Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released, with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation (changelog).
Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift.
A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release:
Also recently updated is Irrlamb. Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its development was originally hosted).
This release adds new graphical capabilities, new levels, gamepad support and various fixes - see the announcement for more details.
I'll also write a really lengthy... wait a minute! Let's link a video instead. ;)
A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates.
OpenDungeons, an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog:
New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management
Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste
Particle effects!
Reworked library logic and made research order configurable
New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood
Customisable creature sound effects!
Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies
In-game settings menu support!
New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements
New minimap camera with real-time rendering
Dedicated server support with command-line parameters
There's plenty of screenshots in the announcement on the frontpage of the OpenDungeons website (but no direct link for the announcement, frustratingly).
Explosions! Spells!
The research tree
The project has some very regular contributors (both programming and art) and the game has multiplayer support which the developers test with the occasional weekend virtual lan party. OpenDungeons has certainly gone from strength to strength in the last year.
FreeOrion version 0.4.5 (announcement with changelog) wraps up the last year's worth of development. Much of the work seems to have been motivated by trying to make the game more fun to play — "performance, responsiveness, AI, balancing etc." —which is nice to see. At some point a project has to stop pushing new features and work on improving the game experience.
I couldn't find any screenshots of 0.4.5 to share, but here's a recent gameplay video posted on YouTube which should give an idea, although he's well into a game at this point:
Finally, and a little too late unfortunately, here's some coverage of ReTux. At first glance, it would seem somebody has taken Super Tux and tried to profit off of it. However, author Julian Merchant (onpon4 on the FGD forums) has written a new engine from scratch in Python. Whilst there are the obvious similarities with the original Super Tux, due to ReTux using many of the same graphics and sounds, there are a number of notable gameplay changes many of which can be seen in the 'Concept Castle' video (I really think his IndieGoGo campaign should have used this video at the very beginning of it).
Julian only raised $378 in the 30 days the campaign lasted, which was very short of the $50,000 goal. Reasons for this will be likely poor coverage (no FG article!) but also probably the perception that it was basically the same as Super Tux. For example, the IGG page starts with a video which the first 2 minutes or so (aside from the change to the fireflower) could easily be recreated by substituting the Super Tux logo for ReTux.
I do think avoiding the more popular media sites (e.g. no YouTube video) hurt the campaign. I can find little-to-no mention of ReTux when searching for it.
It also highlights one of the problems with developing Free games i.e. generally there's no money in it. Julian is obviously passionate about the concept, having done so much work on it already, and I hope he continues with it. As to where he goes from here? I would suggest perhaps trying to get it greenlit on Steam or another platform where he can solicit a small fee from players whilst still maintaining the open source status of the project - a great example being Tales of Maj’Eyal which is also selling well on Steam.
Don't give up Julian. Persistence is the key to success with any endeavour. You just have to find the right path.
The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results.
For the answer visit the thread, I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll post a screenshot, also sourced from said forums and taken by Stunt Rally author CrystalH.
For those who don't know, Stunt Rally is a friendly fork of VDrift.
(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)
On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.
Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.
Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.
To be a master is to spam en mass
So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.
Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level
The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.
Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!
You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.
All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!
Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!
Yeah right...
Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"
Made with love2d
The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!
This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load, self described as:
A cockpit flight game that is more of an arcade than a sim. The game is built on the Panda3D game engine. It is similar to the ancient games like the classic Wings or the very good Strike Commander. The story and the atmosphere are important elements of the game, so a lot of focus is placed on that too.
Here is some in-game action and it seems quite polished already for such a new game:
Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it:
The game code is licensed under GPL 3, and custom-made game assets under
CC-by-SA 4.0. Some of the assets were taken from "free" (as in "not
sure in which way") sources on the Internet, so their licensing
situation is unclear. Eventually these should be cleared for use or
replaced.
Here is a description of the game we got from him:
In Wyrmsun, humans, elves and dwarves all seek to carve a place for
themselves on their different homeworlds, with humans living on Earth,
dwarves dwelling on Nidavellir, and elves inhabiting Alfheim. In the
game's missions, each world follows separate storylines, but the various
civilizations can be mixed and matched in custom games.
Wyrmsun features:
Retro-style graphics
2 playable civilizations, and a number of non-playable ones
18 quests to play, earning technology points which can be used to obtain new units, buildings and technologies
38 units, 30 buildings and 14 technologies
Units that can earn experience, being able to upgrade to new unit types or acquire new abilities upon level-up
Persistent heroes, who carry over their level and abilities throughout scenarios
Personal names and traits for units
Cave, Conifer Forest, Dungeon, Fairlimbed Forest and Swamp tilesets
33 maps of real and fictional locations to choose from, as well as random maps
Living environment, with fauna reproduction and predation
Very moddable game, with mod-loading capability built in
Grand strategy mode, where production is resolved on the
strategic (world map) level, while battles are resolved on the tactical
level
In-game encyclopedia, allowing players to learn more about
the units, buildings and other elements of the game, as well as their
historical and mythological sources of inspiration.
P.S.: Yes FOSS games can be on Steam as long as they don't integrate with closed source steam integration libraries; And it can be a great way to attract more users to your game and maybe even collect some donations or sell add-ons (preferably in a "release freely when sufficient funds are gathered" style). See this game for an successful example.
I had been following this really awesome looking tile based RTS 3D engine project (think Starcraft2 like) on the jMonkey Engine forums for a while, and it is now fully FOSS including the arts assets.
Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:
You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.
