Thursday, January 22, 2009

OverDose on Free Software


OverDose is pretty


What is OverDose? Edit: correct link


OverDose is a Multiplayer team objective based game with online and offline play. Two sides, Earths Confederate Marine Corps. and the evil alien Marauders, battle for control of locations on Earth. Based in a first person, the two conflicting teams must battle not only each other, but large open terrain areas. Every class has his own strong and weak points, but every class is a vital role to the game.


On a technical front, it uses a highly evolved Quake II iD tech 2 engine which renders better than Doom 3 iD tech 4, as evidenced by this video and that video. The gameplay sounds quite good too.



FlightGear


FlightGear 1.9.0 got released. The actual announcement is buried in the mailing list. (For those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, the Sourceforge list archives are about as user unfriendly as you'll find, so you should appreciate me having found it! This release is a major overhaul of the graphics code, FlightGear now makes use of the
OpenSceneGraph library, and work on this has been going on for 2 years, since well before the FlightGear 1.0 release. Some highlights include dynamically configurable 3D Clouds, wingmen AI, particle-based rain, read the announcement for more.


SuperTuxKart 0.6 is out, hot on the heels of 0.6rc1. Here's a video showing some STK gameplay and some of the new levels. Given the level of activity, I'm optimistic that we'll see STK 0.7 this year (prettier graphics, better features with Irrlicht replacing PLIB) and that it'll be really impressive. There's still some level design work to be done though - the new levels are significantly nicer looking compared to the old ones you, the contrast stands out to me in this video.




Generally pygame entries are a bit naff. There are, however, a few nuggets. Like this World-of-Goo-inspired sandbox, the Gauntlet-style zombiefest Plague-like (pygame entry) or this interesting looking RPG engine Dead Creatures Rising (pygame entry). Still, it really needs a rating system to sort out the wheat from the chaff because there is far too much chaff to wade through these days.


L-echo, an open source implementation of the popular game Echochrome, seems to be coming along nicely. Version 0.4.1 released recently. Here's a video of l-echo in action:




Did I mention Naev before? Doesn't seem like it. Anyhow, it's a 2D space RPG in the mould of Solar Winds (like anybody actually knew what that was, other than me). It looks nice, but the controls take a bit of getting used to. You'll need to have a longer attention span than me if you're going to be able...


I wonder if we'll see an executive order closing down Windows. It's like a virtual detention centre where open source [game] developers are subjected to unspeakable things when forced to support it. On another note, I got to OverDose via the Haiku website. Perhaps Haiku can be a future gaming platform? I wonder if that skinny guy with a funny name even knows what Haiku is?

13 comments:

TheAncientGoat said...

Tsk tsk tsk, Charlie, you got your links wrong :P

Overdose: http://www.teamblurgames.com/overdose

It looks pretty, but it's windows only, so meh...

Anyhow, Haiku is... Interesting. But much like ReactOS, I don't see it booming (lets hope that the world, yet again, twists its course to prove me wrong)

Anonymous said...

Naev looks far more similar to Escape Velocity: Nova, especially the hyperspace and outfit screens.

Anonymous said...

Here is the new overdose address
http://www.teamblurgames.com/overdose/news.php

Also, I posted a thread on the SecretMaryoChronicles website about some critiques, if anyone is a fan of the game I'd like your input. http://secretmaryo.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1641

Sardaukar said...

Just wabt you to know, I'm also a big big fan of Solar Winds (1 and 2) ;D

Anonymous said...

You guys know that Vimeo is scrubbing gameplay videos, right?

http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140

The SuperTuxKart video is already gone.

Anonymous said...

You want to say it's shure to be deleted in the future? Maybe.

I uploaded the video there because of the significantly higher quality compared to youtube. This was the first time I made a gaming video and i didn't start with youtube-hd in mind at first place. Now I know a little more about that stuff, I'd make a lot of that different. My source-videos were recorded with 831x624, so I'd need to start from scratch and it would take me several days to create something compareable.

As far as I understand the blog, the video still has a chance to stay at vimeo.

qubodup said...

vimeo allows gamplay videos made by the authors of the game.

but you have to state in the video description that you are dev.

Anonymous said...

SO no mention of the new Alien Arena release in the news? What's up with that?

qubodup said...

anony: ^^

Unknown said...

I played Solar Winds. That makes two of us!

Anonymous said...

I'm also a Solar Winds addict. We're three ;)

Sardaukar said...

I want a seriously cool Solar Winds remake with mission editor and so on... I'll get on it with Ruby and SDL :D

Sslaxx said...

Oh, I remember Solar Winds! Loved it at the time. Yay for remakes!

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