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.

Testing Testing Testing

200 posts to this blog now. :-)

Pingus

Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it.

Also looking for testers is iteam, the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted.

There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs.

Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

www.freegamedev.net

I registered the domain name www.freegamedev.net yesterday. Initially it will just point to the Free Gamer forums, but I want to evolve that into a proper Free Software game development community with useful features e.g.:

• announce.freegamedev.net - a really easy way for people to announce Free games in a single location. No accounts, no web forms, just email to e.g. announce@freegamedev.net and (pending moderator approval) it'll appear.


• planet.freegamdev.net - a place where Free game development blogs are syndicated.


• forums.freegamedev.net, wiki.freegamedev.net etc

Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this "let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs" that will never happen because we are all busy people. KISS. Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation.

Flightgear

A new Flightgear snapshot - 0.9.11pre1 - is available but it's source only. There's been a lot of updates since the last release over a year ago:

A gigantic number of new aircraft, new features, enhancements to existing models, and bugfixes were added.

Oooooo! :-)

I read a review of the previous release that commented on how good Flightgear was as a simulator, noting that - whilst it doesn't qutie have the graphical panache - it has several features not found in other commercial flight simulators like sloped runways. There are also different physics models, a massive number of planes and scenarios available. It's a very high quality open source project.

There's also a new version out of the interesting platform game DangerMan. The author notes he failed to playtest the previous version so a whole host of important bug fixes mean this release should be a better experience. The premise for the game sounds interesting:

Dangerman is an old-school platformer with modern features like line-of-sight and physics.

Anyway, let me know of any thoughts or ideas you have for www.freegamedev.net as I want it to be a community project, not a Free Gamer one. ;-)

Ultimate Stunts

Did you miss me? ... Tough luck, I'm back! ;-)

Ultimate Stunts Editor

Ultimate Stunts 0.7.2 is out with an improved and integrated track editor, a new car, and a few other minor improvements. I like this project, even if it isn't the best or most complete amongst the Free car games out there, it just has a nice vibe about it.

On the topic of car games, The TORCS guys are running a robot championship. If you think you can write a nice racing robot AI and win the prestigious TORCS Endurance World Championship 2007 then sign up and get involved! More details are on the TORCS website.

Whilst checking for [sadly no meaningful] updates to the Combat Simulator Project, I came across Delta3D (although I'm not sure if CSP uses it). There seem to be a few fairly well featured but not-so-well-known open source 3D game engines out there. Somebody brought up Sylphis3D in the FG forums. JCRPG and Air Carrier use jMonkeyEngine. Are there any other good but lesser-known open source 3D engines out there?

SoulFu 1.5 "Niceware"

There's a new release of SoulFu. Whilst the source still comes under a funny license that many would not consider true open source, I believe any restrictions previously placed in the game are now removed. Downloads are up for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you like the game concept but feel strongly about the source code license then the main alternative has to be Egoboo Resurrection - ironically also originally developed by Aaron and no surprise given the graphical similarities. [Edit - a better link, thanks Jacky. Also worth noting is that Egoboo Resurrection is currently available only for Windows although it should be compilable for Linux.]

Also the FreeOrion team snuck out another release - 0.3.1-rc6 - a couple of weeks ago. It's an explore, expand, exterminate [is that correct] kind of space strategy game with a very nice user interface and designed for a deep gameplay experience. I don't recall seeing this release announced anywhere. Also, it seems a strangely large update from 0.3.1rc5:

This release has many UI improvements, new art, bug fixes, and various minor and medium-scale backend changes. Notable major changes are the long-awaited OpenAL sound system (removing a non-free dependency) and Python AI scripting that can be modified without needing to rebuild FreeOrion itself.

Meh, who am I to argue but really, that's surely worthy of a 0.3.2 label at least!? Anyway, the game is available as a Windows installer but Linux users must compile from source.

Finally a quick note on the Open Football project. On the wiki is a small update saying that the game should be at a playable demo state before Christmas this year. Great news for a fantastic looking project. :-)

More on CSPop

A while ago I mentioned cspop, a 3D populus clone. Whilst the game itself hasn't yet gotten a website - the author is waiting until it's playable before really marketing it - there has been progress:

CSPop

Work is still going on on the project, it is quite advanced already, but still some work on ui and some finishes on logic are needed to consider it playable.

Anyway I have a couple of EXCLUSIVE screenshots - to be seen nowhere else on the web. (Oh yeah, I make blogging sound more like magazine writing every day!) This is a very exciting looking project and I'm hopeful that it'll be "out there" sooner rather than later.

The daring can grab it from SVN. You'll need Crystal Space and CEL too. :-)

Speaking of exciting projects linked to Crystal Space, there's more details on Project Apricot following a CS conference last month. Project Apricot is going to be a high profile effort to create an open source game using Blender and Crystal Space.

Pingus revival efforts seem to have made some headway but there's still a few tasks left to do before it gets "re-released" as a more manageable project i.e. no new features yet but [supposedly] more maintainable code so less chance of it stagnating again and a greater likelihood of new features / levels in the future.

Something like that. ;-)

Peragro Tempus

With the time I've spent sorting out the site I've had less time to stay in touch with general open source game developments, so slow news at the moment.

The author of Passenger and Nuclear Graveyard seems to be making headway on his latest project, Last Remaining:

I've just added some more hardened enemies to Last Remaining, and some more serious firepower. I don't want the game to become just another FPS, as the story is quite important, but it won't do any harm to have a bit of action in the middle of it!

He uploaded a version to Sourceforge on 25th July with 3 levels and the aforementioned hardened enemies. He's also looking for modellers. I will note that his games seem to lack a little graphical atmosphere due to using only simple lighting techniques, but I think this is something he is trying to address in Last Remaining.

JCRPG trees

I mention it a lot, but JCRPG is a nice regularly* updated** blog/project and his latest addition, billboard trees, look absolutely fantastic.

All the trees are billboarded. This means that the foliage is given by screen facing squares. But the further the tree is the less and bigger squares the foliage will be on. The furthest tree has only one foliage square.

I would like to see some more on this - trees / foilage are something that a lot of games really fail to get right but Paul (the JCRPG author) has put a lot of effort into it and other open source games would do well to copy or reuse his efforts.

PS or PT castle

Finally, I came across Peragro Tempus, what looks like an open source MMORPG in the making. Details are a little sketchy on the website but it looks very nice. It has the usual open source infrastructure - public SVN, wiki, mailing lists - and uses Crystal Space.

I came across it via this forum thread in the forums for the Planeshift project, and it seems to have a few modellers who used to contribute to popular MMORPG. I wasn't sure whether this castle was destined for Planeshift or Peragro Tempus but it's impressive nonetheless!

One of the main objections people have with contributing art to Planeshift is that you have to give the Planeshift project copyright over the art and it is kept under a closed license. This doesn't sit well with open source advocates or many potential contributors, and I get the impression was one of the motivations behind forming the Peragro Tempus project.

* BIG
** HINT