Dev-Corner: the challenges of developing long, plot-heavy FOSS games

Xenogear: Fighting Elly's GearXenogears is one of my favorite games of all time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it was a Japanese RPG for the Sony PS1 in 1998. Not everyone agrees that it was an amazing game, but it's undeniably one of the longest, most plot-heavy RPGs ever made, especially given the fact that most of the plot is in the form of the main story line as opposed to random side-quests that have very little to do with the...

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When three became two - Glests Uniting!

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project... Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006. ...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features: GlestThe original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared...

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Engines of War: Not dead!

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines. They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay...

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Lugaru animations, maps and skeletons are free (ShareAlike)

Remember when we talked about Lugaru getting ripped? I just got reply (twice) from Wolfire that the licensing information described in this file is correct. [first ticket (img) | second ticket (img)]. Probably the permission was given in private conversation or in the hidden Wolfire forum.I'm so glad they did license hard-to-recreate data as open content! Hopefully some completely free/open source project will come out of this. (There are many more steps/files to go thoug...

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Dev-corner: m64's Development Lessons and Agile in Free Open Source Game Development

In his first Lessons from Bulletstorm post, m64 talks about the importance of Level Design, Editors, Core Gameplay and Mechanics Tweaking for open source games (although most is general gamedev related).First, a disclaimer � Bulletstorm is a big, single-player heavy, action game. If your game is different, the observations might not apply. Some observations are shaped by how Unreal Engine 3 works and might not be easily applicable to games created...

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Space Combat

Space combat tutorial [MUTE (couldn't record audio on win)]Space Combat is a low-end 3d space shooter/simulator and holds promise through it's low-entry-curve tutorial*, which features computer voice. The voice is obviously-generated, although I couldn't find out what software was used.Asteroid Field in Space CombatSpace Combat runs on Windows (couldn't run it using Wine unfortunately [Linux port request here]).The project has two positions to be...

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FAR Colony Funding & Kambi Engine Donations (Is it possible to make money with open source games?)

The "Is it possible to make money" thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features':FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [announcement] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says:Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive !This makes me wonder:...

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Purity

A long time ago, on the old FreeGameDev forum, I heard of Purity; an original game based on the idTech3 engine.Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago.But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting:In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you...

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Developer Interview: Jared "Deraj" (Radius Engine/Avoision/Falling Blocks Game 2)

Avoision & FBG2Avoision and Falling Blocks Game 2 were reviewed 5 weeks ago in the Simple & Polished post and I got curious about the perspective of a small-foss-games developer (the interviews we have had so far were rather with big project developers). Their developer Jared "Deraj" agreed to a short interview.Hey Jared! Where are you from? How's the weather? What do you do in life?I'm from Washington (USA). Right now, it's cloudy outside,...

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OpenMW 0.9 and DungeonHack Progress

OpenMW 0.9 is now available for download. Features:Exterior cells - loading, unloading and managementCharacter Creation GUICharacter creationMake cell names case insensitive when doing internal lookupsMusic playerNPCs renderingNo screenshots I'm afraid!DH concept art from the "clothing the Estonian" threadDungeonHack will have a new software architecture [git repo], estimated to be showcased very soon. [announcement]I noticed that both projects have...

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ProFlightSimulator: Commercial FlightGear Fork (Weak)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free GamerA reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of ProFlightSimulator, a fork of FlightGear on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post.ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to...

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Ripping off Open-Source-Engine Games: Lugaru

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL. The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license. Here's an explanation by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository.Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App...

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LanPower's FOSS Games USB Stick

The following is a guest post by the president of the French language gaming community LanPower [fr-en translation] which distributes game compilations.Gamekey 2 gamesThe LanPower association is a French group of network game players. We contribute to Free Open Source ("libre") games by producing CD/USB compilations of games: "LanPower Games CDs" and "Gamekey".The Gamekeys are composed of portables games. These compilations are for Windows but all...

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FreeGameDev Wiki phpBB integration, propaganda & contributions

 FGD Forum + Wiki As an anti-spam and pro-convenience measure, you can now log into the FGD Wiki using your FGD Forum phpBB account!Please test this and comment on this post or start a thread if there are any inconveniences. :)We're interested in a major re-structuring of the wiki by the way, suggestions are welcome.Have you found the Free Gamer Blogger in you yet?Join us... By the way, you might not have noticed it but we also welcome guest...

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PonySiege

It isn't nearly fluffy enough... missing that horn on its forehead... and it's not riding on rainbows... This should be fixed-lenirWhat I'm trying to say there is (obviously) that FreeSiege (git repo here | screens here) is looking for help updating the assets (and they're looking for an awesome horse I think).So if you know any freely licensed one.. can and want to model one yourself.. or perhaps want to improve the pony (see quote above).....

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Xenowar: Minimalist Squad Tactics (Android/Windows)

Xenowar Xenowar is simple turn-based squad tactics. It had one or two recent releases. Gameplay is not at all as deep as UFO:AI goes but quicker to get started with and fun too.I tested it on a friend's HTC Wildfire [spec]: it was quite laggy and either the screen is too small or my fingers are too big. :) Or maybe I just lack touch-screen-experience.Please excuse this laggy and kind-of-broken recordin...

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Open Web Games, GameOn and Construct 2

(edit: Construct 2 is going Closed Source, I'll either edit out this part or keep it for reference, but don't get your hopes up when reading this)Scirra Construct is one of the few FOSS competitors to the proprietary GameMaker 2D game development suite (Gluon, Enigma and Game-Editor being the others). Unfortunately, the system has been limited to Windows since its inception due to relying on DirectX fiddlies, however, that has all changed...Construct...

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OpenDungeons Progress

OpenDungeons, a long-time Freegamedev project has been through a lot of changes since it started on the Freegamedev forums, going through a lead-dev swap and a major re-write. In the years since we last mentioned them, they've actually produced something playable: lots of new code and artwork has been contributed by a small but dedicated team of contributors and it has been shaping up to be an exemplary FOSS game.There's still lots of work that needs...

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RTS: The Romans VS. the Greek (+Chinese)

I take it my comments regarding the Spring RTS engine were not taken so well... so I will present some (in my opinion) much better and less messy to setup RTS games ;)One, I really like to come back to is Glest! The previously featured version/fork of that game, Megaglest (Edit: Now links to their awesome new webpage, how did I miss this ;) ), just released another version (3.4.0) with quite a lot of new features.Newest Megaglest gameplayIt now got...

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Contact: Tactical Squad RTS

Another game from the well of innovation that is the SpringRTS community, Contact aims to be an Open-Source squad based RTS. It uses models from the DOTA-like attempt "Engines of War" which unfortunately never really got anywhere, other than a couple of nice mechs.The Contact team released a beta on the 25 Dec last year, so it's not exactly breaking news, but the project is still moving forward and could use a couple of eyes if anyone is...

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