Eye of the Tiger

I shall be brief, for I am in my briefs, and briefly available to briefly brief you.

Warzone2100 2.1rc1 - the first release to include the original game sound track. Read the announcement and the changelog for more details.

It's like Command and Conquer. Except it's good. See video:

Rising up... mmmmm mmmm... took my time took my chances... aaaah ooo... just a man and his will to survive... nmmmm mmmmm... its the Eye of the Tiger!" Gotta love that track.

There's a new development release of Oolite, the elite-inspired game. Version 1.72 (announcement, changelog) has been a while coming and, as such, contains a long list of fixes. Looks pretty stable to me but *shrugs* not my project.

FreeCol 0.8.0alpha3 - fixes a few bugs, they say.

Vacuum Magic is R-Type style 2D side scrolling shoot 'em up action, and all Free Software. The game topic is a little off beat but the gameplay is pretty neat and there's plenty of levels to play. Check out the video:

Open Octane, announced in the forums, aims to be a fast paced car combat game where you can destroy most things in the game world. You can see the car crashing through trees and fences in the demo below:

Open Octane physics demo 2 from The Oracle on Vimeo.

It reminds me of another open source game that I can't remember right now as it's late and I have other things to do. I'm sure I'll remember later or somebody will post in the comments the game I'm thinking of...

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LordsAWar! 0.1.3, OpenArena 0.8.1, Commander Stalin 0.9.3

LordsAWar! 0.1.3

LordsAWar! reached an (unstable) 0.1.3 release. After installing some game-uncommon libraries and compiling for half an hour, I expected to move some units around for some turns and stop playing from being bored. But actually, I enjoyed the simple game rules.

LordsAWar! has decent graphics and good music. I like very much that the game cares about the player by providing a 'restore crashed game' button. The game did crash once, but think I shouldn't have started it together with an other app from the same command line and then moved the game window while it was generating a level... :) Actually LordsAWar! makes a stable impression.

The only thing that confused me in some situations is the path finding. Units would walk in a zig-zag pattern instead of straight lines. I think this might be because vertical/horizontal and diagonal movement is equally expensive and that the behavior is not a bug.

LordsAWar! 0.1.3 [direct download]

After the absence of an official OpenArena release for a while, 0.8.1 was recently uploaded. It weights one map more (+3-2) compared to 0.8.0 and features a new hit sound (one of the most important parts of any Quake-related game).

Commander Stalin 0.9.3

Commander Stalin's latest version, 0.9.3, was released for Windows and Linux systems. It's a RTS that appears to just replace most of Bos Wars' media. There is no single-player campaign unfortunately.

Today I understood what the game's Stalin-theme might be all about: a parody of Red Alert! However, I feel discomfort with the media of the game: for Charles II's sake, half of this CD's audio tracks is distributed with the game! (Yes, someone owns the exclusive copyright on these re-mastered communist songs.)

I agree that the music fits the theme, but such practice is not legal. Nor is it very original.

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On Scourge AI and Widelands

Widelands

A quick one today. Firstly, I forgot to mention Widelands yesterday. A new version, a release candidate for build13, is available for download. The changelog is immense, so it should be large improvement over build12 which, for me, felt a little unpolished. Some of the highlights of build13 are:

• More stable multiplayer


• FPS regulation for less CPU usage


• Improved economy routing


• Many new sounds


• Many new graphics and animations especially for the Atlanteans


• Balancing work for all tribes

Not to harp on too much about Scourge, but I find the recent AI updates fairly fascinating. Developer lordtoran describes the effect of the change to a decision matrix from the crude system that used to be in place before:

Creatures that can't reach a location behave a lot more intelligent now: For example, if a monster can't reach you because you are surrounded by other monsters, it will loiter a bit and then throw a damaging spell or heal someone. When one of your attackers falls, it will engage in melee if there is enough space. I find it quite fascinating how the creatures have a "life of their own" just by using a simple decision matrix.

That sounds better than a lot of commercial game AI - which in general is notoriously bad considering the resources that go into some titles.

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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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Shared open source game media

Free Art Search shared media map

Free Art Search, the svn/cvs/git media tracking application developed by hagish and ghoulsblade, now has an overview over the data that is shared between different projects.

I find this tool very exciting! It shows how open sourcing media does help projects and if it was more detailed, one could see what media-demand exists.

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Brain Workshop 4.1, Epoch and an 'Open Source' vaporware console

Release 4.1 of Brain Workshop introduces some GUI tweaks and a new sound theme (piano notes instead of spoken letters). I finally gave it a try and was able to record sound via recordmydesktop with the help of this config guide.

The rules of the game are: watch and listen and press one button if the same field becomes active as it was n (a number) rounds before or if the same sound appears as it was n rounds before. I'll definitely 'play' this brain-trainer some more. :)

Brain Workshop 4.1

Are you into web-based strategy games? Epoch is an sci-fi/space type one. Development started in 2002 and it is open source.

According to this forum post, Epoch's team is now working on an OGRE-based 3D game with the same setting, but it might take some years.

You might have heard about the "open source", GNU/Linux-based, 250$ EVO Smart Console. Lol. 100% vaporware.

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Names, Games, and 150k Wardrobes

Unnamed Game

This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid".

Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum. Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?) after I registered and pointed out this problem. So until things change I'm probably not going to be able to give an update on any TPB3D progress. They do seemed to have designed a lot of flat rides (youtubes) but no roller coasters yet, and certainly nothing close to a playable game. Still, a good one for theme park or Theme Park (I loved that game) enthusiasts.

Bloodmasters

Hey, Windows guys, go download Bloodmasters. Fast, furious fun. It's Free Software and C#. Hey Linux dudes and dudettes, go find some Mono expert to get it ported. I should mention this game more...

Tim "mithro" Ansell from the Thousand Parsec project got in touch recently:

...It is a framework (and games) for
building turn based space empire games. You can find out more at
http://www.thousandparsec.net/

We have recently been part of the Google Summer of Code and have written
up an announcement about the success of the project. You can find that
announcement here -
http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/news.php/2008-10-16-1400...

In a follow up email he goes on to say:

At the moment I am actively trying to get more people to actually play
Thousand Parsec games. The lack of players is reducing the motivation to
do releases and fix bugs (instead of tinkering with some random
feature). It also means that the quality and quantity of our output can
be quite low.

Thousand Parsec

The thing is, TP is introduced (by him, by the TP website) as a game framework. As a player looking for a game to play, a framework is not that interesting to me. You can play TP, so it is a game, but I think they have a perception problem. For example, Freeciv is a game and a framework. But it's a game first, and then when you get drawn in, you see all the different tilesets and mods. TP needs to sort out it's image and have a default game that is presented first if they want to catch more players. People looking for a framework will find it just as easily.

Qubodup wants to switch off blogger comments - we got some spam lately - and simply have a link to the forum after each post. Opinions welcome.

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