Friday, February 12, 2010

Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

6 comments:

Gallaecio said...

LinWarrior... [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here, again].

qubodup said...

Come again?

Julius said...

Hmm Linwarrior really needs a real artists contributing mech models ;)

Oh and btw, is there multiplayer support in Linwarrior? Their website isn't too promising in that regard, but I really think that should be a primary goal of such a game.

Charlie said...

What bothers me about LinWarrior is there is no obvious way to engage the developers. Any emails I have sent have been ignored. There's no public mailing list or forum. It's just an ad-laden website with barely any information, that happens to get updated once in a while.

qubodup said...

I agree that communication is bad.

I did not notice the ads though. Adblock everywhere...

Unknown said...

@Charlie

You are right I have to work on communication.

I was shocked to read that you tried to get into contact several times. I am very happy when I receive email and I answer every email I can get - but I haven't received any emails lately about LinWarrior - I wonder wether they got eaten up by the spam-remover.

As for my email address, I have several forwards to my main address - one can be found on the game's "BBS"-page (just replace the # with an @) "devteam#hackcraft.de".
Another one can be found via a link at the bottom of the page "Service Provider".
I just checked them ok. I guess I have to have an on-page postbox.

If there is demand I can deploy an rss-feed.
A public mailing list or forum may come someday.
Guess I underestimated the demand.

I'm reading this page and Happypenguin, too.
There is an entry for LinWarrior on happypenguin.org you can leave comments there or start a thread in their forum.


@Julius

Network-Gaming is not a near-time goal but it may come eventually. Actually I *would* like to implement split-screen-multiplayer right now but OpenAL (the 3d-audio api) doesn't support multiple listeners at the moment. I do have the strong feeling that "we" the open-source community should foster OpenAL-Standards-Development - see OpenAL-Soft.
If there would be multilistener-support split-screen would be a no-brainer and imagine it on a >40" flatscreen.
But networking most probably wont come in before the gameplay is advanced enough and most features are fixed.
Anyway you are right: Many people would enjoy such a game in multiplayer mode and I'm not saying never.

Graphics are similar besides that up to the current release "models" where hardcoded opengl rendering code and not mesh-files - the next release will change it - it's already implemented but the release is still pending.


@qubodup

Danke für die Reviews!


-Ben
replace # with @: provider#hackcraft.de

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