All about the beta!

Beware traveller. I am here to slay your computer. Unstable fun awaits, betas with bits that may break your bit cruncher. That's what open source is about. Blowing up people's PCs with untested, untried, untrustworthy alpha and beta amateur programmer software! Well, perhaps some of the programmers are not amateurs...

Good news, settlers of the new world! (Or those who feel like settling new worlds but were born in the wrong period of history.) FreeCol 0.10-alpha has been released. Get it from the unstable version download area of their website (the current stable version is 0.9.5).

Speaking of Free* games, did the latest FreeCiv beta get a mention? FreeCiv 2.3.0-beta1 supports gigantic maps and over a hundred simultaneous players.

Development of VDrift is, as ever, ongoing. You can test out build 3030 put together on the 25th Jan. After a period of suffering regressions, some changes have been sidelined to bring the main development branch back to a more stable, playable state. It plays well, although - after the being seeing the deforming crashes on Rigs of Rods - I'd like to see the cars sustain damage. I know, I know, lots of work, little gameplay gain. I'm fickle.

OpenTTD is ramping up to another major release with 1.1.0 beta4. OpenTTD 1.1.0 seems to be really focusing on a combination of network play enhancements and compatibility with the Transport Tycoon Deluxe modding community. Free free to correct me if I am wrong.

MegaGlest continues to enjoy rapid development with 3.4.0 beta2. They embody the, "Release early, release often!" philosophy that I like to parrot.

Cool websites for projects? MegaGlest has one coming. UFO2000 has a sweet homepage. Peragro Tempus too. What are your favourites?

P.S. no screenshots or videos today, sorry!

Two weeks?

Has it really been that long since the last post here? I'd better contribute before tumble weed hits the front page.

Egoboo 2.8.0 has been released (download + changelog). The Egoboo team stress this is an unstable release, that it hasn't yet seen the kind of testing they would like it to have, but it is "biggest release Egoboo has ever had" so it is good news for the project.

Which got me thinking of the successor to Egoboo, SoulFu. Now, this project has had a rocky history. The author released it as "niceware" (some silly 'you agree to be nice to dogs' license) to prevent forks, but that just meant nobody really got involved. Amazed at the lack of help, along with some criticisms he didn't approve of, he threw his arms up and left the project in a huff.

Some years passed by.

Keen people started to get involved (screenshots!) and it seems it is moving again, albeit hampered by the loss of a domain name and forced to move to a new (crappy free-) forum.

Whether it gets fully rejuvenated and released under a real Free license remains to be seen.

At the end of June, VDrift got a major update. The changes are huge, including a rewritten physics engine that fixes many bugs, improves performance, and vastly improves simulation accuracy, new deferred rendering engine that supports normal maps, true HDR rendering, screen-space ambient occlusion, and soft particles, meshes for brake rotors, better wheel and tire meshes, bugfixes and tweaks to control input management, and new sounds.

Every now and again, somebody comes along and takes a Free game project and does something with it that makes you think "wow" and "that's why Free is cool". That applies to this guy porting VDrift to use OGRE. He wanted a stunt car racer game, he liked VDrift's design and physics but wanted to graphical options presented by OGRE, so he knocked up this rather awesome looking hybrid:

How cool is that? Anyway, find out more at the (surely tentatively named) VDrift-OGRE project.

Turn up the juice!

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

• cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now


• AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider


• off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)


• support for H-gate shifters


• improved performance


• lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

• Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.


• The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.


• A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

Scorhed3d 42 and VDrift Refactor Release

Scorched 3D version 42 is out (full changelog). New features include:

Scorched3D

• Optimized graphics rendering to take better advantage of hardware


• Scripting language support for weapons and server scripts


• Much larger landscapes supported


• Added multi-lingual support for chatting and player names


• Added localization support for dialogs and messages


• Some gameplay adjustments


• Better LAN/Internet communications for less timeouts


• Some new maps

For those who don't know, it's a 3D artillery game with destructible terrain and sumptuous graphics. One thing I always think when I look at Scorched3D; why hasn't somebody re-used the engine in a different type of game? Nice effects, destructible terrain, there's plenty of possibilities there.

VDrift has emerged from the other side of a ground up refactor/rewrite with release 2-15-09. This is quite good news as projects as big as VDrift rarely survive a rewrite. Author Joe Venzon describes the highlights of the release:

I think it's a big improvement over the last release. Although there aren't any new features, there are so many bug fixes, stability enhancements, and performance improvements it's hard to make a complete list. Most of the code has been rewritten, including the car physics. Ackermann steering has been added. The in-game HUD has a new look. Font rendering has been vastly improved. More graphical options are available. The new physics numerical integrator is more stable.

I think there's also some more cars and improved tracks in this release, although don't quote me on that one.

Oolite (space rpg game) update; 1.72.2 was released a couple of weeks ago. It's a bugfix for the 1.72 test release. I couldn't play it as autopackage no longer works on my system with some obscure error and I don't fancy compiling it.

MetalChaser is a 3d mech-inspired shooter. It's a bit basic, but could grow into something good. The website isn't very clear about it, but it is open source, with a Google-code project.

Angel Engine:

This is Angel, a 2D game prototyping engine based on OpenGL and C++.



Angel was originally made by a group of employees at Electronic Arts Los Angeles for use in a GameJam they were planning for April of 2008. The source was opened in January 2009.

Curious!

Extreme Tux Racer, Smokin Guns, etc

The somewhat stop-start development of the various Tux Racer projects continues, but it looks hopeful that the latest incarnation of the iconic downhill penguin racer will not disappear like its predecessors. Extreme Tux Racer has finally released an updated 0.5 beta (Windows, Ubuntu, source for other Linuxi) after several months of inactivity. It's getting a bit of optimization love after I (yes, me, important mega me) unleashed my wrath helped a new developer by putting him in his place realise that ETR is not too detailed, as he incorrectly surmised, but ratyher suffers from some poorly implemented features that could be done a lot more quickly. Amazingly, I was right. :-)

I'm always right and I will rule the universe soon! At least, once I've been to the doctor about this over-active procrastination gland of mine.

Smokin' Guns, a total conversion of Quake 3 to recreate the feel of the Wild West is probably undermentioned here, although the graphics are starting to look very dated. Features:

• A full arsenal of weapons with historically correct design. Check the weapons page for more information.

• A variety of western styled maps and player models.

• A realistic damage system with different locations (head, chest, neck, etc) and height-dependant falling damage.

• New western styled gametypes for more fun: Bank Robbery and Duel Modes.

• A money system allowing for equipment purchase with money from rewards & pickups.

• Easy to use graphical user interface and HUD.

• Other small improvements for better gameplay and enhanced fun.

Lemming Ball Z

Another undermentioned and very cool project is Lemming Ball Z. Features include:

• Destructable 3d terrain

• Ability to add your own levels/characters/moves to the game

• Multiplayer with 2-4 players online or local

• Good old-fashion HotSeat play

• Slowmotion, like in "The Matrix"

• Fancy graphics, like cellshading and stuff

• Netplay, without configuring or hamachi

• Stupid AI to practice with

• Blood! lots of it! :)

I used to wonder where the FreeCol project got some of its fancy artwork - now I know, you can grab CC licensed (by-nc-sa) from David Rumsey's collection of ye olde maps.

VDrift

VDrift gets closer to a new release after a massive refactoring and lots of enhancements. Starting to look really, really cool. Still, not as playable as TORCS so if you want a quick fix I recommend you go the TORCS route for now, but VDrift looks set to eclipse TORCS as a spectacle in the course of 2009.

Scourge gets nicer towns, with houses created by combining sections to create more intricate villages. See the latest Scourge Weekly (volume 17, on the website frontpage) for more details and a humorous explanation of why developers should work rather than work on open source, should the choice be forced upon them. :-)

Hrm, other new releases like Teeworlds (0.5.1), Battle for Wesnoth (1.6 beta1) bleh too much blog stuff must go KTHXBYE.

Late nights and leftovers - Scourge 0.21

Scourge 0.21 is out. It's been optimized and stabilized considerably and now has a full 12 chapter storyline. Each release of Scourge gets closer to being a really good game - there are still a few issues that need addressing such as the character models - and that is reflected in the increasing activity of contributors. Until a year or so ago, Scourge development was mainly a 1 man effort, but 4 people put a lot of work into this release. A new model format (they are looking at [the unfortunately named] assimp for 0.22) and some better character models (think Glestimals, some JCRPG models, and a few of their own) and Scourge will offer some real immersion as well as a platform for creating new Free Software 3D isometric RPGs.

Talking about optimizations, VDrift is getting back on track after a ground-up rewrite to address key weaknesses in the codebase. Most features are now back and working better than before. I'm going to give the SVN version a go, but the vdrift-data check out takes a while. I think I started it 40 minutes ago.

Cube on the iPhone? No, really. Yes, really. Video:

Talking of cube-things, in Sauerbraten land I thought this idea was a good one. The Intensity Engine is a... well, it's ambitious. I won't go into that bit. However it brings procedurally generated content to Sauerbraten and that's pretty awesome. Video:

[i]Oops, forgot to link to the [arguably more interesting] counterpart video which shows how a bit of Python generates the above.[i]

Yo Frankie! Or yo, what's the deal Frankie? I guess when something gets so much hype, the expectations are high. The screenshots look lovely. The game? Well, the BGE version (which came with 0documentation and meant I had to ask in irc how to actually start the game since the Yo Frankie website gives as much info as the 0documentation) performance was terrible and the Crystal Space version I couldn't play because 0launch* is just about the worst way of distributing a game I have ever encountered. All hype and a totally cute techdemo. Good effort though.

* As if web browsers weren't already overburdened, apparently now they should be installers for things too. I hope the next release they at least provide a tar.gz download alternative.

I'm a bit off-radar at the moment with work. Thankfully Q is filling in brilliantly. He's the next-gen Free Gamer dude because he actually does stuff like create videos rather than just linkify interesting things.

Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2, Teeworlds 0.4.3, GamePwned

Toying with Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2's Editor(HD)

Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2 has been released and now needs a new home! It is house-trained and can be picked up 24/7 from it's SourceForge shelter.

One can now enter buildings (in a pleasant no-transition way) and an editor is now included. I gave the editor a try.

My first thought was: "What a waste of energy! Why did they not incorporate Tiled, as for example Battle Tanks did?" But then I remembered that my last encounter with the general purpose Java editor. It showed me that instead of being able to completely rely on Tiled, a team would have to create an extra tool for tasks that go beyond map editing. At least a team of non-Java programmers (Allacrost is in C++ and Lua).

Allacrost's editor will go beyond tiles. When it's finished, it will also be a character, skills and inventory editor and will support integration of music/sounds.

Greg Cannon blocking the view on STK ;)

GamePwned is a freeware and open source games blog. A video-review of VDrift and SuperTuxKart was recently posted on it. (The third one, HoverRace, has a weird license). Reminds me of the time when freeware titles were often mentioned on Free Gamer. Mid-1980s IIRC.

I wonder if Sauce The Game is ever going to happen again...

Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3

Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3 is out and some of the changes indicate a wide player base: auto team balance and anti-spam fixes. I gave the game a try a minute ago and the fun and prettiness and cuteness are there! Unfortunately I'm no fan of grapple hooks.

Teewars' Teeworlds' license is a bugger though. Instead of "please don't sell this game" is says "you have to include a hello world app if you want to sell this game".

On the other hand, ladies and gentlemen: the bikeshed.

26 Year Conquest for Brains

Conquest (OpenGL)

I think I found the oldest open source game out. It's called Conquest. In development since 1982. That's kinda awesome.

It is a real-time, multi-player space warfare game. Both curses and OpenGL clients are provided. It looks a bit like 2D Star Trek ship battles (not stereotyping there, it just does).

So, want to be brainier? Well, Brain Workshop might just be the answer.

Brain Workshop is a free open-source Python implementation of the Dual N-Back mental exercise. This exercise is the only mental activity that is scientifically proven to improve your short-term memory and fluid intelligence (IQ). The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time.

O_o

Remember Portalized? I kicked up a bit of a fuss over it several months ago. Well, it has it's own website and forums now, and seems to be coming on a bit. It's not yet open source :'( but a bit of positive encouragement might make that happen.

Random one: I thought these faces were quite cool (OpenTTD).

There's a new stable release for VDrift. I'm not sure that it's much different in terms of features to the last VDrift release as lately the development effort has been on a refactoring / rewrite of the code (which is progressing well).

Also Simutrans 100.0 aka 1.0 got released. This really snuck under the radar as it's a very good open source game and not very well known in comparison to OpenTTD, but it's totally Free Software - something the OpenTTD guys are trying to fix but have a lot more work to do on.

The Simutrans team lost their previous forum when switching from one host to another. Which means the Simutrans website is a bit broken (most information was kept in the forums, so many of the links now just don't work). The main issue with the stable 1.0 release is that there is no official release of pak128 (the hi-res graphics pack) for it, although you can try your luck with the nightly builds which does have a section for the latest version of pak128. I'll leave you with a video of Simutrans pak128 although watch out for the dodgy music:

Happy Gnu Year

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year.

I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too.

Simutrans 128

Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com. And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can play it on BeOS!

Egoboo 2.7.5 came out. It's the biggest update since the original release of Egoboo, however it doesn't work in Linux so we'll go into more detail when 2.7.6 comes out. Windows users should check it out regardless.

VDrift "Christmas edition" is available for download. There's a rewritten physics engine in there, among many other improvements. Also, now the VDrift community has attained somewhat of a critical mass, instead of including all available cars and tracks (of which some were of dubious quality) this release only includes those that are of a high standard. It's pretty awesome looking but I don't understand drifting so I couldn't drive around corners. I hope they provide an arcade racing mode in the future.

I'll wrap up with Sauerbraten "assassin" edition. Released just before Christmas, this release brings hud guns amongst many, many small iterative improvements. Sauerbraten recently got rated 7th out of 7 popular Free Software shooters. The reason being that, despite it's community-map-editing innovations, most of the content isn't so great and there aren't many people playing online, so it's more of a tech demo. I'd say that's fair, but something Sauer does [other than innovative technology] that other games don't do is provide a platform for creating new games, such as Blood Frontier and Eisenstern. I have a feeling that 2008 will be a great year for Sauerbraten and it's mods, where the effort of the last few years comes together very nicely.

New or shiney

The FG forums seem to be experiencing more downtime, which sucks a little. Oh well, such is the risk ya take when using a free service.

There's an interesting article on the state of Linux gaming (parts 1, 2, 3 online with more to come) and, although it covers both commerical and open source games, since the majority of good games on Linux are open source games (ok, that's flamebait, but still...) most of the games in the article are open source. ;-)

Apparently Ubuntu is brilliant for gaming. Good to see people impressed by Free Software, even it's it is running proprietry stuff.

Ok, back to Free game matters, and a 3rd release of irrlamb is out. It's cool to see regular updates to this new and innovative 3D game where you control a sphere and use physics to overcome obstacles and puzzles. I tried it out on my Linux laptop and it both ran well and was fun to play. The graphics are never going to be earth shatteringly great but they don't need to be - the game is simple and the graphics in general are nice and clear and well suited to the game. There are binaries available to download for Linux and Windows. The development roadmap has a few interesting features plus a focus on making it a "fun game" - high scores, level unlocking, the kind of features that give you impetus to play it more.

After a bit of downtime, the VDrift website is back up. The next release will focus on polish - one very well done car and track with a nicer GUI. I think it is a good move and they should set a high standard for cars and tracks included in the default distribution. It will provide motivation for creating better tracks - if it's too easy to get stuff into a game then often the need is not there to keep working on a model once it has reached the "acceptable" standard. Raise the standard, and contribution standards should theoretically go up. Anyway, more information is available on the release planning page in their wiki.

When developing an open source project, there is always a trade off between developing new features and perfecting what you already have. Personally I think the VDrift guys have chosen the right moment to stop working on features and refine what they have done so far.

Which brings me to the title of this post - new or shiney. I think it's fair to state that code can never be both new and shiney. New code has bugs. Shiney code has been refined over time. New and shiney is not a concept that transfers from the tangible reality of goods to the abstract world of programming. New or shiney, pick one and stick at it. ;-)

VDrift + Sonic Robo Blast 2 + RG Pro Hockey

VDrift effects

Firstly a quick mention about the progress of VDrift development. It continues at an impressive pace. To improve performance, amongst other things, they have been implementing their own scenegraph and refactoring the drawing code. Also implemented in this branch are shader-based effects (bloom & motion blur) and it looks sumptuous. All it needs is a few really nice tracks and the commercial racing games will be getting a run for their money from VDrift. Honestly, I played Ridge Racer 7 on the PS3 the other day and I was underwhelmed.

Given the ubiquity of cars, the general appeal of racing games, and the ability for lots of people to contribute content easily, I would go as far as saying that for once the open source model is potentially better than a commercial approach for developing this kind of game. I can't think of any other genre for which that might be true.

Anyway, there's a few loose ends to tidy up. Many thanks to the commenters who contributed the following valuable pieces of information... (and I promise to eventually go back and correct the posts.)

RG Pro Hockey does still exist online, as a Sourceforge project. And there has been commits since the last release, although development is currently inactive. Still, it means it's not lost, and thanks anyway to the other comment pointing to an alternative download site. Anyway, project page for the game is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rg-pro-hockey

Sonic Robo Blast 2 is actually cross-platform. Very cross-platform. It turns out the game code is based on the open source Doom engine Doom Legacy. It even has been ported to the Dreamcast. However I think the SRB2 team needs to rethink it's distribution policy - they only link to a .exe which is a self-extracting archive. I had little luck finding information on any Linux binaries of the game, although admittedly I did not look too hard. I think there's some here (lsdlsrb2 or lsdlsrb2beta) but I have not properly investigated.

I typo'd the Street Rod 3 game name and website. Although development seems dead, apologies to the developers and thanks to the reader who did what I should have done; verified the link. The actual site is here:

http://www.streetrod3.com/

And finally for today there's a relatively new site where you can find several open source multiplayer games being hosted, called Network Games. It's a nice idea to promote a community around playing a few of the better free games around.

Strawberries & Cream

I had these grand plans for today, but instead I slept through two alarms and got to work 2 hours late, and forgot what my plans were. *groan*

Eat the Whistle



ActionCube

Anyhow, onto relevant matters, that previously-imminent VDrift release is now official. Go get it, honestly it is a good experience. And it looks great too. :-)

I played Eat the Whistle for the first time yesterday. Any attempts to run it on Linux had failed even though it has been ported, but I thought I'd have a crack on my Windows laptop and (despite a few graphical glitches) it worked! It's good fun although whenever the other team had the ball I struggled to locate the player I was in control of. However in terms of gameplay feel, it's quite nice to play and a little reminiscent of Sensible Soccer although more dynamic but not quite as sharp.

Not sure if I've mentioned this before, so I'll mention it now... ActionCube looks fun. I might have a bash at it later in the week. Think Counter Strike meets Cube. They are using the Cube engine instead of the Sauerbraten engine (aka Cube2) because, when the project started, Sauer was in constant flux (and still isn't declared to be stable).

Um... I had other things to mention but I'm out of time. Go play Wesnoth or something. ;-)

Music tip:

Filthy Rich - Shake it (Steve Lawler mix)

Egoboo vs FreeTrain vs VDrift

Egoboo 2.3.6 is released! This is a major development in what was a dead game. Egoboo used to be a darling of open source gaming, so I'm hopeful it will rise like a phoenix and restore it's reputation.

Somebody has joined the FreeTrain localization effort! Daniel Markstedt, who also contributes to FreeCiv under the handles dmarks/hima, has started translating the game into English and posting patches to the mailing list (soon to be in SVN).

The VDrift team are gearing up for a release. I downloaded the latest test autopackage and, I must say, I was impressed. Aside from a clunky menu, this felt like playing a commercial racing game. Nice graphics, nice car handling, nice tracks. It took me a while to work out how to get started [you need to press 'w' to shift up a gear to start a race, even with autoshift enabled] but it was a lot of fun after that. :-)

I believe this will be a landmark release for VDrift that will see it rise to the challenge of being a viable alternative to commercial racing titles by attracting a lot of users and subsequently contributors. Ok, ok, the crystal ball is going back under the table.

Penumbra

One game I'd forgotten about, although I could have sworn blind I mentioned it on Free Gamer, is freeware horror FPS Penumbra. Currently only a tech demo (circa 2006) is available but it looks quite cool and innovative. Although I was more interested in the Frictional Games blog than the game itself - they talk about quite a few interesting game development problems such as simple fog being obstructed by shaders.

Speaking of game development stuff... devmaster.net is a hub of activity where developers can bump heads together in an attempt to, er, develop. They mention lots of game engine developments and stuff like that, some Free, some free, and some probably not free. Still it's all interesting if you are into that kind of thing.

Music tip:

Bliss N Script - Honey Child (Beatmasters mix)

Imminent Redesign

[UPDATE]
Doing this redesign meant I had to upgrade the blogger template. As I feared I could not just go for the redesign behind-the-scenes. I had to upgrade the template to get the new blogger structure stuff. So no games list for a bit but I have backups so it'll be back online ASAP. Thanks for your patience. Complaints can be sent to this_is_free@be_happy.com and will not get responded too! ;-)
[/UPDATE]

Ok I'm finally taking the plunge. I have created new graphics (some of which are really cool, even if I say so myself), planned a new layout, and now the only remaining (and biggest) task is to migrate the games list (which you currently see on every page) into it's own page. I'm going to be pressing ahead with the template redesign today and putting up a bunch of new pages. Please bear with me whilst I mess up your RSS readers and generally create havoc. >:-)

Back to the important stuff... FREE GAMES!

VDrift

A VDrift release is imminent although probably won't happen this weekend. However, somebody also added a map (although it won't make it into this version), so as you can see from this screenshot the game is starting to look really polished. The next release adds so many new features (AI, different frictions, more cars & tracks, etc) so should stir up quite a bit of fuss.

Ultima Online was one of the original MMORPGs. It had massive popularity in it's time and dedicated members have made open source servers (e.g. SunUO, Wolfpack) and clients for the game. One of the more spectacular clients is Iris, with glorious 3D graphics. And since there are open source servers too, you do not actually need to own the game to play it. I was reading that you can download the official client, which comes with 15 days of free play. However, that 15 days only covers the official servers. You can play on free shards (such as here and here) with the official client without ever having it expire. I do not know if you need to install the official client to run an open source client like Iris. The next major version of Iris - aka Iris2 - is due this month.

Another free[ware] MMORPG is Regnum Online. Since I don't care about freeware MMORPGs nor have a decent 3D card, I'm not going to say any more on this one - check it out if you are interested in these things. It does look purty.

Music tip:

The Freaks - The Creeps (Vandalism remix)

[possibly labelled 'unreleased mix']

Seriously, that track is mint. :-)

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

More Driving Force

The driving game FOSS scene is quite healthy. With actively developed games like VDrift, SuperTuxKart and Ultmiate Stunts, and relatively complete games like ManiaDrive, Stunt Playground, and Torcs, there's quite a decent choice. But there is always room for more! :-)

Motorsport aims to become the most "realistic simulation of wheeled vehicles". It's been going since 2003 so there's a lot of development history and it looks like it's got a bright future with several consistent developers moving it forward. It is unclear whether this will end up as a racing game or a stunts game or maybe just a generic driving game, but it looks fascinating and has lofty goals.

Stunts 2005 is a fan remake of the classic Stunts game from yester-year. To be fair, a lot of the FOSS driving games seem to take inspiration from Stunts aka 4D Sports Driving. Anyway, Stunts 2005 comes with it's own level editor but development seems to have halted after the initial release. Since I can't play it here I can't make any observation on how complete the game is.

Also worth noting is that the SuperTuxKart guys are working on another release that will include updated AI among other things, although updated physics I think are being pushed back to a subsequent release.

Blah blah blah holiday. :-)

VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!

Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

VDrifting Away

Free Gamer has been on hiatus. Sorry! Sometimes these things happen...

VDrift made a new release yesterday.

Hero of Allocrost released their first tech demo. Thanks to Roots for notifying me and apologies to him for taking a week to say something.

Sauerbraten got forked, the new game is called Extended Death Match (or just EDM). I don't know if it is a cooperative fork. All I know is you can leave sticky notes around the maps.

There's tons of other things I could mention from the last 2 weeks but for now I'll just push you in the direction of the Linux Game Tome which covers most of the them in one way or another.

*Goes back to his corner to work slowly on updating the Free Gamer games list*

Niwki Deluxe

These days my conscience starts playing up when I don't update FG. Here I am, sat at work, fretting over not having posting an update for a few days. I may have to change format to just blog about things as and when I encounter them rather than building up entries... still, I'm digressing.

Nikwi Deluxe

Nikwi Deluxe, by Slashstone, is now available under the GPL. This cute 2D platformer is very old school but still well done. It's also a bit silly [you collect sweets, birds poo on you, etc] and therefore suitable for kids, but still isn't easy to don't let the "kids" tag prevent those mega tough macho men amongst you from checking it out. I even made my own screenshot of it, coincidentally of the level where I gave up because it was too hard.

Sadly it is a Windows only game but should work on WINE. Perhaps now it is GPL somebody will port it? Edit - there appears to be a Linux binary. Thanks Mr Anonymous for the tip.

The latest VDrift release seems to have been the critical mass one. Now the community is building and creating content for the game. There's a cool 69 Dodge Charcher which should be in the next release, as well as a parking lot for practicing drifting. It's really nice to see VDrift flourishing after the open source racing scene suffered a serious setback a few years back when Racer became closed source.

Warzone 2.0.4 is now ready. I hope this fixes any problems people may have exprerienced with it. The guys working on Warzone are fans-turned-developers so are learning all the time - things should get smoother with each release.

Finally, the commercial Freelancer has spawned an ambitious fan project, Openlancer. It will no doubt take years to complete and be freeware, but for fans of Freelancer it's worth following. (I only mentioned this because I got Freelancer and Freespace2 confused so thought it may be a fork before I realised my mistake.)

Freecol, VDrift, Sauer... heaven!

I'll start by noting I messed up my last post. Despite making the post on the 23rd, it was dated the 18th so any frequent readers may have easily missed it. So, for those who haven't yet read it, check out Freeciv3 Part I.

Freecol

Now, onto the real meat. In the last week, Freecol 0.5 was - at long last - released. The original colonization had a cult following and Freecol is only going to enhance that community. It's got a lot of potential. It's got some very nice visuals for a Free game and they're improving with every release.

I've been lazy here and used a screenshot from 0.4 since I'm at work and can't load it up to take a new one, although to me it looks the same in 0.5 for that part of the game.

The game is now very playable with plenty of depth but there's still a few negatives for me:

• The ugliness of Java does sneak through in places despite heavy UI customization. (God damn the default Java UIs are ugly - are Sun developers blind?)
• Sadly I'd forgotten how to play Colonization and there's no tutorial so I didn't get too far. Hopefully a tutorial will be added in a future version.
• The GUI tended to redraw quite slowly every time I closed a dialog.
• Usability needs reviewing e.g. when moving a unit, if it finishes it's move, the game switches to the next unit automatically. That makes it really easy to accidentally move units in the wrong direction by pressing a direction too many times with the previous unit.

Anyway, since 0.5 != 1.0, I look forward to improvements in upcoming releases.

VDrift scenery

Following up the VDrift release earlier this month, the VDrift team have provided an autopackage to help people get drifting. I tried the Windows install on my laptop with it's integrated not-really-3D card and VDrift looked like a toddlers colouring book - bright and messy. Can't blame them for that though, and it's not worth fixing so I can play at 3fps.

There are some screenshots from the latest VDrift. It is beginning to look absolutely beautiful.

In what could be a Free Gamer exclusive, I spotted an update to Sauerbraten. Entitled, "normalmap version", this release presumably focuses on the introduction of normal maps to Sauer's rendering capabilities.

There's an amusing exchange in that thread between Passa (a Sauer developer, I think) and Aardappel (the main Sauer developer), where Passa notes community confusion over to Sauerbraten's identity.

Passa:

On the community promotion Aardappel, I have been trying to convince my ISP to host a server for Sauerbraten.. unfortunately the general community say its just a Quake 3 clone..

Aardappel:

well, so we are improving.



- I started Cube as an advanced Wolfenstein 3D clone :P

- It was then perceived as a Doom clone

- Once we got the really HQ maps like metl3 it was perceived as Quake 1, sometimes even Quake 2 Clone

- Sauer started life as looking like a Quake 2 clone

- Then with the better maps people thought it looked more like Quake 3

- and now with the bump maps I have heard comparisons with Quake 4!!!



So hey, even though people can't get it in to their thick skull that there are other things besides quake out there, and that this is not some kind of lame based on quake source project, we are certainly moving forward!

Sauerbraten isn't half bad for a Quake 3 clone.

What!??! ;-)