Railroad Tycoon now Freeware

The original Railroad Tycoon has been released as freeware. Download it from 2kgames.com who seem to be the official handlers of the freeware RT.

JFreeRails

Still, freeware is not open source. There are GPL clones of RT. The two most notable ones are Railz and JFreeRails. Indeed JFreeRails got updated as recently as September this year. Railz seems to have stalled with it's development.

Then there is of course the other rail game implementations, notably OpenTTD. There are lots of promising noises coming out of the OpenTTD camp and the hires graphics seem to be coming out of the community at a steady pace. I'm very hopeful that we will see a hires release in 2007 that should be a superb game and herald a new era for OpenTTD.

A game that already has hires graphics and is free, albeit only freeware, is Simutrans. The development is relentless and the latest release looks very nice. For some reason I have never found Simutrans as much fun as OpenTTD but then I grew up with the original Transport Tycoon.

VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!

Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

UFO:AI 2.0rc6

UFO:AI 2.0rc6 is out (changelog). "This release candidate should really be the final one for the 2.0 series." With working reaction-fire, an isometric view, and a host of fixes, UFO:AI has emerged as a polished open source game. "We are already working hard on the next major release - the 2.1 tree - which will include a full storyline." Awesome!