New RTS releases: 0 A.D. and Zero-K

Hot news of today is the Alpha 9 release of 0 A.D.:

0 A.D. Alpha 9 gameplay

Main additions are the Roman faction, a new combat concept and new trading system. The new combat concept allows for a strategic selection of your troops to counter certain units (spearmen are better against cavalry and so on) and the trading systems allows for setting up trade routes etc.
Oh and they are still looking for contributers ;)

A little bit less hot news, but still quite recent, is the new version 1.0.3.3. of Zero-K, a cool RTS set in the future (if you are a regular reader you should know it ;) ).

Zero-K gameplay

It now runs on the recently released 87.0 release of the SpringEngine and also features a new faction: the amphibious bots.
Sadly their interesting meta-game PlanetWars is currently closed for reworking, but the next round will happen at some point for sure.

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Trophy 2.0: championship, shop, load/save

Trophy's shop

The top-down racing/shooting game Trophy 2.0 brings championship, shop, key configuration, load/save features and lot of code refactoring. It requires ClanLib 1.0, which unfortunately fails to compile on Arch Linux.

If you too can't get this game to run, there's still Bandit Racer for playing in the browser.

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Xonotic 0.6 released

For those not playing with the autobuild releases, I have good news! A new version of the totally FOSS, competitive multiplayer FPS Xonotic has been released.

Find the released announcement and download links directly here.

The two most important feature additions are a stats tracking system, which can be found via this webpage.

And the addition of client side scripted player-models, which probably doesn't say much to the regular user, but from a developer's point of view it is a pretty great thing ;) Expect many cool advances to come from this over the next couple of months.

Oh and try also the Overkill server, which runs a cool mod with totally new player-models and weapon mechanics, combining insta-gib with a more complex game-play etc. (in Xonotic, server admins can decide to hosts mods and players are automatically supplied with all needed files when joining the server).

Let's hope this new release will increase the player-base a bit, as this game really deserves more attention.

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OpenMW 0.12: Character Animations

image: Sky in OpenMW (scheduled for 0.13)

OpenMW 0.12 has been released:

This release notably includes NPC and Creature animation, though no A.I. has been implemented, so animations must be activated through console commands. Please review the following:

Regressions:

• Sounds other than music not working
• Scroll and button background graphics in launcher not working in Linux package

Important notes:

• You must remove all old openmw.cfg files in order for the automatic detection of Morrowind installations to work.
• If the data path is set manually and it contains spaces, it needs to be put inside quotation marks.

Changelog:

• Various rendering fixes and optimizations
• Refactored engine class
• Automatic package building
• Various build fixes and cleanup
• Various configuration fixes and cleanup, including detection of existing Morrowind installations
• Basic NPC/Creature animation support added, must be activated from console
• Basic implementation of Journal Window added
• Fix for local scripts continuing to run if associated object is deleted
• Fix for crash when taking screenshots
• Fix for crash when visiting Akulakhan�s Chamber
• Added catching of exceptions thrown in input handling functions
• Fix for NPC Activation not working properly
• Allow the player to move away from pre-defined cells

video: character animations in openMW

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Unknown Horizons Multiplayer Session March 10, 4:00 pm GMT

image: Unknown Horizon's multiplayer menu

There have been six updates on Unknown Horizon's blog this year alone and their latest is an invitation to a multiplayer gaming session.

Saturday, March 10, 16:00 GMT (convert to your time zone)

You will have to get and compile the development builds for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows but the guidelines are extensive and you can get real-time support via IRC, so don't let that intimidate you. :)

images: showing off Unknown Horizon's multiplayer chat

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Arx Libertatis: promising GPL engine for proprietary RPG

Arx Libertatis logo

Arx Libertatis is the name of the GPLv3-ed Arx Fatalis (proprietary game) engine. It features a unique "draw symbols to cast spells" magic system and has an own scripting engine (described as "a mess, but at least a human readable mess").

video: Arx Libertatis status Feb 2012

The game engine runs the proprietary game with tolerable lag in some game areas on an ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook on Linux and I am close to completing the game from start to end. It can also be compiled on Windows and OS X. A stable release is not yet finished.

Can Arx Libertatis be used to create a free-as-in-freedom game?

No. Not yet.

As-is, i don't think creating custom models, etc. will be easy. We will add support for more common formats in the future, but for now our focus has been on porting and cleaning up the engine and there is still lots to clean up.

dscharrer of #arxfatalis

While image and sound files are in common formats, 3d models are in a format that mostly has not been explored.

If you're interested to dig deeper into the project's status, I recommend starting with reading the mission statement and filetypes wiki pages.

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TremZ aka Unvanquished 1st alpha released

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February.

However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)...

WIP Unvanquished playermodel

But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;)

Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)

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