Free, libre games and development news
SourceForge.net has "Project of the month" to promote communities supporting their favorite projects.
December 2012: UFO:AI battles against JStock in the poll for "Project of the month". It's a close race.
You know what you have to do.
EvolutionRTS, a nice looking (but sadly CC-by-NC-ND licensed) game based on the SpringRTS engine also saw an update to version 1.3 this month (check out this gameplay video).
For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome ;)
Further more the UFO:AI team is making some great progress after their highly acclaimed 2.3 release two months ago. Besides a a lot smaller changes, various new sounds have been added since then and the rockets got a nice new explosion effect:
Oh and maybe this is of interest for some of you (personally I never really understood the need for it though): War§ow can now be played in a browser window via a Firefox plugin! Check out their development blog for more details.
Check out more screenshots and some videos here!
But lets talk about the actual game. Ya3Dag is aiming to become a single player adventure game (engine) where you play a poor legless pirate ;) It is already playable to a certain extent, but currently there is only a Windows version available (it works well with WINE though).
I quickly send an email to the developer to ask him about this and some other things regarding the media license and future development: Currently he does not have any plans for porting the game to other platforms, but he is open to other contributors. So, if some people are interested in collaboration it might make sense to set up a proper source repository and such (e.g. a sf.net site). Furthermore he does have plans about replacing all artworks with really free/FOSS ones (Yay!), but currently the project is still far from reaching this goal.
Recently they have put out a call for help (especially for artists) so maybe you feel like contributing to a really ambitious project? They specifically state that you don't need to be perfect in modeling etc... someone with a good base knowledge and willingness to improve is very welcome! Check out their FAQ if you want to know more about the project.
The rest of the project description sounds awesome too: Alternative history (after WW2) and game-play similar to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory? Sign me up! But check out their website, and this thread for more awesome pictures! Oh and did I mention that they are looking for help too?
The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.
Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.
PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.
Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.
I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)
Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.
A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.
jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.
irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.
There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI, the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.)
Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though.
FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved.
Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced PARPG - Post-Apocalyptic RPG - to the world, a game that uses FIFE to create a new, erm, post-apocalyptic RPG. I think he'd gotten a bit tired after many years working on FIFE - when you work on an engine sometimes the end result is less tangible and harder to motivate yourself for.
The announcement of PARPG seemed to galvanise the FIFE community, with new and old faces now popping up to fix and featurize FIFE after a fairly long quiet spell in development. There seems to be a lot of interest in contributing to PARPG with threads like this popping up in the forum. It seems they are looking primarily for C++/Python devs at the moment.
Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. Expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods. Increase your power with a well balanced economy and with strategic trade and diplomacy.
With 3 promising active game projects on the go, the FIFE community future looks bright.
Like Morrowind? OpenMW 0.6 got released. Still, you need Morrowind to play it, and that's not Free, so...
It's something-am, I have overdue work, and a Freshmeat announcement put a bee in my bonnet about posting.
LinCity-NG 2.0 is out in the wild, and boy is it starting to look like a nice game. There are only two things that look a bit weak these days - the name (NG? Linux-only?) and the UI (a bit scrappy). For those who don't know, LinCity-NG is a GotM fork of Lincity which brings it into this century with much nicer graphics and a more informative user interface.
Plenty of nice new graphics (notably vegetation, grass, trees) make the game look aesthetically smooth. New resource management (water) adds to the depth of gameplay. There's a load of other new aspects too but there's no official announcement and I'm too busy procrastinating to go digging.
Glest (the 3D RTS) is dead, long live Glest! No, really. Mainline Glest development has ended and Glest Advanced Engine (information), a community-born enhancement, is to officially become the new Glest. Glest Advanced Engine is a project built on top of Glest, that adds new features to the game, it includes both new code and data.
There's a whopping development update on the UFO:AI website (3D TBS RPG). I would link directly, for posterity, but there's no direct links or rss or anything like that. So I guess I have to summarize. Bah!
Map editor improvements, 3D geoscape improvements, UI improvements, new music, sounds & models, new hiring screen, texture updates and new textures, AI infrastructure updates, battlescape improvements, aircraft updates, balancing work, improvements to campaign system, er... basically everything got a bit better.
It looks like the next release will kick serious alien a$$, and really this project is producing one of the stand out open source games, I'm sure you'll all agree. Not that the game doesn't have weaknesses. A lack of really talented core developers mean features like destructible terrain and buildings (a feature found in the original 2D UFO games) is not currently possible. Such issues come down to the underlying technology which is built on an enhanced version of the Quake 2 source.
I'm sure there's some smaller game updates I'm forgetting, like perhaps Word War Vi 0.25 or Vacuum Magic 0.8 or Free Vikings 0.8 or something, but for the life of me I just can't seem to remember... *shrugs*
Early morning edit: just came across Open Simulator. Kinda WTF.
Post-early-morning-edit edit: aaaaaaahhhhh I remember now. The 3D Ultima Online client project Iris2 has a new stable release. Lots of improvements and it looks great. I wonder when the UO community will wake up and move over to an all-open-source platform. :-)
Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.
Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.
I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.
There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.
Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.
I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.
Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!
Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.
I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?
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NettlersSo we have now at least five working games 'inspired' by the board game "Die Siedler von Catan" hosted on SourceForge.net: Solitaire Settlers of Catan 1.0 (new release), Pioneers 0.12.2 (new release), Settlers3D, Nettlers (Win only at the moment) and jCatano.
No problem really, it's a great game and the projects have something individual in each of them. I enjoyed test-playing Nettlers via Wine. I was surprised by a well self-explaining interface. (Other candidates on the list are rather unclear about how to do what.)
Yes, these are the controls. No kidding.Stephen M. Cameron released Word War vi 0.08, a retro-looking, good-sounding (98% self-made, CC-BY-SA 2.0/3.0 sounds/music) Sopwith-ish/Side-scroller game. It's slightly geeky nerdy, just look at the 'intro':
In the beginning, there was ed.
Ed is the standard text editor.
Then there was vi, and it was good.
Then came emacs, and disharmony.
Your mission is to traverse core memory and rid the host of emacs.
It will not be an easy mission, as there are many emacs friendly processes.
Word of warning: the controls are horrible... I also unfortunately was only able to compile it without sound. But it is pretty cool!
Also, UFO: AI 2.2.1 has been released:
This makes me feel a little warm, as I remember, that there was a forum discussion about the the unfairness of the condition to never loose more than a specific amount of civilians' lives. Ah Open Sourcia, land of the free. ^^
Quite a lot to cover, simply because there's a lot of small items that have backed up in my little "FG updates" list which I've been waiting to pool together.
Firstly, the "big" news in that UFO:AI 2.2 got released. There's plenty to write home about, tons of new features, and it's an awesome game. I'm not a great fan of some of the micro-management although it's part of the original X-COM games so understandably part of UFO:AI - I would like to see some automation aids (auto-assign ammo etc) - but that aside this is a really, really good game. If it was released as a commercial game it'd be respected, and because it's Free Software it's only going to get better. Here's a video:
So, the Apricot project is gaining pace. They have still to decide on what type of game they are making. I hope they make, out of their choices, a platform game. I must say, I really disagree with some of their assertions. If a platform game is "heavy on the engine" then I feel sorry for the engine - platform games have very little landscape on-screen at any one time and a good 3D engine should be able to isolate displayed content from off-screen content in order to retain speed. "Lots of work" to create levels? Out of all genres platform games really lend themselves to tile-based layouts with lots of reusable content, so with a half-assed level editor map creation should be pretty easy even if level design is a fine art (but isn't it with any genre).
How cool does that look!?
Spring 1944 is a world war II mod for TA:Spring and it looks F<censored/> ACE! With Spring and Spring mod installation getting easier in recent releases and some mods really coming along with their content, there's a lot to be excited about. :-)
Talking of open source RTS games, Glest and it's mods are moving along nicely too. There's the 2nd SST:LD release (think I covered it a while ago, but no harm repeating it), a Norseman mod (beta), and an upcoming Domineonic mod (alpha). The Domineonic mod especially looks very, very promising.
Too much to go into detail with really... ;-)
Last but not least, Privateer Universe made a release and quickly followed it with developments meaning they no longer are a "mod of a mod", breaking away from the old Privateer Remake and updating to use the latest version of Vega Strike. That's all still in SVN (compilation instructions) but they are making good progress.
Privateer Universe aims to expand upon the original Privateer universe in contrast to the strict canon remake that is Privateer Gemini Gold.
TOOMANYCOOLTHINGSHEADABOUTTOEXPLO..........
(Think of a dead dial tone)
Want to know what's worse than a dog breaking wind? 2 dogs doing so... the Free Gamer hounds are gassing the place and making it very difficult to... oh god... no... not again! ARGH!
I will try my best not to faint but I can't promise I will survive the nauseating stench that keeps filling the room whilst the two hounds sit quietly satisfied under my desk.
I gave UFO:AI a try, the SVN version. It's really rather good - spiffy graphics, lovely sound, and very well presented. The music especially is excellent. Support for my laptop resolution of 1440x900 made me happy and is only the second Free/freeware game I know to do that - the other being Astro Menace. Whilst some people reported the beta as a bit unstable, the SVN verson has been as steady as a rock for me although I have only played it perhaps an hour in total so YMMV.
Overall it is shaping up nicely and is definitely one of the best Free games around. However, there were a few things that bothered me.
The micro-management is too excessive and is pervasive throughout the game. I really don't think it's necessary to have the level of detail in terms of managing ammunition for individual soldiers that there is. It's difficult enough when you only have 1 set of ammunition to cater for (think any FPS game e.g. Half-Life) let alone having to be aware of 8 people's ammunition. Making sure stocks are there is one thing but having to give your guys and your space ships spare ammo and mess around rearming inbetween missions is not fun. If I wanted to manage stock, I'd go sign up at my local supermarket and count baked bean cans.
Your scientists have stats. Your workers have stats. Everything seems to have stats. And that means you spend far too long trying to understand and/or balance them. You assign production queues which take a certain number of hours, and you assign priorities to items in the production queue. This aspect of UFO:AI is less game and more factory management. They have a system probably not far off commercial CRM and ERP in terms of the depth of detail.
In my opinion, unless something is really meaningful, it should be automatically handled. Chalk it down to sensible management i.e. assume you hire the best scientists and workers, assume you're not being ripped off by buying stock - you are the "first and last" line of defense, I'm sure the world wouldn't be too picky about making a profit on selling you stuff! This is a game, not HR. Soldiers will rearm themselves if stocks are there, they shouldn't need to be rearmed by the player, etc etc. I would make basic weapons and ammo (i.e. everything available at the start of the game) naturally limitless (assume the world's military provide it) and leave the production / weapons management to only the alien stuff you research yourself.
I know this all was in the original UFO games but just because a game franchise is really good doesn't mean the gameplay is perfect. I think the amount of fiddling required with these things and the consequences if you forget them (e.g. going into missions without ammo) are a negative for the game.
Also I couldn't seem to intercept UFOs. Having to arm the ships at the start of the game seemed like needless administrative overhead (surely they should be armed by default). After arming them, no matter what order I clicked on the UFOs and my own ships as presented by the UI, I couldn't get my interceptor to go more than about 1 pixel away from the base before it turned back, which effectively killed the game for me. Hopefuly they'll have this sorted for the 2.2 release.
I think the isometric view (toggled in graphic options) is both true to the original franchise and also more usable as it's easier to visually understand the scene in front of you. I'd like to see that enabled by default.
I would also like to see the soldier buttons also carry some information about the soldiers. Perhaps partially fill them with a lighter blue to represent how many movement points a soldier has. Make the blue go red if they are injured, stuff like that.
There was only one thing that trully bothered me, and that's how the UFO:AI team have their SVN laid out.
You check out the ufoai module from SVN. This module contains both the game source (ok) and the map source. To play the SVN version of the game, you must run 'make maps' which takes 6 hours on a fast machine, probably more on mine (I left it overnight). These 'compiled' maps are in a platform independent format. Why include them as source in the main module? Surely you have a different 'maps' module for the map source and commit the 'compiled' maps to the main module or even another module. That way only 1 person ever has to compile a particular map (i.e. the person working on it) and everybody else gets up-to-date maps without messing around (svn up, and hey presto). I'm pushing them to do just that.
It's important to organise your SVN properly. Why? SVN is the 'starting point' for your most useful members of the community - addicted players and contributors. If your source layout causes problems for them, it means you'll have less people playtesting or trying to contribute because they'll get frustrated trying to get the latest and greatest version.
It's also important to ensure your dogs have a good diet because otherwise they'll kill you with biological warfare. Incidentally, talking of good diet, we did upgrade their dog food due to this problem. Unfortunately upgrading dog food also upgraded power and intensity, so I think I might find the cheapest stuff I can next time out in a desparate measure to reduce their emissions.
Time flies when you're forgetting to do things, like update this blog. Damn, I make a post, have a nap, get distracted, and 6 days later I remember I was supposed to be posting again. I have umpteen drafts of half-finished opinions; games get released and I don't know about it. I need to invent an army of workers that will mine the web and report for me.
The Free Gamer forums got a facelift thanks to Qudobup, the guy also behind the look for Free Gamer. It looks really cool and since the forum supports RSS you'll see a few forum-related things going into this site in the nearish future.
Scourge 0.19 got released! Yay! No changelog on the site? Boo. Seems like binaries will eventually be available for all major platforms and will appear on Sourceforge. Despite the lack of information about this release on the site, having monitored Scourge development for a while, I can say 0.19 contains some really cool new features - outdoor environments and more storyline - and some important improvements - much better AI for route finding. It's on the cusp of being a really good game. All it needs is some slightly better artwork.
UFO2000 have had a major new release. Also their website got a facelift and it's probably one of the best looking FOSS game project pages you'll see. Beautiful. Somebody (fan? developer?) commented on a previous post that the community is struggling for players. UFO was (is?) a great series but it's primarily a single player game. I don't see how the multiplayer version can be quite as fun as a big part of the game was building up your team and researching new technology as you waged the war against the alien onslaught.
If the UFO2000 team could focus on a single player version I think they would see their community grow significantly, but they've got a lot of catching up to do with UFO:AI which has focused on SP from the beginning. Still, I do have a soft spot for UFO2000, having observed steady progress for many years on the project. Seeing the gameplay video on the UFO2000 site made me yearn for a single player edition. I want a game I can tackle at my own pace, y'know, multiplayer games tend to favour those who play a lot.
Battle Tanks is another multiplayer-focused game that looks great, and version 0.6 was released the other day. I'm tempted to try it, but again that multiplayer angle just doesn't appeal to me. Even if they offered a simple single player edition where you fought bots, that'd be fine. Please, let me play with myself. I mean, er, um...
I want to say more but no more time. I'll try to be more regular, perhaps doing shorter posts if I'm in a rush rather than no posting at all.
There's beta installers for Linux and Windows for the popular open source game UFO:AI. The changelog for version 2.2 is impressive. The download link is a bit hard to get to - a ploy to stop too many players mistakenly downloading the beta when they didn't realise it might have bugs. Anyway, grab it here, and help them make UFO:AI 2.2 a great release. :-)
There was an interesting comment on the observation I made regarding the version number of LordsAWar:
0.0.3 for the lordsawar version doesn't mean 3% done. The game has most aspects of Warlords 2 implemented, where as freelords only has a few.
Well why version 0.0.3 then? Ok, I admit, version numbers are probably one of the least important aspects of game design. But, come on, really, if your game has lots of features and close to what you consider "1.0" for your game, then label is as such. People who are casually looking for a game to play will see 0.0.3 and think, "not even alpha." They won't play it. Players are fickle like that.
Version numbers imply the amount of progress towards the author's vision of the game. To me, 1.0 is the original vision and past that are evolutions of that vision.
Speaking of vision, I'll also give a quick mention to JCRPG whose author seems to be relentless in his efforts to bring a quality classic RPG framework with all the modern trimmings. Some of his trees are not to far off being life-like in quality. If somebody had the drive to start making a game based on his work so far, thereby pushing things even further, we could see some amazingly atmospheric games.
My brother alluded to an interesting point when commenting on the state of modern gaming. FPS games are monotonous, they are rarely atmospheric. It's just the same sprint shoot sprint cycle except with different weapons and backdrops. The gaming genre has become boring as the limitations of games have eroded away. Complete freedom to move often has the undesired consequence of making the world less interesting as there is no longer a challenge to navigating it - just find the next gap and run through it, all guns blazing. CRPGs used to be mazey, claustrophoic ordeals where you constantly had to plan to avoid getting into too many consecutive battles as monsters were quite fatal. The game worlds were not massive, but they were hard. The gaming industry seems to have forgotten that an enclosed but well defined world is more intriguing than a a massive open one which just looks pretty and has no substance.
Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't played many commercial games in the last 5 or 6 years, but when I have it reinfoces the above feeling. Just a thought.
There's a couple of newish irrlamb gameplay videos. Worth watching if you want to see what the game is like and how devious some of the gameplay can be. For me, irrlamb is definitely one of the most exciting open source game projects around at the moment, being both innovative and challenging in it's gameplay.
Expect some really nice graphics in the next UFO:AI release. A few modelling maniacs seem to have gotten very interested in contributing, which is always good for an open source game project.
As of some time last week, an interesting major change landed in the OpenTTD development trunk - loading of 32bpp graphics and levels of zoom. It's one of the big steps along the road to getting high resolution graphics into OpenTTD. Also it provides a platform for the artwork contributors to see their art in game rather than have to paste it together to showcase it. A completely Free (no TTD required) and beautiful OpenTTD just got one step closer to reality. I'm hopeful that maybe a beta of this work might appear before the end of the year. The image to the right is an actual in-game shot! :-)
Java Classic RPG, the Eye of the Beholder & Dungeon Master inspired project, gained climates this week. If only the quality of the artwork matched the quality of the code developments! I was thinking about this, along with working a bit more on Fortress, and observing Scourge developments, and realising there are very few open source / free medieval and fantasy model resources going. Most projects with good artwork in this genre are either pixel art (like Wesnoth and Daimonin) or restricted (like Planeshift and Eternal Lands).
So, yeah, I think the scene needs a bit of dedicated medieval and fantasy modelling to happen so that all the exciting medieval and fantasy projects can pull quality artwork from a common base. Maybe there already is this kind of stuff available, do you know where? Or maybe there are people out there interested in modelling this kind of stuff. Do you know any? Spread the word!
I'll end today on a coding note. I was working on a layout engine (as part of Vexi, an open source project I lead) and came up against a problem where conversion between ints and floats and back (Java) was causing the assigned space between child boxes to be less than the parent box (box being a layout construct - don't worry about it). The solution was a bit of casting voodoo. I love it. :-)
// casting voodoo to make sure we don't have leftover pixels
diff = child.contentheight + (int)(slack+total) - (int)total;My attempts to explain that to my girlfriend were a spectacular failure! :-D
Sometimes I finish a post feeling apprehensive about being able to find more information to populate the next days ramble on open source gaming matters. However, just earlier I was explaining to a friend the difference between open source games and commercial ones, and realise just why there always is something more to talk about - Free games are not just an end product for a player; they are a process, a community oriented process, with visible progress along the way.
There really are so many high quality open source game projects around, it's a joy to see them all evolving. :-)
Just to emphasise what I mean, Danger from the Deep 0.3.0 just popped up on Freshmeat. This rather awesome project simulating WWII submarine combat gains 4 more U-boats, shader support i.e. eye candy, and better sound support amongst other improvements.
It really does look so good. I remember playing some submarine game when I was younger and just loving the immersion, stalking enemy boats before blowing them out of the water. I just wish I had the hardware to recreate that experience with DftD - maybe by the time it's "complete" I will. ;-)
And another awesome game is looming on the horizon. As seen on /., the Blender Foundation have announced a project to create a high quality open source game in conjunction with Crystal Space project. For those who don't know, Blender does have a game engine but it does not scale very well and is notoriously difficult to debug games made with it.
The previous open effort by the Blender community was Project Orange (aka Elehpants Dream), so that is a benchmark for the quality we can expect to see. High, high quality. :-D
A few other miscellaneous things...
I was quite impressed by this glossary of Oolite ships. I really should play and review that game.
I really like seeing the new artwork going into games, such as this and this going into the next version of UFO:AI - another of those awesome open source game projects.
I managed to come across a resource I once had bookmarked but lost many years ago - Amit's game programming. I can't find the specific pages that interested me (there's a ton of information there to sift through) but I'm happy I found it nonetheless.
Running out of stuff to talk about? My posts seem to get longer by the day...
UFO:AI 2.1 was released (changelog, download) yesterday.
This is turning into an incredible game. It takes the best elements of the original UFO games and builds on them with contemporary technologies to produce what really has to be one of the leading - if not the best - open source games available. If you want to see how cool it looks, just go over to their screenshot gallery.
Importantly this version adds the foundations for a storyline. So subsequent releases will include a story to compliment the gameplay. Awesome! :-)
3D RPG game Scourge has seen quite a lot of development since it's last version. Notably, the game has been localized and translated to Italian, and the UI is being overhauled with a completely new inventory screen that is more traditional i.e. similar to games like Diablo.
With those new features and lots of bugs fixed, hopefully a new release will follow soon.
The 3D post-apocolyptic RTS Warzone 2100 Resurrection team snook out a 2.0.6 release (changelog, download, screenshots) at the weekend as well. It is mainly bug fixes, but shows that they are working away at improving the game - which these days is also another really good open source game.
Another small release for Those Funny Funguloids. It is still Windows only but, GPL and all, hopefully a Linux version will be out soon.
And I came across Memonix the other day, published by Viewizard of Astromenace fame. It is a polished game for kids that is freeware on Linux. It's really good fun for those young'uns. And me. :-)
In oher news, I'm happy because there's a whole year before we have to suffer the next April foolish idiots day. ;-)
Music tip:
RLP & Wise - On Your Side (Electro mix)