Simple & Polished

 Avoision

 Falling Block Game 2

Avoision is a simple collect-dots-avoid-blocks game.

Falling Block Game 2 is a Tetris clone.

Both are simple games. Both are very polished! I avoided them at first, assuming they would be of the yet-another-hello-world-game type but luckily got over that arrogant moment. :)

Neither forces full-screen, they scale to any resolution, controls are crystal clear and feedback is great.

Both games use Radius Engine, which is a Win/Lin OpenGL/SDL/Lua engine. Kind of like LÖVE.

For Arch Linux users: I made AUR packages for Radius Engine, Avoision and FBG2. I use clyde for managing packages.

PS: Sometimes polish is worth more than complexity. Can you name free open source games that are polished to the max?

Changes in Hardwar development

Possible Hardwar main menu scene

Hardwar is a long-term project to remake the 1998 Hardwar - a science fiction flight simulation game. There have been two recent changes:

The code hosting switched from Launchpad's bazaar to GitHub.

The in-game editor was dropped and instead Ogitor will be used. While in-game editing is awesome, I'm glad that a general tool is being used and time is being saved.

Ogitor 0.3

Ogitor is a Plug-In based WYSIWYG editor environment for OGRE.

OGRE is on a hunt for illogic in its API as a preparation for releasing 1.8 and every coder is invited!

Spring RTS bugfix and games list

There's a new Spring version, available as windows build and source package.

License info in spring games list

FOSS-advocate Gallaecio clarified the license status of the "open source" Spring games and now the Spring game list features detailed license information. None of the games have 100% free for commercial usage media.

Gallaecio has (a quite empty) blog (in Galician [english translation])

Coldest Cleaning Up

Re-textured base in Coldest

A few days ago LinWarrior 3D r18 got released, today there's news regarding Coldest! Re-texturing (license related) is in-progress. The current SVN revision looks ..interesting with missing textures :) .

 Coldest SVN r629 screens

I also recorded a video, but YT made it lag (glc-recorded, ffmpeg-encoded using this method)..

OGRE3D History: 2010

There's a retrospective of 2010 post on OGRE's blog. Here are some interesting FOSS projects they mentioned:

Project Name	Type	License	Description
Gorilla	Library	MIT	GUI library
Hovercraft	Game	GPL*	Racing *Depends on non-free fmod, havok and zoidcom
Island Hopping	Game	WTFPL*	Platformer *Depends on non-free irrklang
MOGRE	Library	MIT	Bindings for .NET
OgreKinect	Library	MIT	Input library for Kinect
OgreProcedural	Library	MIT	Procedural geometry library
OpenSpace3D	Tool	LGPL*	Scene Editor *Depends (?) on non-free newton physics
QuickGUI	Library	LGPL	GUI library
Spacescape	Tool	MIT	Create space skyboxes with stars and nebulas
Zen Engine	Library	ZLib	3D game engine client framework

Spacescape running in Wine

I wasn't able to build Spacescape SVN but the 0.3 release runs fine in Wine.

Island Hopping's game over screen

Island Hopping's dependency on irrklang is probably easy to replace, so I gave it a try using Wine with success (broken sound though, go figure).


OpenSpace3D wouldn't start in wine and I don't know if it's build-able on Linux.

PS: Statistics!

Better late than never

Doesn't seem like the other authors of this blog are big FPS fans, so I guess I have to keep you updated about the other nice releases of last week ;) Too bad my current PC is not capable of running any of those though :(

Xonotic 0.1 preview release

So people have been nagging about this in the comment section already... and I agree, the first release of the Nexuiz fork Xonotic is a pretty cool thing:

Xonotic 0.1

For more videos head over to this Youtube page.

Graphics are really a big improvement over the patchwork that was Nexuiz, however the player animation (blending) is still somewhat lacking. Sources tell me that this is actually a current limitation of its Darkplaces engine, but since everything of that game is GPL, someone should take up the challenge and change that ;)

World of Pandman 1.5

Not quite as FOSS (because of un-free media), but still fun is the new World of Padman 1.5 release:

World of Padman 1.5

Their website just says that there are a lot of changes, so be surprised ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7

Errmmm, well and there has been also a very nice SuperTuxKart release over X-mas:

SuperTuxKart 0.7

I have to admit though that given the fact that their forums are actually hosted on our website, we are reporting about this neat game way too little. Well... I promise more coverage, ok? :)

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!

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..