7DFPS - Open Source Prototypes (2012)

Of about 150 entries at the first seven day first person shooter development jam (7DFPS), so far I could identify two prototypes that have clear open source licensing in their code and run.

Note that this contest did not require sources to be released, only 19 entries had theirs released at time of writing.

Video: 7DFPS Cannonball Z Gameplay

Cannonball Z is a game where you shoot zombies with cannonballs. It features randomly generated maps.The source code is in the .zip file. The engine uses a BSD license. My code is GPL and my assets are CC BY-SA.

Video: 7DFPS: OxyFPS

OxyFPS is a simple first person shooter with the restriction of being in an oxygen-lacking environment.You are on an airless planet with only a suit, a crossbow and a tank of air.Your objective is to survive as long as you can while the corporate goons that caused this terraforming catastrophe hunt you down.

Then there's also Jedi-Academy--Renaissance, which I haven't been able to compile yet and Zombies in the Dark, which is only indirectly GPL-ed by being hosted on Google Code.

By the way: I participated in a project with my beginner Blender abilities but only the art assets are freely licensed.

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Great changes upcoming for UFO:AI

One of the FOSS projects I really hold dear (mainly because they chose to include a few models made by myself :p ) is UFO:AI.
For those totally out of the loop: it's a turn based strategy game based on the classic game X-Com utilizing an improved Quake2 engine.

Recently they had a new release, version 2.4, but the changes upcoming are even cooler (new soldier models and a greatly improved GUI):

More cool screens of those upcoming changes can be found here and here. And here you can find some more as part of a slightly older, but still interesting interview with the developers.

Besides these development news, there seems to have been an informal competition of who can do the nicer Let's Play videos of UFO:AI ;)

FrontFox's UFO:AI Let's Play video part1

Click here for Part 2 and Part 3, or check out this series of Let's Play videos as the alternative: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Part 1 starts out with an outdated version though).

So if you are hooked now by this awesome game, you might as well check out some alternatives: OpenXcom and XenoWar. Neither of which has as much polish and nice graphics as UFO:AI however.

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0 A.D. Audio interview and special effects

The premier FOSS RTS 0 A.D. has recently won (by an incredible small margin) the Sourceforge.net project of the month vote and now they have done a cool audio interview:

Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities?
Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.

Click here for the transkript of the full interview, but if you are to lazy to read you can also listen to it on that page in the original voices of the developers.

Besides this, they have recently implemented a lot of cool new graphical effects (I guess you could call it JUICE ;) ):

Distance fog and other new effects

For more nice screenshots of these effects, have a look at this post on their forums.

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Lips of Suna 0.6 and other RPG news

So my recent rant resulted in a lively discussion about ARPGs, but sadly not really in any contributions or new contributors for Summoning Wars so far... but maybe that was too much to hope for ;)

Anyways, another project I mentioned was just recently updated:

Lips of Suna is now available as Version 0.6 (release notes on our forums) and this release marks the first official release with OGRE3D as the rendering engine. In my rant I dissed that rendering engine a bit due to the lack of good content creation tools (yes I know, not their focus or intention), but at least here it seems to have been put to a good use.

In somewhat unrelated news, there is also a new version of OpenMW, which is continuing at their current fast pace to reimplement that well known RPG. Change-log can be also found in our forums.

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DNT 0.9: Map Editor, Art Asset/Game Content Re-Use and Open Source Game Project Infrastructure

images: DNT 0.9 scenes and editor shots

Video: DNTMapEditor - Using skorpio cave tileset [download]

DccNiTghtmare (DNT) is a 3D single-player RPG "in a satirical post-apocalyptical world", which encourages suggestions to be posted on their forum.

Version 0.9 has been released not long ago, which on the gameplay-side appears to mainly bring new models and audio. We have missed quite a few versions here on Free Gamer though. See the changelog for a complete list of versions and features.

As you can see in the video above, third party art assets were used. They were originally created for OpenDungeons and shared on OpenGameArt end of March 2012.

Project infrastructure includes translations on Launchpad, doxygen code documentation, a wiki with instructions for contributors and a roadmap (which is lacking the next version though).

PS: I'm having lots of fun translating the game right now. Join me in the thread!

Video: DNT 0.9 long gameplay

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Node Reviver: Open Source Ludum Dare Puzzle Prototype (GPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

image: Node Reviver main screen 

video: Node Reviver 1.0 Gameplay Video 

Game development jams bring many lines of usually dirty code that power often innovative new implementations of various mechanics and rules. Ludum Dare requires source to be visible but neither code nor art has to be freely licensed.

I believe that the histories of TuxKart/SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100 and OpenArena show that maintenance can be one of the strengths of the open source game development scene. Having more gamejam-made working prototypes available under "safe" free licenses would enable this community to pick up promising projects and slowly build upon them.

Anyways, one of the games that has more than proper licensing information and is both free, open source code and art is Node Reviver. A short description:

• Game mechanics and level designs intersecting with Pac-Man's PipeWalker's.
• Light neon colors on black background visuals.
• Bfxr sound effects (with sound sources included, nice!)

Links:

• GitHub project page
• Developers' blog
• Node Reviver on PyGame.org

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OpenGOO and Using Inkscape or Blender for Editing Maps/Levels

Building bridges in OpenGOO

video: New Physics in OpenGOO

You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed.

Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO

A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape

There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in Shotgun Debugger! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general.

SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!)

Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

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Dust Racing: high speed, Qt-based, cross-platform, with editor

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars

Dust Racing (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system.

Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor

Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply.

Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

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GameLV: Completely Free, Open Source Point And Click Post-Soviet Adventure Game

Post-Soviet Adventure's protagonist cleaning up the inventory

The story of GameLV: Adventure Game in Post Soviet Environment (Post-Soviet Adventure) begins with your dog having gone missing and your only lead being a meat product factory. For about one hour you point-and-click through pre-rendered environments, hunt pixels, read humorous descriptions and dialogues to reach a resolution.

I for one appreciate the humor in AGiPSE's humor, which I might have a high affinity to due to do my roots in Russia and my life taking place in eastern Berlin most of its time.

Be warned though: references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography and violence are common in this game.

Post-Soviet Adventure is available in English and Latvian languages, both text and voice, although the English voices are incomplete.

video: [English Voices] Adventure in Post Soviet Environment (GameLV) by snauts (Artūrs Grebstelis)

The engine features savegames and scene animations and uses image masks to set define interactive areas. Text files seem to be used for defining the game.

To use voices, see following note:

So here is GameLV HEAD from our local repo with half way done english speech that has terrible pronunciation and was abandoned. http://piepe.lv/game-lv/assemble.tgz
That "assemble" is the same as "data" directory on https://github.com/snauts/GameLV, just put your binary in there and run.
P.S. My uplink to foreign countries is slow, so it should take a while for you download it. [mediafire mirror]
P.S.S If you want to run latvian version issue (in assemble directory)
sed "s/\-en//" *.lst -i
UI will still be in english because UI strings are compiled into engine.

Both code and art are freely licensed and the very nice music was even written and performed for the game. Some sounds have unknown sources though and finding freely licensed replacements on Freesound and OpenGameArt would be a way to contribute to the project.

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Arx Libertatis 1.0 "Bloody Gobblers!" released!

Walking in the underground city hub in Arx Libertatis

Looking up magic recipes and managing inventory while a vision enhancement is active in Arx Libertatis

[more screens]

Arx Libertatis 1.0 has been released. We already wrote about the engine a month and a half ago but this is the first official, stable release of the GPL-licensed engine for the proprietary first-person cave RPG Arx Fatalis.

But being able to play the proprietary game is not the end of the development. There are plans for future milestones, for example a Qt-based modern game editor and support for modern shaders. I look forward to it!

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Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

                            

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

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Stunt-Rally 1.5 Multiplayer

We are getting a lot of nice mails from developers lately... not sure yet if I am annoyed by the spam or pleased that I don't have to do any research of my own :p
These must be the benefits of real journalists who always get these nice offers from lobbying firms to write fair and balanced articles for them (yeah, I included some social commentary in this blog!).

So... what was in my spam folder lately? Stunt-Rally got an version 1.5 release (changelog here) which a prominent new feature: multiplayer!

Multiplayer test in Stunt-Rally 1.5

You can find a small guide to set up a multiplayer game here. Not sure if player collision is also implemented... it would be cool however ;)

In general I really think the physics are too bouncy however... not sure if that hits the nail, but something feels off about them. Also... "LOD popping" trees is soo last century :p

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April Snippets

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets.

A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread.

219 bytes tron is:

<body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload=
  z=c.getContext('2d');
  z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325);
  setInterval("
    0<x%n
    &x<n*n
    &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1)
      ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++)
      :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s
  ",9)
><canvas id=c>

Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post, is:

• A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file
• A small part of your build chain

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OpenMW 0.13.0 released

Normally qubodup is responsible for this type of games (I have to admit, never liked Morrowind, nor any predecessors or sequels), but since they are doing such a good job of promoting it (and Q is busy), so I will give them their desired news:

The OpenMW developers have just released our latest version of OpenMW. I was hoping you could post on Freegamer. Below is our message, feel free to put your own spin on it. Also it looks like the Arx Liberatis folks are almost ready to release their 1.0. Thanks!

OpenMW 0.13.0 trailer

Hot on the heels of 0.12.0, the OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.13.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA. Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page. This release notably includes functional NPC dialogue, and beautiful sky! There is a great new demonstration video for 0.13.0 up YouTube channel and a new video showing off our improved physics implementation which is scheduled for version 0.14.0.

Please note:
- On OSX, the path to the application cannot contain spaces, or the launcher will not work properly.

Changelog:

- NPC Dialogue window and mechanics implemented
- Reimplemented sky rendering, added weather effects
- Wireframe mode added
- Fix for sounds broken in 0.12.0
- Fix for 3D sounds
- Added sounds for weather, doors, containers, picking up items, and journal
- Various code cleanup and improvements
- Fixed an Ogre crash at the Dren plantation
- Several launcher improvements
- Added fade to black effect for cutscenes
- Added backend for equipping items
- Fix to stop ASCII 16 character from being added to console on its activation in OSX
- Fixed collision shapes being out of place
- Fixed torch lights not being visible past a short distance
- Fixed some transparency rendering problems

Website
http://openmw.org/en/

Download Page
http://code.google.com/p/openmw/downloads/list

YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrOpenMW

Forum
http://openmw.org/forum/

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New Me and My Shadow release

Almost forgot posting about this... somehow our "own" projects here on FreeGameDev.net get somewhat neglected on the blog from time to time...

But it's not because we don't care ;) So check this great new trailer for Me and My Shadow:

New Me and My Shadow trailer

Or head over to the release announcement on our forums to read about the changes in version 0.3 and download it! Don't forget to comment too ;)

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New RTS releases: 0 A.D. and Zero-K

Hot news of today is the Alpha 9 release of 0 A.D.:

0 A.D. Alpha 9 gameplay

Main additions are the Roman faction, a new combat concept and new trading system. The new combat concept allows for a strategic selection of your troops to counter certain units (spearmen are better against cavalry and so on) and the trading systems allows for setting up trade routes etc.
Oh and they are still looking for contributers ;)

A little bit less hot news, but still quite recent, is the new version 1.0.3.3. of Zero-K, a cool RTS set in the future (if you are a regular reader you should know it ;) ).

Zero-K gameplay

It now runs on the recently released 87.0 release of the SpringEngine and also features a new faction: the amphibious bots.
Sadly their interesting meta-game PlanetWars is currently closed for reworking, but the next round will happen at some point for sure.

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Trophy 2.0: championship, shop, load/save

Trophy's shop

The top-down racing/shooting game Trophy 2.0 brings championship, shop, key configuration, load/save features and lot of code refactoring. It requires ClanLib 1.0, which unfortunately fails to compile on Arch Linux.

If you too can't get this game to run, there's still Bandit Racer for playing in the browser.

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Xonotic 0.6 released

For those not playing with the autobuild releases, I have good news! A new version of the totally FOSS, competitive multiplayer FPS Xonotic has been released.

Find the released announcement and download links directly here.

The two most important feature additions are a stats tracking system, which can be found via this webpage.

And the addition of client side scripted player-models, which probably doesn't say much to the regular user, but from a developer's point of view it is a pretty great thing ;) Expect many cool advances to come from this over the next couple of months.

Oh and try also the Overkill server, which runs a cool mod with totally new player-models and weapon mechanics, combining insta-gib with a more complex game-play etc. (in Xonotic, server admins can decide to hosts mods and players are automatically supplied with all needed files when joining the server).

Let's hope this new release will increase the player-base a bit, as this game really deserves more attention.

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Arx Libertatis: promising GPL engine for proprietary RPG

Arx Libertatis logo

Arx Libertatis is the name of the GPLv3-ed Arx Fatalis (proprietary game) engine. It features a unique "draw symbols to cast spells" magic system and has an own scripting engine (described as "a mess, but at least a human readable mess").

video: Arx Libertatis status Feb 2012

The game engine runs the proprietary game with tolerable lag in some game areas on an ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook on Linux and I am close to completing the game from start to end. It can also be compiled on Windows and OS X. A stable release is not yet finished.

Can Arx Libertatis be used to create a free-as-in-freedom game?

No. Not yet.

As-is, i don't think creating custom models, etc. will be easy. We will add support for more common formats in the future, but for now our focus has been on porting and cleaning up the engine and there is still lots to clean up.

dscharrer of #arxfatalis

While image and sound files are in common formats, 3d models are in a format that mostly has not been explored.

If you're interested to dig deeper into the project's status, I recommend starting with reading the mission statement and filetypes wiki pages.

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TremZ aka Unvanquished 1st alpha released

Hmm... the previously mentioned TremZ project, which btw changed name to "Unvanquished" (which I find much less catchy than the previous name) has released as promised their first alpha on the last day of February.

However as I can't get it to run on Linux (nor on Windows for that matter), I will have to rely on forum postings from which I extract that it really is an alpha and you shouldn't get your hopes too high that it is much more than Tremulous at this point (graphics and game-play wise)...

WIP Unvanquished playermodel

But try it yourself... if you are on a non-optimus system it will probably work fine with Windows ;)

Edit:  A somewhat controversial split-up seems to have happened in the development team. Read here about one side of the argument... you can find the over side of the discussion also via the forums or the irc channels. Not sure what to make of it, but I will keep you informed as soon as the dust has settled ;)

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