jMonkeyEngine Official Beta Contest Announced

We're a week into what has been an absolutely thrilling experience so far. What was more of an experiment to see what some developers might pull off with the new Beta release has far exceeded our expectations.

Prizes include a free copy of the upcoming "jMonkeyEngine 3 Beginner's Guide" and a free theme from the WooThemes shop. Additional prizes might be added.

If you want to get caught up you should read the following articles:
Brief Announcement
Exhaustive Contest Rules
Contest Prizes

Even if you've never used jMonkeyEngine before, 1 and 1/2 months could be enough time to put a game together if you have some experience in Java programming and game development already. We highly encourage developers to download the jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK as the recommended route to a quick start. From there the wiki and community forum are mere clicks away.

We hope this contest will bring some new blood into our lively community, and we trust you'll find it worth your while.

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Script Blocks: 3d visual programming(?)

Yesterday we wrote about Java3d-based Callie. This project is also Java-based but uses the jMonkeyEngine.

Script Blocks is a 3D .. environment, in which you can place blocks that produce or modify signals and blocks that react to them by changing color or by moving for example.

I assume that the project is inspired by Minecraft's Redstone Circuits. And I think it's a great virtue that instead of yet another attempt to implement Minecraft, this project focuses on one (complex) mechanic and extends it.

The video below is much better at explaining what the project is about:

Script Blocks Introduction

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A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

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Sandbox becoming free, more free hardware: aurora

Levelhead

I don't really know yet how to play Levelhead, but it has GPL-ed code and CC-BY-SA-ed art assets. This means it's good, right? Right? Well, I'll try to find out whether or not you can play it without having to cut a LCD display in mouth-sized pieces first.

Sandbox co-operative map editing

There's news regarding Sandbox, the child-friendly Sauerbraten-based 3D game/engine/editor. A completely freely licensed version is in the works. (Code and media.) So, hopefully we'll have a release soon, which will be includable in Debian for example. I'm very interested in this project, as it's obvious aim is to make content/game-creation a child's play!

MonkeyWorld 3D

MonkeyWorld 3D is a BSD Licensed scene editor for the jMonkeyEngine which I found through a thread on Radakan's forums.

Radakan's WorldTool is currently frozen as the energy is now aimed towards the general MonkeyWorld 3D editor. Maybe even jClassicRPG will benefit from it. :)

Speaking of Radakan: There's some tasty new gui design and concept art going on.

aurora: not only sexy but also with free inner values

Cool, I searched for "open source" on flickr and found a new toy: The aurora open source mixer. It's specifications and driver appear to be CC-BY-licensed. I'm not sure if the license is well suitable for hardware, but it does make the device attractive. I wonder if I can get enough motivation to get my soldering iron out. A GNU/Linux driver seems to be missing.

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