79 - my birth year and something else

Air Carrier

The rather sumptious looking Air Carrier project - a 3D aerial combat game written in Java - has put up an install guide. Basically you need to get it from CVS at the moment and run it from Eclipse. So, if you don't like CVS and Eclipse, er, you are out of luck for the moment.

There's been a bunch of testing releases for TA3D as it approaches version 0.4.0 in style. Large parts of the codebase seem to have been rewritten and many bugs fixed. TA3D is an engine to play Total Annihilation but with better graphics and AI, so you need the original TA to play TA3D.

TA3D obviously shares a lot in common with TA:Spring, however there are some important differences. Firstly, TA3D is Linux centric - whilst there is a Windows version, it is developed on and released primarily for Linux. Also TA:Spring includes modifications to the gameplay and does not make use of some TA files like maps, facts which don't sit well with the TA3D author, so TA3D definitely has a niche.

Pok3D

One of my friends is a poker nut. He was playing away on a Windows machine near me, so I thought I would showcase the power of Free Software on my shiney new laptop with it's 3D capabilities... Pok3D here we come!

aptitude install python-poker3d

-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----

0 packages upgraded, 79 newly installed, 0 to remove

What!? 79 new packages!? Ok, I run Ubuntu so I already have a plethora of Python-centric stuff installed. I also have several games installed so the common game packages too are already installed. This was listing MySQL, web frameworks, and all sorts of other things as Pok3D dependencies. That's ridiculous... why the hell does a poker client require MySQL? If you want to use data locally use a simple embeddable database like sqlite. Anyway, needless to say, despite having lots of HD space and the automatic package management powers of apt, call me old fashioned but I wasn't installing that much stuff for one game. All I could think was, "bloat."

Last Remaining Air Carrier

Last Remaining

Last Remaining is a 3D FPS RPG in the same vein as Deus Ex. The idea is to have an engrossing storyline where the player must take whatever action is necessary to get to the bottom of the mystery. The game is written in Java with JMonkeyEngine and first version was uploaded yesterday. Intriguing and definitely one to watch. :-)

The author is the same guy behind Passenger and Nuclear Graveyard, and has a devblog on his various game programming endeavours.

A previous release of Nuclear Graveyard had managed to become corrupted when uploaded, a fact which - much to the author's dismay - nobody reported for nearly 2 months despite over 100 downloads. Anyway, if you were one of those people who downloaded the game and (benefit of the doubt) was unable to get it working then now would be a good time to try again!

He is also moving Passenger from JOGL to jMonkeyEngine (which uses JOGL) which should make subsequent development of the game easier. Anybody who things Java is slow and rubbish for games may want to check out the jME showcase page.

Air Carrier

It turns out that at least one of the games on that showcase page is open source! Air Carrier looks like a splendid 3D aerial combat game. It aims to support single and multiplayer, with gameplay based around plane to plane dogfighting, and strategic use of airborne carriers.

Another notable open source project using jME is Java Classic RPG - the development of which is continuing at a nice pace.

All of these games mentioned today should support all major operating systems (at least Lin, Mac, Win plus anything else supported by JOGL) as they are written in Java - and Java is portable, right? ;-)

There is another good article over at Liberty Gaming that discusses stratagies for expanding Free gaming. He mentions Project Open which I need to really follow through on. Also I hope FG and the FG forums somewhat contribute towards making open source games more accessible, that's the intention anyhow.

I did have something else to mention but I'll save it for tomorrow.