Clonk open sourced and Free Gamer ceil(foss games)

Clonk

Clonk got open sourced! Welcome OpenClonk. Clonky! It seems to be the indie game fashion at the moment what with 0AD and all. What is Clonk?

Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactic-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms.

So, the Clonk developers open sourced it, but since backwards compatability is a big problem for them, they ditched all Clonk content and are asking the community to contribute new game content. Judging by the forum, the community looks very active, it's a case of 'watch this space' I guess.

The above video is the "Clonk Rage" trailer. I got the impression this is what has been open sourced although I'm not sure how of the levels/content came with it, if at all. Perhaps somebody could check out the source and see where it is up to?

Anyhoo... so, Ceil... round up... get it?

Despite the lack of Free Gamer activity, the FOSS game scene is as active as ever.

Some new releases that should have been mentioned earlier:

• Unknown Horizons 2009.1 (announcement)
  
  Many improvements over the 2009.0 release, new UI, multilanguage support, music, game features


• Egoboo 2.7.4 (announcement)
  
  Lots of features, updates, and bug fixes - should be getting pretty good now


• Project Football 0.2 (FGD announcement)
  
  Consecutive seasons, UI updates, AI updates, but still a Spanish-only website although English secions in their forum


• Legend of Edgar 0.20 0.22 (FGD announcement)
  
  Compatibility with 64 bit CPUs, 2 additional maps and a new boss


• Stone Soup 0.5 (LinuxGames announcement)
  
  Its got graphics but is also the winner of the 2009 Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year award


• And last but not least: Yo Frankie! 1.1 (announcement)
  
  Includes the 3 winning levels from the level design competition, with additional improvements

I probably should make more of a fuss over Yo Frankie! than I do - it does look absolutely stunning as you can see in the following video - and it could yet become an important starting platform for creating other types Free games using it's materials and gameplay as a foundation:

Well, so, that's some stuff we already knew about, but what about some things we don't?

Skyscraper: A first-person 3D virtual building simulator. Perhaps not a game. I report, you decide.

Wesnoth + Bloodbowl + a blender = Wesbowl! It's early days (0.1 alpha) but good to see somebody having a bash.

Grandwing is a game being developed to be similar in gameplay to the game Spyro the Dragon.

And world's worst website award goes to... *drumroll* ...ok, I'm not going to say its the worst, but the site for YSFlight (an open source flight sim) has to be a contender.

Toodlepip!

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Late nights and leftovers - Scourge 0.21

Scourge 0.21 is out. It's been optimized and stabilized considerably and now has a full 12 chapter storyline. Each release of Scourge gets closer to being a really good game - there are still a few issues that need addressing such as the character models - and that is reflected in the increasing activity of contributors. Until a year or so ago, Scourge development was mainly a 1 man effort, but 4 people put a lot of work into this release. A new model format (they are looking at [the unfortunately named] assimp for 0.22) and some better character models (think Glestimals, some JCRPG models, and a few of their own) and Scourge will offer some real immersion as well as a platform for creating new Free Software 3D isometric RPGs.

Talking about optimizations, VDrift is getting back on track after a ground-up rewrite to address key weaknesses in the codebase. Most features are now back and working better than before. I'm going to give the SVN version a go, but the vdrift-data check out takes a while. I think I started it 40 minutes ago.

Cube on the iPhone? No, really. Yes, really. Video:

Talking of cube-things, in Sauerbraten land I thought this idea was a good one. The Intensity Engine is a... well, it's ambitious. I won't go into that bit. However it brings procedurally generated content to Sauerbraten and that's pretty awesome. Video:

[i]Oops, forgot to link to the [arguably more interesting] counterpart video which shows how a bit of Python generates the above.[i]

Yo Frankie! Or yo, what's the deal Frankie? I guess when something gets so much hype, the expectations are high. The screenshots look lovely. The game? Well, the BGE version (which came with 0documentation and meant I had to ask in irc how to actually start the game since the Yo Frankie website gives as much info as the 0documentation) performance was terrible and the Crystal Space version I couldn't play because 0launch* is just about the worst way of distributing a game I have ever encountered. All hype and a totally cute techdemo. Good effort though.

* As if web browsers weren't already overburdened, apparently now they should be installers for things too. I hope the next release they at least provide a tar.gz download alternative.

I'm a bit off-radar at the moment with work. Thankfully Q is filling in brilliantly. He's the next-gen Free Gamer dude because he actually does stuff like create videos rather than just linkify interesting things.

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