Sitting on my Toadstool

I came across an interesting Ubuntu forum thread the other day - where I posted this on May 26th 2006:

This thread has inspired me to do something:
http://freegamer.blogspot.com/

Fascinating. It's come a long way since then! :-)

The big news of today is probably the Secret Maryo Chronicles 1.0 release. It's an intriguing project and is gaining some very nice vector-based graphics. I'm still not convinced they have replaced all the ripped graphics and sounds that were in the previous version (0.99.7) nor addressed the gameplay defficiencies I felt were present - the feel of the game wasn't quite right - there is no acceleration, you are either running or not running, making it hard to control the character. It is still an ongoing project and importantly it's a playable game with a fair amount of levels and decent graphics so is worth checking out. It's definitely close to being an open source game that makes people go, "Oooh, nice!" ;-)

Finity Flight II is an open source overhead 2D shooter which several episodes to play and is available for both Linux and Windows. I gave it a shot - it had nice graphics but the gameplay was mystifying to me. I struggled to shoot or be shot unless I was stationary. All artwork and code is available under GPL. It's intriguing and the author has obviously put a lot of effort into it, and has a few other games available.

AlphaShooter is a sci-fi first person shooter. Whilst it may never become a fully fledged game in it's own right, the author has put it online and continues to work on it it the hope that it will be useful as an example on how to get started in computer graphics and games development.

Back to the shadows to plot the expansion of my Free Gamer empire... ;-)

New Look

You may or may not have noticed - depending on whether you have had your morning coffee or not - that Free Gamer has a new look! Thanks go to Iwan 'qudobup' Gabovitch for a sterling contribution. It gives the site it's own identity and he has come up with a cool fg logo and smart little icons. Anyway I love it, so thanks Iwan. In the spirit of open source he has made his work available as public domain.

Only a short one today as I'm short on time and energy after sorting this out...

Java CRPG

Dungeon Craft

There's a new release of JCRPG. Whilst it's still a long way from being a game, it is looking very nice and a few people have started to contribute models. If development pace keeps up of this 3D classic RPG framework I think we can expect some interesting games to the not-too-distant future coming from this project.

Whilst reading the comments on the JCRPG blog, somebody brought up another Dungeon Master inspired game...

Dungeon Craft:

is an effort to develop an RPG and editor that mimics SSI's Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA). This project began back in 1995 as an effort to learn more about Windows/DirectX programming.

It's Windows only :-( but has been in development for over 12 years and is still active! (That's impressive on it's own!) It looks quite nice. I wonder if there is any future scope to move it towards cross-platform technology like OpenGL?

Also the new FG forums [next in line for a makeover] have somewhat recovered since that rather annoying freeforums.org crash & data loss. Back to half the number of users and 25% of posts in just under a week which is quite good considering the [currently relatively small] size of the community. Do encourage your open source gaming contemporaries to join in - it would be good to have a central place for open source game [development] discussion outside the noise of larger sites that this guy describes, I think accurately, as ironically lonely places. Certainly there are many Free Software game projects that are very difficult to find - just like Dungeon Craft - because of the noise that accompanies a site the size of Sourceforge.

Anyway, back to normal tomorrow... hope you like the new look as much as I do!

Battle Tanks and RPG

Battle Tanks

Battle Tanks is, "a funny battle on your desk.". Choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using an arsenal of weapons. Original cartoon-like graphics and cool music, "fun and dynamic," and it has different network modes for deathmatch and cooperative style gameplay. I don't believe it has a single player version, yet. The game is open source and available for Linux (source) and Windows. It's a relatively new game (sf.net project was registered in 2006) so there are still some teething issues it seems.

Adonthell, a longstanding open source console RPG engine has seen it's first update in a couple of years - version 0.4.0 alpha 1. The previous version, 0.3.5, is packaged with a small game called Wastes Edge which is one of the few completable open source games with a storyline and is available for every OS known to man. Whilst the new 'development' version doesn't come packaged with a game, it's good to see a project with nearly 10 years of history is not yet ready to be buried by the sands of time.

The developer of Damnation of the Gods (screenshots) has been in touch. When I mentioned this game last time, a commenter pointed out it hadn't been updated in 2 years. Well, the author of DotG dropped me an email:

I am the developer of DotG - And believe me - did I get a boost from
seeing your post on the freegamer blog!



The problem with DotG right now is the graphics - When I did begin coding on DotG I did it using graphics from the Dungeon Master Java project ... So I put together something - and released (with permission from the graphics artists). Later I got a mail which said something to effect that I couldn't use the graphics any longer (or at least parts of it). Now (quite some time later I started coding again - had completely forgotten about that "small" detail ;) - And then I remembered... However I haven't checked on which parts I can use, and which I cannot - So I think - perhaps it is better to start from scratch and try to get ahold of graphics-artists that can imagine releasing stuff for DotG under an completely open license...



So - the code is out there (GPL'd), but i have no graphics that can go
with it (Just minor stuffs). What I would like to do now is get graphics for my project (prefferable GPL'd) and release all of DotG under GPL or similar license. (I am a Debian user nowadays.. ;)

Dungeon Master Java is another DM clone available from the forums on www.dungeon-master.com - which has a few other free complete DM clones there although they don't seem to be open source.

New Forums Available

With many thanks to ghoulsblade and hagish of SFZ fame, there is a new Free Gamer forum. :-)

Unfortunately there is no way to transfer to old database over and even if it was possible the majority of useful content was posted during the period of data loss (anything after June 30th). However, lessons learned, this new forum should be more responsive (freeforums.org was slow), have better uptime (freeforums.org was frequently down) and is far more customizable (i.e. expect a FG theme in the near future etc).

Parallel Universe

There's a new release of Privateer Gemini Gold. Bug fixes and some improved artwork prompted the team to release 1.02a just a month after 1.02 - release early, release often so this is a good thing in my book. I'm not sure if they have addressed the reported high difficulty level of the game though. If you find PGG too difficult, check out Privateer Remake and/or Parallel Universe.

Or wait for the new Vega Strike release which is coming in August. It's looking sumptuous.

JCRPG development is still at a good pace. To get an idea of the feel of this old fashioned RPG engine, the author posted a video:

JCRPG in action

New TA:Sring Release

Star Wars: TA

Spring 1944

TA:Spring 0.75b2 is out (a few days after 0.75b1). These are the first releases under a new lead since the previous stable versions. TA:Spring is a spectacular 3D RTS based largely upon Total Annihilation, although these days you do not need TA to play Spring. It has a very healthy mod scene with some amazing looking mods.

One such mod is Star Wars: TA. It is, unsurprisingly, set in the Star Wars universe. It looks like the realisation of every 1970s kid's dream - commanding your own army of stormtroopers annihilating those rebel scum. (Yes, The Empire Strikes Back was by far the best of Star Wars movie. You are wrong if you disagree.)

Another exciting mod is Spring 1944 which looks really promising but is yet to be officially released so I don't know if you can play it yet. So this screenshot will have to do.

Do you like old school (NES) Zelda RPG and do you not really care about uber graphics? Monster should be good fun for you.

Worldforge keep up their steady progress. It will be interesting if all the years of work ever culminate in a playable game for this ambitious project. It's all about RPG and expansive 3D worlds.

Speaking of 3D RPG... the MMORPG Planeshift got updated as well. It still looks nice, it still has non-free media. Last time I played it was a while ago (it was a bit boring then - I ran around a town for 30 minutes then gave up) and it looks pretty sweet these days.

Forums Moving

The forums are moving - I'll come back to that after a few game snippets.

8 Kingdoms 1.1.0 has been released, with bug fixes and minor improvements over the previous stable release (release notes). They have yet to update their website but the new version is on the download page. 8 Kingdoms is an open source 3D TBS game with nice graphics, and can be downloaded for Linux and Windows.

Dave, the author of Battle for Wesnoth, is making a new 3D RPG game with the working name Sliver Tree. It is very early days but Dave has an unusual position in the open source game development world - he has a lot of artistic resources at his disposal. If he really pushes this game, Wesnoth contributors (of which there are many) will back it with artwork, so it is going to be an interesting one to watch. Also I like Dave's approach of keeping games simple. He resisted many calls to add lots of features to Wesnoth which may have taken away from the pure simplicity of the game.

So, back to the forum issue.

Our benevolent hosts freeforums.org have lost 3 weeks worth of data. I could stomach the copious service interruptions with this free service, but losing data is just out of order. They gave a bunch of techincal excuses but the reality is that the service they provided was a long way short of what they offered, and to lose 3 weeks of data like that just smacks of incompetence. They frequently afflicted us with downtime, each time with some excuse of how this downtime would lead to a better and more reliable service, but each time it was the same. Before you shout, "but it was free!" let me remind you they offer this free service to get a large community to whom they can offer paid services i.e. freeforums.org is a shoehorn into the hosting market for the people behind it. Ironically I was considering upgrading to a paid-for service with them to get better uptime and a few more features but do you think I want to pay to rely on them now? No, this was disgusting.

So now I'm sorting out new forums - will be done by tomorrow. Since another "feature" of freeforums.org is the inability to get your own backups or dumps, the new forums will have to be started from scratch. However with about 70 registered users and over 600 posts in only a few months despite the patchy service, I am convinced they serve a need for the free software games community so it was not a wasted effort and a good lesson for the new forums.

SuperTuxKart 0.3.0

Well let's start with the fact that despite the complete lack of any announcement whatsoever and no update to the website, SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 is available for download and has been since the 5th July. Well, I'm doing the announcement for them it seems. ;-)

This Super Mario Kart inspired game is available on all popular OSes - Linux, Linux PPC, Mac OSX, and Windows. There's quite a few new features in this release that is a massive improvement over version 0.2:

• Highscore lists


• Shortcut detection


• Improved AI


• Fullscreen support


• New track: the island


• New kart: hexley


• New penalty: bomb


• MacOSX support


• OpenAL and ogg-vorbis support


• Two new Grand Prixs


• Improved user interface

I've no idea why it hasn't been announced anywhere. Thanks to the commenter who point out the fact it is available after I complained yesterday about it not being released yet. (Comments are helpful!)

Vega Strike development news - 0.4.4 has been branched. Expect a new version in August once a bit of bug squashing and play balancing has been finished on that branch.

There's also an update on the Dungeon Digger website. With development restarted hopefully this game will become playable soon. I loved the old Dungeon Keeper games so I'm quite eager for this project to make progress. :-)

Counting the Days

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess.

I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1, and SuperTux 0.4, and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles.

Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum.

Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my current location has such a poor net connection that it can't upload to blogger. Anyway, the game is 2D isometric mech turn-based strategy.

Pi Armada, a Wing Commander Armada clone, has a new project lead. His first priority is to make it work on Linux and Macs since currently Pi Armada only runs on Windows. Since it uses Python/Pygame and Vega Strike, all of which are cross platform, porting shouldn't be too tricky. It's quite impressive how games are based on the VS engine.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to day dreaming. May I return with more newsworthy content tomorrow... ? ;-)