Open Source Gaming Sites

I just came across two new(ish) open source gaming portals: www.OSGamer.org and www.OpenContentGames.org

I also spotted this "royalty free" media resource site: www.omnetwork.net

It's great to see more sites cropping up that are dedicated to open source / Free Software gaming, so go and use them and help open up the world of Free games to the masses. It's a snowball effect - the more people work on consolidating the community the more the games will get noticed.

Also early in December OpenArena 0.6 was released. Originally a TC for Q3, it now is a standalone game using ioq3. I missed it. I missed a few other things too but I haven't yet remembered those.

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It's Been Brutal

Happy New Year everybody! I apologise for the lack of Free Software game commentary over the festive season but I was busy damaging my health in fun ways.

Anyway.....

Brutal Chess 0.5.1 is out! Brutal Chess is a game inspired by the ancient Battle Chess. A quick follow up to the strangely-not-mentioned-on-happypenguin 0.5.0 release which introduces a new codebase, AI of various difficulties, md3 support, and generally lots of other major-update-goodness. The simpler 3D chess game glChess released 1.0.1 on New Year's eve.

I am having a strange sense of de-ja-vu here because I have written this all before only I was under-the-influence of several substances and Blogger does not autosave drafts as I am accustomed to with GMail. Please implement this Blogger people!

Atomic Tanks 2.0-beta2 is also out. Despite the "2.0" in the version number, I don't believe there is that much different between the 2.0-beta2 and 1.5a but it got the game mentioned on Free Gamer so it must be worth it.

The ambitious Free Ryzom project failed to get the rights to the game. They were not able to compete with other commercially-rooted offers to take on the flagging MMORPG so were overlooked by the court deciding what happened to the company behind Ryzom.

The freeware and free-to-play MMORPG Eternal Lands released version 1.3.3 of their client with new monsters and maps. One of my friends played EL extensively. It looked very social but very boring. Lots of slow and repetitive menial tasks to level up seemed to be the order of the day but it could have been because he was playing the game in a daft way [risk-free levelling instead of fighting].

And finally in a move a tiny bit off-topic for this site, I'm going to plug musikCube. This music player/manager for Windows went 1.0 a few weeks ago and I've been enjoying it ever since on my work machine. I'd long been looking for a music player other than Winamp [I don't understand why people like Winamp so much - if you have more than 3 songs it's crap for managing them] or iTunes [barf]. The previous version of musikCube was good but had a few minor problems and development seemed to be stalled but it seemed the author was simply working away quietly instead of flagging noisily. Anyway, it rocks so if you have to use Windows then I highly recommend this Free Software music player. I think musikCube has a very bright future.

I'm sure I had some more games to talk about but I forgot..... :P

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SuperTux 0.3.0 released

SuperTux 0.3.0 was released is now out in the wild. This is a preview of milestone 2, so expect something a little rough on the edges. Still, it should be fun to play and hopefully attract a bit more community help to the project. Go grab it whilst it is hot.

My favourite game Fish Fillets got a minor update to version 0.7.4, including the final level.

SuperTuxKart development has not slowed. Recently there was the contribution of an island level. With improved physics - and wheelies! - I think the next SuperTuxKart release is shaping up to be an awesome little game.

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Battle Just Started 0.1.0

Battle Just Started is a fun multiplayer 3D tank game. It has slightly cartoonish graphics and a basic AI (so you can play single player) and is in the early stages of development, but there have been several releases this month already - "release early, release often!"

Also Stendhal 0.56 was released, adding a new city among other things.

Interesting FLOSS game news is a little slow on the ground at the moment.

*Charlie crouches down and puts his ear on the floor*

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Free Ryzom

The Free Ryzom Campaign is an effort to make the code and the artwork of MMORPG Ryzom available under copyleft licenses. Just today the Free Software Foundation officially backed the campaign with a hefty $60,000 pledge.

Robert Schuster brought it to my attention. He also notes that the Ryzom team also produced the rather cool "levitating, meditating, flute-playing Gnu".

Needless to say, the gameplay video on ryzom.org is pretty impressive. Then again, most things are impressive to me these days since I haven't really indulged in commercial gaming since the turn of the millenium - so look for yourself!

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Wizardy

Ok, technically not a Free game nor really a game, but the damn thing is almost always right. Almost freaky. Try this little flash game, Wizardy:

http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html

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It's A Graveyard Out There

Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool.

The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes.

The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released (changelog). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game.

And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard:

I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/. At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, but the game is completely finished and playable. As it's new, its community is very small, but I'm hoping it will get bigger as people discover it.

I could not find a link for Laser Squad 3D.

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