FOSS game engines put to great use

Người đăng: Admin on Thứ Năm, 9 tháng 6, 2011

Disclamer: Yes I am fully aware that the following two game do not have libre media, and that one of them will never have unless they get away from the copyrighted IP!

That said... the following two gems are really nice examples of what can be done with FOSS engines if some skilled artists work with them.. and they are free as in beer too :p

The first one has been mentioned before on FG, and is a Mod for the nice FOSS RTS Megaglest (Did we mention that one had a small new release too?). Annex: Conquer the World, doesn't seem to have it's one website yet (link goes to Moddb), but check out this awesome new video of that game (gives me a nice Starcraft vibe!):


Actually I don't know anything about the media license on this one, and it isn't released yet, but the closed development process makes me doubt we will have much luck in regards to the media (source must be GPL just as Glest), but hey... you never know!

The second one is as previously mentioned a bit tricky in regards to their media, but at least is is all publicly accessible in their SVN, and maybe you can ask if some parts of the media can be free-ed for other projects to use. Ok well which game am I talking about? Well ZEQ2lite ;)
Have a look at this video and I am sure you will recognize the copyrighted IP:


ZEQ2lite, has a longer history of different mods for Quake3, but this new version is based on a highly modified ioQuake3 version and is completely stand alone from Quake3. Not a big fan of the IP otherwise, but it looks nice and has cool effects :)

Oh and one quick last unrelated news... OpenWolf (a fork of Wolf:ET with Xreal renderer... long story) seems to be making some nice progress in updating this awesome (free as in beer but with FOSS code) multiplayer FPS classic, as you can follow here. And the original Xreal project seems to be somewhat alive too and a release is promised soon... looks like some healthy competition is going on there ;)
More about

Nongame: Killer

Người đăng: Admin

Killer

The Killer is a flash/as3-based nongame. Talking more about it might spoil it so if you're OK with that, there's a discussion going on at TigForums.

The source is "what you want" and hosted on github. Perhaps this could be ported to Haxe/Fixel.

The developer has an interesting "support me" implementation. Exclusive updates and postcards. :)
More about

Strategic Initiative

Người đăng: Admin on Thứ Tư, 8 tháng 6, 2011

Strategic Initiative

Strategic Initiative is "a semi real-time strategy game played over the Internet where the objective is to seize cities on islands". The technology used is Java. Have an alternative description:
Strategic Initiative is an online multiplayer military strategy game played over 10 days where the objective is for you and your ally to control the most cities on the map.
The code is available here under GPLv3.
More about

Naev 0.5 released!

Người đăng: Admin on Thứ Ba, 7 tháng 6, 2011

Naev 0.5


A new release of the 2D space trading and combat game Naev is out and available as binaries for Lin/Mac/Win here.
For those using Ubuntu (or other Debian-derived distributions), Naev is available from PlayDeb. Naev is also available in Arch LinuxGentoo, and from the openSUSE Games repository.
 Have a changelog:

List of changes since 0.4.2:
For Players

  • Larger universe
  • Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire and Pirate territories
  • All-new Sirius and Soromid territory
  • Big systems
  • More planets per system
  • Much larger planets, many new planet and station graphics
  • Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system
  • Overlay map for in-system navigation
  • Mouse interactivity
  • Planet, ship and jump point targeting
  • Contextual click actions (board, hail, land, etc.)
  • Optional mouse-controlled flying
  • Electronic warfare
  • Ships have cloaking and detection abilities
  • Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection
  • Turrets no longer track all ships equally
  • Time model changes
  • In-game time progresses in real-time
  • Dynamic time compression speeds up long journeys
  • On-map security rating abandoned in favour of faction presence indicators
  • System backgrounds (nebulae, stars and more!)
  • Fancier new GUI
  • Brand-new tutorial that is independent from the main game
  • Outfit slots now have sizes
  • Weapon sets allow easy configuration of different weapon combinations for each ship
  • Ship and weapon heat system
  • Weapons start with perfect accuracy, and become inaccurate as they overheat
  • Severe overheating causes rate of fire to drop
  • Damage absorption and penetration system
  • More diverse planetary inventories (see the tech system below)
  • Random bar NPCs
  • Sound system improvements
  • Smarter autonav behaviour
  • … and plenty more (new missions, ships, outfits, portraits, etc.)
More about

BlendSwap Hacked

Người đăng: Admin

Time to swap... passwords

Oh my. Two weeks ago Librivox. Now Blendswap. Read the story here. See their twitter for live updates.

Remember to use strong !P4$$w0rd5%_.

Hm, OpenGameArt appears to be down, so it can't be hacked right now at least. :)
More about

Battle for Wesnoth Architecture

Người đăng: Admin on Thứ Hai, 6 tháng 6, 2011

The popular open source game Battle for Wesnoth has been featured in the new free online book The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

We believe that the beauty of the Battle for Wesnoth as a program is how it made coding accessible to a wide variety of individuals. To achieve this aim, the project often made compromises that do not look elegant whatsoever in the code. It should be noted that many of the project's more talented programmers frown upon WML for its inefficient syntax. Yet this compromise enabled one of the project's greatest successes. Today Wesnoth can boast of hundreds of user-made campaigns and eras, created mostly by users with little or no programming experience.

Read the full section online for further insight into the design and design decisions of Battle for Wesnoth.

More about

bfxr = sfxr + flash + omg awesome

Người đăng: Admin on Thứ Tư, 1 tháng 6, 2011

bfxr

Sfxr is a simple retro sound machine. It has undergone some iterations and the latest software based on its principle is bfxr, which also has valuable management tools.

Their feature list:

  • 5 new waveforms : triangle, breaker, tan, whistle, and pink noise.
  • 3 new filters : compression, harmonics, and bitcrusher.
  • Ability to lock parameters during mutation/randomization.
  • Expanded pitch-jumping abilities - good for arpeggiation effects.
  • Visualisation
  • Mixer
  • Keeps your sounds and mixes in persistant lists.
  • Can reverse synths
  • Ability to link directly to sounds
Needs flash. Might be a problem. Can anybody with free flash implementations run this?
More about