Oh no more updates

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb, and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I'd give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at - now maybe I'm not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL

I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems - occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X - and I'm too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige.

Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy :-( so I haven't tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely. Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided.

There's also a new Thunder 'n' Lightning release. This action / flight combat project is becoming a much more playable game; performance enhancements, more graphical effects, and more deadly enemies. It is available as an autopackage - so should be easy to install for Linux users, and there's a Windows binary too. I'm a big advocate of using autopackage for games because it makes it easier for people to play your FOSS game.

I'm not posting videos on Free Gamer at the moment because, well, they don't work with Gnash and I'm not too fussed about setting up the proprietry Flash package. Gnash does claim to be compatable enough to play YouTube videos but sadly not on my machine.

There's also more talk going on relating to a consolidated Free game art effort in the comments of previous posts - at some point I'll be less lazy and summarize it all. One of the guys is designing a website for it and it will be the first official www.freegamedev.net project.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 Grips

Since I'm a bit tight on time today I'm just going to post a few gripes I have with Freeciv 2.1beta6. Don't get me wrong, I think this is shaping up to be a really, really nice game, but the SDL interface has some very annoying usability issues to address.

• If you run it in windowed mode, you can't resize the game by resizing the window. The game display logic should be independent of the resolution, an absraction that many games fail to make.


• Auto-scrolling is annoying. It is especially annoying when playing in windowed mode when you are often moving the mouse cursor in and out of the game window. It would be better to scroll when pressing the right-mouse-button since the RMB is already used for manual movement.


• There is no UI to save/load games in the SDL client. A work around is to open a chat dialog and use the /save and /load commands.


• Freeciv dialogs have a red X with the tooltip "Cancel" to close them. Not only is 'cancel' a horrible word - implies losing any changes but it simply leaves the dialog - it is also innaccurate. "Close Dialog" is better. A better icon may be the circular arrow commonly used to represent returning to a previous screen.


• There's no option to undo changes in a city dialog. Combine this with the "Cancel" situation and you have a very confusing UI.


• If you click on a group of units, a unit selection dialog pops up. If you the do an action with already-selected unit and the dialog does not close itself.


• I could see no obvious way to end the turn with the mouse - annoying for a mouse-driven game. After being told there is, I looked a bit harder. It's an icon on the minimap panel, alongside various information icons. Hardly obvious - in a heavilty iconified UI like Freeciv SDL is aspiring to be, placing is important. They need to think a bit harder about this one. I would have placed it somewhere at the top near where the year is displayed since the turn and the game year are strongly associated and importantly you won't be clicking on it by accident if it is up there (something easy to do currently as a small icon placed amongst a bunch of other small icons).

There are many positives to this Freeciv update, too many to mention. Lovely graphics, much more stable, classic-yet-balanced Civ gameplay. Freeciv 2.1 is going to be a showcase Free Software game.

I also downloaded the 0.7.0 release of Pingus. It's shaping up nicely although some of the sounds fail to capture the cuteness of Lemmings. It was solid though.

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.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 Now Out!

A new beta of the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 has been released. The last major beta - beta4 - was nearly 5 months ago. There was a beta5 (uploaded a few days ago) but it was not announced due to some serious bugs. Anyway, beta6 is now available from the Freeciv FTP server. Whilst it is currently only up there as a tarball, a Windows and Mac binaries won't be far behind and I'm sure packages for the Linux distribution of your choice will pop up in the relevant places e.g. getdeb for Ubuntu.

The main changes since beta4 are numerous bug and stability fixes. Freeciv 2.1beta4 was a bit prone to crashing unexpectedly - beta6 should be in much better shape. There isn't yet a NEWS page up for beta6 but since beta6 is just beta5 with a few critical fixes, the beta5 NEWS page gives you a good idea of what changed since beta4.

Anyway I'll compile it a bit later if a .deb hasn't appeared by then. I think Freeciv 2.1 is going to be one of the best open source games to point people to - nice graphics, established codebase, well balanced gameplay. So if I don't post tomorrow, you know why. ;-)

I also stumbled upon the Free Sound Project yesterday. It's a collection of creative commons licensed sounds - but sounds only, no music, which is what sets it apart from other sites which tend to be overwhelmed with music. I also came across Gimp Users, a site with some excellent and up-to-date Gimp tutorials. More links like those, to help budding game makers, can be found in our Game Media Creation section of the www.freegamedev.net forums - so join in there where a good Free Software game community is burgeoning.

Smashing

Cannon Smash

Last night I downloaded and played Cannon Smash. I was quite impressed - the ball movement is good, the gameplay fast and fluid. The graphics, although quite simple, are quite nice as well when in motion.

The main problem with this game, and what would be a good mini-project for a budding developer, is the controls. Currently you use the LMB to hit backhands, the RMB to hit forehands, and a slew of keys to target a point on the other side of the table. It's unwieldy - it takes a while to get used to hitting the correct mouse button and at the same time varying the destination of the ball - but, once mastered, it's not even skillful. All you need to know are the far corners (1 and 7) and to be able to time your forehand (RMB). The controls are complex enough to confuse, but once understood are not powerful enough to realistically model table tennis. It's a shame because the ball physics and presentation are really good.

I think it an autochoice of forehand/backhand (depending upon which target is closest to the path of the ball) and instead have the mouse buttons instead represent types of shot - LMB topshin, RMB slice. Aiming should be done by lateral mouse movement whilst a mouse button is depressed. Slice variance should be done by movement of the mouse forwards or backwards whilst a button is depressed. Foot movement should be done by mouse movement whilst no buttons are pressed. That describes a set of controls that would require skill to truly master and offer a massive variation on gameplay that fairly well describes the game of table tennis. The only aspect not covered, really, is shot depth.

Add some better player models, perhaps characters of some sort instead of faceless manikins, more variation on the degrees of skill of AI opponents, and a tournament mode, and Cannon Smash would be a superb Free Software game. As it is, it's just a good Free Software game. :-)

Free this free that O_o

Linux users can now get their hands on the latest version of FreeOrion, the turn-based space stategy project inspired by Master of Orion games, without having to compile it themselves. See this thread for details. It worked well for me, although the game is not easy to figure out and is incomplete - I couldn't work out how to do too much. However for fans of the genre the project is definitely worth following and I'm sure the FO guys would be glad of any extra help.

There's murmours over at the FreeTrain project - tangible progress on an SDL port is evident. One of the developers posted a screenshot with a basic UI much closer to the original A-Train games. Moving to SDL is the major hurdle for making FreeTrain run on Linux - currently it uses .NET and DirectX so can only be run on Windows. Forunately the project is moving towards Mono and SDL. :-)

Er, what else is happening? Not too much...

There's an opinion article on Linux Lookup discussing the problems with Linux/FOSS game development. On the face of things, the author seems to be spot on, but if you think about it properly I think he has completely missed the real problem with FOSS game development. It's not about lack of talent, artistic or otherwise. Or lack of good environments, or lack of anything for that matter. The single biggest problem with FOSS game development is the lack of consolidation. Duplicated effort, too many projects chasing similar goals, too many people solving already-solved problems. If we could harness just 25% of the wasted effort in FOSS game development we could produce some very high quality games. That has to be the community goal, to help eachother to help eachother because whilst competition is healthy, teamwork is powerful.

New Sauerbraten Release

Sauerbraten has a new release with 2007-08-19 "Summer Edition". There's tons of new small features although nothing really stands out - but perhaps that's me just being ignorant of some jargon in the changelog. What does stand out is the absurdly impatient community reaction to the release. Read the linked thread to see what I mean.

OpenLieroX

I came across a fork of LieroX, itself a Liero-clone, in the Gentoo forums where the team seem to be posting news updates. OpenLieroX is a real-time, brutal, excessive Worms-clone with lots of levels and mods. Interesting. :-)

OpenLieroX is available for Windows and Mac OS X from Sourceforge, although it seems Linux users will have to compile it or wait for distro support.

One of the lesser-known open source Elite-inspired games is Elite Strike (a Vega Strike mod). After a period of relative inactivity, development has resumed. Whilst the game has a long way to go to catch up with the likes of Oolite, it's good to see the game isn't dead. Elite Strike aims to have more detailed models and graphics than Oolite.

I started a new blog called "The Free Desktop" as I wanted to post articles on things Free Software but not gaming. Somehow I got linked on the popular site Linux Today. I only mention it because, amusingly, people were accusing me of being on the payroll of Microsoft and/or Opera because I criticised Firefox. Then I see people swearing at the Sauer devs for not immediately posting Mac binaries. How wonderfully irrational people can be.

As a Free Software developer or advocate, we expose ourselves directly to the vocal minority of critical end users - so one of the best things to learn is not to be insulted by anything they say. Reacting only makes them happy and you stressed. It doesn't matter what some ignorant fool says as long as you stay calm and true to your principles. Such people will quickly disappear in Internet anonymity. Their comments are often worthless and not worth responding to. Next time somebody slams your game, remember that many others enjoyed your efforts and they are the people you should focus on.