The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0.
Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite.
A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game?
The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it.
The project uses the “Release early and often” mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon.
If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum.
An editor for OpenMW!
The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn’t capable of. It’s currently a one man project and he could use some help. Visit the OpenMW Editor forum.
I have to apologize for the recent lack in FG updates, but at least *I* have a good excuse as first my Internet broke down, and now I am preparing to relocate to another continent (extra points for guessing which in the comments ).
Anyways… it seems like there is now a “winner” out of the total breakdown and split-up of the efforts to revitalize Tremulous earlier this year. I will not go into details, but I can assure you it was not pretty, and I decided to skip any news coverage on it until the dust had settled. I hope this is now the case, and for now it seems only one of the projects really shows some progress… that is unless the other is not working in stealth mode.
Lets see… at least Unvanquished is actually releasing alphas of their game, so I am leaning toward them when it comes to which will actually become a nice, playable game soon.
You can follow development quite well on one of the team-member’s blog here. In the most recent post, some nice screenshots surfaced, and both their new modeling, GUI and animation work seems quite nice too.
Unvanquished: Human base preparing for an attack
Anyways, check out the other cool news from them, and maybe try one of their recent alphas… however don’t expect a fully refurbished Tremulous yet.
We are a bit late to the party (partially due to my current German Telekom induced Internet abstinence at home ), but last month the first stable release of Annex: Conquer the World was released.
For those out of the loop: Annex is a so called total conversion mod (albeit standalone) of Megaglest. You can read up on its development and the latest news in their forum post on the MG forums.
Yesterday the long awaited version 0.7 1.0 was released and thus after 7 years of development War§ow has gone out of beta.
For those out of the loop, here is a short description of it by the developers:
Warsow is a fast paced, deathmatch game. It has your classic things like bunny hopping, rocket jumping, and general mayhem. There’s many game modes, including, Bomb & Defuse, CTF, Instagib, and the classic 1v1 Duel.
For those wondering, there is some discussion here with War§ow developers trying to justify their decision to keep the art assets non-free and why there isn’t a open source-code repository. Personally I am not convinced, but at least they release their engine code and promise to keep the overall game always freeware…
However besides that, it’s a fun FPS! So try some crazy parcour-like moves yourself
The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order… But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60; because as you should know… a higher number is always better :p
New alien spider bots!
Obviously it wasn’t just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release. Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan:
Open Sourced. Ever Evolving.
Which has a certain ring to it
Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War§ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice screenshots) what kind of changes you can expect here.
Screenshot from the War§ow 0.7 changelog thread
There is also an BETA release of the version 0.7 (which according to standard version naming schemes should be a beta itself I guess ) which can be downloaded here.
Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features.
Sintel: The Game, currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet).
Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator.
Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog.
Frogatto is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started “making friends” on their blog by talking about projects they like.
idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article.
A discussion about OpenGameArt‘s usability for game developers started on their forums. Improvements were recently added to the texture section and this is a chance to formulate enhancement to the other sections.
Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed… however that was never officially announced until now:
This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools… Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don’t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers. Whats more, the code is available… Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any budding coders out there who want to be part of the OverDose team be sure to get in touch, we always, ALWAYS need more coders
In their recent news they also mention that they have realized that keeping the source closed doesn’t help against hackers (a realization that comes better late then never ) and that their updated (GTK-Radiant based) level-editor is now available. That they add all their other (AFAIK Windows only) tools into the open-source mix too is an unexpected but very nice bonus!
Some recent automatic foliage tests
I assume by asking for code access they will point you to the “hidden” repository here, but giving them some positive feedback by asking for it, will probably be the “right thing”tm to do
Oh and don’t miss the long WIP thread with some nice (but over post-processed) screens here.
WIP weapon model
Last but not least: To avoid sounding too negative *again*, I think this is a great development and this could become a really nice open-source modding platform, specially if they make at least a base set of assets available under a more liberal license *hint* So show them some support by helping out or maybe donating.
But at least the awesome guys over at Xonotic took their time and wrote up what exciting new additions are on their way to version 0.7 in their latest edition of what they call WoX-Blox #4.
There you can read up up exiting changes to the Railroad tycoon mod they are working on… watch this video… pure exitement:
Ok I was kidding about the last part… that is actually one among many cool small additions they are working on to make Xonotic an even better game. Not mentioned in the blog yet, are the cool modifications to the Overkill mod and the vehicles tZork is currently working on and which can be tested already on a few servers.
Staying with the FPS Topic, it seems like the development of the GPLed Doom3/idtech4 code is finally moving somewhere. However iodoom3 (besides that they got a nice looking website recently) is not the center of development as it was the case with ioquake3 it seems. The Doom3World forums are buzzing with activity though, with open-source commercial developers looking into porting their upcoming games to idtech4, people working on code and openSDK enhancements and an awesome code review of the idtech4 engine to jump-start potential developers.
Some more (uncommented) gameplay can be seen also in this video. The next version will still require a few Doom3 assets however, so if you are skilled in texture making, mapping (with their DarkRadiant) or such, offer them some help to get rid of those last remaining dependencies. However AFAIK most of the new art is also non-FOSS and only freeware (or at least I can find any info on the art license… please comment if you know better) :-/
Last but not least there also seems to be another awesome looking Doom3 mod, aiming to go standalone at some point: Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer’s Key. No idea when and how, but I guess they are just waiting for a more stable idtech4 community version.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
).
), but last month the first stable release of 
) and that their updated (GTK-Radiant based) level-editor is now available. That they add all their other (AFAIK Windows only) tools into the open-source mix too is an unexpected but very nice bonus!
