The people behind the always very indi friendly and well renowned commercial Torque 3D engineannounced a fews weeks ago that they will release the quite fully featured engine and tool-box under the very liberal and FOSS MIT license.
Some of you might remember the engine from the good old days of Tribes 2, but as you can see it has advanced quite a bit since then. Sadly it also lost its Linux and MacOS ports along the way, which is something the creators hope to have restored more quickly in the open-source version. Other show-stoppers on non-Windows platforms are a few remaining to be removed propitiatory qt-lib in the editor framework and so on. So if you think you can help them with either or those problems, have a look at their git repo here (click on “zip” to download you local copy).
Hmm… what does that mean for the FOSS gamer (besides some commercial game ports to Linux probably soon)? Well Torque is a really good tool-set to create new FOSS games, and they really tried to keep the entry barrier low, which is something that sadly can not be said for most other FOSS 3D engines. So in the longer run there might be some cool new games utilizing it. But for now I hope to see a fully FOSS version of this little gem soon
As always… we will keep you updated with our irregular posts
FreeOrion 0.4.1 has been released a month ago. There still is no manual ship combat mode and there is a certain sluggishness regarding GUI responsiveness but the beautiful audio and graphics and consistent writing are definitely worth a try.
You can check out a preview of current 3d ship combat tech demo in this video (7m30s in).
Xonotic
image: Sniping a Hovercraft on Unsealed Trial 2 in Xonotic (more screens)
Some helpful vote commands: vcall timelimit 600 (for when the time is draining too quickly) vcall gotomap unseal (for when you realize that Unsealed Trial is the only playable map )
If you’d like to record your own videos, all you need to know is on Xonotic’s Democapture wiki page.
Somewhat related to the previous blog post (don’t forget to vote to give a VR kit to the Cube2 developers), I can bring you the news that you can now download a new release (1.3 Galactic Edition) of Red Eclipse. By the words of the developers this is mostly a bugfix release:
This release sees a semi-stabilisation of the gameplay in favour of implementing a variety of bugfixes and user requests. We’ve removed some old cruft and implemented a few new game types to replace them, like coop (humans fight high powered bots), and king-of-the-hill (control and defend one flag). Due to the popularity of the impulse/parkour system we have introduced a new “impulse vaulting”, where you can hold down your parkour key to “vault” over low obstacles, making it that much easier to navigate around busy levels.
But you can read up on the full changelog in the release thread on our forums. Oh and maybe you can help them out and create a new teaser video for their website?
On our forums I was also recently reminded of a Red Eclipse based mod called MekArcade (see more infos on their Moddb site), which as you can guess adds Mechs to the game.
Some MekArcade mechs
Information is otherwise relatively sparse (I couldn’t find any word on their media license for example… but given RE’s CC-By-SA licensing scheme I hope they sticked to the same), but they plan to release a first version relatively soon (Maybe they waited for the RE 1.3 release?). The screenshots released so far look quite nice also and first released video gives off a Mechwarrior like vibe too, so I guess I am looking forward to their first release
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.
The Flight of the Maxima (TFM) is an unlikely fusion of Sci-fi, dark comedy and medieval Christianity.
It is a free roaming roleplaying computer game where you can explore vast lands, talk to an extremely diverse amount of people, and do a lot of crazy things that certainly sounded like a good idea at the time.
There’s also a central story element that begins with you suddenly finding yourself a long way from home and dealing with… well let’s not spoil things just yet.
The game can run on Linux and Windows, is intended to run on Mac (untested as of late), and both the games code and it’s assets are Open Source (BSD), which means you can modify and redistribute the game nearly any way you want.
The game compiles fine for example on Arch Linux 64bit (with these hints). One license problem is the use of non-free FMOD but if I understand correctly, that dependency is optional.
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.
Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).
ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.
SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.
FLARE, a hack’n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.
), but last month the first stable release of 
