Monday, September 11, 2006

Brutal Chess, Warzone, Balder2D

Does anybody remember Battle Chess? I loved that game. I think it was one of the games that really got me hooked on using a PC after years of dedication to a spectrum. Well, great news Battle Chess lovers, there's an open source modern equivalent: Brutal Chess. It obviously needs better models and there's plenty to do (current release is 0.3 alpha) but it's an exciting find nonetheless!



There's a new Warzone 2100 release - 2.0.5rc1 (changelog) - which addresses a number of problems people had with 2.0.4, especially single player games. If you downloaded Warzone and found it buggy, it may be worth trying this update.



The author of Balder2D is looking for help testing packages for Debian/Ubuntu. The game is an overhead 2D shooter. I can't really comment on the gameplay because I don't have time to try it right now.



I just came across FreeAllegiance. If I ever hand out awards, this game will win an award for the most uninformative web page - no screenshots or information about the game? Thank the Lord for Wikipedia. It was originally developed by Microsoft Research around 2000. After failing commercially and being abandoned by Microsoft, they eventually released the source code in 2004 to the dedicated fan base. A 3D space game, it is a mixture of space combat and RTS with deathmatch based gameplay. Sounds interesting!



Thats enough for today.

6 comments:

sciboy said...

It appears that the original Battle Chess had been opensourced a while back.

Found this:
http://www.liberatedgames.com/game.php?game_id=99

Charlie said...

That's a great link, thanks!

Albert said...

Ahhh, the old Quake2 models, eh? :)
(The Quake2 model format is ridiculously well documented, and there's tons of great examples out there on the net... that's why everyone uses the format...)

Battle Chess kicked ass indeed. Considering how young I was at the time, I definitely don't think my parents should have let me play that game, lol.

Anonymous said...

I'm one of the Brutal Chess developers and it's nice to see people finding and enjoying our game. We should be getting a new release out really soon.

@gamegod
Those are actually Quake 3 models in the pic. I don't think we'll be able to release those models with the game due to licensing issues. We will however provide detailed instructions on how to obtain and use them.

Charlie said...

Any prospect of creating specific models or are you waiting for contributors on that?

Anonymous said...

We've tried to recruit people to create models for the project but haven't had much luck so far. We already have the md3 model loader for our engine and would even code other model loaders to suit the needs of artists. What we may do is create some programmer art models to show the potential and maybe get some real artists more interested in our project. If you have any contacts through your site that may be interested in this it would be much appreciated if you sent them our way.

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