Free Gamer - Open Source Games

Node Reviver: Open Source Ludum Dare Puzzle Prototype (GPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

2012-05-25T01:45:00.002+01:00

image: Node Reviver main screen

Game development jams bring many lines of usually dirty code that power often innovative new implementations of various mechanics and rules. Ludum Dare requires source to be visible but neither code nor art has to be freely licensed.

I believe that the histories of TuxKart/SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100 and OpenArena show that maintenance can be one of the strengths of the open source game development scene. Having more gamejam-made working prototypes available under "safe" free licenses would enable this community to pick up promising projects and slowly build upon them.

Anyways, one of the games that has more than proper licensing information and is both free, open source code and art is Node Reviver. A short description:

Game mechanics and level designs intersecting with Pac-Man's PipeWalker's.
Light neon colors on black background visuals.
Bfxr sound effects (with sound sources included, nice!)

Links:

OpenGOO and Using Inkscape or Blender for Editing Maps/Levels

2012-05-23T10:35:00.003+01:00

Building bridges in OpenGOO

video: New Physics in OpenGOO

You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed.

Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO

A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape

There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in Shotgun Debugger! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general.

SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!)

Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

Good FOSS 3D action RPGs, nowhere to be found?

2012-05-20T17:29:00.000+01:00

Today I got a small rant:
So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right?
Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got:

Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development?

Check! (Xonotic, RedEclipse and several other with un-free media)

Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development?

Check! (0 A.D., MegaGlest, Warzone2100, Spring mods etc.)

Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development?

Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply.

Flight simulators, turn based strategy?

Check: Flightgear!
Check: Battle for Wesnoth!

Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight?

Hmmm???

Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into development FOSS representative, but given the (current) popularity of action RPGs lets have a look at what we do have:

So, there is the really cool project FLARE, which besides being not really playable yet is also more of a nostalgic effort. More playable but also with a similar demographic of potential players is Freedroid (besides having a maybe too Linux centric style).

FLARE 2D graphics style

Maybe of interest seem to be DawnRPG and PARPG, but for both the above applies as well and they seem to be going into a rather different direction. Besides that, at least the latter seems to be not progressing well lately.

Then there are the obscure and/or non-isometric DNT and Lips of Suna. Which are both nice projects on their own (especially LoS seems to develop nicely as of late), but are not really suitable as the FOSS reference for action RPGs...

The only game that comes to my mind that would fit is Summoning Wars, which is somewhat playable and even has a single-player campaign, but development is really slow and it is still a long way off what I would call a recommendable game to non-FOSS enthusiasts.

Some new dungeon wall tests

All in all it is a very promising project, which is IMHO hold back by its lack of content creation tools (mainly, but not only a world editor). This is probably partially because of the intention to have randomly generated dungeons, but those are still really bland to look at, and should be complemented by parts or at least towns that are nicely designed by hand (those also exists, but must have been done in a text editor or such ;) ).

Part of the rather slow development I guess was the poor choice of the graphics engine, e.g. OGRE 3D which is foremost a programmers choice (due to nice features and good documentation), but a rather bad FOSS game developers choice in my opinion (due to the lack of a complete game-engine features and good tools).

There are still a few really talented artists trying to contribute (1,2,3), and I recently proposed a creative re-use of 0 A.D. assets, but everything seems to be hitting a road block when it comes to easy tinkering with the game and getting things to actually run in game... and that is really demotivating to potential contributors (FOSS development advise 101 ;) ).

So to sum it up? I think Summoning Wars is really not living up to what it could be, and the only solution I see would be the addition of a new and really motivated programmer to the team to solve the tool-chain problems and thus restart the active development again. Anyone interested???

P.S.: Not to forget mentioning it: There is also the IrrRPG builder, which could probably be a good base to build an action RPG too.

Last day to support the LPC!

2012-05-18T18:15:00.003+01:00

While we are talking about crowd-funded game-dev assets:

The Liberated Pixel Cup has almost reached its funding goal, but today is the last day to contribute... so think about the poor captured pixels and donate!

Professional Car Sounds Crowdfunding for Public Domain

2012-05-18T17:48:00.000+01:00

~5% of David's Merceds' sounds will be donated to the public domain

At the time of this post, USD~~363~~ 353 are missing and 8 days are left for TrackTimeAudio's Mercedes Sound Recording Kickstarter Project to be crowdfunded.

In a recent update, it was announced, that 5 to 10% of the more than 200 resulting sounds will become freely available.

Free, open source projects that could profit from this include TORCS, Speed Dreams, Trigger Rally, Stunt Rally, Rigs of Rods and many more. It would be delightful to see if advocates of free content licensing would bring this project to a "funded" state and further with many small contributions. (And remember, this will allow you to comment what your incentive for supporting was :) ).

OpenMW 0.14: Changelog Video (Commented)

2012-05-16T20:00:00.000+01:00

OpenMW 0.14 has been released [blog announcement] half a month ago.

I'm a fan of commented video changelogs and highly recommend theirs (embedded below)!

As an experiment, I created an audio-only version [ogg Vorbis, 4m12s, 3M] using youtube-dl, ffmpeg and sox, in case you prefer that over YouTube.

video: OpenMW 0.14 Commented Changelog

Dust Racing: high speed, Qt-based, cross-platform, with editor

2012-05-16T01:04:00.000+01:00

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars

Dust Racing (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system.

Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor

Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply.

Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

Cube Train, Frogatto development and LPC

2012-05-10T21:17:00.000+01:00

Today is another session of: "Look what I found in my FG spam folder" ;) But this time I am actually adding a lot of nice other stuff to it, so that it is almost a "dev-corner" post!

But first things first... the frogatto developers made us aware that there is a new game based on their really nice 2D engine, called Cube Trains:

Cube Trains Beta gameplay

Note that, just like frogatto, the final version will cost a few pennies, but the engine is totally FOSS and the current Beta is still free to download.

This seems to fit to the general idea of the folks behind this engine as they outlined in the email to us:

I'm really glad we now have a second major title done in frogatto's engine, because we're gradually trying to position frogatto's engine as an open-source alternative to closed-source packages like GameMaker or RPGMaker; partly just because development tools are one software category that benefits far more than other categories from being open-source, but also because our engine technology is a lot better than GameMaker; we're fully GPU-accelerated, and we've got a much better internal programming language. We've got a ways to go, since GameMaker still has a bunch of advantages over us on the gui side, but we're getting there.

Cube Trains is not one of them, but eventually, we're hoping to build a stable of "starter kits" for different game types - like GameMaker has, built under a CC0 license so they're suitable not just for GPL games, but for absolutely anything (indie titles being a big one). Hopefully that was we can get a bunch of people from the indie gaming crowd behind an open-source tool.

Which seems like a pretty good idea to me, and looking at the awesome features they recently showcased in three tutorials (1,2,3) I wholeheartedly agree with the comment on their superior engine technology!

Speaking of the frogatto engine and tutorials I can elegantly lead to my other topic today, as the people behind the currently pre-warming Liberated Pixels Cup, aka our friends from OpenGameArt, are also endorsing the use of that engine as outlined here. The have also recently featured another really nice 2D game dev. tile editor, and hot of the press is the news that the Mozilla foundation has joined the FSF and Creative Commons as a main sponsor of the event!
With Mozilla also came a significant cash contribution, which means that the initial goal of US$ 10,000 has been reached, but you can still up the ante!

It seems that this comes along a general push from the Mozilla Foundation towards more HTML5 gaming (now part of the LPC too), supported by the fact that they have recently released a nice RPG game demo (BrowserQuest) and are working even on a 3D engine called Gladius.

Ah and not to forget: OGA has also recently added a nice featured tutorial section to their site... so nothing is holding you back to finally become an active part of the FOSS game-development community... yes, I said YOU! :D

GameLV: Completely Free, Open Source Point And Click Post-Soviet Adventure Game

2012-05-07T21:46:00.000+01:00

Post-Soviet Adventure's protagonist cleaning up the inventory

The story of GameLV: Adventure Game in Post Soviet Environment (Post-Soviet Adventure) begins with your dog having gone missing and your only lead being a meat product factory. For about one hour you point-and-click through pre-rendered environments, hunt pixels, read humorous descriptions and dialogues to reach a resolution.

I for one appreciate the humor in AGiPSE's humor, which I might have a high affinity to due to do my roots in Russia and my life taking place in eastern Berlin most of its time.

Be warned though: references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography and violence are common in this game.

Post-Soviet Adventure is available in English and Latvian languages, both text and voice, although the English voices are incomplete.

video: [English Voices] Adventure in Post Soviet Environment (GameLV) by snauts (Artūrs Grebstelis)

The engine features savegames and scene animations and uses image masks to set define interactive areas. Text files seem to be used for defining the game.

To use voices, see following note:

So here is GameLV HEAD from our local repo with half way done english speech that has terrible pronunciation and was abandoned. http://piepe.lv/game-lv/assemble.tgz
That "assemble" is the same as "data" directory on https://github.com/snauts/GameLV, just put your binary in there and run.
P.S. My uplink to foreign countries is slow, so it should take a while for you download it. [mediafire mirror]
P.S.S If you want to run latvian version issue (in assemble directory)
sed "s/\-en//" *.lst -i
UI will still be in english because UI strings are compiled into engine.

Both code and art are freely licensed and the very nice music was even written and performed for the game. Some sounds have unknown sources though and finding freely licensed replacements on Freesound and OpenGameArt would be a way to contribute to the project.

Terasology - YAMC or not?

2012-05-03T21:47:00.000+01:00

YAMC? Yet another Minecraft clone??? Well Terasology (previously called "Moving Blocks") sure looks like one:

Terasology alpha gameplay

But besides looking like a pretty good YAMC, it actually promises to deviate from the boring Minecraft routine and mentions the pretty well liked games Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper as inspirations for its planned game-play :)

Code is under the Apache license, however the current pixel textures are non-free. But if this takes off, those should be relatively easy to replace with really free ones ;)
Oh and you can run it via Java directly from your browser (I had a black void as a world under Linux though... so your mileage might vary also).

Open Source Textures

2012-04-29T14:29:00.001+01:00

OpenGameArt's texture section just received an update. There now is a category tree and files from texture packs are also available as single nodes (pages/description/downloads).

You can see some discussion about the new features on the official announcement's comments.

Arx Libertatis 1.0 "Bloody Gobblers!" released!

2012-04-20T14:18:00.003+01:00

Walking in the underground city hub in Arx Libertatis

Looking up magic recipes and managing inventory while a vision enhancement is active in Arx Libertatis

[more screens]

Arx Libertatis 1.0 has been released. We already wrote about the engine a month and a half ago but this is the first official, stable release of the GPL-licensed engine for the proprietary first-person cave RPG Arx Fatalis.

But being able to play the proprietary game is not the end of the development. There are plans for future milestones, for example a Qt-based modern game editor and support for modern shaders. I look forward to it!

Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

2012-04-18T08:01:00.000+01:00

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code:

A Las Barricadas CC-by-SA boardgame & Kickstarter

2012-04-15T20:50:00.000+01:00

Yes...you read right, a board-game on FreeGamer :p
Playable completely without the aid of a computer or similar device. But hey... it's a game and libre licensed, so it is not really that OT.

So this ominously named "Black Flag Games" collective has recently jumped on the Kickstarter hype and seems to have quite successfully financed their game by it (but you can still donate to the cause). Currently they are at $5,932 of their $3,500 goal with 22 days to go.

I noticed it because they already started releasing graphics on OGA under the CC-by-SA license as promised:

Personally I am looking forward to this, as I actually proposed something quite similar in my long running "game design brain-fart" thread. Luckily for them I released these ideas into the public domain... otherwise I would be sooo suing their a**es off :p

P.S.: viva la revolución... errr I for one welcome our new Kickstarter overlords!

Trigger Rally Online Edition Open Sourced on GitHub

2012-04-14T21:28:00.000+01:00

Trigger Rally Online Edition race start on a sand track with green trees and an animated checkpoint ahead.

Trigger Rally Online Edition [github] is a WebGL racing game based on the concept of Trigger Rally. It has a more detailed car model than the classical game, however I am not sure about the game data license. It features replays too!

The project was created by the lead coder of the original/classical Trigger Rally version.

video: Trigger Rally Online Edition gameplay

By the way: if you are interested in helping me to sort out missing license-clear graphics and sounds for the classical Trigger Rally, I created a thread on OpenGameArt for that purpose.

The Big corrections round-up post (and TA contest)

2012-04-12T20:52:00.001+01:00

So... you might have followed the lengthy discussion in the comment section of this blog entry of mine from last week... if you didn't don't worry you didn't miss anything important :p

However I was corrected in quite a few things (besides all the disagreements), so I though it would be good to post a sort of "counter statement" to clear up some recent mess-ups by me:

First of all, the developers from Q2W informed us that in fact most (but not all) of their art assets are CC-by-SA or GPL, which is great. They have also released a Linux installer now, so feel free to check it out if you are gaming on this platform (like me). Oh and I have also updated the video to a newer one, in case you didn't notice yet.

Also, and I am to be honest quite surprised by this, OverDose does in fact have an open source-code repository since some time now, where you can download the source to the engine and some of the cool in-house tools they have developed. No clearly visible notice on the website about this however :-/ Even on the wiki they have no link to it I think.

Ah, and I was also informed that UFO:AI has now released an Linux version of the mentioned 2.4 RC.

Otherwise? Stunt-Rally does indeed have a player-collision option, which I somehow missed... but at least I am not the only one who feels that the physics are a bit off :p

Last but not least, and that is the only real news in this post:
The rather early in development steam-punk themed MMORPG Tempest in the Aether are hosting an art contest in collaboration with OGA too (to celebrate their first release). A bit of a pity that it will probably be somewhat overlooked due to the big OGA contest mentioned in Bart's previous post, but maybe you want to contribute to this game as well.

P.S.: Criticize me all you want, and I am open to corrections as you can see, but don't expect me become a "proper" journalist! After all this is the "splatter zone" :p

Announcing the Liberated Pixel Cup!

2012-04-11T14:00:00.000+01:00

I'm excited to announce that OpenGameArt.org is will be teaming up this summer with the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons for a big summer games contest, the Liberated Pixel Cup!

The TL;DR version is that the Liberated Pixel Cup will take place in two phases. The first phase will be the art phase, in which artists will be asked to submit pixel art that matches an existing body of professional quality art that we're building specifically for the contest. The second phase will be the programming phase, the object of which will be to create a game using the pre-made assets along with the assets created by contestants during the art phase. A longer overview (as well as the official rules page) can be found on the website.

I've been running OpenGameArt.org for just over three years now, and I'm incredibly excited because this marks the first official recognition we've received from the FSF and the CC. It's particularly awesome because it'sa massive boost for OGA's goal -- that is, bringing artists and coders together to make awesome games!

So, spread the word, donate to the cause (donations will be used to add to the already impressive base art set, and fund contest prize money), and above all, join us and take part in the contest!

Bart K.
OpenGameArt.org

P. S. I'd like to offer a special thank you to Chris Webber (aka paroneayea) from the Creative Commons, who conceived this idea and made it happen. You rock. :)

Stunt-Rally 1.5 Multiplayer

2012-04-10T22:08:00.000+01:00

We are getting a lot of nice mails from developers lately... not sure yet if I am annoyed by the spam or pleased that I don't have to do any research of my own :p
These must be the benefits of real journalists who always get these nice offers from lobbying firms to write fair and balanced articles for them (yeah, I included some social commentary in this blog!).

So... what was in my spam folder lately? Stunt-Rally got an version 1.5 release (changelog here) which a prominent new feature: multiplayer!

Multiplayer test in Stunt-Rally 1.5

You can find a small guide to set up a multiplayer game here. Not sure if player collision is also implemented... it would be cool however ;)

In general I really think the physics are too bouncy however... not sure if that hits the nail, but something feels off about them. Also... "LOD popping" trees is soo last century :p

The Big idTech 2 round-up post

2012-04-05T21:56:00.001+01:00

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news!

And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2).

The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World, which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta, which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet).

Edit: Updated to newer video

But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well).

So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p

Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar:

AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements:

What's new in AlienArena

Ya3dag, also released a new version recently and I still think its cool in-game editing features should be picked up by some other idTech2 engines. Can't be that hard to port...
Especially for UFO:AI it might be a nice way to modify missions. Speaking of which... they are also preparing a new version 2.4 and released an RC (changelog) recently. Again no Linux download, so I am skipping it for now. They have however almost reached full FOSS status of their sound-effects... at least that is what they say, the graphic they posted says CC-sampling plus though, which is AFAIK not FOSS compatible :(

Now to the games that don't show any real visible progress: War§ow is just posting ~~stupid stuff~~ interesting trivia on their blog. However I don't consider the long awaited 0.7 release vapourware yet.
Another matter in the vapourware category is OverDose though... in development since what feels like at least a decade, and still no release anywhere near (which is also their excuse why they don't share their nice engine improvements or for that matter any source-code all together >:( ). However they recently posted a lengthy news on Moddb in what seems to be an attempt to jump on the current "Kickstarter" bandwagon. Think what you want of that... but they are for sure not getting any of my cash before there isn't a engine-source release...

Why Free Culture could be Good for the Games Business

2012-04-02T21:36:00.003+01:00

Today I'd like to talk about how free culture can be (perhaps counter-intuitively) good for the commercial games business. I'm using Dungeons & Dragons (and its recent and highly successful fork, Pathfinder) as a concrete example of what I'm talking about, but there's no reason this couldn't also apply to computer games as well.

I've been a Dungeons & Dragons geek for 20 years now, pretty much since I was introduced to it my freshman year of high school. Back in my high school days, D&D was in its second edition and the internet was in its infancy. Dungeons and Dragons was owned by a litigious beast of a company called TSR, which was well known for sending nastygrams every time someone put up a web page with any fan-created D&D content. This was particularly ironic, since the whole idea behind Dungeons & Dragons was that they threw some rule books at you and then told you to create your own content with them.

In the late 1990s, for a variety of reasons (no doubt including its poor treatment of its customers), TSR was in financial trouble and was bought out by Wizards of the Coast. As any follower of a games company knows, it's always a bit scary when another company acquires a company that you like. Usually it turns out to be a bad thing, because the company doing the acquiring is invariably bigger and generally cares less about the actual quality of the product and more about monetizing it (think of all the studios EA has bought up and ruined). In this particular case, our worries were unfounded; the acquisition of TSR by WOTC actually resulted in a huge cultural change for D&D...

Enter the Open Game License, a share-alike license for table-top roleplaying game content, and the hands down the single best thing ever to happen to Dungeons & Dragons. Shortly after they purchased TSR, Wizards of the Coast released the 3rd edition of D&D under this license, which opened D&D not only to fan expansion but also to commercial development. In fact, after the OGL, the most frequent complaint I heard about D&D is that the popularity OGL-licensed content made the d20 system (which was the underlying system that 3rd edition D&D was built on top of) made it too difficult to compete with. 3rd edition introduced the idea of a System Reference Document, which was a body of content that was free-as-in-speech and included the basic information necessary to play and the game. Mind you, 3rd Edition had its issues, but it was easy to play, learn, and (most of all) build on top of, which resulted in a massive wealth of content, both commercial and player-created.

Unfortunately, the days of Wizards of the Coast were ultimately shortlived, as they were purchased by the toy and games giant Hasbro in 1999. I have no information from inside the company, but from the outside it would certainly seem that the culture of WOTC changed for the worse shortly thereafter, with nearly annual layoffs, generally around every Christmas. After Hasbro acquired Wizards, they released Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which was essentially a more expensive re-release of 3.0 with some balance issues fixed, that ultimately felt like a $100 errata pack. 3.5 was successful as well, but there was no denying the general sense of disappointment gamers felt; it could have been a lot more than it was, and the differences weren't really substantive enough to justify the hefty price tag.

I'm going to digress for a moment and talk about tabletop roleplaying games in general. One thing that seems to happen in the tabletop world is that a new edition of a game will be released, then add-on content will be released for the new edition until eventually the add-ons become so numerous that they're impossible for someone who is GMing the game to keep track of all of them. Eventually, players feel that their needs and wants have been met by the existing content, and no longer feel the need to purchase more; at that point, the games company will go back, examine the limitations of their current system, and create a new one, starting the process anew.

D&D 3.5 had reached this level of saturation when WOTC/Hasbro put out 4th edition. By far (in my opinion) the most distressing change between 3.5 and 4.0 was the gutting of the Open Game Licence and the creation of the Game System License. 4th edition had its own system reference document, but it was pathetic (PDF warning) in comparison to the 3rd edition one, and included nothing in the way of useful content. 4th edition also included a number of system changes under the hood, which aren't the subject of this blog post. While I don't want to start a big flamewar about which rule system is better (that's been done to death), it is objectively true that a lot of people who were happy with 3rd edition felt that 4th edition had departed too far from the rules and style of play that they were used to, and continued to play 3.5 as a consequence.

At this point, any good capitalist will tell you that if there's an existing, un-served customer base that wants to be served, then it in your financial best interest to serve them. A company founded in 2002 called Paizo Publishing, which had been successfully releasing add-ons for 3.0/3.5 (among other things) decided to pick up the OGL licensed D&D 3.x content and expand on it, and the Pathfinder system was born. Pathfinder, which like its predecessor, has a complete System Reference Document, which is particularly notable in that it's much more complete than the original 3.x SRD. (As an aside, if you're interested, you can find the official version here, and a highly usable web version here. They provide more than enough information to play the complete game, including all the official expansions, for free).

The release of Pathfinder, while based on D&D 3.5, did far more than just address game balance issues -- it also added quite a lot of content that made the game more fun to play in general. As a consequence, Pathfinder has cut into WOTC's revenue, bringing in customers that may have otherwise bought into D&D 4. (As an aside, I feel a lot more disappointed in the 3.5 update to 3.0 now that I know what it could have been. Seeing how far Paizo took Pathfinder and how much they added makes WOTC/Hasbro's little 3.0->3.5 update feel like even more of a money grab.)

Now that I've established this background information, I'll finally get to my point: if you don't think about it very hard, you may assume that, since the OGL content has clearly lost WOTC/Hasbro money, it's a bad idea commercially. And from their eyes, it probably is. What most people don't consider, though, is that releasing an open system has allowed someone else to step in and turn what would have been a stagnant product line into a commercial success. Any talk from commercial publishers about how free culture is bad for business is utterly uninformed and missing the point of free culture -- what they mean to say is that free culture is bad for companies like them that aren't able to recognize what their customers want.

For companies like Paizo, free culture has created an opportunity for commercial success, and they've managed to monetize their product without removing it from the commons. And, should Paizo ever undergo an unfortunate change of management and decide not to release any more OGL products, another commercial entity could pick up where they left off and continue to make money by giving customers what they want.

The lesson to be learned here is this: the next time you hear someone suggest that free culture is somehow anti-business or bad for the economy, point out to them that it's only bad for stagnant businesses that feel the need to compete by keeping the market closed, rather than releasing content that their customers want. And there's absolutely no reason this can't apply to video games as well.

Peace out,

Bart Kelsey
OpenGameArt.org

P.S. In case you didn't see it above, here is the complete and unabridged Pathfinder System Reference Document, which contains all of the official Pathfinder content, including add-ons, and is completely playable on its own. If you like it, buy their books. They're excellent. :)

P.P.S Here is a shameless plug for my Pathfinder blog, with all OGC content. :)

April Snippets

2012-04-01T13:38:00.000+01:00

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets.

A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread.

219 bytes tron is:

<body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload=
  z=c.getContext('2d');
  z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325);
  setInterval("
    0<x%n
    &x<n*n
    &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1)
      ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++)
      :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s
  ",9)
><canvas id=c>

Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post, is:

A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file
A small part of your build chain

Black Dog: HTML5 Helicopter in Hell by Wilbefast

2012-03-31T21:30:00.000+01:00

screenshot of Black Dog: A fallen angel flying through hell's caves, burdened by mystical weights, with progress being limited by only slowly regenerating feathers, the many-tongued flying black beast directly behind the angel (interpretation of reviewer)

Black Dog is a dark-theme reaction/precision type side-scroller that will run in your modern HTML5/Javascript-supporting browser. It has beautiful minimal original pixel artwork and at the same time uses works from OpenGameArt.

I highly recommend following Wilbefast if you're interested in Android game development and game dev jams. Most content is related to open source and will soon be added to our FreeGameDev PlanetDev feed aggregator.

Moosader's Text-Based Game Competition [until April 9th 2012]

2012-03-31T11:58:00.003+01:00

image labeled "Text-Based Game": ASCII-Art Female with a o_o expression. Buttons saying "Attack" and "Glare" next to her, the first being selected

Moosader - creator, host and leading contributor to OpenArt - also hosts game development competitions on her community's forum.

The current theme is "Text-Based Game" and will be over in 9 days, so feel free to join! There are 25 projects in it so far.

Make a text-based game, like Zork, Adventure, Nethack, or something completely your own!

I spotted some free, open source projects among them [1] [2] but didn't have time to take a closer look. There's parody, Lua, C++ and JavaScript represented is all I can tell so far.

OpenMW 0.13.0 released

2012-03-29T19:30:00.000+01:00

Normally qubodup is responsible for this type of games (I have to admit, never liked Morrowind, nor any predecessors or sequels), but since they are doing such a good job of promoting it (and Q is busy), so I will give them their desired news:

The OpenMW developers have just released our latest version of OpenMW. I was hoping you could post on Freegamer. Below is our message, feel free to put your own spin on it. Also it looks like the Arx Liberatis folks are almost ready to release their 1.0. Thanks!

OpenMW 0.13.0 trailer

Hot on the heels of 0.12.0, the OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.13.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA. Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page. This release notably includes functional NPC dialogue, and beautiful sky! There is a great new demonstration video for 0.13.0 up YouTube channel and a new video showing off our improved physics implementation which is scheduled for version 0.14.0.

Please note:
- On OSX, the path to the application cannot contain spaces, or the launcher will not work properly.

Changelog:
- NPC Dialogue window and mechanics implemented
- Reimplemented sky rendering, added weather effects
- Wireframe mode added
- Fix for sounds broken in 0.12.0
- Fix for 3D sounds
- Added sounds for weather, doors, containers, picking up items, and journal
- Various code cleanup and improvements
- Fixed an Ogre crash at the Dren plantation
- Several launcher improvements
- Added fade to black effect for cutscenes
- Added backend for equipping items
- Fix to stop ASCII 16 character from being added to console on its activation in OSX
- Fixed collision shapes being out of place
- Fixed torch lights not being visible past a short distance
- Fixed some transparency rendering problems

Website
http://openmw.org/en/

Download Page
http://code.google.com/p/openmw/downloads/list

YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrOpenMW

Forum
http://openmw.org/forum/

Dev-corner: Flourish Conf

2012-03-25T14:29:00.001+01:00

Open Source Conference

Next weekend you will have the chance to hear a talk by the Linux game development legend Ryan "Icculus" Gordon on open-source tools for game development:

Increasingly, the best tools for building games for any platform don't cost a dime. This talk will offer an overview of several of the best open source technologies available to game developers today. Topics will include audio, graphics, filesystems, and scripting. While this won't be a tutorial session, it will be fairly technical in nature, and will be useful for those looking to hack out their first game, or build the next Call of Duty sequel.

I hope they will record this for those who can not attend it personally. We will keep you updated on this next week I guess.