Xonotic and idTech4 news

Hello and welcome to slow summer news time ;)

But at least the awesome guys over at Xonotic took their time and wrote up what exciting new additions are on their way to version 0.7 in their latest edition of what they call WoX-Blox #4.

There you can read up up exiting changes to the Railroad tycoon mod they are working on... watch this video... pure exitement:

Xonotic's railway simulator ;)

Ok I was kidding about the last part... that is actually one among many cool small additions they are working on to make Xonotic an even better game.
Not mentioned in the blog yet, are the cool modifications to the Overkill mod and the vehicles tZork is currently working on and which can be tested already on a few servers.

Staying with the FPS Topic, it seems like the development of the GPLed Doom3/idtech4 code is finally moving somewhere. However iodoom3 (besides that they got a nice looking website recently) is not the center of development as it was the case with ioquake3 it seems.
The Doom3World forums are buzzing with activity though, with open-source commercial developers looking into porting their upcoming games to idtech4, people working on code and openSDK enhancements and an awesome code review of the idtech4 engine to jump-start potential developers.

Besides that, the previously mentioned Doom3 modification The Dark Mod (additional info here), a Thief inspired steampunk-stealth game is finally making some progress toward the long promised stand-alone version (Progress Wiki here).

Here is also some recent commented game-play video:

The Dark Mod gameplay introduction

Some more (uncommented) gameplay can be seen also in this video. The next version will still require a few Doom3 assets however, so if you are skilled in texture making, mapping (with their DarkRadiant) or such, offer them some help to get rid of those last remaining dependencies. However AFAIK most of the new art is also non-FOSS  and only freeware (or at least I can find any info on the art license... please comment if you know better) :-/

Last but not least there also seems to be another awesome looking Doom3 mod, aiming to go standalone at some point: Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer's Key. No idea when and how, but I guess they are just waiting for a more stable idtech4 community version.