Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world.
Blood Frontier, the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release.
Boarman in JCRPG
Woman by Grumbel
There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think).
There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, this and his other portaits are available under an open source license (CC-by-SA or GPL3) and you can find out more information, lavish praise, or even make requests (!) in this topic in the FreeGameDev forums.
In other fantasy-game news, DungeonHack progress continues and they finally have the project in SVN (direct link) so interested people can check out their progress which is apparently pretty good. It's a Daggerfall-inspired game, which can only be a good thing.
Did you know FreeOrion will soon have 3D combat? Check out this topic on the Ogre forums for some preview screenshots. In the meantime, they released 0.3.10 with the usual raft of bug fixes and minor improvements. Downloads are available, from different places, for Linux and Windows.
The White Chamber
Studio Trophis have released the source for their very lovely looking game The White Chamber. It's an anime themed 2D point and click horror adventure game. It requires the WinterMute engine and I'm not sure whether that's Free Software although it seems the source is available but under no specific license EDIT: - it's not open source at all. The White Chamber source is at the bottom of the Studio Trophis downloads page. It looks like it's all Windows-only =( but I could be wrong.
A while back I made some hullabaloo about Portalized, a perhaps-to-be-open-source better-than-Portal engine. Well, the guy working on it (who, by the way, is only 16 - shame on us all who are older and less productive than him) now has a blog with some interesting commentary on his efforts as well as some gorgeous screenshots. It doesn't look like it'll be open source any time soon but I don't think he's ruled it out either, and now he has help so it'll be worth watching. Version 0.1 is on the way, so there's something to look forward to.
Well, hopefully that satisfies your Free game news needs for another day or so...
Did you see some of the cool stuff that is going on at the Thousand Parsec project? They are kind of like FreeOrion but it allows you to play multiple different rulesets. It also has a new 3d client thanks to the Google Summer of Code. We also have a bunch of students working on AIs and new rulesets. It is a very exciting time to get involed!
ReplyDeleteWintermute is Windows only AND the source code is NOT released. There is only a free to use license for the development kit.
ReplyDeleteEven AGS is better than that. At least you can play the games in Linux.
Try ScummC http://alban.dotsec.net, if you want a free software/open source adventure development kit. Already one AGS game was ported to ScummC. The games can be played under ScummVM.
It seems funny to me how some software that is NOT open source is regarded as acceptable here, while Plane Shift the only playable open source MMORPG software is frowned upon because the art is not equally open. :-P
They released the source to the game but I didn't have time to check everything out. I "corrected" the post, but I've made the assumption that you are correct.
ReplyDeleteThe source is open, but under a non-free license (ccbyncsa)
ReplyDeleteAlso it uses an unfree game maker software.
Those other closed source projects (which we aren't that happy about) don't go about pretending to be open, like Planeshift.
ReplyDeletePlaneshift's source code is released under the GPL, a free software license, while the data is released under a proprietary license, just like Quake. Planeshift doesn't pretend to be anything and _is_ Free Software, as defined by the FSF.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous#2: Open source projects with closed source art are only completely open source, if you limit yourself to code.
ReplyDeleteNot all do limit the licenses to code only.
I assume you know about the fact that firefox contains unfree media and is considered as non-free software by some?
Quake, the game, is not open source. There is an engine, which is called Quake engine, which was released under the GPL though.
There never ever was a "Quake the game" release, in which the engine was under the GPL.
Licensing your code under GPL doesn't mean you are not permitted to use it under other conditions any more. And the GPL doesn't retroactively change the license of the software used in the past.
I get it. This is the "Free Gamer - open source games" camp not the Free Software camp. Here games are ok if they are free of charge or open source (the whole game, including art, docs, everything).
ReplyDeleteI just want to point out that art is very different from software and is not free when anybody can modify it. Imagine what the great works of art would be if everybody was allowed to add their "contribution" to them. Ask an artist what happens if you add a line to a piece of art. The whole balance of the piece is changed.
You may argue that games graphics is not high art, but maybe that is the reason why lots of open source games don't look so good (I still love them, and don't consider graphics to be the most important part of a game).
Anyway, I don't think it helps the free software/open source games community to promote Wintermute and bash Planeshift.
Quit whining. First you were constructive, and I updated the post to address the point you raised. Now you are whining, and that's just annoying.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember ever bashing Planeshift. I just don't find their development model interesting or inspiring thus haven't really really posted much about it - although it does get mentioned from time to time.
This site is community driven. People (well, just me and Q at the moment plus the occasional email tip) write about what they are interested in related to open source games. Got a game you think doesn't get enough column inches? Write an article and email it to us and - as long as it isn't dross - it'll get posted. Otherwise quit moaning.
acid_head:
ReplyDeleteNobody ever made a clear statement if open source or free software needs to have it's media under free licenses or not (If you prove me wrong I would be glad.)
I see it this way: the tradition of this blog is to report games that have open source code.
You're welcome to start a constructive discussion on the forum if you think that only free-media games should be considered free software. I would be interested in writing and reading about that.
The Free Gamer blog's "guidelines" are set by Charlie, and I doubt that there will be a "completely free games with free media only"-policy and I think it would be a bad idea to force such.
If you are interested in helping a community, which is focusing on open source games that have completely free media (well, if you think that cc-by and cc-bysa are free), check out the Libregamewiki!
About art and free license: freedom to art makes opensource gaming flourish. As a programmer who has no talent in 2d/3d arts it means treasure if free content can be attached to a starting project. This thing about 'art is different than source code' - well how much? Do you know that codes have soul too? :D Then you'll know that it's all the same - art or source, hours of work put into it. So I must disagree your opinion.
ReplyDeleteCode or artwork, both are the same in that they take a lot of time to prefect and both have a certain elegance to them.
ReplyDeleteStop trying to pretend that artwork in games is somehow different, it's not and it shows a lot of ignorance of how much work programmers do on the other side of the fence.
Planeshift code is not 100% free. A lot of the game server logic is not distributed. Show me a way to download all the code off Planeshift have a 100% working server and client just like they have running now and I would believe you. Sadly that's not the case and the Planeshift team have made extra sure that only they can be the only service provider in town.
I love Free Orion, those planets are looking fantastic.
ReplyDeleteHey, is anyone else unable to get through to Happypenguin.org? I haven't been able to connect for about three days now, and I'm wondering if it's a really bad outage, a DNS problem with my ISP, or if they've just decided to ban anonymous readers, too. :)
ReplyDelete(and did anyone else notice that time about a week after they banned anonymous posters in order to 'clean up the comments', when yet another language flamewar erupted anyway? Hah! Great jorb, guys!)
The White Chamber seems to run fine under WINE however. ^_^ Trying it out now.
ReplyDelete@Andrew: I never tried to compile the Planeshift server, so I thought you were right, but I investigated a bit, and I found out that the code is on Sourceforge, in the SVN trunk under src/server. There is a guide on howt to compile it and how to get it running (bootstrap of database and everything) here: http://planeshift.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/planeshift/planeshift/docs/compiling.html
ReplyDelete@ free_gamer: I was not complaining. I like this blog and I generally like what you are doing. I just came to a realization about it, that's all.