Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.
Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.
NYC in Sauer
I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.
There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.
Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.
UFO:AI Starchaser
I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.
Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!
Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.
I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?
4 comments:
It's not fully open source project (it needs propertiary data), but it looks quite nice:
http://sf.net/projects/fheroes2
It's open source implementation of heroes of might and magic 2 engine. It's already playable.
It's not a game, but could you also wrote something about this project?
http://www.green-eyed-monster.com/reanimator/
Quoting from web page:
"Re-Animator is a development framework written in C++ using SDL and various other Open Source libraries. It allows you to write high-performance 2D sprite-based graphical applications (like games!) using just XML and JavaScript."
Such project could be useful in open source gaming, because it could be something like Game Maker or other game creation software. It would be nice if it would gain some more attention.
Oh, OpenDarkEngine (the Thief/System Shock 2 engine remake) just had its 0.2.9 release. The upcoming 0.3.0 will be a major milestone for them.
It's still just a level viewer ATM as there's a lot left to implement, but the low-level stuff is pretty much complete and they're ready for new developers to come in and start work with the higher-level parts of the game -- object interactions, scripts, ai, etc.
Up to now it's been the work of a small handful of very skilled devs working on getting the game data to load and render correctly in Ogre, now all of that stuff needs to be wired up.
Sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opde
There's also a thread over on the TTLG forums:
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=102289&page=21
http://killrays.blogspot.com/2009/01/das-ist-open-source.html
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