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. :-)