Hedgewars, JCRPG, and 0AD

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts.

Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer:

That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all the available Worms/Artillery clones.

JCRPG

The ever-promising JCRPG has been ported from one Java 3D technology (jMonkeyEngine) to another (Ardor3D). The latter is a newer engine from the creators of the former, and seems to have taken several lessons on board with the design. The motivation for the port was difficult to debug crashes, but a number of nice enhancements have been discovered along the way and JCRPG really looks sumptuous.

Hopefully soon the game will start to get a bit of a storyline as well as beautiful scenery!

Finally, a pre-alpha download of 0ad is available. This utterly gorgeous looking historically-based RTS has so much potential. They have struggled to get more developers involved since originally going open source. I have been encouraging them to make a release and follow up with regular releases in order to expand the pool from which they may discover new contributors.

Here is a 2 year old trailer for 0ad.

Maybe they should make a new one, that could also be a marketing boost for the project.

FOSS RTS games

Hey FreeGamers!
I know, news are a bit slow here lately, but all three of us are a bit busy with real-life issues, I guess. So if you are interested in becoming a contributor to this blog drop us a line in the forum!
We have also recently gotten some readers feedback concerning this blog entry. I have to admit that our background search was a bit short concerning the Hypertension game... and it turned out that this game is surrounded by some controversy concerning the (probably illegal) use of the original Blood art assets (which were only granted by Monolith to the Transfusion project).

Are there any good FOSS RTS?

Well that depends on what you think is good :)
We have had a small discussion in our forums which resulted in a lot of links to all sorts of FOSS RTS. So if you are looking for some obscure (often unmaintained RTS) have a look.
Overall I would say however that currently there is none that can be recommended without doubt. This might change soon however!

0-A.D. Commercial grade FOSS RTS?

We have mentioned this great project before, and especially since they have gone fully open-source earlier this year all eyes of the FOSS community are probably on this gem.
So far a consumer ready release seems to be still distant however, even though some parts of the game look quite playable already:

0-A.D. Gameplay

Development is progressing though and you can have a look at this interview with the current project leader for some background infos and nice new screenshots. Further news can be found on Moddb.com.

Upcoming Warzone2100 developments

Warzone2100 is one of the few really playable FOSS RTS games out there. There are steady improvements and sometimes you can even find someone to play online ;)
With it's Playstation 1 art assets it is quite a chore to look at however. There is light on the horizon though; A new terrain renderer was recently developed for it and is expected to be released with Version 3.0.

New Warzone2100 terrain renderer

Let's hope this will reach us gamers ASAP!
Their forum has also some other nice upcoming features to offer. There are plans to update the GUI, with some really nice mockups.
Furthermore MaNGusT is working on new units:

And there is a nice mod project involving mechs :)

0 A.D. Now Open Source

Some breaking, amazing news related to one of the most exciting freeware Free game projects on the indie scene:

What is 0 A.D.?

0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game.

What are you doing?

Switching from a closed development process to open source: making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions. We've been working on 0 A.D. in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we've achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved.

How can I get started?

See the Getting Started guide to find more information about the game, forums for discussion, instructions for building and running the game, and links to further details.

For the full announcement, see the dedicated page for explaining why they moved to open source from the closed development model. For more media and information on the game, go to the official 0 A.D. website.

This is, of course, an exciting development. This game has been in production of some form for nearly 8 years, has 150k lines of code in the engine, and hundreds of dedicated (and now shared) models. It will be very interesting to gauge the impact this has on the open source game community. The game itself is not yet complete but it's definitely more than a tech demo, so it will also be interesting to see if the move to open source galvanises the project and gives it the push that it needs to get to a more complete/playable state.

Galaxy Mage Redux

Just as I was about to start lamenting the loss of a promising game, somebody steps up with a call to arms to resurrect development efforts.

Galaxy Mage Redux (placeholder site) will continue where the original Galaxy Mage team left off. They need pythoners and pixel artists so if that's you then make Santa's life cheaper by restoring a good Free game. There is already a forum and the game code is still available here.

His request for help has cropped up in a few places -- happypenguin.org and the FG forums are just two of them.

Another project in the doldrums is Mars: Land of no Mercy (website down). It is still available from the Sourceforge project and there's a post (from August) explaining the website downtime. SVN activity indicates that whilst the site has been down, so has development.

And... what's this... 0AD, the uber-looking freeware RTS game, may actually be released under an open source license? Too good to be true? It is, really, they won't release the whole thing, "for security reasons." (I'm not a fan of security through obscurity.)

I'm being lazy, no screenshots. There are some cool shots on the 0ad website though.

Can You Say Revival

The Widelands team put out a release candidate for their next release, Widelands build10, of their Settlers II inspired game. Check it out!

Egoboo

Now who remembers Egoboo? Or the continuation effort that fizzled out? You know, the cutesy 3D roguelike where your characters waddled around? Well, there's a new place to go for Egoboo development. Several individual efforts have been released and now those efforts are being combined. The most notable ones are Egoboo 2.2.4 and Egoboo++. Hopefully we will see a new release in very near future. :-)

Pingus, the Lemmings clone with penguins, which seemed to have died a death at version 0.6.0 - which was a promising release as well with a nice playable tutorial island - has seen development restart. The original developer, and general FLOSS game hero, grumbel has been working on porting Pingus to SDL away from Clanlib. Whether this work will culminate in a release any time soon is another matter, but it is always nice to see forward motion.

netPanzer

The community for netPanzer, the formerly-commercial-now-GPL RTS, seem to be attempting to revive interest in the game. A new community site and resource site have cropped up and activity is high. Maybe development will restart?

Another project that is threatening to revive itself is Transport Empire. I have been very vocal in my criticism on the tt-forums of the bureaucratic approach that has strangled any intended development. One of the developers has had enough too and announced a simple cut-the-crap code-first approach to make the game happen, because discussions and design documents and fine-detail-planning had drowned any previous attempts.

The exciting freeware RTS project 0 A.D., in development for over 3 years so far, has a newish gameplay video up on their site. Check it out, it looks so cool. I wish they would release a demo but patience is a virtue and this game will be a scorcher when it is eventually released. Still, the lengthy development process is frustrating some fans, to which one of the developers made this rather poignant response which is worth a read if you [as a player] want to understand what free/Free game developers go through.

I'm going to have to stop there before this becomes an essay.

Music tip:

Precioso & Libex - Xperimental Scratch