Vote to get Cube 2 devs a free virtual reality kit (Oculus Rift)!

Give Cube 2 some tech!

Vote here for Lee "eihrul" Salzman to receive an Oculus Rift for Cube 2 development!

Oculus Rift is the much lauded VR headset that was Kickstarted recently, making almost 10 times the initial goal in pledges. Unfortunately, it isn't an open project, however, one of the big names in FOSS game dev, Lee "eihrul" Salzman has been nominated to receive a Rift dev kit in a giveaway competition, hosted by Oculus.

Eihrul is the lead developer of the Cube2 "Sauerbraten" engine, that has had implementations other interesting technologies such as the "3rd Space" force feedback vest implemented, making Cube2 an excellent project to provide Rift support.

Vote for him here

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Dev-Corner: Inter Quake Model Format and Open Source Gamedev Collaboration

The following is a guest post by Lee Salzman, a contributor to several open source game projects and the lead developer of such projects as the ENet networking library and Sauerbraten, introducing IQM (the Inter-Quake Model format), a simple model format designed to meet the practical challenge of animated content for Quake(-like) 3D engines and allow more sharing of modeling tools across various engines

As much as players or fans of various open source FPS games might view all these projects as competing, isolated islands, the surprising and hopeful truth is, we developers actually get together and talk about development challenges a lot. And in past discussions, one of those issues that stuck out like a sore thumb was content, especially animated content such as player models. We were all using our own various custom model formats or cast-off commercial formats (like id's MD5 or Valve's SMD formats) with related third-party export or conversion tools, with varying degrees of (dis)satisfaction.

Yet, what we all needed in this case was so eerily similar: we all just wanted a no-fuss, binary, skeletal animation format that was quick to load, had relatively small file sizes, and provided the commonly needed mesh data for Quake(-like) player models - not bloated with unnecessary "but what if..." features while remaining just flexible enough to fulfill the artists' needs. Existing formats like MD5, SMD, Collada, and others had complex textual representations that make them painful to load and often require significant internal conversions of the loaded data to get useful, renderable animation data out of them, often with frustrating omissions such as no ability to directly export vertex normals. Engine specific formats worked around these issues to some extent, but often suffered from poorly supported tooling due to the difficulty of keeping it up-to-date with various modeling tools and artist requirements.

IQM Demo Model, Mr Fixit

Given those frustations, why did we not just throw our lots in together and make one format that could handle our needs well enough, so we all benefit from common efforts on reliable, shared tools? Sanity prevailed, and not much later, after input wrangling from various developers within the community, we hammered out a simple specification for a pair of formats that did just that: IQM, a binary skeletal animation format that provides easy integration into a game engine, and IQE, a textual format that makes it easy to quickly write exporter scripts and easily converts to IQM if one does not wish to write an exporter for it directly.

And what good is a specification without support? So again not much later, we went through the grunt-work of actually making sure the format was well-supported in the key tools our artists used and, of course, the engines we all developed. At the time of this writing, all commonly used versions of Blender have direct exporter and importer support via the IQM development kit, the model viewer and conversion tool Noesis can easily convert from and to the format, and the format has out-of-the-box support in various engines, including but not limited to, DarkPlaces (used in Xonotic, Steel Storm, and more), CRX (used in Alien Arena), Qfusion (used in Warsow), ioquake 3 (used in Open Arena and many more), Remake Quake along with its sibling engine DirectQ, and Cube 2 (used in Sauerbraten, Red Eclipse, and more). To ensure continued and future support by other game engines, the IQM development kit also provides example demos of how to easily load and animate the format, both on the CPU and also using shaders to animate the format on the GPU, for developers that are unsure of how to utilize skeletal animation or just want to see the nitty-gritty details of how the format operates.

Despite the format getting off to a great start thanks to the support of various developers within the gaming community, we still need your help and support to help this format be even more useful. If you happen to use some modeling tools other than Blender (as awesome as it is, people have their preferences) and wouldn't mind writing a simple IQE exporter script for your modeling tool of choice, or even more sophisticated IQM direct export support, we would greatly appreciate your contribution!

To get started with the format, please check out the IQM development kit and other IQM/IQE format resources at: http://lee.fov120.com/iqm

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BananaBread, Sauerbraten in HTML5

Bananabread is the spiritual successor to Syntensity (which added a Javascript scripting layer to Sauerbraten) only this time running inside the player's browser. It was ported using Emscripten, a C++ (LLVM) to Javascript compiler, and seems to have quite a lot of Sauerbraten's functionality ported over, including bots, multiple weapons, map editing, and even a Javascript api to control camera cutscenes.

It currently runs in the development versions of Firefox and Chrome and seems to get about 1/3rd to 1/4th of native fps. Get the source here: https://github.com/kripken/BananaBread

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Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

                            

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

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Fan made trailer contests and other FPS news

So it seems Red Eclipse is having a "contest" for creating an official trailer for their upcoming 1.2 release. Nothing to win (except fame), but the guys from Sauerbraten (also Cube2 engine based, like Red Eclipse) recently did the same with a quite nice result:

 

New official Sauerbraten trailer

So if you want to participate, have a look at their rules and check out these nice open-source tools for video capturing:  GLC (short tutorial by our qudobup) and editing: PiTiVi or KDEnlive (sorry for being Linux centric here :p ).

In other news I can report that the Xonotic team is following up on their promise to report more news and developments on their Blog :) Check out the latest entry for a log read and many nice pictures.
Personally I am currently most excited about the mod "Overkill" with tries to take some features of the well loved instagib mode (sadly so much that it is sometimes hard to find anything but instagib games :( ) like right click laser jump etc. while keeping a variety of weapons that are a bit more appealing to non-instagib players.
Well, check out the more detailed description and pictures at the bottom of the post linked above! Oh and you can already play the mod by joining the test server with a vanilla Xonotic version (all needed files will be auto-downloaded).

P.S.: Here is a small video to show how it currently looks:

Xonotic Overkill mod (early WIP)

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Assorted FPS news

Lets start with the big news for today :)

A new version of Cube2:Sauerbraten was released today: Justice Edition!

Changes include two new player-models, 30 new maps, a mini radar and the new hold and efficiency game modes. For a full change log click here.

The blue base!

The new game mode "efficiency" gives you a set amount of ammunition and all weapons, and you can only "reload" when re-spawning and in the "hold" mode you get points when holding the flag for 30 seconds for your team

Upcoming changes in AlienArena

In this other open-source online arena FPS (sadly also with un-free media) some major changes in the rendering engine have been announced recently. Version 7.45 will include the new IQM skeletal animation format, which speeds up and increases the rendering quality tremendously on all somewhat new GPUs!

Furthermore changes to the shadowing code have been made:

Improved self shadowing

Edit (07/29/2010): 7.45 was released today, get it here.

ZeroBallistics completely FOSS???

Ok maybe I am jumping the gun here, but this interesting post has recently appeared on the Phoronix message-boards. It seems like the former commercial indi game Zero Ballistics (an unrealistic tank battle multiplayer game with pretty sweet graphics) has gone completely FOSS (GPL including the media and even the .blend model source files).

Zero Ballistics trailer

Details are a bit shady, as there was a post on the currently offline webpage about ZB going to be released for "free", but no mention of the exact licensing. However now a complete repository has appeared on the Sourceforge page (tagged as GPL), so speculations are that it is completely FOSS!

We are currently trying to confirm this with the authors listed at the sf.net page, but so far there was no response :( But lets wait and see!

Edit (07/29/2010): I can now confirm that ZeroBallistics is indeed completely FOSS :) Stay tuned for a more in depth preview here on FreeGamer.

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Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

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Cube2: Is it finally taking off?

Ahh, qudobup and Charly are back and posting. Lots of interesting news even for me!
So what can I add to this? Well first of all I forgot to mention this awesome TBS in my last post: UFO2000, which is of course like UFO:AI a clone of a very well known series.
And I should have also mentioned Stellar Forces which is a remake of Laser Squad :)

Cube2 Engine

So as you might have guessed todays topic will be the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, which besides being a mighty fine game on its own, has also spawned some great offspring projects lately. Blood Frontier has been mentioned before and since there have not been any new releases since then I will keep it short and just mention this video review which gives you an idea of the game play. But check it out if you have not done so yet!

Platinum Arts Sandbox

Plantinum Arts Sandbox has also been mentioned here before, and could be quickly described as a game development platform aimed at kids (and adults), utilizing all the nice in game editor features the Cube2 engine offers (and more).

Recent news are that they are hosting a nice contest , they have also just announced a new version. And besides offering the usual amount of fixes and updates, it now boasts a really nice 2D platformer template for you to create new games:

Sandbox's 2D platformer

Furthermore they have templates for RPG projects and for wanna be film makers a new tool called movie cube (movies made with game engines are also called Machinima for those unfamiliar with the term).

Syntensity

Syntensity is a project quite similar to the one mentioned above, albeit with a more mature focus. Their feature list is long and even though still under heavy development it is starting to be a really nice tool for game developers.

And besides the fact that we are happy to announce that they have chosen our network for hosting their community forums, they have also recently released a really nice new game template called Razanak:

Razanak gameplay

So check it out via the Syntensity lobby (the mod gets dowloaded automatically when you enter the corresponding portal), and see for yourself what a powerful game making tool Syntensity has become.

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Sauerbraten Trooper Edition, first playable Mark IV network Demo

Sauerbraten [more screens]

Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [download]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls, new music, and so much more.

Sauerbraten characters

The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story. I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :)

Mark IV

The tank simulation engine Mark IV [project, web page, blog] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary.

A little arcade

Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plus different grid types plus the visual style of Transcend. Source available here. It uses the PopCap Framework, which appears to be free software.

Atomic Worm at YouTube

Do you like cruel, hard moon lander games? If yes, OldSkoolGravityGame was made with you in mind! It may look harmless, even retro-pretty on video... but I have felt the pain...
O_O

Portable game packages

DSN

The Damn Small Nexuiz (DSN) project provides a slim version of Nexuiz with the aim to make it playable on netbooks. Deja Vu?

Speaking of reduced weight: Spring RTS Engine Portable is a win32 Spring (RTS engine) package that doesn't touch the registry.

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Freedom is Fun

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.

Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.

NYC in Sauer

I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.

There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.

Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.

UFO:AI Starchaser

I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.

Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!

Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.

I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?

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RubyWeekend, but also PyDay

Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!"

Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [video], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [video], satoshi's console-based footracer [video], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [video], ippa's Zombie Horde [video], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [video] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught.

The submitted code had to be released under an OSI-approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.)

The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame, which is a SDL-based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu.

Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner

Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare, which is the granddaughter of PyWeek.

You can download an archive (.7z) of all contributions. Or pick them individually. Or just watch some of them.

I also seriously recommend two out of the three PyDay #1 games. They're in the video at the end of this post.

While some games turn out terribly (it will be either less than ugly graphics or inhuman controls), gems tend to appear on such contests. I love the idea of brain-storm programming, even though results are likely to be buggy and incomplete, the important thing is that a playable model of a game exists. It allows to see the potential for fun.

Port Town

For example I enjoy playing Port Town much more than I should. It's a game based on boring random numbers, where you get a random number of units and position them in a part of the town, where they fight and win randomly. The tiny detail that zombies will convert humans to their own kind is what makes the game shine for me. Also the zombies start on the graveyard and the pirates start on a ship. It makes so much sense! I see a lot of potential in this minimal Risk-like strategy game. It only needs a bit more complexity and then a bit more graphics.

Another example is The CopyPirate, which is no fun to play at all for me, but which has a cool scenario. You're a pirate, who has to steal some music and escape to the intertubes while avoiding the RIAA's Zombies! How awesome is that? I hope this scenario will find it's way into a decent satirical game someday.

There is one problem with short time game contests' results though: documentation. I think it's a big deal, as many contest contributors won't be willing to spend any more time on their quickie creations while being the ones who understand the game's code best. (The reasons will be "The source is sooooo dirty!!", "I would, but I got this totally awesome idea for my next game!", "I'll rewrite it instead, rly!!", "I don't care if you like it, I don't!", "I'm lazy!" and "I can only work under pressure!") But at least the small size of the games protects against total unsuitability for further development by others.

I'm looking forward to PyHour. Less is more!

PyDay #1 games (the third one is the coolest!).

[Edit] This just in: Sauerbraten has the new release "CTF Edition" for Lin/Win/Osx. There's a changelog. I've noticed following new things: pretty weapons (which have been in the code repository a long time now), new maps, new capture the flag game mode. New models too I think. Fun!

Sauerbraten CTF Edition

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