Wizardy

Ok, technically not a Free game nor really a game, but the damn thing is almost always right. Almost freaky. Try this little flash game, Wizardy:

http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html

It's A Graveyard Out There

Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool.

The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes.

The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released (changelog). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game.

And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard:

I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/. At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, but the game is completely finished and playable. As it's new, its community is very small, but I'm hoping it will get bigger as people discover it.

I could not find a link for Laser Squad 3D.

Railroad Tycoon now Freeware

The original Railroad Tycoon has been released as freeware. Download it from 2kgames.com who seem to be the official handlers of the freeware RT.

JFreeRails

Still, freeware is not open source. There are GPL clones of RT. The two most notable ones are Railz and JFreeRails. Indeed JFreeRails got updated as recently as September this year. Railz seems to have stalled with it's development.

Then there is of course the other rail game implementations, notably OpenTTD. There are lots of promising noises coming out of the OpenTTD camp and the hires graphics seem to be coming out of the community at a steady pace. I'm very hopeful that we will see a hires release in 2007 that should be a superb game and herald a new era for OpenTTD.

A game that already has hires graphics and is free, albeit only freeware, is Simutrans. The development is relentless and the latest release looks very nice. For some reason I have never found Simutrans as much fun as OpenTTD but then I grew up with the original Transport Tycoon.

VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!

Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

UFO:AI 2.0rc6

UFO:AI 2.0rc6 is out (changelog). "This release candidate should really be the final one for the 2.0 series." With working reaction-fire, an isometric view, and a host of fixes, UFO:AI has emerged as a polished open source game. "We are already working hard on the next major release - the 2.1 tree - which will include a full storyline." Awesome!

Angels Fall First

If you thought yesterday's news was big, Free Gamer comes with an equally impressive post for today!

Angels Fall First

The prolific artist Strangelet has not been inactive, and has made a special request of the Vega Strike community. Angels Fall First started out life as a Homeworld 2 mod. There is a plan for a UT2007 release in the future but the AFF team are looking for an official game engine to embrace.

The models are spectacular and, with work on an impressive VS 0.5 release progressing at a steady pace this, this could be type mod to really compliment VS and really make waves in gaming circles. The artwork is nothing short of A-grade commercial quality.

Anyway, people have volunteered to assist the VS:AFF mod, so it is a case of watch that space (pun intended).

TA:Spring Rewrite

There's a storm of comotion in the TA:Spring community after the lead developers announced intentions to rewrite the entire Spring engine stating unclean code and a desire to utilise external libraries like OGRE to both reduce the codebase size and introduce new features already expertly handled by said libraries.

The two major debating points were the critical "what about the modders" and the ever-so-important "what name should we give the not-started barely-planned mod". In all seriousness, the modders are the essence of the playing community and really make TA:Spring the eye catching open source project as it is - without them it would just be an engine for commercial content. They give the project the massive momentum it currently enjoys and the developers really need to listen to their concerns, which fortunately it appears they are doing.

Some of the highlights of the proposed rewrite are dynamic lighting, inbuilt C# scripting, and the engine being a generic RTS engine (as opposed to a TA-oriented one).

Ground-up rewrites are normally a really, really bad idea. However, this may be one of the exceptions. Not only are there several motivated developers and an enthusiastic community pushing them, but it does seem that there are several trends in the current codebase that make iteratively rejuvenating the codebase an unrealistic prospect - or at least more work than a rewrite. Still I hope they make rapid progress towards basic features rather than creating some grandiose vision that will not be attainable.

VDrifting Away

Free Gamer has been on hiatus. Sorry! Sometimes these things happen...

VDrift made a new release yesterday.

Hero of Allocrost released their first tech demo. Thanks to Roots for notifying me and apologies to him for taking a week to say something.

Sauerbraten got forked, the new game is called Extended Death Match (or just EDM). I don't know if it is a cooperative fork. All I know is you can leave sticky notes around the maps.

There's tons of other things I could mention from the last 2 weeks but for now I'll just push you in the direction of the Linux Game Tome which covers most of the them in one way or another.

*Goes back to his corner to work slowly on updating the Free Gamer games list*