FlightGear 3.0 and Bombable add-on

This week saw finally saw the official release of version 3.0 of FlightGear.

Notable changes:

Highlights in this release include integration of the FGCom voice communications client within the simulator, improved terrain rendering, faster scenery loading, and improved usability. This release also coincides with the release of FlightGear World Scenery 2.0 – massively improved scenery data covering the entirety of the planet and incorporating OpenStreetMap roads and detailed terrain information from a variety of sources.

Also interesting is the "Bombable" add-on, which adds combat mechanics:

Open-source head-tracking

So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before, and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon.

However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam:

The video is shot with FlightGear, everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here, the system itself is not FlightGear specific though.

The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV, which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;)

Less resource demanding are infrared LED tracker version, which do not need to follow a face and also work rather nicely in a dark room. For those, some propitiatory solutions have been available for some time, but you can also find Linux compatible open-source code for such a system here (instructions for FlightGear here).

Personally I was always to lazy to build myself a proper 3 dot LED cap, so I think the face tracking solutions are more convenient. If you are into non-FOSS games on the Windows platform, I can thus also recommend the partial open-source FaceTrackNoIR software, which supports quite a few really nice flight-sims, racing games and even FPS.

GGJ License, EGP Feb 2012, STK Overworld, FG Interview

GGJ 2012 Theme

Global Game Jam 2012 is over and you can find all the by-nc-sa-licensed games here. We talked to the organizers about allowing free (as in freedom etc.) licenses and got some positive replies, but in the end it was too short a notice.

We ask you now to write a short message to GGJ, asking for the inclusion of further licenses, for example a GPL+CC-BY-SA combination for GGJ 2013. Also feel free to discuss this in the comments.

If you participated in GGJ, we would like to encourage you to release your games under free licenses in addition to the required nc license.

EGP February 2012

Speaking of jams, the 7day-jam-during-one-month by Experimental Gameplay Project is "Infinite Worlds" for this month.

STK Overworld

As recently announced, one of the new features in SuperTuxKart 0.8 will be an overworld-connected challenge system.

Durk Talsma: AI programmer

Flight Gear's blog released a new interview. You can find the other interviews so far linked in this post.

Winter Shorts: Bits & Bots, Goblin Camp 0.2, BASE PRO 0.4b-r2, FlightGear Interviews

Bits & Bots: controlling two robots at once

Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.

Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset

Goblin Camp 0.2 brings a stockpile of changes:

• Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.
• Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.
• Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map
• The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.
• Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature
• Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.
• Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.
• Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.
• Skeletons no longer bleed and other assorted bug fixes.

video: BASE PRO Edition 0.4 beta patch2 - Gameplay Sample

BASE Pro is a Windows-only base jumping simulation game. Its community and news can be found on this forum.

Community member LedInfrared got the hang out of gameplay video recording and shared videos of STK and Xonotic on this YouTube page, including download links to original video material!

Stuart Buchanan: FlightGear contributor

FlightGear's news section has seen quite a high activity lately, including three interviews:

• Oliver Jacq: scenery designer/scripter
• Gijs de Rooy: modeller and scenery designer
• Stuart Buchanan: coder and aircraft designer

Flightgear 2.4 plus something cuddly and something fishy

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 (announcement) has been released.

The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt:

• Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more.
• Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain surfaces, 3-dimensional cityscapes, water moves realistically and sunlight is reflected from its surface.
• Many improved planes/models and additional cockpit systems - a choice of nearly 500 different aircraft, from historical to bleeding edge, from ultra-lights to the ultimate flying heavy metal.

Still no combat (see open source flight combat article) but I think that's probably a bit off topic for Flightgear.

The Flightgear project has reached what I call "critical mass" in that it no longer depends on a few active developers to maintain progress. A thriving contributor community outgrows the original development crew and it becomes owned by the community. Usually when a project attains critical mass, development accelerates massively. There are more people contributing to Flightgear than has ever been the case, it is flying. Pun intended.

In fact I can't think of many other FOSS games that have attained "critical mass" status. Battle for Wesnoth of course. Possibly Freeciv and OpenTTD (I wish they'd rename that). Some projects got close but never quite made it, such as Glest and Vega Strike. Others are knocking on the door, such as Pioneer, Speed Dreams, 0AD. (If I am being dozy and missing any such projects, point out in the comments!) The vast majority of projects never get close and usually only are actively developed as long as their originators / principle supporters are motivated.

What could be cuddly? Plee the Bear 0.6 has been released (announcement, forum thread). It features the first big boss. It is a very nice looking game with a lot of potential, and seems great for a younger player.

And the something fishy? Avid readers, those worth their salt, people who are true followers of the blog, those who will enter through the gates of St Peter before all others, they will know I am a big fan of Fish Fillets NG. Somebody has made a clone called, imaginatively, Fish Fillets Clone (screenshots). Whilst I don't like that it is an outright clone, I do like that it uses vector graphics. I think there's promise there.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Oh, yeah, hiiii to my Cuban female fanbase!

FlightGear at LinuxTag 2011

I took a quick look at the Gluon Talk and the games booth at LinuxTag 2011 and thought I'd share some pictures at least. :)

ProFlightSimulator: Commercial FlightGear Fork (Weak)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer

A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of ProFlightSimulator, a fork of FlightGear on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post.

ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game.

This info is placed in Disclaimer/Terms/IsThisFlightgear?.

The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file containing "Source code of these images, content and files" (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here).

Why PFS is not FlightGear

The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation.

I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for every (final) purchase, we donate $1 to the FlightGear project" commitment. Maybe the improvements/code changes are at least useful to the FlightGear project, if any of the devs went through the trouble of buying PFS.

OGA challenges and snippets of games news

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.

Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!

The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.

The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)

And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)


By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.

The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.

I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)

I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.

Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.

Epiar, the foss space action/trading game that is not naev had a dev chat meeting for planning the next version and is now looking for new developers and art submissions.

It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)

FlightGear eyecandy release (2.0)

The flight simulator FlightGear now has pretty clouds and lighting. I have not had the chance of giving the new release a try, so I decided to create a little gallery of the best-looking shots from the 2.0 gallery.

Looks neat. But following video looks even better!

(youtube-dl link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4oMOFnD6bw )

Flightgear 1.0.0 Released

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived.

Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community.

The scope of the Flightgear project is, as you might expect for a game 11 years in the making, nothing short of impressive. Whilst it does fall short in a few departments when compared to commercial flight sims, in others it is unequalled. Having no full time developers and being of such high quality is a testament to the dedication and organisation of it's development team.

Flightgear has a pluggable flight dynamics model with 3 primary options, giving the enthusiast an opportunity to find a flight model that they feel is most accurate and/or fun. The integrated flight dynamics model is optimized for implementing plausibly behaving aircraft without requiring heaps of hard-to-acquire aerodynamic test data. Another is based on an FDM originally written by people at NASA. Quite impressive detail that most players probably won't appreciate.

Flightgear comes with an extensive and accurate database of world scenery. Over 20,000 real world airports are included in the full scenery set. Runways come with markings, lighting, taxiways, some sloped with variable elevation, the latter a feature missing from most commercial titles. The world scenery fits on 3 DVD's - pretty detailed coverage of the entire world with accurate terrain based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data. Scenery includes lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, and nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and even headlights visible on major highways.

You can fly seamlessly around the world, as scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread - minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas and keeping memory requirements realistic.

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. Taking the 'term' simulator to another level, the sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky and the [correctly placed] moon is illuminated by the [correctly placed] sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Getting onto the aircraft, and you can fly a variety of aircraft, from the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets including the A10 tank buster, and several light singles.

Flightgear even can do fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views - although only a few aircraft have had this implemented thus far. Impressive nonetheless.

Despite the unbelievable attention to detail, Flightgear can be played on a rather modest PC. However the better the PC, the better it looks and runs so those with the latest, greatest 3D cards can still enjoy the extra beauty and a smoother experience.

I grabbed a few of the nicer screenshots from the Flightgear 1.0.0 gallery.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go and download Flightgear 1.0.0 (extras / source available here) and get flying - and enjoy knowing that this is Free Software gaming at it's glorious best.

Spread the word and digg this story on FSDaily and Digg.

The Flightgear feature list contains more in-depth analysis of the Flightgear features and is where I grabbed most of the above info - I'm in the business of Free Softare game information rather than Free Software game reviews. ;-)

Testing Testing Testing

200 posts to this blog now. :-)

Pingus

Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it.

Also looking for testers is iteam, the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted.

There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs.

Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

www.freegamedev.net

I registered the domain name www.freegamedev.net yesterday. Initially it will just point to the Free Gamer forums, but I want to evolve that into a proper Free Software game development community with useful features e.g.:

• announce.freegamedev.net - a really easy way for people to announce Free games in a single location. No accounts, no web forms, just email to e.g. announce@freegamedev.net and (pending moderator approval) it'll appear.


• planet.freegamdev.net - a place where Free game development blogs are syndicated.


• forums.freegamedev.net, wiki.freegamedev.net etc

Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this "let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs" that will never happen because we are all busy people. KISS. Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation.

Flightgear

A new Flightgear snapshot - 0.9.11pre1 - is available but it's source only. There's been a lot of updates since the last release over a year ago:

A gigantic number of new aircraft, new features, enhancements to existing models, and bugfixes were added.

Oooooo! :-)

I read a review of the previous release that commented on how good Flightgear was as a simulator, noting that - whilst it doesn't qutie have the graphical panache - it has several features not found in other commercial flight simulators like sloped runways. There are also different physics models, a massive number of planes and scenarios available. It's a very high quality open source project.

There's also a new version out of the interesting platform game DangerMan. The author notes he failed to playtest the previous version so a whole host of important bug fixes mean this release should be a better experience. The premise for the game sounds interesting:

Dangerman is an old-school platformer with modern features like line-of-sight and physics.

Anyway, let me know of any thoughts or ideas you have for www.freegamedev.net as I want it to be a community project, not a Free Gamer one. ;-)

Open Source Flight Combat

Flying Guns

Thunder & Lightening

glHorizon

glHorizon 3D cockpit

Combat Simulator Project

Decopter

Hey, I'm up early - or in bed late. Anyway, I came across a few open source flight combat simulators last night and thought I'd comment on them. I thought the OS flight combat sim scene was barren, but that is definitely not the case.

The main protagonist in this FLOSS game genre is GL-117. It's been stable and polished for quite some time now. There is vaunted development on a v2 of the game, but nothing tangible to speak of. It is more an arcade game than a simulation but packs of fun nonetheless!

RedShift is inspired by GL-117, so will be another arcade flight combat game. It's early days and in the progress of a rewrite from C to C++ but the author is optimistic that he'll be able to release an update in a month or so.

Flying Guns is a WWI flight combat simulation game where you can engage as many as 100 AI planes at a time. It's intrigingly written in Java and does look very, very cool & fun... but the webstart prototype version didn't work for me. :-(

If you want something a little more futuristic then you'll be wanted to take a look at Thunder & Lightening. Development is very active lately. It takes inspiration from 80s classics like Carrier Command and Midwinter giving it an interesting single player edge, but there's still much work to do.

Another Carrier Command inspired title is Carrier 2. The graphics looks very nice but the gameplay still needs working on, so it's at a similar stage of development to Thunder & Lightening. Still both projects have been in development for years so I am optimistic they will eventually turn into excellent FLOSS games.

Back to more contemporary planes, with glHorizon which is a freeware Windows only game. Focused on the F22, some of the visuals are spectacular. No "news" for over a year on this one but I have a gut feeling there'll be updates. The full 3D cockpit looks gorgeous. I hope the author releases the game under an open source license and then it can be embraced by the FLOSS game community. :-)

Then we come to the Combat Simulator Project. This really does look gorgeous. It has been in steady development for over 5 years and aims to provide cross-platform, high-fidelity, large-scale combat scenarios. It is probably the most ambitious of all the open source combat simulation games. The game is still at the demo stage but they are well on their way to acheiving their goals. Hopefully a new version (0.6 was released in April 2006 and is Windows-only) will be out soon. Like glHorizon, it sports 3D cockpits which look pretty cool.

FlightGear will most likely never support combat but is the leading open source flight simulator game so always worth a mention - I mean, you can fly combat planes even if you can't fight with them.

<update> Palomino is another less-combat oriented flight simulator, but looks great none-the-less. Given they showcase fighter jets, I'm hopeful combat will eventually get added to Palomino. <update/>

There are a few older titles that are no longer developed but once showed promise. Vertigo looks like some of the flight sims I used to play in the early 90s - nostalgic. ACM is another retro freeware flight combat game. The windows version is no longer available - I don't know why but that makes me smile. BFRIS is abandonware and I can only find the Windows version to download, but it has an interesting claim to fame:

First game to ship with Windows 95/98/NT *and* Linux binaries on the same CD out of the box. (from Moby Games)

The helicopter combat simulation scene is less healthy. There's Eagles that looks surprisingly good considering it's 10 years old - it looks like it uses a voxel based renderer, something I've not seen in a long time. Decopter also looks really promising but no updates since 2003 give little reason to hope. So it looks like you are stuck with the rather non-combat related Search & Rescue which is a bit more of a playable game than the other two but, as I say, not at all combat oriented.

If you are after a flight combat fix, look no further than GL-117. However there is plenty more to look forward to, so keep an eye on the scene, especially Thunder & Lightening and the Combat Simulator Project.

It's A Graveyard Out There

Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool.

The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes.

The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released (changelog). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game.

And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard:

I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/. At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, but the game is completely finished and playable. As it's new, its community is very small, but I'm hoping it will get bigger as people discover it.

I could not find a link for Laser Squad 3D.