Simple & Quick GPLed Java Tower Defense Game

image: github.com/godrin/TowerDefense screenshot

Just a simple, smooth and stable tower defense game by david kamphausen (godrin) & marc giersch (undermink).

Pro:

• Quite fast-paced, no boring waiting time.

Con:

• Drag-and-drop building placement sometimes fiddly.
• Effect of upgrades not clear.

video: github.com/godrin/TowerDefense gameplay

Download .jar: https://github.com/godrin/TowerDefense/downloads
Run via: java -jar defend-desktop-0.3.jar
Github: https://github.com/godrin/TowerDefense/

Also out of Beta: Annex:CTW Release 3

We are a bit late to the party (partially due to my current German Telekom induced Internet abstinence at home :( ), but last month the first stable release of Annex: Conquer the World was released.




For those out of the loop: Annex is a so called total conversion mod (albeit standalone) of Megaglest. You can read up on its development and the latest news in their forum post on the MG forums.

Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #1

Knights, a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements.

Tales of Gydia, a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC, was started on SourceForge.net.

Unknown Horizons, a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor.

Black Dog, an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released.

Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).

ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.

SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.

FLARE, a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.

0 A.D. Audio interview and special effects

The premier FOSS RTS 0 A.D. has recently won (by an incredible small margin) the Sourceforge.net project of the month vote and now they have done a cool audio interview:

Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities?
Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.

Click here for the transkript of the full interview, but if you are to lazy to read you can also listen to it on that page in the original voices of the developers.

Besides this, they have recently implemented a lot of cool new graphical effects (I guess you could call it JUICE ;) ):

Distance fog and other new effects

For more nice screenshots of these effects, have a look at this post on their forums.

Good FOSS 3D action RPGs, nowhere to be found?

Today I got a small rant:
So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right?
Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got:

• Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development? 
• Check! (Xonotic, RedEclipse and several other with un-free media)
• Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development?
• Check! (0 A.D., MegaGlest, Warzone2100, Spring mods etc.)
• Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development?
• Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply.
• Flight simulators, turn based strategy?
• Check: Flightgear!
• Check: Battle for Wesnoth!
• Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight?
• Hmmm???

Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into development FOSS representative, but given the (current) popularity of action RPGs lets have a look at what we do have:

So, there is the really cool project FLARE, which besides being not really playable yet is also more of a nostalgic effort. More playable but also with a similar demographic of potential players is Freedroid (besides having a maybe too Linux centric style).

FLARE 2D graphics style

Maybe of interest seem to be DawnRPG and PARPG, but for both the above applies as well and they seem to be going into a rather different direction. Besides that, at least the latter seems to be not progressing well lately.

Then there are the obscure and/or non-isometric DNT and Lips of Suna. Which are both nice projects on their own (especially LoS seems to develop nicely as of late), but are not really suitable as the FOSS reference for action RPGs...

The only game that comes to my mind that would fit is Summoning Wars, which is somewhat playable and even has a single-player campaign, but development is really slow and it is still a long way off what I would call a recommendable game to non-FOSS enthusiasts.

Some new dungeon wall tests

All in all it is a very promising project, which is IMHO hold back by its lack of content creation tools (mainly, but not only a world editor). This is probably partially because of the intention to have randomly generated dungeons, but those are still really bland to look at, and should be complemented by parts or at least towns that are nicely designed by hand (those also exists, but must have been done in a text editor or such ;) ).

Part of the rather slow development I guess was the poor choice of the graphics engine, e.g. OGRE 3D which is foremost a programmers choice (due to nice features and good documentation), but a rather bad FOSS game developers choice in my opinion (due to the lack of a complete game-engine features and good tools).

There are still a few really talented artists trying to contribute (1,2,3), and I recently proposed a creative re-use of 0 A.D. assets, but everything seems to be hitting a road block when it comes to easy tinkering with the game and getting things to actually run in game... and that is really demotivating to potential contributors (FOSS development advise 101 ;) ).

So to sum it up? I think Summoning Wars is really not living up to what it could be, and the only solution I see would be the addition of a new and really motivated programmer to the team to solve the tool-chain problems and thus restart the active development again. Anyone interested???

P.S.: Not to forget mentioning it: There is also the IrrRPG builder, which could probably be a good base to build an action RPG too.

New RTS releases: 0 A.D. and Zero-K

Hot news of today is the Alpha 9 release of 0 A.D.:

0 A.D. Alpha 9 gameplay

Main additions are the Roman faction, a new combat concept and new trading system. The new combat concept allows for a strategic selection of your troops to counter certain units (spearmen are better against cavalry and so on) and the trading systems allows for setting up trade routes etc.
Oh and they are still looking for contributers ;)

A little bit less hot news, but still quite recent, is the new version 1.0.3.3. of Zero-K, a cool RTS set in the future (if you are a regular reader you should know it ;) ).

Zero-K gameplay

It now runs on the recently released 87.0 release of the SpringEngine and also features a new faction: the amphibious bots.
Sadly their interesting meta-game PlanetWars is currently closed for reworking, but the next round will happen at some point for sure.

Unknown Horizons Multiplayer Session March 10, 4:00 pm GMT

image: Unknown Horizon's multiplayer menu

There have been six updates on Unknown Horizon's blog this year alone and their latest is an invitation to a multiplayer gaming session.

Saturday, March 10, 16:00 GMT (convert to your time zone)

You will have to get and compile the development builds for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows but the guidelines are extensive and you can get real-time support via IRC, so don't let that intimidate you. :)

images: showing off Unknown Horizon's multiplayer chat

TremZ aka Unvanquished 1st alpha released

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February.

However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)...

WIP Unvanquished playermodel

But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;)

Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)

Short: Gigalomania and CTruck3D

Losing in Gigalomania

Gigalomania [blog] is an open source 2D Real Time Strategy game, for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Nokia smartphones (Symbian, Maemo and Meego). The gameplay consists of researching and developing new technology with which to conquer your enemies, from rocks and sticks to nuclear weapons and spaceships. You can advance through ten different ages, from the stone age to the future. There are 28 different maps to play through.

CTruck3D

CTruck3D is a simple-looking OpenGL truck simulator.

term_CTruck3D

There is an ASCII-Art variant called term_CTruck3D.

EDIT: What's quite interesting about the game is the marketing(?). Two YouTube accounts seem to be quite excited about the game: simhgamedev and violinperforming.

Zolo, Food Fight, GameLV - Treasure Hunt on Reddit!

A thread called "Post your Open Source Game" on the gamedev subreddit let me discover some new and old projects.

Here are three of them:

Zolo

A hyperactively fast jump and run with chainsaws: Zolo.

Food Fight

An OGRE-based real time strategy with vegetables and taco: Food Fight.

GameLV

An "adventure game in a post-soviet environment": GameLV.

Whats happening in OpenDungeons?

Hello, I am one of the OpenDungeons (OD) developers and I wrote this blog post for FreeGamer.

I bet you're all very excited about whats been going on lately, and I can assure you that a lot of stuff have been made for OD. We have new music for you to enjoy while annihilating your foes, we've got new concept art for the Human and Undead faction, a new forge and a completely new tile set. We have also begun working on the AI and a XML specification for creature stats.

Music and trailer

Recently timong join the forum and asked about some musical tasks to perform. He started working on a main theme for the game and came up with this :) While he was at it he also made a nice trailer for us which you can find in the about page or watch it below:

New concept art

We have also received some very nice concept art from the OpenGameArt competition for the Undead faction we got art for these creepy characters:

• Necromancer
• Bone Golem

and for the Human faction we got art for these noble folks:

• Wisp
• Halfling
• Cleric
• Maiden

Code updates

Of changes to the code and features we have begun implementing a basic AI and making a XML specification for creature definitions, which should make life a lot easier for artists which want to try out their new model in game and for balancing the stats of each creature.

New tile set and forge

We also have new tile set made by Skorpio (although it is not in the game yet):

You can find more pictures of the new tile set in this forum thread.

Finally we also have a new forge to make devilish traps and impenetrable doors :)

Current tasks, problems and needed help

A new release is planned once a bug that is crashing the game is fixed. We are also looking for more people/help for the project, especially when it comes to coding. You can see more details about the crasher bug and what skills we need from new people here in this blog post.

News from 0 A.D.

Well I certainly didn't see this coming, but 0 A.D. has decided to switch their game-play concept and turn the game into a Diablo like hack and slash RPG (while keeping the historical accurateness of course). For the first teaser pic see below:



Ok bad phun, I admit...in reality they decided to turn it into a FPS game, which I really can't understand at all :( I mean, just look at these horrible screen-shots they are putting out as a 'proof of concept':


However, unrelated to these shocking news... check out this boring new alpha 4 RTS release, code named Deadalus. It features a boring new AI, and a bunch of other boring stuff (including boring additional celts stuff)... so don't bother with it until the new and shiny 0 A.D. RPG, errm FPS arrives ;)

Political Space Warfare

Political Space Warfare is an ambitious, multi faceted space based strategy in-progress game. Still far from achieving it's full vision, PSW wants to offer gameplay ranging from long-term strategy gameplay as seen in browser based empire building games such as Travian all the way down to a RPG where you play as a single unit in the greater picture.

Unfortunately, its Windows only at the moment, but the team are planning to port it to Linux/other platforms as soon as possible, which will be a lot sooner if there are any of you willing to help :)

PARPG

In a quick aside, PARPG is looking for a Lead Writer/ So if any of you are in the mood for writing some Post Apocaliptic fiction, be sure to have a look

News Avalanche!

Zero-K:

Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :)

It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back

IrrRPG Builder

IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua.

There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functions yet, which crashes the game) and adding some sort of api refference along with autocompletion would really make it a fully fledged IDE :)

Ryzom:

We've been giving Ryzom quite a bit of love recently, with their Linux native client and all, but they just announced an In-game competition for a Linux netbook and got accepted for the Google Code-In initiative. Here's hoping they have lots of success!

Warlock's Gauntlet:

Warlock's Gauntlet is a highly polished Gauntlet/Diablo/Hack'nSlash mashup. A nice interface, smooth gameplay and lots of spells make this a very nice find.(Thanks archl from the comments :) It even has co-op!

Egoboo

The Egoboo team just released their version 2.8.1 beta, it adds randomized loot, special effects and lots of bugfixes. Check it out!

FreedroidRPG

Freedroid recently had their website redesigned(aww I liked the old one :(), and also released version 0.14 which included the Summer of Code work. This added better randomized dungeons, a better interface for the level editor and replaced magical weapons with a more sci-fi addon system (the last addition was done by Nekotaku from Lips of Suna, which also had a release recently :)

Atonement (or Goat's Monthly Post)

Julius' endless poking has sent me over the cliff of post-guilt, fortunately, lots of projects have been jumping up and down for attention of late, so I have quite a bit of content to redeem myself with.

RPGs

OSARE

OSARE showing off powers

Pfunked and recently released an update to the promising OSARE This brings "powers" to the game, the classic Hack 'n Slash abilities that encompass magic, melee and ranged special attacks. No skimping on them here either, intricate systems such as block-counter based attacks and time stopping magic spells definitely differentiate OSARE's powers from the more generic "Do x damage" spells more commonly found. The new powers do bring in a bit of a balance issue though, but such is the nature of RPGs

Dawn RPG

Dawn RPG

Dawn-RPG has also been updating steadily throughout the year; I kind of forgot about the project and should be punished appropriately :P Main recent additions are sound an music (from the illustrious OGA, more on that later), and "characteristics" that diversify its abilities system. Dawn is definitely a project to watch, they are a bit more "traditional" than OSARE in a few ways: Larger amounts of inventory slots and more numerous actions and abilities (albeit more generic in the terms I described earlier), along with quests (although that may be added to OSARE in a future release).

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna hit the 0.1.0 milestone as well, recently. 240 days since the last release means that lots has changed. So much, in fact, that nekotaku didn't even have enough time to list it all, so sorry if I cannot give a concise overview (the game doesn't run on my system because of GFX problems :\). From the screenshots though, one can see that the models have been improved significantly, albeit at the expense of a couple m2 of cloth ;) --edit-- Scratch that, after interrogating nekotaku with a comfy pillow in IRC I managed to pry this out of him "I worked a lot on the graphics engine, as can be seen from it not working :-P I also wrote a new AI, worked on combat, implemented a faction system, a quest system, a crafting system, etc.".

RTSes

Warzone2100

Warzone2100 going BOOM

Warzone 2100 released v3.0-beta1. Another release that keeps its changes close to the heart, it seems that v3 mainly consists of graphical and gameplay improvements and fixes rather than slews of new features. Kick the Goat if you find that his journalistic integrity doesn't meet up to the standards of your average blogger though.

0 A.D

0AD's new Celtic Faction

0AD dropped their second Alpha release "Βελλεροφῶν" (or Bellerophon). Their change log is as beautiful as the game itself; and it had better be after having recently acquired a development manager, and they're always looking for more team members so if check their open positions list and join up if you're man enough. A new faction, gameplay improvements such as fog of war and unit formations, performance improvements... Oh, and victory conditions, sothat you can finally beat your opponent!

Racing

SuperTuxKart

According to my googling, it has been over a year since SuperTuxKart has been mentioned on Freegamer! Scandalous! Anyhow, they recently released Alpha 3 of their 0.7 Irrlicht engine revision, lots of new things has been added like ODE physics and a bunch of new tracks and racers. I'd love to post some screenies/videos, but they're all of the old version. You can find a recent video here, on a German fan site :)

Odds and Ends

Wesnoth Tactics

WTactics wiki

Wesnoth Tactics... Now here's an interesting one, a collectable card game based on the Wesnoth art and universe. Loads of cool art originating from there, which is available at OpenGameArt. The game is also playable on PC using a closed source CCG game client, LackeyCCG, but they plan to produce their own cross platform client in the future. This is a very interesting example of the flexibility of open source settings instead of code; Wesnoth has spawned quite a few shared setting (Or "commundo" as a circa '09 #freegamer channel would have said) games, and hopefully the trend continues

OpenGameArt

Finally, OpenGameArt has received quite a few mentions in this post; they are still alive and very much kicking with quite a few large developments done to the site, namely: Flattr integration, sothat users can recieve micro-donations for their art, and the freeing up of quite a bit of funds for commissions due to serving costs being covered by GameBoom

Some more (L)GPL strategy game love

Ok, quick update before too much dust gathers around here ;)

Just yesterday I stumbled upon this gem of a strategy game over at LGDB:

They call that simple bot???

Its name is Quantum, as some of you might have guessed it is a clone of Dyson/Eufloria. But the game is quite mesmerizing with the strange background noise and your armies of small space tree spores conquering new worlds. But try it yourself!

Now normally clones are not as good as the original, right? Not is this case: Full multiplayer (with master-server and lobby), singleplayer skirmishes, in-game editor etc. are just a small part of the long feature list! Furthermore it's all available under the LGPL (written in Java). Me = happy puppy :)

Seven Kingdoms GPL version

Not exactly super fresh news but the relatively recently GPLed 1997's strategy game Seven Kingdoms got a SDL based Linux port. Check out a small video tutorial here (as I found it difficult understand what to do initially).

Oh, and lets not forget a game-play video

So that's all for today. Stay tuned for more awesome FOSS gaming news!

Some Free, Open Source Puzzle Games

Flipout

Can you imagine what a mix between a Pin-Ball machine, a physics simulator and a breakout clone would look like? Well your wildest dreams have been answered! Check this out:

Flipout

The game Flipout combines all this, and is a very challenging game in addition (didn't manage to even complete the first level :( ). But try it yourself ;)

Mechanical Tower

Another pretty interesting game by the same author is Mechanical Tower, a self described tower defense game: "but instead of defending with towers, you defend in a tower, with traps"

Mechanical Tower

Again the skill level required is quite high... but maybe I am just very bad in puzzle games :p

Jumpman

Another already a bit older puzzle game (Jumpman) has come to my attention since the neat (but closed source) indi hit And Yet It Moves seems to be based on it:

Jumpman trailer

Interested? Well it is pretty hard also :( But don't get discouraged and download it here. Licensing is a bit unclear though... seems to be MIT like, but don't quote me on that ;)

MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.


MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 6.


And believe it or not, qudobup and me tried to play a round (extreme n00b alert :D ), which we recored and commented here:

Megaglest Multiplayer: Julius vs. qubodup [HD .ogg (485M) | tinyogg | no-commentary .mp4 (364M)]

All done with Free software by the way :D (MegaGlest, glc, Audacity, PiTiVi and Mumble)!

Interview with the Megaglest team

For this Megaglest special we are also lucky to had the chance to make a short interview with the two main heads behind this Glest fork.

FreeGamer: For a start, could you please give us a short introduction into your team structure and what your motivation was to fork Glest in order to make Megaglest?

titi: Well teamstructure is... I started and Softcoder joined :) I have been working on glest mods for 2 years now because I like the game and there was so little content available back then. For Megaglest I also do some programming, but Softcoder writes more of the code than me.

Softcoder: But we also have contributions from time to time from others (like the GAE team).

titi: Concerning our motivation, I think we both work on glest because our kids like it :) Right from the start my children were involved in Glest modding. For example my son made nice tileset and helped me with my first mods; especially the Indians (as in native north Americans / the editor ;) ) we made as a coop production!

Softcoder: Yes titi & family are the heart of the community! But my boys also made a number of factions. Elimnator and Tiger are big into mods, and call their mods vbros packs :)

FreeGamer: Interesting to see that FOSS game development can really work as a family hobby! Not really the typical cliche of the lonely bed-room programmer in his teens ;)
But lets move on to the next question: Glest is for sure heavily influenced by Blizzard's Warcraft3, and thus caters to a similar type of gamer. Have you though about bringing some of the popular elements from that game over to Megaglest? Examples would be hero units, and of course the later added game-play modes like DOTA and Tower Defense.

titi: I think we both don't even know Warcraft3 :) I didn't played many RTS games up to now... well I think I played something called Dune2 on the Amiga before ;) Actually I'm more a FPS player.

Softcoder: I'm not a gamer at all. But yeah, the forums are filled with people who ask for features from those games. In short we will therefore likely bring lots of features that people like from there into MG.

titi: Personally however, I don't like all this special hero feature people talk about. Things get too complicated with this, and I think these heroes kill the usual RTS fun. But there are some fun ideas we will follow for sure :) But I see Glest as its own game; I don't want to build a Warcraft clone.
Concerning DOTA, well I guess HON is much better then we can ever be :) But there are mods who do this and when they grow we will support them if it fits to the game itself. Right now we have the current RTS game type in focus, however.

FreeGamer: Ok next question: Megaglest seems to have evolved out of a number of independent factions and tile sets, so the overall game design is lacking a bit. Are there plans to take a more "tighter grip" in order to get the balancing etc. right? Or do you consider Megaglest more of a "playground" and let someone else develop a "pro-mod" for balanced multiplayer?

Softcoder: I think the answer is a challenge of the community and the age groups. Many young people are working on techs, factions, maps etc, but we might need to be more careful to keep "themes" together. So we try to only allow consistent content as part of the shipped product.

titi: Well there are the Tech and Magic factions from the original glest, but the rest was basically made by me. It is something what I called Megapack before. But I learned more while doing this and so they look a bit different :)

FreeGamer: What I actually meant was not the art style but the game balancing and game design. Are there plans to restructure the factions, maybe limit them to 3 or so to be able to get balancing right?

titi: I think the balancing is quite good! Ok, some are better some are not so good, but thats like the players. It is meant like that, good players choose bad factions bad players choose good factions. But what's good or bad depends on the map too!
But I discuss with others in the forums and hear what they say... especially beginners always say this or that faction is too good, but after a while they often come to the conclusion thats its not as they thought :p

Softcoder: I also think the base MG install has that, e.g. a core game-play with good balancing. It is the add-ons etc... that create the "playground".

titi: But for me competitive game-play is also not really the focus. I want to make a game thats fun to play, not competitive! Especially coop gaming against the computer is a big part of the fun playing MG.

FreeGamer: Ok lets move on: With the current release focusing on getting the multiplayer working correctly (and hopefully getting a big enough online player-base), what are your future plans regarding the single-player part? Do you plan on implementing a campaign editor in the already much improved level editor?

titi: Well for me the next focus are graphical improvements. We need better terrain splatting (made by the gfx card), more lights and so on. And we will start to put in lots of new features once we proofed to be stable in multiplayer :)

Softcoder: I think its hard to answer! There are TONS of great ideas in the community, we will talk with our community and see what things are most desired. My focus is more for making my boys happy :) We want MG to be 'mega-fun'!

FreeGamer: Ok so what about editing & modding? Right now the units are rather limited in their special abilities. Do you think stuff like (air) transporters, non attack magic spells, stealth mode etc. (insert other cool units features from Starcraft/Warcraft) could be easily implemented? Or is that already possible with scripting, but not done yet?

titi: I wrote so many wiki entries , made so many forum posts to let people know how to mod glest, I think its quite easy now. The special unit abilities not implemented yet however, but when we think it is fun we will think how hard it is to do and then we do it :)

Softcoder: We plan to add many things like this, but slowly so that we don't lose stability and keep people happy. One example... we added better network play, masterserver AND cross platform play all in this last round of beta! That was TOO MUCH! But things will get done (faster if we have more help) just at its proper pace.

FreeGamer: We already had some remarks on the technical side of things, but lets get back to that again: The Glest engine sure looks a bit dated by today's standards... do you have plans to upgrade the graphics engine to support shaders and such?

Softcoder: Yikes! We agree with you! But I think we have to give hats off to Martino and the rest of the original Glest team that a game written in 2005 still is acceptable today!

titi: We need more speed and many of these features will bring us better speed and better graphics, since the GPU will do alot of the work.

FreeGamer: Ok, but to extent that: with normalmaps and such it often looks more realistic in style. Do you want to go more in that art direction, or stay with a more comic style?

titi: Normal maps are not the main priority, there are other more needed features. And normal maps need new textures, and that is really a lot of work :) So for now we are looking into things that can be done with mostly code which is easier to do.

FreeGamer: So but what weight would you give the development focus right now... more towards improving graphics, or more toward extending game-play?

titi: Both :) But we try to make small steps.

Softcoder: Game development is totally new for me (and Linux programming is fairly new), so priority also depends on how long it takes to learn and do it right! MG is my first graphics code ever, and also and my first Linux open source project.

titi: It is all new for us, no one of us did something like this before. I even learned C++ in the beginning of this year for this project! Same with php, the masterserver is the first thing I ever wrote in php.

FreeGamer: Well I think it turned out pretty well so far never the less :) I think this concludes our short interview. Thank you very much for answering our questions! Ahh, last but not least: Do you have anything you want to tell your players and/or our blog readers?

Softcoder: Yes, our #1 goal for MegaGlest is 'FUN'!

titi: Please come and play MegaGlest ;)

A short introduction into Glest modding

(Mega)Glest has an incredibly easy modding setup. Almost everything in the game can be easily changed with simple XML files, and the 2D map editor is very easy to grasp. Especially with the recent usability improvements in Megaglest (and included Linux editor binaries) it is possible to create a simple but nice map in a matter of minutes!

Edit: I was made aware that those editor improvements come mostly from the GAE project. Very good additions!



(Ok this was not done in minutes :p It's one of the new 8 player maps that come with MegaGlest)


But luckily all these editing features are also very well documented in the Glest wiki.


Last but not least, all single-player and co-op scenarios can be fully scripted right in the XML files with lua, a pretty powerful yet easy scripting language commonly used in computer games. Sadly it is not possible to create full singleplayer campaigns yet, but lets hope that gets added soon too!

A3P: Acquire, Attack, Asplode, PWN!

Hey FreeGamer crowd, I hope there are still a few people around ;)
Today there will be only a short update, as I simply can't believe this gem of a game (see below) has not been featured on this page!
EDIT: Do not miss qudobup's post about FOSS engine news directly below this one!

A unique arena shooter

So someone had the balls (pun intended) and released a completely unique arena shooter with many nifty features, described by the creator as a mix of TPS/RTS/OMG/BBQ ;)
Check out A3P, if that has sparked your interest! At it's current version (0.5) it can be described as a third person arena shooter with some small RTS/squad command elements, and it is definitely fun to play:

A3P gameplay video 4

The technical specs are rather interesting too: Based on the BSD licensed Panda3D engine (while itself being licensed MIT; the media license is unclear though) it has all the bells and whistles one can expect from a modern game (Full GLSL shader based rendering, networked ODE physics, even integration into your webbrowser).
Yet it was developed by ONE man in only ONE year! That makes us fellow free game developers look a bit bad, I guess :( Maybe that's because it was developed in Python!
Check out the development blog for further insight into this miracle ;)

Non RTS strategy games

An update so quickly? Behold the Free Gamer world is coming to an end. :p


So, we mentioned some promising RTS games in the last update. OK, I forgot to mention Spring1944, but I am also a bit reluctant to mention Spring and its mods since it is such a pain in the backside to get it running correctly. :(


Back on topic... there a quite a few really great non RTS FOSS strategy games. I guess I don't really need to mention the classics to the typical reader of this blog, but Wesnoth, FreeCiv, FreeCol and UFO:AI are all very playable and good looking games! However there are others that get less attention and also some that show great promise!

Advanced strategic command

Advanced strategic command is one of those that gets relatively little news coverage, even though it is a really playable game. Granted, its graphics are pretty much the same as its big inspiration, the classic Battle Isle series, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right?

A new version was just released a few days ago, which finally also includes a tutorial for those new to this type of game.

Also interesting is the (German) Project: Battle Planets, which could be described as a MMOTBS based on ASC. It is not quite what you would expect from this description as most of the MMO part is done manually by human game moderators, which exchange ASC games states between players (sorry, it is a bit hard to explain exactly ;) ).

A similar game to ASC is Crimson Fields by the way, which has found its way to many mobile platforms.

Widelands

Another often neglected game is Widelands, which is obviously based on the classic game the Settlers (no not the Settlers of Catan, check Pioneers for that).

Widelands game play

The graphics could still be improved a bit, but it is shaping up to be a very faithful and fun re-implementation of that great classic game.

Unknown Horizons

While we are at FOSS re-implementations of great games... Unknown Horizons is continuing to become a Anno1602 clone of epic proportions. ;)

UH game play

It is not quite at the point where it could be described as a fully playable game yet, but you can expect it to become one relatively soon, I guess! (Another not quite playable but really promising game worth surely mentioning is FreeOrion by the way).

8Kingdoms

Last but not least, there is 8Kingdoms, which really is one of those games people don't even try after having a short glance at the screenshots. Yes, it's programmers art, albeit one that at least tried to hide it by having a plastic-like style for the figures. ;)

But if you actually try it, you will realize that even though it is a bit rough around the edges (why can't I set a custom wide-screen resolution :( ), the game play and the engine is already quite advanced.

What this game clearly needs is an artist taking over the graphical matters, and then this could quite quickly become one of those true FOSS strategy game gems!