Long time no update from...

...FreeGamer? No not this time :p It's rather that the Spring RTS engine ran into some trouble with their long overdue 0.83 version and now decided to release 0.84 instead ;)

Along with it comes also a new Zero-K release (0.9), which prompted one of their players to make a nice new trailer in anticipation:

Zero-K fan trailer

So...that's it for today ;)

P.S.: Check out Zero-K's Planetwars metagame too.

P.P.S.: Also Spring related... someone on their boards is looking for people to take over the development of another quite nice RTS game: Conflict Terra.

Read more »

Zero-K PlanetWars meta game

Not sure how recent this news is, but the website of the SpringRTS based FOSS RTS Zero-K states that their online campaign metagame PlanetWars is now in BETA.

This is a screenshot of the webbased planet overview, which shows how well you (and your clan-mates) are progressing in taking over the galaxy.
Game-play of Zero-K does not change much with this game-mode, but it puts each game into a greater perspective so to say ;) But check out their own description of what PlanetWars is here.

Read more »

Engines of War: Not dead!

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines.

They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay (take that Julius :P). So yeah, check it out!

Read more »

Contact: Tactical Squad RTS

Another game from the well of innovation that is the SpringRTS community, Contact aims to be an Open-Source squad based RTS. It uses models from the DOTA-like attempt "Engines of War" which unfortunately never really got anywhere, other than a couple of nice mechs.

The Contact team released a beta on the 25 Dec last year, so it's not exactly breaking news, but the project is still moving forward and could use a couple of eyes if anyone is interested in it.

Forum Thread with more screenies

Read more »

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])

Read more »

A few interesting things

Hello again from the dark side of the moon (at least it's equally remote ;) ).

Today I have some assorted news of projects previously featured and one new one. Lets start with the latter:

ArcanumAlive or OpenArcanum is a engine re-implemention and assets replacement project for the game Arcanum. It somewhat recently also got a Linux port, and seems to be progressing nicely so far/again.

ArcanumAlive

Some RTS news

Totally unrelated, the previously featured MegaGlest has been updated to version 3.3.7 which brings a series of nice improvements to the game (including a MacOSX port). Some time ago a much improved version of the WW2 themed RTS Spring1944 was released, and the engine it is based on also got a bunch of updates lately.

Finally some FPS news

For the readers with a short attention span, I left the FPS news for the very last (so that they don't read it :p). Recently Irritant the creator of AlienArena released some news about the upcoming version, called 2011. The main feature is probably ODE physics integration, but the new maps look nice too as seen in this video:

AlienArena2011 promo

But that's all for today. Hopefully we will see an update by the other authors of this blog soon ;)

Read more »

A bunch of updates

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK.

So, where to start?

Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown, which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates, a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself:

Octaspire:Crates Tutorial

A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare), which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world".

If you are following the development of the promising turn based colony game Unknown Horizons (aka the artist formerly known as OpenAnno), their new development blog might be of interest. Oh and did I mention that FreeCol also got a bunch of updates lately?

Very neat is also the recent release of FreeOrion, a turn based space colonization game. It still lacks some important features to be really playable (combat and diplomacy), but otherwise it is already a pretty good looking game:

FreeOrion

Another game currently heavily updated game (engine) is OSARE, which aims to be a fully featured base to build Diablo like story lines/games with. An already slightly outdated (v0.08, newest v0.09) shows what can be done already:

OSARE loot drops

Another interesting project I came across lately is the Darkplaces based Blood Omicide, which is of course sadly based on copyrighted material. Overdose, a recently already mentioned open-source "in engine but not in media" (and even the engine code has yet to be released) game has recently shown some rather nice enemy model screen-shots. Furthermore their newest video is quite amazing in regards to the light rendering.

A game-engine and the games based on it that is probably vastly under-reported here on FreeGamer, is the Spring RTS engine. I guess it might be due to my dislike of Total Annihilation like RTS, but there is actually one (with public domain licensed media) that strays from that kind of RTS concept: Kernel Panic puts you right inside of a PC, and has quite a bit of nice uncommon game modi that break up the usual RTS grind.

Kernel Panic promo

I guess that's all for today... my link-list is not yet completely empty, but the rest will have to wait for another day ;)

Read more »

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. :)

Read more »

Snippets and whippets

Complete Annihilation

Apparently the Spring mod Complete Annihilation is rather good, although it's about to be renamed and not quite fully free of its ties to the original Total Annihilation content. The goal is to be totally Free. And it's pretty complete(ish) as a game already. There's lots of lovely screenshots.

Glest Advanced Engine 0.2.12 got released. They also got a Sourceforge project for GAE.

Q3Rally

Fun racing games are always, er, fun. Well, in demand as well. So maybe Q3Rally can strike a chord with the Free gaming public? Apparently the original Quake Rally was the best Quake mod ever, although it was never completed and all that is left of it is Quake Rally: Leftovers. There's plenty of maps and cars and it is billed as a mod for OpenArena so should be totally Free. \o/

Here's a promotional video for Q3Rally that makes it look rather ooo aaah:

Dark Phear, a classic Phantasy Star-like RPG, as reported in the Ubuntu forums. Go there for links, screenshots, and more information.

Oolite, the Elite cloney-but-better game, is getting purty with shaders it seems.

The Privateer Gemini Gold team have been fairly quiet but work is ongoing and the next version will contain much better videos / graphics to make it even more immersive. Some of it can be seen on their youtube channel although the videos are currently just very short showcases.

Read more »

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.

Read more »