Snippets and Tidbits

Due to personal reasons Free Gaming has been a bit slow lately. Here's a few snippets...

• Next version of True Combat: Elite will have HDR lighting making it the first Free Software Linux game to ship with HDR lighting (thanks Albert Santoni)
• VegaStrike gets network deathmatch support - go register and play on the online server
  
• ManiaDrive 1.2 bugfix release "no more crashes"
• Warzone Resurrection 2.0.4rc2
• OpenArena 0.5.0 - btw it's now a standalone download (and has been for a while, I think)
  
• Scourge! 0.15 which should be much more playable than previous releases with lots of work on making the character movement better
• Frets on Fire makes guitar playing fun ;-)

I'm off to suffer having lost my gal to her desire to be free! If only the female mind were open source...

Freeciv Beta + Mania Drive Update

There's been an update to Mania Drive. This one introduces a beginners storyline, which is a welcome addition to any non-expert drivers given the difficulty of the previous release! Lots of bug fixes, lots of new levels, and this game is definitely now one of the leading Free Software driving games available.

Also of note is the 2.1-beta2 release of Freeciv. I checked out the SDL version and it is really looking nice. However, the term "beta" means beta. The release is laden with bugs. Loading it up, the "Start New Game" option is disabled. After manually starting and connecting to a localhost server, the "Server Settings" button was impotent. Still, I remembered "set aifill=6" to give me some opposition although I couldn't work out how to make them tougher (and was too lazy to google) so played on easy AI.

I'll start by saying that they really need to review most of the UI - it is a usability nightmare. Everything is iconized making most actions guesswork until you gain any familiarity. The icons are very small, making them awkward to hit with the mouse. It's little things like the options icon being in the top left corner but not being at the edge making it far harder to spot and hit than it should be. It's like the Windows 98 start button all over again.

A simple tip for the devs - the tooltips are too slow, making them more frustrating than helpful. In fact, I'd forget tooltips for the little buttons and instead have a region above the buttons where it immediately displays the name of the button under the cursor:

The city dialogs are dreadful. They need rethinking from the ground up. I only got anywhere by guesswork - the unit queuing mechanism is completely unintuitive. Make it drag and drop, please. Also it would be really nice to have preset queues since I often make the same 4-5 entries in the build queue for each new city.

Also, why the devil are the science, revolution, and tax buttons located on the unit display in the bottom right? Group things together sensibly! Don't stick things somewhere for symmetry even though they do not belong there.

Also I think it's time to realise that moving the entire view for automatically moving units is 1) disorientating 2) annoying and 3) distracting. Either reset the view back to where it was before the automatic unit movement [since that's where I wanted to be] or making a sub-window (transport tycoon style) showing the currently active unit. Here's a mockup, with a few other peeves highlighted:

One of the most annoying problems was the UI moving the mouse cursor - often it was impossible to select units or cities because moving the mouse over them made it jump somewhere else.

Another glaring problem is the one highlighted in a previous blog on Freeciv - the lack of notifications to speed up multiplayer games really impacts single player games. I built two wonders but was never told about it - I only found out by spotting one city building city walls (I never do) and another on coinage.

I could go on [this all came from only 30 minutes of play] but, like I originally pointed out, this is a beta. If you want something reliable then stick with Freeciv 2.0.x for now. However, this is shaping up as a very nice game with good graphics that make Freeciv 2.0.x/1.x look incredibly dated. I look forward to the final 2.1 release although I don't expect it in 2006 on the evidence of this beta.

The Silver Lining Demo

There is a demo of The Silver Lining (formely known as King's Quest IX) available for download!

For those who don't know, King's Quest is a long running series from Sierra. Back in the good old days of 16 colours, this game combined the best possible graphics, fantastic landscapes, puzzles, and great stories. In fact, I don't think I enjoyed many adventure games more than King's Quest V. (Then again I stopped buying games after that.)

There's a good overview of the King's Quest series on everybody's favourite resource. There's a quick overview & screenshots of each of the KQ titles on vintage-sierra.com. There's also freeware VGA remakes of KQ1 and KQ2 availabe from ADG Interactive.

Enough background information... onto the game in question.

The Silver Lining

The Silver Lining is a 3D adventure game with breathtaking scenery and superbly animated characters. It is a fan-made game so it should combine, refine, and outshine the qualities of the original King's Quest titles. The visuals are stunning and if the gameplay is half as good, this will be an unmissable piece of freeware.

There's a trailer on Google Video, as well as a making-of.

The bad news, it's Windows only. And my laptop is too crap to run it.

I did try to talk them into open sourcing the engine a while back, but it fell on deaf ears. That is, "We don't want people to steal or ruin our game!" deaf ears. Ignorance is bliss.

I would be interested to know how well it works with WINE or Cedega.

ORTS - A Free Software RTS Game Engine

OTRS

Well, look what we have here. Joining the likes of Boson, Glest, and TA:Spring/TA3D is another Free 3D RTS game: ORTS.

The interesting thing about ORTS is the motivation - the AI.

ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games.

<snip> ...the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines.

<snip> ... the ORTS project [is] a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games.

<snip> Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate tasks to AI helper modules of increasing performance.

The game is not yet released as a download although you can grab a daily snapshot and build it yourself. Is it going to be released any time soon?

We have a working platform-independent server/client RTS [3D] game engine... We are working on a standard ORTS game... By autumn 2006 we hope to have a working system which is interesting for both RTS players and AI researchers.

This is definitely one worth watching out for. AI agents are already publicly available. It could be a game that's tougher and less predictable than usual. Most games challenge me but I'm, er, challenged.

What I do like about it is that the AI won't cheat. There's nothing that pisses me off more about a game than lazy developers giving the AI daft advantages because they were too inept [or short on time] to come up a decent AI. I like to be beaten because something has been clever, not because it can unfairly see all my units or build things for half the cost!

Gusanos on Linux

Thanks to Nicklas Marcusson who took the time to email me his findings on running Gusanos on Linux.

Without further ado:

I saw in your previous blog entry that you mentioned gusanos and I have been looking for a good liero like game for linux, and man I have to say this game is the cat's pyjamas :D

It is a shame that they have not made it easy to find the documentation on how to compile it for linux and what mods there is etc.

I thought I'd share my findings:

Build gusanos under linux:
http://gusanos.sourceforge.net
/docs/doku.php?id=main:installation_docs:linux

How to fix a compile error with the latest cvs source code:
http://comser.liero.org.pl
/forum/index.php?topic=250.msg2549#msg2549

Mods for gusanos:
http://powerhuhn.net/depot/gusanos/mods/

Fanzine covering the latest and greatest news regarding Gusanos:
http://powerhuhn.net/depot/gusanos/lieromag/

Video of the upcoming Quake mod for gusanos:
http://powerhuhn.net/depot/gusanos/videos/trailerg3a1.avi

Clanlib update, Pingus to follow?

Recently the ClanLib team released version 0.8.0 upon the indie game development world. This "game SDK" boasts an impressive number of games built using it, and one of the more notable ones is Pingus.

Pingus Level

Pingus Tutorial Island

Peng2illa

Pingus, many may recall, is a Lemmings clone, except we watch lots of penguins die instead of lemmings. The last release, 0.6, shows so much promise - it's stable and playable and comes with a tutorial set of levels (tutorials == good) presented nicely on an island. Sadly, it seems that development has somewhat ceased. From memory and list archive perusal, issues with ClanLib changes [from ClanLib 0.6 to the then-unstable 0.7] was hindering progress. I'm very hopeful that, now ClanLib 0.8 is out, development might resume and a release with more levels and depth can rekindle the project.

Another cool ClanLib-based game is Peng2illa. This circular pong-on-rails game is very good looking and about as fun as pong can be.

Sadly many of the games in the ClanLib list are either obselete or their development has stalled. Feuerkraft is one such example of any exciting game whose author, the prolific grumbel, has not had time for in the last few years which is a shame because it looks like it could be so cool if it was developed a bit more.

New Mistlands Download

What is Mistlands? It's a graphically impressive 3d open source rpg! At the end of July they released Milestone 5, just over a year since their last release. It's online-only, I think, which is a shame. Single player games just aren't the flavour these days.

I feel obliged to mention Gusanos. Thanks to Amos ML for the link and apologies for taking more than a month to post it. Gusanos is a Liero clone for modern operating systems. (Liero requires DOS or DOS emulation.) Whilst the Windows download was easy to get to, I couldn't see an obvious download for non-Windows platforms despite the homepage promise of portability. For those not familiar with the classic Liero, here's some gameplay videos of Gusanos. Think Worms vs Quake.

There was an update to Trackballs, making it more fun for younger kids which is good news for me and my 6 year old.

For the adventurous, there's a 0.2 pre-release of Battles of Antargis which is coming along nicely.

There's two new interesting 2d platformers, both of which are at a very alpha stage of development so don't expect too much: Zelda2D (er, Zelda in 2D), Wasteland (kinda Jazz Jack Rabbit crossed with Mario)

In my enforced abscense there's been a number of updates to a lot of good open source games. Here's a few notable ones: Globulation (notably new AI!), Blob and Conquer (lots of new levels), Sturmbahnfahrer

Intermission!

Sorry for the lack of posts... damn laptop died and it's taken several days to sort it out. Between that and an unusually time-sapping week last week, it took the wind out of my free gaming sails.

Service will be resumed shortly.