Cube2 engine keeps on expanding!

While the recent new release of Cube2: Sauerbraten didn't bring any really big changes, the network of friendly forks keeps expanding. But before I go into more details, here is a new feature trailer of Cube2: Sauerbraten:



The maybe most prominent and fully FOSS fork RedEclipse is still working on the promised new 1.4 release, with them doing some silly and some cool enhancement projects in the meantime... so yeah:

Red Eclipse in Valve Time tm

Octaforge still has a few day to go in order to avoid missing their estimated release "this month", but when browsing OpenGameArt.org, I came across an interesting fork of the Sandbox Game Maker fork, called Lamiae with the RPG game Kelgar:


Kelgar Gameplay 0.8 - Indie DB

According to their github page, content seems to be libre (CC-by or CC-by-SA) but information is a bit scarce. Even less information is available for this other fork, called SabiCube, but you can download and test their alpha.

Oh and a bit older, but also interesting: the emscripten powered HTML5 port of Cube2, called Banana Bread, has also really picked up since the main emscripten developer was hired by the Mozilla foundation. Here you can see it running a multi-player game (very recent new feature), and with the upcoming (also Mozilla powered) asm.js Javascript speed-up, it will probably run at near native speeds in the not too far future.

Ok... I hope that is all... if you know of other interesting Cube2 powered projects, please comment below!

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Some upcoming releases

Looks like we will get some nice x-mas presents this year:

A bit delayed but probably right on time for the Mayan end of the world, we will see a long awaited new release of Cube2:Sauerbraten. Read about the release announcement here. Hmm, I wonder if it has already Occulus Rift support...

Also on the FPS front, AlienArena is having a major engine update, with a claimed massive 3-4 times speed increase in BSP rendering and more VBO improvements.

Mars meets CounterStrike?

Furthermore they announce a new game-mode to be added soon, which tries to slow down the game-play of AlienArena a bit and add a more tactical appeal. Sounds a bit like selling out to the CounterStrike/ModernWarefare crowd to me, but lets see how it will play ;)

Last but not least, GarageGames has announced that after the recent FOSS licensed release of their 3D engine Torque3D (see latest updates here, sadly no working Linux port yet), they will also open-source their 2D engine!

And in fact it will not only be a source-drop, but rather a significant update including a merger of their iOS code with the rest of the Torque2D one.

Also no Linux port yet, but just as for the 3D engine one will hopefully show up sooner or later.

P.S.: In case someone has missed it: SuperTuxKart had a very nice new release recently, bumping it up to version 0.8. See a video of it in action here.

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Vote to get Cube 2 devs a free virtual reality kit (Oculus Rift)!

Give Cube 2 some tech!

Vote here for Lee "eihrul" Salzman to receive an Oculus Rift for Cube 2 development!

Oculus Rift is the much lauded VR headset that was Kickstarted recently, making almost 10 times the initial goal in pledges. Unfortunately, it isn't an open project, however, one of the big names in FOSS game dev, Lee "eihrul" Salzman has been nominated to receive a Rift dev kit in a giveaway competition, hosted by Oculus.

Eihrul is the lead developer of the Cube2 "Sauerbraten" engine, that has had implementations other interesting technologies such as the "3rd Space" force feedback vest implemented, making Cube2 an excellent project to provide Rift support.

Vote for him here

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Dev-Corner: Inter Quake Model Format and Open Source Gamedev Collaboration

The following is a guest post by Lee Salzman, a contributor to several open source game projects and the lead developer of such projects as the ENet networking library and Sauerbraten, introducing IQM (the Inter-Quake Model format), a simple model format designed to meet the practical challenge of animated content for Quake(-like) 3D engines and allow more sharing of modeling tools across various engines

As much as players or fans of various open source FPS games might view all these projects as competing, isolated islands, the surprising and hopeful truth is, we developers actually get together and talk about development challenges a lot. And in past discussions, one of those issues that stuck out like a sore thumb was content, especially animated content such as player models. We were all using our own various custom model formats or cast-off commercial formats (like id's MD5 or Valve's SMD formats) with related third-party export or conversion tools, with varying degrees of (dis)satisfaction.

Yet, what we all needed in this case was so eerily similar: we all just wanted a no-fuss, binary, skeletal animation format that was quick to load, had relatively small file sizes, and provided the commonly needed mesh data for Quake(-like) player models - not bloated with unnecessary "but what if..." features while remaining just flexible enough to fulfill the artists' needs. Existing formats like MD5, SMD, Collada, and others had complex textual representations that make them painful to load and often require significant internal conversions of the loaded data to get useful, renderable animation data out of them, often with frustrating omissions such as no ability to directly export vertex normals. Engine specific formats worked around these issues to some extent, but often suffered from poorly supported tooling due to the difficulty of keeping it up-to-date with various modeling tools and artist requirements.

IQM Demo Model, Mr Fixit

Given those frustations, why did we not just throw our lots in together and make one format that could handle our needs well enough, so we all benefit from common efforts on reliable, shared tools? Sanity prevailed, and not much later, after input wrangling from various developers within the community, we hammered out a simple specification for a pair of formats that did just that: IQM, a binary skeletal animation format that provides easy integration into a game engine, and IQE, a textual format that makes it easy to quickly write exporter scripts and easily converts to IQM if one does not wish to write an exporter for it directly.

And what good is a specification without support? So again not much later, we went through the grunt-work of actually making sure the format was well-supported in the key tools our artists used and, of course, the engines we all developed. At the time of this writing, all commonly used versions of Blender have direct exporter and importer support via the IQM development kit, the model viewer and conversion tool Noesis can easily convert from and to the format, and the format has out-of-the-box support in various engines, including but not limited to, DarkPlaces (used in Xonotic, Steel Storm, and more), CRX (used in Alien Arena), Qfusion (used in Warsow), ioquake 3 (used in Open Arena and many more), Remake Quake along with its sibling engine DirectQ, and Cube 2 (used in Sauerbraten, Red Eclipse, and more). To ensure continued and future support by other game engines, the IQM development kit also provides example demos of how to easily load and animate the format, both on the CPU and also using shaders to animate the format on the GPU, for developers that are unsure of how to utilize skeletal animation or just want to see the nitty-gritty details of how the format operates.

Despite the format getting off to a great start thanks to the support of various developers within the gaming community, we still need your help and support to help this format be even more useful. If you happen to use some modeling tools other than Blender (as awesome as it is, people have their preferences) and wouldn't mind writing a simple IQE exporter script for your modeling tool of choice, or even more sophisticated IQM direct export support, we would greatly appreciate your contribution!

To get started with the format, please check out the IQM development kit and other IQM/IQE format resources at: http://lee.fov120.com/iqm

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BananaBread, Sauerbraten in HTML5

Bananabread is the spiritual successor to Syntensity (which added a Javascript scripting layer to Sauerbraten) only this time running inside the player's browser. It was ported using Emscripten, a C++ (LLVM) to Javascript compiler, and seems to have quite a lot of Sauerbraten's functionality ported over, including bots, multiple weapons, map editing, and even a Javascript api to control camera cutscenes.

It currently runs in the development versions of Firefox and Chrome and seems to get about 1/3rd to 1/4th of native fps. Get the source here: https://github.com/kripken/BananaBread

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Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

                            

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

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Fan made trailer contests and other FPS news

So it seems Red Eclipse is having a "contest" for creating an official trailer for their upcoming 1.2 release. Nothing to win (except fame), but the guys from Sauerbraten (also Cube2 engine based, like Red Eclipse) recently did the same with a quite nice result:

 

New official Sauerbraten trailer

So if you want to participate, have a look at their rules and check out these nice open-source tools for video capturing:  GLC (short tutorial by our qudobup) and editing: PiTiVi or KDEnlive (sorry for being Linux centric here :p ).

In other news I can report that the Xonotic team is following up on their promise to report more news and developments on their Blog :) Check out the latest entry for a log read and many nice pictures.
Personally I am currently most excited about the mod "Overkill" with tries to take some features of the well loved instagib mode (sadly so much that it is sometimes hard to find anything but instagib games :( ) like right click laser jump etc. while keeping a variety of weapons that are a bit more appealing to non-instagib players.
Well, check out the more detailed description and pictures at the bottom of the post linked above! Oh and you can already play the mod by joining the test server with a vanilla Xonotic version (all needed files will be auto-downloaded).

P.S.: Here is a small video to show how it currently looks:

Xonotic Overkill mod (early WIP)

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Combing Github for Games

I am bored. SF.net doesn't produce many new foss game findings, so I say: "Let's try GitHub's search function!"

Searching "game" quickly turned into "game -warcraft -framework -iPhone -life -cocos -Invaders" and I gave up such a general approach. Next up "fps".

1. maroxe/fps - Soya3D-based shooter. Doesn't run, so I write a report. Project probably inactive, the history tells me. Next.
2. ctmammoth/mammoth - "Tactical/strategy CTF-style FPS". Contains just a .sln (Visual Studio) file and dlls in the repo. Is written in C#. Obviously non-Linux. Next.
3. 
   treeform/simple-fps - "Simple fps demo for panda3d". Last action October 2009. It runs! Let's make a quick video, even though it's nothing, but the texture is kind of interesting. Lagging in the video [YT, TO] because of recording app I think. Next.
4. mlambir/Pygame-FPS - "Wolfenstein style fps in pygame". It uses original Wolfenstein's gfx too. Nothing to look at, still recorded a video [YT, TO]. Last activity September 2009. Next.
5. Michael-mrg/Sauerbraten - "Fork of the sauerbraten fps with a variety of convenience patches". Not going to test it, but nice to know there are Sauerbraten improvements on GitHub..
6. gitpan/SDL-App-FPS - What a compelling... name. But then again, behind lame names, there sometimes are quality games! Requires SDL-Perl. The test suite tries to fullscreen and kills X.org in the process. Next.
7. danopia/quak - "Implementation of duckinator's weird FPS idea". I don't know who duckinator is, but this sounds swell! OGRE-based. Won't start, let's rebuild OGRE. Doesn't help. Write report.

Okay, no more "fps" search results that I could care about. Let's try "rts".

1. 
   spring/spring - Spring. Oh hi, I didn't see you there! And you brought a friend: the GPL/BY-SA game "Project Recoil" which seems to have at least some 3D & concept art going on.
2. mrpouet/chenilles - "RTS worms-like". Can't say that I like those, the original is the best Worms-like game so far for me. No activity since > 1 year. Okay, we have terrain and a worm which won't stop walking. Not mucht, but have a video [YT, TO].
3. shawn42/snelps - "Rubygame RTS" which is now over three years periodically in development. I was unable to test it this time however, due to rubygame problems on my side.
4. dragly/loose_cannon - "Simple Qt's OpenGL RTS". I accidentally wrote an incorrect report but then got instructions for compiling the game. (Didn't manage to do it ye though.)
5. 
   Acedio/craft - "A simple RTS". This is a WarCraft 3-style WarCraft 2 clone (at least it feels like that)! Too bad it has nothing more than unit movement and animations. No more development since May 2009. Blender files of models are in the repository, so if somebody found out the license, they might become useful to some other project. Have a video [YT, TO].
6. jvranish/SpaceWars - "RTS with an emphasis on gravity". It seems not to work. Bug report. Next.

Let's try "rpg".

1. Can't run | can't run | can't run | can't run | a renderer [YT, TO] | not pretty but functional [YT, TO] | too complicated to set up, no convenient package of pybox2d for Arch Linux | a little something [screen] | A pre-alpha Panda3D RPG [YT, TO] | tiled map, I could watch this guy all day | no content [screen]
2. 
   foxostro/arbarlith2 - Finaly something more 'robust'! Charlie once mentioned the game in a post. Rather complicated to compile (see readme) and fails too, so I created a report and hope for support.

That wasn't much fun... Um, "adventure" anyone? I'll ignore games I can't run for the rest of this post.

1. 
   kallepersson/subterranean - This one is playable! (Only one quest to solve but it has music.) One great thing about it is that wheels are not being re-invented for it, it uses an adventure engine that was the product of a PyWeek challenge. Here's a little video [YT, TO].
2. 
   codingisacopingstrategy/ countryoforigin [homepage] - This one is a ScummVM adventure, where dialog and philosophy appear to be the key to winning the game (does it even matter?). It looks so retro but breaks its visual predecessor's habits in a way, that reminds me of Mr. Rohrer's games.
   
3. 
   Droggelbecher/Grail - An adventure engine with parallax drawing, noir graphics and no interaction as of yet. A video shows the effect and animations [YT, TO]

What a clusterfoo! I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! The next post I'm going to write will hopefully be a one-game one. :)

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Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

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Cube2: Is it finally taking off?

Ahh, qudobup and Charly are back and posting. Lots of interesting news even for me!
So what can I add to this? Well first of all I forgot to mention this awesome TBS in my last post: UFO2000, which is of course like UFO:AI a clone of a very well known series.
And I should have also mentioned Stellar Forces which is a remake of Laser Squad :)

Cube2 Engine

So as you might have guessed todays topic will be the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, which besides being a mighty fine game on its own, has also spawned some great offspring projects lately. Blood Frontier has been mentioned before and since there have not been any new releases since then I will keep it short and just mention this video review which gives you an idea of the game play. But check it out if you have not done so yet!

Platinum Arts Sandbox

Plantinum Arts Sandbox has also been mentioned here before, and could be quickly described as a game development platform aimed at kids (and adults), utilizing all the nice in game editor features the Cube2 engine offers (and more).

Recent news are that they are hosting a nice contest , they have also just announced a new version. And besides offering the usual amount of fixes and updates, it now boasts a really nice 2D platformer template for you to create new games:

Sandbox's 2D platformer

Furthermore they have templates for RPG projects and for wanna be film makers a new tool called movie cube (movies made with game engines are also called Machinima for those unfamiliar with the term).

Syntensity

Syntensity is a project quite similar to the one mentioned above, albeit with a more mature focus. Their feature list is long and even though still under heavy development it is starting to be a really nice tool for game developers.

And besides the fact that we are happy to announce that they have chosen our network for hosting their community forums, they have also recently released a really nice new game template called Razanak:

Razanak gameplay

So check it out via the Syntensity lobby (the mod gets dowloaded automatically when you enter the corresponding portal), and see for yourself what a powerful game making tool Syntensity has become.

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Sauerbraten Trooper Edition, first playable Mark IV network Demo

Sauerbraten [more screens]

Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [download]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls, new music, and so much more.

Sauerbraten characters

The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story. I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :)

Mark IV

The tank simulation engine Mark IV [project, web page, blog] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary.

A little arcade

Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plus different grid types plus the visual style of Transcend. Source available here. It uses the PopCap Framework, which appears to be free software.

Atomic Worm at YouTube

Do you like cruel, hard moon lander games? If yes, OldSkoolGravityGame was made with you in mind! It may look harmless, even retro-pretty on video... but I have felt the pain...
O_O

Portable game packages

DSN

The Damn Small Nexuiz (DSN) project provides a slim version of Nexuiz with the aim to make it playable on netbooks. Deja Vu?

Speaking of reduced weight: Spring RTS Engine Portable is a win32 Spring (RTS engine) package that doesn't touch the registry.

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Freedom is Fun

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.

Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.

NYC in Sauer

I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.

There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.

Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.

UFO:AI Starchaser

I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.

Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!

Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.

I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?

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