Progress on Octaforge

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge. It is basically a fork of Tesseract, which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine.

The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua.

Read about their progress on the latest beta here, which also includes this nice video showcasing the new player model and an test map:

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Zelda can now be free as in freedom

Not only from the clutches of Ganondorf, but also from the dominion of proprietary software. All thanks to the magnificent Solarus Engine, a GPLed, SDL-based, 2D action RPG engine. This amazing project aims to provide a stable and easily customizable platform for users to create their own Zelda-like games, and so far, I must say, I am darn impressed by what I've seen. The engine already has two incredible launching titles, named The Legend of Zelda: Mystery of Solarus DX, and a parody of the former, Mystery of Solarus XD. Both are true love letters to the classic SNES RPG, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and amazing and enjoyable games on their own.

Mystery of Solarus DX

But hark, the mere words of a mortal make no justice to the grandiosity of this undertaking. Sheathe thy sword, get thy green cap and ready yourself to adventure! You can start by marching straight to the Solarus download section, or, if your intentions are more creative, you can check the various sources here, and the quest editor here.

Code License: GPLv3
Mystery of Solarus DX Artwork License: Mixed  (original Solarus assets under CC-BY-SA, but the game also uses spritework taken directly the A Link to the Past rom)

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Linux Game Awards voting open now!

Quietly in the background a group of open-source and Linux enthusiast websites (full disclosure: including FreeGamer ;) ) has developed a new platform for promoting open-source games: http://www.linuxgameawards.org/

One of its regular features will be a monthly award and a related promotion drive for the winner on all affiliated sites.

As a start, our community came up with the first 10 nominees for the January 2014 award and you can now vote for your favorite game of those here.

P.S.: One of the nominated projects, SuperTuxKart, had a new release today also. Don't forget to check it out and vote for them if you like it.

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Holiday Racer 2.2 released (aka Stunt Rally)

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now:

More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here, and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log.

Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

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Lips of Suna 0.8.0 released

And another great new release :)

Our favorite work in progress & not quite serious anime RPG Lips of Suna bumps its release number to 0.8 (change-log).

I know what you are thinking...

Most notable changes:

• New player model and animations contributed by gruntunbur.
• Lots of sound effects contributed by qubodup.
• More powerful animation blending.
• Performance improvements.
• Better eye, face and hair color customization.
• Fixed the AI not being able to use many kind of weapons correctly.
• Procedural map area placement and planning system.
• Procedural dungeon generation with corridors, rooms, treasures and monsters.
• Balanced the movement speed and physics behavior of player characters.
• Terrain chunks close to the player character load much faster.

Comment away below or in our forums.

Addition (2013-11-21): Now there are also windows binaries available.

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MegaGlest 3.9.0 released

Since I am having internet troubles as of late, I'll keep it short and hope it will actually come through:

Megaglest 3.9.0 was released today, see changelog:

v3.9.0
- we hopefully now really solved the last out of sync problems for cross platform games.
- animated tileset object support. ( like trees moving in the wind )
- new tileset texturing possibilities
- new tilesets birchforest, desert4 and updated mediterran using animated objects and new texture system
- greatly improved textures and animations for the roman faction
- new maps
- better network game performance / management to handle slower clients.
- easier ability to download game content from host and masterserver( if available there ).
- new arranged options menu with several sub menus
- menu gui improvements
- attack hotkey toggles through all attack types
- single player games can be sped up incrementally in steps.
- color picking is greatly improved and the default selection mode now for better compatibility
- greater ability to translate game content into your native language. (including techtrees)
- Added Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnamese (and others).
- screenshots for savegames without annoying menu in screenshot.
- addition of google-breakpad to better track down bugs.
- many new lua functions for scenario modders.
- cell coordinates are shown in the mapeditor
- tilesets can set default air unit heights
- added ability for stand alone mod's to customize more of the engine like about screen.
- performance improvements.
- and as always many bugs were fixed
- improved textures for tech faction

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New releases from the Worldforge project.

Yesterday saw the release of a new version of the client-side software "Ember" for the Worldforge project (an open-source MMO framework).

The focus of this version was to improve the world-editing features, and if not yet included, the GoSC 2013 improvements (for example an updated terrain renderer) should arrive in Ember soon too.

Speaking of the GoSC 2013: Another project benefiting from it under the umbrella of Worldforge was Ryzom Core, the open-sourced MMORPG engine behind the (older) commercial Ryzom MMORPG.

It seems like their OpenGL3.0 renderer is making good progress (see some videos here), and they seem to have finally decided to tackle the lack of proper Blender tools by hiring someone to do it (see paid job advertisement on Blender Artists). As it is an open-source project this seems to have been initiated by one of the developers only, so maybe we can get some people to pledge some extra funds to add to the bounty he is offering?

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Quick reminder: Free The Monsters open game art crowd-funding

We talked about it before here, but now there is only about 2 days left and even though all funds go to the team regardless of if the goal is reached, they are still a long way off what then would need to create a nice set of openly licensed fantasy monsters.

So please head over to their indiegogo fund-raiser page: "Free the Monsters" and donate.

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DevCorner: jMonkeyEngine SDK 3.0 (stealth) release

The maybe most user friendly and complete FOSS game engine jMonkey Engine 3, has recently released the final version 3.0 of their very nice SDK.

Here is a list of the full changes:

Engine
- LWJGL base now works on MacOSX 10.7+ incl. Applets
- Hardware Skinning
- Shader Nodes
- Better Character (beta)
- New LOD Generator!
- TangentBinormalGenerator was refactored
- Better physics debug view
SDK
- Now bundles a compatible version of the JDK
- Now bundles a version of Blender for conversion and more
- Shader Node Editor (!)
- Code completion for assets
- Texture Atlas creation and packed texture handling
- External editor mesh updates for j3o files
- Seamless 3DS and Collada import through blender
- Improvements to model import tool, allows to locate and import textures
- Attach custom AppStates to the SDK editor scene
- New help and error log system, look for the monkey in the bottom right!
- Improved Font Importer
- Improved support for using other IDEs for code
- Improved obfuscation support for protecting your applications code

Besides general advanced of this Java based game engine, some changes of the list of new features are especially interesting! I think that for example their graphical editor of GLSL shaders is something that could benefit even projects not using jMonkey3 itself, and it is definitely something that was lacking as a FOSS game-dev tool (the half-heartily implementation for something like this in Blender has yet to reach the level of real usability).

Check out the link above to learn more about this shader node editor!

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Frogatto & Friends looking to be "greenlit" on Steam

We have mentioned in the past a few times that it is a common misconception that FOSS games need to be also "freeware", and in fact the opposite can be quite beneficial to the overall development of a game or the engine it is build on.

The 2D jump & run  Frogatto & Friends has been for sale on mobile platforms for a while now, and its really high quality game-play and graphics are definitely a notch above most other open-source games:



All of it is possible through the use of their awesome open-source engine Anura.

Now they are looking to sell their game also on desktop computers through the very popular Steam digital distribution platform. You can vote for inclusion here.

As far as I am aware this is the first open-source game that actually aims to be sold through this channel, but recently another one, Warsow, was actually approved for inclusion as a freeware title.

As a launch of their "greenlight" campaign, the creators of Frogatto & Friends have started a Q&A session on reddit, where you can learn more about them and their awesome game(s).

Unrelated to that: please also check out our own "sub-reddit" about open-source gaming :)

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Breaking news: The Dark Mod 2.0 stand alone version out now!

I guess quite a few people were waiting for this to finally happen :)

Have a look at the release announcement here and the full change-log here.

They also did a nice introduction video a few months ago:



Haven't got the chance to try it myself yet, but this is high on my list of open-source games to play!

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Blender Game Making Challenge starts on the 20th of this month

While not necessary only for FOSS games, all will be done with the Blender3D included game engine (BGE). Check out their website here and/watch the video below:



The overall theme will be announce on the 20th when the contest starts.

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Valyria Tear 0.6.0 released

I have to admit that we are a bit slow on reporting the news on FOSS gaming projects with we actually host ourselves via the freegamedev.net forums. Valyria Tear is sadly no exception, and their new 0.6.0 release has been out a few days already. Sorry to all whom this may concern.

For those not in the loop, Valyria Tear is based on the engine of Hero of Allacrost and aims to be an all FOSS jRPG. To give you a better idea of the game-play, here is a (slightly older) cool video of it done by some Linux enthusiasts:



(Thanks also to Rootgamer who reminded me of this news).

If you like the new release, give them some praise on our forums!

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Fundraiser: Fantasy Creature under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

Free the Monsters! is a collaborative Indiegogo campaign to create and share five fantasy creature 3d models under CC-BY-SA 3.0

5 3d models and 10 works of concept art will be released if the goal of USD5000 is reached.

Perks include t-shirts and voting rights. Voting will be based on short creature descriptions. The top 10 will be turned into concept art and of those, the top 5 will be turned into 3d models.

Two additional creature concepts and models for each additional USD2000 will be produced.

Justin Nichol will be creating the concept art. You can find his past contributions to the free and open pool of game art on his OpenGameArt profile page.

Jonathan Williamson - partner at CG Cookie (aka Blender Cookie) - will be creating the 3d models.

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Stephen Cameron: Space Nerds in Space Interview and Crew Gameplay Video

A 15 minutes long video profile of Stephen Cameron was published on YouTube by Jack Younger - hacker (presumed) at TX/RX Labs.

Stephen Cameron Video Profile

The video includes an interview of Cameron's about his latest project Space Nerds in Space including inspiration and actual authentic gameplay video footage of the crew (highlights at 08:30).

Video thumbnails

Some of Word War Vi's history also is covered in the video (4:00).

Do I need to spell it out? Press that like button if you can! :)

Source: Announcement on the FreeGameDev forums

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Fundraising for GPL game Plee the Bear

This is a guest post by Julien Jorge, developer, artist and musician behind the open source indie games Plee the Bear and Andy's Super Great Park, here to present the fundraising campaign he launched for the former.

Some years ago, with the help of three of my friends and anonymous people on the web, I have created Plee the Bear, a great platformer in which you play an angry bear whose son has been kidnapped by god. Here is a guy hard to brave! You sure will jump in this amazing journey to find and rescue your son. Because you want to rescue him, don't you? Or to slap him? Maybe both….

The game was a spare time project for a long time, then we recently decided to create a real, full, complete, fun and original version out of the prototype. We have thus created our company, Stuffomatic, published a first game and now we are launching a fundraising campaign for Plee the Bear!

The prototypes of the game have always been released for Windows and Linux as free software, available under the terms of the GNU GPL and the CC by-sa licenses. The latest version contains three levels of the storyline and four mini-games; and has already generated very positive criticisms (e.g. on The Linux Game Tome). Players loved the fun, the graphics and the music; other indie developers were pleasantly surprised by the technical skills and the details of the game; and people in the free software movement appreciated the overall process and the quality of the resources, remarkable for a free game.

All these feedbacks motivated us to complete the game and to launch a fundraising campaign to help the development. The campaign is organized in order to implement the new contents of the game one after the other, each time with a new fundraiser. So, for the initial one, the feature you are welcome to support is a complete refresh of the existing work. You can see the details on the project's page on OpenFunding but let me show you how the game will look:

To be compared with the current release:

(The screen is larger in the new version, it's not just Plee who is smaller…) 

The animations will also be reworked. For example, here is a comparison of the changes in the animation of Plee walking. The old version is on the bright stripes, the new one is in the black stripes:

If you are a game developer, you may have already used some free resources from websites like OpenGameArt.org or Freesound.org. If you are a gamer, you may have played games using the resources of such websites. In both cases, you are certainly interested by our process consisting of releasing each part of the game under a free license. Actually, we have recently started to supply OpenGameArt.org with our assets.

So, if you like our project:

• give us some money for the next development steps,
• give us feedback about the process to help us improving it,
• share this announcement with your neighbors.

This way, we will all go toward a fun and good game :)

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New Alien Arena, with included alpha-demo of in development commercial spin-off

Yes, it looks like the developers behind the long running idTech2 based AlienArena are going make a more slower paced & 'tactical' spin-off and try to sell it. As before the engine will stay open-source (GPLv2), but the assets for the spin-off will stop being free-as-in-beer.

Here is the official launch-trailer of the new update and the alpha demo:


Beside the new game-play mode, they have also finally updated the menu, and the new version of it is rather spiffy. You can see it in action and more of the regular game-play in this recently uploaded random YouTube vid (warning: goofy British accents and profanity). GamingOnLinux also recently had a small preview-article.

Last but not least (while we are on the topic of idTech2 based games), a small game-developer's advertisement of a new project currently unfolding in our forums. If you know your way around Quake(2) based engines and/or pixelish art, please join the effort ;)

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Flock 2013, OLCP Games, Gamification through Badges on Linux

There were some game development related events at Flock Fedora Contributor Conference, August 2013 in lovely Charleston, SC, US.

Trigger Rally Map Workshop 

So far my contributions to Fedora were merely a few wiki edits but my conference proposals were well-received.

Free Art Game Making presentation slide

I ended up speaking about making games using free art and leading a Trigger Rally level building workshop (video).

Fedora badges

At the conference, I learned about Fedora's badge program and that it is connected to Mozilla Open Badges.

Lemonade Stand (OLPC) Sugar "activity"

Another discovery: Lemonade Stand, which is an educational game developed by people from FOSS@RIT, who work on bringing Mozilla Open Badges to the OLPC.

Game development appears to be getting more and more of a foot in the door at free software conferences, so I encourage people working on open games to apply as speakers at conferences, talking about technical and social aspects of free, open source game development project leadership and contribution. (Not just at FOSS events, why not at general game dev events as well?)

If you have any relevant talks from recent events to point out, please do so in the comments!

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Alpha 14 and a crowd-funding campaign for 0 A.D.

Pretty interesting news from 0 A.D. today: They are having a Indigogo crowd-funding campaign.



Note that this is a flexible funding campaign, so even if they don't reach their goals all money donated will go to the project.

They also released a new Alpha version, codenamed Naukratis. Change-log would be too long to list here (which I consider a good thing ;) ), but here is a picture of some high-quality newly added building models:

New blacksmith buildings

So check out the new version and please consider donating to this top of the crop FOSS game project.

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Today: Glamour, or how to hide irony about gender stereotypes very well...

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour):

You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances.

Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt.

Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart.

At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot...

Source-code is available here for those that wonder...

*stalkes slowly away*

But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly:

Unvanquished Alpha 19

-BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound like a game for -BAM- real men!

Hmm BAM?

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WebGL dungeon crawler Moonshades now FOSS

More browser-based RPG goods for you today: the developer behind the game Moonshades recently indicated on the Opengameart.org forums that this neat old-school (ok not as old-school as Heroine Dusk) dungeon crawler is now fully open-source.

Have a look at the alpha game-play:


It seems the entire game (including the source-code) is released under the rather art focused Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by 3.0) license, but since that is pretty compatible even to the GPL, this shouldn't really matter at all.

Have fun playing!

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Browser based MMO: Ironbane

I wanted to write about this browser-based MMO game called Ironbane for a while, but never actually got around trying it (it's easy though, no need to register for the alpha currently, just hit play; but for me under Linux with Firefox 23 it just kept loading and loading... could have been my very slow connection though). Luckily the creator got into contact with us to remind me about it.

Here is an slightly older video of the tutorial level:


The code (GPLv3) can be accessed on Github, and there is a nice contributors guide. The author also confirmed that there are plans to release all the artworks under CC-by-SA soon, so it can be called a proper FOSS game.

But regardless of that, I feel they need to work on the huge pixel (ok actually texel) density spread, e.g. the strongly different size of individual pixels on the screen ;)

We also asked the creator about any longer plans to commercialize it and this is what he got to offer in that regard:

When we reach beta we would like to offer optional stuff like houses, special clothes and other things for donations (nothing that can give an unfair advantage). So in a way this can be classified as F2P, yes.

Which I guess sounds like a good idea to fund further development and hosting costs.

Anyways... unless you live in the same internet darkage like me, there is no reason not to give it a try!

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Assault Cube reloaded, version 2.5.8

I'm a bit hesitant to cover this game, as media licensing is a complete mess, but well some might enjoy playing it and the source-code is there ;)

Here is a longish game-play video of Assault Cube Reloaded:



You can follow the latest development and see the change-log here.

P.S.: Funny to see some of the Red Eclipse artwork and Xonotic sounds (I think) reused, but I wouldn't want to open the can of worms in regards to them being copy-left licensed...

Play Game: Zusoc

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Lips of Suna 0.7.0 released

After a long hibernation a new version of the 3D RPG Lips of Suna was released today!

Take that you, ermm brown something?

More screenshots here, and there are quite a few great new features:

• New terrain system.
• More responsive controls.
• Real single player mode.
• New spell and enchantment systems.
• Many graphical improvements.
• Added limited scope game modes.
• Improved script performance.
• Extended character modeling support.
• User interface improvements.
• Improved mod loading.
• Major code cleanup.
• Several less interesting changes.

Looks like the developers are back at it full-force, so give them some encuraging feedback over here!

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GSoC 2013 pushes SuperTuxKart forward!

If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.

Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character:



But their blog has many interesting technical details (and other screenshots + videos) to show off the new features.

So if you like to also contribute, or just want to praise the great work, have a look at their FreeGamer hosted forums :)

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Stunt Rally 2.1 released

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;)

Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now:

Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1

A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here.

All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

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Assorted news #1024

*hrmmpf*

• New FreeOrion 0.43 release.
• Unvanquished Alpha 18.
• Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake.
• Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again.
• OpenMW 0.25.0 released.
• New Ya3dag 1.42 release.
• Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0.

tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

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Much activity for Zero-K and some other news

Zero-K, the probably coolest fully FOSS offspring of the SpringRTS engine has seen at least two new releases since it last crossed my mind to check their page... a pity actually as the new features of version 1.1.7.0 (and prior) seem quite nice.
And for those not into the game (yet), there is now a channel with commented multi-player matches like this one:



Just a pity that the game-play doesn't really allow much zooming in to see the graphically really nice units ;)

In unrelated news:

• New release of Arx Libertatis (1.1.1)
• Tesseract is getting its own "base game" it seems
• There is a constant stream of new betas from Octaforge
• The Unvanquished summer tournament is under way, but matches so far have been a bit one-sided ;)
• Check out the new 3.8.0-beta1 version of MegaGlest

Hmm, there is probably much more... so please comment below :D

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