Testing Testing Testing

200 posts to this blog now. :-)

Pingus

Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it.

Also looking for testers is iteam, the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted.

There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs.

Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

Thunder'n'Lightning and iteam

Good news today. Not only did I finally succeed in getting to name a What the Duck strip, but there's a new Thunder and Lightning release. There are some sweeet new features, focused around AI and an aircraft carrier as well as purty graphical enhancements as you can tell from yonder youtube video below. Also the game is now available as an autopackage making it easier to install for Lusers everywhere, as well as Wusers (!?).

That's the first time I've embedded a youtube video on this blog. Should I do it more regularly? I've avoided it in the past but I quite liked that one.

iteam progress

The iteam project is making rapid progress. Only incepted about a month ago they have made tangible progress. Whilst you still can only get this Gunbound-inspired game via SVN for the time being, it surely can't be long before an actual release should they keep up this kind of momentum.

I'd never heard of Gunbound before I came across iteam. Showing my age a bit... bring back the Spectrums and the Amigas I say! Still looks like a Worms clone to me. Although true gamers would say Scorched Earth, right? :-D

Back on topic, and some more evidence of their progress:

Ok, from never having posted a youtube video to doing it twice in 1 post. Niiice. But damn that music is catchy...

The FreeCol is releasing version 0.7.0 of their Colonization-inspired game on Friday if their roadmap is anything to go by. No point talking more about it until!

"Daaa daa da... duuu duu du..." :-)

Gate 88 to become open source?

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D

I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph.

The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0.

Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life...

The i-team project gets a new forum, meaning I have one less reason to browse Ubuntu's! Yay! It also got a wiki. By all accounts there has been quite a lot of coding going on by the i-team guys so I'm hopeful we'll see something fairly soon.

The rather more mature Atomic Tanks project, another game similar to Scorched Earth / Worms, just released version 2.4 of their game. The game is portable to Windows and Mac OS X although there only seems to be a Linux binary (rpm) for the latest version. According to the release announcement it also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)

It seems that the rather cool freeware abstract RTS game Gate88 has an open source future. I encourage people to lobby the author in a friendly manner to speed up the process. I got in touch yesterday although he has yet to reply.

The Post With No Name

The other day I came across Battleship 88. Assuming it was freeware, being Windows only, I didn't mention it but did download it. Given the lack of a source code download on the website, I was a bit surprised at being forced to agree to the GPL before installing it. Despite what the word Battleship imbues - some form of strategy - the game is much more arcade in it's nature. You steer your battleship around blowing the <expletive> out of anything that gets near you. The game is complete - the graphics and sound are polished and it even contains an introduction to the gameplay (which is topical).

Anyway, those who followed the link might have noticed it's to an organisation called www.gamecreation.org and they have completed a few games. I wonder if they all are available under the GPL and, if so, where the sources are?

One game they list, which I've been looking for since forgetting it's name, is Shotgun Debugger. It's a top down shoot 'em up, cross platform, the sources definitely are available, and the gameplay looks crisp and fun.

The Gunbound inspired game that is being "brainstormed at the moment now has a website and a name - i-team.

FreeTrain

And an interesting little debate cropped up on the tt-forums when somebody labelled FreeTrain's graphics as "awful". Some people can be very judgemental without ever actually investigating things. The reality is that FreeTrain's graphics are good but a different style to (Open)TTD's, and as such appeal to a different audience. I personally prefer the really varied cityscapes that you can generate in FreeTrain vs the somewhat repetitive towns that litter an OpenTTD landscape.

Other than all that I have not yet gotten around to working on the previously talked about award categories, but I will try and work on that for tomorrow's blog entry.

The Free Gamer forums really should be more stable now after the freeforums.org guys eventually resolved all the problems afflicting their service. Pffft, free services, eh? ;-)