Harder Than It Should Be

Open Football

I'm really excited this morning. Go on, ask me why! Well, since you asked :-) it's because I came across a new football game project... Open Football. Ok, it's only available from SVN, the game is far from complete, but look at the screenshot. It looks full of potential! Project description:

"Open Football aims to become the new best multiplatform soccer game that everyone can enjoy. Providing arcade style playing while still mantaining the manager side of the game ensures hours of high quality, nail bitting fun."

I'm giddy just imagining it. I hope they set up some more infrastructure (think nicer phpBB forums, mailing lists etc) so people can get involved. As all you budding developers [should] know, infrastructure fosters communities. No infrastructure, no community! And the SF.net forums are a pile of stinking <censored> so don't rely on those. ;-)

So, yeah, I want to install Freeciv 2.1beta3 on my Linux laptop. What's this? I have to compile it myself? And people wonder why desktop-Linux take-up is so slow? I mean, for the love of Mary, I'm using Ubuntu... the most popular distro... yet I have to trawl forums looking for .debs of the latest release of one of the most popular Linux games, finding only broken links and "email me for it" posts. Why don't people embrace solutions like Autopackage? This is a topic I might have a big whine about someday here on FG.

Whilst searching, I did come across GetDeb. This is a nice idea, a community run portal for uploading unofficial packages for Ubuntu. There's quite a few games listed. (It amuses me that the 'games' category id is 1.) I think Autopackage needs something similar in order to bolster it's popularity. The way they list their packages is, well, rubbish.

Ok I ran out of things to talk about.

Music tip:

Jesse Garcia - Work This Pussy

*childish chuckles*

Release Early, Release Often

Wormux<

I had a go at Wormux last night. It's a Worms clone, closest to Worms II. I'm impressed, this is a well done game although it lacks is AI. Once it has AI, it will be one of those awesome games that everybody should have (like Frozen Bubble).

There was a game looking for testers... I forgot what it was though. :-(

Another game that needs a bit of help testing new developments is Battle for Antargis. Development seemed to have stopped earlier in the year but fortunately it has restarted. A bit of testing and ironing out of any major issues and they'll make another release, so go help out if you have time.

Battle for Antargis

Battle for Antargis is one of the more original FLOSS games (inspired by Powermonger which older readers might remember), so it would be nice to see it progress further.

Now that FreeTrain in English development has begun, I might make another project to resurrect another FLOSS game. At the moment I'm thinking either Emilia Pinball or Eat the Whistle. Both are playable games, the former lacks good pinball tables and the latter needs a bit of debugging to run more reliably plus it's graphics are a little too retro. Any preferences? Please comment - feel free to suggest other games that you think need attention too.

I think I finally talked the Vega Strike people into making another release after years without an update. The development has always been active but just lacks focus. The new release should be an awesome game although may be a little rough around the edges (read: have a few bugs). In the mean time, people continue to produce jaw-dropping media for the game.

Not quite FLOSS, but the rather cool freeware transport sim Simutrans is close to another stable release. It's development has been impressively steady and the latest version is much improved over the current stable version.

In more personal news, I started hacking together a Football Management game, entitled Soccer Boss (in homage to the ancient Spectrum game Soccer Boss). At the moment it's just a UI sandbox. When it's useful, I'll comment some more.

Music tip:

68 Beats - Replay The Night (John Dalhback mix)

Strawberries & Cream

I had these grand plans for today, but instead I slept through two alarms and got to work 2 hours late, and forgot what my plans were. *groan*

Eat the Whistle



ActionCube

Anyhow, onto relevant matters, that previously-imminent VDrift release is now official. Go get it, honestly it is a good experience. And it looks great too. :-)

I played Eat the Whistle for the first time yesterday. Any attempts to run it on Linux had failed even though it has been ported, but I thought I'd have a crack on my Windows laptop and (despite a few graphical glitches) it worked! It's good fun although whenever the other team had the ball I struggled to locate the player I was in control of. However in terms of gameplay feel, it's quite nice to play and a little reminiscent of Sensible Soccer although more dynamic but not quite as sharp.

Not sure if I've mentioned this before, so I'll mention it now... ActionCube looks fun. I might have a bash at it later in the week. Think Counter Strike meets Cube. They are using the Cube engine instead of the Sauerbraten engine (aka Cube2) because, when the project started, Sauer was in constant flux (and still isn't declared to be stable).

Um... I had other things to mention but I'm out of time. Go play Wesnoth or something. ;-)

Music tip:

Filthy Rich - Shake it (Steve Lawler mix)

Go With The Flow

Firstly a quick update on FreeTrain. The main game has now been translated, so should compile and run on Windows. At the moment, though, there are a few things to be addressed before it can be officially released and also it probably needs porting to SDL to run on Linux as - although Mono is implementing WinForms - it makes a few DirectX calls. That and I'm too lame (in combination with VS2005) to even make it compile on Windows.

FlowFlowMania, a Pipe Mania clone, showed up on Freshmeat today. Sadly there's only 2 playable levels and graphics for a resolution of 320x240 but it's early days yet so hopefully development will continue. I loved Pipe Mania when it came out on my ZX48+.

Since I was commenting on FLOSS platform games (or lack of) the other day, "Steve" brought to my attention his game - Danger Man. I gotta say, although it's early days for this game (don't expect much), it was a fun to play for a few minutes. It's only v0.1 and there's no real animation but the essential gameplay elements are there. Danger Man reminded me a bit of Abuse [SDL] (Freshmeat link due to homepage not working) with the mouse/keyboard combination, although it has a long way to go before it reaches a similar level of polish.

SuperTux

Continuing the platformer theme, I played SuperTux 0.3.0 for the first time yesterday. It felt sluggish and generally not-as-fun (on my 1Ghz laptop) compared to SuperTux 0.2.0. Maybe I'm just getting old or something? It is labelled a "preview" release so I also had a look at their progress towards a full Milestone 2 release (v0.4.0 I presume) and noted a complaint about a penguin that can't swim. Does anybody else see an opportunity for a Mario meets Ecco the Dolphin clone? Now that would be something special. :-)

Of course to do that well, you might want 3D characters instead of 2D sprites. Perhaps an adaption of the Windstille engine? I'm an idea-a-minute at the moment!

I love Fish Fillets. If you haven't played it, go to that link IMMEDIATELY. I like it that much, that I'm going to mention it's commercial follow up - Fish Fillets II. The graphics are, as usual, much improved. Anyway, I mention it only to see if people can bug Altar Games to either make a Linux port or perhaps GPL the engine so people can do it themselves aka Fish Fillets NG.

There's a rumour that UFO:AI 2.1 will get released before the end of the month. They got bored backporting changes from SVN trunk to the 2.0 branch so skipped an official 2.0 release altogether (after 6 RCs). I've no complaints with that - at the end of the day open source developers have limitted time. If something is actually detracting from development then sometimes it is better to forget about it. At the end of the day players want the latest, greatest stuff so generally will prefer a quick 2.1 release to a 2.0 release that delays v2.1 of the game. Besides, the developers can just argue that 2.0 was just a preview of 2.1 anyway! ;-)

Music tip:

Conamore - I've Got This Feeling (Ben Macklin Mix)

Oh My Word

I didn't have an opportunity to sleep last night so inaccuracy, incompleteness, general rubbishness, etc, to be expected. ;-)

FG has come a long way since it started. I got sortable tables working yesterday for the main list so next step is to fill out the list properly and create the other lists. More tweaking is required on the template, but I think I'm in a position to finish off the upgrade next week. Not today.

In case you hadn't guessed I'm a little light on subject matter today.

TecnoballZ

TecnoballZ is a breakout game with an anime feel. The graphics have a nice oldskool feel to them, the sound is entertaining, and importantly the game evolves very quickly. Too many breakout games leave you waiting for ages to nail the last few bricks - but with weapons and multi-ball and all kinds of enhancements that quickly build up you never seem to suffer that with TecnoballZ. It's fun for a few minutes. :-)

There's stuff happening over with Windstille, a platform game full of potential. There's a really old gameplay video, and lots of graphics coming out of the woodwork. I hope there'll be a playable release soon because it's just the type of open source game that is missing - a nice looking platformer that plays like Turrican. If you don't know what I'm talking about then check out these freeware Turrican remakes, notably T2002, T4_funeral from the download page - Windows only. :-(

That's enough. My head hurts. Music tip:

Rivera & Padilla - Sick

Oh, the irony. :-)

Egoboo vs FreeTrain vs VDrift

Egoboo 2.3.6 is released! This is a major development in what was a dead game. Egoboo used to be a darling of open source gaming, so I'm hopeful it will rise like a phoenix and restore it's reputation.

Somebody has joined the FreeTrain localization effort! Daniel Markstedt, who also contributes to FreeCiv under the handles dmarks/hima, has started translating the game into English and posting patches to the mailing list (soon to be in SVN).

The VDrift team are gearing up for a release. I downloaded the latest test autopackage and, I must say, I was impressed. Aside from a clunky menu, this felt like playing a commercial racing game. Nice graphics, nice car handling, nice tracks. It took me a while to work out how to get started [you need to press 'w' to shift up a gear to start a race, even with autoshift enabled] but it was a lot of fun after that. :-)

I believe this will be a landmark release for VDrift that will see it rise to the challenge of being a viable alternative to commercial racing titles by attracting a lot of users and subsequently contributors. Ok, ok, the crystal ball is going back under the table.

Penumbra

One game I'd forgotten about, although I could have sworn blind I mentioned it on Free Gamer, is freeware horror FPS Penumbra. Currently only a tech demo (circa 2006) is available but it looks quite cool and innovative. Although I was more interested in the Frictional Games blog than the game itself - they talk about quite a few interesting game development problems such as simple fog being obstructed by shaders.

Speaking of game development stuff... devmaster.net is a hub of activity where developers can bump heads together in an attempt to, er, develop. They mention lots of game engine developments and stuff like that, some Free, some free, and some probably not free. Still it's all interesting if you are into that kind of thing.

Music tip:

Bliss N Script - Honey Child (Beatmasters mix)

Slowly Does It

Ok, I made a few minor improvements... it'll take a while to get this right. My advice; do not hold your breath. You'll die! :'(

Shall I be on-topic for a change with a few game mentions? Ok.

I'll start with Those Funny Funguloids! This 3D "mushroom collecting" game looks gorgeous, sounds lovely, is open source, is simple and fun, but is currently Windows-only. :-( Please port it to Linux, somebody! All the libraries it uses (OGRE, Lua, FMod Ex) work on Linux, so it should not only be feasible but quite easy.

A game that does run on Linux, though, is Widelands. And they just released their latest version of the game. If you remember and like Settlers II then you'll love this. It still feels a little rough, mostly to do with the slightly unintuitive UI and lack of tutorials, but it is definitely getting there.

Music tip:

TV Rock feat. Seany B - Flaunt It (Dirty South mix)

Ok, the rest is diatribe about FG & Blogger so if you don't want to know then don't read on. But you are still reading? Don't blame me. Stop reading!

I had to turn off automatic line breaks. That means going through all 80-something previous posts and manually adding <p> and <br/> tags. Happy happy joy joy! Next task is getting the sortable table to work with the main list. A few more tricks are required, but I'm hopeful it will work eventually - providing a giant sortable list of Free games.

Of course a big list is unwieldy. After I have refined it there will be other lists sprouting up, so don't worry, the format will reflect (to a degree) the nice organised lists that were there once before. :-)

Only Free Software will be in the main lists, although there will be a special page for notable freeware titles. Anyway, once complete, it will all be much more manageable *cheer* and useful *cheer* and generate more hits for when I reinstate Google ads *charlie cheers*.