Contributors, contributors, contributors

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.

Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.

Programming

Rocket Race in Syntensity [more]

Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript.

latest UFO:AI world view

I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues.

PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.

Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.

Current PARPG status

I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)

Assets/Media/Art

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Racer r242 screenshots

Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.

A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.

jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.

irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.

Read more »

UFOs and Post-Apocalyptic Adventures

There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI, the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.)

Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though.

FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved.

Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced PARPG - Post-Apocalyptic RPG - to the world, a game that uses FIFE to create a new, erm, post-apocalyptic RPG. I think he'd gotten a bit tired after many years working on FIFE - when you work on an engine sometimes the end result is less tangible and harder to motivate yourself for.

The announcement of PARPG seemed to galvanise the FIFE community, with new and old faces now popping up to fix and featurize FIFE after a fairly long quiet spell in development. There seems to be a lot of interest in contributing to PARPG with threads like this popping up in the forum. It seems they are looking primarily for C++/Python devs at the moment.

Unknown Horizons

OpenAnno has been renamed to Unknown Horizons, partly because the name OpenAnno sucked but mainly because Unknown Horizons is an original game and not an Anno rip off. I do like the new name.

Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. Expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods. Increase your power with a well balanced economy and with strategic trade and diplomacy.

Zero Projekt

Zero Projekt celebrated 3 years of active development and it's looking as nice as ever. There's some beautiful graphics in that game. Annoyingly for me site updates/news tend to be in German with English updates being somewhat sporadic.

With 3 promising active game projects on the go, the FIFE community future looks bright.

Like Morrowind? OpenMW 0.6 got released. Still, you need Morrowind to play it, and that's not Free, so...

DungeonHack

However, a project that is Free software and Morrowind (well, more Daggerfall) inspired is DungeonHack. There's lots of interesting development noises going on in the forums - that's one to watch for 2009. There's an imminent demo which is the culmination of a lot of refactoring and project reorganizing and new technology adoption, but the next version after that will be where things start to get interesting as several procedural generation techniques are surfacing in their subversion repository.

Read more »

Game & engine news cluster

Nebula from FreeOrion

So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today?

On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae. Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds!

I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE. You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic!

OpenDungeons' map editor

OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome...

So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS!

There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer. But I have two problems with the game: 1. The controls are explosively sensitive and I was so far unable to overcome the first platform sequence in the first level. 2. The turning speed of my character is depending on the distance between bob and the camera, so when bob is standing back to a wall, it will be impossible to aim because the turning speed will be 40 degrees per 1 point mouse movement...

This apparently will not change:

Please note: the camera is not going to get much better than this. Minor niggles, etc. can be ironed out, but a full blown, intelligent and dynamic camera, as found in many multi million dollar budget games is not going to happen.

You can take a look at the first level of the game and at my issues with it in this gameplay video.

Also let me tell you that I appreciate very much, how Parallel Realities gave Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid a nice story and setting, and made it a fun to play game. So I'm not giving up on the 3d platform/shooter just yet!

I just found out that ja2-stracciatella, is based on the unfree (although open) Jagged Alliance 2 source code. :( Thanks to Lightkey of Holarse (de) for giving me the license link!

FIFE's map editor

FIFE 2008.1 has been released! The flexible, isometric 2d game engine has seen many changes: It is now licensed under the LGPL (GPL before), dependencies have been removed (no more tinyxml), it features a small example game and muuuuuuch moooooooore.

What *really* makes me interested in this release, is the inclusion of a map editor! I unfortunately haven't been able to compile FIFE (apparently due to an error in the unstable Debian sid distribution), so as soon as I install Arch Linux, I'll be bombarding you with mapping videos again!

FIFE Is no Fallout Emulator btw!

Nice render for OpenAnno

Speaking of FIFE: OpenAnno 2008.0 was completed (the game uses FIFE as an engine.) There have been some art and code and documentation additions. And new teammates also! :) OpenAnno will be represented at a german indy game dev meeting that I'll be visiting this weekend.

This just in: Simutrans 100.0 (r1867) has been released! Last time I checked it, the game was a Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone with pretty graphics and a deadly/unfair AI.

Read more »

Adventures, art, design...

New art for Adonthell

There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash, an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".)

Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks

Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions, the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo.

Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games situation. Compared to RTS or FPS, the situation is: "there aren't any." At least not of the point-and-click kind of type. Steve says the reason is that making adventure games isn't fun - since the story/surprise/suspension of your work won't work on you.

There is however the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine, an apparently simple-to use visual interactive fiction engine. It sure is and all and the engine's logo is the obligatory girl entangled by a tentacle monster python snake, but I'd rather prefer a decent point-and-click engine and community. I simply am a sucker for more interactivity and less text and more animations and less relationship novels and more (audible) speech and less *blush* in adventure games. It's great to see that the open source gamedev community appears to be useful for lots of prepubescent girls though!

Back on the adventure games issue: Tranberry proposed, that instead of creating games, game developers should create game frameworks for non-developers. O_o Of course it makes sense from the perspective, that it's no fun to know the story of the game for the game programmer, but on the other hand someone will have to know the whole story and won't be able to play the game as a player, this way or another. I think he's correct though that the role of the game designer should be separated from the role of the programmer for great justice better game quality. Excluding some naturals I guess.

BTW: Tranberry is the guy, who created the friggin-awesome looking current style for the JCRPG blog (see old style for comparison.)

Ulroth Axe, one of the kick-ass awesome models from OpenFrag

Again back to the game design issue: Creating the story and assembling the game's code and media should be done in a specific order. I am the fan of the "functionality-first, story-second"-method. OpenFrag's dev team is walking such a way at the moment, as I was told on #openfrag yesterday. In the beginning of the project, there were discussions about the story, but it became too complicated and now they concentrate on getting the orcs and swords and the slaughtering and bloodsheds to work and will worry about story later! Awesome!

Metropolis game menu

PS: Something seems to be happening regarding Micropolis' port to *nix systems... But I'm not sure what. I can start the game menu, but fail to actually play it. See screen.

Where are my buildings?

PPS: Anonymous just told me to deactivate NumLock, which helped :) But I am unable to see anything besides the map. O_o

PPPS: Gah, all the info is in the comments, if you want it. ^^

Read more »

Developing Games Takes Time

Zero Projekt

FIFE is starting to come of age. Although their tech-demo collaboration ended after a dispute between the two parties, Zero Project have continued their efforts and have settled on FIFE for their game project which has so far been two years in the making. To celebrate their second birthday they've put up an array of WIP screenshots. FIFE got a nice new layout for it's wiki too.

The Castle 0.8.1 has been released. "The Castle is a first-person shooter game in a dark fantasy setting. Your main weapon is a sword, so the fight is mostly short-range. Three main levels are included, packed with creatures, items, and sounds. The game engine is based on VRML, OpenGL, OpenAL, and all shadows are done by the shadow volumes approach." Interesting but not quite there yet.

Remember the classic game Theme Park (it started off the whole dang 'Theme X' genre)? Followed by the Rollercoaster Tycoon series (1-3)? Well these guys do and they are aiming to recreate, in open source glory, the ultimate theme park game. Theme Park Builder 3D just got it's inaugural source release.

Speaking of projects to create 'the ultimate of their genre', Transport Empire has come back to life. Started by members of the Transport Tycoon community, it had languished for years in the depths of design documents and decision making. Well last year somebody decided enough was enough, grabbed the bull by the horns and started coding - basically throwing the overbearing bureaucracy out of the window. Code is available from SVN and can now be compiled on Linux (for the brave only at the moment). It'll be interesting to see where that one goes in 2008.

Last but not least, one of my favourite projects GemRB released a new version, 0.3.0 and now you can [mostly] play through a bunch of Infinity Engine games (i.e. the Baldur's Gate series). Hopefully somebody will start creating a Free game that uses GemRB. :-)

On to a freeware game, The Silver Lining (a massive fan effort to make a top quality freeware game based on the King's Quest series) have a journal update where they show how they build up the 3D scenes used in the game. It's both pretty and interesting and shows just how much effort is involved for just a single aspect of the game. It's a Windows only game but I guess that's becoming less of a problem these days.

Read more »

D2X-XL free media project

FIFE, the Fallout-like engine project, have made their first release of 2008, and put up a video of the tech demo that comes with the engine. Lots of new features, lots of progress, hopefully we'll see some exciting FIFE powered games coming along this year!

D2X-XL is an spanky implementation of the engine for Descent 1/2, both very popular commercial games in their time. It adds lots of improvements, but the games themselves are proprietary and look a bit dated. So the D2X-XL guys are looking for people to contribute to a free D2X-XL media project. It's a good opportunity to create an awesome free game because the ships and designs from the Descent genre of games doesn't tend to be very complex, meaning it is easy to tackle on or two models without having to animate and skeletalize and add moles and skin pores and all the other daftness that seems to accompany character modelling lately. Back on topic, and they have some ships and textures and a few levels already, and of course the game engine is rocking and far exceeds the original Descent engines. There's massive potential there. I wonder if they should go and look at other space game projects like Vega Strike to see if there's any suitable models/textures they can borrow...

OpenFrag Orc

OpenFrag is a project to create a commercial grade FPS. They also are champions of the OpenCDS project, which is an open source Steam clone; content distribution software. Looks interesting although a long way to go still for OpenFrag if the screenshots are anything to go by.

Another effort to create commercial grade material is Radakan, this time in the form of a single player 3D RPG. Again, it has a long way to go. Actually I mentioned this before but there's no harm occasionally repeating these things. (My oh my, wasn't that linked post lyrical!)

I need a bath. It's been at least a week and even the FG hounds are starting to turn their noses up at me.

Read more »

Mega Games Bumper Post

Well, I was fighting with myself not to post twice in a single day, but I have so much good stuff to post and the last post was simply a rant so it's OK!

Topically, Extreme Tux Racer 0.4 has been released, bringing better graphics, a cleaner slicker ui, all new courses and more! You can find download information on the site. No new screenshots on the site yet though. I can't believe I've not seen this game mentioned anywhere else. (Who maintains the tome these days?! It doesn't even have an ETR entry!!!)

ETCE

XreaL

ETCE (full name yet to be decided) is an already-underway project to create a successor to the popular (and proprietary) game Enemy Territory: Castle Wolfenstein. They have [wisely] chosen Sauerbraten as the base for the game. They have a forum, development screenshots, and buckets of enthusiasm. Could the gameplay of one of the most popular online FPS games of all time soon be found in a Free Software game? Let's hope so!

Paintown is an awesome old school 2D beat-em-up game and version 3.0 brings some really neat features - new characters, network play, AI assisted play, and enemies explode into body parts. I'm going to definitely check this one out.

FIFE, the 2D adventure RPG engine, continues good progress. Nothing I can really single out but if you're into your development blogs and what goes on inbetween releases then worth a read.

Last but definitely not least, XreaL is an amazing project modernising the Quake 3 engine to bring it in line with Doom 3 or better. On top of that they are trying to make a game and (like most projects) are looking for artists. The visual quality is stunning. Not much more to say.

Already announced on the game tome but worth a mention:

• MTP Target 1.5.15, a 3D distance jumping game, the latest release featuring teams, time records, new levels, and works on win/lin/mac.


• Top10 0.4, a 3D kart racing game, this release includes new tracks and a track editor.


• Really Rather Good Battles In Space 1.04, a nice looking 2D RTS game with fleets of spaceships. I played this the other day - good fun and well presented game.

Now, that's real open source game information. All these games are open source and work on Lin/Win and (mostly) Mac. Cheap bloody games lists... *grumble grumble*

Read more »

Common Media Project and loads more

The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre - the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists - that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge, JCRPG, Xarvh, 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there.

Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIFEngine as a platform. More on this tomorrow.

The guys attempting to revive the Tux Racer / Planet Penguin Racer project under the new moniker Extreme Tux Racer are, despite not meeting their own scheduled expectations, keeping at it. They have a spiffy new logo!

Well, well, what have we here... the inaugral release of Silver Tree, brainchild of Battle for Wesnoth creator Dave White. Given the "resources" he has at his disposal - some of the core Wesnoth developers and artists are also set to contribute to Silver Tree - this really has to be a project to watch. Still, it's early days for this 3D RPG and it's hybrid real-time and turn-based gameplay. I couldn't get it to compile (admittedly not trying to hard) so I'll wait a bit.

I wonder if Silver Tree signals the "end" of Wesnoth development - in that it has gotten as far as it can really get as a game, besides bugfixes, new campaigns etc - as the core team are essentially moving on.

I see Auteria on the game tome. Not Free but freeware, YA3DMMORPG. (Yet Another...) 'Nuff said. (The name makes me think 'autism'... nothing to do with the quality of the game, just the the name.)

An up-to-date Linux port of Egoboo Resurrection is almost a reality. It is buildable although there's a few reported issues. It looks like a public SVN is going to be made available, good news for the project, so helping out with development should be easier. The lead developer Zefz has been working hard on it in an unintentionally private manner.

Read more »