Yeah, yeah, been quiet, will change, etc

Some people can organise themselves really well and accomplish everything they want to each day. Sadly that's not me!

However now my girlfriend is away for 2 months which means I have a lot of extra time. ;-)

OpenCity

Anyhow, OpenCity 0.0.5beta is available for download. It's not much of a game yet but is a promising start. Underwater schools aside, the user interface is quite nice, it seems solid enough, and the codebase looks like it is engineered with lots of original features. "Starting earthquake subsystem" is one of the impressive phrases to read when starting the game.

I also had a go at the latest Ghouls and Ghosts Remix release. Nostalgic! It's very good fun except for two things 1) it's insanely hard [or is that part of the fun?] and 2) the keys are not Linux friendly. Using alt/ctrl for jump/shoot and arrow keys for movement isn't a good idea when ctrl+alt combined with arrow keys tends to interact with your window manager (as with most modern distros). Oops.

I have more important things to talk about though. FreeArtSearch is a project by Ghoulsblade/Hagish (SFZ developers, FG forum hosts, among other things) to create a place where artwork for games is indexed all in a single place. It has automated tag clouds and lots of other features engineered towards making it easy to track down art relevant to your needs.

They also set up Planet FreeGameDev, a place where people's Free game development blogs are getting syndicated. Want your blog there? Post here or in the forums. Where those two get the time to set up all these things, make games (interesting SFZ information/videos in that link), and attend university, who knows!

High Contrast

Gamma Low is an interesting new multiplayer RTS project. Players act in teams in some kind of light oriented battle. It is very early in the project and the only worthwhile information seems to be in their roadmap, but it's an intriguing concept nonetheless.

Hex-a-pop is an original and well implemented puzzle game with cute graphics. Once you get your head around the basic techniques used to consume common hex patterns, it's pretty easy, but I think it's a good game for spatially challenging a younger audience. And it's open source and available for most operating systems.

Open City

There's a new Open City screenshot, seen here on the right. How cool is that starting to look, eh? New release soon? Fingers crossed.

I mentioned the space sim Stress Free Zone for the first time a few weeks ago, a space combat game which aims to have cooperative multiplayer gameplay (e.g. defending space stations) as well as modular ships among other features. They are making good progress too, which can be seen on their development blog.

And last but not least Windstille 0.3.0 is out in the wild. A platform game in the style of the classic Turrican series, the game now boasts 3D characters running around an artistic 2D world. Currently it is only distributed in source format but is still only more of a tech demo than a game. It is hard to find any screenshots but I have seen it in action and it looks really nice.

I'm sure there's more but my brain is in "off mode". I still did not get Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02rc1 running (well, it runs, just without sound) on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn laptop although I did help one of the main developers fix a few setup issues. Did anybody else have more success?

netPanzer Development Resumes

netPanzer

netPanzer development seems to have resumed. "New" developer Krom Xp issued an update back in April that I'd not seen until now. He seems to have focused on making the game more stable, which is a Good Thing (tm). This action-strategy war game (doesn't action-strategy sound better than RTS?) is available for Windows and Linux and looks rather cool too - helped by formerly being a commercial game.

The other day I was whining about the lack of single player open source FPS [or FPS RPG] games... well, d'oh, I forgot Eisenstern. A collaborative fork of Sauerbraten, the design for Eisenstern makes for very interesting reading. It will be one huge map with 5-50 hours worth of gameplay, very few limitations on what the player can do, with most story and quest work being done through the guidance of NPCs - although they can be ignored and you can slaughter everybody if that's what makes you feel good.

That's not the only SP-focused mod appearing for Sauerbraten. Somebody has started on a sci-fi horror mod. It's early days but my gut instinct says we'll see more of this due to the ability to rapidly create content for Sauerbraten and the relative eagerness (and decent looking screenshots) of this fella.

There's been a lot of progress in the OpenCity codebase since it's last release. *twiddles thumbs impatiently*

I came across Street Rods 3 yesterday. It seems like it is dead although there is talk in the forums attempting to revive the game. An open source attempt to create a sequel to the Amiga classic Street Rods 2, you buy and modify cars and illegally race them to earn cash. The current incarnation only runs on Windows and development has been abandoned. However there still seems to be enthusiasm amongst the people in the forums, just it's offset by frustration at lack of progress. I get the impression it's all artists and no coders - funny how most projects seem to have either one or the other abundance of the two talents, but rarely both.

Anyway, I hadn't heard of SR3 until today and it's been in development for 6 years. Either they were doing something wrong or the Gods hate them. Time for them to sacrifice a few virgins, I think.

Beyond The Red Line

Welcome to post number 100 on Free Gamer. Slowly I am finding out how to push blogger to it's limits. The list is starting to look much better, now that the layout is getting there. The tedious work of populating it with real information is looming. Once that is done, several more mini-lists will sprout up.

Anyway, back to the daily grind of talking about Free Software games. It's a hard knock life, it is. ;-)

Starting with Freeciv, which saw 2.1beta4 released (download) over the weekend. (Not sure how I missed that yesterday.) It fixes many crashes so hopefully should be a lot more stable than 2.1beta3 which, in my experience, was fairly ropey. Initial feedback seems to be pretty good.

I created some Ubuntu packages for Freeciv-2.1beta4. I felt like doing a good deed for the day, or something like that.

Beyond The Red Line

Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line is a game being developed by fans for fans of the series and is based on a modified version of the open sourced Freespace2 engine. It looks fantastic! They just released a demo of their work so far.

Since it is a total conversion (i.e. not a mod) you do not need the origianl Freespace2 game [media] to play, making this game Free! Another cool 3D arcade space shooter joins the mix. Awesome. :-)

I've not mentioned Open City for a while. This 3D Sim City inspired title is slowly taking shape. The last release was showing a lot of promise and I'm hopeful the next release (thriftily labelled 0.0.5) should have all the essential elements of a city management game.

Iris2

Another game that saw a release over the weekend was Iris2. This is a complete rewrite using the OGRE 3D engine. It looks very tasty indeed. Whilst you do need the original Ultima Online files, you can download a trial version for free and use it to play unlimited on free shards as it only locks you out of official shards (shards being servers).

Music tip:

Rooster & Peralta - Pornokopia (Kobbe & Leeds mix)

PS. Please comment on the new list format. Good feedback early on means less work later on fixing it!

New Releases on the Horizon

There are imminent releases for OpenCity and Pingus.

OpenCity 0.0.4beta is looking a lot more playable than it's version number suggests with the TODO looking like 0.0.5 will contain most elements you'd expect in a city simulation game.

Pingus will probably be a 0.7 alpha release because the project is struggling for developers and Pingus 0.6 is getting withdrawn from distros as it needs the deprecated Clanlib 0.6 to run. It'd be nice to see a new Pingus release since the game is pretty much there, it just needs a few more levels and a tiny bit of polishing and it'll be better than the original Lemmings titles.

SuperTuxKart 0.2rc1 is available for download. There's been a lot of code activity so I'm waiting on the next rc to try it out although I think you need a good PC to play it - I've heard a few murmours that the graphics engine really needs optimising.

Enough of games that are gearing up to releases, there was a new game announced on the Linux Game Tome: Max Fighter, a 2D shooter with a strong asteroids influence. It's got nice graphics and is quite fun but the gameplay quickly becomes very repetitive and it's nowhere near as addictive as SolarWolf nor has the depth of Chromium BSU. It was also very choppy / low fps on my 1ghz laptop. In times of CPU/GPU affluence it seems that increasingly developers are caring less about optimising their games.