Ardorcraft AI

TeamTeapotCraft

Ardorcraft is now an API for Ardor3D.

Fortunately, they follow the philosophy of having biiig screenshots on the project's main page.

Unfortunately, as a non-Java-savy person I don't know how to quickly test it.

Fortunately, a video of its impressive AI/NPCs is available:

ArdorCraft - First NPC tests

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Tales of Maj'Eyal and T-Engine4

My greatest desire worst nightmare* is being answered realised! Long have I desired a graphical roguelike that was less savage than IVAN, and a nicer play than the standard 'land in random dungeon, and head off' fare that comes with the likes of Vulture's Eye and Lambda Rogue (trailer) - both good games but just missing something for me.

* These things can swallow days and weeks of a man's life!

The first thing to notice is that TOME4 is gorgeous. It has lavishly detailed sprites and stunning particle effects. Movement is smooth, and the UI is shaping up nicely.

T.O.M.E. is not a new game series and is one of the better roguelikes. It looks like they are merging the depth of a traditional roguelike with the atmosphere of modern graphics in TE4/TOME4 and we are in for a treat if the latest betas are anything to go by.

The last release, TOME4 1.0.0 beta28, was on the 4th of June. It is already a fairly polished experience, with a nice tutorial mode (Charlie approves of tutorials!), good music, and plenty of the aforementioned graphical panache. There are still a few ascii-style sprites but it is still beta, so that's to be expected. (Unless I am wrong and it will be a gorgeous graphics and ascii mix, which would just be a bit odd.)

*waits with baited breath for future releases*

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FOSS game engines put to great use

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!):

Annex gameplay teaser

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:

ZEQ2ite gameplay teaser

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 ;)

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Nongame: Killer

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. :)

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Strategic Initiative

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.

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Naev 0.5 released!

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 Linux, Gentoo, 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.)

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BlendSwap Hacked

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. :)

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