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The first major community effort is coming out of the FreeGameDev community. It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art – either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project. As yet untitled and unorganised, it will be an effort to create a set of quality artwork for a specific genre – the fantasy genre is looking like the choice of the involved artists – that will be hosted in an easy to find / use place so that Free game developers can easily use this common media to create the basis of their own game before branching off in their own artistic direction once they attract contributors. Games like Scourge, JCRPG, Xarvh, 8 Kingdoms, and the many other open source fantasy/medieval games out there.

Speaking of new projects, FIFEngine and Zero Projekt have announced that they will collaborate to create a commercial quality techdemo (i.e. mini-game) that will showcase FIFEngine as a platform. More on this tomorrow.

The guys attempting to revive the Tux Racer / Planet Penguin Racer project under the new moniker Extreme Tux Racer are, despite not meeting their own scheduled expectations, keeping at it. They have a spiffy new logo!

Well, well, what have we here… the inaugral release of Silver Tree, brainchild of Battle for Wesnoth creator Dave White. Given the “resources” he has at his disposal – some of the core Wesnoth developers and artists are also set to contribute to Silver Tree – this really has to be a project to watch. Still, it’s early days for this 3D RPG and it’s hybrid real-time and turn-based gameplay. I couldn’t get it to compile (admittedly not trying to hard) so I’ll wait a bit.

I wonder if Silver Tree signals the “end” of Wesnoth development – in that it has gotten as far as it can really get as a game, besides bugfixes, new campaigns etc – as the core team are essentially moving on.

I see Auteria on the game tome. Not Free but freeware, YA3DMMORPG. (Yet Another…) ‘Nuff said. (The name makes me think ‘autism’… nothing to do with the quality of the game, just the the name.)

An up-to-date Linux port of Egoboo Resurrection is almost a reality. It is buildable although there’s a few reported issues. It looks like a public SVN is going to be made available, good news for the project, so helping out with development should be easier. The lead developer Zefz has been working hard on it in an unintentionally private manner.

The latest Sauerbraten release is now available from getdeb, and since I have a new spiffy laptop I thought I’d give it a try. The RPG levels are pretty awesome to look at – now maybe I’m not quite up to date on the latest commercial offerings but compared to recent popular commercial games like Enemy Territory and Half Life 2, a well designed Sauerbraten level looks very nice indeed. The grass and water shaders look lucious.

Freeciv 2.1beta6 SDL

I wanted to take screenshots of Sauer but it seems to have a few problems – occasional hangs, dumping me back into low-res X – and I’m too busy to resolve them. So somebody asked for a few Freeciv SDL screenshots, which I oblige.

Irrlamb 0.0.5 is out, introducing springs and other new features. The Linux binary won’t work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Gutsy so I haven’t tried it, but it seems to be shaping up nicely. Window and Ubuntu Feisty binaries are provided.

There’s also a new Thunder ‘n’ Lightning release. This action / flight combat project is becoming a much more playable game; performance enhancements, more graphical effects, and more deadly enemies. It is available as an autopackage – so should be easy to install for Linux users, and there’s a Windows binary too. I’m a big advocate of using autopackage for games because it makes it easier for people to play your FOSS game.

I’m not posting videos on Free Gamer at the moment because, well, they don’t work with Gnash and I’m not too fussed about setting up the proprietry Flash package. Gnash does claim to be compatable enough to play YouTube videos but sadly not on my machine.

There’s also more talk going on relating to a consolidated Free game art effort in the comments of previous posts – at some point I’ll be less lazy and summarize it all. One of the guys is designing a website for it and it will be the first official www.freegamedev.net project.

Since I’m a bit tight on time today I’m just going to post a few gripes I have with Freeciv 2.1beta6. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is shaping up to be a really, really nice game, but the SDL interface has some very annoying usability issues to address.

• If you run it in windowed mode, you can’t resize the game by resizing the window. The game display logic should be independent of the resolution, an absraction that many games fail to make.
• Auto-scrolling is annoying. It is especially annoying when playing in windowed mode when you are often moving the mouse cursor in and out of the game window. It would be better to scroll when pressing the right-mouse-button since the RMB is already used for manual movement.
• There is no UI to save/load games in the SDL client. A work around is to open a chat dialog and use the /save and /load commands.
• Freeciv dialogs have a red X with the tooltip “Cancel” to close them. Not only is ‘cancel’ a horrible word – implies losing any changes but it simply leaves the dialog – it is also innaccurate. “Close Dialog” is better. A better icon may be the circular arrow commonly used to represent returning to a previous screen.
• There’s no option to undo changes in a city dialog. Combine this with the “Cancel” situation and you have a very confusing UI.
• If you click on a group of units, a unit selection dialog pops up. If you the do an action with already-selected unit and the dialog does not close itself.
• I could see no obvious way to end the turn with the mouse – annoying for a mouse-driven game. After being told there is, I looked a bit harder. It’s an icon on the minimap panel, alongside various information icons. Hardly obvious – in a heavilty iconified UI like Freeciv SDL is aspiring to be, placing is important. They need to think a bit harder about this one. I would have placed it somewhere at the top near where the year is displayed since the turn and the game year are strongly associated and importantly you won’t be clicking on it by accident if it is up there (something easy to do currently as a small icon placed amongst a bunch of other small icons).

There are many positives to this Freeciv update, too many to mention. Lovely graphics, much more stable, classic-yet-balanced Civ gameplay. Freeciv 2.1 is going to be a showcase Free Software game.

I also downloaded the 0.7.0 release of Pingus. It’s shaping up nicely although some of the sounds fail to capture the cuteness of Lemmings. It was solid though.

Pingus 0.7.0 is available for download. With revival work complete, Pingus now uses SDL and comes with lovel anti-aliased fonts. There’s no new levels yet but with development seemingly back on track hopefully the level editor will return and some good levelsets will get contributed. It has a lot of potential as a game because the Lemmings series kinda, well, was more fun when it was 2D. If enough level makers could get together, I’d love to see a release inspired by “Oh no! More Lemmings” which was my favourite of the series and also incredibly challenging.

Another game with a major update is Egoboo Resurrection. There is a new fully working music system and major graphic enchancements – antialasing, shading, dithering and prespective correction all supported. (A long list of buzz words there.) Most importantly the lead developer Zefz is trying to get the game in SVN so others can contribute more easily and, speaking of contributions, somebody is already having a crack at porting it to Linux. At the moment it’s only available as a Linux download but “watch this space”. Well, not that precise space as that’ll only ever say “watch this space”. But in a more abstract sense I will hopefully be able to report a Linux port in the near future.

My post the other day, “Free this free that O_o” (catchy title eh?) sparked a lot of debate about the need for consolidation of Free Software game development efforts. You can read it there so I won’t repeat it all, but one comment did make me think and it is something I had thought about in the past as well – there is a tremendous amount of artistic and game design talent poured into making mods for commercial games. Whilst this comes good if the engine subsequently becomes open source (think Tremulous, World of Padman, and other iD game mods) there are many more examples where the game engine remains closed source. Take Air Buccaneers for example. It’s a jaw dropping mod for UT2004. What a shame it will only ever be a mod for a commercial game. Could these mods be a source of art if we proactively approach projects asking them to make their efforts Freely available? Maybe it could just work…

One of the productive conversations spawned by the above debate was the notion of a common media project. Take a target genre – Ben (the thread poster) suggested fantasy – and develop a set of decent media for it that games can use as a base before branching out in their own artistic direction. I think it’s a great idea.

Also there was a desire for a good quality Free art portal – there are already several efforts but they seem to just fail to capture the niche, to become that place that people say, “Hey, this is a great resource for good Free art!” Is a new one needed? A new idea, a new design? Or maybe just identify the best efforts and back them unequivocably to get the word out there? This is also something Ben touched on… it’ll be interesting to see where it goes. There’s already a lot of information collecting in the Game Media Creation section of the Free Game Dev forums.

One thing is for sure – the forums at www.freegamedev.net have proved there is a need for a consolidated Free game development community that was not previously being filled and there is a desire to provide a nexus where Free game developers can work together instead of in their disjoint and often isolated worlds that currently populate the open source game universe.