Yesterday there was also a new 0.7.0 release of the 3D Worldforge client Ember:
- Completely new tileset
- New buildings: alvearies, barracks, blender, cocoa field, doctor, herbary, lookout, pastry shop, spice field, vineyard, vintner
- Many new graphics for existing buildings
- AI can now handle war and diplomacy
- Vast performance improvements
- New music track: Battle
- Tons of bug fixes
- Updated translations
- Much, much more
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| Worldforge 3D client Ember 0.7.0 |
Last but not least,the recently open-sourced AgentKeeper got a dedicated sub-forum on our messageboards and is looking for contributors:
So, if you want to help out with this brand new jMonkey powered dungeon tycoon game, check out this nice list of video tutorials.
- Complete settlement AI (details here)
- Combat and diplomacy system
- Increase in performance (partially thanks to FIFE)
- Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr)
- Nine new buildings, one new ship (here are some)
- New statistic widgets
- Usability and interface improvements (for example the in-game menu)
- New maps and a parameters-based map generator
Development is active and they are on the lookout for people to help out or even join:
- 2D/3D/Animation artists can find some tasks here
- Naval public domain painting lovers can help by finding some background art
- Interested in mechanics/story? Share your ideas for catastrophes!
- Interesting screenshots and videos should be posted here
- Feedback is needed for this release. It can be shared on the forums or IRC room.
Pioneer and settler buildings
Shooting pirates
Translucent environment
libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.
I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".
The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).
Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.
Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.
New to the feeds is our revision control planet, for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p
It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward.
However, recently they released an auto-builds update script, which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p
Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released:
Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode.
Other things to mention? Mage is a open-source MTG client, but not as nice looking as Wagic. But it might convince you with other features (of which Mage has a lot ;) ).
Unknown Horizons has a nice news update with all the improvements Google's Summer of Code gave them and the Zod engine is set out to improve the multiplayer part of the (back then really nice) game Z (using the unfree media from the original it seems).
Clonk
Clonk got open sourced! Welcome OpenClonk. Clonky! It seems to be the indie game fashion at the moment what with 0AD and all. What is Clonk?
Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactic-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms.
So, the Clonk developers open sourced it, but since backwards compatability is a big problem for them, they ditched all Clonk content and are asking the community to contribute new game content. Judging by the forum, the community looks very active, it's a case of 'watch this space' I guess.
The above video is the "Clonk Rage" trailer. I got the impression this is what has been open sourced although I'm not sure how of the levels/content came with it, if at all. Perhaps somebody could check out the source and see where it is up to?
Anyhoo... so, Ceil... round up... get it?
Despite the lack of Free Gamer activity, the FOSS game scene is as active as ever.
Some new releases that should have been mentioned earlier:
- Unknown Horizons 2009.1 (announcement)
Many improvements over the 2009.0 release, new UI, multilanguage support, music, game features - Egoboo 2.7.4 (announcement)
Lots of features, updates, and bug fixes - should be getting pretty good now - Project Football 0.2 (FGD announcement)
Consecutive seasons, UI updates, AI updates, but still a Spanish-only website although English secions in their forum - Legend of Edgar 0.20 0.22 (FGD announcement)
Compatibility with 64 bit CPUs, 2 additional maps and a new boss - Stone Soup 0.5 (LinuxGames announcement)
Its got graphics but is also the winner of the 2009 Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year award - And last but not least: Yo Frankie! 1.1 (announcement)
Includes the 3 winning levels from the level design competition, with additional improvements
I probably should make more of a fuss over Yo Frankie! than I do - it does look absolutely stunning as you can see in the following video - and it could yet become an important starting platform for creating other types Free games using it's materials and gameplay as a foundation:
Well, so, that's some stuff we already knew about, but what about some things we don't?
Skyscraper: A first-person 3D virtual building simulator. Perhaps not a game. I report, you decide.
Wesnoth + Bloodbowl + a blender = Wesbowl! It's early days (0.1 alpha) but good to see somebody having a bash.
Grandwing is a game being developed to be similar in gameplay to the game Spyro the Dragon.
And world's worst website award goes to... *drumroll* ...ok, I'm not going to say its the worst, but the site for YSFlight (an open source flight sim) has to be a contender.
Toodlepip!
Wesnoth Knight
Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.
Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.
PARPG Weapons
PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.
Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!
Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.
Simutrans Subways
It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!
There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...
...so...
...post them in the comments!
Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.
Update: brain malfunction. I first posted 2.7.0, then 2.7.7b, but the correct _stable_ version of Egoboo is 2.7.0b and the development version is 2.7.7, got it? =/ Thanks for the pointer, maststef
A new stable Egoboo 2.7.0 2.7.7b 2.7.0 wraps up several months of development and bug fixing. This project has really come back to life over the course of 2008. It is very well tested with a lengthy changelog. If I had make a criticism, it would be that Egoboo really looks dated these days and perhaps they could renew focus on nicer textures and more detailed models - perhaps aspiring to be a bit closer to SoulFu in quality - but graphics do not a good game make. It's great to see the project successfully revived from a lifeless piece of bitrot that it had become a few years go.
Now it's a pretty smooth looking experience. Check out this (slightly rambly) video review:
Unknown Horizons 2009.1 was released several days ago. It now resembles a game, you can build a city, although it's still a few features short of being fun. They are changing their release policy to monthly updates / snapshots with stable releases less often (i.e. when they are ready) instead of a stable release every 6 months. Sounds like a wise plan to me.
Battery is a browser based 2D top scrolling game written in Java. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view and shoots down enemies. The game is free and freely distributable. The game can be played inside the browser window, if you have Java.
The Legend of Mazzeroth aims to be a new 2D MMORPG, I think in the style of The Mana World or Stendhal. In fact, I thought it was a fork or inspired by one of those two, but I can't easily find the reference nor do I have the time to search for it. Update: it was originally a fork of The Mana World but now is written from scratch although probably uses TMW graphics. Thanks for finding that out Crush.
Extreme Tux Racer 0.5 beta is supposed to be pretty nice and a big improvement over the 0.4 release.
Dammit I had at least two more project updates but I forgot them. Perhaps Freedroid RPG 0.12? Maybe. What about Vacuum Magic 0.10? Possibly. Who can remember... oh, check out this musicy web thingy. Your browser is the next Flash platform, it seems.
There's another monthly overview of developments for UFO:AI, the 3D turn based tactics game where you see off an alien invasion of sorts. Development is happening at an impressive pace, with a lot of new minor features and improvements to existing features. The changes affect many aspects of the project, and as such I won't summarize them here. Read it for yourself on their website. (No permanent link to the update, sorry.)
Speaking of UFO games, I do wish UFO2000 development would return. I have an affinity for the original game and I really hoped UFO2000 would emerge as a playable single-player game. It hasn't yet, and looks like it never will, which is a shame. They have a gorgeous website though.
FIFE world seems to have taken off a bit lately. FIFE is a 2D isometric game engine. It was originally created for the purposes of being a Fallout engine but evolved.
Shortly after stepping down from management duties from FIFE, project manager MvBarracuda announced PARPG - Post-Apocalyptic RPG - to the world, a game that uses FIFE to create a new, erm, post-apocalyptic RPG. I think he'd gotten a bit tired after many years working on FIFE - when you work on an engine sometimes the end result is less tangible and harder to motivate yourself for.
The announcement of PARPG seemed to galvanise the FIFE community, with new and old faces now popping up to fix and featurize FIFE after a fairly long quiet spell in development. There seems to be a lot of interest in contributing to PARPG with threads like this popping up in the forum. It seems they are looking primarily for C++/Python devs at the moment.
Unknown Horizons
Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. Expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods. Increase your power with a well balanced economy and with strategic trade and diplomacy.
Zero Projekt
With 3 promising active game projects on the go, the FIFE community future looks bright.
Like Morrowind? OpenMW 0.6 got released. Still, you need Morrowind to play it, and that's not Free, so...
DungeonHack
