One of the Christmas presents this year was Battle Tanks Xmas Edition. It introduces more interactivity (very GTA-like stuff) and a lot of fixes.
No kidding, this is the biggest update we've ever done to our little game.
Sounds promising.
Warzone 2100 2.0.10
Warzone 2100 2.0.10 was released shortly before 2008. It fixes ATI 3D graphics and Vorbis 1.2 sound support and should make the game fully playable for some who were not able to run it with sound or at reasonable frame rates. Also terrain rendering is supposed to be faster and produce prettier results. The ex-commercial project is for me the best free strategy game available. It was GPL-ed, excluding videos and music and I hope that it will soon feature some cool tracks to make the click-action even more pleasant.
Stormbaan Coureur 2.0.2 is available for linux systems. It features a new model, which I think is sexy, although I don't understand how the rear axis is physically possible (you'll see what I mean.) Another feature is a terribly low frame rate in comparison to former versions. =( Anyways, take a look at the official video!
Dead Justice
It's quite impressive what you can find when browsing SourceForge's project list... quite impressive... What I found is Cat MotherDead Justice, a Directx-only 3rd-person shooter, which is a stopped and open-sourced commercial project. It has good graphics and does run stable. The best part for me is: The art is under GPL. This hopefully means that we can expect some imported pretty/prettier models/maps/textures in games like Nexuiz or OpenArena, though I think any 3D game could profit from it, for example JCRPG, which could use some fully-animated models - new textures would do the trick! Maybe even someone would care to port the currently windows-only Cat Mother Dead Justice...
Well what would you know. There actually was plenty happening yesterday just I wasn't looking in the right places...
The assualt course racing game Sturmbahnfahrer has been renamed for reasons of political correctness. The new name is Stormbaan Coureur (dutch for "assault course racer") and there is a new release, version 1.5, which has save points, a half pipe, turntables, brakelights and more. It is currently only available as a source download, but hopefully that'll change soon. Whilst the game is aimed at Linux, it uses PLIB and ODE so is theoretically compilable on anything those two support (which is all major platforms).
Crashtest
Stormbaan Coureur is also the basis for another game - crashtest, the education crash test simulator for Linux. Interesting... :-)
There's also a new version of the Atomic Tanks. It's a worms clone and the project makes regular releases. Good stuff.
There's a lovely long post on the Vega Strike devblog from the project leader: version 0.5.0 looks a little closer! Basically the summer has given several core developers time to smash through bugs in SVN, implement some smart new features, and create an improved universe to roam about in. The only word of caution is that it seems VS SVN needs lots of memory. Hopefully they can slim that down a little prior to release.
There's an update in denial of project death on the Ecksdee wiki. It's been a while since the last release of this Wipeout-style futuristic racing game. There's been lots of development activity so hopefully that will result in a playable release in the near future.
And probably the best bit of news for the day - Freeciv 2.1beta6 is going to be out in the next few days. They built a 2.1beta5 release but it had a fatal flaw in it so announcements were shelved and a beta6 release is planned once the problems are ironed out. I look forward to it! :-)
