Spaced Out - Vega Strike and Pioneer betas plus Multiplayer Simutrans and MotoGT

The recent blogging activity, spurred on by the growth in official Free Gamer blog authors, is a pleasure to see. When I started the blog back in 2006, I didn't think it'd ever be so popular, let alone last this long.

* Casual reference to remind readers that I am the original author and, should I ever be displeased, I will smite thee with banana flesh limbs.

^ Reference to IVAN; LIVAN or IVANX are better - see community site for variants.

Vega Strike Shaders

There's a new beta release for Vega Strike. Version 0.5.1 beta 1 (forum announcement) is a bigger point release than the 0.5.0->0.5.1 step implies. Improved planet shaders, lots of bug fixing, lots of general tidy up, video support (mainly for mods) and a lot more ships.

Coincidentally, one of the original Vega Strike authors is working on a project called OurBricks for online collaboration of 3D resources. Lots of the Vega Strike ships are already uploaded.

The ever impressive Pioneer Space Sim project, an Elite-inspired game, continues its activity with the release of Pioneer beta 9. Changelog includes rewritten combat AI, lots of HUD work, some even nicer planet terrain, trade ships, and more.

Also there's big news for Simutrans fans. There was a lull in releases after Simutrans 102.2.2 as the team worked on introducing multiplayer. After nearly a year, version 110.0.1 (and 110.0.0 before it) has arrived with the usual plethora of fixes and well as full multiplayer support.

Our final exciting release is for the fourth beta for MotoGT. Changes include new tracks, effects, joystick support, full championship mode, and more. A video:

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Oh my God-it's full of stars!: Free and Open Source procedural space sim round up (a la Infinity or Elite)

"The thing's hollow..it goes on forever..-and--Oh my God--it's full of stars!"

Bowman's memorable utterance in 2001 A Space Odyssey encapsulates perfectly the way the space and its' exploration resonates with the imagination and nothing encapsulates the experience of stepping out and living amongst the stars as well as David Braben's immense procedural opus, the Frontier Elite/Elite series of games.

The Elite and Frontier Elite series left a long shadow, inspiring academic work in procedural generation (see vterrain.org) but towering over countless emulation attempts, for both the depicted universe (space and surfaces of all objects on a scale of light years, to meters) procedural gameplay (location/assets/mission/incidental event combination, with a full range of mission types), interaction (action based reputation, politics etc.). Although a lot of academic work was done, like with a lot of areas of game development, not much in the way of actual realisation was ever done (a genre of space sims emulated a fraction of the scope of the game, often using large FPS style rooms with space/planet wall paper). There were a few foss/indie projects (Oolite, FFEd3d, Ad astra, Evochron series) that attempted to follow.

Recently with the advent of very powerful hardware ( just begging for realistic procedural simulation) the I-Novae engines indie creator decided to implement a procedural universe, with stunning results (see here and here for motivation), and the proof of concept has further stirred opensource attempts. I-Novae people are mainly focussed on an MMO, which largely gets around interaction/social simulation in a by replacing it with standard MMO player-player interaction mechanics.

Which leaves a large empty space for commercial, indie, or most importantly FOSS singleplayer games, as well as, and much more interestingly, a chance for FOSS to produce the standout significant modern game in a genre first.

The procedural space sim bug has resulted in quite a few FOSS projects, often the result of a single founder's inspiration, occurring independently and in isolation, and subsequently attracting some attention from the community:


Pioneer:

(Download, more recent v7.5/Source/Forum/Screenshots)
Most developed procedural planets (along with Spaceway). New sim, released online by Tomm Morton (creator of glFrontier), and associates, and whose development has avalanched a bit. OpenGL 2.0, lua/c++, all bodies spin/orbit around each other, scriptable procedural models, economy/life/missions implemented but require fleshing out, procedural cities/ground vehicles etc. mean FPS/RPG/air/ground stories/gameplay of sci-fi tv franchises like Star Wars/Star Trek/Doctor Who/BSG/Babylon 5 (and game worlds from books) etc. can be potentially recreated therefore also of interest to franchise modders.

There is a weight/substance to planets when viewed from a distance which is not even present in Infinity (as far as youtube vids show). Probably a combination of not looking plastic-y due to phong-like lighting model/strong specularity and planets having a realistic radius allowing you to be reasonably distant and still see the planet stretch away despite turning a lot.

Note: all screenshots are from earlier versions of Pioneer, and the graphics have improved even more since then.


Spaceway:


(Download/Screenshots) Virtually identical specs to pioneer, has procedural spaceships half implemented, no life/cities yet. Created by FOSS Orbiter's oglaclient author Artlav and shares some code with it. Intended to be a procedural replacement for orbiter he is looking at a game as well. Sourceforge says GPL license. Code not released yet as apparently he is waiting until it is cleaned. Good atmospheric scattering. Many galaxies simulated.

Titaniumart's Planetary space:


(Ogre thread/Screenshots) More speculative, long presence in Ogre forums, where they have mentioned it will be opensource, and a procedural 'snap-in' will be released, potentially allowing FPS/RPG devs to incorporate procedural terrain easily. Due for a tech demo soon.

Vegastrike:


(Download/Source/Forum/Screenshots) Have recently started looking into procedural planets. Mostly included here for completeness.Features a large procedurally generation universe, with economy/empires/wars simulated. Multiplayer/modding community. Released version is years behind, and graphically of a previous era, looking for a coder to port to Ogre.


Project Simerge:


(Code) Windows/Linux support. Inactive, but code may be of some use (Sourceforge shows 5 week old commits, thanks Charlieg). A partly completed procedural sim, the developer released code under GPL3 and is considering a seperate closed source game. Working prototype.Building interior support.

FOSS tech demos/source:

Sponeil.net: Windows/Linux.
Various tech demos, including planet/volumetric cloud generation.

Galaxy Engine: (Download/Source/Ogre thread) Procedural planet tech demo.

OgrePlanet: (Source) Another recently started attempt..

Foss clones of Elite series exist (not modern, as they are the same game essentially, but..) e.g. Oolite: Elite remake as for a long time gameplay just was not available elsewhere. Planets etc. nowhere near upto pioneer/spaceway standards.

---

It strikes me that development of so much software so identical in spirit, scope and vision, is precisely the type of duplication an open and social philosophy like FOSS seeks to prevent. It should be possible for projects to list their particular requirements to see if a framework for a space sim engine cannot be created that allows overlapping areas to be developed in a way that avoids duplication (especially considering the drought of programmers in FOSS space sim communities like Vegastrike, Freespace open etc.).

If there is software, stats, or facts that would be relevant please feel free to note in comments.

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Freedom is Fun

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period.

Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts.

NYC in Sauer

I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance.

There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super.

Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts.

UFO:AI Starchaser

I really liked this UFO:AI "Starchaser" interceptor (right). I'm looking forward to 2.3 which should be another impressive release for the project.

Vega Strike has had a lot of speech packs contributed in the last few weeks. To preview them you'll have to head on over to the VS forums (sorry, no direct links). I'm sure this will make the next release of the game more atmospheric. Whilst core development seems a little cool at the moment, the community contributions are as active as ever and I predict an explosive release sometime in 2009 that makes people go, "Wow, that's what open source can do." I also mined this nugget from the Ogre forums when procrastinating the other day (hellcatv is a lead VS dev, VS is prospectively getting ported to OGRE, and that thread is about a feature that looks particularly useful for transitions between space and planetscapes). Yes, that is rumour-mongering, and I'm proud of it!

Scourge is getting nicer lighting, there's a poor quality video on vimeo of it in its infancy (the effects have since improved). There was a bump with the 0.21 release, which got pulled and replaced by 0.21.1, but now that's sorted out development momentum has returned and already 0.22 looks promising.

I don't monitor nearly as many projects as I used to. Are there any other impressive screenshots you guys have seen lately? Any other projects looking promising for nice 2009 releases?

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The Morning After The Night Before

Something important happened last night. Something transformational. Qubodup designed a new forum logo.

:-)

For those that don't follow the planet, which is titled "news" in the link bars ^^, there have been some great game updates lately.

Vega Strike ship: MK32

This update on Vega Strike is a great read with some screenshots of the many gorgeous new models that have gone into the game. They also have a new gallery system since the old one was fairy broken after the Sourceforge web hosting service updates.

Scourge gets plenty of planet-time these days with a (now 7 week strong) weekly update. Over the last few months there's been an AI overhaul, lots of optimization and leak fixing, an item model/artwork overhaul, and lots of miscellaneous small improvements to the game. Short of a nice animation system and character model pipeline (most of the character models are assorted free[ware] md3 models) the game is looking very good indeed. Once better support for animated models (probably using assimp and obj/md5) is tackled, Scourge will be a very strong project indeed and hopefully a few adventure RPG game projects will appear, using Scourge as their base/engine.

Hedgewars 0.9.7 is out. The video is so reminiscent of classic Worms gameplay, it's uncanny. If you swapped the hedgehogs for worms, I wouldn't have known the difference. It looks great and has much stronger multiplayer support in the new version. The artillery clone scene is probably one of the strongest open source game genres with strong competition between Hedgewars, Wormux, Scorched3D and (the more action oriented) Teeworlds, among others.

CGMadness

I was impressed by CGMadness, which has smooth graphics and potentially good gameplay. It like Trackballs but has a nicer feel which is difficult to really quantify. Intriguingly there is CGPortals which promises to take CGMadness and add portals to it - that should be an interesting combination although I didn't try out the early versions.

The number of projects that extend Sauerbraten seems to be growing all the time. From the cubedev blog (another listed on the planet) I came across the Plexus project which looks to take Sauer and turn it into a more flexible game system. They've already implemented a much nicer mouse handling system and the ability to import Dwarf Fortress maps, and more. "Socket level control of Sauerbraten" sounds especially useful, giving developers the freedom to control Sauerbraten from their programming language of choice.

The planet and the forum are great for the FOSS gaming scene as it means that the community can communicate much better with the world around it. It's bad for this blog though because I don't feel the need to post much, but that's good for me since posting used to take up way too much time. These days it's much easier to post too.

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Eying Eisenstern And Eye Candy

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing!

Eisenstern

Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or, if you love acronym overload, a FOSS SP FPS RPG. Or FSFR if you love acronym acronyms. I'm digressing again... it's a bad habit!

The Apricot Project is coming to the final stages of it's effort, and thus the game Yo Frankie! nears it's official release. It looks really, really good. The graphics are fantastic and the gameplay looks fun too. Here's the video:

Blender 2.48 just got released, and it includes many improvements contributed by the Apricot Project during it's development of Yo Frankie!. (That '!' messes with my grammar, but I'll resist the temptation to digress.) It looks like a real boost to the Blender Game Engine as a platform for creating games:

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

Warzone2100 2.1-beta5 came out at the end of September, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere. Well \o/ it just got mentioned here! Erm, but, back on topic, WZ 2.1 is approaching "super stableness" which is always a good thing. Check it out if you love your 3D future war RTS games and open source. :-)

And to round off, lately there have been some awesome contributions to Vega Strike. There's some real eye candy to be had here. This alien space base or this massive space ship are two intimidatingly beautiful examples. There's plenty more to be found. (Disclaimer: I may have posted some of this before, I'm a big fan of the project.)

Spread the word! • digg • fsdaily

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Vega Strike 0.5.0

After over 3 years of development since the last stable release, many major new features and contributions, and lots of patience, Vega Strike 0.5.0 has finally been released.

There's so much potential in this release. Shader support, movie support, so many active contributors, and a more settled development timeline that should see more regular releases from now onwards. Despite the length of time since the previous release (0.4.3) the project rarely was not in active development. That means that 0.5.0 is a huge update and Vega Strike is poised to return to the high esteem in which it was once held as a FOSS project.

For screenshots check out the gallery but none were recent enough for me to include them here.

Vega Strike is a really cool project and this stable release will hopefully further galvanise the development. If things continue, I have no doubts VS will turn out to be a truly stunning FOSS game. It's pretty damn good already!

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Bedtime

Tired today. Sorry for lack of details.

Daimonin (2D MMORPG) got a new website. Spiffy.

Warsow 0.42. It's a fast multiplayer FPS.

Ace video on Nexuiz, looks fancy FPS.

There's an RC out for VDrift release 2008-02-23, the "next gen" car game. (I don't quite get the notion of an RC for dated releases.

Vega Strike needs nvidia users to test before release due to an unknown number of cards affected by a buggy driver (boo for closed source).

I'm... Zzzzzz...

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The Best Way To Play

Here's a good tip on how to get extra performance in Linux. It's on the Ubuntu forums but is essentially an X.org trick.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.4rc1 (aka 1.3.18) is out - good preview of what is close to becoming the next stable release.

FreeOrion 0.3.8 is out. Another steady iteration that lays the groundwork for easier AI development.

NERO 2.0 released. This is currently freeware however the next version will be open source (2.0 uses Torque) which will make it a very interesting Free Software project indeed. "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives, or NERO for short, is a unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!"

Project TTNA is a project, "to create a free (as in open source), crossplatform 3d game." What a delightfully simple goal. They are writing their own game engine, which seems a little superfluous given the myriad of Freely available game engines. Anyway, there's a long way to go with TTNA but the goal was so endearing, I just had to mention it.

Open Source representatives in mod-of-the-year awards 2007 on MODDB. It's one of those annoying pages that tries to make you watch a video you probably don't want to watch. Press 'next' (beneath the video) a couple of times to get to the results. Tremulous (#5), World of Padman (#4), and Warsow (#4) are the open source representatives while BSG: Beyond the Red Line (#1) is a standalone freeware game that uses the freespace2 source code project. Quite a domination and vindication that open source engines make a big difference to mods that would otherwise struggle to survive the changing times.

Two popular open source games that have gone a while without a release are close to release - Vega Strike 0.5.0 and Scourge 0.20 are imminent.

A quick thanks to everybody who submitted information for todays post, in comments and emails and the forum. This is probably the first time that most of the information was provided by others and I'm just putting it in a post. Perhaps one day Free Gamer can be evolved to be more community-driven but for now it's good to have people feed information because it means I can post even if I don't have much time to look things up.

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Game Announcements Now Onine

There is now a Game Announcements section on the forum. Anonymous posting is allowed (but moderated) and any form of FOSS game news is welcome. The idea being is that if you want to publicize a game in any way, post the update there. New versions, new demos, new tournaments, new news, whatever. It is also fully RSSed so, well, if you have a website, include it. Let's get lots of Free Software gaming updates to the world so everybody can know about it.

You may notice a 'Chat' irc link above - #freegamer on irc.freenode.net - another community experiment. IRC has always been a popular medium for collaboration so we'll see if that works for Free Gamer too. ;-)

Good news for *nix users (Linux, BSD etc) who have wanted, but been unable, to play SoulFu - somebody has posted a modified download of SoulFu (~1.5.1) which should compile and run. YMMV. It didn't work for me.

Vega Strike 0.5 finally hits beta. Anybody who has read this blog before should know all about VS and how awesome this version is looking. Love space games? Go help test it.

Qudobup aka Uber-Q has been collecting links of new open source games he has come across in the FG forums. It's in the News Flash bit on Game Announcements (linked above). More tomorrow... hopefully! :-)

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Return of the Jedi Gamer

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)

Blood Frontier

Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.

I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.

Vega Wars

Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.

Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.

There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.

Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.

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Not Dead

Nope, I'm not dead, just caught up in doing real work so time has been at a premium lately.

Eat the Whistle

Also not dead is arcade football game Eat the Whistle. They have migrated to SVN as they build up to a new release. 'They' could mean just 'he' or just 'her' as I'm not quite sure how many people are working on EtW but the good news is it is being worked on. It's a fun game to play but suffered from being very buggy so hopefully this release will bring it a new lease of stable life.

What has been dead has been my Freshmeat inbox - no notable game releases for a while apart from Widelands, Bub Brothers, ja2-stracciatella, Wormux, and Xarvh. And those are just the ones on the Game Tome. Still, like I say, Freshmeat has been quiet. ;-)

Xarvh is not linked because it has been renamed to Everborn. It's a turn-based multiplayer fantasy strategy game, with real-time battles, born as a clone of Simtex's Master of Magic. In case you didn't know.

Star Wars Warlords

The other news centres around Vega Strike being close to release with massive SVN updates making it much faster to load/play. Also the Star Wars mod for VS, imaginatively named Vega Wars, had some very good news in that it has access to a slew of Star Wars models from the Star Wars Warlords project (a mod for Homeworld 2) that simply need converting to a format VS supports - which means a playable release of that project before the end of the year is quite realistic possibility. A Free Software game featuring some of these models is an exciting prospect!

I will probably come to an agreement with some other FreeGameDev forum members on posting here so that, should I forget or lose a limb, somebody else can step in and take on the mantle of bringing you all the fascinating Free Software game news. :-)

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How Original

I really shouldn't be posting right now because I have a million more important things to do but I love you guys so...

There's a preview version of Vega Strike 0.5.0 up for download for Intel Mac users. The VS devs need some feedback on most notably sound due to porting issues. Users of other platforms will have to use subversion for the time being but Windows users don't need to compile as there's a .exe in subversion.

Want to know what OpenTTD will look like when the new graphics are ready? Well there's some interesting screenshots in the Ubuntu forums. I know this guy has riled the OpenTTD community by posting work there that they don't approve of. Issues to do with language barriers and badly put-together mockups / inserted graphics. Still, it seemed a bit harsh to me but for some reason he doesn't understand English. Anyway, this babble is digressing too much.

Globulation2 and Bos Wars got updates. Hopefully C&C being released as freeware won't dent the efforts of the developers of those games by taking players away from their communities.

I hate Westwood and the C&C series. Why? It's the most unoriginal piece of crap. Ever played Dune II? Awesome game for it's time, truly awesome. So awesome that the entire C&C series was just a rehash of it. I was so disgusted when I played Dune III, over 10 years after Dune II, the gameplay was pretty much identical and even the same gameplay / stupid AI bugs still existed. You could still select units, click on the floor, and watch whilst a few enemy units systematically wiped them out and your units continued to attack nothing. I vowed never to play a C&C game again after that - it's just the same but with shinier graphics. This probably isn't the first, and probably won't be the last time I mention this. I still remember watching a video of one of the game designers talking about how "original" Dune III was and feeling sick to my stomach that I helped line their pockets with gold. Dune II was original. Dune III had nothing original about it - it's not like 3D graphics were even a new phenomena. The evolution between Dune II, through the C&C series, to Dune III, was purely superficial, which for a multi-million-dollar franchise was pretty poor going if you ask me.

Never fear, open source is here! FOSS games are often original, contrary to what many people think. Originality goes beyond the conceptual. Originality is about project direction, about improving gameplay. Free games may often be reimplementations but they usually take a proactive approach to addressing gameplay and game balancing issues. You can be sure that the same AI bugs that afflicted the initial versions of Freeciv 10+ years ago have been addressed in the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 - which already has patches for the issues I mentioned the other day.

Hey, how topical is this. Whilst searching for a Dune III link (unable to find one easily - obviously a completely unremarkable game unlike it's predecessor) I came across two active Dune II remakes; Dune II: The Sleeper Has Awakened, which was only updated on the 3rd of September, and Dune II: The Maker, updated in August with gallery additions even yesterday. Intriguing.

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I'm baaaaaaaaack!

Whenever I have an extended FG absence (nearly 4 days this time!) it always makes me feel like shouting "I'm back" in the style of that guy from Independence Day. Maybe in a past life I had my dignity taken away from me by rectally-fascinated aliens? Who knows, but now it's out of my system I doubt I'll think it again.

So... since it's "tomorrow" now, I'll point people in the direction of a comment by FIFE developer mvbaracuda who corrects my "commercial quality techdemo" description of the upcoming joint venture between FIFE and Zero Projekt. So if you are interested in making adventure games then investigate further.

Paintown

Paintown is an old school beat-em-up like Double Dragon. It's been in development all year and has an installer for Windows and source download for other platforms (Linux only, I think, but not checked it thoroughly) and looks like a fun game.

I tried out Vega Strike which looks nice although I think these kind of space exploration games need a storyline to get people involved. Since it doesn't have one, there's no initial purpose to the game (other than make money I guess) so I didn't spend too long playing. The latest VS is only available from subversion but it's shaping up nicely so a release should come soon - before the end of the month, I reckon. The big news is the addition of shader support so it's going to look very pretty, in addition to tons of gameplay balancing and bug fixes.

I also tried out JCRPG which is turning into a very nice little game engine. The graphics are great and if the same determination and attention to detail is paid to the rest of the JCRPG goals then we will have something really special on our hands. There is a download available if you want to check it out - it's Java so you can, er, run it anywhere. That's what they say. ;-)

Fortress may be a long way away from anything releasable but, well, castles are cool. So check out the development blog for pictures of two contributed castles. I'm personally involved in the project so it's exciting for me and if those artistic efforts are a measure of what the game will look like, it's going to look absolutely awesome.

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Releases on the Horizon

Well what would you know. There actually was plenty happening yesterday just I wasn't looking in the right places...

The assualt course racing game Sturmbahnfahrer has been renamed for reasons of political correctness. The new name is Stormbaan Coureur (dutch for "assault course racer") and there is a new release, version 1.5, which has save points, a half pipe, turntables, brakelights and more. It is currently only available as a source download, but hopefully that'll change soon. Whilst the game is aimed at Linux, it uses PLIB and ODE so is theoretically compilable on anything those two support (which is all major platforms).

Crashtest

Stormbaan Coureur is also the basis for another game - crashtest, the education crash test simulator for Linux. Interesting... :-)

There's also a new version of the Atomic Tanks. It's a worms clone and the project makes regular releases. Good stuff.

There's a lovely long post on the Vega Strike devblog from the project leader: version 0.5.0 looks a little closer! Basically the summer has given several core developers time to smash through bugs in SVN, implement some smart new features, and create an improved universe to roam about in. The only word of caution is that it seems VS SVN needs lots of memory. Hopefully they can slim that down a little prior to release.

There's an update in denial of project death on the Ecksdee wiki. It's been a while since the last release of this Wipeout-style futuristic racing game. There's been lots of development activity so hopefully that will result in a playable release in the near future.

And probably the best bit of news for the day - Freeciv 2.1beta6 is going to be out in the next few days. They built a 2.1beta5 release but it had a fatal flaw in it so announcements were shelved and a beta6 release is planned once the problems are ironed out. I look forward to it! :-)

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New Forums Available

With many thanks to ghoulsblade and hagish of SFZ fame, there is a new Free Gamer forum. :-)

Unfortunately there is no way to transfer to old database over and even if it was possible the majority of useful content was posted during the period of data loss (anything after June 30th). However, lessons learned, this new forum should be more responsive (freeforums.org was slow), have better uptime (freeforums.org was frequently down) and is far more customizable (i.e. expect a FG theme in the near future etc).

Parallel Universe

There's a new release of Privateer Gemini Gold. Bug fixes and some improved artwork prompted the team to release 1.02a just a month after 1.02 - release early, release often so this is a good thing in my book. I'm not sure if they have addressed the reported high difficulty level of the game though. If you find PGG too difficult, check out Privateer Remake and/or Parallel Universe.

Or wait for the new Vega Strike release which is coming in August. It's looking sumptuous.

JCRPG development is still at a good pace. To get an idea of the feel of this old fashioned RPG engine, the author posted a video:

JCRPG in action

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SuperTuxKart 0.3.0

Well let's start with the fact that despite the complete lack of any announcement whatsoever and no update to the website, SuperTuxKart 0.3.0 is available for download and has been since the 5th July. Well, I'm doing the announcement for them it seems. ;-)

This Super Mario Kart inspired game is available on all popular OSes - Linux, Linux PPC, Mac OSX, and Windows. There's quite a few new features in this release that is a massive improvement over version 0.2:

• Highscore lists


• Shortcut detection


• Improved AI


• Fullscreen support


• New track: the island


• New kart: hexley


• New penalty: bomb


• MacOSX support


• OpenAL and ogg-vorbis support


• Two new Grand Prixs


• Improved user interface

I've no idea why it hasn't been announced anywhere. Thanks to the commenter who point out the fact it is available after I complained yesterday about it not being released yet. (Comments are helpful!)

Vega Strike development news - 0.4.4 has been branched. Expect a new version in August once a bit of bug squashing and play balancing has been finished on that branch.

There's also an update on the Dungeon Digger website. With development restarted hopefully this game will become playable soon. I loved the old Dungeon Keeper games so I'm quite eager for this project to make progress. :-)

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Counting the Days

I dunno what happened yesterday. A combination of not-much-happening and being-very-busy I guess.

I wish SuperTuxKart 0.3 would come out, and FreeCiv 2.1, and SuperTux 0.4, and a bunch of other games that are close to release but just are taking ages to get over their respective hurdles.

Promisingly there's quite a bit of movement on the Pingus revival. People are working on an SDL port for it and it's mostly back to it's previously released state of the Lemmings-like game. The number of interested contributors bodes well for future development which may see a decent level editor among other cute features. For more information the best place is probably the Pingus forum.

Development of Mars: Land of No Mercy continues at a steady pace. There's plenty of new graphics going into the next version of the game which may also be playable in a tech demo kinda way. I was trying to post a sceenshot to give readers an idea of what the game is going to be like, but my current location has such a poor net connection that it can't upload to blogger. Anyway, the game is 2D isometric mech turn-based strategy.

Pi Armada, a Wing Commander Armada clone, has a new project lead. His first priority is to make it work on Linux and Macs since currently Pi Armada only runs on Windows. Since it uses Python/Pygame and Vega Strike, all of which are cross platform, porting shouldn't be too tricky. It's quite impressive how games are based on the VS engine.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to day dreaming. May I return with more newsworthy content tomorrow... ? ;-)

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Ascii 3D

Tower

New VS Models :-)

Tower - a rogue-like with a difference. The art is ascii, but it's rendered in 3D. Interesting...

The devblog for Vega Strike is full of activity. People are sorting out new artwork, replacing the frail sound server, and implementing lots of other improvements to the game. It seems that school is oout and summer is in, so the developers are rallying to make a superb new release of VS a reality in the next month or two.

The up and coming space game Stress Free Zone is seeing lots of development activity. They are working on implementing the ability to walk around your ship. Since your ship is modular this involves generating the ship internals as well as just modelling them. Whilst a lot of the art is placeholder work, the concepts are really cool and I can't wait for that game to get a few more features, a bigger community, and blossom into the awesome game it's threatening to become. I really like the ideas behind SFZ - like reducing things such as trading grind and focusing on keeping the gameplay interesting and fun.

Over at happypenguin.org (which I can barely reach at the moment) they are running a poll about the demise of the platformer. They should check out SauerMod that, among other things, turns Sauerbraten into a platform game. "Other things" includes AI bots, kart racing, and other enhancements to Sauer. Speaking of Sauerbraten, it looks rather lovely these days, as evidenced by this trailer:

Sauerbraten Trailer

A few people commented that they prefer other video hosts to YouTube. Well the choice of video host is not mine - it's up to people who post videos for their games, and I'm not going to be downloading and reuploading gameplay videos every time I want to embed one here so it's hobson's choice there. However I will try and link them each time from no onwards as well as just embedding them. Thanks for the handy feedback! :-)

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Privateer Parallel Universe

Parallel Universe, a modification of Privateer Remake, has gotten itself a rather smart website and community forums. There's a good bit of work going on over there and the feedback on PU is generally pretty good. Definitely worth a look for space game fans. It is also part of a rather complex development scene based around Privateer & Wing Commander games. I'll get back to that in a bit.

A couple of Ubuntu users have posted their first serious effort at a game, Slingshot. It's a fairly simple 2D affair, take it in turns to shoot at each other, your shots being affected by the gravity pulls of planets.

I've mentioned Egoboo Resurrection a few times - a continuation of the classic game Egoboo. I've not really mentioned that it's only released for Windows despite the original predominantly being a Linux game. It just comes down to a lack of Linux based contributors. However there's another "branch" called Egoboo 2.x which has binaries for Mac OS X and Windows. I'm sure eventually a Linux guy will pop up and help out but until then it seems us Lusers are a bit stuck when it comes to getting an Egoboo fix. I guess there is always SoulFu. Anyway, to encourage contributors one of the Egoboo Resurrection devs posted a development bundle which comes with game editing tools as well as the source.

There's now a Mac OS X binary up for the latest Warzone 2100 release, 2.0.7. Good day for Mac users, eh? :-)

Back to PU and a bit about the scene which PU comes from, and it's all a bit complex, rotating around the Vega Strike engine. Some of the VS devs (herein called the 'devs') made Privateer Remake. This got noticed by the Wing Commander nuts at crius.net (herein called the 'canons') who are dedicated to their cause. Some less fierce but equally obsessed WC fans (herein called the 'non-canons') at the same time started forming Wing Commander Universe, a super-mod that encompassed all things WC, a lot of which started making it's way into PR. Unhappy at the way PR was not completely true to the original Privateer, the canons - with help from the devs - created Privateer Gemini Gold, a fork of PR. The canons publicly denounce WCU. The non-canons decided that not only was the limitations imposed on gameplay in PGG not conducive to a fun game, but they did not go far enough, so created Parallel Universe, something even less true to it's WC heritage that embraces fun over accuracy.

So you now have a triangle of groups - the devs with VS and PR, the canons with PGG who gets help from the devs, the non-canons with WCU and PU who collaborate with the devs on PR. It's quite an interesting thing to follow. It's quite a caustic atmosphere between the canons and the non-canons. At the end of the day, not everybody can always get along, and the canons are abrasive at best, with questionable forum policies and immature moderation the last time I encountered them.

Anyway, my point was that PGG is the most well known of all the projects. However, feedback isn't that great on the latest release 1.02 which new players are finding incredibly hard with a high starting difficulty. The PU team could flank PGG in terms of community by being a more fun game to play so attracting more players and contributors. And there's PR in the middle that will no doubt continue to, well, be in the middle.

I hope I got that all correct. Whilst it was a stormy path to the projects we have today, I think each project serves a niche and they can coexist harmoneously. It may even turn out to be one of those situations where the existance of one is what spurs on the other - Yin and Yang etc. :-)

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New Vega Strike in August

Typical. I stop monitoring Vega Strike for a week or so and everything starts happening. They get a new website, a devblog, and one of the developers commits to an August update for the game to bring the latest developments to players not prepared to dabble in SVN.

Vega Strike has never been a dead project, nor an inactive one, something the lack of a release since 2003 has betrayed for a game purportedly "in development". I think the devblog is an excellent compromise between showing activity and spamming the news page with not-newsworthy items.

VS is an strong example of the growing pains experienced by a popular open source project and how managing releases and resources should be considered as much a task as development itself. I would put the lack of releases down to a failure to manage contributions, but I think they have turned the corner with this.

For an excellent example of good resource management, look at the Battle for Wesnoth project. I'll also note it is easy to look in and criticise, but far harder to apply good practise to your own projects.

There's a Windows SDK available for the FreeOrion project to encourage developers who use Windows. I think this is another good practise, making it more than easy to get started with the source code. I would go as far as to say that the indimidating factor of downloading and using various development tools is probably as big a barrier than knowing how to program. You can learn programming basics from looking at source code and following the logic, but it's meaningless if you can't make a change and see what effect that has.

Other blog watch:

• There's another description of a game idea over at lostgarden.com although this time it's just a description and not a challenge to create the game (no graphics provided).
• There's the fourth part of an overview of Linux games here, this part covers MMORPGs and lists at least four open source games.

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