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!

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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)

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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!

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