Medieval / fantasy models required

There's a couple of newish irrlamb gameplay videos. Worth watching if you want to see what the game is like and how devious some of the gameplay can be. For me, irrlamb is definitely one of the most exciting open source game projects around at the moment, being both innovative and challenging in it's gameplay.

Expect some really nice graphics in the next UFO:AI release. A few modelling maniacs seem to have gotten very interested in contributing, which is always good for an open source game project.

OpenTTD Hi-res

As of some time last week, an interesting major change landed in the OpenTTD development trunk - loading of 32bpp graphics and levels of zoom. It's one of the big steps along the road to getting high resolution graphics into OpenTTD. Also it provides a platform for the artwork contributors to see their art in game rather than have to paste it together to showcase it. A completely Free (no TTD required) and beautiful OpenTTD just got one step closer to reality. I'm hopeful that maybe a beta of this work might appear before the end of the year. The image to the right is an actual in-game shot! :-)

Java Classic RPG, the Eye of the Beholder & Dungeon Master inspired project, gained climates this week. If only the quality of the artwork matched the quality of the code developments! I was thinking about this, along with working a bit more on Fortress, and observing Scourge developments, and realising there are very few open source / free medieval and fantasy model resources going. Most projects with good artwork in this genre are either pixel art (like Wesnoth and Daimonin) or restricted (like Planeshift and Eternal Lands).

So, yeah, I think the scene needs a bit of dedicated medieval and fantasy modelling to happen so that all the exciting medieval and fantasy projects can pull quality artwork from a common base. Maybe there already is this kind of stuff available, do you know where? Or maybe there are people out there interested in modelling this kind of stuff. Do you know any? Spread the word!

I'll end today on a coding note. I was working on a layout engine (as part of Vexi, an open source project I lead) and came up against a problem where conversion between ints and floats and back (Java) was causing the assigned space between child boxes to be less than the parent box (box being a layout construct - don't worry about it). The solution was a bit of casting voodoo. I love it. :-)

// casting voodoo to make sure we don't have leftover pixels

diff = child.contentheight + (int)(slack+total) - (int)total;

My attempts to explain that to my girlfriend were a spectacular failure! :-D

Ain't Fate A Funny Thing

So here I am lamenting the lack of free (well, open source, but free is good enough) single player FPS games, and up pops this on Freshmeat; Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge:

EMR 3.0 is a unique scenario based upon the Aleph One (Marathon) engine. It is a first-person action adventure game, featuring an epic and in-depth story line.

The Aleph One engine is hardly cutting edge (originally powering the Marathon trilogy of games, circa 1996-1998) as you can tell from the EMR screenshots, but it takes a long time to produce a fully fledged single player FPS. EMR boasts 42 SP levels and a decent storyline. The game works on all 3 major platforms (Lin, Win, Mac) and is downloadable from their Sourceforge project page. I don't have time to verify how open source this game is but the source code is listed amongst the downloads.

Another free single player game based on the same engine is Tempus Irae, which is based in the Marathon universe but adds a lot of new content. The original Marathon games are freely downloadable too according to this page. So if the slightly retro graphics (sprites instead of models for NPCs) does not phase you, then there is plenty of content to work through there.

Eternal Lands

There's also an update to Eternal Lands, the MMORPG that once had a rather wierd license to it's source code although I believe it is properly open source these days. Version 1.4.0 of the client brings new effects, maps, and monsters. I always found the game to be plodding whenever I tried it but these days I'm quite fussy and I know a lot of people who have lost a lot of time to EL by becoming quite immersed in it. It is more graphically rich than Daimonin and more complete a game than Planeshift, the other two main open source MMORPG games.

A plumbing game called Vodovod showed up as well on Freshmeat. Taking inspiration from the Pipemania style of games, it reminded me of FlowFlowMania. Checking out the FlowFlowMania website, there was a sobering news update to be found. From the website:

Just a little news to inform you that FlowFlowMania is slowing down a little due to the fact that I'm hospitalized since May 02 2007 for a leukemia at Paris.

I think I'm going to have a lot of time during next weeks to continue FlowFlowMania, but the poor network of the hospital does not allow me to use FlowFlowMania SVN ...

So don't be affraid by the SVN inactivity. The things will go better when I'll be back home ;o)

Well, I hope you get well Bobsky. Isn't that something to remind us of our mortality and how important Free Software games really are? To some people, they represent a passion and a dream.

It's Been Brutal

Happy New Year everybody! I apologise for the lack of Free Software game commentary over the festive season but I was busy damaging my health in fun ways.

Anyway.....

Brutal Chess 0.5.1 is out! Brutal Chess is a game inspired by the ancient Battle Chess. A quick follow up to the strangely-not-mentioned-on-happypenguin 0.5.0 release which introduces a new codebase, AI of various difficulties, md3 support, and generally lots of other major-update-goodness. The simpler 3D chess game glChess released 1.0.1 on New Year's eve.

I am having a strange sense of de-ja-vu here because I have written this all before only I was under-the-influence of several substances and Blogger does not autosave drafts as I am accustomed to with GMail. Please implement this Blogger people!

Atomic Tanks 2.0-beta2 is also out. Despite the "2.0" in the version number, I don't believe there is that much different between the 2.0-beta2 and 1.5a but it got the game mentioned on Free Gamer so it must be worth it.

The ambitious Free Ryzom project failed to get the rights to the game. They were not able to compete with other commercially-rooted offers to take on the flagging MMORPG so were overlooked by the court deciding what happened to the company behind Ryzom.

The freeware and free-to-play MMORPG Eternal Lands released version 1.3.3 of their client with new monsters and maps. One of my friends played EL extensively. It looked very social but very boring. Lots of slow and repetitive menial tasks to level up seemed to be the order of the day but it could have been because he was playing the game in a daft way [risk-free levelling instead of fighting].

And finally in a move a tiny bit off-topic for this site, I'm going to plug musikCube. This music player/manager for Windows went 1.0 a few weeks ago and I've been enjoying it ever since on my work machine. I'd long been looking for a music player other than Winamp [I don't understand why people like Winamp so much - if you have more than 3 songs it's crap for managing them] or iTunes [barf]. The previous version of musikCube was good but had a few minor problems and development seemed to be stalled but it seemed the author was simply working away quietly instead of flagging noisily. Anyway, it rocks so if you have to use Windows then I highly recommend this Free Software music player. I think musikCube has a very bright future.

I'm sure I had some more games to talk about but I forgot..... :P