Open Source Survives Financial Meltdown

There's a few juicy updates to several great Free Software game projects over the last few days. I'm feeling too lazy to grab screenshots though. You'll just have to peruse yourself if you find something interesting.

We'll start with TA:Spring 0.77b3 - Linux and Windows binaries are up for download - with the comment, "After some people have stated that we should release more early and often*, we give you 0.77b3 here." I downloaded and installed it using the generic Linux installer - worked without a hitch - and it looks fan-bloody-tastic. Still, the state of licensing of some of the content is a little unclear - I don't feel reassured that I'm playing a totally Free game although I'm certain some of the mods are Free Software. That doesn't bother me like it might some of the purists out there.

OpenLieroX 0.57_beta8 arrived. Worms and blood and chaotic 2D action. It's a pixel dream.

Open City 0.0.6 beta can be found on Sourceforge. There's no release notice yet on the website but there's plenty of features in it. Open City is a largely unknown open source 3D city building game. It really deserves more attention than it gets IMHO. The fundamental gameplay foundations are already in place and it's a more in-depth game than Lincity[-NG] or Micropolis (aka Sim City classic), but lacks the polish and stability required to make it attract a larger playing community. Every release is a step closer!

Ok, hrm, how about two new [to Free Gamer] projects?

LBA Prequel (project) is a fan-made effort to create a Free game based on the Little Big Adventure universe, a prequel to the original games. The franchise is officially discontinued so unofficial intervention is required. They are taking the work of two previous projects - which partially reverse engineered the original games to create cross platform engines to play them - to create an engine capable of playing the original titles and the game LBA Prequel is essentially a total conversion that uses this engine.

Epic of Thalia is an RPG of the non-MMO variety. Woohoo! MMO has become the new shell suit, for those of us that don't like MMOs. Alas, I digress. The game is in early stages of development and the website is cryptic until you realise you have to click on the 'navigation' button. What is good is that they have an active source repository** and a few concept releases already, which is more than many aspiring projects make. The Epic of Thalia team is, like all good open source projects, looking for contributors.

* I firmly believe it is true: "release early, release often" is the mantra of a successful open source project.

** It's Darcs. Which reminds me of a new DRCS I saw called Fossil - it's an integrated RCS, Wiki, and bug tracking system. Think git meets trac. Anybody tried it yet?

EDIT: Just got emailed that Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.2.4 is out. The project is an attempt to make a version of Sauerbraten that's more kid-friendly and oriented around cooperative content. Lots of new features and there's been work on a Kid Friendly RPG (brainstorming) for it too, check out Cabzilla:

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)

SimCity open sourced for One Laptop per Child

Remember me?

SimCity, open source. The news is nearly a year old, but now it has been released and you can try to compile it. Download the source or get it via git: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/
projects/micropolis-activity. Unfortunately neither version wanted to be built on my machine. =(

The name SimCity was removed from the game, along with the plane crash disaster. The new name is Micropolis. According to a text file in the release, child-friendly graphics are wanted for the OLPC version.

Update: Micropolis has now it's own home page.

There is a list of games for the XO, can you think of any, that would fit that list?

Spring surprise

In other news, Spring 0.76b1 has been released. The Changelog reveals that for example installing mods is now easier. Hopefully it'll work for me, until this day I was only able to run the engine tech demos. Let's go get it then!

79 - my birth year and something else

Air Carrier

The rather sumptious looking Air Carrier project - a 3D aerial combat game written in Java - has put up an install guide. Basically you need to get it from CVS at the moment and run it from Eclipse. So, if you don't like CVS and Eclipse, er, you are out of luck for the moment.

There's been a bunch of testing releases for TA3D as it approaches version 0.4.0 in style. Large parts of the codebase seem to have been rewritten and many bugs fixed. TA3D is an engine to play Total Annihilation but with better graphics and AI, so you need the original TA to play TA3D.

TA3D obviously shares a lot in common with TA:Spring, however there are some important differences. Firstly, TA3D is Linux centric - whilst there is a Windows version, it is developed on and released primarily for Linux. Also TA:Spring includes modifications to the gameplay and does not make use of some TA files like maps, facts which don't sit well with the TA3D author, so TA3D definitely has a niche.

Pok3D

One of my friends is a poker nut. He was playing away on a Windows machine near me, so I thought I would showcase the power of Free Software on my shiney new laptop with it's 3D capabilities... Pok3D here we come!

aptitude install python-poker3d

-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----

0 packages upgraded, 79 newly installed, 0 to remove

What!? 79 new packages!? Ok, I run Ubuntu so I already have a plethora of Python-centric stuff installed. I also have several games installed so the common game packages too are already installed. This was listing MySQL, web frameworks, and all sorts of other things as Pok3D dependencies. That's ridiculous... why the hell does a poker client require MySQL? If you want to use data locally use a simple embeddable database like sqlite. Anyway, needless to say, despite having lots of HD space and the automatic package management powers of apt, call me old fashioned but I wasn't installing that much stuff for one game. All I could think was, "bloat."

New TA:Sring Release

Star Wars: TA

Spring 1944

TA:Spring 0.75b2 is out (a few days after 0.75b1). These are the first releases under a new lead since the previous stable versions. TA:Spring is a spectacular 3D RTS based largely upon Total Annihilation, although these days you do not need TA to play Spring. It has a very healthy mod scene with some amazing looking mods.

One such mod is Star Wars: TA. It is, unsurprisingly, set in the Star Wars universe. It looks like the realisation of every 1970s kid's dream - commanding your own army of stormtroopers annihilating those rebel scum. (Yes, The Empire Strikes Back was by far the best of Star Wars movie. You are wrong if you disagree.)

Another exciting mod is Spring 1944 which looks really promising but is yet to be officially released so I don't know if you can play it yet. So this screenshot will have to do.

Do you like old school (NES) Zelda RPG and do you not really care about uber graphics? Monster should be good fun for you.

Worldforge keep up their steady progress. It will be interesting if all the years of work ever culminate in a playable game for this ambitious project. It's all about RPG and expansive 3D worlds.

Speaking of 3D RPG... the MMORPG Planeshift got updated as well. It still looks nice, it still has non-free media. Last time I played it was a while ago (it was a bit boring then - I ran around a town for 30 minutes then gave up) and it looks pretty sweet these days.

TA:Spring Rewrite

There's a storm of comotion in the TA:Spring community after the lead developers announced intentions to rewrite the entire Spring engine stating unclean code and a desire to utilise external libraries like OGRE to both reduce the codebase size and introduce new features already expertly handled by said libraries.

The two major debating points were the critical "what about the modders" and the ever-so-important "what name should we give the not-started barely-planned mod". In all seriousness, the modders are the essence of the playing community and really make TA:Spring the eye catching open source project as it is - without them it would just be an engine for commercial content. They give the project the massive momentum it currently enjoys and the developers really need to listen to their concerns, which fortunately it appears they are doing.

Some of the highlights of the proposed rewrite are dynamic lighting, inbuilt C# scripting, and the engine being a generic RTS engine (as opposed to a TA-oriented one).

Ground-up rewrites are normally a really, really bad idea. However, this may be one of the exceptions. Not only are there several motivated developers and an enthusiastic community pushing them, but it does seem that there are several trends in the current codebase that make iteratively rejuvenating the codebase an unrealistic prospect - or at least more work than a rewrite. Still I hope they make rapid progress towards basic features rather than creating some grandiose vision that will not be attainable.

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!

Some Cool Game Updates

UFO:AI

Hot off the press is the 2.0 rc3 release from the UFO:AI team, which is shaping up as a flagship open source game after it briefly floundered due to developer desertion last year. This is another example of why indie games being open source is a Good Idea (tm). Had this been closed source, the promising initial release (tech demo 1) would have the end of the line. Fortunately it was the beginning of an era.

Another important Free strategy game was updated today - Warzone Resurrection. If you haven't played this yet, I don't know what you are waiting for. It's about as polished as you will come across for an open source game, mainly due to it's commercial roots.

When it rains, it pours. TA:Spring, the advanced Total Annihilation engine, was updated on the 17th to version 0.72b1. The changelog is impressive, with the main new features being a new shield system and custom explosions, both mainly for modders. I'm hopeful that TA:Spring will turn into a respectable standalone game in it's own right based on some of the budding mods. I know you can play it without the original TA but I hope they really back and bundle some officially.

There was also another major update to TA3D, a friendly competitor to TA:Spring. I haven't researched the difference between the two but I get the impression the latter is at a more advanced stage of development.

Automanic

In a departure from the tactical flavour of this post, the promising Carmageddon-alike Automanic saw it's second official release, achieving version 0.2 earlier in the week. I'm really enjoying the progress of Automanic, especially after seeing promising games like Slickworm and DIE stagnate and, er, die. I hope that a community builds around it and keeps development alive and kicking.

The original Carmaggedon was awesome and it would be great to top it and improve on the genre with a Free game. I hope the Automanic developers avoid the dreaded rewrite bug that tends to kill off a lot of open source games. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Open Source Game Engines

ScummVM



FIFE



OpenTTD

Today is a game engine special on Free Gamer. These are the projects that take your favourite [old school] titles and provide not only a native port but also fix all the nasties that had you saving and loading or even resetting your PC in the past. I remember the days of autoexec.bat and making every byte of that 640k count. Well these won't give you that fun but at least you get to play your old games!

Let's start with the exciting FIFE: Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine. Started as an attempt to make a Fallout engine, it is becoming more ambitious and there are even rumours of a FIFE-based game in development. It should be able to run fan-made Fallout mods like the aptly named Fan Made Fallout.

I have a pet favourite among RPG engines - GemRB. (I respect the steady progress on a difficult project.) This Infinity Engine emulator aims to be able to run the Baldur's Gate titles and even improve the experience they offer. The development version is advancing nicely and hopefully the next release will give BG fans something to clamour about even if it still won't be quite capable of playing a full game.

Let's not forget ScummVM, one of the grand daddies of Free Software engines. This enables a host of old-school adventure games to be playable in a modern environment. Since it's inception, some of these adventure games have even been made freely available by their publishers, notably Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Sadly they show their age. As fickle as it is, the low resolution makes it harder to enjoy the game when we live in an increasingly detailed and beautiful digital world.

FreeSCI is another adventure game engine for the many old Sierra titles out there. Like ScummVM, it boasts an impressive list of supported games with more added each arbitrary period of time that goes by.

Moving on to RTS games, we start with the evergreen TA Spring. I gave it column inches yesterday and it's thriving community doesn't need the publicity so I move swiftly on.

The classic project of the open source RTS engines is Stratagus. Once named FreeCraft, it has survived a blizzard and been made stronger for it. The available games, not counting Warcraft support through Wargus, are still a little rough around the edges but the future looks good.

Speaking of snow stormy games, we come across SCSharp, a C# adaptation of Starcraft. It's not yet capable of much more than loading a few game objects but it's worth watching out for.

Of course no RTS-related round-up is complete without a mention of something C&C (or should I say Dune 2 reincarnate). The main effort here is FreeCNC. Or should I say FreeRA, as it appears FreeCNC development has ceased so somebody has taken on the codebase under another moniker.

We finish with OpenTTD. This has breathed life into an excellent old-school game. Transport Tycoon is addictive and OpenTTD (partially inspired by TTDPatch) fixes the old problems such as vehicle limitations and then adds even more features to the game. However they are still working on the crazy railroads the AI tends to create! They are working on a hires replacement graphics set which will make OpenTTD a game in it's own right, hopefully by the end of the year.

I can only mention so much so left out the various engines ID have open sourced. However, if I missed any other cracking open source engines please comment below!

Sauerbraten and TA Spring

Sauerbraten

There is an updated release for Sauerbraten. This innovative open source 3D FPS is an evolution of the popular game Cube. For those who don't know, Cube and Sauer are not just FPS games but live map modding tools as well where you can manipulate the game world in real time. The game maps are combinations of deformable cubes giving map creators massive control with minimum complexity. There are already some jaw dropping maps available for Sauer which is adding new eye candy all the time.

The developers are designing a roaming action RPG using Sauerbraten engine called Eisenstern. The entire game world will be in one massive level which the player will have to battle around. It seems to be more in a proof-of-concept stage whilst Sauer matures but is definitely one worth looking out for.

TA Spring

In other news, playing TA Spring just got a whole lot easier for Ubuntu (Dapper) and Debian (Sarge+) users. There's an entire guide to getting it up and running over at the DebSpring project.

TA Spring really does look beautiful lately. There are some incredible screenshots on the website. This game, more than anything else, makes me want to upgrade my PC. When I do you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be a 7-page review up on Free Gamer.