WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.
Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)
Blood Frontier
Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.
I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.
Vega Wars
Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.
Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.
There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.
Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.
10 comments:
Actually, no, soulfu isn't open. The one on sourceforge is (illegally) licensed under the conflicting nagware requirements of docs/Manual.htm, as well as the GPL. I've modified it to cleanly compile, and I will post a patchset and full source tarball (for things like an archlinux PKGBUILD, etc) soon enough, but it remains that the author has created a veritable license quadmire, and patches posted on the sourceforge tracker disappear into /dev/null (I suspect the maintainer is actually creating a huge changeset, instead of pushing bit-by-bit to cvs.)
hounds?
brendan: whatnow? is it or is it not open source? will it be?
@brendan(after having looked at your blog): holy shit dude, you have some serious writing skills!
-qubodup
Thanks for the compliment on the writing skills; I try not to post often to my blog because I've little so say about anything.
Regarding soulfu becoming open source: I really don't know. The source is available, but Aaron Bishop only released it under the terms found in 'The Manual' (version in SVN), which are incompatible with the Open Source definition.
I've been trying to do some minor cleanup on the game anyway (thank god for git cvs-import), and I'll see about releasing a tarball more suitable for *nix soon enough. I'm still uncertain how I can legally release it yet though, given the GPL/custom license conflict.
Check out the 7331 new forum skin! (And complain or say "wow" about it)
You know, and edit button on comments would be nice. In any case, the tarball has been uploaded, and relevant discussion now has a thread on the soulfu forums.
w007 for full post text in the RSS feed!
YAY!!!!!!!
I can't say how great it is to get my whole freegamer fix in my feed reader.
I've been a loyal reader since the beginning (OK, the second significant post about your games list, I'll admit) and I have to say, Bravo!
I can't seem to get blood frontier working, some problem with the start script. I think there was a carriage return there somewhere, removing it helped, but still quits with errors.
It'd be nice if they paid attention to that before releasing it.
"It'd be nice if they paid attention to that before releasing it."
Acord was neither a programmer, nor a Linux user, and hence, his first release had alot of issues. As the developer of the former "SauerMod", I have since combined forces with Acord to make the game run on all platforms, as well as being generally better written code.
We hope to make the Alpha 2 release soon, but people are encouraged to visit our website, make use of SVN, and submit lots of feedback/comments so we can get as much done before this next release :)
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