There's very little of note happening. I should use the opportunity to work on some more interesting content for Free Gamer (fixed lists? awards? etc) but instead I have a new laptop (shiney!) and so will spend time fiddling with it.
Want to know what the Linux Game Tome looked like 10 years ago?
Where is FreeCiv 2.1? Patience is a virtue, but an updated beta would be nice. I'm contemplating checking out latest SVN to see where it's up to.
I played SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 a bit. Lots of potential but still rough around the edges. Some very dodgy collision detection, very annoying instant deceleration if you go slightly off the road, and only 1 really decent track (island) plus a couple of OK ones. Most of the tracks, IMHO, are not worth including.
There's an interesting list grumbel's grumbles; things grumbel thinks are wrong with SuperTux. I think he's spot on with most of them, he's an astute game programmer (Free Gamer interview) and fixing most of what he says would make SuperTux a very, very nice game.
The www.freegamedev.net forums (still need to rebrand them - still looks like the Free Gamer forums) are doing well at our new host after the [old host] freeforums.org data loss forced us to start over - nearly 50 users and nearly 500 posts in a few weeks. Hopefully it is a sign of things to come with the Free Software game development community consolidating it's efforts and improving on the fractured nature that afflicts Free game development. There's a lot of duplicated effort, lots of good small projects that don't get recognised and don't make it, and projects missing artists and projects missing programmers that could work together better. Hopefully www.freegamedev.net can serve as a place to solve these kind of problems.
Yes, freegamer forum may catalyze things in jcrpg too. The project received quite a few good contribs through the forum. Easy to register, easy to add attachments, and as it is a forum it is easy to track things based on topics. Hope to see more free projects there, that may mean more contribs reusable within multiple projects. If the contributors licensing policy follows the free opensourceish way (and why wouldn't) it may become a booster to several projects at the same time!
ReplyDeleteIndeed - that's what I'd like to see, a few projects working together. Many projects set up their own forums which quickly die. I think only the biggest Free Software game projects really need their own dedicated forums, but new and upcoming games will benefit greatly from slotting into an existing community like www.freegamedev.net whilst bolstering the community at the same time. Less forums to register for, easier to collaborate, benefits benefits benefits!
ReplyDeletehey man, what laptop did you get, and have you linux on it?
ReplyDeleteYeah I can agree with most of those grumbles. Tux really does need a proper run animation, something where he leans forward and charges, so it looks like he's actually running.
ReplyDeleteI got a rather spiffy Acer 9425WSMi and I have installed Ubuntu on it altho kept a Vista partition too.
ReplyDeleteHi
ReplyDeleteJust found out about your freegamedev.net project.
Simply want to inform you, I may have a similar project, but it's more focused on Unix Game Development than FOSS.
I'll keep watching your project, 'cause I think it's better to work together on similar ideas. Hope you do the same, to prevent we do same thing twice. Please contact in that case.
http://unixgamedev.blogspot.com/
About Freeciv: fact is that is has seen very heavy development over the last two months or so, with several dozen bugs fixed, as well as usability improvements. A beta5 release was created just a few hours ago, but soon afterwards a fatal bug was discovered that made the game fail instantly if installed for the first time. For this reason, we have decided to postpone the official announcement of this release and are working hard on beta6 that will be released within a few days.
ReplyDeleteJust to let you know that there still is life in this old man of open source game project. :)
you liked the island track in tuxkart? seriously? it's almost completely unplayable imho. the whole game is pretty weak, i mean, adjusting the "instant slowdown" (soooo annoying) should (as far as i can tell) be simply a matter of changing a number in the src. i guess they're focusing on making progress with other aspects rather than balancing and tuning it at this point... :(
ReplyDelete