Four New Free Games

Of course, when I say new, I mean new to me. New to me means, generally, a bit off the radar in the Free Software game community. So, with the post title qualified, let's start...

Top10 is a realistic kart racing game for Windows and Linux. It reminds me of Karting Race, which is fairly inevitable since they are both kart racing simulations, but Top10 is GPL (yay!) whereas Karting Race is freeware (not-so-yay!) so it already has that going for it over Karting Race. (See, I believe that being open source is a significant strength for a freely-available game.) It's quite playable already although still undergoing heavy development. Less words, more video:

Opposite Lock is a racing game for J2ME platforms, originally written for mobile phones. The author has released the engine under a GPL license with 3 free tracks, and is planning to release the game tools including a tile-based track editor, as open source too, and eventually his game tracks under a CC license. It looks like a really fun game, is a complete game, and could be great for the GP2X or maybe OLPC or similar platforms. It's a bit like the original MarioKart but with cars. See the video:

Thanks to Andrew for bringing that one up in the forums.

Teewars is a cute 2D deathmatch game. It's a bit of a cross between something like Quake and Metal Blob Solid. It's very similar in scope to the Liero-style of game, an open source version being OpenLieroX. It looks full of potential although it's probably going to be multiplayer only. However, there is a caveat. It's under a rather strange open source license.

How am I doing? That's 3 so far. I've got one more. OpenClou! is an effort to keep the genre of the burglary simulations alive. It's 3D, it's open source, beyond that and the following video, and the obvious ethical debate on whether we should promote or glorify theft, I can't really say much more!

That's it for today. Very video laden! :-)

SimCity open sourced for One Laptop per Child

Remember me?

SimCity, open source. The news is nearly a year old, but now it has been released and you can try to compile it. Download the source or get it via git: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/
projects/micropolis-activity. Unfortunately neither version wanted to be built on my machine. =(

The name SimCity was removed from the game, along with the plane crash disaster. The new name is Micropolis. According to a text file in the release, child-friendly graphics are wanted for the OLPC version.

Update: Micropolis has now it's own home page.

There is a list of games for the XO, can you think of any, that would fit that list?

Spring surprise

In other news, Spring 0.76b1 has been released. The Changelog reveals that for example installing mods is now easier. Hopefully it'll work for me, until this day I was only able to run the engine tech demos. Let's go get it then!

Happy Gnu Year

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year.

I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too.

Simutrans 128

Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com. And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can play it on BeOS!

Egoboo 2.7.5 came out. It's the biggest update since the original release of Egoboo, however it doesn't work in Linux so we'll go into more detail when 2.7.6 comes out. Windows users should check it out regardless.

VDrift "Christmas edition" is available for download. There's a rewritten physics engine in there, among many other improvements. Also, now the VDrift community has attained somewhat of a critical mass, instead of including all available cars and tracks (of which some were of dubious quality) this release only includes those that are of a high standard. It's pretty awesome looking but I don't understand drifting so I couldn't drive around corners. I hope they provide an arcade racing mode in the future.

I'll wrap up with Sauerbraten "assassin" edition. Released just before Christmas, this release brings hud guns amongst many, many small iterative improvements. Sauerbraten recently got rated 7th out of 7 popular Free Software shooters. The reason being that, despite it's community-map-editing innovations, most of the content isn't so great and there aren't many people playing online, so it's more of a tech demo. I'd say that's fair, but something Sauer does [other than innovative technology] that other games don't do is provide a platform for creating new games, such as Blood Frontier and Eisenstern. I have a feeling that 2008 will be a great year for Sauerbraten and it's mods, where the effort of the last few years comes together very nicely.

Updates, updates, updates... woha!

Just a tiny snack this time!

One of the Christmas presents this year was Battle Tanks Xmas Edition. It introduces more interactivity (very GTA-like stuff) and a lot of fixes.

No kidding, this is the biggest update we've ever done to our little game.

Sounds promising.

Warzone 2100 2.0.10

Warzone 2100 2.0.10 was released shortly before 2008. It fixes ATI 3D graphics and Vorbis 1.2 sound support and should make the game fully playable for some who were not able to run it with sound or at reasonable frame rates. Also terrain rendering is supposed to be faster and produce prettier results.
The ex-commercial project is for me the best free strategy game available. It was GPL-ed, excluding videos and music and I hope that it will soon feature some cool tracks to make the click-action even more pleasant.

Stormbaan Coureur 2.0.2 is available for linux systems. It features a new model, which I think is sexy, although I don't understand how the rear axis is physically possible (you'll see what I mean.) Another feature is a terribly low frame rate in comparison to former versions. =( Anyways, take a look at the official video!

Dead Justice

It's quite impressive what you can find when browsing SourceForge's project list... quite impressive... What I found is Cat Mother Dead Justice, a Directx-only 3rd-person shooter, which is a stopped and open-sourced commercial project. It has good graphics and does run stable. The best part for me is: The art is under GPL. This hopefully means that we can expect some imported pretty/prettier models/maps/textures in games like Nexuiz or OpenArena, though I think any 3D game could profit from it, for example JCRPG, which could use some fully-animated models - new textures would do the trick! Maybe even someone would care to port the currently windows-only Cat Mother Dead Justice...

Making sounds, building models, playing games

Hi there, I'm new here but let's get straight to the point.

sfxr

While browsing through the Ludum Dare contest's blog, I found a nifty little tool which generates 8-bitish sfx, without me having to know anything about sound synthesis. It's called sfxr and was made by Tomas Pettersson. License unknown. You can download it for win32 and *nix (run 'make') systems.

The other awesome thing is the first FreeGameDev.net modelling contest. The mission is to create rts industrial-style buildings under free licenses. The competition ends when February begins. Ironically, I tripped over a similar contest in a forum, where I told about the FGD contest.

Hex-a-hop

Yesterday I realized, that Charlie never mentioned (oh snap he did, under the name Hex-a-pop) the totally awesome puzzle game Hex-a-hop. It's homepage is dead, but the game survived at Debian. I also was able to retrieve a half-broken archive (linux source/build) using the Wayback machine. Try the game or at least give it to your kids!

Charlie once mentioned AstroMenace, but did he tell that Viewizard released it's source and media under the GPL v3? It works like a charm, copying some files, 'cmake .', 'make', './AstroMenace' and I see a game menu with spaceships flying in it's background on my display.

OpenAstroMenace

The game looks sharp and the gameplay is impressive for an top-down (or down-top?) arcade. I also have to mention that my subwoofer likes the explosions' sounds. My neighbours noticed it too.

I sure hope that some arcade freaks will soon take the game and improve it (Menu gui is a bit confusing, levels could contain a bit more diversity, enemies could drop temporary upgrades.) But for now: go get it!

Flightgear 1.0.0 Released

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived.

Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community.

The scope of the Flightgear project is, as you might expect for a game 11 years in the making, nothing short of impressive. Whilst it does fall short in a few departments when compared to commercial flight sims, in others it is unequalled. Having no full time developers and being of such high quality is a testament to the dedication and organisation of it's development team.

Flightgear has a pluggable flight dynamics model with 3 primary options, giving the enthusiast an opportunity to find a flight model that they feel is most accurate and/or fun. The integrated flight dynamics model is optimized for implementing plausibly behaving aircraft without requiring heaps of hard-to-acquire aerodynamic test data. Another is based on an FDM originally written by people at NASA. Quite impressive detail that most players probably won't appreciate.

Flightgear comes with an extensive and accurate database of world scenery. Over 20,000 real world airports are included in the full scenery set. Runways come with markings, lighting, taxiways, some sloped with variable elevation, the latter a feature missing from most commercial titles. The world scenery fits on 3 DVD's - pretty detailed coverage of the entire world with accurate terrain based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data. Scenery includes lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, and nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and even headlights visible on major highways.

You can fly seamlessly around the world, as scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread - minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas and keeping memory requirements realistic.

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. Taking the 'term' simulator to another level, the sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky and the [correctly placed] moon is illuminated by the [correctly placed] sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Getting onto the aircraft, and you can fly a variety of aircraft, from the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets including the A10 tank buster, and several light singles.

Flightgear even can do fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views - although only a few aircraft have had this implemented thus far. Impressive nonetheless.

Despite the unbelievable attention to detail, Flightgear can be played on a rather modest PC. However the better the PC, the better it looks and runs so those with the latest, greatest 3D cards can still enjoy the extra beauty and a smoother experience.

I grabbed a few of the nicer screenshots from the Flightgear 1.0.0 gallery.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go and download Flightgear 1.0.0 (extras / source available here) and get flying - and enjoy knowing that this is Free Software gaming at it's glorious best.

Spread the word and digg this story on FSDaily and Digg.

The Flightgear feature list contains more in-depth analysis of the Flightgear features and is where I grabbed most of the above info - I'm in the business of Free Softare game information rather than Free Software game reviews. ;-)

Simu-this

OpenCity

OpenCity 0.0.5 has been unleashed upon the wider public. The game is, well, not yet much of a game but it is progressing steadily. I would like to see the author approach maybe the Open Transport Tycoon project to see if there's any room for utilizing some of their many wonderous building models. I'm a big believer in project synergy, of which there isn't nearly enough occurence in the Free Software game world. People seem to fear a lack of identity to a game, but a game identity is foremost created by experience - of which graphics are only a part of the bigger picture. Also, just becasue two projects share graphical resources, doesn't mean they have to completely overlap.

Getting back to OpenTTD, version 0.6 is around the corner and 0.6-beta2 was released a few days ago. 0.6 final, "will give you loads of new features, like newhouses, newindustries, signals and diagonal tracks under bridges, trams, autoslope, oneway roads, half tile slopes and much more. It furthermore contains quite a few performance improvements under certain conditions as well as a very long list of bugreports."

OpenTTD is pretty addictive and this sounds like another good upgrade. I'd better stay away, if this blog is to regain momentum. ;-)

There's a lot of people hacking away on OpenTTD for one reason or another. I thought this 3D hack-up (as opposed to a mock-up, a hack-up is a barely functioning codebase to showcase an idea) was pretty interesting, as was the suggestion that 3D could work in different ways - I quite like the idea of an abstract 3D transport simulation.

Free Games on SkyOS

Keeping with the city/transport simulation theme, Simutrans 0.99.16 got released a few days ago. Simutrans and OpenTTD are both incredibly portable. Both have been ported to BeOS [a classic-but-defunct operating system]. I'm not sure how current the OpenTTD build is, but Simutrans could probably run on Haiku [an open source successor to BeOS].

I do think that a good niche for Free Software games is alternative operating systems. Not only does it allow OS enthusiasts to port games to their favourite platform (e.g. the SkyOS author has ported a number of open source games) but it allows the games to be played on a platform that commercial games are not available on, even if it is a tiny minority.

Allo Allo with Allacrost

Ok, I've been slacking. I could make excuses (please somebody tell me a cheat so I can complete level 50 of Kobo Deluxe) but I won't.

Another Hero of Allacrost release is up for grabs on their website. This version does bring a few new features to the current tech demo status of the project, but it's a major rewrite of several parts so versions will hopefully be coming thicker and faster in the next few months.

I tried it out and it's impressive, although not very expansive yet. If they can keep up the production quality and go on to make a full game, it's going to be an amazing game indeed.

Fortress WIP

There has been plenty of work on the project that was started here earlier this year - Fortress. Check out the castle components courteousy of our very own povray magician, Rushhour. There'll be a playable tech demo soon so I'll post news of that when it arrives!

Sun Dog Resurrection is a project to make a Free Software successor to the classic game Sun Dog for the Apple II (now that's going back a ways). What makes this project interesting is that it's the original Sun Dog game author who instigated it. They had been a bit stagnant but there's activity on the sf.net project page.

Project Apricot got it's blog going. It's syndicated on the FreeGameDev planet, as are many other Free Software game project / developer blogs, so if you enjoy this blog then the planet is a good place for you to go as well.