Free Games

Posted by by Sophia Brueckner, Software Engineer, iGoogle

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage -- a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.

Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world's content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world's most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.

To make yours, choose the gadget template you'd like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends' email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.

Today we're also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we're making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click "Select theme" to pick a theme for your own page.

Overgod

Overgod, an abstract shooter using Allegro, is a fast paced top down shooter. It's fun although pretty tough, and has a nice retro feel but with good modern graphics. It's one of those games you can pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes, let off some steam, then be back to whatever it was you were doing without having lost too much time. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Macs. :-)

Cube Legends (formely known as LOZ:Cube) is a Cube mod, inspired by the Legend of Zela series of games. Since Cube is getting a bit old in the tooth and has been superceeded by Sauerbraten, somebody has stepped up to work on Cube Legends 2007 which will bring this popular Cube mod up-to-date to run on Sauerbraten.

FreeTrain has gained another developer, and progress on fixing up the codebase continues. Even better, there is an additional plugin set which contains something like 200+ plugins for FreeTrain, and in the coming weeks it is being translated as well. There's stuff like a rollercoaster plugin in there, so it should be really cool. Internationalization is the next task to be tackled, then after that it will be replacing DirectX with SDL so that the game can be ported to Linux and other platforms. :-)

Last one for today, StarShip Troopers: Last Defense development is going well. They posted a gameplay video which looks promising, and expect to have a playable release in the next week or so. However despite the obvious progress being made with the game, there is obviously a fair amount of work to do before it captures the veracity of the battles in the movie, so don't be too expectant. I hope they offer a Linux version of this Glest conversion but could find no information one way or the other.

FreeSynd 0.2 is out! It's not yet mentioned on their site but you can get it from the project download page (Windows only, but 0.1 had a Linux version so hopefully it'll follow soon). I loved the original Syndicate (although the sequel Syndicate Wars was better). What a game that was. I can hardly wait for it to download... downloaded... playing... ok! That was a blast from the past. Only the first mission is playable but it's clear they have gotten through a lot of the harder work on this project. Future versions should be quite fun to play.

However they are using the art & media from the original - I would have thought that is of questionable legality (the game is classed as abandonware) but I can't comment properly without knowing the facts and they are not so easy to come by for a game with so little official documentation online.

Speaking of classic DOS games and open source efforts to revive them, UFO2000 no longer needs data files from the original to play it - a new fan-made set of graphics is included with UFO2000 by default. UFO: Enemy Unknown is probably one of the best games for it's time. Ever.

There's some more screenshots up on the OpenFootball website (although the rest of the website is somewhat barren). It's looking very, very cool. I can hardly wait for the first release. :-)

Dark Oberon

One of the lesser-known open source real-time strategy games is Dark Oberon. Ubuntu packages have been made for it so maybe now it'll get a bit more exposure. Dark Oberon has a fairly unique approach to graphics design - the images have been created from plasticine models giving the game a very distinctive and original look and feel. However I'm not sure that there is an AI included in the latest release as the roadmap states it has been removed, and it's reinstatement is part of an ongoing reimplementation of most parts of the game.

Speaking of free RTS games, Globulation2 alpha23 was released a week or so ago. The codebase is going to undergo a rewrite before the next release so I imagine alpha23 will be the last release for some time. Rewrites can be deadly for open source projects as a game can be in limbo for the duration of the rewrite and if the rewrite is never completed then the game often stagnates. It's happened to quite a few games over the years. Still the Globulation2 development has been steady for several years so hopefully it will not meet a similar fate.

Woo, all those games have Linux support. I was beginning to get worried I was mentioning far too many Windows only titles lately. ;-)

Funny how I have a quick moan about Beats of Rage yesterday only to find OpenBoR today. In fact I had mentioned OpenBoR before on this site but forgot plus these days they seem to be a little more organised. Saying that, borgeneration.com seems to have a few issues (forum down, mod links 403).

Beats of Rage is an old school arcade beat em up game, and there's various mods for it such as Double Dragon (what a game that was, eh!?). OpenBoR is an open source effort to provide a free engine compatable with Beats of Rage. I'm hopeful that OpenBoR will run with more success on my Linux laptop than the official BoR game does.

There is even an "enhanced" fork of OpenBoR found on lavalit.com. I use quotes because I can't vouch for that, it's just how I found it described on the Beats of Rage article on Wikipedia.

The BoR community seems to be pretty active, and there's lots of mods. If I had the time I would try out a few. But I don't.

Just to prove that Wikipedia isn't all that, it mentions OpenHOR - supposedly a subproject of OpenBOR that allows modders to create horizontal and vertical two dimensional aircraft shooting games... really? I think not.

Interestingly there's (crazy golf aside) no open source golf sim games. That doesn't bother me - golf is boring although Neverputt is fun (comes with Neverball). :-)

I wanna post more but I am out of time... I'll just note that I'm going to add a translation tool to the site (some cool JS hack I found on another site) among other things and that the completion of the games lists is put off for a few more days because I'm too busy with real work (had to do it some time). Ciao for now.

Posted by Ricky Opaterny, Authors@Google team

For over the past year, we've invited some of the most prominent and promising thinkers, artists, leaders, and personalities of our time to give talks and have discussions at Google about their recently published books. We call the series Authors@Google, and we've posted videos of many of our events online. And now, the program has grown out of our Mountain View headquarters to include seven U.S. offices as well as our London and Dublin offices.

In addition, we've just added our most important location yet: an online home at google.com/talks/authors with a video archive of our events on YouTube. Just this year, we've hosted a great variety of authors, including Martin Amis, Strobe Talbott, Bob & Lee Woodruff, Jonathan Lethem, Don Tapscott, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina. The subjects of their talks range from literary fiction to science fiction, sociology to technology, politics to business.

We're delighted to share our digital library of events with you, and will continue adding to it. We hope you'll bookmark this page and check back often.

Finally, this weekend, April 28 and 29, the Authors@Google team will be exhibiting on the UCLA campus at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books -- the largest book-related event in the U.S. If you're in the area, do stop by, say hello, and browse books and videos from some of our previous events.

Posted by Sean Cornwell, Senior Product Marketing Manager

I'm just back from running a marathon at the North Pole. It's only by continuously repeating this sentence out loud that the experience has started to become more real. Certainly, when you are at the Pole -- a place of absolute wondrous beauty, isolation, and harshness -- it feels very surreal. The 24-hour light with the sun always at the horizon, the mind-numbing cold, the lack of sleep -- it all gets to you. Wow, don't I make it sound like fun?

So why, you might ask, did I put myself through this?

Well, a friend and I also ran the Sahara marathon at the end of February as a kick start to launch EarthFireIce, a campaign to raise awareness for the importance of individual action to reduce carbon emissions. By racing in such extreme conditions, the hottest and coldest marathons in the world, we also hoped to highlight two regions that stand to be seriously affected by climate change. People can make simple pledges of action on an interactive Google Maps mashup at our campaign site.

We've frequently been asked how we prepare for such extremes. The answer is that it's very hard. We tried to wrap ourselves in plastic wrap to replicate the Sahara heat, and we sat in a Kriotherapy chamber at -130 C (-202 F) to get used to the extreme cold. Neither experience, I must confess, was that useful. The Sahara, at 42 C (approx. 108 F), simply sapped all my energy. And the second half of that run was one of the slowest and most painful in my life. Watch the video of the Sahara run, and me struggling through it:

The North Pole, on the other hand, was tough because you have to wear those ridiculous snowshoes, and because the terrain varies from hard ice to 2 foot deep powder snow. So it's much more of a slow jog, and thus less exhausting. However, the battle there is with the cold: at -30 C (-22 F), you really feel it despite the act of running.

What's next, you may ask? Well, a lot of rest and relaxation, and back to my day job -- and then, some more events under the EarthFireIce banner, hopefully with lots of others joining us!

Posted by Kevin Tom, Google Desktop team

We are happy to be releasing the Google Desktop 5 application in 29 languages, including our first release in Hindi. It's now easier than ever for people around the world to find content on their computer as well as on the web. We've redesigned the look and feel of the sidebar and many of our most popular gadgets. There are also previews for search results and warnings for suspicious websites, whether you're clicking on links from documents, IMs, websites, and more.

No matter which country you're in, we hope that these changes make it easier to quickly and safely find the right information. To learn more about what's new with Desktop 5, read this post on the Google Desktop Blog. And check out the recently-released version for Mac, too.

If you want to help the next SuperTuxKart release then be sure to check out 0.3 alpha which has been uploaded. Expect bugs but once ironed out this should be a cool game again. :-)

The lead developer of Heroes of Allacrost kindly let me know that a new version is due in the next two weeks.

Colonies

The "other" Colonization-inspired effort, now called Colonies, saw version 0.0.3 out yesterday. I'm not sure how indicative of the gameplay state that version number is e.g. I wouldn't say that OpenCity 0.0.4 reflected the state of development, I would say it was more like 20-30% complete but what would I know! Anyway I don't have time to check it out properly but I eventually found the screenshots (not in the most obvious place).

Any really dedicated Free Gamer readers may note I said that they claimed to be an open source sequel to the 1994 original, but they are explicit that this is not the case (don't know whether I was being sensationalistic or ignorant or they have changed tact - was too long ago). However they claim it's open source but I could find no source code locations

What's this? 3D Wesnoth? As an RTS? Screenshot posted by the lead Wesnoth developer... maybe he's working on something eh? We'd be so lucky. :-)

FreeOrion

There's now a roadmap for FreeOrion 0.4. I'm looking forward to the next few versions of this open source game, which is inspired by the Masters of Orion series. MOO II is one of those games that sapped up [too] many hours of my younger years. FreeOrion is very thoroughly designed and the graphics are very, very slick. When it's done, it'll be one of those FLOSS games that will be, um, simply awesome. The research UI is especially nice. Still, a few years to go before version 1.0 though.

I wish Beats of Rage (download) was open source. It doesn't run on my Linux laptop. Does it run for anyone else? It looks like fun... so no fun for me! :-(

I would post more but I gotta save at least a few things for another day. ;-)

At last, a Vega Strike update is coming in the summer. It's been long overdue. :-)

The next Ultimate Stunts release is imminent. It won't bring much in the way of features but should keep things moving forward. I like this game, it's a little different to the other racing games out there - a little more freeform and funky. (It makes sense to me.) A few more graphics, levels, and cars and it really would be a cool game, but there's only so much that 1 guy can do unless others chip in. ;-)

Pingus needs an SDL guru... well, not a guru, but somebody prepared to take the SDL port which "sort of" works and make it "really" work. I might run a little campaign now that the translated version of FreeTrain is coming together.

Speaking of FreeTrain, a Windows binary is due in the next couple of weeks. The end goal is to replace any Windows-specific code and make it cross platform but that is going to have to wait. The game lacks proper save game support (saves are done using serialization - meaning they are very fragile when it comes to new versions of the game) so that also needs working on. Still the future is starting to look rosey after nearly a year's campaign on Free Gamer to get it translated and, eventually, ported. :-)

Nexuiz

Ashes: TWC

Y'know, I haven't given Nexuiz enough of a mention on this site. This deathmatch FPS game looks beautiful. Everywhere I look I read glowing reports on how much fun it is, how well balanced the gameplay is, how good the graphics are and how well it performs even on modest hardware. Nexuiz uses the Darkplaces engine which is a highly modified Quake 1 engine. I think it is kinda cool how Darkplaces is in some ways more advanced than the Quake 3 engine - using ioq3 as a reference.

If you lurve your FPS games then you should be downloading it already.

How am I doing? Hmm... one more...

Ashes: Two Worlds Collide is inspired by Ultima VII amongst others. I'm fairly sure it's only going to be freeware, but free advanced RPGs are a pretty rare thing so this is an exciting looking project. Some gameplay movies are due in the next couple of weeks showing off the latest progress.

Ashes tries to be a complete rpg experience

An exciting prospect. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the cartoony graphics [which are a homage to Ultimate VII] but otherwise it does look pretty cool for a free game. Now if only it was open source... :-)

No music tips currently. I've made too many and forgotten what I already posted so it's put off until I instate a music tips list mainly for my own reference.

*Cheer* A Linux version of Those Funny Funguloids is being prepared. Stop by the OGRE forums if you fancy an early look although you will need to compile it yourself.

*Cheer* The next release of Scourge is imminent - due this weekend. Improved UI, more story, more game art, localization, bug fixes, and general Scourge love mean this should be a kicking release. (Scourge is a fave Free game of mine!) :-)

*Cheer* Also due this weekend is some real RSS abuse as I take on reinstating the Free Gamer lists in full. Social life + no home Internet + sometimes having to work == delay thus far.

OpenOutcast

*Booes* I got a bit of stick yesterday for slightly misrepresenting the fact that Crystal Space is more than just a 3D engine - whereas OGRE is just a 3D engine - so yesterday's comparison of the two was slightly unfair. No stable release for something like 3 years was a mistake by the CS team (a similar mistake being made by the Vega Strike developers) but it's good to see CS getting back into shape and hopefully this open source game engine will be the foundation of some cracking titles in the near future. Ecksdee, OpenOutcast, and Crystal Core are a selection of those in the works with Planeshift being the leading game using Crystal Space.

*Cheer* OpenTTD 0.5.1 got released. That game can be addictive although I think I'm all played out from my younger years. You need the original game [files] to play it although it is not hard to come by.

*Cheer* And I'll round things up by mentioning the Secret Maryo 0.99.6 release. I like the regular releases of this project and the graphics are starting to look really nice. A bit more work on improving the gameplay, levels, and efficiency of the engine and this will be a really, really good game. As it is, it's already a good game and if you like Mario or platform games in general then I would check it out.

*Booes* And so I return to the daily grind...

(Don't worry, the imaginary crowd won't return tomorrow! ;-)

Posted by RK Stewart, FAIA, President 2007, American Institute of Architects

Architects are pretty passionate about architecture -– no surprise there. However, we've come to find that the American public is too. Starting today, there are two new Google Earth layers with which to explore architecture’s most popular structures and take away some ideas to help enhance the communities we live in. As president of The American Institute of Architects (AIA), I’m ecstatic to announce our partnership with Google Earth to launch these new layers in celebration of our the 150^th anniversary.

Check out this video on YouTube to watch us navigate these layers from Google headquarters.

Fly to America’s Favorite Architecture, a layer featuring the American public’s favorite architecture (as selected though a national poll announced earlier this year). View all 150 structures, including many with just created 3-D models of the buildings, ballparks, bridges, and memorials that characterize architecture in the eyes of Americans. And then explore the second layer, Blueprint for America. Blueprint is a community service effort funded by the AIA, in which AIA members donating their time and expertise are collaborating with community leaders and local citizens to enhance the quality of life in their community. You’ll be able to track the progress of these projects on Google Earth as they unfold over the next year and, we hope, become inspired to take action where you live.

I know what I wanted to post about yesterday... the Crystal Core tech demo! This rather sexy looking FPS is designed to showcase Crystal Space 3d engine. Crystal Space used to be the open source 3d engine of choice in it's early days, but then OGRE roared past with much better management and more frequent releases. (Developers of any project: release early, release often.) It's difficult to see CS ever getting back on level terms with OGRE but it's good to see progress. I want another Ecksdee release though!

Battle for Antargis 0.2 was rather quietly released several days ago. I've mentioned this game a few times on FG - I like it because it's fairly original i.e. not another remake and because it's inspired by a fairly unique game - Powermonger.

Ok so the ZX Spectrum turned 25 yesterday. I'm older, so I am not amused. What does amuse me is the classic spectrum games - Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy II. Those two remakes had me up until 3am last night, sadly they are Windows only. They should work in WINE though. And are not Free games, just freeware.

This strip can be enjoyed by everybody [who remembers JSWII] - Jet Set Willy Online.

Got any favourite old Speccy games you wish were remade?

Plasma Pong

Well, actually, if you're playing Plasma Pong your Monday is probably multi-coloured! What a cool looking variant on a classic game, eh? Shame it's only available for Windows & MacOS X at the moment but it works in WINE. Another shame is that it's not released under a FLOSS license. (The author wants to keep his research into fluid effects proprietry.)

A pong game that is Free and looks quite cool can be found on darkdawn.co.uk. This one is FLOSS and has a few nice particle effects.

If you like Frets on Fire, be sure to check out this thread in the Ubuntu forums which gives details on some cool improvements you can get for the game as well as some song locations.

And there's another release of FIFE, the engine which has evolved from a Fallout port to a "unique 2D RPG engine". This release takes the engine much closer to being a viable generic RPG engine. I've got a feeling we'll be seeing a game or two based on FIFE crop up in the nearish future. :-)

Barbie Seahorse Adventures. Sounds terrible, but is fun in a cute retro way. If you are a little girl. Just joking, grown men can enjoy it too. It is a former PyWeek game entrant that's been improved a bit. Like I said, retro & cute.

Quick gripe. Flash games might look good sometimes, but I rarely ever find them fun. Usually they are just poor imitations with a bit of gloss and the gameplay sucks. That's why I don't mention them. Example. Oh, and they are rarely, if ever, released under a Free license.

I swear I had some more interesting stuff to talk about but the weekend's antics have removed whatever they were from my memory. Which reminds me... music...

Today's music tip is awesome:

Atrocite - Only You (Dennis Hurwitz mix)

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

English spelling is far from being phonetic -- and commonly-used proper nouns make the problem even more complex. Often the final arbiter is "it looks correct." Try writing "success" with one trailing "s" and you'll see what I mean.

This final aspect of spelling -- it "looks wrong" -- can be a serious challenge when one cannot see. I can spell well in English, and for regular English text, there are always dictionaries and spell-checkers that come to one's aid. But spelling commonly-used proper nouns that you've only heard others pronounce can still pose a challenge when writing them for the first time. Consider the following:

We're going on a skiing holiday to Taho.
I was in Rino last week.
My friend lives in San Luis Obispoe.

Notice that the proper nouns in the above all contain spelling errors, and the respective Google search triggers a "did you mean" spelling suggestion as follows:

Did you mean: Tahoe
Did you mean: Reno
Did you mean: san luis obispo

Over the years, I've come to find this an indispensible tool, especially in cases where there is general agreement on the web as to the correct spelling. And for the record, intelligence on the Web appears to believe that San Luis Obispo can also be spelt San Louis Obispo.

Google's spell-checking intelligence comes from examining all the documents on the web. Thus, correct spellings often dominate incorrect ones. The example of San Luis Obispo is interesting; if you take the Web as representing current accepted practice, it would appear that people do write that proper noun both ways -- i.e., Luis or Louis.

Who knows, perhaps we'll restore the o-u parity by adopting an extra "o" in Luis for the "u" that got dropped in "color."

There's a Frets on Fire update. I swear that game has the coolest logo. New features for this guitar-meets-DDR game include wobbly effects for long notes, combo totals, and support for left-handed players, plus the usual bug fixes.

You can now play FreeTrain. It lives! Still missing are pre-made levels, proper save game support, and tutorials, plus a few of the plugins don't work. FreeTrain is an interesting game when it comes to architecture. Almost everything is written as a plugin, trains and all. Anyway if you have a copy of VS2005 you can play it now, otherwise you'll have to wait a bit longer before binaries are created.

I somehow missed a game out yesterday in the flight combat article... Edit - added it! Carrier 2, an opengl remake of the old classic Carrier Command. It looks good and 4 years steady development means it should get better. ;-)

Also I don't think I mentioned that Egoboo Resurrection 2.3.7 got released - for Windows & Mac only at the moment though. I can't remember if I mentioned the April 1st Warzone 2.0.6 release either.

What are you waiting for? Go play them.

Music tip:

Huntemann - 2 Beloved

I don't know whether many people bother to download these tips, but this one is another really cracking track.

On a side note my list plans are coming together soon so expect RSS abuse. I also need to update a ton of articles that are missing <p> tags since I switched off auto line breaks in blogger.

Posted by Douglas Merrill, VP Engineering

As a company, we thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration. So we're excited about acquiring Marratech's video conferencing software, which will enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in videoconference meetings wherever there's an Internet connection.

We look forward to learning from the extraordinary ingenuity of Marratech's engineers as they focus on desktop conferencing research and development in Sweden, where they will continue to be located.

Update: To clarify some confusion, we acquired Marratech's software, not the company itself.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Product Manager for Personalization

I'll probably visit more than 100 web pages today, and so will hundreds of millions of people. Printed and bound together, the web pages you'll visit in just one day are probably bigger than the book sitting on your night table. Over the next month alone, that's an entire bookcase full! The idea of having access to this virtual library of information has always fascinated me. Imagine being able to search over the full text of pages you've visited online and finding that one particular quote you remember reading somewhere months ago. Imagine always knowing exactly where you saw something online, like that priceless YouTube video of your friend attempting to perform dance moves from a bygone age. Better yet, imagine having this wealth of information work for you to make searching for new information easier and faster.

Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of Web History, a new feature for Google Account users that makes it easy to view and search across the pages you've visited. If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. Web History lets you look back in time, revisit the sites you've browsed, and search over the full text of pages you've seen. It's your slice of the web, at your fingertips.

How does Web History work? All you need is a Google Account and the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. The Toolbar, as part of your browser, helps us associate the pages you visit with your Google Account. If you're currently a Search History user, you'll notice that we've renamed Search History to Web History to reflect this new functionality. To sign up for Web History, visit http://www.google.com/history.

Flying Guns

Thunder & Lightening

glHorizon

glHorizon 3D cockpit

Combat Simulator Project

Decopter

Hey, I'm up early - or in bed late. Anyway, I came across a few open source flight combat simulators last night and thought I'd comment on them. I thought the OS flight combat sim scene was barren, but that is definitely not the case.

The main protagonist in this FLOSS game genre is GL-117. It's been stable and polished for quite some time now. There is vaunted development on a v2 of the game, but nothing tangible to speak of. It is more an arcade game than a simulation but packs of fun nonetheless!

RedShift is inspired by GL-117, so will be another arcade flight combat game. It's early days and in the progress of a rewrite from C to C++ but the author is optimistic that he'll be able to release an update in a month or so.

Flying Guns is a WWI flight combat simulation game where you can engage as many as 100 AI planes at a time. It's intrigingly written in Java and does look very, very cool & fun... but the webstart prototype version didn't work for me. :-(

If you want something a little more futuristic then you'll be wanted to take a look at Thunder & Lightening. Development is very active lately. It takes inspiration from 80s classics like Carrier Command and Midwinter giving it an interesting single player edge, but there's still much work to do.

Another Carrier Command inspired title is Carrier 2. The graphics looks very nice but the gameplay still needs working on, so it's at a similar stage of development to Thunder & Lightening. Still both projects have been in development for years so I am optimistic they will eventually turn into excellent FLOSS games.

Back to more contemporary planes, with glHorizon which is a freeware Windows only game. Focused on the F22, some of the visuals are spectacular. No "news" for over a year on this one but I have a gut feeling there'll be updates. The full 3D cockpit looks gorgeous. I hope the author releases the game under an open source license and then it can be embraced by the FLOSS game community. :-)

Then we come to the Combat Simulator Project. This really does look gorgeous. It has been in steady development for over 5 years and aims to provide cross-platform, high-fidelity, large-scale combat scenarios. It is probably the most ambitious of all the open source combat simulation games. The game is still at the demo stage but they are well on their way to acheiving their goals. Hopefully a new version (0.6 was released in April 2006 and is Windows-only) will be out soon. Like glHorizon, it sports 3D cockpits which look pretty cool.

FlightGear will most likely never support combat but is the leading open source flight simulator game so always worth a mention - I mean, you can fly combat planes even if you can't fight with them.

<update> Palomino is another less-combat oriented flight simulator, but looks great none-the-less. Given they showcase fighter jets, I'm hopeful combat will eventually get added to Palomino. <update/>

There are a few older titles that are no longer developed but once showed promise. Vertigo looks like some of the flight sims I used to play in the early 90s - nostalgic. ACM is another retro freeware flight combat game. The windows version is no longer available - I don't know why but that makes me smile. BFRIS is abandonware and I can only find the Windows version to download, but it has an interesting claim to fame:

First game to ship with Windows 95/98/NT *and* Linux binaries on the same CD out of the box. (from Moby Games)

The helicopter combat simulation scene is less healthy. There's Eagles that looks surprisingly good considering it's 10 years old - it looks like it uses a voxel based renderer, something I've not seen in a long time. Decopter also looks really promising but no updates since 2003 give little reason to hope. So it looks like you are stuck with the rather non-combat related Search & Rescue which is a bit more of a playable game than the other two but, as I say, not at all combat oriented.

If you are after a flight combat fix, look no further than GL-117. However there is plenty more to look forward to, so keep an eye on the scene, especially Thunder & Lightening and the Combat Simulator Project.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search & User Experience, and Jeff Bartelma, Product Manager, Google Product Search (the product formerly known as Froogle :) )

Today, we're making some changes to how we help users find things to buy. You may be familiar with our product Froogle (a pun on "frugal"). Froogle offers a lot of great functionality and has helped many users find things to buy over the years, but the name caused confusion for some because it doesn't clearly describe what the product does.

So we're renaming Froogle as Google Product Search. We're taking the opportunity to refocus the user experience on providing the most comprehensive, relevant results in a clean, simple, easy-to-use UI. We're also excited about how Google Checkout can help searchers have a fast and secure purchase experience, so the new interface makes it easier to buy with Checkout.

One thing we didn't change is the wide variety of items you can find with Product Search. Perhaps you're looking for a toaster, a wireless router, or an apple slicer. Or maybe you're in the market for a Lego watch (like Jeff's) or a new longboard (go for Flashback wheels). We hope this update makes it easier to find whatever you're looking to buy.

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

You already know that search is at the core of everything we do: we want to deliver useful and relevant information every time you do a search. But what about when you don't have a query in mind, or if you just don't feel like typing in a query? Today we're releasing two features that reduce the need for you to type in specific queries to get the information you want. Both of these are available to Search History users.

The first is a recommendations button on the Google Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice. Click on the dice, and we'll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we'll show you a new one. We'll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. Just add the button to your Toolbar. (In order to use this feature, you need the latest version of the Toolbar.)

If you prefer to get your information at a glance, we've added a recommendations tab that you can add to your personalized homepage. Simply click on "Add A Tab" on your Google Personalized Homepage, and type in "Recommendations" for the tab name (keep the "I'm feeling lucky" checkbox checked). We'll give you a page of recommendations that are updated daily.

Don't expect very much at the beginning, but the more you build up your search history, and the more you use these features, the better they'll become. Over time, we will give you more and better recommendations.

Somebody is taking the Glest engine and turning it into a game based on Starship Troopers, the bloodiest goriest movie ever to be certified as suitable for viewing by 15 year olds in the UK.

StarShip Troopers:
Last Defense

StarShip Troopers: Last Defense is in it's infancy but they are making steady progress and it would be nice to finally have an open source answer to Starcraft. Building on the Glest engine shows off one of the powers of Free Software. :-)

FreeTrain is now playable. If you have VS2005 you can grab SVN and run it. There are a few more issues to be addressed before any builds are posted, related to features not working that should be and a rather sharp learning curve that needs addressing with a few nice tutorial levels, but it's getting there!

Simutrans continues to close in on it's 1.0 release with version 0.99.10 - I always like a release early, release often strategy and the Simutrans releases epitomise that philosophy.

I had more to talk about but I'm in a rush and forgot, plus I'm doing somebody else's dissertation proposal for them because, well, guys are an easy target for girls.

Music tip:

Groove Armada - Get Down

(Yay, music tips are back... and this one is awesome.

Posted by Sam Schillace, Engineering Director

Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we've been dying to tell you about the bun we've got in the oven. We'll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we've just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you're almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

Our due date is this summer. We promise to share family photos just as soon as we can.

Tired

OpenCity 0.0.5 closing in (screenshot)

FreeCol 0.6

Sauerbraten 2007-04-13

Lords A War - fork of FreeLords

Unofficial FreeLords update

Posted by Scott Silverman, Strategic Partner Development Manager

It's been more than a year since my dMarc Broadcasting colleagues and I joined Google. We've been taking incremental steps toward our long term vision of bringing simplicity, efficiency, and accountability to the buying and selling of radio advertising. To do this, we've fully integrated dMarc technology into Google AdWords, and we've partnered with hundreds of radio stations across the U.S., connecting these broadcasters to new advertisers who in many cases had previously not advertised on radio.

Today's announcement of a strategic multi-year agreement with Clear Channel Radio, the largest radio station group owner in the U.S, is an important milestone for us. This new relationship with the leading U.S. radio group gives our advertisers access to guaranteed inventory on top-rated AM and FM stations all over the U.S., making it much easier for them to reach their target customers with radio ads. Since radio advertising is new for Google, we're excited to be able to learn from and collaborate with the market leader and ultimately bring more value to radio.

Freespace 2 is a commercial 3D space action game, created by Volition inc, whose engine has been made available as Free Software.

This has enabled several total conversions of the game, 3 in particular, to be made into standalone games.

WC Saga

First up there is Wing Commander Saga, (obviously) set in the ever-popular Wing Commander universe. There is no Linux version yet but it's in the works, so you'll need a Mac or Windows (or WINE?) to play it at the moment.

The Babylon Project is (obviously) set in the Babylon 5 universe. It seems to be Windows only for the moment. :-(

Finally, the recently announced BattleStar Galactica - Beyond the Red Line, set in (you guessed it) the Battlestar Galactica universe, which does have a Linux version (yay!) although you may need a few tricks to be able to play it in Linux.

There is another TC called Inferno that is fairly popular amongst FS2 fans, but it's existence is a little less clear. There is:

Inferno Release 1 (old, abandoned, not a TC, but works with an available SCP patch)

Inferno: Alliance (works, not sure where it fits in, not a TC yet...)

Inferno: SCP (going to be a TC)

There may be more as currently, some projects are on "back burner" to try and get some of the other projects released. There is a Star Wars mod, as well as a few others, but it is unclear which ones are TC or not as it's all for internal access only. For those interested in looking further, check out HLP Forums > Hosted Projects.

This post was really just a fleshed out version of an email sent to me by Joshua Richards - thanks Joshua!

No music tip today. Not slept for a while and in no mood to choose anything with a pounding beat.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management

At Google, we are constantly looking for new, innovative ways to make the information you want more accessible and more relevant—and to deliver it as fast as possible. Since Google's inception, it has always been our intention to present users with highly targeted, useful advertisements when appropriate—ads that unobtrusively complement users experience. We have always believed in, and tirelessly pursued, the idea that serving relevant, unintrusive ads would best serve our advertisers in the long term.

To that end, we are truly excited to announce our acquisition of DoubleClick. DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.

This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for our users.

Sponsored information served by Google has always been, and will always be, clearly distinguished from objective content available via our search results and across our partner network. We want you to find the information that you are looking for—be it in an ad or elsewhere—quickly and without hassle. We know that our collaboration with DoubleClick will serve and advance this goal.

For more information on this new acquisition, please read our FAQ.

Anything is possible

Sauer Platformer

So yesterday I'm perusing the Sauerbraten forums and came across this wonderful new map [see right]. The creativity! :-)

But, more seriously, check out the following screenshot of SauerMod, described as:

Gameplay Extensions for Sauerbraten, including Bots and Enhancements to the FPS, as well as a new Side Scrolling Platformer.

Kewl. Although I wish they'd finish Eisenstern. *twiddles thumbs*

In other Free FPS news, the action oriented game Warsow is closing in on a new release, 0.3, which should bring a lot of improvements to the game. If you want to get a feel for the game without playing it, there's a community gameplay movie showing off the various jumping tricks you can pull off in Warsow. Get the HD version from their forum or stream it in a lower resolution.

Does anybody remember PPRacer? It was supposed to be the Free Software successor to the formerly-Free Tux Racer. Development of PPRacer stagnated, planetpenguin.de died (where PPRacer development was hosted), and the project seemed doomed. However some Ubuntu forum members are trying to revive things and have put a site up on www.planetpenguinracer.com although it's just a forum at the moment. The power of Free Software, the revival of a game. :-D

The FreeTrain translation effort progresses. Expect a release, soon. The first release will be Windows only but the medium-term goal is to port it to SDL. Any C#/SDL wizards are welcomed with open arms to the project so join in if you can!

Finally I will be getting the Internet at home again. That means I'll be able to properly finish up the lists. Woohoo! The excitement of going through hundreds of game websites etc. What can I say, I'm underwhelmed.

Music tip:

Buzzy Trent - Groove On The Line

I'm outta here...

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Senior Product Manager

We're excited to tell you that as of this morning the speed, security, and convenience of Google Checkout is available to online shops and shoppers in the United Kingdom. Here's Google Checkout UK.

From now until 2008, merchants that offer Checkout in the UK will receive free credit and debit card processing for all of their Checkout sales. And just so buyers don't feel left out, we're giving them £10 off all orders over £30.

Posted by Eric Case, Product Manager

Today Blogger is available in eight new languages! Check it out in Nederlands, Dansk, suomi, Norsk, Svenska, Русский, Türkçe and ภาษาไทย, which brings us to 19 total. Blogging is clearly a global phenomenon, and we're incredibly excited to help bring it to ever more people around the world. With Blogger, you can:

easily set up a weblog with just a few clicks
share writing and photos for free
customize your blog's layout with different fonts and colors
only show your blog to friends and family

We have more languages in the works too -- stay tuned!

Posted by Larry Fox, Business Development, Trimble Outdoors

Many of you reading this may already know that Trimble Outdoors has partnered with Google to provide Google Earth viewers with GPS-based interactive hiking information. We’re very excited about being able to share all the great GPS content we’ve developed over the years and through partnerships with magazines including Backpacker, Bicycling and Mountain Bike. It’s an outstanding resource for outdoors enthusiasts, or really, anyone who wants to do a little research before setting out on a hike. You can access lots of multimedia info on fitness and outdoor adventures, including routes, points of interest, pictures, video segments and even audio clips. Essentially, anytime, anywhere you can launch Google Earth, you can view hundreds of hikes that have already been logged and completed, and view personalized web content. Then, through the convergence of Trimble Outdoors’ technology and Google Earth, you can click one button, and the exact trail route is exported to your GPS-enabled phone.

This partnership between Google Earth and Trimble Outdoors is designed to support the community of outdoor enthusiasts with exciting new ways to explore the earth and share adventure stories online.

Posted by Anupama Dutta and Nitin Arora, Software Engineers

Ever wondered how cool it would be if you could type "Haal kaisa hai janaab ka" in your usual chatting style and the words actually got converted automagically to "हाल कैसा है जनाब का"? We have now made that possible with the new Blogger transliteration feature. Now you can easily publish your thoughts, experiences and even your favourite Bollywood songs in Hindi.

Enabling the transliteration option allows you to type out Hindi words using phonetically equivalent English script, and see the words getting transformed into the corresponding Devanagari script. The plus is that you now don't need to learn complicated mappings from English alphabet combinations to Hindi letters. That means you really don't need to worry about WeiRD UpPerCasEing to get the right Hindi spellings. Just type as you would naturally do, in your own style, and let Google read your mind :) Well, not really, but close. We realised that everybody has their own unique way of spelling Hindi words in English -- so we have a personalization mechanism in place that enables us to remember your writing style. Correct once, and get the word right every time after that!

We use machine learning technology in the background to give you the most satisfactory transliteration. This way, you can focus on the writing and comfortably express yourself in a language close to your heart. Go creative, try it out, and discuss it here. We're sure you will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it!

I'm in a rush today - back to proper Free Gamer business as usual next week - so just a quick one.

The old school GTA games may be available as freeware, but purists will be happy to see Passenger, an open source game which shares many gameplay elements with the newer GTA games. Based on the Spectrum classic Turbo Esprit, the idea is to hunt down and kill terrorists rather than indulge mindless gangster oriented mayhem. The fact that you may cause carnage en-route is moot. :-)

Check out S.W.I.N.E., a 3D RTS by indie developers StormRegion. It's freeware and Windows-only but it looks really cool! Get some WINE ready. ;-)

Another Windows-only freeware game called Chaos, has a demo available (gameplay video). A game based on molecular simulation - if that's not original then I don't know what is! I am in direct contact with the author so will try to talk him into making it available under a Free license (think Linux port) so we'll see where that dicussion goes.

(You can always tell I'm rushing when I mention lots of freeware as I don't have time to research Free games. Since I'm rushing, no music tip today either! What a slacker!)

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

As some of you may remember, last June at the Googleplex we held a Geo Developer Day alongside the Where 2.0 conference. We invited a bunch of developers from Where 2.0 to come to campus and meet the Google Maps and Earth teams. Everyone at Google had a great time interacting with the more than 200 developers who came, and we knew we wanted to do something like it again.

When we started thinking about plans for this year, two things came to mind. First, we’ve released a number of new developer products over the past 12 months which we’re excited to talk more about, including the Google Web Toolkit, the Google data APIs, the AJAX Search API, and Google Gadgets. Second, as much as we love the Googleplex, we realize that not everyone can travel to Mountain View to hang out with us.

Put those two considerations together and what you have is this year’s Google Developer Day. Many developer products, 10 countries, one day: May 31^st.

The day itself will vary in format from location to location, but the goal is the same: bring Google’s developer community closer together, share our knowledge, and of course have fun in the process. We’ll be posting more details on the sessions as we finalize them, but in the meantime, here are just a few of the Googlers we have lined up across the globe:

Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing);
Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London);
Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid);
Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit™ (Mountain View);
Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View);
Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps™ senior engineer (Sydney); and
Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).

We’re excited to be inviting everyone. To find out more, and to let us know if you can make it, please visit the Google Developer Day site.

It's been nearly a year since I first posted up a request for volunteers to get FreeTrain (original Japanese homepage) up and running.

Many thanks to Daniel Markstedt who has stepped up and not only translated the game but managed to get it running as well! A little bit more work is involved in getting it to a stage where we can provide binaries but the hard stuff is done.

If you want to know what all the excitement is about, check out this gargantuan screenshot of FreeTrain in action. How cool is that? :-)

In order to disambiguate this version of FreeTrain from the original, it needs a new name. FreeTrain-En and FreeTrain International are already taken. Daniel gives his opinion:

I was thinking of something in the lines of "FreeTrain Universal" or maybe "FreeTrain - Free Edition" ('freed' from its linguistic/geographic and platform restraints.) =)

Can anybody come up with something for us?

In the rumour mill, apparently the Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02 release is imminent. Lots of updated graphics (notably the bases and UI which were low-res in 1.01 but redone hi-res for 1.02) and lots of bugfixes and play balancing should polish off this game nicely.

Also a new Scourge! release draws closer. Improved UI, lots of bug fixes, and some nice new artwork should make this game much more fun to play.

I need to get back to work. No headphones lately so no music tips at the moment.

Posted by Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel

In addition to his day job as Global Privacy Counsel, our own Peter Fleischer has just been elected to the board of the IAPP -- the world’s largest association of privacy professionals, with more than 3,000 members across 23 countries. We're pleased for this recognition, as Peter's work in privacy over the last decade mirrors a real evolution in the profession. Today, privacy is universally viewed as a key corporate goal, and privacy officers are responsible for creating a culture of respect for privacy inside their companies.

We're excited that Peter will have the chance to continue his contributions to the discussion of privacy issues through his role with the IAPP. The organization provides a forum for privacy professionals to share best practices, track trends, advance privacy management issues, and provide education and guidance on opportunities in the field of privacy. Our congratulations to Peter and others joining the board for their work in this important area.

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Google Enterprise Specialist

As I remember my college days, I spent a lot of time (though not all) worried about required courses and fixed deadlines – things that while necessary, still made me wish I'd had more of a choice about the university policies that affected me. Even the little things – like my email.

Now we're taking the first step to reach out to university students nationwide to find out what they like or don't like about their email. We're conducting a survey to see whether Google Apps Education Edition might offer students more of a choice about their online communication tools.

Since we first launched Google Apps at universities, students took notice. We've even heard that at some schools like Northwestern, students lobbied their administrators for Google Apps, which includes 2GB email storage, instant messaging, and centralized calendaring as part of their school's official communications package.

So if you're a student who's not using Google Apps, take our survey and tell us what you like or not about your current university email system. And if your school has recently switched to Google Apps, write us and let us know what we can do better. Your feedback will help us ensure that we'll continue to keep up with you, the next generation of world-changers.

In a brief follow up (time constraints) to the Q3 TCs post, there's some news on a couple projects.

The guys behind the recently released World of Padman have talked about the future of the project whilst thanking people for the positive initial feedback:

This first version is not supposed to be the final one. There are some things we want to implement in future versions like the missing singleplayer. Well, we only plan to integrate a simple SP, fighting against the bots throught the maps, but want to tell a story by adding some nice comic strips and videos. Known bugs will be fixed too and some new features are also on our list. Have we already mentioned a new map pack by ENTE, which might be available within 2 or 3 days?

And I missed out the mod Urban Terror. Although this is more freeware than Free due to some restrictions on the game content, it is still a cool looking TC for Q3 and worth checking out if you are into your contemporary war-fests.

Lastly the game FlowFlowMania got another quickfire release as the author keeps up his initial momentum. Now it supports skins and has some more levels so is starting to evolve into a nice little game!

That's it for today, sorry. :-(

Not much happening really, then again I have been offline for X days.

I'm in the process of inputting the Free Game list into OpenOffice.org Base (Access equivalent). Then I'll be able to do lots more fun things to the game lists, not to mention no more hand-typing hundreds of html tags.

I'm back-dating this post to the 9th (it's the 10th really) because I can and because it's something-AM. And [the real reason] I'll probably post stuff later when I get bored trying to do my urgent work that has me in my office at 2:30am in the morning.

New team members for Google.org

Posted by Larry Brilliant, Executive Director,Google.org

It has been almost exactly one year since I began my work at Google.org. We've been in a bit of a quiet period during that time, meeting with foundation leaders, activists, NGOs, and scientists -- and Googlers -- from all over the world. My major task has been to build a world-class team, comprised of experienced Google managers paired with content experts from the fields of climate change, global public health and economic development to spearhead strategic initiatives for our philanthropic efforts.

There were four of us one year ago; today we are 25 people, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce a few of the newer members of our team. Dan Reicher, former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, joins Aimee Christensen, Kirsten Olsen and Googler Ki Mun to work on our clean energy and climate change initiatives, policy and advocacy.

Mark Smolinski and Corrie Conrad join Googlers Katie Wurtz, Matt Waddell and Emily Delmont on our global public health team. Mark is an MD MPH and CDC-trained epidemiologist who worked at the Institute of Medicine and was formerly a Vice President at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, where he worked on a regional disease surveillance system. Corrie joins as a researcher focusing on preventable diseases afflicting the poor, coming from the Clinton Foundation, where she was working on its HIV/AIDS program in Rwanda.

Blaise Judja-Sato, Sonal Shah and Juliette Gimon join Googlers Rachel Payne, Meryl Stone, and Kim Thompson to guide our global economic development efforts. Born in Cameroon, Blaise was most recently President of the Nelson Mandela Foundation USA and the founder of VillageReach, a nonprofit that brings sustainable health care and essential services to more than 3.5 million people in Mozambique. Sonal is the co-founder of Indicorps, a non-profit offering one-year fellowships for people of Indian origin to work on development projects in India, and was previously a Vice President at Goldman, Sachs & Co. developing the firm's corporate citizenship and environmental strategies. Juliette is the chair of the Global Fund for Children and a trustee of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She also serves on the board of the Synergos Institute and the advisory committees of Youth Philanthropy Worldwide and the Global Philanthropy Forum. And I'm particularly pleased that Sheryl Sandberg, VP of Online Sales and Operations and Google.org board member, has agreed to spend a significant amount of her time leading this effort.

Working across our content domains are Linda Segre, Gregory Miller, Jacquelline Fuller, Gillian Peoples, and Chris Busselle along with Googlers Brad Presner, Alan Louie and Tara Canobbio. Linda has responsibility for managing Google.org's project initiatives and operations within Google and is the person to talk to for any operational question about what we call "dotorg". Greg has responsibility for Google.org's investing and grant practices, legal affairs and strategic partnerships as well as the affairs of the Google Foundation. Before moving to California, Jacquelline served as Deputy Director of the Global Health program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she managed Public Affairs and served as speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis Sullivan. Jacquelline, who also reports to Elliot Schrage, our VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs, in order to keep our PR efforts coordinated, will lead Google.org's advocacy and communications agenda, including efforts to influence public policy and media.

Also with us on sabbatical is Dr. Larry Simon. He comes to us on leave from Brandeis University's Heller School, where he is Professor and Director of the Sustainable International Development Graduate Programs and Associate Dean for Academic Programs. A specialist on poverty and vulnerability, Larry led Oxfam America's work in Central America and the Caribbean.

We are still looking for a few "good people," and welcome you to visit our updated list of open positions.

So where are we going now? Google.org is looking to better understand the inextricable linkages among climate change, global public health and economic development, and the impact of global warming on the poor. We want to fund projects that are making a difference and that are effective on a large scale.

We live in very complicated times. Global health, poverty, and climate are inextricably interrelated, and it is the poor of the world who bear the heaviest burden. Google.org is focused on learning initiatives that simultaneously fund good organizations working in these areas and provide insights into "big ideas" that could be scalable from these pilot projects.

During this year we anticipate making more significant grants and investments in support of our major initiatives. We hope to innovate both in what we do, and how we do it. We will report back to you via our site and on this blog regarding on these grants, investments and initiatives. Please look for additional updates as our work progresses.

Update: Awaiting approval from one of our consultants on his participation.

In the first of a new wave of Free Gamer content, Ingo Ruhnke aka Grumbel and one of the most prolific open source game developers around has kindly taken the time to do an interview.

Please note that Ingo's first language is not English, and I've not modified his answers in any way other than to sanitize links. I have made a few notes on his answers at the end of the interview. Many thanks to Ingo for taking time to answer my questions, especially in so much detail - much more than I could have hoped for! :-)

Just in case you left your brain at home today, the questions are bold and prefaced with a Q - and the answers, er, not bold with no Q.

Q. In my best Cilla Black accent, "What's yer name an' where d'ya come from?"

My Name is Ingo Ruhnke in the real world, on IRC and web forums I use to call myself Grumbel. I am coming from good old Germany from a town called Bielefeld:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy

Q. And what do you do for a living?

I am going to end my studies soon, not yet sure what I will do after that, I thought a bit about turning into the independent game business, but not sure if I will actually do it in the end.

Q. What is your favourite open source game(s)?

Adonthell, since it happens to be one of the very few open source games that actually has story, characters and dialog, it also happens to have the best music of any open source games rivaling even that of many commercial titles. The gameplay of the game is very basic, but story, characters and stuff are just so good that its simply not an issue. Its not the longest game around, but the most interesting one.

Q. What is your favourite commercial game(s)?

That would be Another World and The Longest Journey.

Another World because it was and still is absolutely revolutionary in so many aspects. Its a very short game, but one that basically never repeats, every moment in it is uniq, the story, even so told without a word is absolutely stunning and the polygon based 2D graphic was something very different then everything else at its time. Its a game that simply lacks what makes video games look like video games and instead turns them into an interactive experience. And as if that wouldn't be already enough, its also a game that got created from start to finish by only a single person.

The Longest Journey on the other side is much more a classical adventure game, but one of the best. It improved on what LucasArts did in terms of interface and added an epic sci-fi/fantasy story into the mix like there is no other. I like games that feature interesting characters and worlds and The Longest Journey simply has tons of both.

Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?

At the moment not much, I don't yet own any of the next generation
consoles (still waiting for a price cut on the XBox360) and there
simply aren't much more games coming out for the current generation.
So I am kind of stuck there. My PC also happens to be not in the shape
any more for commercial PC games and that Vista Beta I am running
beside my Linux isn't exactly in the best shape either. However I
recently replayed AstroBoy Omega factor on the GBA, since thats my
favorite game for that machine and I also plan to have a deeper look
into my linux version of X2 soon.

In terms of FLOSS I don't really play much of those at all, I enjoyed
Adonthell a lot, had some fun with Neverball, but beside that I am not
interesting in most of the games

Q. What open source games have you worked on, preferrably in chronological order?

Lets see if I can get that figured out without forgetting anything:

In the very beginning I did some C64 Basic and QBasic applications,
most playable was a simple clone of that motorcycle game of the Tron
movie, another thing was a labyrinth/dungeon game, but that never went
anywhere and didn't got finished. All that stuff is available on the
net, but not very interesting for most people I guess:

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...qbasic.html

After those I moved on to C++ and coded Retriever, it was meant to be
an adventure game and written under DOS with DJGPP and Allegro, it
never went beyond a little demo in which you could walk through a few
screen, but I am currently recycling a few of the concepts for
Windstille.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-retriever.png

Closely after Retriever came Vect, a simple vector graphics editor,
that might be used to create the graphics for Retriever. Its kind of
usable, but not exactly very confortable, it again was coded primary
for DOS with DJGPP and Allegro.

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect2.png

pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/...-vect.png

Then I moved onto Linux and switched from Allegro to ClanLib, my first
game then happens to be Pingus, a rather straight forward Lemmings clone with penguins, its
quite playable, but to this day not exactly finished.

http://pingus.seul.org/

Sometimes after that I did a tiny little bit work on TuxRacer, nothing
big, just a script for Gimp to make level creation a bit easier, a few
levels and a few bug reports.

The next game that I wrote from scratch was Feuerkraft, it was
somewhat inspired by the old Amiga game Firepower, but not a direct
clone, it has plenty of influence from games such as GTA and Operation
Flashpoint, as with most of my stuff, I never really finished it.

http://www.nongnu.org/feuerkraft/

Feuerkraft on video.google.com

Sometimes in between I did start Advent, which was basically a rewrite
from Retriever. I was trying to give it a proper scripting interface
and make it properly extensible, which Retriever really wasn't. One of
the results was Cosmos, a little demo game build on top of the engine,
due to library and binary incompatibilities it however might no longer
be playable today:

http://www.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/advent.new/

Then came Freecraft aka Stratagus, a real time strategy engine along
the lines of Warcraft2. Its again a project where I didn't really
contribute much and only joined in rather late. For most part I simply
organize the rename from Freecraft to Stratagus that was needed after
the cease and desist letter from Blizzard, I picked up the bits and
pieces, did a new webpage and some stuff like that. I didn't ever
touch the engine itself.

http://www.stratagus.org/

In the follow up of the Stratagus rename came Robovasion, it was meant
as a little demo game to show that Stratagus can be used for other
games beside Warcraft2. While the basic design got quite finished, it
never got properly implemented due to some missing core features in
Stratagus. Since in the meantime there followed other games that made
use of Stratagus as an engine there soon was no longer a need for
Robovasion, so it never got finished.

http://www.nongnu.org/robovasion/

Construo is again a project I started myself and did most of the
coding. Its a simple particle+spring engine/editor, the game doesn't
have any goals, its more like LEGO bricks where you can just toy
around with and build your own stuff. Its one of the few games I did
that ever become fully playable, its not 100% feature complete, but
what it does, it does quite well:

http://www.nongnu.org/construo/

Sometime after that came Windstille, it started as a little recreation
of Turrican style gameplay, but soon moved on to became something very
different. A little demo with Turrican style gameplay was however
released:

Windstille on video.google.com

netPanzer was kind of interesting, one day I got a email of one of the
original creators who asked me if I had some use for the code in
Feuerkraft, since Feuerkraft was a 2D action game, not a stratagey one
I declined. Since the netPanzer project didn't went anyway after a
year I contacted them again if they still want to do anything with the
code, they agreed that it would be ok to OpenSource it and so I build
a little webpage and announced it on happypenguin.org. Soon after the
announcement was done some people picked it up and ported it to Linux,
I again didn't really touch much of the code, but simply did a bit
organisation here and there.

http://netpanzer.berlios.de

A while after that Happypenguin GoTM was born, it was a project meant
to pick every month a open source game and improve some key aspects
of it. We started with SuperTux and joined an already ongoing effort
to bring the old SuperTux into a clean shape. I did most of the
graphics, some code and around half of the levels of the reborn
SuperTux Milestone1.

http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1243

http://supertux.lethargik.org

After SuperTux was done, some people moved on to TuxKart, we didn't
manage to turn it into a playable game and had to fork it due to some
issues, but plenty of new graphics got done and some unfinished
improvements where done. A while after the SuperTuxKart code was
picked up by some other people and the project is quite alive know
gain:

http://supertuxkart.berlios.de/

Then GotM picked LinCity and we gave that game some new graphics and
user interface, I modeled most of the 3D buildings, while other people
worked on the code and interface graphics. The project got mostly
finished, however I still consider it a failure since one of the key
problems wasn't addressed, namely the game still misses a proper
tutorial and some game elements just don't make any sense.

Windstille also got picked up by GotM, while we didn't manage a
release, it got a large over vault and its the game that I am
currently still working on. Beside from that I am also a little bit
working on getting SuperTux Milestone2 done.

Q. Of the above, do you have a favourite?

Construo is probably my best game that nobody knows about, its plain
and simple and actually fun to play, while many of the other projects
never went that far and got stuck somewhere earlier. It happens to be
the only of my games that I can actually enjoy playing. Beside from
that there is also Windstille, since that game is in some part based
on Retriever and I am kind of working on it for like 10 years I have
grown pretty attached to it.

Q. What attracted you to developing & contributing to open source games rather than selling your efforts as shareware or commercial titles?

Rather simple: Money means trouble, no money means a smooth ride. If I
open source it I don't have to care about advertising, publishers and
whatever, I can simply concentrate on the game and do whatever I like
instead of trying to figure out what would actually sell. Open Source
also gives the freedom to recycle bits and pieces from other project
much easier. Its also much easier to accept contributions when no
money is involved.

That said, all this is of course only true as long as you don't need
the money and do it in your spare time, when you actually want to make
a living out of writing games Open Source doesn't seem to be much of a
good choice.

Q. From your experiences, what would you say are the best tips for making a successful open source game?

I think the by far two most important things are this:

Figure out what exactly you want to do before announcing the game to
the public. Sounds simple, but many Open Source games completly fail
on that, people tweak around an engine for month and years without
anybody having a clue where the whole game is actually going. So they
never really go anywhere with their project, but just running around
in circles forever.

Don't expect anybody else to help you, be prepared to do everything
yourself. When you do a Open Source game you won't magically get
contributions, you might get none at all, so you shouldn't depend on
them to get the job done, but instead be prepared to do everything
yourself.

Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game development fail?

One simple rule would be to not start a new project, ever. Try to join
one of the already ongoing Open Source projects, if you don't see them
going anywhere, hijack them and give them some direction. A goalless
project can often be very easily turned into a different direction, it
just requires that you actually know exactly where you want to be
going.

Another thing: Don't aim to low. Of course you shouldn't try to do
Doom3 when you don't have a clue about 3D programming, but there
simply isn't a need for yet another Tetris clone, we have by far
enough of that. If you try something new, try to actually make
something new, don't just recreate something for which there already
exist dozens of recreations.

Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?

Liquidwar, that game has a pretty cool concept, but rather ugly
interface and graphics, it could definitvly need some additional
polish and improvements.

My favorite Adonthell also needs a new release, it has been going
forward very slowly in the last years and could definitvly need a
solid push.

Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your games do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

I currently do a lot of work on Windstille, a lot of which actually
isn't even very relevant to the game itself (i.e. history, ship
design, etc.). I am more or less trying to create a little universe
instead of just what I would need for a simple 2D action adventure.
If I ever get done with Windstille itself, I probably turn some of
that additional material into a game of its own. One thing I always
wanted to do was a realistic mech simulation, kind of an Operation
Flashpoint in space type of game. However knowing that such a game
would require a loooonnnggg time I prefer to stick for the moment with
my simple 2D game in the Windstille universe, since even that is
already hard enough of a thing to get done.

Interview Notes

Adonthell:

http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/

Liquid War 5:

http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5

Development of Liquid War is ongoing - the game has been rewritten from scratch and become part of the GNU project as Liquid War 6:

http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/

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