FOSS game engines put to great use

Disclamer: Yes I am fully aware that the following two game do not have libre media, and that one of them will never have unless they get away from the copyrighted IP!

That said... the following two gems are really nice examples of what can be done with FOSS engines if some skilled artists work with them.. and they are free as in beer too :p

The first one has been mentioned before on FG, and is a Mod for the nice FOSS RTS Megaglest (Did we mention that one had a small new release too?). Annex: Conquer the World, doesn't seem to have it's one website yet (link goes to Moddb), but check out this awesome new video of that game (gives me a nice Starcraft vibe!):

Annex gameplay teaser

Actually I don't know anything about the media license on this one, and it isn't released yet, but the closed development process makes me doubt we will have much luck in regards to the media (source must be GPL just as Glest), but hey... you never know!

The second one is as previously mentioned a bit tricky in regards to their media, but at least is is all publicly accessible in their SVN, and maybe you can ask if some parts of the media can be free-ed for other projects to use. Ok well which game am I talking about? Well ZEQ2lite ;)
Have a look at this video and I am sure you will recognize the copyrighted IP:

ZEQ2ite gameplay teaser

ZEQ2lite, has a longer history of different mods for Quake3, but this new version is based on a highly modified ioQuake3 version and is completely stand alone from Quake3. Not a big fan of the IP otherwise, but it looks nice and has cool effects :)

Oh and one quick last unrelated news... OpenWolf (a fork of Wolf:ET with Xreal renderer... long story) seems to be making some nice progress in updating this awesome (free as in beer but with FOSS code) multiplayer FPS classic, as you can follow here. And the original Xreal project seems to be somewhat alive too and a release is promised soon... looks like some healthy competition is going on there ;)

When three became two - Glests Uniting!

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project...

Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006.

...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features:

• Glest
  The original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared to the continuations.
• Glest: Advanced Engine aka GlestAE
  A community-led continuation of Glest by adding features and rewriting significant portions of the Glest codebase.
• Mega Glest
  With frustrations growing about the lack of stability of early GlestAE work, and the length of time between releases, a prolific modder started to add key features such as improved multiplayer, a 'mega pack' of mods (which inspired the name), and port useful changes back from GlestAE - the result was MegaGlest.

For some good videas of both forks, go to player UltiFD's youtube channel.

My impression of the different development approaches for MegaGlest and GlestAE is that MegaGlest development is driven by a "whatever works" mentality to make rapid improvements and bring more features to players. GlestAE development seems to be based on a much longer term outlook, with most work being fairly significant in nature and few basic improvements.

Where are they now

Both MegaGlest and GlestAE have remained much lower profile than perhaps the efforts of the developers have deserved. Whilst Glest remains popular, and enjoys many downloads due to high Internet profile, there is no mention of MegaGlest and GlestAE on the homepage and only people diving into the forum will discover them.

Lacking features and stability, players who fall away after trying Glest may have stuck around if they encounter MegaGlest or GlestAE, but they are unlikely to ever try them. Hopefully this will change now MegaGlest has an amazing website and will start to gain an Internet profile of its own.

Another issue is the increasing amount of time spent porting improvements between the two forks.

A further issue is that, since GlestAE has features that MegaGlest doesn't (and, to a lesser degree, vice versa), there is an increasing divergence in the modding communities.

Glest forms to join forces?

Well, the story may yet have a happy ending. After a brutal conflict, with bloodshed, riots, toppled dictators, eathquakes and... wait, I'm looking at the wrong screen...

After much pressing by Internet trolls and well wishers, it seems that a joining of efforts is in the offing.

Even if the efforts do merge, they may still remain separate entities. Reading through the post, there's talk of official liasons between the projects and all sorts. It seems a bit more complicated than you might expect.

There's even a distant hope that the resultant efforts of the GlestAE/MegaGlest merger may result in Glest 4.0 if the community finally takes over the now-abandoned Glest project.

In Other Glest News

Glest forks (MegaGlest, at leasT) now can have cliffs! This opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to map design and gives the game a bit of vertical depth, making it look cooler (in my opinion - and I am incredibly cool).

Somebody with a peculiar middle name is making a fully-3D Glest-inspired game called GlestNG - it will use Glest assets but otherwise be completed written from scratch using Ogre3D. Will it ever become playable? Who knows, but it's intriguing nonetheless. So just when two forks merge, another project arises to take the spare seat. Hah!

A completely cool mod Annex Conquer The World (moddb) has been teasingly dangled in front of us, with acclaims already including: "Easily the best Glest mod since the original Magitech!!"

Let's hope it gets released as Free software! ;-)

MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.

MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 6.

And believe it or not, qudobup and me tried to play a round (extreme n00b alert :D ), which we recored and commented here:

Megaglest Multiplayer: Julius vs. qubodup [HD .ogg (485M) | tinyogg | no-commentary .mp4 (364M)]

All done with Free software by the way :D (MegaGlest, glc, Audacity, PiTiVi and Mumble)!

Interview with the Megaglest team

For this Megaglest special we are also lucky to had the chance to make a short interview with the two main heads behind this Glest fork.

FreeGamer: For a start, could you please give us a short introduction into your team structure and what your motivation was to fork Glest in order to make Megaglest?

titi: Well teamstructure is... I started and Softcoder joined :) I have been working on glest mods for 2 years now because I like the game and there was so little content available back then. For Megaglest I also do some programming, but Softcoder writes more of the code than me.

Softcoder: But we also have contributions from time to time from others (like the GAE team).

titi: Concerning our motivation, I think we both work on glest because our kids like it :) Right from the start my children were involved in Glest modding. For example my son made nice tileset and helped me with my first mods; especially the Indians (as in native north Americans / the editor ;) ) we made as a coop production!

Softcoder: Yes titi & family are the heart of the community! But my boys also made a number of factions. Elimnator and Tiger are big into mods, and call their mods vbros packs :)

FreeGamer: Interesting to see that FOSS game development can really work as a family hobby! Not really the typical cliche of the lonely bed-room programmer in his teens ;)
But lets move on to the next question: Glest is for sure heavily influenced by Blizzard's Warcraft3, and thus caters to a similar type of gamer. Have you though about bringing some of the popular elements from that game over to Megaglest? Examples would be hero units, and of course the later added game-play modes like DOTA and Tower Defense.

titi: I think we both don't even know Warcraft3 :) I didn't played many RTS games up to now... well I think I played something called Dune2 on the Amiga before ;) Actually I'm more a FPS player.

Softcoder: I'm not a gamer at all. But yeah, the forums are filled with people who ask for features from those games. In short we will therefore likely bring lots of features that people like from there into MG.

titi: Personally however, I don't like all this special hero feature people talk about. Things get too complicated with this, and I think these heroes kill the usual RTS fun. But there are some fun ideas we will follow for sure :) But I see Glest as its own game; I don't want to build a Warcraft clone.
Concerning DOTA, well I guess HON is much better then we can ever be :) But there are mods who do this and when they grow we will support them if it fits to the game itself. Right now we have the current RTS game type in focus, however.

FreeGamer: Ok next question: Megaglest seems to have evolved out of a number of independent factions and tile sets, so the overall game design is lacking a bit. Are there plans to take a more "tighter grip" in order to get the balancing etc. right? Or do you consider Megaglest more of a "playground" and let someone else develop a "pro-mod" for balanced multiplayer?

Softcoder: I think the answer is a challenge of the community and the age groups. Many young people are working on techs, factions, maps etc, but we might need to be more careful to keep "themes" together. So we try to only allow consistent content as part of the shipped product.

titi: Well there are the Tech and Magic factions from the original glest, but the rest was basically made by me. It is something what I called Megapack before. But I learned more while doing this and so they look a bit different :)

FreeGamer: What I actually meant was not the art style but the game balancing and game design. Are there plans to restructure the factions, maybe limit them to 3 or so to be able to get balancing right?

titi: I think the balancing is quite good! Ok, some are better some are not so good, but thats like the players. It is meant like that, good players choose bad factions bad players choose good factions. But what's good or bad depends on the map too!
But I discuss with others in the forums and hear what they say... especially beginners always say this or that faction is too good, but after a while they often come to the conclusion thats its not as they thought :p

Softcoder: I also think the base MG install has that, e.g. a core game-play with good balancing. It is the add-ons etc... that create the "playground".

titi: But for me competitive game-play is also not really the focus. I want to make a game thats fun to play, not competitive! Especially coop gaming against the computer is a big part of the fun playing MG.

FreeGamer: Ok lets move on: With the current release focusing on getting the multiplayer working correctly (and hopefully getting a big enough online player-base), what are your future plans regarding the single-player part? Do you plan on implementing a campaign editor in the already much improved level editor?

titi: Well for me the next focus are graphical improvements. We need better terrain splatting (made by the gfx card), more lights and so on. And we will start to put in lots of new features once we proofed to be stable in multiplayer :)

Softcoder: I think its hard to answer! There are TONS of great ideas in the community, we will talk with our community and see what things are most desired. My focus is more for making my boys happy :) We want MG to be 'mega-fun'!

FreeGamer: Ok so what about editing & modding? Right now the units are rather limited in their special abilities. Do you think stuff like (air) transporters, non attack magic spells, stealth mode etc. (insert other cool units features from Starcraft/Warcraft) could be easily implemented? Or is that already possible with scripting, but not done yet?

titi: I wrote so many wiki entries , made so many forum posts to let people know how to mod glest, I think its quite easy now. The special unit abilities not implemented yet however, but when we think it is fun we will think how hard it is to do and then we do it :)

Softcoder: We plan to add many things like this, but slowly so that we don't lose stability and keep people happy. One example... we added better network play, masterserver AND cross platform play all in this last round of beta! That was TOO MUCH! But things will get done (faster if we have more help) just at its proper pace.

FreeGamer: We already had some remarks on the technical side of things, but lets get back to that again: The Glest engine sure looks a bit dated by today's standards... do you have plans to upgrade the graphics engine to support shaders and such?

Softcoder: Yikes! We agree with you! But I think we have to give hats off to Martino and the rest of the original Glest team that a game written in 2005 still is acceptable today!

titi: We need more speed and many of these features will bring us better speed and better graphics, since the GPU will do alot of the work.

FreeGamer: Ok, but to extent that: with normalmaps and such it often looks more realistic in style. Do you want to go more in that art direction, or stay with a more comic style?

titi: Normal maps are not the main priority, there are other more needed features. And normal maps need new textures, and that is really a lot of work :) So for now we are looking into things that can be done with mostly code which is easier to do.

FreeGamer: So but what weight would you give the development focus right now... more towards improving graphics, or more toward extending game-play?

titi: Both :) But we try to make small steps.

Softcoder: Game development is totally new for me (and Linux programming is fairly new), so priority also depends on how long it takes to learn and do it right! MG is my first graphics code ever, and also and my first Linux open source project.

titi: It is all new for us, no one of us did something like this before. I even learned C++ in the beginning of this year for this project! Same with php, the masterserver is the first thing I ever wrote in php.

FreeGamer: Well I think it turned out pretty well so far never the less :) I think this concludes our short interview. Thank you very much for answering our questions! Ahh, last but not least: Do you have anything you want to tell your players and/or our blog readers?

Softcoder: Yes, our #1 goal for MegaGlest is 'FUN'!

titi: Please come and play MegaGlest ;)

A short introduction into Glest modding

(Mega)Glest has an incredibly easy modding setup. Almost everything in the game can be easily changed with simple XML files, and the 2D map editor is very easy to grasp. Especially with the recent usability improvements in Megaglest (and included Linux editor binaries) it is possible to create a simple but nice map in a matter of minutes!

Edit: I was made aware that those editor improvements come mostly from the GAE project. Very good additions!

(Ok this was not done in minutes :p It's one of the new 8 player maps that come with MegaGlest)

But luckily all these editing features are also very well documented in the Glest wiki.

Last but not least, all single-player and co-op scenarios can be fully scripted right in the XML files with lua, a pretty powerful yet easy scripting language commonly used in computer games. Sadly it is not possible to create full singleplayer campaigns yet, but lets hope that gets added soon too!

Rigs of Rods goes Open Source and Glest 3.2

Rigs of Rods is going open source. How cool is that?

Rigs of Rods (also known as RoR), is a truck, car, airplane and boat simulator. You can drive, fly or sail in total freedom in an open environment. What makes RoR different to most simulators is its unique soft-body physics: vehicles chassis and wheels are simulated in real-time as flexible objects, giving the simulation an extremely accurate behavior, while allowing the vehicles to be simply specified by their structural composition, as a network of interconnected nodes (forming the chassis and the wheels). Crashing into walls or terrain can permanently deform a vehicle in a realistic manner. In addition to its unique soft-body physics, RoR also features an advanced flight model based on blade element theory, allowing the accurate simulation of any airplane, base on their physical dimensions and wing airfoils. It also features an accurate buoyancy model based on elemental pressure gradients, enabling boats with complex hulls to move realistically in the swell.

Thanks to Mantar for the heads up. Here's a video showing just how cool it looks:

Well Glest 3.2 is out. Which is interesting given I proclaimed official Glest development dead* and Glest Advanced Engine to be its successor. It's like I just made it all up. Only I didn't, there was a thread where the official Glest developers stated that GAE would become official Glest. The link now goes to an inaccessible page. However, I'm not the only one who found it and logged it. Sadly Google obviously hadn't, since there's no cache available.

* FYI "Glest is dead, long live Glest!" is a play on "The King is dead, long live the King!" I didn't mean it was actually dead.

So, either the good news is that the main Glest developers have returned, or that the Glest team (new and old) has decided to make things look a little more cohesive, or somebody is playing a practical joke on me and posting grumpy anonymous comments implying that I am inciting trouble. Either way, it's great to see a new Glest release.

Glest 3.2 brings Lua scripting support, a new tileset, and tutorials as its primary features. I think more was expected, but given the lack of activity, the developers decided to push out a toned down 3.2 release instead.

Freelords tech release 0.03 has been released. Ignore the website, which says 11th Feb 2008, it's a typo. New graphics and new features, although it is still not quite playable yet.

Some other releases that piqued my interest: Neverball 1.5.0, Tennix 0.7.0, Vacuum Magic 0.9.

In the article reviewing simulation games, I lamented a lack of documentation for Simutrans. I was a bit off, there is plenty. It's just a bit scattered. For those who want to try it, I suggest starting with the wiki and specifically this page on transportation basics. There are also several errors in the article that stem from me writing it ad hoc and not proof reading properly, but I'm too lazy to correct them.

In the comments somebody offered to help out with FreeTrain development, the didn't leave any contact details and didn't get in touch. Still looking for help from C# developers for FreeTrain. Please leave details or email me - freegamerblog at gmail.

There did seem to be a bit of a negative slant from some commentors on the article in general. There were those lamenting that there is no depth (5 playable games not enough for you?) and those lamenting that Lincity-NG was not enough like Sim City 2k (no-win scenario, if it was a clone there would also be complaints). Come on guys and gal! Lighten up a bit!

Mid-night madness - LinCity-NG 2.0

It's something-am, I have overdue work, and a Freshmeat announcement put a bee in my bonnet about posting.

LinCity 2.0

LinCity-NG 2.0 is out in the wild, and boy is it starting to look like a nice game. There are only two things that look a bit weak these days - the name (NG? Linux-only?) and the UI (a bit scrappy). For those who don't know, LinCity-NG is a GotM fork of Lincity which brings it into this century with much nicer graphics and a more informative user interface.

Plenty of nice new graphics (notably vegetation, grass, trees) make the game look aesthetically smooth. New resource management (water) adds to the depth of gameplay. There's a load of other new aspects too but there's no official announcement and I'm too busy procrastinating to go digging.

Glest (the 3D RTS) is dead, long live Glest! No, really. Mainline Glest development has ended and Glest Advanced Engine (information), a community-born enhancement, is to officially become the new Glest. Glest Advanced Engine is a project built on top of Glest, that adds new features to the game, it includes both new code and data.

UFO:AI

There's a whopping development update on the UFO:AI website (3D TBS RPG). I would link directly, for posterity, but there's no direct links or rss or anything like that. So I guess I have to summarize. Bah!

Map editor improvements, 3D geoscape improvements, UI improvements, new music, sounds & models, new hiring screen, texture updates and new textures, AI infrastructure updates, battlescape improvements, aircraft updates, balancing work, improvements to campaign system, er... basically everything got a bit better.

It looks like the next release will kick serious alien a$$, and really this project is producing one of the stand out open source games, I'm sure you'll all agree. Not that the game doesn't have weaknesses. A lack of really talented core developers mean features like destructible terrain and buildings (a feature found in the original 2D UFO games) is not currently possible. Such issues come down to the underlying technology which is built on an enhanced version of the Quake 2 source.

I'm sure there's some smaller game updates I'm forgetting, like perhaps Word War Vi 0.25 or Vacuum Magic 0.8 or Free Vikings 0.8 or something, but for the life of me I just can't seem to remember... *shrugs*

Early morning edit: just came across Open Simulator. Kinda WTF.

Post-early-morning-edit edit: aaaaaaahhhhh I remember now. The 3D Ultima Online client project Iris2 has a new stable release. Lots of improvements and it looks great. I wonder when the UO community will wake up and move over to an all-open-source platform. :-)

Screenshots are for wimps

Glest 3.1.2 has been released (changelog, linux). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this.

SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge. It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed.

There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer derivative) and then race on them all without the game without specialist tools or knowledge.

Speaking of Sauerbraten, here's some videos showing how basic world editing works.

Word War vi (that's vi as in vi vs emacs as opposed to VI as in 4 6 (d'oh! dang roman numerals...)) is a side scrolling shooter which is, well, kinda geeky but also kinda fun. (Did you spend a few secs thinking "World War IV" too?)

Finally, the Secret Maryo Chronicles project is looking for a new name to get away from copyright trademark issues with the Mario franchise. I'm sure all good ideas are welcome.

In case you didn't guess from the title, there's no screenshots in the post. I'm too busy to do it today! Edit: Ok, thought I'd post this Word War iv vi video since it's kinda cool:

Community Updates

Lots of activity amongst the FreeGameDev crowd. Qubodup has created an amazing new forum skin, so participating in the forums has never been a more pleasant experience than it is now, and he's still tweaking away. A new feature, Wikiwatch, a sort of planet for wikis, was added.

Now I just need to improve the blog (include announcements rss, update links, generally nicer layout) and FreeGameDev is go. 5.... 4.... 3... etc. ;-)

In terms of game news, it's gone a bit quiet, fortunately for me.

Glest with shadows

Bloodmasters

Glest got shadows. Purty. :-)

The OpenClou! team have put up their first model concepts, as seen on the Sourceforge project. Lovely!

Bloodmasters will soon be open source. It's a 3D top-down arcade shooter with plenty of blood. Will report on it more when it is. Yay for me. :-D

I wanted to put a screenshot up but Blogger is being lame... will put it up later. Edit: Done!

Bridge Builder 2006 is now available for Linux from here. It's only freeware (it'll be "eventually open source"). I spoke with the authors briefly so I'll strong arm them into believing. I'm sure I can think of a suitable way to coerce them into accepting Free Software is best. ;-)

For purists, there's still Construo and Bridge Constructor but the former isn't really a game and the latter is way behind in features, and both are somewhat abandoned.

Is your game violent in Rambo-esque proportions? Well you can label it with a suitable rating. Check out TIGRS and PEGI. Discuss in the forums here.

Glest 3.1 invaded by aliens

Glest: Alien Invasion

Gearhead2

Chromium BSU

Hot on the heels of Glest 3.0 is... Glest 3.1! Great to see the rejuvenated development of a poster Free Software game. This version continues to add multiplayer features such as in-game chat. Oh, and a new menu background. Eye candy! :-)

The mod scene for Glest has also never been healthier. The latest mod to show up (although currently just a WIP) is Glest: Alien Invasion. Pictures speak etc - see the images.

In the grand scheme of things, websites aren't that important. Or are they? Gearhead2 is a mech-based rogue-like. Maybe you like the sound of a [mech-based] rogue-like. To everybody else, the term 'rogue-like' tends to mean 'no graphics', so when you visit a web page like the homepage of Gearhead2, combined with the knowledge of it being a rogue-like, I bet the vast majority of people go no further. It looks awful, the screenshots link doesn't work, and because in the lay visitor's mind the game isn't graphical, it's game over already.

The shame of it is, Gearhead2 looks like a really promising game. It has a 3D version with a snazzy UI (it's predecessor Gearhead does not). Mechs are cool. There is a well supported forum. Somebody needs to just delete every bit of HTML on that Gearhead2 homepage and put up something 1. functional (i.e. working links) and 2. web layout !circa 1998.

Last but not least for today, Chromium BSU, the frantic top-down shooter, is under new maintainership. The Debian maintainer of the game has access to the Sourceforge project for Chromium BSU so will be applying patches that have been collecting for a few years in the various distros. Whether it'll see further development of the game is unlikely but it's good to avoid the usual bitrot of forgotten projects. Also I noticed the sequel project Chromium BSU 2: Second Strike, but despite there being source in SVN, it didn't really get off the ground.

In Internet-lameness news, I can't believe my Portalized exclusive barely made a dent on digg. I mean, utter rubbish which is merely a Portal influence gets 1000s of diggs. How come a [possibly open source] improvement on Portal's game dynamics not even break double-digits? I mean, I got more damn "diggs"* on FSDaily! The Internet won't do what I want. It's officially lame. Want to correct this ludicrous aberration? Go forth and DIGG!

* Is digg a new verb? What would you call it on FSDaily? FSDailied? :-?

Updates Galore

Iris2

There's quite a few updates that have not caught the public eye in the last few days:

• Freeciv 2.1.3 is a maintenance release with mainly bug fixes


• FreeCol 0.7.3 which includes new map and tutorial features (announcement)


• Glest 3.0 is ready and brings with it network play and gameplay balances (announcement)


• SST:LD 2.1 (Glest Starship Stroopers mod) which is now available as a standalone download (announcement)


• Ultimate Stunts 0.7.4 (3D driving sim) which has graphical improvements - smoke effects, nicer sky - and a better track editor (news page)


• Stendhal 0.66 which has new features... which... I'm not sure what they are - something to do with the server providing new ways of storing data (renting areas/houses or something)


• Open Clou! gets a Sourceforge project


• Iris2 (3D Ultima Online client) has seem some awesome improvements in it's graphical capabilities - see the dev blog for more info

NewCol

NewCol is, "a game based on a classic map engine displaying forests, rivers, mountains and seas with a textured relief map, gaussian random number generator and z-buffer like algorithm." It's obviously inspired a bit by colonization, but it looks very original in it's design. I wasn't able to find a direct link to the screenshots page so you'll have to go their yourself.

Finally, one of my favourite projects Scourge has seen some great improvements lately. There's a lot more people contributing to the game and, thanks to the increased visibility of Free media out there, has gained some impoved models. The SVN version of Scourge is pretty damn good and the game only really needs some decent character models to become one of the more impressive Free Software games available.

Do you want to find some open source media for your game? Then these are the two places you should start:

• Free 3D and 2D art and audio resources on the FreeGameDev wiki


• Free Art Search, a tool for searching for open source images

Uh... I posted way more than I intended to... I need a cup of tea!

Singing in the rain

Ok, ok, I know, I've been a bit rubbish lately. I'm struggling with the same problems that afflict many, many Free Software developers. Firstly I over-committed myself and the blog is lower priority than the various Free Software projects I should be working on. The blog is, if you like, the end result of far too much web surfing indulgence. If I can't indulge, the blog material quickly dries up. It's why nobody else does it; you can't do it if you don't do a lot of research and research takes a lot of time. Fortunately, over the last year a few other sites have come up. Libregamewiki, the FreeGameDev site (the forums, the awesome art search site and wiki) have materialized and the Linux Game Tome has been somewhat resurgent now it has reliable hosting. I like to think that in some small way I somehow caused the new waves of Free Software gaming that's hitting the beaches lately. Butterfly on freegamer, tornado on alpha centurai or something like that.

I don't believe in making dramatic statements, but if there's no new material here it's because I'm out conquering the world so you should leave some comments of worship so I look upon you favourably when I'm in power. Er...

Somehow I forgot to mention it before, but Glest 3.0 is in beta. Info is scattered around the Glest forums. Here's SVN instructions for the brave. Glest is now on moddb which gives convenient listings of the main mods.

Do you like Globulation2? One of the main contributors is offering 6 months of full time development at a very cheap price (as developers go). Details from the mailing list where one guy has offered to double all other offers in order to make it happen.

Are you making a 2D game? Want a level editor without having to write one? Tile Editor.

Want a simple 2D pixel art program for making sprites? JDraw is for you.

UFO:AI vs Apricot vs Glest vs... crikey

Quite a lot to cover, simply because there's a lot of small items that have backed up in my little "FG updates" list which I've been waiting to pool together.

Firstly, the "big" news in that UFO:AI 2.2 got released. There's plenty to write home about, tons of new features, and it's an awesome game. I'm not a great fan of some of the micro-management although it's part of the original X-COM games so understandably part of UFO:AI - I would like to see some automation aids (auto-assign ammo etc) - but that aside this is a really, really good game. If it was released as a commercial game it'd be respected, and because it's Free Software it's only going to get better. Here's a video:

So, the Apricot project is gaining pace. They have still to decide on what type of game they are making. I hope they make, out of their choices, a platform game. I must say, I really disagree with some of their assertions. If a platform game is "heavy on the engine" then I feel sorry for the engine - platform games have very little landscape on-screen at any one time and a good 3D engine should be able to isolate displayed content from off-screen content in order to retain speed. "Lots of work" to create levels? Out of all genres platform games really lend themselves to tile-based layouts with lots of reusable content, so with a half-assed level editor map creation should be pretty easy even if level design is a fine art (but isn't it with any genre).

Spring 1944

Glest: Domineonic

How cool does that look!?

Spring 1944 is a world war II mod for TA:Spring and it looks F<censored/> ACE! With Spring and Spring mod installation getting easier in recent releases and some mods really coming along with their content, there's a lot to be excited about. :-)

Talking of open source RTS games, Glest and it's mods are moving along nicely too. There's the 2nd SST:LD release (think I covered it a while ago, but no harm repeating it), a Norseman mod (beta), and an upcoming Domineonic mod (alpha). The Domineonic mod especially looks very, very promising.

Too much to go into detail with really... ;-)

Last but not least, Privateer Universe made a release and quickly followed it with developments meaning they no longer are a "mod of a mod", breaking away from the old Privateer Remake and updating to use the latest version of Vega Strike. That's all still in SVN (compilation instructions) but they are making good progress.

Privateer Universe aims to expand upon the original Privateer universe in contrast to the strict canon remake that is Privateer Gemini Gold.

TOOMANYCOOLTHINGSHEADABOUTTOEXPLO..........

(Think of a dead dial tone)

Breaking News: Glest Updates

Glest has carried the accolade of being a leading open source game due to the relatively polished nature of it's graphics at the time of release a few years ago. Since then, sadly, the development pace has not matched the original hype surrounding the game.

For the first time in quite a while, there's a major development push. This time, the emphasis is on making it multiplayer.

There's a windows binary patch, and the code is in SVN for other OS users, although is largely untested on anything other than Windows.

Also released today was Star Ship Troopers: Last Defense 2, a mod for Glest. Updated models can be seen in this thread. The download is a whopping 130mb so there's plenty of new content to chew over in there.

That's a lot of Glest goodness. Enjoy!

Bos Wars and Glest with ATI

There's a preview version of Bos Wars 2.4, an RTS in the style of Red Alert, available for download for Linux and Windows (and should compile on other OSes). This version introduces...

"a completely new rate-based economy. Energy is produced by power plants and magma by magma pumps. Building also consume resources continously instead of requiring an upfront payment.

It sounds interesting. Bos Wars development is very active although the majority of developer communication happens on irc instead of the mailing list, which can make it look - to the casual onlooker - as if not much is happening. They could probably do with a devblog too!

Freedroid RPG

FreedroidRPG 0.10.2 final got released as well - well, renamed from 0.10.2rc4, whichever way you prefer to call it. One thing I didn't mention yesterday was that I really like FreedroidRPG's graphics. They are very distinctive and quite good. :-)

The SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 release is tantalisingly imminent. Announcement will be any day now, perhaps over the weekend? A lovely new island track and Hexley the platypus character are two highlights of a significant improvement over the previous version. This game has a lot of potential, so hopefully this release will get a few more people interested in helping out with the development.

Speaking of project communities, Glest, the rather well done 3D fantasy RTS, has quite an active one despite the seeming inactivity of the main developers. This guy has released a final version of his Indian faction for the game. The faction has involved, including learning, some 500 hours of work so is worth checking out. Another guy has a blog dedicated to Glest and there's more WIP factions happening in the Glest forums. Admittedly some of these fan efforts are more enthusiastic than they are well executed, but everybody starts somewhere so good luck to them. ;-)

On a side note, if you are a Linux user with an ATI graphics card and have problems running Glest, this tip might help out.

Sauerbraten, Vega Strike, Project Kilo

Did I not mention this Sauerbraten update? I don't recall doing so, and I swear it was not a thread in their forum at the weekend despite being listed as posted on the 12th June. Anyway... it fixes a whole lot of bugs, adds graphical enhancements, and cleans up scripting support a little. Probably more of an update for people making mods/games with Sauer than players but, shucks, I love this project. Embarrassingly this was a 2006 release... *oops*

There's the possibility of a StarShip Troopers: Last Defense, the Glest mod, becoming available for FreeBSD.

The Java Classic RPG project has posted a snapshot for anybody who wants to play with it in it's very early stages of development. Work continues at an impressively frantic pace, soldiering away on features. Hopefully a modeller or two can start contributing to the project to make the artwork updates as impressive as those to the codebase.

I keep pestering the Vega Strike team to make a new release. I, and others, frequently get pointed to the SVN version. However it turns out that there is a Windows build of the executable made every few weeks, although you will still need a subversion client to get the latest version of the game data.

Talking of pestering projects, I'm trying to convince the Project Kilo guys to use Sauerbraten as their game engine. Project Kilo is an effort (well, currenlty mostly an idea) to create an immersive single player 3D RPG game. Sauer is the engine also behind the Eisenstern project, another 3D single player RPG effort with slightly less lofty (but still impressive) goals than Kilo.

Eisenstern

The main feature of Sauer is in-game multiplayer map editing where all map elements are defined as cubes or combinations of cubes, it makes a lot of sense to map modellers. I think the combined nature of Sauer's very easy map creation and it's development supporting Eisenstern makes it really suitable for, at the very least, prototyping a concept like Project Kilo. With little or no code the Kilo team can be up and running in no-time, and (being open source) they can build additional features into Sauer as they require them and possibly even feed back upstream. I think it's a far more pragmatic route than taking an engine like Crystal Space or OGRE3D and creating the game logic from scratch. Map modelling itself will become far more of a burden using this approach, let alone the extra effort to make a playable scenario.

I'm not saying that Crystal Space and OGRE3D don't have their place in development - they are important game creation tools - but if somebody has done 95% of the work for you like the Sauer team has, by implementing a game [engine] that not only makes map modelling easy but lets you roam around massive maps with fancy effects and is easy to customize, then surely it makes sense to start there instead of starting far behind them.

People should do as I command suggest because I am always usually right. ;-)

Return of Glest?

Another game whose development appeared to have stagnated was Glest. This 3D RTS was widely acclaimed as a leading open source game when it came out, with high quality graphics and solid gameplay. Although it lacked features, it seemed like the ideal platform to build a game that had depth as well as eye candy. Sadly development just seemed to stop but it looks like it's restarting, with the release of Glest 2.1-rc1. Don't expect anything spectacular with this release but hopefully it's the start of a return of Glest development.

However a game that has shown very nice steady development activity (something that always makes me happy) is VDrift. And a new release is imminent. With a host of new features that really add to the gameplay, this release... well, I'll let their lead developer 'thelusiv' explain:

I'm pretty excited about the release...this will be our first in almost five months, and not only fixes a ton of problems but also adds lots of new things that have made the game several times more fun that it has ever been before.

So get your joysticks & steering wheels ready. ;-)

Dungeon Digger, an open source game inspired by Dungeon Keeper, is looking more and more fun. On Feb 25 a new demo became available with a menu among other things. If you look at the screenshots, it's starting to look like a nice little game. More resources and creatures and I look forward to building me some grotty horrible disgusting places to lure ye ole knights into.

I was also playing the GTK2 version of Freeciv 2.1-beta3. All I'll say is, "Niiiiiice!" Still, it crashed although was much more robust than the SDL counterpart, but it's beta, right? Freeciv 2.1 should be released in April.

There's more but if I keep going then I'll have nothing to report on tomorrow!?

Music tips... I'm gonna start giving them at the end of each blog, starting with an oldish one:

Umek - Posing As Me

ORTS - A Free Software RTS Game Engine

OTRS

Well, look what we have here. Joining the likes of Boson, Glest, and TA:Spring/TA3D is another Free 3D RTS game: ORTS.

The interesting thing about ORTS is the motivation - the AI.

ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games.

<snip> ...the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines.

<snip> ... the ORTS project [is] a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games.

<snip> Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate tasks to AI helper modules of increasing performance.

The game is not yet released as a download although you can grab a daily snapshot and build it yourself. Is it going to be released any time soon?

We have a working platform-independent server/client RTS [3D] game engine... We are working on a standard ORTS game... By autumn 2006 we hope to have a working system which is interesting for both RTS players and AI researchers.

This is definitely one worth watching out for. AI agents are already publicly available. It could be a game that's tougher and less predictable than usual. Most games challenge me but I'm, er, challenged.

What I do like about it is that the AI won't cheat. There's nothing that pisses me off more about a game than lazy developers giving the AI daft advantages because they were too inept [or short on time] to come up a decent AI. I like to be beaten because something has been clever, not because it can unfairly see all my units or build things for half the cost!