Free Gamer - open source games

Some more (L)GPL strategy game love

Published on 2010-08-26 16:14:00

Ok, quick update before too much dust gathers around here ;) Just yesterday I stumbled upon this gem of a strategy game over at LGDB: They call that simple bot??? Its name is Quantum, as some of you might have guessed it is a clone of Dyson/Eufloria. But the game is quite mesmerizing with the strange background noise and your armies of small space tree spores conquering new worlds. But try it yourself! Now normally clones are not as good as the original, right? Not is this case: Full multipla

O A.D. Alpha 1 Argonaut

Published on 2010-08-16 12:18:00

Fresh from our forums come the news that the first playable (multi-player only) alpha of O A.D. has been released! 0 A.D. Alpha 1 video It features "aggressive units that attack enemies on sight, lifelike animals that escape danger, two new maps, in-game multiplayer chat and much more"! Check their release news for more details and instructions how to install. As always this gem of a game is looking for helping hands, so join them now and become part of FOSS gaming history! P.S.: I will b

RTCW and ET open-sourced

Published on 2010-08-15 12:26:00

You probably heard it before elsewhere, but I was waiting for some actual developments to occur instead of making yet another "yay! source release!!!" blog entry ;) Anyways... the kind people over at id software have decided to release the source code of this two awesome games under the GPLv3. The guys behind the engine improvements of Quake3, IoQuake3 have already a source repository running and you can expect them to merge all the nice stuff from their Quake3 version into it soon (like in

Quake2 engine day ;)

Published on 2010-08-11 11:20:00

Ok, today I have quite a lot of stuff, and its all Quake2 related :p Believe it or not Quake2 is alive and kicking... and its engine is featuring some of the very best open-source games! For those who might have missed it: AlienArena 7.45 has been released recently and the release makes an already solid game even more awesome ;) Further more the UFO:AI team is making some great progress after their highly acclaimed 2.3 release two months ago. Besides a a lot smaller changes, various new sounds h

Some puzzle games

Published on 2010-08-09 18:54:00

Can you imagine what a mix between a Pin-Ball machine, a physics simulator and a breakout clone would look like? Well your wildest dreams have been answered! Check this out: The game Flipout combines all this, and is a very challenging game in addition (didn't manage to even complete the first level :( ). But try it yourself ;) Another pretty interesting game by the same author is Mechanical Tower, a self described tower defense game: "but instead of defending with towers, you defend in a towe

Two weeks?

Published on 2010-08-04 17:41:00

Has it really been that long since the last post here? I'd better contribute before tumble weed hits the front page. Egoboo 2.8.0 has been released (download + changelog). The Egoboo team stress this is an unstable release, that it hasn't yet seen the kind of testing they would like it to have, but it is "biggest release Egoboo has ever had" so it is good news for the project. Which got me thinking of the successor to Egoboo, SoulFu. Now, this project has had a rocky history. The author

Assorted FPS news

Published on 2010-07-20 12:16:00

Lets start with the big news for today :) A new version of Cube2:Sauerbraten was released today: Justice Edition! Changes include two new player-models, 30 new maps, a mini radar and the new hold and efficiency game modes. For a full change log click here. The blue base! The new game mode "efficiency" gives you a set amount of ammunition and all weapons, and you can only "reload" when re-spawning and in the "hold" mode you get points when holding the flag for 30 seconds for your team Upcomin

Convergent evolution?

Published on 2010-07-14 05:33:00

Today we have a small biology lesson ;) Have a look at this screenshot: A nice warehouse TeamFortress2, right? Well WRONG ;) It is actually a screenshot from one of the maps from the upcoming War§ow 0.55 release! War§ow is a open-source game based on the updated Quake2 engine QFusion, and has already seen some quite successful previous releases. They focus on a fast, e-sports style game play and their general art direction is a pretty nice cell-shaded comic world. Lately their their style

Strap-on-bomb Car: One-Button Mini-Racing game

Published on 2010-07-11 08:47:00

Str.. Bomb Car! Awesome! A one-button mini car racing game where you have to blow up your car in the most hilarious way thinkable! No wait, that's not right. It's actually a time trial game but this kid [tinyogg] figured out what's most fun to do! So you use the space bar to make the car either turn left or right but for whatever reason there is a bomb, where a bumper should be. Get it here in a .zip for OSX/Win/Lin32&64/src if your computer can run 3D games! Both game content and source c

Deep Adventure GPLed, Pretty HTML5 Pong, Red Eclipse Status

Published on 2010-07-09 15:06:00

Feeling random! Bullets! Colors! (Sun does that to you! Don't go outside! Stay inside and make open source games!) Country of Origin is now GPLed You are in a computer game in which you have to find the essence of time and space. You could be tempted to think this quest is in vain, because you think that questions are more important than answers. But you are in a computer game. Games have solutions for they consist of puzzles. And as Thomas Kuhn says, although intrinsic value is no prerequi

MegaGlest 3.3.5 Pre-release special!

Published on 2010-07-03 19:30:00

A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here. MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a

Coldest, LinWarrior, Metallblech - Mech Combat Action Games

Published on 2010-06-24 21:05:00

I stumbled upon an older release of Coldest while making space on my HDD for game video recording, Metallblech popped out of nowhere recently on our forums with awesome art and I still haven't tried Linwarrior's latest release. Time for a mech games post! Mechs are big robots and they make sounds like this and you can have great fun assembling them and then blowing stuff up! Metallblech Mashup of Metallblech's art Planned as a game for Syntensity, there are many models ready for usage in Met

HE'S ALIVE

Published on 2010-06-23 17:46:00

*Qubodup's eyes shift left and right* Qubodup mutters, "I smell death." *Charlie jumps out from behind a tree* "No! It's me!" Or maybe Q meant death by a thousand of Charlie's bad jokes? I got jokes, man. Ok, ok... games stuff. Enough inane joke stuff. Games... FreeOrion 0.3.14 came out with a fairly mega changelog. A preview of the 3d space combat is in there, as well as lots of fixing and balancing and content enhancing. It's becoming a very deep game and once the 3d combat is done

DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition

Published on 2010-06-23 01:12:00

Squamulus in the forums has pointed us to the DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition, a competition for complete-ish open source games, wherein the winners get ported to their new all-encompassing content delivery/creation system WorldKi Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you wa

BOFH: Servers Under Siege

Published on 2010-06-20 05:23:00

BOFH title screen: NINJAS AND PIr.. SERVERS! (and whips and guns) BOFH is a top-down shooter that takes place in a school. You're a mean administrator and have to shoot bad guys, take their weapons and disarm bombs attached to server stacks by finding notes that tell you in what order to cut the wires! Now this might sound overly simple, but the enemy AI make the mindless shooting interesting enough by reacting to gunshots sounds and having non-naive movement patterns. I haven't progressed too

Ufo:AI and A3P updates

Published on 2010-06-18 15:19:00

A long awaited update of one of the flagship FOSS games has just been released: UFO:AI! UFO:AI (for those not in the loop) is a turn based strategy game very similar to the classic X-COM. The improvements of the new version are multi fold; Besides big improvements to the render engine, game-play was also overhauled, but head over to their full change log to get the full picture. Speaking of pictures, here a nice one showing the new glow effects on the world map: (Maybe qudobup will be so nice

Summering Wars and Mac OSX

Published on 2010-06-10 06:37:00

Recently modeled & textured SumWars character by Evil_E While the sun warms my body, Summoning Wars' development activity warms my fossy heart: icons are being created by hal9000, sounds are being mixed by artisticdude, music is being composed by West. And of course the 3D model, see the image on top of this post. A new release (0.5.1) has been recently uploaded and the next release is being discussed. One quite important planned feature is an OSX port, as there are at least two (if I recall c

Shotgun Debugger

Published on 2010-05-23 07:30:00

In Shotgun Debugger, you play a hacker on the run from black-shades-agents and fight against armies of droids. Projectile and energy weapons serve your cause, the most original of which gets reflected by walls and can be used to destroy enemies out of sight. Game mechanics include damage-inducing surfaces, exploding barrels and droids and simple press-the-button or find-the-key tasks. The story progresses in text boxes which appear between levels. Varying level styles... Relatively simple puzz

Free as in F..Dragon History.. and cyberpunk

Published on 2010-05-19 22:09:00

Some of Dragon History's GPLv2-ed assetsYou might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here. The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you c

Penumbra engine open source (non-free 32bit library dependancy)

Published on 2010-05-15 11:43:00

Penumbra 1's engine now FOSS The engine of the best proprietary horror game in existence (Penumbra Overture) has been released under GPLv3, and some parts under even more liberal licenses. The engine features a physics interaction system, which is extremely well-balanced between complexity of possible interactions and intuitive usability. A few test maps and some objects and textures were released under By-Sa-3 (in comparison: Lugaru comes with no freely-licensed assets). The textures that come

Of Summoning Wars and RakNet

Published on 2010-05-14 07:02:00

When I found out that Summoning Wars, it in fact uses a freely licensed network library, I wanted to test it, but failed at compiling. Today, with fresh Subversion checkout, I succeeded and was surprised by a Diablo-rules-style RPG with 3D graphics (OGRE) a lot of dialog (hours and hours of tutorials ;) ), choices, different character classes and various spells and items. Sarcophagus open up! (And let me take precious loot!) Enlightening zombies in a dark cave with fireballs Leaving

Combing Github for Games

Published on 2010-05-12 20:29:00

I am bored. SF.net doesn't produce many new foss game findings, so I say: "Let's try GitHub's search function!" Searching "game" quickly turned into "game -warcraft -framework -iPhone -life -cocos -Invaders" and I gave up such a general approach. Next up "fps". maroxe/fps - Soya3D-based shooter. Doesn't run, so I write a report. Project probably inactive, the history tells me. Next. ctmammoth/mammoth - "Tactical/strategy CTF-style FPS". Conta

Lugaru open source on GNU/Linux (64bit)

Published on 2010-05-12 09:37:00

Lugaru was open sourced (the code, not the assets). Aquaria, Gish and Penumbra Overture are to follow in a time frame of three days. Here's the counter (top right). Lugaru is a 3d martial arts fighting game that mainly plays in open-air levels in it's proprietary version. Besides kicking and jumping, sneaking and weapon use are main features of the game. A fork allowed me to compile Lugaru on 64bit Linux with ease. Hopefully tutorials for creating completely original content will appear soo

Port and Configure - Specialists Wanted for Diablo-like and 3D and cute pixels!

Published on 2010-05-10 16:38:00

Holyspirit is a good-looking hack & slash game with (rendered?) 3D graphics, which I unfortunately was only able to run using wine (and it wasn't very stable either: entering some areas and saving would cause it to freeze). It appears however, that it should be very simple to make it compile on Linux, somebody will just have to figure out how to make Code::Blocks (.cbp files is provided) find SFML, a SDL alternative that is used by Holyspirit and provide compile instructions. DotModeler i

Formula Retro

Published on 2010-05-08 07:03:00

Formula Retro is an actively developed "Sega's Virtua Racing look-alike". I found it to be somewhat buggy (but stable) and I like the look. Windows releases are available for download and here are GNU/Linux compile instructions, you will need to have irrlicht installed: svn co https://formularetro.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/formularetro/trunk formularetro cd formularetro find . -exec sed -i 's|../irrlicht/include|/usr/include/irrlicht|g' {} ; make ./dist/Debug/GNU-Linux-x86/formularetro If y