Fictional Air Combat 0.1.3

Fictional Air Combat 0.1.3

I recently discovered YAFS on SF.net: Fictional Air Combat, which is an action flight simulation at an early development stage.

There are 32 bit Win/Lin releases available, but the Linux release contains source which can be easily recompiled for 64 bit systems. (So did I.)

I have not yet tried to find out the licenses/authors of 3d graphics and textures (and don't know if I will). It seems however that they are all original. (And I like them.) There is no sound yet.

Height map for FAC

Levels get created from height maps and a texture placement file, which has an own graphical editor for it (though I wasn't able to find the tool).

Fictional Air Combat reminds me of Thunder&Lightning, which was unfortunately updated last time nearly one year ago.

Fictional Air Combat V_0.1.3

Watch the video in high definition.

Oh no more updates

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb, and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I'd give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at - now maybe I'm not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL

I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems - occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X - and I'm too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige.

Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won't work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy :-( so I haven't tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely. Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided.

There's also a new Thunder 'n' Lightning release. This action / flight combat project is becoming a much more playable game; performance enhancements, more graphical effects, and more deadly enemies. It is available as an autopackage - so should be easy to install for Linux users, and there's a Windows binary too. I'm a big advocate of using autopackage for games because it makes it easier for people to play your FOSS game.

I'm not posting videos on Free Gamer at the moment because, well, they don't work with Gnash and I'm not too fussed about setting up the proprietry Flash package. Gnash does claim to be compatable enough to play YouTube videos but sadly not on my machine.

There's also more talk going on relating to a consolidated Free game art effort in the comments of previous posts - at some point I'll be less lazy and summarize it all. One of the guys is designing a website for it and it will be the first official www.freegamedev.net project.

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..." :-)

Open Source Flight Combat

Flying Guns

Thunder & Lightening

glHorizon

glHorizon 3D cockpit

Combat Simulator Project

Decopter

Hey, I'm up early - or in bed late. Anyway, I came across a few open source flight combat simulators last night and thought I'd comment on them. I thought the OS flight combat sim scene was barren, but that is definitely not the case.

The main protagonist in this FLOSS game genre is GL-117. It's been stable and polished for quite some time now. There is vaunted development on a v2 of the game, but nothing tangible to speak of. It is more an arcade game than a simulation but packs of fun nonetheless!

RedShift is inspired by GL-117, so will be another arcade flight combat game. It's early days and in the progress of a rewrite from C to C++ but the author is optimistic that he'll be able to release an update in a month or so.

Flying Guns is a WWI flight combat simulation game where you can engage as many as 100 AI planes at a time. It's intrigingly written in Java and does look very, very cool & fun... but the webstart prototype version didn't work for me. :-(

If you want something a little more futuristic then you'll be wanted to take a look at Thunder & Lightening. Development is very active lately. It takes inspiration from 80s classics like Carrier Command and Midwinter giving it an interesting single player edge, but there's still much work to do.

Another Carrier Command inspired title is Carrier 2. The graphics looks very nice but the gameplay still needs working on, so it's at a similar stage of development to Thunder & Lightening. Still both projects have been in development for years so I am optimistic they will eventually turn into excellent FLOSS games.

Back to more contemporary planes, with glHorizon which is a freeware Windows only game. Focused on the F22, some of the visuals are spectacular. No "news" for over a year on this one but I have a gut feeling there'll be updates. The full 3D cockpit looks gorgeous. I hope the author releases the game under an open source license and then it can be embraced by the FLOSS game community. :-)

Then we come to the Combat Simulator Project. This really does look gorgeous. It has been in steady development for over 5 years and aims to provide cross-platform, high-fidelity, large-scale combat scenarios. It is probably the most ambitious of all the open source combat simulation games. The game is still at the demo stage but they are well on their way to acheiving their goals. Hopefully a new version (0.6 was released in April 2006 and is Windows-only) will be out soon. Like glHorizon, it sports 3D cockpits which look pretty cool.

FlightGear will most likely never support combat but is the leading open source flight simulator game so always worth a mention - I mean, you can fly combat planes even if you can't fight with them.

<update> Palomino is another less-combat oriented flight simulator, but looks great none-the-less. Given they showcase fighter jets, I'm hopeful combat will eventually get added to Palomino. <update/>

There are a few older titles that are no longer developed but once showed promise. Vertigo looks like some of the flight sims I used to play in the early 90s - nostalgic. ACM is another retro freeware flight combat game. The windows version is no longer available - I don't know why but that makes me smile. BFRIS is abandonware and I can only find the Windows version to download, but it has an interesting claim to fame:

First game to ship with Windows 95/98/NT *and* Linux binaries on the same CD out of the box. (from Moby Games)

The helicopter combat simulation scene is less healthy. There's Eagles that looks surprisingly good considering it's 10 years old - it looks like it uses a voxel based renderer, something I've not seen in a long time. Decopter also looks really promising but no updates since 2003 give little reason to hope. So it looks like you are stuck with the rather non-combat related Search & Rescue which is a bit more of a playable game than the other two but, as I say, not at all combat oriented.

If you are after a flight combat fix, look no further than GL-117. However there is plenty more to look forward to, so keep an eye on the scene, especially Thunder & Lightening and the Combat Simulator Project.