Open source Artillery / Worms clones

So it seems that Scorched 3D, Wormux, Hedgewars, and Atomic Tanks are all clones of inspired by... Worms? No. Scorched Earth? Nah. Gorillas? Nope. Tank Wars? No. That's right, their roots go all the way back to a 1980 on the Apple II under the name Artillery. Even earlier ascii versions from as early as 1976 are reported. Now that's real history - all other games (pong and chess excepted) are modern upstarts. ;-)

Atomic Tanks

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One of the older and more mature open source Artillery clones, with version 0.5 first available in January of 2003, Atomic Tanks doesn't seem to have the online presence of it's contemporaries. This is probably because it doesn't look that nice, with garish colours, coarse widgets, and almost badly drawn sprites.

Update: Markus comments, "I am sure that the graphics and such in Atomic Tanks are intentional. It is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Scorched Earth, and for those of us who grew up playing that game quite a bit, that is where the real appeal lies." I'm not sure I can agree with you there [on the intentionality of the bad graphics] after inspecting the original graphics.

What it lacks in the graphics department, it makes up for in features. The sheer range of weapons is overwhelming. You earn money, which you can use upgrade features and improve your tanks, making the game a much more appealing single player experience. Also the land behaves differently, falling to fill and holes created by explosions.

The latest release was 20th March 2009, which gives it a spot at the top of the article. :-)

Scorched 3D

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Scorched 3D has been in development since 2001 with build 1 released on 29th April of that year.

The first thing to note about Scorched 3D is that it looks beautiful. It is the only 3D game in the article, but it is especially well done. The islands deform as they get pounded by missiles. Battleships stay moored offshore, the waves lap against the beaches, and jet fighters fly overhead the tanks. It looks as good as a commercial game.

Scorched 3D build 42.1 arrived on 3rd March 2009.

Hedgewars

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Hedgewars is the youngest of the four projects, in development since 2004 and first released on 13th November 2006.

If I had to sum up Hedgewars in 3 words, I would say, "Worms II with hedgehogs." (Hey, II is a number!) With it's yelps and ows, and faithful recreation of many of the popular Worms weapons, it makes for a very similar gaming experience, arguably even better.

Hedgewars 0.9.9 was released 19th January 2009 and version 0.9.10 is imminent. I think the video successfully gets across just how Worms-like Hedgewars is:

Wormux

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Wormux looks very nice, and gameplay deviates a bit more than Hedgewars from the original worms experience, but is still very heavily inspired by it. It includes all the popular Free software mascots, so there's plenty of characters that you should recognise or should learn to recognise - making it almost educational! ;-)

The last few years have seen the developers work towards a new engine that will massively enhance the game with features like integrated physics (they created whysics engine just for this). I expect Wormux will continue to depart in a good way - by adding new interesting features that enhance gameplay - from it's Worms foundations whilst retaining the spirit that inspired the project originally.

Version 0.8.3 was released on 5th March 2009 and included some backported enhancements from the development version.

Incoming!

Looking to the future, there is also the iteam project, inspired by Gunbound. It seems like it could combine the graphical panache of Wormux with the upgrading fun of Atomic Tanks, but development has been very slow despite a wave of initial enthusiasm.

OpenLieroX

Teeworlds

Alternatives

If you like things to look Worms-like, but be more frantic, you should check out the games OpenLieroX or Gusanos - both inspired by a freeware game Liero(X). It has the character of old-school Worms but plays like 2D Quake. Gusanos (based on the classic Liero) development is inactive, last release occuring on 31st January 2006, whereas OpenLieroX (based on LeiroX) development is ongoing at a slow pace, with version 0.57_beta8 released 9th October 2008.

(My Liero-foo history may be out there, I'm not 100% sure how the different projects relate to eachother.)

Similar in gameplay style, but more modern and less retro-pixel, perhaps Teeworlds is your cup of tea. At version 0.5.1, the game is already solid, polished, and playable and has an enthusiastic, growing player base with many regular players. Development is very active and the last release was 25th January 2009.

Conclusion

The Artillery genre of open source games is possibly the healthiest genre of open source games with 4 very good, polished, playable, and actively developed projects, as well as other similar games, inspired by the classics. With 2D games increasingly neglected by the commercial sector, this genre is arguably one where a few of the open source projects have surpassed their commercial counterparts.

So, which (if any) of the Artillery-inspired open source games do you prefer to play? What's best about it? Or are you hardcore and only accept real clones and none of this contemporary rubbish? :-)

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?

Thunder'n'Lightning and iteam

Good news today. Not only did I finally succeed in getting to name a What the Duck strip, but there's a new Thunder and Lightning release. There are some sweeet new features, focused around AI and an aircraft carrier as well as purty graphical enhancements as you can tell from yonder youtube video below. Also the game is now available as an autopackage making it easier to install for Lusers everywhere, as well as Wusers (!?).

That's the first time I've embedded a youtube video on this blog. Should I do it more regularly? I've avoided it in the past but I quite liked that one.

iteam progress

The iteam project is making rapid progress. Only incepted about a month ago they have made tangible progress. Whilst you still can only get this Gunbound-inspired game via SVN for the time being, it surely can't be long before an actual release should they keep up this kind of momentum.

I'd never heard of Gunbound before I came across iteam. Showing my age a bit... bring back the Spectrums and the Amigas I say! Still looks like a Worms clone to me. Although true gamers would say Scorched Earth, right? :-D

Back on topic, and some more evidence of their progress:

Ok, from never having posted a youtube video to doing it twice in 1 post. Niiice. But damn that music is catchy...

The FreeCol is releasing version 0.7.0 of their Colonization-inspired game on Friday if their roadmap is anything to go by. No point talking more about it until!

"Daaa daa da... duuu duu du..." :-)

Gate 88 to become open source?

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D

I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph.

The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0.

Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life...

The i-team project gets a new forum, meaning I have one less reason to browse Ubuntu's! Yay! It also got a wiki. By all accounts there has been quite a lot of coding going on by the i-team guys so I'm hopeful we'll see something fairly soon.

The rather more mature Atomic Tanks project, another game similar to Scorched Earth / Worms, just released version 2.4 of their game. The game is portable to Windows and Mac OS X although there only seems to be a Linux binary (rpm) for the latest version. According to the release announcement it also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)

It seems that the rather cool freeware abstract RTS game Gate88 has an open source future. I encourage people to lobby the author in a friendly manner to speed up the process. I got in touch yesterday although he has yet to reply.

The Post With No Name

The other day I came across Battleship 88. Assuming it was freeware, being Windows only, I didn't mention it but did download it. Given the lack of a source code download on the website, I was a bit surprised at being forced to agree to the GPL before installing it. Despite what the word Battleship imbues - some form of strategy - the game is much more arcade in it's nature. You steer your battleship around blowing the <expletive> out of anything that gets near you. The game is complete - the graphics and sound are polished and it even contains an introduction to the gameplay (which is topical).

Anyway, those who followed the link might have noticed it's to an organisation called www.gamecreation.org and they have completed a few games. I wonder if they all are available under the GPL and, if so, where the sources are?

One game they list, which I've been looking for since forgetting it's name, is Shotgun Debugger. It's a top down shoot 'em up, cross platform, the sources definitely are available, and the gameplay looks crisp and fun.

The Gunbound inspired game that is being "brainstormed at the moment now has a website and a name - i-team.

FreeTrain

And an interesting little debate cropped up on the tt-forums when somebody labelled FreeTrain's graphics as "awful". Some people can be very judgemental without ever actually investigating things. The reality is that FreeTrain's graphics are good but a different style to (Open)TTD's, and as such appeal to a different audience. I personally prefer the really varied cityscapes that you can generate in FreeTrain vs the somewhat repetitive towns that litter an OpenTTD landscape.

Other than all that I have not yet gotten around to working on the previously talked about award categories, but I will try and work on that for tomorrow's blog entry.

The Free Gamer forums really should be more stable now after the freeforums.org guys eventually resolved all the problems afflicting their service. Pffft, free services, eh? ;-)