Screenshots are for wimps

Glest 3.1.2 has been released (changelog, linux). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this.

SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge. It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed.

There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer derivative) and then race on them all without the game without specialist tools or knowledge.

Speaking of Sauerbraten, here's some videos showing how basic world editing works.

Word War vi (that's vi as in vi vs emacs as opposed to VI as in 4 6 (d'oh! dang roman numerals...)) is a side scrolling shooter which is, well, kinda geeky but also kinda fun. (Did you spend a few secs thinking "World War IV" too?)

Finally, the Secret Maryo Chronicles project is looking for a new name to get away from copyright trademark issues with the Mario franchise. I'm sure all good ideas are welcome.

In case you didn't guess from the title, there's no screenshots in the post. I'm too busy to do it today! Edit: Ok, thought I'd post this Word War iv vi video since it's kinda cool:

Saucey

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him.

FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely.

Sauer NYC

Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style.

Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is. It is, however, by far the best open source FPS technology and platform, as evidenced by games like Blood Frontier and Eisenstern. If they can polish the default gameplay of Sauer itself, it's a bonus. Blood Frontier has seen a number of feature additions that may or may not go back into Sauer SVN, but it'll be a great advert for Sauer when it's done.

Battle Tanks now has a level editor. It's a fun little game.

Short n sweet today. Adios!

Return of the Jedi Gamer

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)

Blood Frontier

Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.

I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.

Vega Wars

Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.

Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.

There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.

Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.

Oh no more updates

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb, and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I'd give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at - now maybe I'm not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL

I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems - occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X - and I'm too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige.

Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy :-( so I haven't tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely. Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided.

There's also a new Thunder 'n' Lightning release. This action / flight combat project is becoming a much more playable game; performance enhancements, more graphical effects, and more deadly enemies. It is available as an autopackage - so should be easy to install for Linux users, and there's a Windows binary too. I'm a big advocate of using autopackage for games because it makes it easier for people to play your FOSS game.

I'm not posting videos on Free Gamer at the moment because, well, they don't work with Gnash and I'm not too fussed about setting up the proprietry Flash package. Gnash does claim to be compatable enough to play YouTube videos but sadly not on my machine.

There's also more talk going on relating to a consolidated Free game art effort in the comments of previous posts - at some point I'll be less lazy and summarize it all. One of the guys is designing a website for it and it will be the first official www.freegamedev.net project.

New Sauerbraten Release

Sauerbraten has a new release with 2007-08-19 "Summer Edition". There's tons of new small features although nothing really stands out - but perhaps that's me just being ignorant of some jargon in the changelog. What does stand out is the absurdly impatient community reaction to the release. Read the linked thread to see what I mean.

OpenLieroX

I came across a fork of LieroX, itself a Liero-clone, in the Gentoo forums where the team seem to be posting news updates. OpenLieroX is a real-time, brutal, excessive Worms-clone with lots of levels and mods. Interesting. :-)

OpenLieroX is available for Windows and Mac OS X from Sourceforge, although it seems Linux users will have to compile it or wait for distro support.

One of the lesser-known open source Elite-inspired games is Elite Strike (a Vega Strike mod). After a period of relative inactivity, development has resumed. Whilst the game has a long way to go to catch up with the likes of Oolite, it's good to see the game isn't dead. Elite Strike aims to have more detailed models and graphics than Oolite.

I started a new blog called "The Free Desktop" as I wanted to post articles on things Free Software but not gaming. Somehow I got linked on the popular site Linux Today. I only mention it because, amusingly, people were accusing me of being on the payroll of Microsoft and/or Opera because I criticised Firefox. Then I see people swearing at the Sauer devs for not immediately posting Mac binaries. How wonderfully irrational people can be.

As a Free Software developer or advocate, we expose ourselves directly to the vocal minority of critical end users - so one of the best things to learn is not to be insulted by anything they say. Reacting only makes them happy and you stressed. It doesn't matter what some ignorant fool says as long as you stay calm and true to your principles. Such people will quickly disappear in Internet anonymity. Their comments are often worthless and not worth responding to. Next time somebody slams your game, remember that many others enjoyed your efforts and they are the people you should focus on.

Ascii 3D

Tower

New VS Models :-)

Tower - a rogue-like with a difference. The art is ascii, but it's rendered in 3D. Interesting...

The devblog for Vega Strike is full of activity. People are sorting out new artwork, replacing the frail sound server, and implementing lots of other improvements to the game. It seems that school is oout and summer is in, so the developers are rallying to make a superb new release of VS a reality in the next month or two.

The up and coming space game Stress Free Zone is seeing lots of development activity. They are working on implementing the ability to walk around your ship. Since your ship is modular this involves generating the ship internals as well as just modelling them. Whilst a lot of the art is placeholder work, the concepts are really cool and I can't wait for that game to get a few more features, a bigger community, and blossom into the awesome game it's threatening to become. I really like the ideas behind SFZ - like reducing things such as trading grind and focusing on keeping the gameplay interesting and fun.

Over at happypenguin.org (which I can barely reach at the moment) they are running a poll about the demise of the platformer. They should check out SauerMod that, among other things, turns Sauerbraten into a platform game. "Other things" includes AI bots, kart racing, and other enhancements to Sauer. Speaking of Sauerbraten, it looks rather lovely these days, as evidenced by this trailer:

Sauerbraten Trailer

A few people commented that they prefer other video hosts to YouTube. Well the choice of video host is not mine - it's up to people who post videos for their games, and I'm not going to be downloading and reuploading gameplay videos every time I want to embed one here so it's hobson's choice there. However I will try and link them each time from no onwards as well as just embedding them. Thanks for the handy feedback! :-)

Buy Me A Centurion

Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02 rc1 - the game bringing the classic commercial title Privateer kicking and screaming into the modern era - is ready and they require testers. They only provide a Windows binary, however the game is based on the cross-platform Vega Strike game engine and previous versions have had Linux and Mac binaries too.

PGG is just one of the variants to spring from the original Privateer Remake. Another one, Privateer Universe, seems to be gaining a bit of popularity - it adds to the gameplay whereas PGG strives to remain true to the original. It's a 3D space combat RPG, for the very few that don't already know.

Freeciv Tileset updates - Freeciv 2.1 imminent? Hmm, rumour mill, speculation, and sensationalism, all in one. ;-)

Er, "A Sauer Mod"

The so-titled Unnamed Sauer Mod is looking promising as the developer continues to make progress - now with zombies. In case you didn't read about it previously here on FG (I did mention it, right?) it is a single player FPS game where you take on a zombie infested habitation on Mars. It looks like it'll be a cross between Doom and House of the Dead in terms of gameplay although obviously it's a small team (one man?) effort so perhaps comparing it to commercial titles is a little unfair - but you know what I mean. Sauer allows for rapid map creation so it seems to be making the job a bit easier, as was the original intention of the Sauer authors!

Trophy development has resumed. Trophy is a Free Software top-down 3D-ish racing game. The new development brings the game up to date with the latest clanlib release and hopefully a new Trophy release will reinvigourate the project. :-)

I came across another top-down-ish 3D-ish racing game, - GeneRally although it is only freeware and only available for Windows. :-(

It looks cute. There's loads of user-created tracks to play and it seems to have a very active playing community. If only it was open source though, I'm sure it would be even better. Hmm, I moaned quite a bit about Simutrans not being open source and lo and behold yesterday things changed. Perhaps I should do the same with GeneRally? Then somebody can port it away from the monstrousity that is Direct-puke-X and educated people can play it as well as those 'dozey peons. :-D

Just because I can, here's another [this time 2D] racing game - Road Fighter, a remake of a classic game from the 80s which I'm too lazy to find information on. The source version is compatabile with Lin, Mac, Win but I think only a Windows binary is available to download. Retro but looks O.K. Enjoy!

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.

Legendary

Overgod

Overgod, an abstract shooter using Allegro, is a fast paced top down shooter. It's fun although pretty tough, and has a nice retro feel but with good modern graphics. It's one of those games you can pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes, let off some steam, then be back to whatever it was you were doing without having lost too much time. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Macs. :-)

Cube Legends (formely known as LOZ:Cube) is a Cube mod, inspired by the Legend of Zela series of games. Since Cube is getting a bit old in the tooth and has been superceeded by Sauerbraten, somebody has stepped up to work on Cube Legends 2007 which will bring this popular Cube mod up-to-date to run on Sauerbraten.

FreeTrain has gained another developer, and progress on fixing up the codebase continues. Even better, there is an additional plugin set which contains something like 200+ plugins for FreeTrain, and in the coming weeks it is being translated as well. There's stuff like a rollercoaster plugin in there, so it should be really cool. Internationalization is the next task to be tackled, then after that it will be replacing DirectX with SDL so that the game can be ported to Linux and other platforms. :-)

Last one for today, StarShip Troopers: Last Defense development is going well. They posted a gameplay video which looks promising, and expect to have a playable release in the next week or so. However despite the obvious progress being made with the game, there is obviously a fair amount of work to do before it captures the veracity of the battles in the movie, so don't be too expectant. I hope they offer a Linux version of this Glest conversion but could find no information one way or the other.

Strawberries & Cream

I had these grand plans for today, but instead I slept through two alarms and got to work 2 hours late, and forgot what my plans were. *groan*

Eat the Whistle



ActionCube

Anyhow, onto relevant matters, that previously-imminent VDrift release is now official. Go get it, honestly it is a good experience. And it looks great too. :-)

I played Eat the Whistle for the first time yesterday. Any attempts to run it on Linux had failed even though it has been ported, but I thought I'd have a crack on my Windows laptop and (despite a few graphical glitches) it worked! It's good fun although whenever the other team had the ball I struggled to locate the player I was in control of. However in terms of gameplay feel, it's quite nice to play and a little reminiscent of Sensible Soccer although more dynamic but not quite as sharp.

Not sure if I've mentioned this before, so I'll mention it now... ActionCube looks fun. I might have a bash at it later in the week. Think Counter Strike meets Cube. They are using the Cube engine instead of the Sauerbraten engine (aka Cube2) because, when the project started, Sauer was in constant flux (and still isn't declared to be stable).

Um... I had other things to mention but I'm out of time. Go play Wesnoth or something. ;-)

Music tip:

Filthy Rich - Shake it (Steve Lawler mix)

VDrifting Away

Free Gamer has been on hiatus. Sorry! Sometimes these things happen...

VDrift made a new release yesterday.

Hero of Allocrost released their first tech demo. Thanks to Roots for notifying me and apologies to him for taking a week to say something.

Sauerbraten got forked, the new game is called Extended Death Match (or just EDM). I don't know if it is a cooperative fork. All I know is you can leave sticky notes around the maps.

There's tons of other things I could mention from the last 2 weeks but for now I'll just push you in the direction of the Linux Game Tome which covers most of the them in one way or another.

*Goes back to his corner to work slowly on updating the Free Gamer games list*

Sauerbraten, Site Upgrade

Sauerbraten

There's a new Sauerbraten download and this one is looking beautiful. Just check out the screenshot... wow! This update introduces reflective water, performance improvements, bug fixes, and lots of other little features.

Well the time has come to upgrade the Free Gamer site. Things to expect:

• Tags
  Blogger beta introduces tags so now I can tag all my posts. What will this mean? Automatic listing of article types plus game name tags - so you can get a list of e.g. all reviews or e.g. all posts referencing game X. I'll be going back through my posts and tagging them all appropriately to adhere to this.
  
  
• Sortable Games List
  I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do it yet, but using an AJAX table I'll have the games in a proper list sorted by genre, type, etc etc. I'll still maintain my own little top-ten but a full list where you can order by what you are looking for will make browsing the list much easier. Plus it'll be on a separate page so the information should be more direct.
  
  
• Smaller Front Page
  The front page at the moment is somewhat massive. Only the latest article will be in full on the front page, with other recent articles summarized with links.
  
  
• Free Gamer Logo
  I'm going to come up with one. Or if somebody else submits one, I'll take that too. ;-)
  

The idea is to make the site:

1. Easier to navigate
2. Easier to read
3. And by virtue of the above, more useful as a resource

If anybody has any concerns or ideas, please speak up!

That downside to all this is that, due to the nature of the blogger.com templating system, during the implementation period things might break or go weird or not work. This isn't because I'm erasing the site and removing the list or trying to kill newborn puppies. It is simply a consequence of trying to get the best out of blogger.com which frustratingly involves doing a lot of update development directly on a live site.

Freecol, VDrift, Sauer... heaven!

I'll start by noting I messed up my last post. Despite making the post on the 23rd, it was dated the 18th so any frequent readers may have easily missed it. So, for those who haven't yet read it, check out Freeciv3 Part I.

Freecol

Now, onto the real meat. In the last week, Freecol 0.5 was - at long last - released. The original colonization had a cult following and Freecol is only going to enhance that community. It's got a lot of potential. It's got some very nice visuals for a Free game and they're improving with every release.

I've been lazy here and used a screenshot from 0.4 since I'm at work and can't load it up to take a new one, although to me it looks the same in 0.5 for that part of the game.

The game is now very playable with plenty of depth but there's still a few negatives for me:

• The ugliness of Java does sneak through in places despite heavy UI customization. (God damn the default Java UIs are ugly - are Sun developers blind?)
• Sadly I'd forgotten how to play Colonization and there's no tutorial so I didn't get too far. Hopefully a tutorial will be added in a future version.
• The GUI tended to redraw quite slowly every time I closed a dialog.
• Usability needs reviewing e.g. when moving a unit, if it finishes it's move, the game switches to the next unit automatically. That makes it really easy to accidentally move units in the wrong direction by pressing a direction too many times with the previous unit.

Anyway, since 0.5 != 1.0, I look forward to improvements in upcoming releases.

VDrift scenery

Following up the VDrift release earlier this month, the VDrift team have provided an autopackage to help people get drifting. I tried the Windows install on my laptop with it's integrated not-really-3D card and VDrift looked like a toddlers colouring book - bright and messy. Can't blame them for that though, and it's not worth fixing so I can play at 3fps.

There are some screenshots from the latest VDrift. It is beginning to look absolutely beautiful.

In what could be a Free Gamer exclusive, I spotted an update to Sauerbraten. Entitled, "normalmap version", this release presumably focuses on the introduction of normal maps to Sauer's rendering capabilities.

There's an amusing exchange in that thread between Passa (a Sauer developer, I think) and Aardappel (the main Sauer developer), where Passa notes community confusion over to Sauerbraten's identity.

Passa:

On the community promotion Aardappel, I have been trying to convince my ISP to host a server for Sauerbraten.. unfortunately the general community say its just a Quake 3 clone..

Aardappel:

well, so we are improving.



- I started Cube as an advanced Wolfenstein 3D clone :P

- It was then perceived as a Doom clone

- Once we got the really HQ maps like metl3 it was perceived as Quake 1, sometimes even Quake 2 Clone

- Sauer started life as looking like a Quake 2 clone

- Then with the better maps people thought it looked more like Quake 3

- and now with the bump maps I have heard comparisons with Quake 4!!!



So hey, even though people can't get it in to their thick skull that there are other things besides quake out there, and that this is not some kind of lame based on quake source project, we are certainly moving forward!

Sauerbraten isn't half bad for a Quake 3 clone.

What!??! ;-)

Dedication's What You Need

...if you wanna be a record breaker! Oooo ooo... </singing>

One of the great things about Free software games is that people are free to dedicate themselves to whatever makes them happy. Check out this ship, the Atlantia, created for a Vega Strike mod [not yet published].

Speaking of Vega Strike, the musings over the last couple of weeks suggest a new 0.4.x release [the current engine] later on in the year. I don't think the real juice [the 0.5 OGRE-based engine] will come until 2007, but when it does it will be good. Check out the screenshot to the right, a sample of planet shaders that VS developer klauss is working on. More images here.

That's simply beautiful.

There's a new dungeon game in town. Sadly it is a Doom 3 mod so it's not really free, but we know what happens with iD engines so there is hope! The game is Dungeon Doom and hopefully it will evolve into a stellar Free game in the future.

Another interesting mod [UT2004 this time] is Air Buccaneers. It looks innovative but again is based on a non-free engine. I wish people would create mods for free engines like Sauerbraten. Can you imagine the syndicated power of mod developers being focused on Free Software engines? If only I could control people's minds, the world would be a better place.

I tried a few games today.

Secret Maryo Chronicles is a high resolution remake of old-school Super Mario. It's fun for a bit but I don't have the patience to learn levels like I used to when I was younger. The game has no music and the way Maryo responds to controls doesn't quite feel right. Some parts of the game look great while others look distinctly amateur, but it has a lot of potential.

Ri-Li is a cross between a wooden train set and Snake. It's probably more aimed at kids, but the gameplay seems to get very hectic very quickly. Also I could swear that the train does not always go the direction you tell it to go. I tried pressing before junctions, pressing at junctions, pressing both before and at junctions, or just holding down the direction, and it felt hit-and-miss.

Then I tried Pang Zero and Don Ceferino Hazaña. The gameplay of both games revolves around throwing up a dagger or spear to pop balloons (?) that bounce around the screen and kill you on-touch. It's like a simpler version of asteroids. Don Ceferino is the more entertaining and polished of the two, even if the gameplay is essentially the same, with a nicely presented story despite the awful spilleng mistakes.

The Don Ceferino website is all in Spanish. I hate to say it, but the language of the Net is English. If you want maximum recognition and traffic, you had better translate your musings. Otherwise obscurity and International exile loom for your project.

Sauerbraten and TA Spring

Sauerbraten

There is an updated release for Sauerbraten. This innovative open source 3D FPS is an evolution of the popular game Cube. For those who don't know, Cube and Sauer are not just FPS games but live map modding tools as well where you can manipulate the game world in real time. The game maps are combinations of deformable cubes giving map creators massive control with minimum complexity. There are already some jaw dropping maps available for Sauer which is adding new eye candy all the time.

The developers are designing a roaming action RPG using Sauerbraten engine called Eisenstern. The entire game world will be in one massive level which the player will have to battle around. It seems to be more in a proof-of-concept stage whilst Sauer matures but is definitely one worth looking out for.

TA Spring

In other news, playing TA Spring just got a whole lot easier for Ubuntu (Dapper) and Debian (Sarge+) users. There's an entire guide to getting it up and running over at the DebSpring project.

TA Spring really does look beautiful lately. There are some incredible screenshots on the website. This game, more than anything else, makes me want to upgrade my PC. When I do you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be a 7-page review up on Free Gamer.