign is an effort to make the code and the artwork of MMORPG Ryzom available under copyleft licenses. Just today the Free Software Foundation officially backed the campaign with a hefty $60,000 pledge.
Robert Schuster brought it to my attention. He also notes that the Ryzom team also produced the rather cool "levitating, meditating, flute-playing Gnu".
Needless to say, the gameplay video on ryzom.org is pretty impressive. Then again, most things are impressive to me these days since I haven't really indulged in commercial gaming since the turn of the millenium - so look for yourself!
Robert Schuster brought it to my attention. He also notes that the Ryzom team also produced the rather cool "levitating, meditating, flute-playing Gnu".
Needless to say, the gameplay video on ryzom.org is pretty impressive. Then again, most things are impressive to me these days since I haven't really indulged in commercial gaming since the turn of the millenium - so look for yourself!
Wizardy
Ok, technically not a Free game nor really a game, but the damn thing is almost always right. Almost freaky. Try this little flash game, Wizardy:
http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html
http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html
It's A Graveyard Out There
Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool.
The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes.
The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released (changelog). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game.
And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard:
I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/. At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, but the game is completely finished and playable. As it's new, its community is very small, but I'm hoping it will get bigger as people discover it.
I could not find a link for Laser Squad 3D.
Railroad Tycoon now Freeware
The original Railroad Tycoon has been released as freeware. Download it from 2kgames.com who seem to be the official handlers of the freeware RT.
JFreeRails
Still, freeware is not open source. There are GPL clones of RT. The two most notable ones are Railz and JFreeRails. Indeed JFreeRails got updated as recently as September this year. Railz seems to have stalled with it's development.
Then there is of course the other rail game implementations, notably OpenTTD. There are lots of promising noises coming out of the OpenTTD camp and the hires graphics seem to be coming out of the community at a steady pace. I'm very hopeful that we will see a hires release in 2007 that should be a superb game and herald a new era for OpenTTD.
A game that already has hires graphics and is free, albeit only freeware, is Simutrans. The development is relentless and the latest release looks very nice. For some reason I have never found Simutrans as much fun as OpenTTD but then I grew up with the original Transport Tycoon.
VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update
VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!
Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.