Saturday, January 01, 2011

LinWarrior r18 "Hazy Blur"

LinWarrior 3D r18

There's a new LinWarrior 3D source release [download link above first screenshot on this page].
  • Enhanced look of landscape and sky
  • Location markers and zones
  • Mission messages 
  • Jump-jet-thruster vibrations (quite awesome!)
  • Blueoading screen:
There's a to-do list and I see collaboration options in procedural city generation: Current cities are textured blocks of different size aligned on a flat grid and created manually. The textures of roads and buildings are procedurally generated though.

There's supposed to be a git repository for the project soon.


HackCraft's OGA contributions

HackCraft, the developer of LW3D, has made many small-but-useful contributions to OpenGameArt in the last few months.

PS: Aw, yeah, mech games.

PPS: I'm curious what kind of suggestions people come up with after test-playing this release, so feel welcome to comment!

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Remembering and discovering some adventure and role playing games

Blood and Iron menu

Blood and Iron "is a dark low fantasy tactical RPG where you attempt to lead a mercenary company to fame and fortune." This sounds like a Mount & Blade demake [EDIT] but it's not!


  • Dark low fantasy theme 
  • You play the owner of a mercenary company, the characters on the battlefield are just employees 
  • Your goal is to make your mercenary company the most famous one in history, and to complete various special challenges (achievements) 
  • Yes, you really won't save the world this time 
  • Tactical (actual combat) and strategic (resource management) layer 
  • Turn-based, of course 
  • Ironman only, no girlie man reloading whenever something goes wrong here 
  • Yes, when characters die they are gone - forever 


It is written in SDL and supposed to be portable.

So far (the project is one day old at time of writing) there is only a win32 binary (runs on linux using wine) available for download which features an incomplete menu and low-pixel art.. I would love to see this project ripen.

Pages of Adventure dialog

Pages of Adventure is a lovely "puzzle adventure in a strange world" which so far features one puzzle. I tested the game on Arch Linux.

Game testers are wanted for the SVN version of the game, different resolutions need to be tested for example. Testers and people who can recommend game/map/dialog editors for tile-based rpg/adventure games, please report to the PoA thread on our forums!


Dawn RPG makes progress. They use MediaWiki for posting news, which makes following development not too comfortable. SumWars is progressing as well. Both games have gained new team members and released new versions.


Hmm.. remember Hero of Allacrost, Silver Tree and Adonthell, FLARE, Arkhart, Radakan and PARPG ? I wonder how many open source non-roguelike role-playing or adventure games are out there and how many are playable and how many are finished..

Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Aðfangadagskvöld!

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ):

Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress

OGA's presents

There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example.

Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared.

Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

Thursday, December 23, 2010

News Avalanche!

Zero-K:



Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :)

It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back

IrrRPG Builder



IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua.

There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functions yet, which crashes the game) and adding some sort of api refference along with autocompletion would really make it a fully fledged IDE :)



Ryzom:


We've been giving Ryzom quite a bit of love recently, with their Linux native client and all, but they just announced an In-game competition for a Linux netbook and got accepted for the Google Code-In initiative. Here's hoping they have lots of success!

Warlock's Gauntlet:





Warlock's Gauntlet is a highly polished Gauntlet/Diablo/Hack'nSlash mashup. A nice interface, smooth gameplay and lots of spells make this a very nice find.(Thanks archl from the comments :) It even has co-op!


Egoboo



The Egoboo team just released their version 2.8.1 beta, it adds randomized loot, special effects and lots of bugfixes. Check it out!

FreedroidRPG


Freedroid recently had their website redesigned(aww I liked the old one :(), and also released version 0.14 which included the Summer of Code work. This added better randomized dungeons, a better interface for the level editor and replaced magical weapons with a more sci-fi addon system (the last addition was done by Nekotaku from Lips of Suna, which also had a release recently :)

Monday, December 20, 2010

An early Xmas?

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p

So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors.


Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here. They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :)

ZeroBallistics 2.0


So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game!!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here.

War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011

Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will make it short: War§ow 0.6 (BIG and very nice release) and AlienArena2011 (now with ODE physics for rag-dolls).

Thursday, December 16, 2010

From Open to Free, visual programming, new SumWars RPG and Berlin game dev summoning

FLARE logo

OSARE is now FLARE. From an OGA tread:
I sent an email to Richard Stallman asking if he's interested in supporting Justin Nichol's Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Project.

He pointed out that the difference between "open source" and "free" or "free/libre" and noted this:

"However, if you decide to describe it "free" or "free/libre" instead of "open source", then I would be honored to participate."

Stallman's lectures are what convinced me in the first place to use the GPL for my work, and to be interested in copyleft licenses in general. I'm quite honored that he answered my email at all, and I agree with his reasoning.

IOSKETCH visual programming

IOSKETCH is a cross-platform visual authoring tool for games. It is written in Common Lisp.

Summoning Wars 0.5.3
The new version

SumWars 0.5.3 is out:
  • Upgrade to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7
  • More art and story content
  • Russian translation

See the arrow?

There's a little meeting this Saturday for making little games in Berlin. Artists, programmers, designers and whatnot are welcome! We speak English. Wir sprechen Deutsch. At least one speaks Spanish, at least one speaks Russian.

You might want to bring a multiple outlet strip (don't forget your converter if you need one).

Berlin Game Developers Meet-Up #5 on Facebook.
Where:   Cafe Osswald
When:    Saturday, December 18 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Lithosphere - awesome visual procedural 3d terrain map generator with shaders

Forget my last post about terrain generators! I'm just going to let the screen/video talk for themselves.



Lithosphere is a GPU driven terrain generator. It allows you to create and export material textures and heightmaps intended for use in realtime graphics applications.

All terrain algorithms are implemented as GLSL fragment shaders operating on floating point textures. This allows realtime modification of the terrain. A graph of nodes is evaluated in order to arrive at the terrain output.

License: AGPL

Requirement: 32bit python2.6 (:|), a modern graphics card

Tested on: Windows, Linux

The creator's blog might be of interest to you as well. The last few articles cover OpenGL and HTML5/JavaScript Canvas.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Portrait Marathon got $1500, could use $1500 more :)

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

Provide feedback:

Due to SPAM issues we have disabled public commenting here.

But feel free to join our forums or easily chat via IRC with us.