Updates Galore

Iris2

There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days:

• Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes


• FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features (announcement)


• Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances (announcement)


• SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download (announcement)


• Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor (news page)


• Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something)


• Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project


• Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info

NewCol

NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine displaying forests, rivers, mountains and seas with a textured relief map, gaussian random number generator and z-buffer like algorithm." It's obviously inspired a bit by colonization, but it looks very original in it's design. I wasn't able to find a direct link to the screenshots page so you'll have to go their yourself.

Finally, one of my favourite projects Scourge has seen some great improvements lately. There's a lot more people contributing to the game and, thanks to the increased visibility of Free media out there, has gained some impoved models. The SVN version of Scourge is pretty damn good and the game only really needs some decent character models to become one of the more impressive Free Software games available.

Do you want to find some open source media for your game? Then these are the two places you should start:

• Free 3D and 2D art and audio resources on the FreeGameDev wiki


• Free Art Search, a tool for searching for open source images

Uh... I posted way more than I intended to... I need a cup of tea!

Four New Free Games

Of course, when I say new, I mean new to me. New to me means, generally, a bit off the radar in the Free Software game community. So, with the post title qualified, let's start...

Top10 is a realistic kart racing game for Windows and Linux. It reminds me of Karting Race, which is fairly inevitable since they are both kart racing simulations, but Top10 is GPL (yay!) whereas Karting Race is freeware (not-so-yay!) so it already has that going for it over Karting Race. (See, I believe that being open source is a significant strength for a freely-available game.) It's quite playable already although still undergoing heavy development. Less words, more video:

Opposite Lock is a racing game for J2ME platforms, originally written for mobile phones. The author has released the engine under a GPL license with 3 free tracks, and is planning to release the game tools including a tile-based track editor, as open source too, and eventually his game tracks under a CC license. It looks like a really fun game, is a complete game, and could be great for the GP2X or maybe OLPC or similar platforms. It's a bit like the original MarioKart but with cars. See the video:

Thanks to Andrew for bringing that one up in the forums.

Teewars is a cute 2D deathmatch game. It's a bit of a cross between something like Quake and Metal Blob Solid. It's very similar in scope to the Liero-style of game, an open source version being OpenLieroX. It looks full of potential although it's probably going to be multiplayer only. However, there is a caveat. It's under a rather strange open source license.

How am I doing? That's 3 so far. I've got one more. OpenClou! is an effort to keep the genre of the burglary simulations alive. It's 3D, it's open source, beyond that and the following video, and the obvious ethical debate on whether we should promote or glorify theft, I can't really say much more!

That's it for today. Very video laden! :-)