Simutrans and Open Arena and Irrlamb

Open Arena

now with bloom

Simutrans, one of the major open source rail games, gets an update with version 0.99.13 - bug fixes and optimizations are the topic of the day here and with large speed ups for vehicle routing and map scrolling the game should have a nicer feel.

Open Arena ends an 8 month barren spell of releases with 0.7.0 which comes with 10 new player models and 26 new maps. Open Arena looked like a struggling project a year ago but now it is thriving and a worthy Free replacement for the proprietary Quake 3 content.

Irrlamb 0.0.4 is now available, with a bunch of new features for this 3D abstract action / puzzle game. There are binaries for Linux and Windows. I love the regular updatse to this project. :-)

Rumour mill... Angels Fall First demo may be out soon. Check out the trailer. Sumptuous. FG Note: I should try and interview that guy!

Regular readers may know that I'm not big on posting web games (this is an open source games blog after all) but I found this one rather stylish. I bizzarely encountered it on a blog about room escape games that I found whilst cleaning up my bookmarks. I don't think there's a worse genre of game than room escape games. Every time I play one I end up feeling suicidal. Well, ok, not that bad but I can't see how somebody can enjoy just clicking randomly until something lands in your inventory and eventually you can leave a room - it's like focusing the worst aspect of adventure games. Who would repeatedly subject themselves to such torture?

Remorse - a Phenomenal Game

When looking at stuff like the Ubuntu forums, full of I-love-my-Windows-games posters crying about how WINE and Cedega don't run World of Warcraft perfectly, it's very easy to glance at something and dismiss it as commercial. Fortunately, I gave this thread a second look.

Remorse demo

Remorse is the first game project by Phenomena Games, a group of enthusiasts who have created the Existence 2.0 engine which supports all kinds of fancy things (shaders, physics etc). There are some impressive screenshots and videos - the motionblur effect video is delicious.

Remorse is primarily going to be a single player game, good news in the FPS genre that is swamped with deathmatch games. Anyway, they seem to have a few people working on it and hopefully a bit of exposure might get them a few more contributors. It looks like it has lots of potential.

I mentioned Project Open a few days ago, a place to consolidate efforts to get copyright holders to release abandonware / freeware titles under an open source license. There's a fascinating thread on Hardwar by forum member andrew. It transpires that when the UK company that owned the copryrights became insolvent, the copyright passed onto The Crown - sadly not the Queen of England but the formal entity that covers the land. Anyway, it's good to see him making progress.

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. :-)

Bos Wars and Glest with ATI

There's a preview version of Bos Wars 2.4, an RTS in the style of Red Alert, available for download for Linux and Windows (and should compile on other OSes). This version introduces...

"a completely new rate-based economy. Energy is produced by power plants and magma by magma pumps. Building also consume resources continously instead of requiring an upfront payment.

It sounds interesting. Bos Wars development is very active although the majority of developer communication happens on irc instead of the mailing list, which can make it look - to the casual onlooker - as if not much is happening. They could probably do with a devblog too!

Freedroid RPG

FreedroidRPG 0.10.2 final got released as well - well, renamed from 0.10.2rc4, whichever way you prefer to call it. One thing I didn't mention yesterday was that I really like FreedroidRPG's graphics. They are very distinctive and quite good. :-)

The SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 release is tantalisingly imminent. Announcement will be any day now, perhaps over the weekend? A lovely new island track and Hexley the platypus character are two highlights of a significant improvement over the previous version. This game has a lot of potential, so hopefully this release will get a few more people interested in helping out with the development.

Speaking of project communities, Glest, the rather well done 3D fantasy RTS, has quite an active one despite the seeming inactivity of the main developers. This guy has released a final version of his Indian faction for the game. The faction has involved, including learning, some 500 hours of work so is worth checking out. Another guy has a blog dedicated to Glest and there's more WIP factions happening in the Glest forums. Admittedly some of these fan efforts are more enthusiastic than they are well executed, but everybody starts somewhere so good luck to them. ;-)

On a side note, if you are a Linux user with an ATI graphics card and have problems running Glest, this tip might help out.

New Vega Strike in August

Typical. I stop monitoring Vega Strike for a week or so and everything starts happening. They get a new website, a devblog, and one of the developers commits to an August update for the game to bring the latest developments to players not prepared to dabble in SVN.

Vega Strike has never been a dead project, nor an inactive one, something the lack of a release since 2003 has betrayed for a game purportedly "in development". I think the devblog is an excellent compromise between showing activity and spamming the news page with not-newsworthy items.

VS is an strong example of the growing pains experienced by a popular open source project and how managing releases and resources should be considered as much a task as development itself. I would put the lack of releases down to a failure to manage contributions, but I think they have turned the corner with this.

For an excellent example of good resource management, look at the Battle for Wesnoth project. I'll also note it is easy to look in and criticise, but far harder to apply good practise to your own projects.

There's a Windows SDK available for the FreeOrion project to encourage developers who use Windows. I think this is another good practise, making it more than easy to get started with the source code. I would go as far as to say that the indimidating factor of downloading and using various development tools is probably as big a barrier than knowing how to program. You can learn programming basics from looking at source code and following the logic, but it's meaningless if you can't make a change and see what effect that has.

Other blog watch:

• There's another description of a game idea over at lostgarden.com although this time it's just a description and not a challenge to create the game (no graphics provided).
• There's the fourth part of an overview of Linux games here, this part covers MMORPGs and lists at least four open source games.

Oh No More Pingus!

I'm happy today. No, not just because Arsenal signed a quality striker, but also because it looks like a Pingus revival is on the cards. :-)

The game has been mostly ported to SDL but the SDL port is unplayable. The stable version depends on the aged and not well supported Clanlib 0.6 and it seems there is not enough interest or expertise in upgrading Pingus to Clanlib 0.8 which was released earlier this year. Anyway, a few people have expressed interest in working on the codebase so we can only hope that interest can be turned into tangible progress.

JCRPG continues to get new features, now featuring day and night cycles among other things. If that project keeps up the current development pace we'll have a tidy game come out of the JCRPG framework before the end of the year.

Orbiter. A mature 3D project for contemporary space flight simulation. No explosions.

Snowball is an interesting looking platform game. No development for two years but perhaps it does not need it? Next development is "on ice" - I'm going to inquire to see if that is still the case.

I'm running a little experiment in the FG forums. I've set up Project Open - a place to organise efforts for open sourcing games that would benefit from it, essentially freeware and abandonware games. I'm not going to make much of it until I've managed to successfully encourage somebody to open up their game, but the idea was not mine so it is obvious that there is a desire for this.

The return of Freedroid RPG

Good morning to open source game enthusiasts and any normal people reading. I feel a bit refreshed after getting back to the Internet having spent nearly 48 hours offline. I know, I nearly died, the withdrawl symptoms were horrendous, but it's ok as I am back online now and have been for nearly 12 hours.

So a few things today. Freedroid RPG development has become really active and a string of new releases has occurred in the last couple of weeks. It is a cross platform isometric RPG game similar to Baldur's Gate Diablo only, instead of swords and scantily clad heroines, you have cattle prods and robotic penguins. It's good to see development pick up and they are focusing on making development easier and fixing bugs, so it's looking like a bright future for the game. The latest release is available for Linux and Windows.

Another game that shows off some of the originality that you can find in indie and open source game projects is Which Way Is Up. A platform game with cute-but-not-bad retro graphics, you have to reach a lever which, when activated, rotates the game world. It's quite an intriguing concept and I'm interested in how much mileage can be gotten out of it. There's lots of interesting touches, like enemies that jump when you jump, making for some tough gameplay. It's a lot of fun and development is ongoing. Written using PyGame, it's available for basically any OS that can run Python.

Project Diaspora is a 2D MMORPG space game. I haven't researched it much but it looks like it used to be a commercial game that was shut down a couple of years ago and some fans (or the original developers?) have gotten the (deceased?) company to release the game code under the GPL and set up their own server. Anyway, most game information and screenshots can be found on the Nightsoft.net forums that seem to be especially for Project Diaspora. You can play it on both Linux and Windows.

Busy day today since I was AFK all weekend! Warsow 0.31 is out. I like the project description on Freshmeat:

Warsow is a standalone, eSports-oriented FPS game. It is based on Qfusion, an advanced modification of the Quake 2 engine. It features fast-paced gameplay focused on trix (trick jumps) and art of movement. War§ow features a complete power-up system, including weak and strong fire mode for each weapon in all "normal" gametypes as well as Warshell (battle shield) and Warshock (quad damage) for team-based gametypes. Its cartoonish graphics use cel shading with a style that is similar but not identical to Manga.

I haven't been able to load happypenguin.org since I got back. That site has been up and down like a yo yo lately. Oh well, people have Free Gamer to read so that's ok. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm thinking of procuring a domain name (as suggested in the FG forums) and then possibly migrating the lists to a host outside of Blogger - probably a sourceforge.net project. I'm wary that having the lists on Blogger will mess up RSS and that maintaining the lists in HTML is just not scaling. If I move the lists (not the blog, the blog stays) to Sourceforge, then I can use a proper database and have user ratings and comments etc. Saying that, all this talk of game lists is a bit weak when I've left them in a mess for the last couple of months but, hey, I'm a busy guy. :-)