Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released, with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation (changelog).
Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift.
A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release:
Also recently updated is Irrlamb. Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its development was originally hosted).
This release adds new graphical capabilities, new levels, gamepad support and various fixes - see the announcement for more details.
I'll also write a really lengthy... wait a minute! Let's link a video instead. ;)
OpenDungeons and FreeOrion updates plus ReTux
A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates.
OpenDungeons, an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog:
The project has some very regular contributors (both programming and art) and the game has multiplayer support which the developers test with the occasional weekend virtual lan party. OpenDungeons has certainly gone from strength to strength in the last year.
FreeOrion version 0.4.5 (announcement with changelog) wraps up the last year's worth of development. Much of the work seems to have been motivated by trying to make the game more fun to play — "performance, responsiveness, AI, balancing etc." —which is nice to see. At some point a project has to stop pushing new features and work on improving the game experience.
I couldn't find any screenshots of 0.4.5 to share, but here's a recent gameplay video posted on YouTube which should give an idea, although he's well into a game at this point:
Finally, and a little too late unfortunately, here's some coverage of ReTux. At first glance, it would seem somebody has taken Super Tux and tried to profit off of it. However, author Julian Merchant (onpon4 on the FGD forums) has written a new engine from scratch in Python. Whilst there are the obvious similarities with the original Super Tux, due to ReTux using many of the same graphics and sounds, there are a number of notable gameplay changes many of which can be seen in the 'Concept Castle' video (I really think his IndieGoGo campaign should have used this video at the very beginning of it).
Julian only raised $378 in the 30 days the campaign lasted, which was very short of the $50,000 goal. Reasons for this will be likely poor coverage (no FG article!) but also probably the perception that it was basically the same as Super Tux. For example, the IGG page starts with a video which the first 2 minutes or so (aside from the change to the fireflower) could easily be recreated by substituting the Super Tux logo for ReTux.
I do think avoiding the more popular media sites (e.g. no YouTube video) hurt the campaign. I can find little-to-no mention of ReTux when searching for it.
It also highlights one of the problems with developing Free games i.e. generally there's no money in it. Julian is obviously passionate about the concept, having done so much work on it already, and I hope he continues with it. As to where he goes from here? I would suggest perhaps trying to get it greenlit on Steam or another platform where he can solicit a small fee from players whilst still maintaining the open source status of the project - a great example being Tales of Maj’Eyal which is also selling well on Steam.
Don't give up Julian. Persistence is the key to success with any endeavour. You just have to find the right path.
OpenDungeons, an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog:
- New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management
- Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste
- Particle effects!
- Reworked library logic and made research order configurable
- New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood
- Customisable creature sound effects!
- Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies
- In-game settings menu support!
- New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements
- New minimap camera with real-time rendering
- Dedicated server support with command-line parameters
 |  | |
| Explosions! Spells! | The research tree |
The project has some very regular contributors (both programming and art) and the game has multiplayer support which the developers test with the occasional weekend virtual lan party. OpenDungeons has certainly gone from strength to strength in the last year.
FreeOrion version 0.4.5 (announcement with changelog) wraps up the last year's worth of development. Much of the work seems to have been motivated by trying to make the game more fun to play — "performance, responsiveness, AI, balancing etc." —which is nice to see. At some point a project has to stop pushing new features and work on improving the game experience.
I couldn't find any screenshots of 0.4.5 to share, but here's a recent gameplay video posted on YouTube which should give an idea, although he's well into a game at this point:
Finally, and a little too late unfortunately, here's some coverage of ReTux. At first glance, it would seem somebody has taken Super Tux and tried to profit off of it. However, author Julian Merchant (onpon4 on the FGD forums) has written a new engine from scratch in Python. Whilst there are the obvious similarities with the original Super Tux, due to ReTux using many of the same graphics and sounds, there are a number of notable gameplay changes many of which can be seen in the 'Concept Castle' video (I really think his IndieGoGo campaign should have used this video at the very beginning of it).
Julian only raised $378 in the 30 days the campaign lasted, which was very short of the $50,000 goal. Reasons for this will be likely poor coverage (no FG article!) but also probably the perception that it was basically the same as Super Tux. For example, the IGG page starts with a video which the first 2 minutes or so (aside from the change to the fireflower) could easily be recreated by substituting the Super Tux logo for ReTux.
I do think avoiding the more popular media sites (e.g. no YouTube video) hurt the campaign. I can find little-to-no mention of ReTux when searching for it.
It also highlights one of the problems with developing Free games i.e. generally there's no money in it. Julian is obviously passionate about the concept, having done so much work on it already, and I hope he continues with it. As to where he goes from here? I would suggest perhaps trying to get it greenlit on Steam or another platform where he can solicit a small fee from players whilst still maintaining the open source status of the project - a great example being Tales of Maj’Eyal which is also selling well on Steam.
Don't give up Julian. Persistence is the key to success with any endeavour. You just have to find the right path.
Devcorner: Macros Are Evil
The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results.
Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often.
Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN:
For the answer visit the thread, I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll post a screenshot, also sourced from said forums and taken by Stunt Rally author CrystalH.
For those who don't know, Stunt Rally is a friendly fork of VDrift.
Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often.
Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN:
So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes.
It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro.Code:#define SIMD_PI btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029)
#define SIMD_2_PI btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI
#define SIMD_HALF_PI (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5))
#define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0))
#define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI)
The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie.
For the answer visit the thread, I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll post a screenshot, also sourced from said forums and taken by Stunt Rally author CrystalH.
Xonotic 0.8.1 released & related news
For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch (via the autobuilds), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps.
From the user "Antibody" (known for his duel commentary videos) comes this nice video overview of the new features:
(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)
On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.
Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.
From the user "Antibody" (known for his duel commentary videos) comes this nice video overview of the new features:
(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)
On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.
Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.
Mini Sci-Fi Open Source Tower Defense Game
Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.
To be a master is to spam en mass
So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.
Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level
The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.
Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!
You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.
All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!
Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!
Yeah right...
Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"
Made with love2d
The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!
Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!
Limit Load, new arcade combat flight simulator
Stealth development might not be very "open-sourceish", but it sometimes makes for some nice surprises in our project showcase forum.
This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load, self described as:
Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it:
This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load, self described as:
A cockpit flight game that is more of an arcade than a sim. The game is built on the Panda3D game engine. It is similar to the ancient games like the classic Wings or the very good Strike Commander. The story and the atmosphere are important elements of the game, so a lot of focus is placed on that too.Here is some in-game action and it seems quite polished already for such a new game:
Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it:
The game code is licensed under GPL 3, and custom-made game assets under CC-by-SA 4.0. Some of the assets were taken from "free" (as in "not sure in which way") sources on the Internet, so their licensing situation is unclear. Eventually these should be cleared for use or replaced.So where is my VR kit? :D
Old school 2D RTS Wyrmsun is looking to be greenlit
We were kindly made aware by the main developer of the 2D RTS Wyrmsun that he is currently looking for support to get this game on the Steam platform (link includes a game-play video).
Here is a description of the game we got from him:
P.S.: Yes FOSS games can be on Steam as long as they don't integrate with closed source steam integration libraries; And it can be a great way to attract more users to your game and maybe even collect some donations or sell add-ons (preferably in a "release freely when sufficient funds are gathered" style). See this game for an successful example.
Here is a description of the game we got from him:
In Wyrmsun, humans, elves and dwarves all seek to carve a place for themselves on their different homeworlds, with humans living on Earth, dwarves dwelling on Nidavellir, and elves inhabiting Alfheim. In the game's missions, each world follows separate storylines, but the various civilizations can be mixed and matched in custom games.For those more inclined to help out with the code, there are two code repositories: one for the game and one for the modified Stratagus engine.
Wyrmsun features:
- Retro-style graphics
- 2 playable civilizations, and a number of non-playable ones
- 18 quests to play, earning technology points which can be used to obtain new units, buildings and technologies
- 38 units, 30 buildings and 14 technologies
- Units that can earn experience, being able to upgrade to new unit types or acquire new abilities upon level-up
- Persistent heroes, who carry over their level and abilities throughout scenarios
- Personal names and traits for units
- Cave, Conifer Forest, Dungeon, Fairlimbed Forest and Swamp tilesets
- 33 maps of real and fictional locations to choose from, as well as random maps
- Living environment, with fauna reproduction and predation
- Very moddable game, with mod-loading capability built in
- Grand strategy mode, where production is resolved on the strategic (world map) level, while battles are resolved on the tactical level
- In-game encyclopedia, allowing players to learn more about the units, buildings and other elements of the game, as well as their historical and mythological sources of inspiration.
P.S.: Yes FOSS games can be on Steam as long as they don't integrate with closed source steam integration libraries; And it can be a great way to attract more users to your game and maybe even collect some donations or sell add-ons (preferably in a "release freely when sufficient funds are gathered" style). See this game for an successful example.
New FOSS 3D RTS Engine, OpenRTS!
I had been following this really awesome looking tile based RTS 3D engine project (think Starcraft2 like) on the jMonkey Engine forums for a while, and it is now fully FOSS including the arts assets.
Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:
You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.
Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:
You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.
Top Futuristic Open Source Racing Games on Linux
F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers.
Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code:
H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software with freeware data.
While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre.
CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version.
Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible. Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases.
Racer is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfortunately it does not compile on current Arch Linux.
Of our four projects, this is the only that has the classic drive-over boost fields.
Ecksdee is the oldest of the bunch and has challenging time trial single-player gameplay.
There are weapon pickups but without AI or human competitors they serve no purpose yet.
Project Comparison
| H-Craft | CoreBreach | Racer* | Ecksdee | |
| Latest Version | 2015-02-23 (1.3) | 2012-11-30 (git) | 2010-10-10 (r349) | 2006-11-24 (0.0.9) |
| Campaign Mode | yes | yes | no | no |
| Split-Screen Multiplayer | no | yes | yes | no |
| Weapons | no | yes | no | yes |
| AI | yes | yes | no | no |
| Gamepad Support | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Menu UI Look | good | ok | good | ok |
| Music | yes | yes | no | yes |
| Sounds | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Linux Builds or Compiling | not tested, build used | complicated but compiles | fails | fails, win32 build/wine used |
| Art Asset License(s) | Mostly no-modify-no-distribute | no-distribution, GPL, CC-BY 3.0 | CC-BY-SA 3.0 | GPL, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND |
| Is It Cool? | yes | yes | yes | yes |
Related projects
Stunt Rally has a F-Zero-esque antigrav vehicles and futuristic levels but primarily it's a car racing game. The default physics don't seem to be working for a futuristic racing style.
The cool Blender Game Engine project RGP has it's .blend file available but it does not have license information. The .blend contains no audio and only one level without AI.
HexGL is pretty but has no sound, no ai, only one level and is CC 3.0 BY-NC licensed (including code) at the moment. If anybody is interested in contributing: the developer indicated interest in the MIT license.
TheRush seem to be Windows-only and does not run in Wine.
DevCorner: Overlap2D editor goes open source & Godot 1.1. Beta with huge 2D engine enhancements!
Some nice developments on the 2D game-dev front lately, and as you will later see, 2D with full shader, real-time lights and so on can be a quite awsome way to make games, without having to hire a full team of 3D artists ;)
First of all a great new 2D editor, Overlap2D, has been released under the Apache2 license:
Contrary to other popular 2D editors (for example tiled or DAME), it is not tile based, has a modern renderer and also comes with a nice GUI editor. It currently exports to a standard JSON file and has a libGDX runtime.
This of course requires a bit more than simple 2D sprites ;) If you want to create cool 2D normal-maps, this should give you an simple way to create them.
Also very nice is the now working graphical/node-based shader editor:
If this has raised your interest in developing a game with Godot, check out this nice series of tutorials or these. It's script language is a simplified version of python, so most beginning coders should feel right at home. Also check out this cool video of a mobile game made with Godot, if you still need convincing ;)
First of all a great new 2D editor, Overlap2D, has been released under the Apache2 license:
Contrary to other popular 2D editors (for example tiled or DAME), it is not tile based, has a modern renderer and also comes with a nice GUI editor. It currently exports to a standard JSON file and has a libGDX runtime.
Godot 1.1 BETA
Really awesome are also the latest developments of the (often described as the open-source Unity) Godot engine which you can now easily try. For me the coolest new features are the new dynamic lights (shown here in the also new isometric game sample):This of course requires a bit more than simple 2D sprites ;) If you want to create cool 2D normal-maps, this should give you an simple way to create them.
Also very nice is the now working graphical/node-based shader editor:
If this has raised your interest in developing a game with Godot, check out this nice series of tutorials or these. It's script language is a simplified version of python, so most beginning coders should feel right at home. Also check out this cool video of a mobile game made with Godot, if you still need convincing ;)
SDL2 FPS & on Finding New Open Source Games
I took a quick look whether one could find some open source games news (new game projects to be specific) by sorting SourceForge game projects by date but no luck, only established projects seem to show up there.
So I did the same on GitHub, and after making educated guesses whether projects might be worth clicking based on their title and short description, I f ound graphitemaster/neothyne.
The project uses SDL2, is about half a year old, doesn't have shooting functionality but at least movement feels kind of nice and definitely fast. In fact I'm honestly surprised that SDL is usable for 3D.
What surprised me even more that it compiles in mere seconds.
To come back to the point of finding games: My impression is that development is getting faster, projects are getting more but also less ambitious (read: more realistic to achieve) and less care is being given to licenses but at the same time more legal resources are being used because of OpenGameArt's and Freesound's popularity.
Personally, I have been using old onboard graphics for two years or more (no chance to run anything interesting 3D) because I'd prefer to upgrade from a HTC Wildfire (Buzz) to a OnePlus One, rather than buying a new Power Supply and Graphics card, having a louder computer and the knowledge that it's using more electricity.
This is also the reason why the above video is so tiny. :) No 720p 3D for my GPU.
If you find it interesting to browse through lists of game projects, trying to find a playable one that suits your interest, I recommend the GitHub search. Just don't rely on the "game" search key too much and imagine what the developer might use to describe it (probably genre names...).
For your entertainment, a list of "game" project short descriptions from GitHub.
So I did the same on GitHub, and after making educated guesses whether projects might be worth clicking based on their title and short description, I f ound graphitemaster/neothyne.
The project uses SDL2, is about half a year old, doesn't have shooting functionality but at least movement feels kind of nice and definitely fast. In fact I'm honestly surprised that SDL is usable for 3D.
Neothyne is an attempt at getting back to the roots of good old twitch shooting akin to that of Quake World..It certainly feels more like Cube 1 or Quake, rather than OpenArena, Sauerbraten or Nexuiz.
What surprised me even more that it compiles in mere seconds.
To come back to the point of finding games: My impression is that development is getting faster, projects are getting more but also less ambitious (read: more realistic to achieve) and less care is being given to licenses but at the same time more legal resources are being used because of OpenGameArt's and Freesound's popularity.
Personally, I have been using old onboard graphics for two years or more (no chance to run anything interesting 3D) because I'd prefer to upgrade from a HTC Wildfire (Buzz) to a OnePlus One, rather than buying a new Power Supply and Graphics card, having a louder computer and the knowledge that it's using more electricity.
This is also the reason why the above video is so tiny. :) No 720p 3D for my GPU.
If you find it interesting to browse through lists of game projects, trying to find a playable one that suits your interest, I recommend the GitHub search. Just don't rely on the "game" search key too much and imagine what the developer might use to describe it (probably genre names...).
For your entertainment, a list of "game" project short descriptions from GitHub.
- Actual game for the Capstrong DePaul capstone team
- recreating cs203-game1 repository because of a corruption in the original repo that I can't figure out how to fix atm
- the tic tac toe game on node.js
- Survival game
- kouluprojekti2
- Hotline Miami inspiered HTML5/JS game for school project
- Island is a programming game designed as a support for Software Engineering classes
- game
- Just a little game I'm working on
- Card game...
What's your favorite? Can you find anything better?
Space Station 13 remake liberated!
Many of us know Space Station 13 as "that awesome game I never played". Along with games like Dorf Fortress it stands as one of the pinnacles of the gameplay philosophy of fun through massive amounts of diversity. Originally developed in one of the most broken and unupdated platforms ever imaginable, BYOND, fans of the game have been trying to develop a standalone remake of the game for a while.
After a long period of development, the team of Robust Games, in charge of the project, decided to liberate the whole thing and turn to open development. This means all of the code is now GPLv3 and all of the art assets are now CC-BY-SA, effectively making the game 100% free-as-in-free-domes.
So what are you waiting for? Get to developin'!
EDIT: Apparently only the placeholder sprites (not the fancy ones in the screenshot) have been released under CC-BY-SA. The game should still be 100% playable with these, though.
EDIT: Apparently only the placeholder sprites (not the fancy ones in the screenshot) have been released under CC-BY-SA. The game should still be 100% playable with these, though.
Code License: GPLv3
Assets License: CC-BY-SA
Via RPS
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