Monday, January 26, 2009

Mid-night madness - LinCity-NG 2.0

It's something-am, I have overdue work, and a Freshmeat announcement put a bee in my bonnet about posting.




LinCity 2.0


LinCity-NG 2.0 is out in the wild, and boy is it starting to look like a nice game. There are only two things that look a bit weak these days - the name (NG? Linux-only?) and the UI (a bit scrappy). For those who don't know, LinCity-NG is a GotM fork of Lincity which brings it into this century with much nicer graphics and a more informative user interface.



Plenty of nice new graphics (notably vegetation, grass, trees) make the game look aesthetically smooth. New resource management (water) adds to the depth of gameplay. There's a load of other new aspects too but there's no official announcement and I'm too busy procrastinating to go digging.



Glest (the 3D RTS) is dead, long live Glest! No, really. Mainline Glest development has ended and Glest Advanced Engine (information), a community-born enhancement, is to officially become the new Glest. Glest Advanced Engine is a project built on top of Glest, that adds new features to the game, it includes both new code and data.




UFO:AI


There's a whopping development update on the UFO:AI website (3D TBS RPG). I would link directly, for posterity, but there's no direct links or rss or anything like that. So I guess I have to summarize. Bah!



Map editor improvements, 3D geoscape improvements, UI improvements, new music, sounds & models, new hiring screen, texture updates and new textures, AI infrastructure updates, battlescape improvements, aircraft updates, balancing work, improvements to campaign system, er... basically everything got a bit better.



It looks like the next release will kick serious alien a$$, and really this project is producing one of the stand out open source games, I'm sure you'll all agree. Not that the game doesn't have weaknesses. A lack of really talented core developers mean features like destructible terrain and buildings (a feature found in the original 2D UFO games) is not currently possible. Such issues come down to the underlying technology which is built on an enhanced version of the Quake 2 source.



I'm sure there's some smaller game updates I'm forgetting, like perhaps Word War Vi 0.25 or Vacuum Magic 0.8 or Free Vikings 0.8 or something, but for the life of me I just can't seem to remember... *shrugs*



Early morning edit: just came across Open Simulator. Kinda WTF.



Post-early-morning-edit edit: aaaaaaahhhhh I remember now. The 3D Ultima Online client project Iris2 has a new stable release. Lots of improvements and it looks great. I wonder when the UO community will wake up and move over to an all-open-source platform. :-)

11 comments:

qubodup said...

Man, these small updates to UFO:AI look taasty!

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately looks like Vacuum Magic is using ripped graphics from Three Wonders arcade game:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%22three%20wonders%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

Anonymous said...

And STILL no mention of Alien Arena 7.21 release on this site :/

KIAaze said...

The more time you spend immersed in the Libre world, the less you understand people saying there are no games there.

I don't even have time to play all those games! xD

It's just a matter of exposition, really.

Anonymous said...

Free Vikings? Very cool project 8)

If anybody is NOT familiar with the game this project seems to be based on (Lost Vikings), feel free to get your own impressions here...

Lost Vikings
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Lost%20Vikings/

Lost Vikings II
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E2905799DAAD4E52

Have fun :)
Werner

Anonymous said...

@John Z:

It depends on genre you like. There are gazilloin arcade/casual games in FOSS and freeware games but 40+ hour games are much scarcer and some genres these are rare or nonexistent.

There are not too many isometric team based (2d/3d) western style RPGs (there's million and one console style RPGs that all use mostly same graphics, sounds and rule sets that look, feel and play alike), tactical team based (again isometric) war game, large/global scale turn based strategy games or large scale economic simulations. (heck, these are rather rare in commercial games as well :p its all RTS and 1st/3rd person these days)

Anonymous said...

> "lack of really talented core developers"

A bit offensive, hm? Sounds like they got enough core developers but no talented ones? Or... Am i missinterpreting here? Maybe.

I dont know how well you know them ... I dont know them well enough to judge them so maybe its true though I really dont think so.

But anyway imho that was impolite.

Anonymous said...

"lack of really talented core developers"

So I guess untalented people produce one of "the stand out open source games"... way to bash a game

Free Gamer said...

Sheesh you guys are sensitive.

"Really talented" as opposed to "talented"...

At the end of the day, if they had a dev with Carmack-like jedi code powers, things like destructible terrain would be a breeze. But they don't. They have some great developers, but nobody who can just knock out features on a whim.

People are so darn easy to offend...

qubodup said...

"Sheesh you guys are sensitive."

"People are so darn easy to offend..."

True, but hey, are you saying you didn't know that yet? :)

Anonymous said...

The LinCity-NG 2.0 Windows-Built doesn't work for me. The error log shows:

tinygettext: expected 'msgid' keyword, got
at line 1492
Config::load# Unknown attribute 'upgradeTransport' in element 'game' from userconfig.xml.
Config::load# Unknown attribute 'instantBulldoze' in element 'game' from userconfig.xml.
Config::load# Unknown attribute 'showDay' in element 'game' from userconfig.xml.
fast = 9

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