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!

Foooooooooooooo Egoboo

Update: brain malfunction. I first posted 2.7.0, then 2.7.7b, but the correct _stable_ version of Egoboo is 2.7.0b and the development version is 2.7.7, got it? =/ Thanks for the pointer, maststef

A new stable Egoboo 2.7.0 2.7.7b 2.7.0 wraps up several months of development and bug fixing. This project has really come back to life over the course of 2008. It is very well tested with a lengthy changelog. If I had make a criticism, it would be that Egoboo really looks dated these days and perhaps they could renew focus on nicer textures and more detailed models - perhaps aspiring to be a bit closer to SoulFu in quality - but graphics do not a good game make. It's great to see the project successfully revived from a lifeless piece of bitrot that it had become a few years go.

Now it's a pretty smooth looking experience. Check out this (slightly rambly) video review:

Unknown Horizons 2009.1 was released several days ago. It now resembles a game, you can build a city, although it's still a few features short of being fun. They are changing their release policy to monthly updates / snapshots with stable releases less often (i.e. when they are ready) instead of a stable release every 6 months. Sounds like a wise plan to me.

Battery is a browser based 2D top scrolling game written in Java. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view and shoots down enemies. The game is free and freely distributable. The game can be played inside the browser window, if you have Java.

The Legend of Mazzeroth aims to be a new 2D MMORPG, I think in the style of The Mana World or Stendhal. In fact, I thought it was a fork or inspired by one of those two, but I can't easily find the reference nor do I have the time to search for it. Update: it was originally a fork of The Mana World but now is written from scratch although probably uses TMW graphics. Thanks for finding that out Crush.

Extreme Tux Racer 0.5 beta is supposed to be pretty nice and a big improvement over the 0.4 release.

Dammit I had at least two more project updates but I forgot them. Perhaps Freedroid RPG 0.12? Maybe. What about Vacuum Magic 0.10? Possibly. Who can remember... oh, check out this musicy web thingy. Your browser is the next Flash platform, it seems.

OpenTTD, Simutrans, and Egoboo

OpenTTD OpenGFX

OpenTTD moved a step closer to being a Free Software game with alpha releases of OpenGFX, the "[8bpp] Graphics Replacement Project". There's still a few black boxes ("features") where yet-to-be-replaced buildings should be, but it looks fairly good other than that.

OpenTTD 32bit extra zoom

Of course, this is just the low-resolution replacement that makes OpenTTD fully free, and is not to be confused with the high-resolution graphics work (see screenshot). The more detailed graphics are [unsurprisingly] less further along.

In the meantime, there is a totally Free Software transport game in Simutrans.

Simutrans Pak96 Comic

Pak96 Comic [for Simutrans] looks especially gorgeous. Clean, clear, and consistent graphics mean you can focus on gameplay rather than get distracted by artifacts or areas that are difficult to visually parse. The simplistic style has meant they have been able to rapidly create a large number of graphics with minimal deviation in style. There are different climates zones and architectures. Also it's bigger than the oft-tiny-looking standard pak64 graphics (equivalent to OpenTTD's 8bpp graphics) whilst not oversized like the pak128 (equivalent to OpenTTD's 32bpp graphics) can appear. It's a good balance for the standard resolutions today and fun to play - a better experience IMHO than standard OpenTTD or Simutrans. Download it from here.

Egoboo 2.6.8 has been released (see 2nd post in that thread for the impressive changelog). To quote the homepage on what 2.6.8 brings us:

This release includes a lot of new content, and a lot of bugs have been squashed. It is also -- Macintosh users rejoice -- finally available on all three platforms!

It got extended beta testing and the development seems to be maturing a bit as well. Whilst previous versions have been plagued by long-standing issues, from my observers parapet it would appear they have largely been dealt with. I haven't tried it, but it looks like they have finally fully emerged from the mess that Egoboo once was and it is now a healthy project and a playable game. Congratulations especially to developer Zefz whose determination and dedication have saved the game. Anybody who tries 2.6.8, please post a comment on your experience!

P.S. I'm unable to access the forums currently :-( due to voluntary content restrictions on my Internet connection. However that, in a way, is a good thing. I'm supposed to be programming Fortress, y'see, so now I have less distractions... we'll see how it works out.

Egofoo with Egoboo and a Tank Pledge

Egoboo 2.6.1 (stable) is ready for consumption (go there for download links). Go kick some ego ass with this revived classic. For braver souls there's also the development version but the Linux effort lags a bit behind the Windows effort with that one.

There's also a great overview of the upcoming Scourge 0.20 release. The features for version 0.21 sound very promising. Scourge is very close to having enough features and contributors to make it a very, very nice game and if support for the Worldforge model format gets done, I can see some nice new models making it into the game and it finally getting some credit.

Here's pictures of Project Football, an exciting project to create a soccer management game. The site is mostly in Spanish though the author posted a thread in the FGD forum.

Finally, the author Stormbaan Coureur of has posted the following request for pledges towards a game he has been creating that fully simulates a tank with tracks. If he gets enough pledges, he'll make it open source, and it's certainly a very cool prospect. He's going for $1000 which, when you think about the megatons of money some rather rubbish commercial games make, is very little given how cool it is. How cool is it? Have a look at the video below. Here is the the pledge page.

Games, Games, and Free Software

Goonies

F1 Spirit

Road Fighter

Daimonin

A good open source platform game that never gets a mention is The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition. This game is a remake of the classic NES / Master System version by Konami. The same team is also responsible two rather fun arcade top-down racing games, F1 Spirit and Road Fighter, which are also remakes. I'm not sure what the source license is for these (ack, there goes my Free Software credibility) but you can get the source and the games compile / run on the 3 major platforms (y'know, Lin/Win/Mac).

There's not-so-recent updates to Daimonin, the 2D isometric fantasy MMORPG that seems to play second fiddle to the likes of Eternal Lands and Planeshift due to it not coming with the fancy 3D 3Dness. I mean, everybody wants 3D, and those who don't play nethack. So there's no room for anything else. Especially not something as addictive as Daimonin. I'm not going near that game again, I barely escaped the first time! Anyhow, it's up to version 0.9.7.1 which means something to somebody, somewhere.

Egoboo has been travelling, but after several years finally returned home to egoboo.sourceforge.net where it's open source adventure originally started. Development is highly active, with lead developer Zefz having dragged it kick and screaming back from the depths of stagnancy. (My god, that's actually a valid [ab]use of the word... I mean, I typed it as a joke, and the spell checker didn't cry.)

Entropy found via the Ubuntu forums, is... I'll use their words, "Entropy is an open source game project the likes of which you have never seen. With what is currently a small team of modelers, texture artists, and programmers, development on Entropy (which just finished the final stages of design) is... brand new and revolutionary, in both its spirit and style of gameplay. Entropy will be a structured mix of First Person Shooter combat, with vehicles of all sorts, combined with Real Time Strategy, with a few Role Playing elements thrown in. However, the most important aspect of Entropy is that it is entirely online and immersive, almost every character in game will be an actual player."

Sounds very interesting. However, I believe their ambition far outweighs their ability to deliver on it, something I expressed. However, they are 'veterans'. Whether being veteran means 1 guy can program a commercial grade game in 2 years when programming Gods (think John Carmack) don't do that, well, who am I to be a party pooper. Still, I hope they succeed.

All I'll say is that, unless you have fairly modest requirements, programming your own engine from scrach is absolute madness with the likes of Ogre3D (and the plethora of other options) at your fingertips. (Note: we need to make a page for these on the FreeGameDev wiki.)

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.

650 Days Later

No, it's not another diabolical sequel... it's the number of days since the last major Freeciv release until yesterday when Freeciv 2.1 went gold.

People round on Freeciv for being unoriginal, but for me it fixes most of the problems with one of the greatest game franchises ever and is, well, Free Software. So for me Freeciv is everything that's great about Free gaming too! :-)

Hi-res graphics (well, relative to Civ2/Freeciv2.0) and a new SDL interface that got last minute save/load support *cheer*, better AI, and a lot of gameplay balancing - just some of the many features that went into this release. It's been worth waiting for and my brother has promised me a game once we acheive some work milestones! Multiplayer Civ is a lot of fun and very involving (who needs FPS games?) but importantly the Freeciv team place high value on the single player edition so it caters to the casual gamer as well as the intense one.

I came across another open source 3D flight simulator (some one commented on the open source flight combat article) - Palomino is an open-source flight simulator and 3D engine for Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac. No idea if it is new or what not, but the screenshots are intriguing albeit a bit simple.

I had some more stuff to post...

Ah, that's it, preliminary Linux port of Egoboo has been posted and it's got a subversion repository so development should be more organised [read: faster?] from now on. I've enjoyed seeing developer Zefz pushing Egoboo forward despite SoulFu attracting all the attention and Egoboo has seen a lot of new features recently and is subsequently a much richer game than SoulFu yet obviously has the style similarity. I would love to see some of the graphical Panache of SoulFu merged into the more evolved Egoboo world but until the SoulFu license situation is cleaned up I guess that is out of the question!

I should post screenshots for Freeciv 2.1 and Egoboo, but there are none on the websites and the FG hounds are hounding me into a midnight walk. So, er, annoying dogs win vs readership. You guys just don't whine enough!

Return of the Jedi Gamer

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)

Blood Frontier

Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.

I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.

Vega Wars

Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.

Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.

There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.

Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.

Common Media Project and loads more

The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre - the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists - that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge, JCRPG, Xarvh, 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there.

Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIFEngine as a platform. More on this tomorrow.

The guys attempting to revive the Tux Racer / Planet Penguin Racer project under the new moniker Extreme Tux Racer are, despite not meeting their own scheduled expectations, keeping at it. They have a spiffy new logo!

Well, well, what have we here... the inaugral release of Silver Tree, brainchild of Battle for Wesnoth creator Dave White. Given the "resources" he has at his disposal - some of the core Wesnoth developers and artists are also set to contribute to Silver Tree - this really has to be a project to watch. Still, it's early days for this 3D RPG and it's hybrid real-time and turn-based gameplay. I couldn't get it to compile (admittedly not trying to hard) so I'll wait a bit.

I wonder if Silver Tree signals the "end" of Wesnoth development - in that it has gotten as far as it can really get as a game, besides bugfixes, new campaigns etc - as the core team are essentially moving on.

I see Auteria on the game tome. Not Free but freeware, YA3DMMORPG. (Yet Another...) 'Nuff said. (The name makes me think 'autism'... nothing to do with the quality of the game, just the the name.)

An up-to-date Linux port of Egoboo Resurrection is almost a reality. It is buildable although there's a few reported issues. It looks like a public SVN is going to be made available, good news for the project, so helping out with development should be easier. The lead developer Zefz has been working hard on it in an unintentionally private manner.

Revival of the fittest - sourcing art

Pingus 0.7.0 is available for download. With revival work complete, Pingus now uses SDL and comes with lovel anti-aliased fonts. There's no new levels yet but with development seemingly back on track hopefully the level editor will return and some good levelsets will get contributed. It has a lot of potential as a game because the Lemmings series kinda, well, was more fun when it was 2D. If enough level makers could get together, I'd love to see a release inspired by "Oh no! More Lemmings" which was my favourite of the series and also incredibly challenging.

Another game with a major update is Egoboo Resurrection. There is a new fully working music system and major graphic enchancements - antialasing, shading, dithering and prespective correction all supported. (A long list of buzz words there.) Most importantly the lead developer Zefz is trying to get the game in SVN so others can contribute more easily and, speaking of contributions, somebody is already having a crack at porting it to Linux. At the moment it's only available as a Linux download but "watch this space". Well, not that precise space as that'll only ever say "watch this space". But in a more abstract sense I will hopefully be able to report a Linux port in the near future. ;-)

My post the other day, "Free this free that O_o" (catchy title eh?) sparked a lot of debate about the need for consolidation of Free Software game development efforts. You can read it there so I won't repeat it all, but one comment did make me think and it is something I had thought about in the past as well - there is a tremendous amount of artistic and game design talent poured into making mods for commercial games. Whilst this comes good if the engine subsequently becomes open source (think Tremulous, World of Padman, and other iD game mods) there are many more examples where the game engine remains closed source. Take Air Buccaneers for example. It's a jaw dropping mod for UT2004. What a shame it will only ever be a mod for a commercial game. Could these mods be a source of art if we proactively approach projects asking them to make their efforts Freely available? Maybe it could just work...

One of the productive conversations spawned by the above debate was the notion of a common media project. Take a target genre - Ben (the thread poster) suggested fantasy - and develop a set of decent media for it that games can use as a base before branching out in their own artistic direction. I think it's a great idea.

Also there was a desire for a good quality Free art portal - there are already several efforts but they seem to just fail to capture the niche, to become that place that people say, "Hey, this is a great resource for good Free art!" Is a new one needed? A new idea, a new design? Or maybe just identify the best efforts and back them unequivocably to get the word out there? This is also something Ben touched on... it'll be interesting to see where it goes. There's already a lot of information collecting in the Game Media Creation section of the Free Game Dev forums.

One thing is for sure - the forums at www.freegamedev.net have proved there is a need for a consolidated Free game development community that was not previously being filled and there is a desire to provide a nexus where Free game developers can work together instead of in their disjoint and often isolated worlds that currently populate the open source game universe.

Bos Wars and Egoboo

There's a new Bos Wars release - version 2.4 comes with a new resource system and a new tutorial (presumably to reflect the new resource system). These days Bos Wars is the flagship game using Stratagus, the 2D isometric RTS engine that powers Wargus and the lesser developed Stargus.

Tutorials are good. If you want a good player retention rate for your game, code a tutorial. I can't stress enough how effective that is - most players are lazy. Take me for instance. I'm busy, if I play a game I want near instantaneous enjoyment. If I don't know what's going on I will quit a game within 30s. Many FOSS games I install are uninstalled very quickly - not because I don't like them, but because I don't have the desire to learn them on my own. (Note, I do not play commercial games at all.)

Good news for Egoboo! It gains SDL_mixer support - Egoboo now music and improved sound support. They still don't have somebody producing Linux builds though, which is a shame because Egoboo could have a good following again if it were more accessible on Linux. Still, Windows binaries are available.

The latest Egoboo version is 2.3.9 - released last week but since it's only announced (that I know of) in their forums it's hard to come by. The Egoboo community have added a lot to it over the years, and the game has quite a lot of content and depth if you get into it. It just needs marketing better and a Linux build.

Egoboo "World Map"

There's also a new Cultivation release. I like this project, it's an innovative game design and I like seeing that development is still ongoing, although this version doesn't bring much other than bug fixes and new sounds.

Privateer Parallel Universe

Parallel Universe, a modification of Privateer Remake, has gotten itself a rather smart website and community forums. There's a good bit of work going on over there and the feedback on PU is generally pretty good. Definitely worth a look for space game fans. It is also part of a rather complex development scene based around Privateer & Wing Commander games. I'll get back to that in a bit.

A couple of Ubuntu users have posted their first serious effort at a game, Slingshot. It's a fairly simple 2D affair, take it in turns to shoot at each other, your shots being affected by the gravity pulls of planets.

I've mentioned Egoboo Resurrection a few times - a continuation of the classic game Egoboo. I've not really mentioned that it's only released for Windows despite the original predominantly being a Linux game. It just comes down to a lack of Linux based contributors. However there's another "branch" called Egoboo 2.x which has binaries for Mac OS X and Windows. I'm sure eventually a Linux guy will pop up and help out but until then it seems us Lusers are a bit stuck when it comes to getting an Egoboo fix. I guess there is always SoulFu. Anyway, to encourage contributors one of the Egoboo Resurrection devs posted a development bundle which comes with game editing tools as well as the source.

There's now a Mac OS X binary up for the latest Warzone 2100 release, 2.0.7. Good day for Mac users, eh? :-)

Back to PU and a bit about the scene which PU comes from, and it's all a bit complex, rotating around the Vega Strike engine. Some of the VS devs (herein called the 'devs') made Privateer Remake. This got noticed by the Wing Commander nuts at crius.net (herein called the 'canons') who are dedicated to their cause. Some less fierce but equally obsessed WC fans (herein called the 'non-canons') at the same time started forming Wing Commander Universe, a super-mod that encompassed all things WC, a lot of which started making it's way into PR. Unhappy at the way PR was not completely true to the original Privateer, the canons - with help from the devs - created Privateer Gemini Gold, a fork of PR. The canons publicly denounce WCU. The non-canons decided that not only was the limitations imposed on gameplay in PGG not conducive to a fun game, but they did not go far enough, so created Parallel Universe, something even less true to it's WC heritage that embraces fun over accuracy.

So you now have a triangle of groups - the devs with VS and PR, the canons with PGG who gets help from the devs, the non-canons with WCU and PU who collaborate with the devs on PR. It's quite an interesting thing to follow. It's quite a caustic atmosphere between the canons and the non-canons. At the end of the day, not everybody can always get along, and the canons are abrasive at best, with questionable forum policies and immature moderation the last time I encountered them.

Anyway, my point was that PGG is the most well known of all the projects. However, feedback isn't that great on the latest release 1.02 which new players are finding incredibly hard with a high starting difficulty. The PU team could flank PGG in terms of community by being a more fun game to play so attracting more players and contributors. And there's PR in the middle that will no doubt continue to, well, be in the middle.

I hope I got that all correct. Whilst it was a stormy path to the projects we have today, I think each project serves a niche and they can coexist harmoneously. It may even turn out to be one of those situations where the existance of one is what spurs on the other - Yin and Yang etc. :-)

8 Kingdoms and Strategy

8 Kingdoms

Legacy of Magic

8 Kingdoms is a 3D turn based fantasy strategy game. Build empires and conquer enemy kingdoms. I came across it in the Ubuntu forums where the poster suggested the graphics were not that great. Well, the graphics look pretty good to me. In fact I quite like the plastic-like model style. It gives the game an interesting look and feel. The game is at version 1.0 so is fully playable. :-)

The map is hex based which also intrigues me. I always find hex more fascinating than boring square grids. There is only a Windows installer and a tar.gz available for download, so non-Windows players will probably have to compile it themselves.

Keeping on the strategy theme, I came across a game I'd lost the link for a while back. Legacy of Magic is a very promising looking fantasy war game. The homepage is a development blog although there has been no update since November 2006 so I'm going to email the author to see how he is getting on. It would be a shame for such a nice looking game to cease development.

Another upcoming open source strategy game seems to have lost it's way a little - the Galaxy Mage website is down [so that link won't work] but the code is always available from it's project page. The last code change was only a couple of months ago so hopefully the website will be back up soon and work resumed.

There's an interesting update on the Allacrost website regarding development. Basically they tackled the major architectural hurdles in the 0.2.0 release - the rather nice consequence of which is there will be much less time before the next release. :-D

Also the Egoboo Resurrection project released version 2.3.8 of their continuation efforts for this classic open source RPG game. It introduces new levels and bug fixes, but still is only being built for Windows although the game has strong Linux roots so surely will still be compilable should somebody take it on. I think they just don't have Linux expertise amongst the development group at the moment so head on over there if you think you can help out.

Not quite open source games, but I found this open source Java virtual PC rather fascinating and the 3 demo pages (1, 2, 3) have it running DOS (FreeDOS maybe?) loaded with several of the classic games of the DOS era such as Prince of Persia and Lemmings. Quite a nostalgic way to pass a few minutes of time for the elder gamers amongst us. Anyway, a quick reminder to help you get started:

C:
dir
cd prince
prince

Scourge and SoulFu

Scourge 0.18 (download) has been released. :-)

If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult. Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there.

Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online.

It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find the ideal balance for development. I have contemplated setting up a site where open source games can make calls for help with programming, artwork, or modelling, since at the moment it's just a case of hoping somebody with the right skill and interest eventually finds your game project - there is no centralized resource for organizing open source game development and I think one is increasingly needed as the number of people creating free software games keeps rising.

SoulFu

Aaron Bishop, the original author of Egoboo (see Egoboo Resurrection for current versions) has finally finished his latest game after 4 years of development. SoulFu is currently only available for Windows but he is planning Linux and Mac versions of the game. The game is freeware but maybe after some time he'll open source it like he did with Egoboo.

You can see the graphical similarities between SoulFu and Egoboo, the chunky cutesy character models, but the graphics look a little more refined in SoulFu. It looks fun but my Windows machine is too pap to play it so perhaps a few readers could comment on what the gameplay is like. There are a couple of gameplay videos [1, 2] from earlier on in development just to give an idea of what how SoulFu plays.

Edit - hey, you have to pay money for the full SoulFu experience :-( that really sucks (no mention on the webpage) and I'm frustrated that I mentioned it now!

There's been some interest on the Ubuntu forums about making a Gunbound-like game. For those who don't know, Gunbound (gameplay video) is kinda like Worms only with fancier graphics and weapons. If this project goes ahead, I hope they look at working with the Wormux crew who have an engine capable of 90% of the needs of this project-in-planning.

Egoboo vs FreeTrain vs VDrift

Egoboo 2.3.6 is released! This is a major development in what was a dead game. Egoboo used to be a darling of open source gaming, so I'm hopeful it will rise like a phoenix and restore it's reputation.

Somebody has joined the FreeTrain localization effort! Daniel Markstedt, who also contributes to FreeCiv under the handles dmarks/hima, has started translating the game into English and posting patches to the mailing list (soon to be in SVN).

The VDrift team are gearing up for a release. I downloaded the latest test autopackage and, I must say, I was impressed. Aside from a clunky menu, this felt like playing a commercial racing game. Nice graphics, nice car handling, nice tracks. It took me a while to work out how to get started [you need to press 'w' to shift up a gear to start a race, even with autoshift enabled] but it was a lot of fun after that. :-)

I believe this will be a landmark release for VDrift that will see it rise to the challenge of being a viable alternative to commercial racing titles by attracting a lot of users and subsequently contributors. Ok, ok, the crystal ball is going back under the table.

Penumbra

One game I'd forgotten about, although I could have sworn blind I mentioned it on Free Gamer, is freeware horror FPS Penumbra. Currently only a tech demo (circa 2006) is available but it looks quite cool and innovative. Although I was more interested in the Frictional Games blog than the game itself - they talk about quite a few interesting game development problems such as simple fog being obstructed by shaders.

Speaking of game development stuff... devmaster.net is a hub of activity where developers can bump heads together in an attempt to, er, develop. They mention lots of game engine developments and stuff like that, some Free, some free, and some probably not free. Still it's all interesting if you are into that kind of thing.

Music tip:

Bliss N Script - Honey Child (Beatmasters mix)

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