Spaced Out - Vega Strike and Pioneer betas plus Multiplayer Simutrans and MotoGT

The recent blogging activity, spurred on by the growth in official Free Gamer blog authors, is a pleasure to see. When I started the blog back in 2006, I didn't think it'd ever be so popular, let alone last this long.

* Casual reference to remind readers that I am the original author and, should I ever be displeased, I will smite thee with banana flesh limbs.

^ Reference to IVAN; LIVAN or IVANX are better - see community site for variants.

Vega Strike Shaders

There's a new beta release for Vega Strike. Version 0.5.1 beta 1 (forum announcement) is a bigger point release than the 0.5.0->0.5.1 step implies. Improved planet shaders, lots of bug fixing, lots of general tidy up, video support (mainly for mods) and a lot more ships.

Coincidentally, one of the original Vega Strike authors is working on a project called OurBricks for online collaboration of 3D resources. Lots of the Vega Strike ships are already uploaded.

The ever impressive Pioneer Space Sim project, an Elite-inspired game, continues its activity with the release of Pioneer beta 9. Changelog includes rewritten combat AI, lots of HUD work, some even nicer planet terrain, trade ships, and more.

Also there's big news for Simutrans fans. There was a lull in releases after Simutrans 102.2.2 as the team worked on introducing multiplayer. After nearly a year, version 110.0.1 (and 110.0.0 before it) has arrived with the usual plethora of fixes and well as full multiplayer support.

Our final exciting release is for the fourth beta for MotoGT. Changes include new tracks, effects, joystick support, full championship mode, and more. A video:

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Oh my God-it's full of stars!: Free and Open Source procedural space sim round up (a la Infinity or Elite)

"The thing's hollow..it goes on forever..-and--Oh my God--it's full of stars!"

Bowman's memorable utterance in 2001 A Space Odyssey encapsulates perfectly the way the space and its' exploration resonates with the imagination and nothing encapsulates the experience of stepping out and living amongst the stars as well as David Braben's immense procedural opus, the Frontier Elite/Elite series of games.

The Elite and Frontier Elite series left a long shadow, inspiring academic work in procedural generation (see vterrain.org) but towering over countless emulation attempts, for both the depicted universe (space and surfaces of all objects on a scale of light years, to meters) procedural gameplay (location/assets/mission/incidental event combination, with a full range of mission types), interaction (action based reputation, politics etc.). Although a lot of academic work was done, like with a lot of areas of game development, not much in the way of actual realisation was ever done (a genre of space sims emulated a fraction of the scope of the game, often using large FPS style rooms with space/planet wall paper). There were a few foss/indie projects (Oolite, FFEd3d, Ad astra, Evochron series) that attempted to follow.

Recently with the advent of very powerful hardware ( just begging for realistic procedural simulation) the I-Novae engines indie creator decided to implement a procedural universe, with stunning results (see here and here for motivation), and the proof of concept has further stirred opensource attempts. I-Novae people are mainly focussed on an MMO, which largely gets around interaction/social simulation in a by replacing it with standard MMO player-player interaction mechanics.

Which leaves a large empty space for commercial, indie, or most importantly FOSS singleplayer games, as well as, and much more interestingly, a chance for FOSS to produce the standout significant modern game in a genre first.

The procedural space sim bug has resulted in quite a few FOSS projects, often the result of a single founder's inspiration, occurring independently and in isolation, and subsequently attracting some attention from the community:


Pioneer:

(Download, more recent v7.5/Source/Forum/Screenshots)
Most developed procedural planets (along with Spaceway). New sim, released online by Tomm Morton (creator of glFrontier), and associates, and whose development has avalanched a bit. OpenGL 2.0, lua/c++, all bodies spin/orbit around each other, scriptable procedural models, economy/life/missions implemented but require fleshing out, procedural cities/ground vehicles etc. mean FPS/RPG/air/ground stories/gameplay of sci-fi tv franchises like Star Wars/Star Trek/Doctor Who/BSG/Babylon 5 (and game worlds from books) etc. can be potentially recreated therefore also of interest to franchise modders.

There is a weight/substance to planets when viewed from a distance which is not even present in Infinity (as far as youtube vids show). Probably a combination of not looking plastic-y due to phong-like lighting model/strong specularity and planets having a realistic radius allowing you to be reasonably distant and still see the planet stretch away despite turning a lot.

Note: all screenshots are from earlier versions of Pioneer, and the graphics have improved even more since then.


Spaceway:


(Download/Screenshots) Virtually identical specs to pioneer, has procedural spaceships half implemented, no life/cities yet. Created by FOSS Orbiter's oglaclient author Artlav and shares some code with it. Intended to be a procedural replacement for orbiter he is looking at a game as well. Sourceforge says GPL license. Code not released yet as apparently he is waiting until it is cleaned. Good atmospheric scattering. Many galaxies simulated.

Titaniumart's Planetary space:


(Ogre thread/Screenshots) More speculative, long presence in Ogre forums, where they have mentioned it will be opensource, and a procedural 'snap-in' will be released, potentially allowing FPS/RPG devs to incorporate procedural terrain easily. Due for a tech demo soon.

Vegastrike:


(Download/Source/Forum/Screenshots) Have recently started looking into procedural planets. Mostly included here for completeness.Features a large procedurally generation universe, with economy/empires/wars simulated. Multiplayer/modding community. Released version is years behind, and graphically of a previous era, looking for a coder to port to Ogre.


Project Simerge:


(Code) Windows/Linux support. Inactive, but code may be of some use (Sourceforge shows 5 week old commits, thanks Charlieg). A partly completed procedural sim, the developer released code under GPL3 and is considering a seperate closed source game. Working prototype.Building interior support.

FOSS tech demos/source:

Sponeil.net: Windows/Linux.
Various tech demos, including planet/volumetric cloud generation.

Galaxy Engine: (Download/Source/Ogre thread) Procedural planet tech demo.

OgrePlanet: (Source) Another recently started attempt..

Foss clones of Elite series exist (not modern, as they are the same game essentially, but..) e.g. Oolite: Elite remake as for a long time gameplay just was not available elsewhere. Planets etc. nowhere near upto pioneer/spaceway standards.

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It strikes me that development of so much software so identical in spirit, scope and vision, is precisely the type of duplication an open and social philosophy like FOSS seeks to prevent. It should be possible for projects to list their particular requirements to see if a framework for a space sim engine cannot be created that allows overlapping areas to be developed in a way that avoids duplication (especially considering the drought of programmers in FOSS space sim communities like Vegastrike, Freespace open etc.).

If there is software, stats, or facts that would be relevant please feel free to note in comments.

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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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The Morning After The Night Before

Something important happened last night. Something transformational. Qubodup designed a new forum logo.

:-)

For those that don't follow the planet, which is titled "news" in the link bars ^^, there have been some great game updates lately.

Vega Strike ship: MK32

This update on Vega Strike is a great read with some screenshots of the many gorgeous new models that have gone into the game. They also have a new gallery system since the old one was fairy broken after the Sourceforge web hosting service updates.

Scourge gets plenty of planet-time these days with a (now 7 week strong) weekly update. Over the last few months there's been an AI overhaul, lots of optimization and leak fixing, an item model/artwork overhaul, and lots of miscellaneous small improvements to the game. Short of a nice animation system and character model pipeline (most of the character models are assorted free[ware] md3 models) the game is looking very good indeed. Once better support for animated models (probably using assimp and obj/md5) is tackled, Scourge will be a very strong project indeed and hopefully a few adventure RPG game projects will appear, using Scourge as their base/engine.

Hedgewars 0.9.7 is out. The video is so reminiscent of classic Worms gameplay, it's uncanny. If you swapped the hedgehogs for worms, I wouldn't have known the difference. It looks great and has much stronger multiplayer support in the new version. The artillery clone scene is probably one of the strongest open source game genres with strong competition between Hedgewars, Wormux, Scorched3D and (the more action oriented) Teeworlds, among others.

CGMadness

I was impressed by CGMadness, which has smooth graphics and potentially good gameplay. It like Trackballs but has a nicer feel which is difficult to really quantify. Intriguingly there is CGPortals which promises to take CGMadness and add portals to it - that should be an interesting combination although I didn't try out the early versions.

The number of projects that extend Sauerbraten seems to be growing all the time. From the cubedev blog (another listed on the planet) I came across the Plexus project which looks to take Sauer and turn it into a more flexible game system. They've already implemented a much nicer mouse handling system and the ability to import Dwarf Fortress maps, and more. "Socket level control of Sauerbraten" sounds especially useful, giving developers the freedom to control Sauerbraten from their programming language of choice.

The planet and the forum are great for the FOSS gaming scene as it means that the community can communicate much better with the world around it. It's bad for this blog though because I don't feel the need to post much, but that's good for me since posting used to take up way too much time. These days it's much easier to post too.

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Eying Eisenstern And Eye Candy

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing!

Eisenstern

Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or, if you love acronym overload, a FOSS SP FPS RPG. Or FSFR if you love acronym acronyms. I'm digressing again... it's a bad habit!

The Apricot Project is coming to the final stages of it's effort, and thus the game Yo Frankie! nears it's official release. It looks really, really good. The graphics are fantastic and the gameplay looks fun too. Here's the video:

Blender 2.48 just got released, and it includes many improvements contributed by the Apricot Project during it's development of Yo Frankie!. (That '!' messes with my grammar, but I'll resist the temptation to digress.) It looks like a real boost to the Blender Game Engine as a platform for creating games:

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

Warzone2100 2.1-beta5 came out at the end of September, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere. Well \o/ it just got mentioned here! Erm, but, back on topic, WZ 2.1 is approaching "super stableness" which is always a good thing. Check it out if you love your 3D future war RTS games and open source. :-)

And to round off, lately there have been some awesome contributions to Vega Strike. There's some real eye candy to be had here. This alien space base or this massive space ship are two intimidatingly beautiful examples. There's plenty more to be found. (Disclaimer: I may have posted some of this before, I'm a big fan of the project.)

Spread the word! • digg • fsdaily

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