Free Gamer - Open Source Games

Classic gaming: OGS Mahjong

2012-01-29T13:08:00.001Z

A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre:

OGS Mahjong 0.9 promo

The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of this age-old classic (like me).

Coldest: Mech AI and Playtesting with the Dev!

2012-01-25T12:00:00.000Z

Trees in Coldest

Video: Coldest's Crazy Bots

Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via:

git clone git://coldestgame.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/coldestgame/coldestgame coldest

Build instructions here.

Mass Blaster: Ambidextrous Abstract Shooter

2012-01-24T22:00:00.000Z

Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster

Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

2012-01-23T19:19:00.003Z

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down. Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads. A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore.

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

You may have already realized that to some extent piracy creates buzz about media. If people enjoy a movie or a game or an album or whatever, they talk about it, and the word gets out, even if the person doing the talking pirated it. This is not a justification for piracy, mind you. If someone wants to make content and then threaten to send you to jail for using it the wrong way, that's their prerogative under copyright law. On the other hand, people and companies who do that don't deserve your business, and they don't deserve the buzz that you create by talking about their media. This is particularly true given the fact that they're spending the money you give them to curtail your freedoms through draconian legislation and copyright treaties.

Ask yourself this, dear reader: Do I need the RIAA to tell me what music I ought to like? Do I need the MPAA to tell me what movies to like? Do I need crappy, DRM-loving, morally-bankrupt game studios like EA to tell me what games to like? I mean, seriously, have you seen big budget movies lately? Most of them are complete lowest-common-denominator tripe. As intelligent individuals, we can do better than that.

There's an awful lot of media out there released for free (or at least very cheaply in some cases), directly by the artists, musicians, cinematographers, and game studios that make them. Some people like to argue that piracy doesn't harm anyone if you never would have paid anyway; I would contend that by pirating big budget, mass-market crap, you're hurting dedicated artists who are releasing their work for free, because the time you spend finding a pirated copy of whatever it is you want to download could have been spent discovering and talking about their works.

Even better, you could spend some of that idle time creating entertainment rather than just being entertained. If you haven't worked on your own art, music, movies, or game projects, I would strongly encourage you to try it out. Creating entertainment for other people to enjoy and getting their feedback on it can be immensely satisfying. As an honest aside here, even a brief browse through open media libraries will make it obvious that movies are by far the weakest link in this chain, followed by games. Music, being easy now for individuals or bands to produce on a large scale at home with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, is by far the strongest. If regular people like us are willing to spend the time helping to create games and movies, we can close the gap. It'll take time, but if we can pull it off, it'll be worth it.

Media doesn't have to come from a feeding tube. Go out, look around, and see the world. There's a lot more out there than the big studios would like you to believe. And while it's not yet equal in some ways (special effects, etc) to the big budget stuff, your interest and contributions can help it get there, and at the same time help render the big studios and their anti-consumer copyright laws irrelevant. The big studios may, to some extent, be able to make it more difficult to pirate their content. What they cannot do is force us to give them money -- we can always choose not to watch their stuff.

Here are some places to get started.

Viewing:

Getting involved:

Creating:

Scirra Construct
OpenGameArt.org (disclaimer: yeah, it's my site ;) )
WeAreTheMusicMakers on Reddit
BandCamp

If you have other sites to add to this list, drop me a line and I'll add them. In the meantime, go discover something. :)

P.S. If you agree with this, tell people about it. Retweet, reblog, upvote, +1, whatever. I can talk about this all day, but we need a real movement if this is going to change anything, and that means we need people to be aware.

Flesh Snatcher: Bloody Java Polygons

2012-01-23T03:03:00.000Z

Scenes from Flesh Snatcher

Flesh Snatcher is a bloody jME2 fps with fast movement and dodge-bullets gameplay that is low poly and low-tech enough to run smoothly on a netbook (tested: Asus EeePC 1000H).

Most models were made by the author, Arbaro was used for tree generation, FSRad (shared source, noncommercial) was used for lightmap generation. FOSS-incompatible textures from CGTextures were used.

The code license is not all that clear, I seem only to be able to find the jME license in the archive.

This active thread reveals more info and gives an opportunity to talk to the developer.

Traction Edge: Squad-Based Tactics, Roguelike Interface

2012-01-20T16:15:00.000Z

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:
Turn based gameplay
2-4 member squad teams
Destructable terrain
Victorian Steampunk setting
SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.
Planned Features:
16-20 static levels with full story arc
Random content, procedural maps
Procedural tech tree
Civilians
Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

Annex: Conquer the world Beta2 released

2012-01-17T22:08:00.000Z

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently:

Annex beta2 game-play

Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;)
But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

TremZ updates

2012-01-15T23:04:00.000Z

As reported previously, the release of the Tremulous "reboot" TremZ has been pushed back to Spring 2012 and with news of their project lead "Volt" having stepped down due to burn-out, things don't look too bright for that date either...

Showing off the high art quality of the new alien models

However the new guys in charge seem to try hard and aim to improve community relations (see their slightly older forums) further by opening up a development blog.
Here they also posted a link to their PR image dump from which I took this very recent picture:

The new human marine model (high-poly base for normal-maps)

I have to say that I am really impressed by most of their artwork so far, and last time I asked they assured me that it will be almost completely licensed under the CC-by-SA (with a sad exception of a few audio works that will be CC-by-SA-NC upon request by the creator).

So I hope I will not be proven wrong when saying: TremZ will the THE FOSS game of 2012 :)

RetroBlazer Alpha demo

2012-01-14T13:24:00.000Z

RetroBlazer alpha demo

Looks pretty nice, this Darkplaces based game, doesn't it? And you can download a RetroBlazer alpha demo now... take it with a grain of salt though as my intuition tells me that this is probably planned to be a commercial release based on a FOSS engine like SteelStorm. While this is of course not bad in general (in fact personally I think there should be more FOSS based commercial games), I always get a lot of flak in the comments for posting about games with un-Free media or such ;)

On a side-note however (after playing the demo for a short while) I have to say that it is a bit too retro for me (no proper mouse aiming? is it like 1996?). I was hoping for more of a hybrid than a strait Doom reimplementation ;)

Winter Shorts 3: Wizznic Cursor, TORCS Music, Knights Deathmatch, Humm and Strumm Specs, SuperTux Contest

2012-01-10T09:26:00.000Z

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [video (00:57@YouTube)]
TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [.ogg (05:50/7.1MB)]
Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [description]
Humm and Strumm is an in-dev co-op game engine [design .pdf (156kB)]

SuperTux' level contest has four entries so far [submission thread]

Winter Shorts 2: Wizznic! Mouse Input, Me and My Shadow New Look, Epiar Cleanup, GemRB Platforms and Games

2012-01-08T21:06:00.000Z

Wizznic!

Wizznic! supports mouse & touchscreen. [Video] Code available on GitHub.

MeAndMyShadow

MeAndMyShadow 0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor.

video: Epiar 0.5.0 game start

Epiar 0.5.0 has been released:

UI clean-up
Expanded missions system
Sound and music additions
Main menu
Editor greatly expanded
Misc. bug fixes

GemRB logo

GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.

New FPS updates

2012-01-07T14:59:00.000Z

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates:

Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;)

Another new release (7.53) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings.

Alien Arena 7.53

Quick rundown of other news:
War§ow got a new website, and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine (OpenWolf) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here (and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more).

Stunt Rally 1.4 Release & Trigger Rally 0.6 Videos

2012-01-05T16:25:00.000Z

video: Stunt Rally ver. 1.4 - gameplay

From an announcement email:

Hi, after some months of silence we've released version 1.4 with a huge changelog. Some highlights:
71 tracks
2 new cars (TC6, NS)
Fixed shadows (self shadowing, lightmapping)
Better looking shaders (fresnel effect, reflectivity/specular maps)
SSAO effect (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion)
Sound effects and particles for water or mud areas
Improved in-car camera
Rear gear throttle-brake inverse option

Also, installing this game just got a whole lot easier for linux users as there is now a binary Linux release (32 and 64 bit).

Downloads page (Linux and Windows):
Project's page (including info and links):
Screenshots gallery:

Trigger Rally 0.6 has been out for two months by now but now there are some high-resolution gameplay videos available:

video: Trigger Rally 0.6.0: Desert Rush

video: Trigger Rally 0.6.0: Pulp: Cars Can Fly

The game is much simpler in all aspects than Stunt Rally but it runs well on netbooks. There is a community effort going on to replace copyright/trademark-problematic assets right now.

Maybe you can help by answering this strange question: would you consider these 3D models to be infringing on proprietary car designs?

SuperTux Forum and January 2012 Level Contest

2012-01-04T13:00:00.000Z

SuperTux level design mistakes to avoid

SuperTux just got a forum on FreeGameDev.net and started a level contest.

Rules:

A snow tileset theme
Submit your levels here until the 27th of January, when voting will start
Voting on levels will end on the January 30st
Winners will be announced January 31st
Have fun
One level per person
Top few levels will/can be made into an add-on or
If admins are okay with it top levels will get added to incubator island (if winners are okay with it - pick cc0 or cc-by-sa for your level)
One entry per person
Please make a new level. (not from and existing worldmap/levelset)
Don't vote for your self.
Voting will take place in a new forum topic.
Feel free to comment on peoples levels, most people would like to hear what was wrong or good with their level.

Get the editor, read the editor guide (and just play around, as the guide is incomplete ;) ) and check out the style guide.

You can upload submissions in this thread.

Winter Shorts: Bits & Bots, Goblin Camp 0.2, BASE PRO 0.4b-r2, FlightGear Interviews

2012-01-03T15:19:00.000Z

Bits & Bots: controlling two robots at once

Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.

Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset

Goblin Camp 0.2 brings a stockpile of changes:

Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.
Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.
Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map
The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.
Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature
Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.
Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.
Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.
Skeletons no longer bleed and other assorted bug fixes.

video: BASE PRO Edition 0.4 beta patch2 - Gameplay Sample

BASE Pro is a Windows-only base jumping simulation game. Its community and news can be found on this forum.

Community member LedInfrared got the hang out of gameplay video recording and shared videos of STK and Xonotic on this YouTube page, including download links to original video material!

Stuart Buchanan: FlightGear contributor

FlightGear's news section has seen quite a high activity lately, including three interviews:

Oliver Jacq: scenery designer/scripter
Gijs de Rooy: modeller and scenery designer
Stuart Buchanan: coder and aircraft designer

HTML5 Defense: MiniMek Urbie Defense

2012-01-02T15:47:00.001Z

Two 'towers' down in MiniMek Urbie Defense

A little top-down defense game was released under GPL (art & code) as a new year's present. It shows nicely, how libre art can be used for small game programming projects.

These use some art assets from megamek (http://megamek.info/) and therefore these games are also licensed under the GPL

A straightforward interpretation of the GPL applied to assets. I'm afraid though, the images of MegaMek might be incompatible with the GPL, due to Battletech copyright and/or trademark.

The game has good performance but little complexity except for a Missile Commander-esque twist: getting hit reduces player's spacial ability to shoot.

According to the project page, more games with the same graphical theme are to be expected. I'm looking forward to them!

Video: MM:UD

RTS updates (slightly older)

2011-12-30T17:42:00.001Z

You probably heard about it already, but for the sake of updating this blog and in case you might have missed it over the holiday stress:
0 A.D. got a pretty massive update to version 0.8 "Haxāmaniš"!

0AD 0.8 video

The release news have all the details including the possibility to listen to the very nice soundtrack of the game. Oh and the developers are requesting to mention that they are still looking for contributors!

Otherwise? Well there are some even older news regarding the Megaglest project:
First of all, we didn't mention their new release yet: version 3.6.0.2. It's mostly a bugfix and various smaller improvements release, but they also significantly improved the modding support. In releation to that I guess they also made the .blend sources of much of the content available. Something they are not required by the CC-by-SA btw, so many thanks to those guys!
Other upcoming news for Megaglest are the inclusion into the official Debian repositories and an option to play scenarios in multiplayer mode. No real news on the merger with GAE yet though it seems... a pity really if this isn't progressing...

4 hours left to apply: Talk in Brussels about your FOSSGame

2011-12-23T17:42:00.000Z

When: February 5th, 2012, 09:00 - 17:00
Where: Brussels, Belgium, Europe, Earth
More info here

Modern retro-graphics: RetroBlazer

2011-12-23T17:14:00.001Z

Short call for help: Awesome looking retro-graphics game is looking for a Darkplaces QC programmer.
So far only two screen-shots have been released (and no word on the license of the media):

I am loving the style... so here is the other:

So if you know your way around Quake's QC scripting language try to get into contact with them :) Otherwise you can still follow the progress of this game over at QuakeOne's forums.

Oh and taking about Darkplaces... Xonotic finally implemented client-side networked players in their most recent development release. Meaning that there is now client-side movement prediction and thus less (visually) laggy game-play on slower netspeeds!

Crowd-Sourced Portraits ETA: February 2012!

2011-12-23T09:00:00.000Z

New fantasy portraits by Justin Nichol [more here]

Remember Justin Nichol's crowd-sourced fantasy portrait commission?

In a recent announcement the artists reports, that the collection of 35 portraits will be finished by February 2012, as they will be exhibited some day that month somewhere in California, USA.

Why we need a stronger copyleft for artists, and how this might be accomplished.

2011-12-21T20:22:00.005Z

Currently, art copylefts are weak with respect to code. If I'm a programmer and I want to write code that's specifically for use in libre software, all I have to do is slap the GPL on it and I'm done. If someone uses my code in their program, they either have to GPL their program or I can force them to stop distributing it.

Artists don't receive the same protection. If I want to make a piece of art (be it an image, model, sound file, etc) for use in libre software, I'm out of luck. As it stands, all the people using my art have to do is share their modifications to my art and they're free to do whatever they want with the code. There aren't currently any acceptable libre licenses that cover a situation in which a program loads a specific art file. (Mind you, as an artist, it doesn't matter to me if someone loads my file in a proprietary editor, the same way it wouldn't matter to me as a coder if someone loaded my GPLed code into a proprietary text editor. More on this later.)

Over the last couple of years, a number of artists who have been frustrated by this particular issue have come to me and asked me what could be done about it. Many of them have asked me to include a noncommercial licensing option on OpenGameArt to address this issue. Unfortunately, NC licenses are incompatible with free software and as such I'm not able to include them on OGA without seriously violating the stated mission of the site. NC licenses do somewhat address this issue (although mostly by accident), but the problem with them is that they're far too broad about how you can use the media in question. A better solution is needed.

So, a few months after OpenGameArt.org was founded, I had a discussion on the debian-legal mailing list about licensing that would expand the copyleft for artists by (in short -- please read the details of my plan before criticizing) forcing the programs that load a specific piece of media to also be licensed with a strong copyleft.

At the time, I was politely shot down. In their defense, at that point I was just a random person off the street with yet another random idea for yet another random license. Two and a half years later, I'm now recognizable by at least two or three members of the FOSS community (making me a small-time contributor instead of just a random dude) and I've had long discussions with people about the specific provisions of what exactly a license like this would require and how it would interact with free software.

Now, the key here is that for something to be free software (or compatible with free software), it can't prohibit "bundling". Bundling in this case is the idea of including multiple separate programs in the same archive. For something to be free software, the license must allow it to coexist peacefully with proprietary software.

In any case, for the purpose of this discussion, I'll refer to this hypothetical media license as the Foo License. Any media released under the Foo License would require that any code that specifically references that piece of media be licensed under a strong copyleft (such as the GPL or the Foo License or others -- we can define these by enumerating them specifically or just listing a set of requirements). If a program does not specifically reference the piece of media covered under the Foo License, then the program would not trigger the share-alike requirement.

To give specific examples of this, if I write a game that loads a certain sprite that's covered by the Foo License, my game code would need to have a strong copyleft. Conversely, if I distribute an image viewer (or editor) along with a bunch of images that are covered by the Foo License, the image viewer would not fall under the sharealike clause because there's nothing in the code that tells it to reference a single, specific Foo Licensed image.

Now, some game engines are clearly generic. If you run that engine on a specific data file or point it at a specific tree, the resulting game could be completely different from one stored in a different data file. The Doom engine is a specific example of this, although there are many, many others. In this case, the engine itself is completely generic, and would fall outside the scope of the Foo License. What is not generic here are the scripts and data files that define the actual game. In these cases, while the engine itself is generic, the script layer is not, because it has to reference specific items in order to load them and tell the game engine what to do with them. A generic engine like this is essentially a VM, and much like the GPL, the Foo License would not cover that the VM that runs the code.

One argument I've seen against this is that it's possible in some cases for people to construct specific, inconvenient examples of how you might skirt the requirements of the license. I can't deny that those situations exist, however the same sorts of situations exist for the GPL, and coding around them is a fairly effective deterrent (not to mention the fact that deliberately circumventing a license puts you on shaky ground anyway). It's been done, but it's not done all that often and it tends to make things inconvenient for both programmers and their customers. In any case, no edge case like this that anyone has brought up before has rendered the license non-free, so even if the Foo License is imperfect, it would still, like the GPL, work in most cases.

So, I'm looking for comments on this, but before you comment, please make sure you've read this carefully. Below is some copypasta that I'll use to answer you if you ask a question that I've already addressed. Please consider these answers before you ask, and if you're guessing that I'm going to respond with one but you believe it doesn't apply, explain why. :)

[ ] While your example could conceivably get around the intent of the license, it would be inconvenient to implement and doesn't render the license non-free. In any case, the GPL has similar edge cases.
[ ] The program you mentioned is a generic viewer/editor and is not programmed to reference *specific* media files.
[ ] In your example, the engine would not be covered because all of the media is referenced in a completely separate script layer, which *would* be covered.
[ ] In your example, the engine would be covered because it references the media in question by name.
[ ] I understand your wariness, but the fact that this hasn't been done in the past don't make it not worth considering.
[ ] Just because there are multiple ways we could decide how to address this issue, doesn't mean that it's ambiguous. It must means we need to talk about which way would be best and settle on a decision (see additional comments).'
[ ] While it may initially seem that the GPL would cover this case, the FSF has clarified (see "Non-functional Data") that art is data, and the linking requirements in the GPL do not apply in the case of art. Thus, even if the art itself is GPLed, the FSF doesn't consider it "linking", and the share-alike requirement is not triggered. (Added 12/28)

Okay, bring it on. I love a good controversy. :)

Bart Kelsey
OpenGameArt.org

Trepidation 2011-12-20

2011-12-21T13:29:00.000Z

999 ammo in Trepidation

Trepidation is an open source first person shooter based on the IOQuake3 engine. It was originally conceived on April 9, 2006 with the intent to build a free first person shooter with a sci-fi theme. The idea was initially developed by members of the Star Trek Elite Force gaming community.

Yesterday, the first development release since 2007 was released. It's mostly fixes but gameplay is affected. For example the sniper scope is more reactive and missing sounds are now in place.

There are 141 MB downloads for 32bit Linux and Windows. For 64bit Linux and other systems there's svn:
svn co https://trepidation.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/trepidation trepidation

I haven't had the time to figure out whether or not I need Quake 3 or OpenArena for Trepidation to work. Besides the project page there is a blog and a forum.

Open-Sourcing Canabalt was a Success

2011-12-20T10:42:00.001Z

Adam Saltsman, developer of the bsd-code, closed-assets, one-button reaction game Canabalt wrote about the effects of Open-Sourcing Your Game While It's Still Popular to their game.

The results of this decision, though not what we expected, have been very positive.

Let's hope the discussion doesn't turn into a hairsplitting war about "free"/"open" and "game"/"engine". :)

By the way, I found this news via reddit.com/r/gamedev in this comment thread. If you're into reddit as well, feel free to submit and cross-post relevant open source game (dev) news on /r/opensourcegames!

Ludum Dare, Game Jams and Licenses

2011-12-19T23:30:00.004Z

Olofson's LD22 game

Free, open source licenses are underrepresented at game jams and contests.

This weekend's Ludum Dare ends in a few hours and it already counts 754 entries. The following authors mentioned open source licenses in the context of the compo/jam:

roschdal plans on "releasing the game as open source on Github"
Riley Adams's project is already there (GPL3)
Agon's code is as well ("LICENSE: TODO")
mcc released LD code as open source before, maybe it'll happen again?
Olofson's (of Kobo Deluxe fame) failed submission is available (under LGPL)
Furyhunter submitted a jME game (Not sure but seems to be GPL)
kragniz's GPL game requires pyglet and pymunk
lorancou made a HTML/Canvas game called lonekitty (GPL)

lonekitty

Here are some non-submission projects discovered on Ludum Dare:

dwrensha released a SDL framework (GPL)
KhaoTom mentioned the Spacescape skybox generator

A *lot* of other submissions use GitHub but have no license info. :(

I found above projects using this advanced Google search. Hopefully, there will be more results in a few hours, which would mean another blog post.

kragniz' in-progress

Here's a quick list of ideas how free licenses could get more attention in such events.

Organizers could recommend free code and asset licenses
Developers could offer porting non-cross-platform submissions in exchange for release under free licenses
Participating developers, who already use free licenses, could advertise these in blog posts and announcements (more)

The Global Game Jam for example requires use of the CC-BY-NC-SA license, which unfortunately is non-free though.

Let us know of any freely licensed game jam/competition entries which we didn't cover!

Hale Review & Flare 0.15 Video

2011-12-15T13:01:00.000Z

Hale RPG

A very fine read is this review of the TBS/RPG Hale. Its first comment was written by the sole developer.

Video: Flare 0.15

Flare 0.15 introduces outdoor areas. Translation submissions are welcome now as well. Look for instructions and examples in this post.

Freedroid RPG recently released the second candidate for 0.15. Soon it will be ten years since registration of the freedroid project on SourceFroge.net.

Checking on Scourge 2, another open source RPG title, there has been no development for eight months.

Whats happening in OpenDungeons?

2011-12-13T22:00:00.002Z

Hello, I am one of the OpenDungeons (OD) developers and I wrote this blog post for FreeGamer.

I bet you're all very excited about whats been going on lately, and I can assure you that a lot of stuff have been made for OD. We have new music for you to enjoy while annihilating your foes, we've got new concept art for the Human and Undead faction, a new forge and a completely new tile set. We have also begun working on the AI and a XML specification for creature stats.

Music and trailer

Recently timong join the forum and asked about some musical tasks to perform. He started working on a main theme for the game and came up with this :) While he was at it he also made a nice trailer for us which you can find in the about page or watch it below:

New concept art

We have also received some very nice concept art from the OpenGameArt competition for the Undead faction we got art for these creepy characters:

and for the Human faction we got art for these noble folks:

Code updates

Of changes to the code and features we have begun implementing a basic AI and making a XML specification for creature definitions, which should make life a lot easier for artists which want to try out their new model in game and for balancing the stats of each creature.

New tile set and forge

We also have new tile set made by Skorpio (although it is not in the game yet):

You can find more pictures of the new tile set in this forum thread.

Finally we also have a new forge to make devilish traps and impenetrable doors :)

Current tasks, problems and needed help

A new release is planned once a bug that is crashing the game is fixed. We are also looking for more people/help for the project, especially when it comes to coding. You can see more details about the crasher bug and what skills we need from new people here in this blog post.

Minimal puzzles: Search for Smodrick 1.3.1 and Black Obelisk

2011-12-06T20:29:00.000Z

Search for Smodrick 1.3.1, a simple ncurses-based game, was recently uploaded to SourceForge.

Nearly dead in Search for Smodrick 1.3.1

The gameplay consists of finding an optimal path to get to the next level and avoiding/deflecting enemy androids. Game turns appear to be mixed-real/turn-based

No monsters yet in this match of Black Obelisk 0.2

I was reminded of the JavaScript game Black Obelisk by Starinfidel, in which your task is to destroy hidden obelisks while avoiding or luring deadly monsters. Hint: input is via mouse and you start playing by pressing black tiles next to non-black tiles.

Both games are single-player puzzles with minimal visuals.

Aleph One 1.0 released

2011-12-02T20:19:00.001Z

Hard to believe, but after 12 years of community development, the guys from the open-source engine based on Bungie's Marathon trilogy Aleph One have finally released a version called 1.0!

If you are lazy, you can watch this first part of a long set of "let's play" videos to get run through this FPS classic:

Let's play Aleph One (Part 1)

~~But honestly? This thing even runs on your cell phone (unless you have a talking brick like me :p ), so no reason not to play it yourself.~~
Edit: *hust* that was shoddy investigative journalism by me again :( In fact Aleph One does not seem to run on cell phones yet.

Long time no update from...

2011-11-29T22:47:00.001Z

...FreeGamer? No not this time :p It's rather that the Spring RTS engine ran into some trouble with their long overdue 0.83 version and now decided to release 0.84 instead ;)

Along with it comes also a new Zero-K release (0.9), which prompted one of their players to make a nice new trailer in anticipation:

Zero-K fan trailer

So...that's it for today ;)

P.S.: Check out Zero-K's Planetwars metagame too.

P.P.S.: Also Spring related... someone on their boards is looking for people to take over the development of another quite nice RTS game: Conflict Terra.

OGA challenge: Mobile, Become WTactics a Character, Illes' Game Music Album

2011-11-29T12:51:00.001Z

First 'mobile devices' contest submission by Mumu

The current OpenGameArt challenge is 'mobile devices' and ends on Monday, December 5, 2011. The contest before that was low on participants and a survey was started to figure out how to get more people involved.

Becoming a WTactics character

Taken from OGA: WTactics is currently offering a chance to have your likeness on a WTactics card in order to raise funds for the continued development of thier project. From their website:

Give our artists a picture of you or your beloved one and become a part of the game! The artist will create a nice portrait with your chosen class, clothing and equipment, making it an everlasting part of our game and the open source communities, turning it into an immortal memory.

This reminds me of the Fantasy Portrait Kickstarter project, which produced some pretty portraits but unfortunately still istn't finished yet.

pzi's album cover

Pal Zoltan Illes of jClassicRPG fame released the game music album A Mantle Of Games under CC-BY-SA. Feel free to use and leave a comment here.

Open Source RPG News, Freedroid and IrrRPG builder

2011-11-26T16:09:00.001Z

The wayward Goat strikes again!

Freedroid 0.15 rc 1:

The plucky, 'puter punching penguin hack 'n slash RPG stalwart has had a new release recently, reaching the 0.15 rc milestone (how many years will it take them to get to 1.0, I wonder?)

It adds lots of things, new quests, new guns, new abilities, UI fixes, editor tweaks... Lots of development happening there, so check it out!

EDIT: Thanks to shirish for pointing out that it's still at rc 1 stage, and thus not a final release.

IrrRPG Builder Alpha 2

A project that looked promising, and that I almost forgot about, is the RPG game IDE, IrrRPG Builder. Finally, a basic battle system is implemented, and the scripting system was improved as well, so it's getting pretty close to being feature complete.

BREAKING NEWS: Doom3 source code released!

2011-11-22T23:19:00.001Z

Ha, you probably read it here first, since it is just an hour ago that it was uploaded!

https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl

Have fun tinkering with it!

P.S.: A good dev forum for it is Doom3world.

Fan made trailer contests and other FPS news

2011-11-21T16:55:00.001Z

So it seems Red Eclipse is having a "contest" for creating an official trailer for their upcoming 1.2 release. Nothing to win (except fame), but the guys from Sauerbraten (also Cube2 engine based, like Red Eclipse) recently did the same with a quite nice result:

New official Sauerbraten trailer

So if you want to participate, have a look at their rules and check out these nice open-source tools for video capturing: GLC (short tutorial by our qudobup) and editing: PiTiVi or KDEnlive (sorry for being Linux centric here :p ).

In other news I can report that the Xonotic team is following up on their promise to report more news and developments on their Blog :) Check out the latest entry for a log read and many nice pictures.
Personally I am currently most excited about the mod "Overkill" with tries to take some features of the well loved instagib mode (sadly so much that it is sometimes hard to find anything but instagib games :( ) like right click laser jump etc. while keeping a variety of weapons that are a bit more appealing to non-instagib players.
Well, check out the more detailed description and pictures at the bottom of the post linked above! Oh and you can already play the mod by joining the test server with a vanilla Xonotic version (all needed files will be auto-downloaded).

P.S.: Here is a small video to show how it currently looks:

Xonotic Overkill mod (early WIP)

jMonkeyEngine Official Beta Contest Announced

2011-11-15T12:00:00.000Z

We're a week into what has been an absolutely thrilling experience so far. What was more of an experiment to see what some developers might pull off with the new Beta release has far exceeded our expectations.

Prizes include a free copy of the upcoming "jMonkeyEngine 3 Beginner's Guide" and a free theme from the WooThemes shop. Additional prizes might be added.

If you want to get caught up you should read the following articles:
Brief Announcement
Exhaustive Contest Rules
Contest Prizes

Even if you've never used jMonkeyEngine before, 1 and 1/2 months could be enough time to put a game together if you have some experience in Java programming and game development already. We highly encourage developers to download the jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK as the recommended route to a quick start. From there the wiki and community forum are mere clicks away.

We hope this contest will bring some new blood into our lively community, and we trust you'll find it worth your while.

Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Changes and Videolog

2011-11-14T11:27:00.000Z

Unknown Horizons 2011.3 is out! Features are:

Complete settlement AI (details here)
Combat and diplomacy system
Increase in performance (partially thanks to FIFE)
Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr)
Nine new buildings, one new ship (here are some)
New statistic widgets
Usability and interface improvements (for example the in-game menu)
New maps and a parameters-based map generator

The original announcement is here and some more details about the new features here.

[video: Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Changes (voiced)]

Development is active and they are on the lookout for people to help out or even join:

2D/3D/Animation artists can find some tasks here
Naval public domain painting lovers can help by finding some background art
Interested in mechanics/story? Share your ideas for catastrophes!
Interesting screenshots and videos should be posted here
Feedback is needed for this release. It can be shared on the forums or IRC room.

Translators, sound artists, programmers, game designers, writers and voice artists can also help. The get involved page will let you know how to get started.

Pioneer and settler buildings

Shooting pirates

Translucent environment

[More screenshots]

New websites, releases and competitions etc

2011-11-12T21:12:00.001Z

Couldn't really think of a fitting headline, but here is the bunch of randomly collected news from the FOSS gaming realm:

First of all, OpenDungeons finally got a nice website and a blog (as mentioned previously). And in collaboration with OpenGameArt, the kicked off their art competitions again.

SummoningWars also got a new website recently, and they have also released version 0.55 a few days ago.

New Summoning Wars GUI

Last but not least, the pledgie donation drive for 0 A.D. seemed to have payed off to some extend, so one of the main developers is now working full time on the game for one month. See here for his first report on things newly implemented (most notable a save-game feature). But... you can still donate to keep him motivated longer ;)

Settlers of Catan Rules in Open Source Games (aka Clones, Remakes, Implementations)

2011-11-11T20:00:00.001Z

Settlers of Catan is a popular board game. In today's terms it can be described as very 'social' thanks to its trade mechanic, which can lead to exploitation, corruption, deception... all that fun stuff.

There are a few open source implementations of the game rules, some of which I mentioned years ago and with two of them being updated recently, I decided to revisit them.

First, a few fun facts in comparable table form, further below you'll find screenshots, impressions and feature lists. Enjoy! If you're looking for somebody to play against, why not try the #freegamer IRC channel? :)

Thanks for hiponboy's (of SumWars fame) help at testing games and collecting data!


	Game	Platform	Activity	© Infringement	™ Infringement	Compilable?


Pioneers (pio)	C, GTK+	active	Hex-tiles look suspicious	None found	Yes (./configure && make)
Java Settlers of Catan (jsettlers2)	Java	active	Yes ("Gorillaz" character portrait file in resources)	Yes ("Settlers of Catan")	Yes (ant)
Cities3D	C/C++, openGL	6 months ago	None found	None found	No (./configure error)
Solitaire Settlers of Catan (solitairecatan)	Java	3 years ago	Yes (original Catan card images)	Yes ("Settlers of Catan")	No (ant error)
jCatano	Java	5 years ago	None found	Possibly ("Catan")	Yes (ant)
GL Catan	C/C++, openGL	5 years ago	Yes (original Catan card images)	Possibly ("Catan")	No (source not found)
Java Settlers of Catan (javasettlers)	Java	6 years ago	None found	Yes ("Settlers of Catan")	No (instructions missing)
Nettlers of Catan (nettlers)	C/C++	7 years ago	None found	Possibly ("_ettlers of Catan")	No (not ported to Linux)

In the table I pointed out copyright and trademark infringement, which according to this article created problems for SoC clones in the past.

I encourage project maintainers to check whether all assets are openly licensed, credited and legal and distance themselves from the Settlers of Catan trademark to avoid confusion.

Pioneers

Pioneers is feature-loaded and is configurable in content (maps), look (theme) and gameplay (rules).

Features: Various boards, Seafarers mode available, network multiplayer or single-player, one AI level, map editor, complex trade (not sure if it's possible to trade multiple vs multiple resources though), few custom rules, themes

Java Settlers of Catan (JSettlers2)

JSettlers2 nice to play with complex trade, although offers can be confusing and widgets can't be resized individually.

Another drawback is the apparently forced slowness of the AI. On the other hand the AI sometimes offers trade, which makes it stand out from the trade-passive AI of the other games.

Features: Board for 4/6 players, network multiplayer or single-player, one AI level, complex trade, few custom rules

My suggestion for a hopefully non-infringing name change: "Builders of Javatan"

By the way, I was inspired to create a little tile set for JSettlers2.

Cities3D

Cities3D looks great and feels great but needs a developer/maintainer.

Unfortunately FMOD is used for sound, which renders the game non-free.

Features: Various boards, Seafarers mode available, network multiplayer only, complex trade, polished UI, sounds

Solitaire Settlers of Catan

Solitaire Settlers of Catan has a nice look and a clear trade interface (although unfortunately only simple trade is possible).

Features: Board for 4/6 players, single-player only, different AI levels, simple trade, additional Volcano scenario

jCatano

jCatano has a non-intuitive interface and is a bit of a pain to play with for example no resource icons and impossible action buttons not being grayed out.

Features: Board for 4 players only, network multiplayer only, no harbors, no trade between players, unpolished UI

GL Catan

As long as source code is missing, GL Catan can be considered proprietary software.

Features: Custom board size, single-player only, different AI levels, savegames, map editor, no trade with AI, points to win can be set

Java Settlers of Catan (javasettlers)

Javasettlers is not playable.

Features: Javasettlers is a techdemo of board rendering and building placement.

Nettlers of Catan (nettlers)

Nettlers' advantage is its shortcut-driven interface and minimal UI.

Features: Custom board size, Seafarers mode only, multi-player only, complex trade, shortcut-driven interface

Note about features: "complex trade" means that "I will trade 2 wool and 1 wood against 1 iron" is possible with other players, "simple trade" means only "1 resource for 1" resource trade is possible.

ET:Xreal 0.3.0 released

2011-11-09T22:57:00.000Z

Just as a quick follow-up to last weeks post about ET:Xreal:
Version 0.3.0 got released today!

ET:Xreal 0.3.0

As you can see, it is still a long way to go to replace all the non-free assets, and graphics sure don't look quite as great as all the features of that engine would make you believe (which proves again: it is the artists making a game look good :p ), but it's a start and you can begin brushing up your ET skills again ;)

Trigger Rally 0.6.0

2011-11-09T02:44:00.000Z

Testing Trigger's Physics [source video]

Trigger Rally 0.6.0 for Linux (source portable) brings following new features:

New (and old) contributed tracks and events
New Practice Mode
Paging on the Single Races screen to show all the available tracks
Option to show speedometer in KPH or MPH
Option to show digital speed on the speed dial ('hybrid' style)
Fading track comment and GO at race start
Freezing course time when passing through a checkpoint
Tweak menu colors for more contrast

PS: If I understand this tweet correctly, this means high-quality motor, drift and crash sounds for Speed Dreams that hopefully will also be usable in Trigger, SuperTuxKart and other racing games.

Phlipple - Unique 3D Puzzle

2011-11-07T00:53:00.000Z

Phlipple

Phlipple is an original puzzle game which could be useful for training thinking in 3D.

It's available for Linux and Windows with 50 levels and there is a 100-level version for Android (EUR 1.70 / USD 2.30) and iOS (was it taken down? License drama senses tingling!).

I don't know anything about the availability/license of the build instructions/scripts for the portable platforms and of the additional level files but assume they are closed.

Phlipple is by Remigiusz 'mal1ce' Dybka, who also made Zaz (including a [proprietary?] version for Android).

Video: Phlipple promo

Enemy Territory source related news

2011-11-03T19:50:00.000Z

About a year after the Wolf:ET source release, significant advances to the original game (in a playable and easily obtainable form) are sadly still MIA :(

The quite promising ET:Xreal engine enhancement project is one possible exception, even though they just had to sadly announce that they wouldn't make their Nov. 5th first release date (I was originally waiting for news about this until then...).

ET:Xreal with some Free high quality textures

As you might have guessed, this project takes the advanced id-Tech3 (Quake3) renderer from the now defunct Xreal project and brings it over to the Enemy-Territory engine (also id-Tech3 based). But besides that it also aims to give the engine a general overhaul and possibly add additional advanced features like real physics etc.
Additionally work has also started to replace the free-as-in-beer media from the original game, with much higher quality CC-by-SA textures to make use of the advanced engine features.
To qoute one of the developers (Eonfge) regarding their plans to go fully FOSS:

"The project we are working on consists of multiple parts. First we have a renderer, which is now fairly stable and pretty looking. Then we have the assets, new high quality assets that make the environment come alive. Then we have the official part from Splash Damage. It's our goal to go independent one day, but until we have all the assets replaced, we will remain a mod. After we replaced them all, we'll be an independent open source game."

Lets see how that turns out... alternatively the developer of the awesome looking (but totally non-FOSS) ET mod True Combat: CQB also did express interest in porting his game to ET:Xreal some months back.

On the other side of things it looks like the ET:Xreal fork OpenWolf is turning more and more into a wild mix of different id-Tech3 engines.
Its developer recently announced full compatibility with the id-Tech3 based game Tremulous, and is making his roads towards a quite fully featured general id-Tech3 compatible engine based on ET.
I suspect this is also somehow related to the very similar engine enhancements promised for the quite awesome looking Tremulous fork TremZ:

New alien model in TremZ

But information on that project are quite scares right now, as there seemed to have been some community drama related to it and they are waiting for their own official page to be published now.
But rumors are running wild (in face of the log awaited but more or less vapourware Tremulous 1.2), so I can't confirm if the proposed release date before the end of the year is true or not ;)

Multitouch RTS gaming

2011-10-27T16:01:00.002+01:00

Back from holidays... and no new post on the blog in the mean time??? qudobup is getting lazy :p

So before we lose all our loyal readers (e.g. the blog authors themselves *chirp* *chirp*), here a quick update:

Zero-K, the Spring-Engine using RTS game, got a bunch uf new releases lately... all the way up to version 0.8.13.1 by the time of writing this. Try it out if you liked Total Annihilation back in the days :D

However, the main reason for me writing about this is the cool multi-touch (tablet) interface someone coded for the spring engine and showcased with Zero-K:

Zero-K multitouch

Still a bit rough around the edges as you can see... but this shows that RTS games might have a bright future on tablet-pcs!

A Garden of colorful projects

2011-10-16T16:17:00.001+01:00

Found this nice abstract shooter over at LGDB a few days ago:

Garden of coloured lights gameplay

As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*).

In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called "Free Game Alliance" to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this!
Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages...

Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena, which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here.

Double 0.7.4: Pingus and M.A.R.S.

2011-10-15T00:09:00.000+01:00

No screenshot of Pingus 0.7.4

Version 0.7.4 of Pingus introduces an array of changes:

Content:

New levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign" (27 new levels in total)
This is the first use of the desert and factory graphics in official levels

Gameplay:

Deadly fall height increased
Digger/Miner/Basher paths cleanup

Features:

Demo recordings/playback re-implemented (32bit/64bit not compatible)
--usedir parameter added (useful for portable play)
Unicode support added
Option menu added

Usability:

Window can be resized in-game
Soundcard dependancy removed
Man page added

Look:

Level dimensions now suit 1920x1200 resolution
Anti-aliasing added to bitmap fonts

Performance:

Software rendering improved
OpenGL rendering option added

Other:

Editor enhancements
Fixes

Good Old Colorful M.A.R.S. (0.7.4)

0.7.3 and then 0.7.4 of M.A.R.S. were relesed:

New speacial
New weapon
Dutch, Mongolian and Norwegian languages added
In-game speed settings

Ren'Py Visual Novels

2011-10-09T22:23:00.000+01:00

So a while ago we were asked on our forums why we never featured any games done with the open-source Visual Novel engine Ren'Py... which I pretty much dismissed in my mind with "prfff... those are not games anyways" :D
But well... a small competition over at the very nice Linux Gaming News blog asking which game engine actually had the most Linux compatible (and often at least freeware) games released so far, got me thinking about this again as with literally hundreds of games available on-line, we shouldn't simply dismiss this genre outright, I guess.

Screen-shot from the Ren'Py game Katawa Shoujo

Luckily, I do watch Anime from time to time, so I wasn't completely "out of the loop" so to say and thought "if tentacle p*** didn't kill me, I am up for anything" (except for 4chan's /b/ :D ). And at least in Japan, Visual Novels are a pretty big thing, with "next-gen" console releases, high quality movie adaptions and millions of players/readers (as an rather good example "Stein's Gate" could be mentioned).

However Visual Novels do have a certain prejudice attached to them, that most are all about school-girl dating sims or worse e.g. so called "eroge" surprisingly often also meant for a female audience, including boy-boy scenes o_o
And after digging into the scene a bit, I have to admit those prejudices are somewhat correct *slowly wanders off and wonders why he even bothered*

Screen-shot from the FOSS Visual Novel @Camelia Girls

But, that doesn't mean there aren't some good/interesting ones (for example this one), and the Ren'Py engine allows for some pretty awesome interactive storytelling (also on your Android powered device)... so lets not judge a tool by some of its user.
Besides that... it is perfectly feasible for a one man (or woman) team to succeed in creating a great Visual Novel, which can't be said for most other game genres. So if you have an awesome story to tell, and writing a book isn't your thing... well maybe making a Visual Novel is (the programming involved is rather simple... no worries ;) ). Interested? Well head over to the LemmaSoft Visual Novel development forums and dive right into this rather strange sub-culture :p

GunFu Deadlands 1.01: Performance Up!

2011-10-04T00:32:00.003+01:00

GunFu Deadlands title screen

GunFu Deadlands, a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated (1.01) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to Git.

The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again!

Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls.

This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago.

Video: GunFu Deadlands 1.01 gameplay

By the way, did you know that GunFu Deadlands is one of the 250 Indie Games You Must Play?

PS: I got word from the developer about the performance increase:

Just for your interest, I made some measurements and it seems that the speed increase is indeed dramatic: 55% faster.

I computed the mean FPS rate by measuring the time it takes to render 1000 frames in-game and dividing 1000 by this number. The formula (FPS_faster_version - FPS_slower_version) / FPS_slower_version is what produced this 55%.

Summer Shorts #3

2011-10-01T22:38:00.000+01:00

"Summer?" you ask? Well.. I'ts warm in Berlin.*
Also a warning: this article is 80% development, 31.5% art and 18% games.

Cross-language forums so far

FreeGameDev Forums now have Spanish and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian subforums. Should we add some more? Read this then write here.

OpenClonk old and new terrain rendering

The 2.0 OpenClonk release brings higher resolution for the terrain, which makes the game look a lot better. Read the full changelog here.

Blendswap entries. Amazing.

Check out the Blendswap Military Vehicles Contest entries:

I'm amazed. But that's just me. I have a thing for mechs. Alot even.

WebGL lessons. Freely licensed too.

Did anybody know of these CC-BY-SA-licensed WebGL tutorials? This dog told me about them.

"Hacking" 8-hour prototypes: Hubwar and Nodehack

* Speaking of Berlin, Germany. There was a little game dev jam in Berlin . Two of the prototypes are open source! (Hubwar and Nodehack)

Cross-Language Community(?)

2011-09-30T13:20:00.000+01:00

It recently came to my attention that over 24% of Simutrans forum posts are in languages other than English. Some posts (including a few jokes) later FreeGameDev had its first non-English board.

Simutrans Forum Post Languages

Should we really have a section on our board for non-English languages?

Pro:

Lurkers who would not post in English would have the chance to contribute in the international forum
Engaged non-English-speakers are likely to improve English skills over time, attracted by the larger community

Con:

People who might give English a try to contribute will use the international forum out of comfort instead, decreasaing growth of the English-speaking community
People who use English now, will use the international forum and contribute less to the English-speaking community
Moderators need to be found

It could also be that there will be no effect at all. We will add non-English forums if we find volunteer moderators as an experiment for a while and see where this leads us (few more details here).

If you would like to help moderate a language forum, please let us know in this thread.

English language map of the non-primarily English-speaking world [source by-nc-nd]

GJID

2011-09-27T02:03:00.000+01:00

GJID's first level

I have a hard time playing puzzle games when their only reward is getting to the next one. Consequently I'm usually not a fan of Sokoban games. Having a little or a lot of story bundled with the puzzle helps though.

In GJID you control a brave robot of the name GJID, who volunteered to recycle dangerous weapons from a cold war. In 14 levels you have to dispose of nuclear and disruptor weapons.

Movement controls reacts instantly and you are allowed to skip levels. There is no save function and no sound. The game runs in full-screen but thankfully does not resize the screen and scales instead. License: MIT

This version seems to be made for *nix only. ./configure && make allows to easily run the game.

From the README:

This is a clone of the eponymous DOS shareware game written in 92 by John Remyn. I spoke with John in 95, when the first version of this clone was made. He admired the 8-bit graphics (original game was done in 4-color CGA) and did not object to its existence. His email address has since expired and the few contact attempts I've made recently hit dead ends. The DOS game was $10 shareware and I include the original registration form in the README, in case you want to track John down and give him money for the excellent level design that make this game what it is.
Aside from being an entertaining puzzle, I also release this game as an example of using the XCB library for making X applications. XCB is the new lightweight replacement for Xlib that suffers from lack of documentation. This game demonstrates how to create small applications with it and also how to use RENDER for drawing text, tile sprites, and for hardware scaling of the 320x240 backbuffer.

GJID reminds me of another, even more story-driven Sokoban-style game with simple graphics: The Villany of Cat Food Inc.

Totally missed the Annex Beta 1 release :(

2011-09-24T16:03:00.002+01:00

Wow... can believe this myself, but after hyping this cool Megaglest mod a few times here on FreeGamer I totally missed their first release last month :(

Here as a reminder how cool Annex-Conquer the World looks:

Annex - Conquer the World

Currently there is only a Windows port available, but a Linux version is promised for the next release... Edit: I was confused about the media licensing... more or less all the new assets are CC-by-NC-SA, which is as you might know not considered FOSS due to the NC clause. A pity really :-/

So... how was I reminded of this gem? Well check out this cool interview with the Megaglest developers from the Greek site OSArena (in English though) ;)

Now I am off booting into windows to have another round with Annex ;)

0AD Alpha 7 Geronium and more

2011-09-21T23:26:00.001+01:00

Act 1

In case you've been hiding under a rock or you rely on Free Gamer for your open source game updates (and we love you if you do), there has been another release of 0AD (announcement) the 3D historical RTS game.

Lots of improvements, including an all-new and unique Carthaginian civilization, a new main menu that moves, new music, new sound effects, new maps, and likely (although not mentioned) a lot of development and the fixes and subtle improvements to go with it.

This is going to be one of the marquee open source games soon. It has the potential for mainstream appeal that is missing from a Battle for Wesnoth, no matter how polished it becomes (and it is very, very polished these days).

Since becoming open source to help save the project from an ignominious end, development seems to have gone from strength to strength with a series of alpha releases each bringing the game one step closer to being a playable title.

Act 2

Also big news coming out of the ~~Dungeonhack~~ Godhead project - a new release! This is the first since a tech demo over 2 years ago. This release marks the beginning of a different direction for the project. They now use the Lips of Suna engine. It is early days but the new engine already has a lot of what a now-defunct rewrite was trying to achieve in that it is server-client based, and it is 3D and the world is deformable, and there is now a workflow to get ideas straight in to a game world, giving writers and artists more possibilities to see their work immediately applied. Still, early days, it was just a black screen for me (but this was Windows 7 x64 - boo) so we'll see if this can reverse the fortunes of a project that has struggled to maintain momentum from one release to the next.

Free Gamer approves of inter-project cooperation. Huzzah!

Act 3

Finally, lady and gentlemen, for your entertainment, a fun ninja platformer!

Shinobi Densetsu is created using the OpenSNC engine, proving it is not just limited to hedgehog-based games.

I used to leave a plate of milk out for hedgehogs when I was a kid. I also had to shift through mucky half-rotten piles of leaves to make sure none were hibernating in the base of a bonfire-to-be. True stories! I digress...

Video!

Huzzah!

FPS news

2011-09-19T00:34:00.007+01:00

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ).

So FPS news only from me today ;)

Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week.

Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above.

Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums.
More cool WIP screens can be seen here. Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently.

Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project.
So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure (and more) open sourced

2011-09-17T19:26:00.001+01:00

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure

The quadruple-A block-style story-based, sneaky-action pandora game Adamant Armor Affection Adventure is now GPLed. Along with it some other games for that platform by the same author (AAA for one [video]) were open sourced.

Sources can be downloaded here (AAAA) and here (other games).

Video: 13 minutes of AAAA on OpenPandora

Much more info about the releases along with some internet drama history can be read in this post.

I'm not sure about the assets and their license, there seem to be none included in the tarballs.

/me requesting Linux desktop ports

Slipstream Vehicle Simulation

2011-09-16T02:55:00.000+01:00

The author of Techne has a new project:

Slipstream is a free racing vehicle simulator trying to be physically accurate and fun to play at the same time! Contrary to most simulators out there it's not designed around a single type of vehicle. It should be able to support anything from a bicycle to a car or anything else that can be driven around on a racetrack for that matter.

Help is requested on the content-side:

The graphics are still very primitive I'm afraid but they get the job done at least. Making Slipstream pretty is still a high priority but I doubt I'll be able to create decent track and vehicle models myself. If you're an artist and want to participate in making a great racing simulator please drop me a line [dpapavas@gmail.com].

Video: Showcasing Slipstream

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

2011-09-12T01:17:00.000+01:00

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Quadruped in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

2011-09-10T04:37:00.000+01:00

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.

The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.

IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.

DungeonHack/Godhead Demo Ultimatum

2011-09-07T01:20:00.000+01:00

DungeonHack aka Godhead imposed an ultimatum on itself: two weeks for finishing a gameplay demo using the Lips of Suna engine.

Should the demo not be finished by that time, the development team will commit Seppuku.

Just kidding. :)

It's refreshing to see an open project put some pressure on itself. I'm looking forward to the results of this.

GeneticInvasion : a brand new Tower Defence

2011-09-02T20:33:00.000+01:00

Hi! I'm here to show you a new game that I'm working on: GeneticInvasion

It's Tower Defence game, but it has something special: it uses evolutionary algorithms.
The idea of evolutionary algorithm is to use darwin theory to solve problems:

We generate random solution to the problem.
We evaluate them.
We take some of the better ones, apply random mutations to them, and generate an offspring from them.
The child replaces their parents in the solution population to form a new generation.
And we do this, again and again, until we find a solution that is good enough.

Well, in GeneticInvasion, the problem, is you. So enemies evolve in order to crush you.

Video of the game

Download the .webm video

We used a real evolutionary computation library called EO to make this game. The library is being used for many serious projects.

So, you heard me, an army of colorful enemies are trying to eliminate you, don't just sit here, fight!

Some notes:

For the first time since we began to develop it, the game is now interesting to play. That means that it's neither too easy nor too hard to play.
I also added 3 levels that are supposed to be sorted by difficulty.
There is a medal system, so you can try to get gold on all 3 of them. (I failed to get the gold medal on the third one through :P)
There are no binaries, if someone is feeling like doing some, please contact me.
The game is theoretically compatible with at least GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS but has only been tested on GNU/Linux. You'll need SFML, EO and Glu to build it.
Please send us your remarks and comments.!

Also, I'd like to thanks OpenGameArt and the artists that contribute it, without them our game would probably had hand-drawing art, and we suck at it. (Also many thanks to ozzed who did the music on Jamendo)

Official website: GeneticInvasion Controls for playin the game

Flightgear 2.4 plus something cuddly and something fishy

2011-08-31T01:02:00.004+01:00

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 (announcement) has been released.

The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt:

Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more.
Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain surfaces, 3-dimensional cityscapes, water moves realistically and sunlight is reflected from its surface.
Many improved planes/models and additional cockpit systems - a choice of nearly 500 different aircraft, from historical to bleeding edge, from ultra-lights to the ultimate flying heavy metal.

Still no combat (see open source flight combat article) but I think that's probably a bit off topic for Flightgear.

The Flightgear project has reached what I call "critical mass" in that it no longer depends on a few active developers to maintain progress. A thriving contributor community outgrows the original development crew and it becomes owned by the community. Usually when a project attains critical mass, development accelerates massively. There are more people contributing to Flightgear than has ever been the case, it is flying. Pun intended.

In fact I can't think of many other FOSS games that have attained "critical mass" status. Battle for Wesnoth of course. Possibly Freeciv and OpenTTD (I wish they'd rename that). Some projects got close but never quite made it, such as Glest and Vega Strike. Others are knocking on the door, such as Pioneer, Speed Dreams, 0AD. (If I am being dozy and missing any such projects, point out in the comments!) The vast majority of projects never get close and usually only are actively developed as long as their originators / principle supporters are motivated.

What could be cuddly? Plee the Bear 0.6 has been released (announcement, forum thread). It features the first big boss. It is a very nice looking game with a lot of potential, and seems great for a younger player.

And the something fishy? Avid readers, those worth their salt, people who are true followers of the blog, those who will enter through the gates of St Peter before all others, they will know I am a big fan of Fish Fillets NG. Somebody has made a clone called, imaginatively, Fish Fillets Clone (screenshots). Whilst I don't like that it is an outright clone, I do like that it uses vector graphics. I think there's promise there.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Oh, yeah, hiiii to my Cuban female fanbase!

Planets are a nice thing...

2011-08-29T17:12:00.007+01:00

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p
New to the feeds is our revision control planet, for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p

It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward.
However, recently they released an auto-builds update script, which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p

Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released:

Stunt Rally 1.2

Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode.

Other things to mention? Mage is a open-source MTG client, but not as nice looking as Wagic. But it might convince you with other features (of which Mage has a lot ;) ).
Unknown Horizons has a nice news update with all the improvements Google's Summer of Code gave them and the Zod engine is set out to improve the multiplayer part of the (back then really nice) game Z (using the unfree media from the original it seems).

PyWeek 13 (And PyWeek 12 Winners)

2011-08-25T14:43:00.003+01:00

It's time PyWeek #13 soon!

The dates of this challenge are are 00:00 UTC 2011-09-11 to 00:00 UTC 2011-09-18.

Timetable
Friday 2011/08/12	Registration underway
Sunday 2011/09/04	Theme voting commences
Sunday 2011/09/11	Challenge start
Sunday 2011/09/18	Challenge end, judging begins
Sunday 2011/10/02	Judging closes, winners announced

Check out PyWeek 12's winners by the way:

Loopback: Asteroids + Tower defense. Retro Look. Permissive code license.

Loopback - PyWeek #12 Team Winner

Lemming: Enough Plumbers + Canabalt??? Hand-drawn horrible ;). Permissive code license.

Video: PyWeek #12: Lemming Speed Run

The PyWeek guys seem to have figured out the license part of game prototyping well: Lemming for example contains a list of all used art pieces' urls and licenses. Neat!

PS: Ludum Dare got 600-1 entries last weekend.

BZFlag Tournament hosted by Ohava Open Computers

2011-08-25T01:17:00.001+01:00

BZFlag

There will be a tournament of the CTF game BZFlag.

When: September 30th, at 5pm EST

Where: Online(?)

How: Visit ohava.com/gametourney for sign-up.

Prize: An Ohava OpenBook BE awarded to the MVP of the winning team. More prizes will be given to all of the winning team's members.

News Shorts

2011-08-22T14:13:00.002+01:00

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one.

OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too.

Alex the Allegator was part-ported to HTML5 using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D

DusteD, maker of Wizznic! is not dead.

Blendswap now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying.

Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS. Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

Keeping up a tradition...

2011-08-20T00:17:00.010+01:00

Yes, I post only seldom, but when I do it I keep up the good old tradition of mixing totally unrelated projects in one big post :p

So where to start today? Ahh yes:

The puzzle type game Berusky 2 was recently FOSSified (code and art GPL) as pointed out in our forums (but I have to admit I saw it first on LGDB). And as out great founder was quick to point out, it follows the great tradition of the first part with was also released under the terms of the GPL.

In totally unrelated news, Lips of Suna version 0.5 got released last week, with a bunch of nice graphical and game-play improvements (change log and discussion here).

For those living behind a rock, Lips of Suna is a crazy mix of Minecraft, slightly adult themed anime and a more classic RPG. Definitly worth a try, even though still under heavy development!

Hmm and now a quick run-down of other (I'd say less important) news:
Q3 Rally (now stand alone with the ioQuake3 engine) is nearing another release and OpenXcom is making good progress in the "battlescape" AI. In WarZone2100 land, you can now test the cool new models with a test mod (is supposed to work with the latest snapshot release). The fork of the W:ET, OpenWolf is also progressing with a fix of the Mod support (while the more ambitious ET:Xreal seems to have gone in a hiatus again), and while talking about id software source-code, I have started this small anticipatory id tech 4 project which needs contributors ;)

The end.

Oh wait, did we ever mention the source release of Cities3D (a Setters of Catan like game)?

On OpenGameArt 2 and FreeSound 2

2011-08-17T02:30:00.000+01:00

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :)

OpenGameArt 2 submission form

FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!

FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash...

A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:

FreeSound Bulk License Change

If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY.

I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:

Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site

Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!

Open Source in Humble Indie Bundle #3: Haaf's Game Engine (HGE)

2011-08-08T10:10:00.000+01:00

HGE's Particle Editor

The proprietary games sale Humble Indie Bundle has a tradition of including open source engine releases.

In all of the other humble bundles there has always been at least one game that opened its source (in #2 it was revenge of the titans. in #1 it was penumbra, lugaru, aquaria and gish).

- Fer C.

Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages: hge, hge-unix.

The non-free BASS audio library was replaced with OpenAL.

The hge-unix readme states "10 I don't know anything about the Windows version of HGE.", which might mean that developers have to juggle two engine versions and audio libraries if they want to support the three main platforms. Or hge-unix needs to be ported back to windows systems.

You can read more about the port in the blog post HGE comes to Mac and Linux by Ryan Gordon aka icculus. Or perhaps watch his talk about Linux/open source gaming (again?).

LinWarrior r19+

2011-08-07T12:00:00.003+01:00

LinWarrior r19+ Test Video

I tested and recorded the latest LinWarrior git revision (a few changes since release19). Some of the new features in r19 and after include:

Atmospheric daytime setting
New units (Flopsy, Scorpion and Tank)
Cockpit frame in first-person view
Trees, trees, trees

The LinWarrior engine is still being developed, for example mechs are still hardcoded rather than configured in textfiles right now.

PS: A video of actual gameplay, rather than just testing the controls. Unfortunately no sound but 1920x1200 resolution...

Playing LinWarrior r19+ [mute]

Cubosphere: First Beta

2011-08-06T19:52:00.000+01:00

Cubosphere 0.1 Beta testing video

The first beta release of Cubosphere is available.

The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

Some random FPS engine news

2011-08-04T23:22:00.010+01:00

Fast games for slow summer news weeks... but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p

To start out... yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums, but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users.

Noteworthy news related to that (albeit not strictly FOSS related): RedEclipse also got included into Desura now (Moddb's indie friendly answer to Steam, even with an upcoming Linux port). To avoid complains in the comments... I mention this here even though it is a closed source game distribution platform, simply because it can be a great way to promote (and maybe even sell?) FOSS games, and if we would finally be able to attract the modding community (which is largely represented on Moddb) to work with FOSS engines instead, it would be win-win for everyone involved.

Despite its unfree content War§ow is also worth a look now and then. According to their somewhat recent blog entries they have made great progress in speeding up the Quake2 based renderer, and plan to include a matchmaking and statistics system in the maybe not so distant 0.7 release. It's actually a pity that the engine isn't used for other projects, and given that it is Quake2 based, it could probably be ported to mobile platforms like Android rather quickly (since there is a full and fast Quake2 Java port).

Talking about mobile platforms... the engine behind Xonotic (formerly Nexuiz) Darkplaces, seems to have gotten an iOS port judging by a quick look at the very recent new source release. No news post about the most recent changes, but slightly older news tell us about a much higher frame rate then before :) Would be nice if Xonotic would see another Beta release soon also ;)

Oh and I know I will get flamed for this again (e.g. for mentioning a commercial game on this blog; but I stand by my opinion that commercial isn't != FOSS), but the Darkplaces based and GPLed source-code containing SteelStorm: Burning Retribution, has been added as a free bonus to the latest HumbleBundle (at the time of writing this, with still 5 days remaining to get this "pay what you want" indie-game-bundle including some really nice games all running on Linux). Just to quickly mention... no news about source releases from that source this time (but they added all of the games from the 2nd bundle if you pay above average)... but given the somewhat lukewarm source releases last time (not really FOSS) I guess that is not a big loss :-/

Hmm what else? World of Padman was somewhat recently updated, and its engine ioQuake3 is moving to a modularized renderer.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST (hot news coming in while I am writing this)... John Carmack just confirmed in his keynote on this year's QuakeCon, that the Doom3 source code will be released this year (probably shortly after the Rage release scheduled early October)... which will be a really nice addition to the FOSS engine pool (finally a somewhat modern single player FPS engine). I am especially looking forward to see some of the existing high quality Doom3 mods to go stand alone, and maybe even FOSS!

Double Trouble

2011-07-27T04:27:00.004+01:00

Hallow thar Free Gamers!

Warmux, the project formerly known as Wormux, is dying. (It amuses me how "formerly" sounds like "formally", doesn't it? Or is that my colloquial pronunciation?)

The current development version has rather minor changes: improved game mode (ie including weapon), new "squad" play (teams can ally). But there's little more coming. What this means is that the next version - if any - of WarMUX, might be the last. At least, it is most probably over for the author of these words.

Who knows. It was not long ago that the PARPG lead was calling that dead (and I scolded him for it, did I). The great thing about Free software is that it can live on.

Moving on to more vibrant projects, and ToME4 beta 29 30 31 is in the wild. The current development pace is quite astonishing. More graphical tiles, bug fixes, play balancing, and some useful optimizations - don't get addicted!

zzoxx

In a similar vein, the author of Scourge has embarked on another project: a HTML/JS isometric graphical rogue-like called zzoxx. It is intriguing, though not yet really playable. What's the best Free browser-based game you know of? Comments encouraged, let's talk about how Free software gaming is engaging the browser as a platform - and if it is a good idea or not.

Freeciv 2.3rc1 (NEWS) was released a few days ago. This major release of Freeciv is focused on multiplayer features including longplay. I just had a quick go and Freeciv is really well done these days. There's a few kinks still, but this is the best release yet. It still misses some of the charm of the original, and there's a few ways in which is not friendly to new users (no direct link from the city screen to the help content, in case you want to know what a wonder or building does, for example). I'd love to see some dedicated community members put together an introduction and a palace and/or throne screen.

There's also been a Freecol bugfix release. Freecol 0.10.1 fixes many of the issues with version 0.10.0 which was a fairly major release for the project.

There's been other stuff I forgot about. It's a funny time of day. Speaking of fun - here's a rather fun video of Stunty Rally 1.2 mishaps doubled up with music I found fitting. There are several points where it seems like those two videos are deliberately synchronized!

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2: Add-on manager release

2011-07-23T14:00:00.003+01:00

SuperTuxKart now has an add-on/DLC/community-content manager, which allows you to download tracks and karts from inside the game, without having to move or unzip files. I am very excited about this feature, which hopefully will be a strong motivation for community members to create new content for the game.

Suzanne's kart

One example of the advantages of this feature: a few days after the release of 0.7.2 the amazing Suzanne (Blender's mascot) kart was finished. Instead of having to manually download and install it or wait for 0.7.3, players can simply get the kart in the add-on manager. [edit: unfortunately right now Suzanne is only in SVN and not yet in the add-on manager (to be fixed)]

Here's a video of some of the content you can get via the add-on manager:

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 DLC

In case you are on Linux or OS X, consider getting the 0.7.2a release, which should perform much better [info here].

Beastie

Two more content addition in this version are:

New Beastie Kart
New Snow Peak track by Samuncle

NOLF2 source released but to what end

2011-07-21T20:15:00.002+01:00

The ~~commercial~~ abandonware 2002 game No One Lives Forever (trailer) has been released under the GPLv2.

The NOLF2 source code has been released under the GPLv2 by Touchdown Entertainment. Along with the game source code, you will find the engine source code, as well the tools behind it. It's great news for the entire NOLF2 modding community, since now we'll be able to keep the game alive!
I have uploaded the package to free services since the Touchdown Entertainment website is down: http://www.multiupload.com/WBO4EQHRAE

It isn't yet clear what license the assets are released under, but as with most commercial game source releases I suspect that it is not part of the source release.

Do these commercial source pseudo-Free releases have any merit beyond giving loyal followers a way to keep their fun alive? It has been of great benefit to have had the ID engines released as Free software, but they were the platform for a number of very significant free projects that would later transition from freeware mods to true Free software.

If the source release is a way to say thanks to the fans, why not bundle the media too?

The same recently happened with the more popular Arx Fatalis. The Arx Liberatis developers are doing a valiant job of cleaning up with the ultimate goal being a native Linux port (currently WINE reliant) but is this just a commercial company using the open source community to keep a dead game alive and milk the last few drops out of their dying cash cow?

I'm not impressed by decade-old game source releases that do not include the full media for the game. It's still not Free, even worse, it's still not free. If anything, it is arguably a negative for the open source community because it reduces the pool of developers who might otherwise contribute their skills to a more worthy cause.

*grumbles*

RIOT Game Coding Competition

2011-07-20T15:21:00.001+01:00

RIOT is a game coding competition for Caanoo, Wiz, Pandora and Dingoo's Dingux developers. In the future, probably also for nD devs, unless that one turns out to be vaporware.

The contest entry dealine is over but votes are running until July 22 2011.

Four RIOT entries that provide source

So far, four of the entries provided their source, you can filter them out here.

HTML5 2D Game/Engine crowdfunding: Time Hammer

2011-07-11T21:32:00.000+01:00

When I was looking for last post's link to Justin's portraits, I found a collection of b/w portraits and a new crowdfunding game project: Time Hammer.

Timehammer project introduction video

What is Time Hammer?

A game where you run, jump, fall and die, try again, smash enemies, and have fun (hopefully!) It's a retro, 8-bit throwback to an earlier time, but with some modern touches that we just couldn't help but include. Low gravity, destructible environments, a kickin chip-tune soundtrack... yeah, it's a blast!
A gaming engine built from scratch in HTML5 / Javascript. Time Hammer will be the first fully-featured, plot-driven game featuring the HTML5
An indie community dream come true. The game engine will be released open-source on GitHub - meaning that anybody can download it, improve it, and use it for any purpose, free of charge.

"Which license?" was my first thought and question.

I haven't actually researched the nuance of those licenses, and honestly some of the kickstarter money would be used to get a lawyer to recommend one. Two strong contenders are the GPL and MIT license.

Isn't there a group of free software lawyers, who might consult for free beer or less? Supporters can voice their opinion to this topic on the comments page.

Going for USD 8,500

I was reassured, that flash will not be used at all, not even for sound.

Flare 0.14 Characters, Quests and HD video

2011-07-09T22:45:00.003+01:00

The last version of Flare that Free Gamer took a look at was 0.11. The newest version is 0.14.

Character customization in Flare

Title and savegame loading screens now exist, adding to immersion.

Character customization (gender, portrait and name) is now possible. (Note how much depth this part of starting a game can acchieve in some cases). The character portraits are a product of Justin Nichol's fantasy portrait marathon.

Joystick support, conversations, vendors, quests, a new area and many more smaller additions included. It is now possible to configure keybindings and resolution, which leds to my first 720p HD video of Flare gameplay:

Watch this video in 720p HD here

Clint Bellanger, main developer of Flare, posted a reflection on game progress in Flare, which includes some simple but interesting statistics.

You can show Flare some pocket love via Flattr.

Warzone2100 art revolution project

2011-07-05T21:41:00.009+01:00

I've been following the Warzone 2100 art revolution project for some time now... but after years of displaying only nice renders of cool new models, it finally seems to be getting closer to an actual game integration with the recent integration of GLSL normal-maps etc. into the latest Warzone2100 snapshot.

More awesome (very much work in progress) screen-shots can be found in the Warzone2100 art dev forum (especially this thread) and on the art revolution forum. And while there is still a lot of things to do... an actual Warzone2100 release with a massive graphical update seems not too unlikely in 2011! Lets hope for the best ;)

Script Blocks: 3d visual programming(?)

2011-07-05T13:22:00.001+01:00

Yesterday we wrote about Java3d-based Callie. This project is also Java-based but uses the jMonkeyEngine.

Script Blocks is a 3D .. environment, in which you can place blocks that produce or modify signals and blocks that react to them by changing color or by moving for example.

I assume that the project is inspired by Minecraft's Redstone Circuits. And I think it's a great virtue that instead of yet another attempt to implement Minecraft, this project focuses on one (complex) mechanic and extends it.

The video below is much better at explaining what the project is about:

Script Blocks Introduction

Callie: 3D Action

2011-07-04T13:22:00.001+01:00

Callie is an in-development 3D action game with jumping puzzles and guns. It runs using Java WebStart.

This is Amy

There are a few common problems with the project: animations are missing, the camera is hard to handle in the level environment, license info is missing for both assets and code. One very nice thing the developer did is providing this simple control scheme.

The use of Java3D in the project, lead to complaints and might discourage developers from contributing code. Apparently the problem is that Java3D is not an active project.

Callie 0.4 gameplay

Some random news from our forums etc

2011-07-03T19:16:00.010+01:00

Yes, big summer hole here in FG... luckily we get at least some guest posts from Bart (aka the OpenGameArt founder).

So, maybe today we just make a small summery of recent news that popped up in our Freegamedev forums (boring for the forum regulars I know :p ):

First of all (as we mention that project way to little), find a release candidate of the latest SuperTuxKart version in this thread.

In our showcase forum you can also find a nice (but low-fi) turn based strategy game called Strategic Initiative, which is made by the same guy who was also behind the classic Empire (well I didn't know it before ;) ). Also don't miss the updates on The Legend of Edgar.

Back in the section of out hosted projects, the user Skorpio has been showcasing some nice Mechs for Linwarrior3D lately, which are now being integrated into the game:

At the Red Eclipse forums an interesting collaboration project to make a mod loosely based on Team Fortress (classic?) recently showed up, with the user John_III making a lot of progress on the first map (and a very recent small WIP by me too ;) ):

Oh and the work that is currently done to redesign the look of OpenDungeons as seen in this thread, is looking rather fantastic too.

In other words, don't miss the action in our forums (and on the FG planet), during this time of little blog updates ;)

Dev-corner: How to request art for your FOSS game project (and how not to)

2011-06-27T19:08:00.006+01:00

During my tenure thus far as the head of OpenGameArt.org, I've run into a lot of different requests for art by various projects. I'd like to start out by saying this: Please, if you need art for your FOSS project, don't hesitate to come ask us! That's why we're here. :)

That being said, there are ways to ask for art, and ways not to. Unlike some places, we'll never yell at you for not asking correctly, but there are still some things you can do (and avoid doing) to make your request more likely to be filled. I'd like to go over these today.

Be specific about what you want.

By far the biggest challenge in making art for FOSS games is that projects will have artists come and go, and because of that it's difficult to maintain consistency between pieces of art. It's possible to have a bunch of art elements that are all individually excellent but have a game that looks horrible because the art elements don't go together well.

The first thing you need to know is what general theme you're looking for. Describe it and provide examples and references. That will give your artists a general idea of what to go for.

If at all possible, you'll also want to provide a color palette for the artists to use. Your palette doesn't need to be enforced with an iron fist, but it does need to be enough to give artists direction so that whatever thematic elements they make will fit into your game. If you're making a game with a dreamy pastel theme, dark, gritty colors aren't going to fit (and vice-versa).

Provide design guidelines. This is particularly important for your user interface icons. Tell us how thick you want the outlines to be. Tell us if you want things to be angular (and, if so, what angles), or rounded. Should we use gradients? Pixel art? Vector art? Digital painting? If possible, write up a short document describing how to produce the general look of what you're going for.

Now, that's a lot to think about, and it applies a lot more to large requests than small ones. If you're only asking for a couple of things, you can get away with a few general bullet points describing what you want. If you've got a large, ambitious project, your design guidelines really ought to be part of your design document.

People have expressed hesitation in the past about making these decisions because they'd rather leave them up to the artists. That's a valid concern, and we'd love to help. If you don't have a set of design guidelines, come talk to use on IRC (#opengameart on freenode) and we'll walk you through the process. We may even draw some up for you by request, as long as you're willing to take part in the process. :)

Make it easy.

Art is like code. It takes a lot of time and effort. If you're asking someone who doesn't have a vested interest in your project to spend their spare time making you something, you have to meet them half way. Make a list of the specific pieces of art that you want, and make sure that it's up to date. Many projects keep wiki pages that show their art assets. If you have such a wiki page, it's absolutely imperative that it be updated with the art that you already have, so artists know which things they ought to be working on.

Don't expect artists to poke through your code repository to figure out what you need versus what you already have. A lot of artists aren't familiar with version control systems (nor should they need to be). In general, it's not a good idea to ask an outside artist to do legwork that you're capable of doing yourself. Even if you find an artist who's willing to do that work for you, the hours they spend organizing your project's existing art will be hours not spent utilizing their artistic talents, which is a waste.

Be nice.

Hopefully I'm preaching to the choir here, but be understanding of the fact that a lot of artists don't code. Many of them don't use Linux. This doesn't mean they're dumb or that they lack talent -- they like to work in an environment where they're the most productive. Artists (and other people) will tend to gravitate to projects where people are polite and accepting

Mind you, it's perfectly reasonable to ask that your art assets be created with FOSS tools, but be aware that it's a trade-off -- on one hand, it's a badge of pride for your project to have a 100% FOSS workflow, but on the other hand you shrink the pool of available artists. If you're going this route, explain yourself politely, and many people will be willing to work with you on it.

Be realistic.

If you're coming in with a very ambitious project (like an MMO) and requesting very specific resources, be prepared to produce several hours of real gameplay. This isn't a hard and fast rule -- we make exceptions from time to time, based on circumstances. If the art you're requesting is something that would be generally useful to a lot of projects, we'll be more likely to help you out, because we know the time won't be wasted even if you don't end up using it yourselves. With one exception, we've turned down art requests for MMO projects that don't yet have solid gameplay. This isn't out of spite -- we just have limited resources, and need to put those toward projects that are more likely to succeed.

If your project is one or two people with a concept for a great MMO, you're not ready for art assistance yet. Expand your team and build a game. If we have the necessary resources, we'll try and help you once you have something that runs with real gameplay (quests, etc).

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some projects are essentially finished (playable, with placeholder art), and come in with relatively small requests. These are the types of requests that we'll address first and with highest priority, because we know that the art will be used almost immediately. If you have a mostly finished project with programmer art (or art lifted from unlicensed sources), we'd love to help you! Come talk to us. :)

Trade.

If you have a talented artist (or musician, sound effects person, etc), and you need some art that's outside of that person's comfort zone, find out if they'd be willing to help out another project in exchange for one of their artists helping your project. There's a lot of art talent out there in the FOSS community, but there's not quite enough to go around for every project. Trading art between projects is a great way to get your requests filled. If your game project has talents (art, coding, audio, writing, etc) that you'd be willing to trade for other art, note that in your request, and someone on another project might see it and be willing to help you out.

Buy.

I think the anti-commercial sentiment in the FOSS community is starting to subside a bit, but it's still out there. Artists have to eat and pay rent too, and if you'd like good art for your project, sometimes the best thing to do is just spend money on it (particularly if OpenGameArt can't help you for whatever reason). There's nothing wrong with spending money on a Free project -- remember, it's free as in speech, not as in beer. If you believe in your project and have been willing to sink a lot of hours into it, you might want to consider sinking some funds into it too, if you have cash available. I've commissioned a lot of art myself and I have a good idea where to look and how much people generally pay for good art, so I'd be happy to talk to you if you have questions concerning doing your own art commissions.

Other caveats

If you're requesting art from OpenGameArt.org, be understanding of the fact that some resources are harder to provide than others. Pixel and vector art, and untextured, low-poly 3d models are relatively easy. Sound effects, music, and concept art are somewhat harder. High poly 3d work, particularly with textures, takes the most time. Given our limited resources, we'll be more likely to spend our time where we can be the most effective. You can always feel free to request anything, but be understanding of the fact that some requests are easier than others.

In conclusion...

Art isn't easy, and as a community we're still figuring out how to integrate artists into the FOSS movement. I'm kind of rare in that I'm a good coder and a decent artist -- not great, but enough to have some understanding of the issues that artists and coders run into when trying to communicate. If you don't know how to make a request, come talk to us, or make a post in the OpenGameArt.org art requests forum. If we need more information, we'll ask for it. :)

Thanks for reading!

Bart K.

(BartK on irc.freenode.org -- again, you can find me in #opengameart).

Some thoughts on commercial FOSS game development

2011-06-20T20:40:00.003+01:00

It's been a while since I last stirred up controversy on the freegamer blog, so I thought today I'd talk about -- gasp -- developing FOSS games commercially.

There's a common misconception out there (although I'm guessing a majority of the readers of this blog are aware of it) that software can't be both libre and commercial (I use libre here instead of free to make it clear that I'm referring to free as in speech and not as in beer). This is a problem that the FOSS community has struggled with since the very beginning. Writing FOSS full time is difficult because, let's face it, your internet connection costs money (not to mention other minor things like food and rent). As such, a lot of FOSS development, particularly game development, is done as a hobby.

The Open Source development model is somewhat difficult for a small developer (such as an indie game studio) to make money at. The current practice is to make the game code open and keep the game content (graphics, sound, levels, etc) non-libre in some way. This is a known business model that's being used right now, so I'm not going to discuss it in great detail in this particular blog post.

Instead, I'll be asking this: How close can we get to a 100% libre game and still make money while we're developing it?

The big problem here is that people tend to be more willing to spend money if they get something immediate in return. Take, for instance, the first Humble Bundle, which made over a million dollars. A fairly significant portion of that money was from people who wanted to see the code for the games contained into the bundle open sourced. On the other hand, open source projects that accept donations tend to get a slow trickle of cash (if any at all) -- certainly not enough to fund a single full-time developer, let alone several. Yet, if you consider it, the folks who work on FOSS projects have already put the time and effort into building their games. Aren't they equally deserving of payment?

Now, I'm not trying to guilt anyone into running out and donating to FOSS game projects (although I'm sure a lot of them would appreciate the help). The point I'm trying to make here is about human nature -- if you want sustained, significant income, people need to receive something in return when they give you money. Unfortunately, open source software is somewhat resistant to this kind of business model. While you're not technically obligated to give your source code to anyone who wants it, you are obligated to give it to anyone you give an executable to. Then, that person is free to distribute the source code that you gave them. Hence, one person could buy your code from you and then give it away to everyone else. And as a FOSS enthusiast myself, that's how I prefer things to be.

So, to summarize thus far, in order to pay the rent, you have to make money. In order to make money, you have to sell something. In order to viably sell something in any reasonable volume, the thing you're selling can't be libre. So where does that leave us?

I've been pondering some ideas for a while ago, and I wanted to throw them out there and get an honest discussion of their advantages and disadvantages.

My first thought is that a commercial FOSS game developer could release both their game and their game media (graphics and sound) into the libre ecosystem, but keep their glue code (game scripts, levels, plot, etc) non-libre. This method allows people to build whatever mods they want, and use your code and media to create their own games, while still putting you in a position to sell the substance of your game. The disadvantage here is that there's still a fairly significant portion of code and data that's not really free -- so you miss out on the benefits of having a completely libre game. For one thing, if you do this, you can't get your game into a number of major Linux distributions. The other issue is that people will be less likely to submit patches for your glue code if that code isn't really FOSS. So, while you've established a revenue stream, you lose out on certain benefits because your game isn't 100% libre in all respects.

Another possibility is the idea of a source ransom. Let's say I write a game (including the game data, glue code, and media) and release it all under the GPL. At this point the game is fully playable, but there are definitely some places where new features could be added. If I wanted to follow a ransom model, I could code up version 1.1 and not release it immediately. Instead, I would release screenshots and preview videos of it, then ask people to pay some arbitrary sum of money for the version I just created. Since the code is 100% mine, I'm not bound by the GPL, so I can send them the binary (or even the source code) under a more restrictive license, preventing them from distributing it. When the number of donations reaches a set amount, the new version is released under the GPL. Rinse, repeat. Any user who has already paid for the software receives the new version early, and the source is released when you recoup your development costs.

Doing the above, we've solved the issue of getting into the major linux distros (although the latest version wouldn't be eligible), but we've essentially closed ourselves off from outside contributions, since we have to own the copyright on all of the code in order to keep it closed, even for a limited time. Outside contributors could still contribute, provided they signed the copyright over to the main developer, or contributed the code with a BSD-style license that doesn't have a share-alike requirement.

As a variant of the above, you could accept GPLed patches from people and simply not release the code to anyone until the funding goal has been reached. The downside to this, though, is that you still can't really get outside help developing the latest version.

Understandably, there's always a lot of suspicion when dealing with commercial interests. As such, I imagine the reaction to this sort of development model wouldn't be uniformly positive. However, I'd like to point out an up side that people may not have considered: FOSS game development, as I said, is a hobby for most people. If you're lucky, you can spend maybe 5-20 hours per week doing it, often with long periods of downtime when real life happens. As such, FOSS game development is often slow, and the developers themselves tend to come and go, sometimes taking promising projects with them. On the other hand, if you can turn it into a viable business model, you can suddenly reliably spend 40-60 hours per week working on your project, which opens up a world of possibilities. With enough cash flow, you can even hire additional full time artists and developers, and build games that are much larger in magnitude than normally possible under the traditional FOSS devlopment model. And while this may require that you keep the most recent version closed source, the overall benefit to the community may be much higher, since your game will most likely progress far faster than it otherwise would, meaning that more code and media would be released into the libre ecosystem sooner.

Anyway, that's it for today. I'd be curious to hear what people think. If this ruffles your feathers, please be very specific as to why. If you have more ideas, I'd love to hear them. If you see problems making the above ideas work, tell me about them.

Peace,

Bart K.

Assorted bunch of news

2011-06-20T17:33:00.010+01:00

Yes... slow days here on FreeGamer... so we will try to give you a bunch of smaller news and projects to check out:

First another Minecraft clone (this time for the PSP, but with GPL code): Lamecaft (which is a title I approve... generally ;) ). Then we have a open-source reimplementation of the famous jump&run Cave-Story: NXEngine. Maybe it is something nice to make your own platformer with too?

A bit more high profile I guess is this game I recently cam across: Turtle Arena, which you might have guessed is another game based on the ioQuake3 engine. Its goals are pretty ambitious (it wants to be "not annoying"...but with those hideous turtles that might be next to impossible :p ). Artwork is CC-by-SA too, but obviously a bit IP tainted.

Turtle Arena

Another offspring of the ioQuake3 project are the ioWolf (RTCW and ET) engine upgrades, which seemed rather dead all the time. However some people actually forked them and are working on their own versions, of which especially the COOP single-player enhancement of RTCW seems news worthy (the others are here and here). Staying with Wolf:ET, the previously mentioned ET:Xreal now has a nice presentation page too.

That's all for today... but stay with us even if news come only slowly :)

Release Changelog Bullets: Los, SaR2, HoA, NatR

2011-06-13T14:49:00.000+01:00

Lips of Suna - 0.4.0

Lots of sound effects.
Master server and server browser.
Climbing over obstacles.
Merchants and trading.
Attacks can be charged by holding the attack button.
Projectiles and sword swings have speed lines.
Controls can be customized in-game.
Basic blood effects and beheading.
More flexible map generation algorithm.
Improved aer female, android female and kraken models.
New items: crossbow, musket, revolver, barrel, bookcase, dewspring leaf, fruit.
New spells: berserk, dig, firewall, light, travel.
New quests: Brigands, Mining Guild, Sword on the Stone.

Search and Rescue II - 2.3.0

Copyrighted Guadarrama scenery textures replaced with public domain ones in order to avoid licensing problems
Small bugixes
OpenSuse packages have been updated as well

Hero of Allacrost - June 2011 Unstable Release

Two brand new maps with many scripted events that develop the beginning plot of the main story
Enter/exit sequences in battle to smooth the transition from map exploration to battle execution
Better display of battle damage and status indicator text and images
Receiving damage causes a brief stun on the stamina bar, allowing you to delay opponents actions slightly
New skills available to use, some of which can target an entire party
Attack points have specific stat modifiers (for defense and evasion)
Targeting certain attack points may invoke status effects. For example, targeting legs to reduce agility
Enemy's are no longer "leveled up" to match the party's strength
If the player loses a battle, they have the option to restart the battle from the beginning, taking a penalty on XP/drunes earned upon victory
Two new enemies to fight, one of which is a boss-type

Nikki and the Robots - 0.3 + 0.3.1

Prettier on-screen display elements
Editor bug fixed
Slowdown bug fixed on many systems

Minetest-c55

2011-06-12T10:00:00.001+01:00

Minetest-c55

Minetest-c55: it's kind of like m*nec*aft, but:

C++ & Irrlicht
technically simple, stable and portable
lightweight enough for a laptop with Intel 945GM graphics
GPL