Padman Roadmap and Urban Terror

In a brief follow up (time constraints) to the Q3 TCs post, there's some news on a couple projects.

The guys behind the recently released World of Padman have talked about the future of the project whilst thanking people for the positive initial feedback:

This first version is not supposed to be the final one. There are some things we want to implement in future versions like the missing singleplayer. Well, we only plan to integrate a simple SP, fighting against the bots throught the maps, but want to tell a story by adding some nice comic strips and videos. Known bugs will be fixed too and some new features are also on our list. Have we already mentioned a new map pack by ENTE, which might be available within 2 or 3 days?

And I missed out the mod Urban Terror. Although this is more freeware than Free due to some restrictions on the game content, it is still a cool looking TC for Q3 and worth checking out if you are into your contemporary war-fests.

Lastly the game FlowFlowMania got another quickfire release as the author keeps up his initial momentum. Now it supports skins and has some more levels so is starting to evolve into a nice little game!

That's it for today, sorry. :-(

Easter Blues

Not much happening really, then again I have been offline for X days.

I'm in the process of inputting the Free Game list into OpenOffice.org Base (Access equivalent). Then I'll be able to do lots more fun things to the game lists, not to mention no more hand-typing hundreds of html tags.

I'm back-dating this post to the 9th (it's the 10th really) because I can and because it's something-AM. And [the real reason] I'll probably post stuff later when I get bored trying to do my urgent work that has me in my office at 2:30am in the morning.

Interview: Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel

In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview.

Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-)

Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q.

Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?"

My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy

Q. And what do you do for a living?

I am going to end my studies soon, not yet sure what I will do after that, I thought a bit about turning into the independent game business, but not sure if I will actually do it in the end.

Q. What is your favourite open source game(s)?

Adonthell, since it happens to be one of the very few open source games that actually has story, characters and dialog, it also happens to have the best music of any open source games rivaling even that of many commercial titles. The gameplay of the game is very basic, but story, characters and stuff are just so good that its simply not an issue. Its not the longest game around, but the most interesting one.

Q. What is your favourite commercial game(s)?

That would be Another World and The Longest Journey.

Another World because it was and still is absolutely revolutionary in so many aspects. Its a very short game, but one that basically never repeats, every moment in it is uniq, the story, even so told without a word is absolutely stunning and the polygon based 2D graphic was something very different then everything else at its time. Its a game that simply lacks what makes video games look like video games and instead turns them into an interactive experience. And as if that wouldn't be already enough, its also a game that got created from start to finish by only a single person.

The Longest Journey on the other side is much more a classical adventure game, but one of the best. It improved on what LucasArts did in terms of interface and added an epic sci-fi/fantasy story into the mix like there is no other. I like games that feature interesting characters and worlds and The Longest Journey simply has tons of both.

Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?

At the moment not much, I don't yet own any of the next generation
consoles (still waiting for a price cut on the XBox360) and there
simply aren't much more games coming out for the current generation.
So I am kind of stuck there. My PC also happens to be not in the shape
any more for commercial PC games and that Vista Beta I am running
beside my Linux isn't exactly in the best shape either. However I
recently replayed AstroBoy Omega factor on the GBA, since thats my
favorite game for that machine and I also plan to have a deeper look
into my linux version of X2 soon.

In terms of FLOSS I don't really play much of those at all, I enjoyed
Adonthell a lot, had some fun with Neverball, but beside that I am not
interesting in most of the games

Q. What open source games have you worked on, preferrably in chronological order?

Lets see if I can get that figured out without forgetting anything:

In the very beginning I did some C64 Basic and QBasic applications,
most playable was a simple clone of that motorcycle game of the Tron
movie, another thing was a labyrinth/dungeon game, but that never went
anywhere and didn't got finished. All that stuff is available on the
net, but not very interesting for most people I guess:

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...qbasic.html

After those I moved on to C++ and coded Retriever, it was meant to be
an adventure game and written under DOS with DJGPP and Allegro, it
never went beyond a little demo in which you could walk through a few
screen, but I am currently recycling a few of the concepts for
Windstille.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-retriever.png

Closely after Retriever came Vect, a simple vector graphics editor,
that might be used to create the graphics for Retriever. Its kind of
usable, but not exactly very confortable, it again was coded primary
for DOS with DJGPP and Allegro.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect2.png

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect.png

Then I moved onto Linux and switched from Allegro to ClanLib, my first
game then happens to be Pingus, a rather straight forward Lemmings clone with penguins, its
quite playable, but to this day not exactly finished.

http://pingus.seul.org/

Sometimes after that I did a tiny little bit work on TuxRacer, nothing
big, just a script for Gimp to make level creation a bit easier, a few
levels and a few bug reports.

The next game that I wrote from scratch was Feuerkraft, it was
somewhat inspired by the old Amiga game Firepower, but not a direct
clone, it has plenty of influence from games such as GTA and Operation
Flashpoint, as with most of my stuff, I never really finished it.

http://www.nongnu.org/feuerkraft/

Feuerkraft on video.google.com

Sometimes in between I did start Advent, which was basically a rewrite
from Retriever. I was trying to give it a proper scripting interface
and make it properly extensible, which Retriever really wasn't. One of
the results was Cosmos, a little demo game build on top of the engine,
due to library and binary incompatibilities it however might no longer
be playable today:

http://www.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/advent.new/

Then came Freecraft aka Stratagus, a real time strategy engine along
the lines of Warcraft2. Its again a project where I didn't really
contribute much and only joined in rather late. For most part I simply
organize the rename from Freecraft to Stratagus that was needed after
the cease and desist letter from Blizzard, I picked up the bits and
pieces, did a new webpage and some stuff like that. I didn't ever
touch the engine itself.

http://www.stratagus.org/

In the follow up of the Stratagus rename came Robovasion, it was meant
as a little demo game to show that Stratagus can be used for other
games beside Warcraft2. While the basic design got quite finished, it
never got properly implemented due to some missing core features in
Stratagus. Since in the meantime there followed other games that made
use of Stratagus as an engine there soon was no longer a need for
Robovasion, so it never got finished.

http://www.nongnu.org/robovasion/

Construo is again a project I started myself and did most of the
coding. Its a simple particle+spring engine/editor, the game doesn't
have any goals, its more like LEGO bricks where you can just toy
around with and build your own stuff. Its one of the few games I did
that ever become fully playable, its not 100% feature complete, but
what it does, it does quite well:

http://www.nongnu.org/construo/

Sometime after that came Windstille, it started as a little recreation
of Turrican style gameplay, but soon moved on to became something very
different. A little demo with Turrican style gameplay was however
released:

Windstille on video.google.com

netPanzer was kind of interesting, one day I got a email of one of the
original creators who asked me if I had some use for the code in
Feuerkraft, since Feuerkraft was a 2D action game, not a stratagey one
I declined. Since the netPanzer project didn't went anyway after a
year I contacted them again if they still want to do anything with the
code, they agreed that it would be ok to OpenSource it and so I build
a little webpage and announced it on happypenguin.org. Soon after the
announcement was done some people picked it up and ported it to Linux,
I again didn't really touch much of the code, but simply did a bit
organisation here and there.

http://netpanzer.berlios.de

A while after that Happypenguin GoTM was born, it was a project meant
to pick every month a open source game and improve some key aspects
of it. We started with SuperTux and joined an already ongoing effort
to bring the old SuperTux into a clean shape. I did most of the
graphics, some code and around half of the levels of the reborn
SuperTux Milestone1.

http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1243

http://supertux.lethargik.org

After SuperTux was done, some people moved on to TuxKart, we didn't
manage to turn it into a playable game and had to fork it due to some
issues, but plenty of new graphics got done and some unfinished
improvements where done. A while after the SuperTuxKart code was
picked up by some other people and the project is quite alive know
gain:

http://supertuxkart.berlios.de/

Then GotM picked LinCity and we gave that game some new graphics and
user interface, I modeled most of the 3D buildings, while other people
worked on the code and interface graphics. The project got mostly
finished, however I still consider it a failure since one of the key
problems wasn't addressed, namely the game still misses a proper
tutorial and some game elements just don't make any sense.

Windstille also got picked up by GotM, while we didn't manage a
release, it got a large over vault and its the game that I am
currently still working on. Beside from that I am also a little bit
working on getting SuperTux Milestone2 done.

Q. Of the above, do you have a favourite?

Construo is probably my best game that nobody knows about, its plain
and simple and actually fun to play, while many of the other projects
never went that far and got stuck somewhere earlier. It happens to be
the only of my games that I can actually enjoy playing. Beside from
that there is also Windstille, since that game is in some part based
on Retriever and I am kind of working on it for like 10 years I have
grown pretty attached to it.

Q. What attracted you to developing & contributing to open source
games rather than selling your efforts as shareware or commercial
titles?

Rather simple: Money means trouble, no money means a smooth ride. If I
open source it I don't have to care about advertising, publishers and
whatever, I can simply concentrate on the game and do whatever I like
instead of trying to figure out what would actually sell. Open Source
also gives the freedom to recycle bits and pieces from other project
much easier. Its also much easier to accept contributions when no
money is involved.

That said, all this is of course only true as long as you don't need
the money and do it in your spare time, when you actually want to make
a living out of writing games Open Source doesn't seem to be much of a
good choice.

Q. From your experiences, what would you say are the best tips for
making a successful open source game?

I think the by far two most important things are this:

Figure out what exactly you want to do before announcing the game to
the public. Sounds simple, but many Open Source games completly fail
on that, people tweak around an engine for month and years without
anybody having a clue where the whole game is actually going. So they
never really go anywhere with their project, but just running around
in circles forever.

Don't expect anybody else to help you, be prepared to do everything
yourself. When you do a Open Source game you won't magically get
contributions, you might get none at all, so you shouldn't depend on
them to get the job done, but instead be prepared to do everything
yourself.

Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game
development fail?

One simple rule would be to not start a new project, ever. Try to join
one of the already ongoing Open Source projects, if you don't see them
going anywhere, hijack them and give them some direction. A goalless
project can often be very easily turned into a different direction, it
just requires that you actually know exactly where you want to be
going.

Another thing: Don't aim to low. Of course you shouldn't try to do
Doom3 when you don't have a clue about 3D programming, but there
simply isn't a need for yet another Tetris clone, we have by far
enough of that. If you try something new, try to actually make
something new, don't just recreate something for which there already
exist dozens of recreations.

Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's
development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?

Liquidwar, that game has a pretty cool concept, but rather ugly
interface and graphics, it could definitvly need some additional
polish and improvements.

My favorite Adonthell also needs a new release, it has been going
forward very slowly in the last years and could definitvly need a
solid push.

Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your
games do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

I currently do a lot of work on Windstille, a lot of which actually
isn't even very relevant to the game itself (i.e. history, ship
design, etc.). I am more or less trying to create a little universe
instead of just what I would need for a simple 2D action adventure.
If I ever get done with Windstille itself, I probably turn some of
that additional material into a game of its own. One thing I always
wanted to do was a realistic mech simulation, kind of an Operation
Flashpoint in space type of game. However knowing that such a game
would require a loooonnnggg time I prefer to stick for the moment with
my simple 2D game in the Windstille universe, since even that is
already hard enough of a thing to get done.

Interview Notes

• Adonthell:
  
  http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/


• Liquid War 5:
  
  http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5


• Development of Liquid War is ongoing - the game has been rewritten from scratch and become part of the GNU project as Liquid War 6:
  
  http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/

Quake3 Total Conversions

It's really great when a company like iD Software release their game engines under a Free license. It means all the hard work by modders (the vast majority of community game development goes into modding commercial games) can be made available to everybody and not just owners of the game. It also means they can improve the engine to suit their games. So, without further ado, here's a few really cool total conversions of Quake 3...

Western Quake 3 is a wild west TC. Accurately simulated classic weapons, new music, obviously models and maps, and various gameplay tweaks mean it should be quite an interesting experience. Still in beta but a new release is imminent.

Urban Terror made a release on April 1st. It's a Counter-Strike-like game. 'Nuff said.

Tremulous, one of the original FPS RTS combo games, recently celebrated the 1 year anniverisary of their 1.1 release - the first standalone version of the game and the one that really got people talking. Since then there has never been a moment when somebody was not playing the game. They posted an interesting graph depicting play activity. A new release (1.2) is imminent.

Bid For Power is a rather cool looking Dragonball Z TC for Quake 3. Unfortunately they only have a Windows version at the moment.

Spiderman: Dynamic Forces looks cool. Sadly they got sent a cease & desist order by Marvel. Fans making games is wrong, apparently?

World of Padman is a Toy Story-like game, whose inaugral release was on April 1st as well. It's no joke either! In fact, it's a rather fun game. :-)

If only other game engines were released as Free Software, then mods like Air Buccaneers (Unreal Tournament 2004 TC) could become standalone free/Free games too.

Are there any other interesting Q3 TCs not mentioned here? I did a little digging (I'm a bit busy today) but came up with not-much.

Music tip:

Absolut feat. V-Tunes - Boxrocker

Some Classic Game Remakes

I came across the Hardwar project the other day, a contemporary remake of the classic game. No visible progress but plenty of ambition and a cute website. We shall see if it gets anywhere.

A remake that has made some good progress is Game of Bases, putting a modern spin on a Commodore 64 classic Flash Attack. Control 4 tanks, protect your base, and take out your opponents.

I mentioned FlowFlowMania the other day, a Pipe Mania remake. Since then there have been a few updates - 0.5 was announced on Freshmeat although not on the FlowFlowMania site at the time of writing.

Gno3dtet

Blockout was the original 3D tetris. Gno3Dtet (aka 3D Tetris) is a remake that looks very similar to the original in terms of the tile graphics.

Beware, for I have known more than one person be addicted to that game to the point it adversely affected their degrees!

Not a remake, nor open source, but the Flash adventure game "The Terrific Menace of the Invaders from Audio Galaxy" (I'm not typing that again!) is reminiscent of the Lucasarts classic Day of the Tentacle (these days playable using ScummVM). It is, of course, free to play.

Shadow of the Beast 3D

Remember Shadow of the Beast? I loved that game, and the follow up (Shadow of the Beast II, of course). Somebody started remaking it in 3D! Sadly it doesn't seem to be headed anywhere (last updated 2 years ago) but I live in hope.

(Y'know, I swear I'd mentioned that last one before but Google says I haven't and I'm not reading 100 posts to see if I did!)

I'll finish off with a Super Mario remake. Since the Secret Maryo developers only provide source packages for Linux, I created some Secret Maryo 0.99.5 packages for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (might work on Dapper Drake). Enjoy!

Music tip:

Franke, Neumann - Criss Source (Titan Remix)

Beyond The Red Line

Welcome to post number 100 on Free Gamer. Slowly I am finding out how to push blogger to it's limits. The list is starting to look much better, now that the layout is getting there. The tedious work of populating it with real information is looming. Once that is done, several more mini-lists will sprout up.

Anyway, back to the daily grind of talking about Free Software games. It's a hard knock life, it is. ;-)

Starting with Freeciv, which saw 2.1beta4 released (download) over the weekend. (Not sure how I missed that yesterday.) It fixes many crashes so hopefully should be a lot more stable than 2.1beta3 which, in my experience, was fairly ropey. Initial feedback seems to be pretty good.

I created some Ubuntu packages for Freeciv-2.1beta4. I felt like doing a good deed for the day, or something like that.

Beyond The Red Line

Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line is a game being developed by fans for fans of the series and is based on a modified version of the open sourced Freespace2 engine. It looks fantastic! They just released a demo of their work so far.

Since it is a total conversion (i.e. not a mod) you do not need the origianl Freespace2 game [media] to play, making this game Free! Another cool 3D arcade space shooter joins the mix. Awesome. :-)

I've not mentioned Open City for a while. This 3D Sim City inspired title is slowly taking shape. The last release was showing a lot of promise and I'm hopeful the next release (thriftily labelled 0.0.5) should have all the essential elements of a city management game.

Iris2

Another game that saw a release over the weekend was Iris2. This is a complete rewrite using the OGRE 3D engine. It looks very tasty indeed. Whilst you do need the original Ultima Online files, you can download a trial version for free and use it to play unlimited on free shards as it only locks you out of official shards (shards being servers).

Music tip:

Rooster & Peralta - Pornokopia (Kobbe & Leeds mix)

PS. Please comment on the new list format. Good feedback early on means less work later on fixing it!

UFO:AI 2.1

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)

My Favourite Day Of The Year

Well, not really, I never enjoy reading rubbish people try to make up to be funny. Honestly, if I want a laugh, I'll go to a comedy store. Anyhow...

World of Padman. 3D, Toy Story esque setting and freeware. It's a deathmatch game but comes with bots, it runs on Linux and Windows, looks fantastic, and even has a promo trailer. Released today, surely this is not an April Fool's as it is too elaborate. Or maybe it is just a promotion for a commercial game, released as freeware for today only? Who knows. This is why I don't like April 1st. Anyway, download it and see. It's not open source though.

I've been whining about a lack of good platform games, but I found a few on GetDeb.

The Goonies

I came across The Goonies just after posting on Friday. It's a remake of a classic NES game, but with better graphics and sound. It's quite tricky to play but a good time waster.

Then I tried to play Magicor which looks fun, but it crashed on my Feisty Fawn setup. There's a tip for getting it to run in the comments on GetDeb but I only just saw that now.

Looking at the list though, there's quite a few platform games. There's Nikwi, which I've mentioned before. There's Secret Maryo which is enjoying sustained development and increasingly nice graphics. Of course we have SuperTux, and there's Fuzzy Adventure which was looking promising although development seems to have stagnated. Still, my point is there's options.

Since it's a Sunday and I'm feeling lazy, I'm just going to give a general non-electro music tip. (I'm too partied out to listen to electro right now.)

So... music tip: Goldfrapp

Lastly a few people have commented to me directly that the games list is a bit broken. I know it is. I'm slowly fixing it and restoring it to it's former glory, but even better. Only I can't do it offline because I'm not that clued up on how Blogger works, so I have to fiddle with it live.

All I'll say is that I have grand plans [or delusions of grandure] for turning this into an award winning blog. So I either just made a glamourous prediction or made myself look foolish. Who cares? ;-)