Darsana

There's a new Ultimate Stunts release, 0.7.1, which adds a few nifty features and fixes a few commonly reported bugs. This open ended driving game continues it's history of steady development, something I like to see in open source games.

Our newly incepted project Fortress continues to attract interest and we now have a wiki collecting together information on the both Castles (the game that inspires Fortress) and how we want to see Fortress evolve. Hopefully in the next few weeks a bit of prototyping will occur, but a bit of planning in the meantime should scope out the project nicely.

Fortress will also provide me an opportunity to write some articles on the issues that affect open source game development. (I was tempted to write "successfully developing an open source game" but then that's just setting myself up.)

Darsana

Somebody brings up Darsana in the Ubuntu forums. They call it beautiful, well, that's perhaps a little strong. It does look interesting though, an FPS with a medieval setting. However there seems to be some furore over the licensing of it. Whilst it uses the Dark Places engine (a highly modified version of the Q1 engine released by iD) which is licensed under the GPL, the author of Darsana believes that he is under no obligation [2] to release the source to the game. Now that's something I would need to look into deeper before I could comment properly on it (there are various nuances to the virality of the GPL so I'm not sure how it would affect mods) but it is intriguing.

To add to the Darsana soap opera, it appears that the source to version 1.0 has been lost, although work continues on version 2.0 of the game.

I came across the online gaming magazine Escapist. It's layout is beautiful, although totally image based. Whilst not open source specific, I found it quite interesting. Plus there's an article about girls in gaming. Seriously, I could barely believe it either, girls can play computer games. Next thing you'll be telling me is that they can play sports too! ;-)