Updates Galore

Iris2

There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days:

• Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes


• FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features (announcement)


• Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances (announcement)


• SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download (announcement)


• Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor (news page)


• Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something)


• Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project


• Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info

NewCol

NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine displaying forests, rivers, mountains and seas with a textured relief map, gaussian random number generator and z-buffer like algorithm." It's obviously inspired a bit by colonization, but it looks very original in it's design. I wasn't able to find a direct link to the screenshots page so you'll have to go their yourself.

Finally, one of my favourite projects Scourge has seen some great improvements lately. There's a lot more people contributing to the game and, thanks to the increased visibility of Free media out there, has gained some impoved models. The SVN version of Scourge is pretty damn good and the game only really needs some decent character models to become one of the more impressive Free Software games available.

Do you want to find some open source media for your game? Then these are the two places you should start:

• Free 3D and 2D art and audio resources on the FreeGameDev wiki


• Free Art Search, a tool for searching for open source images

Uh... I posted way more than I intended to... I need a cup of tea!

Scourge-erific

Time flies when you're forgetting to do things, like update this blog. Damn, I make a post, have a nap, get distracted, and 6 days later I remember I was supposed to be posting again. I have umpteen drafts of half-finished opinions; games get released and I don't know about it. I need to invent an army of workers that will mine the web and report for me.

The Free Gamer forums got a facelift thanks to Qudobup, the guy also behind the look for Free Gamer. It looks really cool and since the forum supports RSS you'll see a few forum-related things going into this site in the nearish future.

Scourge 0.19 got released! Yay! No changelog on the site? Boo. Seems like binaries will eventually be available for all major platforms and will appear on Sourceforge. Despite the lack of information about this release on the site, having monitored Scourge development for a while, I can say 0.19 contains some really cool new features - outdoor environments and more storyline - and some important improvements - much better AI for route finding. It's on the cusp of being a really good game. All it needs is some slightly better artwork.

UFO2000

UFO2000 have had a major new release. Also their website got a facelift and it's probably one of the best looking FOSS game project pages you'll see. Beautiful. Somebody (fan? developer?) commented on a previous post that the community is struggling for players. UFO was (is?) a great series but it's primarily a single player game. I don't see how the multiplayer version can be quite as fun as a big part of the game was building up your team and researching new technology as you waged the war against the alien onslaught.

If the UFO2000 team could focus on a single player version I think they would see their community grow significantly, but they've got a lot of catching up to do with UFO:AI which has focused on SP from the beginning. Still, I do have a soft spot for UFO2000, having observed steady progress for many years on the project. Seeing the gameplay video on the UFO2000 site made me yearn for a single player edition. I want a game I can tackle at my own pace, y'know, multiplayer games tend to favour those who play a lot.

Battle Tanks is another multiplayer-focused game that looks great, and version 0.6 was released the other day. I'm tempted to try it, but again that multiplayer angle just doesn't appeal to me. Even if they offered a simple single player edition where you fought bots, that'd be fine. Please, let me play with myself. I mean, er, um...

I want to say more but no more time. I'll try to be more regular, perhaps doing shorter posts if I'm in a rush rather than no posting at all.

FreeOrion and Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue

Global Conflict Blue is a:"

a real-time 3D naval and air warfare simulation game similar to Fleet Command and Harpoon. The goal is a scalable single player and multiplayer game that can handle scenarios ranging from simple engagements playable in 30 minutes to massive campaigns contested over weeks.

It's only available for Windows but it's open source and a lot of it is written in Python so that can change. Intriguingly it has been adapted by the Thai Navy for for training purposes although sadly they haven't made their changes availalbe to the wider public.

There's a Linux binary of FreeOrion available for download here. I'm not sure whether it's the latest stable version or latest from SVN but it should provide an opportunity for people who hadn't previously played the game to get an idea of what it is about. It is confirmed as working on an i386 Unbuntu Feisty system.

Development of FreeOrion continues at the same steady pace it has done for several years, which is promising. Some nice new graphics and features are coming. It's a well designed and well thought out game that will have a lot of depth and longevity when fully realised.

Scourge

Scourge development continues steadily as well. The next release of this RPG game game will feature outdoor environments and traps. If a couple more people would contribute to Scourge it could rapidly become an absolutely amazing open source RPG, so hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later. It is starting to look pretty good though, as you can see in this screenshot.

It is sometimes a slight shame that some projects get very laden with contributors - to the point that much effort is discarded because of the high standards of other contributions - whilst the developers of other projects slug it out with only token help.

Finally, as expected FreeCol 0.7.0 got released on Friday. :-)

Third FreeTrain SE Release

There's another binary version of FreeTrain available, with additional translations, plugings, and fixing a serious bug in the previous release. It still is Windows only although the next step for the project is to make it run on SDL/Mono instead of DirectX/.NET therefore making it cross-platform.

Simutrans development continues, 0.99.12 now available. I wish they'd open source the game. The original reason not to open source it (by original developer Hajo) was to prevent loss of control of the game (which is a daft reason IMHO - if game development is going well, there will be no fork apart from to take the game in a completely different direction). Lately, since Hajo stopped working on Simutrans and gave the choice to lead developer prissi and other contributors, they declined to open source it because they see no additional benefits from changing the current development model. You can't argue with that, as long as they don't stop working on it, but when they do I guess it will be a case of 3rd time lucky asking for the game to be made available as Free Software.

Onto other topics and I now have the code to RG Pro Hockey (Linux Game Toom link), thanks to a comment on FG. I should upload it as a new Sourceforge project.

Also on the Tome I saw Pix Bros. A cross between Bubble Bobble, Tumple Pop, and Snow Bros. Almost as interesting as this guy mastering the Mario music on the piano. (Can you spell 'obsession'?) However the Pix Bros game and website seem to be purely in Spanish (I think) which put me off trying it.

Check out this glowing comment on Scourge:

With the new .18 update, there was some improvements made to the GUI, I must admit I tried to play it before, but could not get familiar with this game. I like it very much now. Reminds me a bit of Diablo, with the items and magic system, and on the other side of Jagged Alliance with its round based strategy. Five points for it.

A game everyone should give a try if he likes JA-2 or Diablo. Gives you sure some days/weeks of play...

Finally, slightly off topic but related to FLOSS gaming - pictures of a Dell coming with Ubuntu preinstalled, something that will boost the open source gaming scene that is predominantly based on Linux. The open source desktop reality moves ever closer!

Scourge and SoulFu

Scourge 0.18 (download) has been released. :-)

If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult. Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there.

Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online.

It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find the ideal balance for development. I have contemplated setting up a site where open source games can make calls for help with programming, artwork, or modelling, since at the moment it's just a case of hoping somebody with the right skill and interest eventually finds your game project - there is no centralized resource for organizing open source game development and I think one is increasingly needed as the number of people creating free software games keeps rising.

SoulFu

Aaron Bishop, the original author of Egoboo (see Egoboo Resurrection for current versions) has finally finished his latest game after 4 years of development. SoulFu is currently only available for Windows but he is planning Linux and Mac versions of the game. The game is freeware but maybe after some time he'll open source it like he did with Egoboo.

You can see the graphical similarities between SoulFu and Egoboo, the chunky cutesy character models, but the graphics look a little more refined in SoulFu. It looks fun but my Windows machine is too pap to play it so perhaps a few readers could comment on what the gameplay is like. There are a couple of gameplay videos [1, 2] from earlier on in development just to give an idea of what how SoulFu plays.

Edit - hey, you have to pay money for the full SoulFu experience :-( that really sucks (no mention on the webpage) and I'm frustrated that I mentioned it now!

There's been some interest on the Ubuntu forums about making a Gunbound-like game. For those who don't know, Gunbound (gameplay video) is kinda like Worms only with fancier graphics and weapons. If this project goes ahead, I hope they look at working with the Wormux crew who have an engine capable of 90% of the needs of this project-in-planning.

UFO:AI 2.1

UFO:AI 2.1 was released (changelog, download) yesterday.

This is turning into an incredible game. It takes the best elements of the original UFO games and builds on them with contemporary technologies to produce what really has to be one of the leading - if not the best - open source games available. If you want to see how cool it looks, just go over to their screenshot gallery.

Importantly this version adds the foundations for a storyline. So subsequent releases will include a story to compliment the gameplay. Awesome! :-)

3D RPG game Scourge has seen quite a lot of development since it's last version. Notably, the game has been localized and translated to Italian, and the UI is being overhauled with a completely new inventory screen that is more traditional i.e. similar to games like Diablo.

With those new features and lots of bugs fixed, hopefully a new release will follow soon.

The 3D post-apocolyptic RTS Warzone 2100 Resurrection team snook out a 2.0.6 release (changelog, download, screenshots) at the weekend as well. It is mainly bug fixes, but shows that they are working away at improving the game - which these days is also another really good open source game.

Another small release for Those Funny Funguloids. It is still Windows only but, GPL and all, hopefully a Linux version will be out soon.

And I came across Memonix the other day, published by Viewizard of Astromenace fame. It is a polished game for kids that is freeware on Linux. It's really good fun for those young'uns. And me. :-)

In oher news, I'm happy because there's a whole year before we have to suffer the next April foolish idiots day. ;-)

Music tip:

RLP & Wise - On Your Side (Electro mix)

Scourge 0.17

Scourge

Up on scourgeweb.org is the announcement for Scourge 0.17 which introduces proper save-game support, earthquakes, more storyline and game media, as well as bug fixes. Scourge is a 3D adventure game, similar to Baldur's Gate with a Nethack flavour. Earlier versions were frustrating to play as there were problems controlling your party but these problems have pretty much all been ironed out in the last two versions.

Cultivation 7 is also available. This is an interesting and original game, but I don't think I can beat the Freshmeat description so here's a quote:

You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise. Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words, game objects are "grown" in real-time instead of being hand-painted or hard-coded. Each plant and gardener in the game is unique in terms of both its appearance and behavior.

This is the type of game that just couldn't be made commercially as it's not going to sell [where's the violence or thrills?] but at the same time it is completely fascinating and full of potential.

Mechanized

Remember Mech Commander 2? Well, you might not, because I was originally thinking of Mech Warrior 2 when I saw it [I loved that game] but Mech Commander 2 looks cool none-the-less and Microsoft have released it [some time ago] under their own shared source license [whatever that means]. No free download on the page other than a source download so I don't quite get what the point of that is. The only place I know to grab the source is on the liberatedgames.com page for Mech Commander 2. So I guess this is only for fans to fix bugs as I get the impression the game media/data is not under a 'free' license. However there is scope for a Linux port if somebody were so inclined.

I did not know the original GTA and GTA2 were freeware these days. Grab them from liberated games. I don't know whether they work in WINE. It was quite nostalgic running over people in a stolen car in top down chases.

Atomic Tanks 2.0 final is out. Woo!

FIFE 2007.0 is also available. They are pining for a developer to focus on the level editor so that people can start making custom mods for FIFE rather than it being limited to just playing Fallout on Linux. Speaking of game engines, the GemRB team (for playing Inifity-based games like Baldur's Gate) keeps grinding away and released 0.2.8 recently. There's also a new Linux installer for GemRB so it should be a bit more conventient to use.

Freedriod RPG 0.10 came out a week or so ago. It's a good Tux-themed isometric RPG although I find it quite confusing in terms of what your purpose is other than wandering around fighting robots when I played it a year or so ago.

In another news snippet, one of my favourite FOSS games SCOURGE is heading towards a new release. It's starting to gather a bit of a community so starting to become a little less rough around the edges. There's a new official website - www.scourgeweb.org - and now 10 chapters of storyline to play through.

Snippets and Tidbits

Due to personal reasons Free Gaming has been a bit slow lately. Here's a few snippets...

• Next version of True Combat: Elite will have HDR lighting making it the first Free Software Linux game to ship with HDR lighting (thanks Albert Santoni)
• VegaStrike gets network deathmatch support - go register and play on the online server
  
• ManiaDrive 1.2 bugfix release "no more crashes"
• Warzone Resurrection 2.0.4rc2
• OpenArena 0.5.0 - btw it's now a standalone download (and has been for a while, I think)
  
• Scourge! 0.15 which should be much more playable than previous releases with lots of work on making the character movement better
• Frets on Fire makes guitar playing fun ;-)

I'm off to suffer having lost my gal to her desire to be free! If only the female mind were open source...