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!

Battle Just Started 0.1.0

Battle Just Started is a fun multiplayer 3D tank game. It has slightly cartoonish graphics and a basic AI (so you can play single player) and is in the early stages of development, but there have been several releases this month already - "release early, release often!"

Also Stendhal 0.56 was released, adding a new city among other things.

Interesting FLOSS game news is a little slow on the ground at the moment.

*Charlie crouches down and puts his ear on the floor*

Mono and Bubble Thing

Well it appears I missed out Onyx from the special on open source 3d space games... or did I? With no pointer to a source repository nor a zip/tar/rar of source, or a freeware download of any mention, I can't classify this game as anything other than todoware at the moment. Contact the Onyx developer(s) if you want to beta test the game.

There has been updates to the 2D open source & free MMORPGs (that was a mouthful) Crossfire and Stendhal. Stendhal looks cute but those kind of games are not my cup of tea.

Mono

Bubble Thing

Something I did find a lot of fun was mono, by Binary Zoo. Sadly it's only available for Windows, although I'd be interested to hear if it worked through WINE. It's fantastic fun and really shows it's possible to innovate even though the graphics and gameplay are so simple.

A great freeware title that runs in Linux, with similar innovative qualities, is Bubble Thing. Inflate the bubbles until they burst and see if you can create bubble-popping chain reactions. You can make the bubbles absolutely massive with controlled inflation.

I know this is supposed to be an open source games blog but those two freeware titles really caught my eye (and attention).

Currently the games list is missing a large number of iD-based open source 'stuff' such as Darkplaces, FreeDoom, the Vavoom Engine, OpenArena, Hexen II: HoT, and others. There's a lot of them. I'm working on adding them to the list in a way that does not swamp the rest of the list in the new 3 column layout. Expect it in a couple of weeks.