Ultra Fickle Overtones

UFO:AI

There's beta installers for Linux and Windows for the popular open source game UFO:AI. The changelog for version 2.2 is impressive. The download link is a bit hard to get to - a ploy to stop too many players mistakenly downloading the beta when they didn't realise it might have bugs. Anyway, grab it here, and help them make UFO:AI 2.2 a great release. :-)

There was an interesting comment on the observation I made regarding the version number of LordsAWar:

0.0.3 for the lordsawar version doesn't mean 3% done. The game has most aspects of Warlords 2 implemented, where as freelords only has a few.

Well why version 0.0.3 then? Ok, I admit, version numbers are probably one of the least important aspects of game design. But, come on, really, if your game has lots of features and close to what you consider "1.0" for your game, then label is as such. People who are casually looking for a game to play will see 0.0.3 and think, "not even alpha." They won't play it. Players are fickle like that.

Version numbers imply the amount of progress towards the author's vision of the game. To me, 1.0 is the original vision and past that are evolutions of that vision.

JCRPG

Speaking of vision, I'll also give a quick mention to JCRPG whose author seems to be relentless in his efforts to bring a quality classic RPG framework with all the modern trimmings. Some of his trees are not to far off being life-like in quality. If somebody had the drive to start making a game based on his work so far, thereby pushing things even further, we could see some amazingly atmospheric games.

My brother alluded to an interesting point when commenting on the state of modern gaming. FPS games are monotonous, they are rarely atmospheric. It's just the same sprint shoot sprint cycle except with different weapons and backdrops. The gaming genre has become boring as the limitations of games have eroded away. Complete freedom to move often has the undesired consequence of making the world less interesting as there is no longer a challenge to navigating it - just find the next gap and run through it, all guns blazing. CRPGs used to be mazey, claustrophoic ordeals where you constantly had to plan to avoid getting into too many consecutive battles as monsters were quite fatal. The game worlds were not massive, but they were hard. The gaming industry seems to have forgotten that an enclosed but well defined world is more intriguing than a a massive open one which just looks pretty and has no substance.

Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't played many commercial games in the last 5 or 6 years, but when I have it reinfoces the above feeling. Just a thought.

YouTube and Checkout for the non-profit world

Posted by Maryrose Dunton, Product Manager, YouTube, and Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager, Google Checkout

Ever since YouTube first launched, people and organizations have been using it to broadcast their causes and engage supporters around the issues they care about. In that spirit, today YouTube unveiled its Non-Profit Program at the Clinton Global Initiative to help non-profit organizations more easily connect with the world's largest online video community. In the past few years, online video has emerged as a key tool for grassroots organizing on the Internet -- a short, simple video can demonstrate the impact and the needs of an organization in a uniquely compelling fashion. This program will enable non-profits to create dedicated YouTube channels for themselves, making it even easier for people to find, watch, and engage with the organization's video content. The initial participants are 13 organizations including the American Cancer Society, Friends of the Earth, and YouthNoise.

One other thing the YouTube Non-Profit Program offers: the ability to collect donations directly from these channels using the new Google Checkout for Non-Profits. Checkout for Non-Profits -- which can also be integrated directly into a non-profit's site -- helps drive more donations for U.S.-based 501(c)(3) groups by making it possible for supporters to contribute quickly and securely. It also offers supporters the satisfaction of knowing that 100 percent of their contributions will be sent to the non-profit, as Google has committed to processing donations through Checkout for free through at least the end of 2008. This functionality is particularly exciting, as today's fund-raising is increasingly moving online -- and Checkout for Non-Profits makes the entire process even easier. You can learn more here.

Our testimony on Google-DoubleClick

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Policy Counsel

You may have read that a U.S. Senate committee in Washington is holding a hearing today looking at online advertising and our acquisition of DoubleClick. Check out our Public Policy blog for more details about Google's testimony.

Return of the Jedi Gamer

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)

Blood Frontier

Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.

I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.

Vega Wars

Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.

Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.

There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.

Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.

A new caffeine-free way to stay alert

Posted by Amy Wu, Associate Product Manager, and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Since new videos are constantly appearing all over the web, it's difficult to keep tabs on all of them. But now Google Alerts will make it easy for you to add video to your other Alerts: News, Web, Blog and Groups.

Video Alerts enables you to specify any topics or queries of interest so we can deliver interesting and relevant videos on a daily, weekly, or as-it-happens basis (your choice) to you via email. To start receiving Video Alerts, you can visit the Google Alerts homepage directly or set up the alert during your normal video searches. Videos may come from Google Video, YouTube, or many other video sources on the web.

What are you waiting for? Stay up to date with the One Laptop Per Child program. Find the latest videos on the Lunar X-Prize. Impress Grandma by updating your scarf-knitting skills.

Search privacy and Personalized Search

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel

Online privacy isn’t always an easy thing to understand—or to explain. When I recently joined the company, I was happy to learn that Google was continuing with the effort to make our privacy practices (and your choices) even clearer and more accessible. We are using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why we collect information about searches, and how you can protect your privacy while using our search engine.

If you watched the first privacy video, you learned about some of the information we collect (IP addresses, cookies, and search queries) and how we use this information to improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and other abuses. We appreciated all of the feedback we got in response to the first video.

In response to your requests for more detailed information, in our second video we're offering a closer look at personalization and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about privacy, and we want you to understand how we personalize search results while protecting your privacy.

As the video explains, search algorithms that are designed to take your personal preferences into account, including the things you search for and the sites you visit, have better odds of delivering useful results for you. So if you’ve been checking out sites about the Louvre and you search for [Paris], you’re more likely to get results about the French capital than the celebrity heiress. The privacy tools we’ve designed — such as “pause” and “remove” buttons — help put you in control of personalization.

So sit back, take a look, and then tell us what you think about this video (and the earlier one too). We look forward to hearing from you.

It's all about today

Posted by Niv Efron and Eyal Molad, Google Trends Engineers, Tel-Aviv

A lot of us love video games, and everyone here has their favorite from the latest generation of consoles. We have a game room in our building that happens to have all three of the latest systems: Artem loves Microsoft's Xbox 360, Niv can't part with Sony's Playstation 3, and Corey is hopelessly addicted to the Nintendo Wii. After some serious work organizing the world's information, we like to kick back with a round of Wii Tennis or a trip to Rapture. The problem is that there's only one TV in the game room, and of course only one system can be played at a time. In true Googley fashion, we look to data to decide which console gets first dibs. For that, we used Google Trends, which lets us see what the world is searching for.

Take, for example, a comparison across the systems:



Looks like a pretty tight race. Let's take a closer look at 2007.



Wow, they're definitely neck and neck (and neck) -- the top console could change anytime. Fortunately, Google Trends is now updated every day with the latest information. (Until now, Trends was only updated once a month.) Now we can follow the console race (or any other topic) every 24 hours, whether it's The Office vs Heroes or the candidates for the next presidential election.

In addition to daily updates, we've also created an iGoogle gadget and a feed for Hot Trends. If you have ever wanted to know what the Internet was thinking right now, Hot Trends can tell you just that. Hot Trends shows you what the fastest rising search queries are on Google. Now you can keep track of Hot Trends three ways: by visiting the site, adding the gadget to your homepage, or subscribing to the feed by adding the feed URL to Google Reader or your favorite feed reader.

We'd love to hear about any interesting trends you've discovered. Please send them to us at cooltrends@google.com. We'll feature the best ones in a future post.

Pour on the pedal power

Posted by Dan Reicher, Google.org

You may already know that we're working to reduce our impact on the environment in a number of ways. We opt for locally-grown food whenever possible in all of our cafes. We've covered our roofs with solar panels. We offer a rebate on our employees' fuel-efficient car purchases. When it comes to getting people to the office, we offer round-trip shuttle service to our Bay Area Googlers, as well as incentives for creative commuting, from walking to biking and even to kayaking (depending, of course, on where the office is).

Over at Google.org, the RechargeIT project is collecting data on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in an effort to accelerate commercial adoption of the cars as well as vehicle to grid technology. To the same end, we just issued a $10 million request for investment proposals to encourage companies and individuals to develop sustainable transportation solutions.

And now, we encourage all of you to get your wheels spinning to offset climate change. Google has teamed up with Specialized and Goodby Silverstein & Partners on the Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Challenge, to give you problem-solvers a chance to show us with a YouTube video how you harness pedal power in innovative ways. In January, you could win $5,000 in cash and Specialized Globe bikes to keep up your commitment. We're doing our bit to support new solutions. Are you feeling inspired?

Extreme Tux Racer

Extreme Tux Racer

The team over at Extreme Tux Racer - the latest fork to take on the Tux Racer continuation mantle - have made their inaugral release. It's still a bedding-in period with no real major updates other than a new campaign (cup?) but hopefully it will signal the start of a new lease of life for development of a popular open source franchise.

FreeLords, the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed.

LordsAWar, a fork of discontinued FreeLords C++ codebase, has hit version 0.0.3. Whilst that sounds very small I think it's not really a reflection on the completeness (implying 3%) as the C++ FreeLords was in development for years and I think this project is just trying to gain some early momentum.

The Secret Maryo project is keeping up it's good progress with another release. Version 1.1 sees the game make more steps to being a platform game worthy of the Mario moniker that it emulates.

The OpenTyrian project came up on the freegamedev.net forums. Tyrian is an old DOS game, a vertical scrolling shooter. Those games used to be so much fun - most games did in those days. Anyway, before I digress, this is just a port of the game to C/SDL. You need the original game to play it :-( but, since it's available on most abandonware sites, that shouldn't be hard to find.

Also I note Free Gamer made its debut on Slashdot, more about that tomorrow. No, it's not so significant that it gets its own post, it just caused me to think about something I wanted to express i.e. when the first iteration of this paragraph was longer than the rest of the post put together, it became obvious it needed its own space. ;-)

iGoogle tackles the Rugby World Cup

Posted by Thomas Gayno, Associate Product Marketing Manager, France

Salut! You may have heard by now that France (relieved after our recent win over Namibia) is currently hosting the sixth Rugby World Cup, which is a gathering of the best rugby teams from around the world competing for the coveted Ellis Cup. You Yanks should imagine the Super Bowl, but held only once every four years, with 20 teams from around the globe -- and without padding or helmets!

Four years ago, when England won the last Rugby World Cup, we French Rooster fans began planning for the next global matchup. Meanwhile, our French superstar Sébastien Chabal -- otherwise known as The French Beast, The Anesthetist, Attila or the Caveman -- has grown longer hair, a longer beard and bigger muscles. And he's back for this year's World Cup! To help track The French Beast's team's (or any other team's) progress towards victory, we created an iGoogle tab complete with a variety of gadgets that puts you in the middle of the action. The tab features live scores, group standings, a map of the venues, fan videos from YouTube, and a fun "make some noise" gadget that lets you cheer on your favorite team. With the iGoogle Rugby World Cup tab, you can experience the action in an entirely new way. Even if you've never used iGoogle before, you can add the tab here. Alternatively, type [rugby] into the Google search box and click on "add to my Google page."

In line with the international aspect of this sporting event, this tab is available in the following countries: USA, Canada, Portugal, Ireland, UK (Wales, Scotland and England), Romania, Georgia, Namibia, South Africa, Japan, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy and Argentina. Whether you're a fan of Sébastian Chabal, Dan Carter or Stirling Mortlock, use the iGoogle Rugby tab to keep track of the action. And if these names don't mean anything to you, tune into the Rugby World Cup and they soon will!

FreeCol update

FreeCol

A game update of interest (not been many lately) - FreeCol 0.7.2. Not too much else of interest going on. A few months ago I would have spent some time digging up unusual games or extra development information. Or write some interview questions or something. My time however is very limited at the moment.

I have a few Free game commitments and I really want to focus on creating Fortress. It's been a long time coming but I'm now at a stage where I want to contribute to a game as well as making copious amounts of net noise.

As such perhaps it is time to make this a more public blog - have some people contribute to it. Make it more community-based.

I'm thinking about it...

The other thing I need to do is organise things a little for the www.freegamedev.net (forums current here) community. A few simple tasks and things would be able to run without me but I've been too busy to sort that stuff out.

Anybody got some free spare time? I couldn't find any low cost spare time on ebay.

Hrmm... there's a thought... auctioning off your spare time on ebay... :-)

Google Reader goes multilingual

Posted by Kevin Systrom, Product Marketing Manager

I've been traveling a bunch in the past few days, and the one thing I've noticed is the variety of newspapers you're offered on every flight in Europe. In London, where I am now, my hotel has between 10 and 15 newspapers in the lobby from around the world in different languages. So I started thinking about how news plays an increasingly important role across the world.

Of course, blogs have also become an international phenomenon. They're not constrained by language or nationality — in fact, blogs have become an important way to bring rise to independent reporters and writers. And there are more and more people who wish to read blogs in other languages. Up until now, our blog and news site service, Google Reader, was only available in English. As of today, it supports these languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (UK), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, and Korean.

With this announcement (you might enjoy this take from the Reader blog), I'm also happy to tell you that we're removing the "Labs" label from Google Reader. It's a small textual change, but we believe it solidifies our commitment to make reading blogs and news sites easier than ever. So try Google Reader and get all your blogs and news sites in one place.

Update: Added Dutch, which is now live.

Our feature presentation

Posted by Attila Bodis, Software Engineer

In April we announced that we were working to bring presentations to Google Docs. (Astute readers may recall learning about this even earlier, which caused a bit of excitement around here.) And today we're unveiling the new Google Docs presentations feature and invite you to try it at documents.google.com. Maybe more than any other type of document, presentations are created to be shared. But assembling slide decks by emailing them around is as frustrating as it is time-consuming. The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps you to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser.

Starting today, presentations -- whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor -- are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it's time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they're watching. Not wanting anyone to feel left out, we've made the presentation feature available in 25 languages; Google Apps customers can also access it as part of Google Docs.

We hope the millions of people who already create and share documents and spreadsheets will find presentations a welcome addition to the Google Docs family, and we can't wait to add even more features and enhancements.

If you're new to Google Docs, watch this video to learn more about creating and collaborating on documents (and now presentations!).

Not Dead

Nope, I'm not dead, just caught up in doing real work so time has been at a premium lately.

Eat the Whistle

Also not dead is arcade football game Eat the Whistle. They have migrated to SVN as they build up to a new release. 'They' could mean just 'he' or just 'her' as I'm not quite sure how many people are working on EtW but the good news is it is being worked on. It's a fun game to play but suffered from being very buggy so hopefully this release will bring it a new lease of stable life.

What has been dead has been my Freshmeat inbox - no notable game releases for a while apart from Widelands, Bub Brothers, ja2-stracciatella, Wormux, and Xarvh. And those are just the ones on the Game Tome. Still, like I say, Freshmeat has been quiet. ;-)

Xarvh is not linked because it has been renamed to Everborn. It's a turn-based multiplayer fantasy strategy game, with real-time battles, born as a clone of Simtex's Master of Magic. In case you didn't know.

Star Wars Warlords

The other news centres around Vega Strike being close to release with massive SVN updates making it much faster to load/play. Also the Star Wars mod for VS, imaginatively named Vega Wars, had some very good news in that it has access to a slew of Star Wars models from the Star Wars Warlords project (a mod for Homeworld 2) that simply need converting to a format VS supports - which means a playable release of that project before the end of the year is quite realistic possibility. A Free Software game featuring some of these models is an exciting prospect!

I will probably come to an agreement with some other FreeGameDev forum members on posting here so that, should I forget or lose a limb, somebody else can step in and take on the mantle of bringing you all the fascinating Free Software game news. :-)

Australia readies itself for a Google election

Posted by Julian Sonego and Rob Shilkin, Google Australia

Looking from down under, the long U.S. election cycle ensures that there is no shortage of political headlines generated more than a year out from the actual Presidential election. Many of you may not realise that Australia is also readying itself to enter campaign mode. A federal election is anticipated to be held before the end of the year. You can be sure as the Australian parties get out on the hustings, babies will be kissed, doors knocked and hands vigorously shook -- but this election campaign is already a lot different to others, with digital media playing a new and important role.

Today, in Sydney, we announced the launch of a Google Australia election website, so that Australian voters can have an intimate look at the parties, candidates and election issues, all in one Google location. These services, spanning Search, Maps, News, video, Earth, Trends, and iGoogle, enable voters to organise, find and share Australian election information more easily than ever.

We created a Picasa Web Album to showcase all the elements, and we're pleased to offer these world-first tools that were developed in our Australian office. Here's hoping Australians will find them useful and even fun. It's our view that democracy on the web works -- and the web can work for democracy.

We've officially acquired Postini

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President & General Manager, Google Enterprise

As of today, Postini becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and we couldn’t be happier about it. (Here's the FAQ.) Since July 9, when we announced the agreement to acquire Postini, plenty of businesses have told us how much they respect Postini and how the acquisition makes sense for customers of both companies.

We view this as welcome news, but also a sign of things to come. With the more than 100,000 businesses on Google Apps, 35,000 businesses and more than 10 million users of Postini products, we see great potential on both sides. We're committed to continue to deliver the type of innovative and useful business products our customers have come to expect. And we plan to announce even more product offerings in the very near future.

Separately, both companies shared a vision for what the world of hosted applications can become for businesses of all sizes. Together, we look forward to achieving it.

Fly me to the moon

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Engineering

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space and orbit the Earth. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space (she orbited the earth 48 times -- take that, Yuri). By the end of the decade, the Apollo teams, rising to President Kennedy's challenge, made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin the first human beings to walk on the Moon.

Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That's why we're thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.

Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it's cool. More seriously, space exploration has a remarkable history of producing technological breakthroughs, from ablative heat shields and asteroid mining to invisible braces and Tang; the X-PRIZE, too, could lead to important developments in robotic space exploration, a whole host of new space-age materials, precision landing control technology, and who knows what else.

Finally, we hope the contest will help renew public interest in fields like math, engineering and computer science, especially among the young people on whom we'll all be depending to tackle tomorrow's technical challenges, whether they're on the web or among the stars.

As Neil Armstrong famously pointed out, small steps lead to giant leaps. We hope that our sponsorship of the Lunar X-PRIZE is one of those small steps, and we can't wait to see what giant leaps result. By the way, just so the teams can scout locations and plan accordingly, Google Moon just went live. For more information, visit the Google Lunar X-PRIZE site.

Get your cricket scores here

Posted by Sadeesh Duraisamy, Software Engineer, and Alok Goel, Business Product Manager

With the start of the Twenty20 world championship, cricket fever is upon legions of enthusiasts. To make it easier for you to indulge your interest in a game John Fowles characterized as "chess made flesh," we've simplified your search for cricket scores. Just type [cricket] in a Google search box and you'll see a brief score of all the current cricket matches. A single click will also give you access to a detailed cricket score card.

If you're a diehard India fan, then type [cricket india] or [cricket score India England] to get results for Indian matches. Of course, feel free to replace India with the country of your choice for country-specific results.

A new Google.org RFP

Posted by Kirsten Olsen, Project Manager, Google.org

Today, Google.org has issued a request for proposals to the tune of $10 million in order to advance sustainable transportation solutions. We're inviting entrepreneurs and companies to show us their best ideas on how they can contribute to this important cause. We need catalytic investments to support technologies, products and services that are critical to accelerating plug-in vehicle commercialization.

There's more about this on the Google.org blog.

Our plans for Code Jam

Posted by Bartholomew "Ruberik" Furrow, Technical Lead

What do you do if you've got a head full of good ideas, and nothing interesting to do with them? You might need a good dose of competitive programming. During a programming competition you contort your brain, trying desperately to figure out that tiny trick that will let your program run a thousand times faster, or searching for the elusive mathematical fact that will lead you to the solution. Then you tell your computer what to do, and watch it solve that torturous problem faster than you can blink. If you're like me, you eagerly participate in every coding competition that comes along.

Since 2003, we have supported the fun and intensity of competitive programming around the world by offering code jams powered by TopCoder. Contests like the ACM ICPC, the TopCoder Open and our TopCoder-powered code jams have formed a great community of contests and contestants; now we're excited to join that community in our own right, by producing a Google Code Jam of our own! There aren't too many details to share yet, but we have some big plans: there are quite a few super-competitive programmers here, and we've put them to work preparing challenges for you.

So start brushing up with a couple of practice problems -- and it's well worth checking out some old problems from the ACM ICPC and TopCoder too. We're also excited to hear what you think would make for a great Google-run programming contest, so send us your feedback -- and get ready for a challenge.

Briskly Brief

I'm really quite strapped for time right now so again this is brief.

Stargus, the Stratagus-based project to get native Starcraft on Linux, is close to release. If the screenshots are anything to go by then Stargus will be pretty playable with this release.

The latest Freedroid RPG release looks nice. The project seemed to have stalled earlier in the year but there's lots of contributors these days which is nice to see.

Want to make games but not a programmer? Maybe Mokoi Gaming is for you. The project is in it's infancy but it's already usable although the documentation is a little sparse. Still, it all seems well done so a bit of user feedback I'm sure will be warmly received.

Tennix now has SVG graphics. A very concise concept is turning into a nice little game to while away the occasional onset of boredom.

Also another simple game shaping up nicely is Qonk, with 5-minute galactic conquest gameplay.

No screenshots. No time to find any. :-(

Edit: also the FIFE developers are celebrating their project's 2nd birthday. Always a good milestone to have had 2 years ongoing development.

Nuxified and Cluenet FOSS Game Tournament

The forums are NOT down, they are still up here:
http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/

I'm moving admin of the freegamedev.net domain over to tuxfamily.org so it can be more useful than a simple redirect. [watch this space!]

On top of that, if your Free Software game project includes non-Free art then you need to be careful. Why? Because this could happen to you. Sure it's a setback that the Warsow team will recover from, but by using an appopriate license or agreeing terms this situation could be avoided.

For instance I'm accepting some non-Free contributions to a project of mine but I made sure the author agreed the graphics had irrevocable usage rights for the project. So he can't rip his graphics out if he has a change of heart.

Anyway, the whole purpose of creating games is to play them, right? Well, Nuxified and Cluesoft have come together to put together a tournament using solely Free Software games. They haven't yet chosen the exact games for the tournament so contribute your opinion if you want to be playing your favourite game if you want to take part.

Find a needle in a feedstack with Google Reader

Posted by Ben Darnell, Google Reader Engineer

The fundamental problem with information is that there's too much of it, and this is probably why we all go to our trusted sources to learn what we really need to know. Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place.

So if you want to keep up with the chatter about the new iPods or Superbad, now you can. We've added a familiar search box to the top of Google Reader so you can search across all the blogs and sites to which you're subscribed.



See if this doesn't help with your information overload. And by the way, if you want to learn more about feed readers, here's a great explanation:

Fill This Space

Hrm... *eyes shift left then right* ...something's wrong - I don't know what to write about.

I could start with that ATI/AMD releasing ATI GPU specs and committing to helping out the open source drivers, but everybody else is doing that and to be honest - whilst game related and good news for ATI (who were close to being written off as a half-decent provider of hardware for anybody intending to run Linux which is actually quite a lot of people) it's not overly relevant to open source games which tend to be, wel, not so demanding on our GPUs.

Oh, if you read that first here, either you are a really dedicated Free Gamer reader and checked FG first thing after sleeping for 16 hours having slept so long because you spent the entire day ready the FG archives, or you have your head in the sand when it comes to technical news... ;-)

I tried out Interstate Outlaws, the Carmageddon-ish game that is the successor to [the now defunct project] Automanic. It comes with an auto-update feature, which is kinda refreshing. Normally one must do this things manually or wait for your distro to do it. Given how out of date most games in Ubuntu are (and Ubuntu is pretty cutting edge by most distro standards) this is a welcome feature. Only it doesn't really work - but the game is 0.1.x still so bumps are to be expected. Still, the cars looked really cool before the game prevented me driving them. :-D

What's more interesting is that they have created an intro movie for Interstate Outlaws. You can see it on YouTube or wait for them to include a full quality version in the game.

You can now play Wormux online! More instructions here.

Hrm... what else... nothing not mentioned recently in other posts so I'll keep it short and sweet today.

Collect, share, and discover books

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager

Books often live a vibrant life offline, and through digitization Google Book Search tries to help them live an even more exciting life online through full text search. Today we're launching some new features that go beyond search so you can collect, share, and discover new books.

To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion. Other people can view your library, so you can share your collection as Bethany has done. Or take a look at some other interesting collections.

Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. For example, Sir Isaac Newton once said:

I know not what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

This quote has resonated and been used in hundreds of books from the early 1800s to 2007. You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call "Popular passages." Read more and dive into the meme pool.

We've also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this .

We hope these new features help you discover, collect, and share some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before us.

How Original

I really shouldn't be posting right now because I have a million more important things to do but I love you guys so...

There's a preview version of Vega Strike 0.5.0 up for download for Intel Mac users. The VS devs need some feedback on most notably sound due to porting issues. Users of other platforms will have to use subversion for the time being but Windows users don't need to compile as there's a .exe in subversion.

Want to know what OpenTTD will look like when the new graphics are ready? Well there's some interesting screenshots in the Ubuntu forums. I know this guy has riled the OpenTTD community by posting work there that they don't approve of. Issues to do with language barriers and badly put-together mockups / inserted graphics. Still, it seemed a bit harsh to me but for some reason he doesn't understand English. Anyway, this babble is digressing too much.

Globulation2 and Bos Wars got updates. Hopefully C&C being released as freeware won't dent the efforts of the developers of those games by taking players away from their communities.

I hate Westwood and the C&C series. Why? It's the most unoriginal piece of crap. Ever played Dune II? Awesome game for it's time, truly awesome. So awesome that the entire C&C series was just a rehash of it. I was so disgusted when I played Dune III, over 10 years after Dune II, the gameplay was pretty much identical and even the same gameplay / stupid AI bugs still existed. You could still select units, click on the floor, and watch whilst a few enemy units systematically wiped them out and your units continued to attack nothing. I vowed never to play a C&C game again after that - it's just the same but with shinier graphics. This probably isn't the first, and probably won't be the last time I mention this. I still remember watching a video of one of the game designers talking about how "original" Dune III was and feeling sick to my stomach that I helped line their pockets with gold. Dune II was original. Dune III had nothing original about it - it's not like 3D graphics were even a new phenomena. The evolution between Dune II, through the C&C series, to Dune III, was purely superficial, which for a multi-million-dollar franchise was pretty poor going if you ask me.

Never fear, open source is here! FOSS games are often original, contrary to what many people think. Originality goes beyond the conceptual. Originality is about project direction, about improving gameplay. Free games may often be reimplementations but they usually take a proactive approach to addressing gameplay and game balancing issues. You can be sure that the same AI bugs that afflicted the initial versions of Freeciv 10+ years ago have been addressed in the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 - which already has patches for the issues I mentioned the other day.

Hey, how topical is this. Whilst searching for a Dune III link (unable to find one easily - obviously a completely unremarkable game unlike it's predecessor) I came across two active Dune II remakes; Dune II: The Sleeper Has Awakened, which was only updated on the 3rd of September, and Dune II: The Maker, updated in August with gallery additions even yesterday. Intriguing.

I'm baaaaaaaaack!

Whenever I have an extended FG absence (nearly 4 days this time!) it always makes me feel like shouting "I'm back" in the style of that guy from Independence Day. Maybe in a past life I had my dignity taken away from me by rectally-fascinated aliens? Who knows, but now it's out of my system I doubt I'll think it again.

So... since it's "tomorrow" now, I'll point people in the direction of a comment by FIFE developer mvbaracuda who corrects my "commercial quality techdemo" description of the upcoming joint venture between FIFE and Zero Projekt. So if you are interested in making adventure games then investigate further.

Paintown

Paintown is an old school beat-em-up like Double Dragon. It's been in development all year and has an installer for Windows and source download for other platforms (Linux only, I think, but not checked it thoroughly) and looks like a fun game.

I tried out Vega Strike which looks nice although I think these kind of space exploration games need a storyline to get people involved. Since it doesn't have one, there's no initial purpose to the game (other than make money I guess) so I didn't spend too long playing. The latest VS is only available from subversion but it's shaping up nicely so a release should come soon - before the end of the month, I reckon. The big news is the addition of shader support so it's going to look very pretty, in addition to tons of gameplay balancing and bug fixes.

I also tried out JCRPG which is turning into a very nice little game engine. The graphics are great and if the same determination and attention to detail is paid to the rest of the JCRPG goals then we will have something really special on our hands. There is a download available if you want to check it out - it's Java so you can, er, run it anywhere. That's what they say. ;-)

Fortress may be a long way away from anything releasable but, well, castles are cool. So check out the development blog for pictures of two contributed castles. I'm personally involved in the project so it's exciting for me and if those artistic efforts are a measure of what the game will look like, it's going to look absolutely awesome.