Top 3 Open Source Pinball Games

The first flipper pinball machine was released 68 years and 1 month ago and yet there is only a handful of open source, cross-platform pinball video games available! Oh well, let's take them for a spin, shall we?

UPDATE Dec 1st, 2015: 1. Added Libre Pinball, see Honorable Mentions below. 2. Added conclusion section.

UPDATE Jul 17th, 2016: Updated Emilia Pinball links

Nexus Pinball

Nova Pinball Gameplay

Started only a month ago, Nova Pinball's simple sole 2D table is a lot of fun and development has made good progress.

Emilia Pinball

Emilia Pinball Gameplay on Five Tables

The ancient 3D Emilia Pinball project has a recent fork on GitHub that adds more tables (the last official release had only 2, the new one has 5). The code is the ancient but consistent original SourceForge project and some new tables are flowing around patches/mailing list posts https://sf.net/p/pinball/

The game has 4 perspectives (F5-F8)

The models are very low-poly, which is fine and fast but the textures are sinfully low-resolution. However editing textures appears to be simple in existing tables, simply by overwriting them with higher-resolution files, as demonstrated with the angry gnu head in the screenshot above.

Creating new tables requires an editor, which I unfortunately was not able to compile yet (possibly due to lack of old Qt libraries).

Emilia Pinball Zombie Table Gameplay

There is a zombie/horror/Halloween table, which unfortunately contains non-free content.

Linball

Linball Gameplay

The 2D Linball table is crazy fast but suffers from some sounds ripped from proprietary games (maybe there's more non-free content).

Honorable mentions

Libre Pinball Gameplay

Libre Pinball (thread) is very atmospheric but has no missions and only very few table elements right now. It was made using the Godot Engine.

Sadly, Visual Pinball only runs on Windows (wine page).

Vector Pinball for Android unfortunately has no instructions for desktop/Linux compilation.

Devil's Pinball Buggy Gameplay

Devil's Pinball is a Blender-made pinball table. It's quite buggy when played in recent Blender and there is no license information.

Conclusion

I find the open pinball games on Linux more entertaining than I expected them to be. The major downside is decoration and context: while the themes of some tables are intriguing, they unfortunately exist in a widescreen world without a proper background that adds to the experience.

And of course some accessible (video) documentation on how to create new tables would be a huge plus.

Got theme ideas for open source pinball tables? Write them in the comments!

Top 10 Projects To Revive

The great thing about open source is a project can never become extinct - there is always a chance of it being brought back to life either by the original authors who re-find their motivation, by new contributors who see the potential, or a mixture of both.

Here are the top 10 games, complete with cliches, I'd like to see return to the development scene and back on the road to completion.

1. Bloodmasters

home • project

This gorgeous 3D top-down action game was released as open source last year after indie developer Pascal "CodeImp" vd Heiden found he'd lost motivation to continue with the project. It's a complete game with great graphics and needs a good C# developer to pick it up, port it to Mono, and help restore the community.

2. Project Citadel

home • project

A very nice looking turn based strategy game set in World War II.

The game reached a playable state before it's development team ByteWare stopped playing the development game.

3. Windstille

home • project

This project isn't technically dead - lead developer Grumbel occasionally bumps it with more concept work - but it's definitely in hibernation and progress is frustratingly slow.

Grumbel is actively seeking writers and developers so the prospects of reviving the project are quite good - no organizational work required.

4. Emilia Pinball

home • project

Come on, who wouldn't love a great Free pinball game? Emilia Pinball is a fairly solid 3D pinball game that is playable, if a little "bare bones" in it's current form. A better table editor, some more tables, and a bit of love to the user interface and ball physics and this game would be a corker.

Hopefully one day a pinball wizard will resume improving this game and add another table or two as well as a few more features.

5. Labyrinth of Worlds

home • project

Ultimate Underworld is my favourite ever game, and this is a project to create a new game based on it the 2nd instalment of the popular series. Since these days the world of Ultima is somewhat abandoned by it's foster parent company EA, I hoped projects like this and Underworld Adventures would have gained more support.

6. Boson

home • project

The promising 3D RTS came a long way but never quite snowballed despite having nice graphics, original gameplay, and most of the hard work already done. I think the dependency on KDE libs was hurtful to attracting contributors.

It is original, playable, has a full set of units for two sides, nice graphics. It has everything going for it except momentum. Oh but to borrow a bit of enthusiasm from the Spring project, and Boson could spring back into life.

7. MyLink / MyNet

home • source

MyLink is inspired by the rather cool game UpLink. After encountering difficulties the author started from scratch with the name MyNet, but after hitting difficulties again (with motivation this time) the project got abandoned. The author is waiting for a new maintainer to step up to the plate. Until that happens, consider this project disconnected.

8. Civil

home • project

Civil is a cross-platform, turn-based, networked strategy game, which allows players to take part in scenarios set in historical battle theatres. The U.S. Civil war was the primary focus before they started losing the battle and development stopped in 2005. Written purely in Python/Pygame, there should be plenty of people able to help out.

Battle simulations, how could that fail to be fun? When development dies, that's how!

9. Slickworm

home • project

An innovative FPS where the terrain was deformable. It went through a few rewrites before the lead developer went silent. He was obviously talented and probably snapped up by a commercial company - a shame for the open source game community as it blows a big hole in the future for Slickworm; this potentially brilliant game looks like it'll never be more than a tech demo.

10. Battle for Antargis

home • project

An original game that mixes elements of strategy and role play, this project enjoyed sustained development for several years and looked very promising before development tailed off as 2008 began. Hopefully somebody will pick things up again as this is one of those projects that counters the 'open source can only copy' popular criticism.

It had another original edge to it, it was probably the first significant Ruby game project, which probably doesn't help when it comes to attracting developers.

Honorable Mentions

Here's a few that I thought also had potential:

• SilverTree RPG
  
  The lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth started to make an RPG! There was joyous celebrations and wide eyed expectation as SilverTree was unleashed on the public. Then he moved on to another project and the with it so went the development activity of the RPG.


• Mars: Land of No Mercy
  
  A 2D mech strategy game that could be nice if development had no slowed to a near stand still. Every now and again something seems to happen that nearly equates to activity, so it didn't quite make the list.


• GalaxyMage
  
  It once looked like a great new strategy game but the developers and the website went AWOL. Enthusiasts resumed development under the moniker Galaxy Mage Redux but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere other than the archives.


• 
  FreePop
  
  This was an attempt to recreate and improve upon the iconic Populous games of the early nineties. It never quite got to a playable state before the developer declared the project dead and moved on.


• Legacy of Magic
  
  Another very promising war strategy game with very nice 3D graphics that never managed to emerge from abyss of alpha releases.


• Fuzzy Adventure
  
  It came about at a time when the only platform games on Linux were SuperTux and XEvil. A quick burst of activity was never turned into long term development. I suspect that Fuzzy Adventure was just SuperTux with different graphics (gameplay was nearly identical) but that's never been confirmed.


• Reaper3D
  
  A space shoot-em-up, this game was neary completed before it stalled.


• OpenParsec
  
  This 3D space combat game was the darling of its time but very dated now. The developers declined to open source it for several years, and by the time they did the times, and with it the community, had long since moved on.

Another games you wished were still going?

Update: some more games that would be cool to revive:

• Dark Oberon is an original 2D isometric RTS whose graphics are created by taking images of melded plasticine models.


• Cspop, a Crystal Space populus-inspired game (svn, no homepage) previously mentioned (twice) on Free Gamer and announced on the happypenguin forums.


• Zugspiel, a 3D train tycoon game (forum) which never quite made it after the author became inactive.


• FreeTrain, a 2D isometric city & rail network building game. It needs an enthusiastic C# developer (contact me directly or post in the FreeGameDev Help Offered forum if you are interested).

Another Populus Remake

cspop

I wanted to mention it yesterday but held off... check out this post in the happy penguin forums effectively announcing a 3D RTS inspired by populus! Currently there is only an SVN repo and no official website but it looks like it's full of potential. I used to have high hopes for FreePop, a 2D populus clone, but sadly development fizzled out. This game - working title "cspop" - looks like it's actually further along in development than FreePop and is a much more exciting project. Whilst it looks a bit sparse, the author states (with grammar corrections):

Note I have been concentrating more on the logic to start with, so the look is still a bit cheesy, but that will be looked on soon also. Logic is close to finished though.

Random thought: I wish somebody would revive Emilia Pinball. I did suggest it as a GotM candidate at one point, but it didn't happen. Maybe when I've sorted out the FreeTrain stuff (*eyes look wearily up*) I'll focus on that.

FreeTrain

Speaking of FreeTrain, I registered a SF project. I just need to import SVN then make it build in MonoDevelop or VS2005. I'm waiting on some Japanese speaking help though since my Japanese extends to, "Konichiwa." Er, konichiwa!

There's another update to the Ghouls and Ghosts Remake! I like that game, although I wish the author would incorporate Scale2x and make it not so tiny. All that squinting hurts my eyes. :'(

So, todays music tip... Why have I decided to start giving music tips?

1. I love electro, dirty electro music and it's often not well known

2. Open source games often don't have sound so, well, durrr

3. Something else for me to ramble about, with a tenuous FOSS game link

Onto the tip:

Mark Romboy - The Club (Early)