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