Planet Free gaming

The theme of the RubyWeekend #2 game contest has just been announced, marking the start of the contest period! If you’re participating, you’ve got 60 hours to work on your game before you have to submit it!

The theme is “Opposites”. Will your game be about fire and ice, or black and white, or big and small… or something else? I expect to see lots of different interpretations on this very abstract theme!

Remember, we’ll be hanging out in #rubygame on the freenode.net IRC network all weekend, and posting in the Contests forum at rubygameforums.com. Drop by and visit us between coding sessions. :)

Good luck to all the contest participants, and don’t forget to have fun!

TORCS 1.3.1

It has been a while since the last time I gave The Open Racing Car Simulator a try and this time I had unexpectedly much fun with it. Though some things are strange about it: the game generally runs smoothly, except for some rare, sporadic lags which make controls problematic for a second. There are great textures in the game but some of them are just bad (probably heritage from darker times.) I like the track's layouts but I wish there was an environment artist who would spice up TORCS' landscapes. Still, I think it's great.

There is a lack of a damage model, but it's still fun to practice an aggressive driving style sometimes. :) Oh yeah, I nearly forgot to tell you that I made a stupid little gameplay video.

I tried to compile the racing simulation from CVS and failed, but fortunately it is available in binary forms for Win/Lin/Mac and is easy to install.

One unusual aspect of the game's installer is that you can to choose to not install the unfree car models (although I don't know for sure how free the TORCS team's definition of free media is.)

Dungeon Hack landscape

Dungeon Hack, a spiritual remake of Daggerfall, will be blessed with an editor some time soon. Hopefully they will make the jump from awesome landscape generator to kick-butt role-playing game!

I also hope there will be a GNU/Linux version available soon. The only other application of which I'm eagerly waiting for a GNU/Linux port is FxGen.

Other than that, there's not much to say about Dungeon Hack. The current aim is programming and not already bother with gameplay/visual details. I think this is a good sign: they're not trying to rush things or to do everything at the same time.

You can get version Alpha build 23 of Digital Paint Paintball 2. The game is one of those, which I never figured out how to play. Problem was with the last version I tried, that I was unable to disable the too-much-for-my-gfxcard-water/reflection-effects.

FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 town's new look

FreedroidRPG 0.11rc1 has lots of new features:

• Level changes and additions
• Weapon additions and balancing
• Programs (spells) balancing and a new skill
• New music!
• Engine improvements (for example performance)
• Editor improvements (for example undo/redo functions)

CatchemRPG detail

PS: Apricot aka Yo Frankie! (sight) would very much like you to animate a character for them.

The second RubyWeekend game creation contest is this weekend! The official rules and time have been posted, and everybody’s gearing up for some programming fun this weekend!

The contest starts at Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 16:00 UTC (find it in your time zone) and ends Monday, July 28, 2008 @ 04:00 UTC (find it in your time zone)! The theme will be announced at the start of the contest period.

We’ll be hanging out in #rubygame on freenode.net all weekend, and posting in the contests forum too. Hope you’ll join us!

Surt's goblin

Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb) released the first version of Choria, which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest.

Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux!

RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :)

The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ).

Also: No more game videos on Vimeo allowed. Not sure if they permit videos of games you did yourself.

Nebula from FreeOrion

So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today?

On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae. Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds!

I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE. You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic!

So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS!

There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer. But I have two problems with the game: 1. The controls are explosively sensitive and I was so far unable to overcome the first platform sequence in the first level. 2. The turning speed of my character is depending on the distance between bob and the camera, so when bob is standing back to a wall, it will be impossible to aim because the turning speed will be 40 degrees per 1 point mouse movement...

This apparently will not change:

Please note: the camera is not going to get much better than this. Minor niggles, etc. can be ironed out, but a full blown, intelligent and dynamic camera, as found in many multi million dollar budget games is not going to happen.

Also let me tell you that I appreciate very much, how Parallel Realities gave Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid a nice story and setting, and made it a fun to play game. So I'm not giving up on the 3d platform/shooter just yet!

I just found out that ja2-stracciatella, is based on the unfree (although open) Jagged Alliance 2 source code. :( Thanks to Lightkey of Holarse (de) for giving me the license link!

FIFE's map editor

FIFE 2008.1 has been released! The flexible, isometric 2d game engine has seen many changes: It is now licensed under the LGPL (GPL before), dependencies have been removed (no more tinyxml), it features a small example game and muuuuuuch moooooooore.

What *really* makes me interested in this release, is the inclusion of a map editor! I unfortunately haven't been able to compile FIFE (apparently due to an error in the unstable Debian sid distribution), so as soon as I install Arch Linux, I'll be bombarding you with mapping videos again!

FIFE Is no Fallout Emulator btw!

Nice render for OpenAnno

This just in: Simutrans 100.0 (r1867) has been released! Last time I checked it, the game was a Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone with pretty graphics and a deadly/unfair AI.

Our game now have Ukrainian localization. Thanks to Vadim Nehay.

This localization will be included to the final release 0.8.xxxx. Now it can be found in SVN.

By the way, we are wanna appeal to those who have translate our game to their languages. There are a lot of new phrases that need to be translated. We would appreciate if you renew your localization.

Welcome to yet another FIFE blog update :-) This one will mainly focus on the planned name switch of the FIFE project.

Name switch

Why we're searching for a new name

When the FIFE project was founded it was planned to become an open source engine for the creation of RPGs like the Interplay classics Fallout 1 & 2. Furthermore we wanted to add support for the Fallout file formats to FIFE not just but also for having easy access to assets that could be used to test the engine. The other reason for Fallout support was that the Fallout engine was not designed for modding purposes. Our hope was to provide a better platform for Fallout-like games than the engine of the original game.

However things have changed. We moved away from our Fallout roots and old limitations and legacies have been removed among this way as well. FIFE stopped to be a Fallout-like engine and started to become a general purpose isometric game engine not limited to RPGs anymore. While browsing a bunch of forums we have discovered that the current name of the project (especially the "Fallout-like" part of it) gives a wrong impression of the possibilities of the engine. Therefore we would like to see a change in this field.

Possible options

There are basically three options for us:

Completely new name

We would totally abandon the FIFE name in this case and pick a cool new title for the project.

Advantages:

• We might come up with something more catchy than "FIFE".
• That would be the most effective way to show that FIFE is not related to Fallout anymore.

Disadvantages:

• We would need to register a new domain for the website.
• The FIFE brand has already at least a certain popularity and we would need to invest quite some time into advertizing the new name to make it well-known.

Change the meaning of the acronym

The second option is to stick to the name FIFE but to change the meaning of the acronym. We should get rid of the Fallout-like part of it at least though a completely new meaning for all letters would be possible as well.

Advantages:

• The FIFE name is already quite well-known so we could profit from its popularity.
• No new domain for the website needed.
• We can show that the engine is not related to Fallout anymore (though a completely new name would work even better in this aspect).

Disadvantages:

• We would need to spend some time to advertize the new meaning behind the FIFE acronym.
• People might still think that the engine is limited to Fallout-like games because it's still called FIFE although we would have changed the meaning of the acronym.

Keep everything as it is

Last but not least we could stick to the name FIFE and don't change the meaning of the acronym either.

Advantages:

• We wouldn't need to invest any time advertizing a new name / meaning of the acronym.

Disadvantages:

• People looking for an engine that suits them might disregard FIFE because of its name.
• Keeping the old name / meaning of the acronym feels like sticking to legacies just because of being afraid of change.

Roadmap to a new name

Now we don't want to decide on our own but we're sure that the community got some good ideas as well. Therefore we decided to make the possible name switch a three step process.

Collecting ideas

In the first phase we're collecting suggestions for new names as well as new meanings for the FIFE acronym. You got two weeks (2008/07/20 - 2008/08/03) to bring up proposals at the FIFE forums. You can post your ideas at this thread: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=93.0

Voting

The second part of the process is to create a public poll at the forums that contains all proposals that have been collected in phase one. Every registered forums users can take part in the poll and can vote for two of the available options. The poll will be open for voting for four weeks (2008/08/04 - 2008/08/31).

Picking a winner

After the poll has ended the development team will take the top three choices from the poll and will try to agree on one of them. We hope that with just three options we can find a solution that the majority of the developers are pleased with.

So we encourage everyone to take part in the name switch process and support the project this way :-)

Project birthday

Slightly related to the name change: FIFE will turn three years old at Tuesday, 2008/09/11. We have hopefully picked a winner until then and can present the new (or old) name of the project at the IRC birthday party. Hopefully a bunch of developers will be around at the channel and answer your questions about FIFE. This is just an early announcement of the birthday party. You'll see a more detailed official birthday reminder at one of the following blog updates.

FIFE IRC channel can be found here: http://wiki.fifengine.de/IRC

Draft of a new FIFE logo

Urban Breznik, a friend of our team member Lamoot, was so kind to provide us with a draft for a new FIFE logo; Urban is studying to become a professional visual designer. Although we have a bunch of different logos at the forums and wiki, we would like to agree on a new official logo together with the planned name switch. You can take a look at the draft here: http://wiki.fifengine.de/images/5/58/Fife_new_logo.jpg

All kind of feedback concerning the new logo is appreciated. Tell us what you like or dislike about it. Discussion takes place here: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=86.0

Still searching for a web designer

And slighty related to name switch and new logo: we're still searching for a web designer who would like to help us to overwork the fifengine.de website. More information about the web designer position as well as a list of required skills and tasks that would need to be taken care of can be found here: http://wiki.fifengine.de/Help_wanted#Web_designer

That's from our side today :-)

Posted in: fife, name, helpwanted

We're currently in the planning stages of replacing our fifengine.de website with a better looking version that shares a consistent design among the majority of its subpages and introduces some new functionality (integration of blog & forums so users can comment on blog articles as well as planet functionality for aggregating all FIFE-related feeds in one central place).

A collection of all ideas concerning the new website can be found at our wiki: http://wiki.fifengine.de/Website

Tasks

We're looking for somebody who could take care of the following tasks:

• Either create a new design from scratch or pick one from http://www.oswd.org/ and modify it for our needs. There are already some design-related notes at the wiki article linked above. Solid (X)HTML & CSS knowledge required.
• Create templates of the new design for the following software solutions that we plan to use for the new website:
  • Mediawiki (wiki functionality)
  • Drupal (planet functionality; for a first test version see: http://planet.fifengine.de/)
  • SMF (forums)
  • Wordpress or any blogging solution of your choice
• Optional: find a way to integrate a blogging solution into our forums (we're using the SMF software). We looked into a couple of bridges for Wordpress but we haven't really decided on a solution yet so we would appreciate any pointer from somebody who had done something similar in the past.

If you would like to help us with this undertaking please head over to our IRC channel or the forums and let us know! :-)

Posted in: fifengine.de, website, webdesigner

The second RubyWeekend Game Contest is almost here! The weekend of July 25 - 27, compete with other Ruby programmers to create a game in 2 days!

A theme will be announced on July 25 at the start of the contest period. Then, create a game based on the theme, working alone or in pairs (2 people). You can use any Ruby library available (Rubygame, Gosu, Shoes, etc.) for your game, as long as your game code is written in Ruby.

For more info as the contest date approaches, or to check out the winning games from RubyWeekend #1, check out the Contests forum on rubygameforums.com:

http://www.rubygameforums.com/viewforum.php?f=10

Hope to see you there on July 25!

- John

A bit of short notice, but we’ve having a small game creation contest starting this Friday, June 13 at 20:00 GMT <add>16:00 GMT</add>, and lasting until Sunday <add>Monday</add> 04:00 GMT . The contest is called RubyWeekend, as a cheap knock-off of Pygame’s “PyWeek” (just like Rubygame is a cheap knock-off of Pygame, right?). The idea is to promote Ruby as a viable language for writing games, and have a lot of fun doing it.

The contest starts when the theme is announced on Friday – then you have to write a game with that theme before the contest ends on Sunday!

Think it’s impossible to write a game in just 2 days? The key is to come up with a fun and creative idea that won’t take a lot of time to implement. You’ll also have to manage your time well, not letting yourself get stuck on little details, and deciding when (or if) to sleep! It’s a lot of fun, and a huge adrenaline rush!

You’re not limited to only Rubygame – you can use whatever you like, as long your game is written in Ruby. That could be Gosu, Ruby-Opengl, Ruby/SDL, Rails (for a web game), or even just a text game with plain Ruby. It’s up to you.

Even if you can’t dedicate the full weekend to writing a game (especially on short notice, if this is the first you heard about it), you could write a simple little game in an afternoon and evening, just for the fun and experience.

I hope you’ll join us in writing a game with Ruby this weekend!

The RubyWeekend contest finished up this past Sunday/Monday (timezone depending). We got 7 entries: 4 written in Rubygame, 2 in Gosu, and 1 simple ‘game’ just using the text console!

You’ve still got a few days to try them out and vote for your 3 favorites! There are also screencast videos of all the games in action, and post-mortems from the developers talking about their experience.

• Entry descriptions / downloads
• Videos
• Vote for #1 favorite
• Vote for #2 favorite
• Vote for #3 favorite
• Post-mortems

Despite some organization troubles and short notice, the contest was a lot of fun for all involved. We’ll probably have another contest next month!

I’m pondering Duck Typing tonight as I write event classes and their associated specs.

Here’s an abbreviated spec for the WindowResized event, which holds an [x, y] array with the new size of the window:

1
2
3

it "should reject non-array objects as size" do
    lambda { WindowResized.new( 20 ) }.should raise_error(ArgumentError)
end

Giving the number 20 as the size doesn’t make sense, and you’d run into an error sooner or later. In this case, without any checks, the error would probably show up when you tried to set the Screen mode again to the new size. Because of the delayed effect of the event queue, the backtrace wouldn’t have anything to do with the real problem – that you gave the event an invalid argument.

So, the rationale behind this spec is that the class should complain loudly at the soonest opportunity, so that the location of the error is easy to find.

To make this spec pass, I might write the following:

1
2
3
4
5

# this is not duck typing
unless size.kind_of? Array
    raise ArgumentError, "size has to be an Array"
end
@size = size

The spec would pass, but the code would be pretty inflexible. Suppose someone wrote a Size class which had 2 elements, but wasn’t actually an Array. This check would reject it, even though it might have been usable. A conundrum!

Duck typing to the rescue, right?

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the size parameter doesn’t have to be an Array per se, it just has to be something that can be converted into an Array before I store it. Since anything that can be converted to an array should have a #to_ary method, I could check that it has that:

1
2
3
4
5

# getting warmer...
unless size.respond_to?( :to_ary )
    raise ArgumentError, "size has to be convertable to an Array"
end
@size = size.to_ary

The spec still passes, and I’m getting more duck-typey. Or at least chicken-typey. We could go a step further:

1
2

# quack, quack!
@size = size.to_ary

Since the goal was just to complain loudly if the argument is invalid, and we’ve decided that an argument is invalid if it can’t be converted to an Array, then we don’t really need to check that it responds to anything. Just try calling the method! If it doesn’t have that method, you’ll get an error, just like you’re supposed to (although we’d have to tweak the spec to expect NoMethodError instead of ArgumentError). If it does have the method, you have a (presumably) valid parameter. So, it’s all good.

It would be even more duck-typey to have no checks at all (and no specs for the checks), and instead just assume that everybody who uses the method has read the docs and knows to pass the right sort of thing. But as I explained earlier, not checking is not a good idea here. (Well, maybe in this specific case it would work out fine, since users wouldn’t usually be creating their own instances of this event. But in general, no.)

So, what’s my point? I don’t have one. I just wrote this as a thought experiment to help me decide what to do. Thanks for listening!

Introduction

Welcome to the FIFE 2008.1 README. This snapshot is based on SVN revision 2512.

Download

• Sourcecode package: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/FIFE_2008.1_r2512_src.tar.bz2
• Win32 precompiled package: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fife/FIFE_2008.1_r2512_win32.exe

Theme of this release

For the 2008.1 release we decided to stick to the tropical island concept and called our example game "Rio de hola".

Caution: this release is still lacking a lot of polish, especially the "Rio de hola" game that ships with it. It lacks almost any form of gameplay but there is a reason why we decided to ship the release in its current form nevertheless. We planned to release future FIFE milestones under the LGPL to offer a less "restrictive" license to possible FIFE users (we know that the term "restrictive" is just our personal point of view).

We had to clear up the legal situation first and fortunately the software freedom law center (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/) helped us with the transition. The agreement of all developers who contributed code that was still used in FIFE was needed and because over three dozens of people contributed code to the project, this took us a lot of time. We were not able to reach all of them so we decided to either remove or rewrite the code of the contributors who didn't reply to our license switch proposal mails (from scratch).

We were able to replace the last parts of the problematic code today so now FIFE is officially LGPL'ed software. We're glad that we were able to make this step after it took us so long and we think that the new license alone is worth a release. Therefore we're proud to finally present the first FIFE release that is published under LGPL 2.1 or newer (your choice).

Engine and the editor tool made _huge_ steps forward since the last release about 5 months ago. Therefore we decided to release the current status as stable release although it offers not many new aspects on the content side and the content that is in place is very likely to change with the 2008.2 release.

The milestone itself seems to be a very important step into the right direction. You can build your own maps now with the help of the editor tool. Furthermore a basic application structure is in place that should give you an idea how can create your own FIFE-based game; this release is stable enough to start working on your game now :-)

Important changes since the 2008.0 release

Model improvements & simplifications

• Elevations removed (Fallout legacy).
• Support for namespaces:
  • New resource infrastructure migrated into whole engine. This enables:
    • uniform pooling for all resources that need to be pooled.
    • uniform loading for all resources (model stuff, images, sounds...).
    • uniform saving for resources which support saving (model stuff).
  • Datasets are now stored in a flat list in model instead of dataset hierarchy.
  • Changes in model are now bookkeeped. Observer interfaces provided for change listeners.
    • This enables e.g. reacting only to changes instead of polling on every round.
    • Also critical enabler for triggers.
  • Instances now support initial rotation value.
  • Objects support default actions.
  • Further model cleanup.

XML format changes

• All resources are now defined with principle 1 file / 1 resource.
• Importing of objects can now be done also based on directories where they are contained.
• Relative paths are now used instead of absolute ones.

Loaders

• All loading happens now from python (tinyxml dependency removed).
• Improved error reporting.

Editor

• Possibility to move instances on map.
• Possibility to rotate instances on map.
• Possibility to zoom the map (OpenGL mode only).
• Painting with currently selected instance (e.g. large ground areas).
• Importing of multiple objects based on given directory.
• Initial map creation wizard (still work in progress).

Rio de hola game

• More assets:
  • Graphics, sounds, music...
  • Two new maps matching the storyline.
  • Rio de hola now conforms to package structure: http://wiki.fifengine.de/Fife_Package_Specification
  • Popup menu integration, demonstration of actions (kick, talk).

Pychan improvements

• Hiding of scrollbars.
• Text wrapping.
• A lot of smaller improvements.

Functionality

• Pixel perfect instance picking (taking transparency into account).
• Ability to get list of instances from given screen rectangle.
• Distance calculations made easy, exposed to scripts.
• Instance outlining.
• Instance coloring.
• Screenshots are now saved in png format (instead of bmp).
• Stereo sound support in linux (introduced with the help of openal-soft).

Video / view improvements

• Both renderbackend and separate images can now render graphical primitives (e.g. lines, dots..).
• Each camera now has separate set of renderers. Allows truly adjusting cameras independently.
• Zooming capability (currently properly supported only by OpenGL backend).
• Support for drag cursor definitions.
• OpenGL graphics chunking size is now definable in settings. Should help e.g. with large backgrounds.
• GenericRenderer? adding customised rendering capabilities for scripts.

Misc. changes

• Initial package structure defined for FIFE clients.
• Updated guichan to the latest release 0.8.1.
• Usage of unittest++ instead of boost unittests.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Non-code related changes

• Switch from GPL 2.0 to LGPL 2.1 (or newer).

Features

A complete list of the features that FIFE offers can be found at the project wiki:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Engine_features

License

The source code (*.cpp, *.h & *.py) is licensed under LGPL 2.1 or newer:

• http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html

Content was taken from a lot a lot of different 3rd party sources. Therefore each client directory comes with a separate LICENSE file that states the origin of the content, the author and the actual license it was published under.

Building & running FIFE

Dependencies

A list of all dependencies (including accurate version numbers) that you'll need to obtain to build FIFE on your platform can be found at the project wiki:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Build_dependencies

General notes

FIFE utilizes the SCons (http://www.scons.org) build system. Here is a quick list of scons commands that can be important for building FIFE on your platform:

• 'scons ext=1' will build specific FIFE dependencies from source that usually don't reside in the most important Linux package managers.
• 'scons -h' will list additional compile options.
• 'scons' will build FIFE.
• 'scons tests=1' will build FIFE and the unittests (needed for test_fife.py).
• 'scons -c' clears any compiled objects (= scons equivalent of 'make clean').

Platform specific details how to build FIFE can be found down below.

Linux

Detailed information how to build FIFE on Linux-based distributions can be found at the project wiki:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Building:Linux:SCons

After FIFE has been built successfully move into the <FIFE>/clients/rio_de_hola directory and run: python run.py

Mac

Detailed information how to build FIFE on Macintosh systems can be found at the project wiki:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Building:Mac:Scons

Caution: the Mac compile guide is currently heavily outdated! We would like to improve this situation but we're lacking a Mac maintainer who could take care of that. In case you're interested in the position feel free to get in contact with our developers on the project's IRC channel:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=IRC

In case you manage to build FIFE on your Mac system you can move into the <FIFE>/clients/rio_de_hola directory and run: python run.py

Win32

The Win32 package ships with precompiled binaries. Simply unpack the package to location of your choice. After that you'll need to install ActivePython? 2.5 to run the techdemo:

• http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePython/windows/2.5/ActivePython-2.5.2.2-win32-x86.msi (for 32bit Windows systems)
• http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePython/windows/2.5/ActivePython-2.5.2.2-win64-x64-nopywin32.msi (for 64bit Windows systems)

Move into the <FIFE>\clients\rio_de_hola directory and start the run.py script. You can simply double-click with your mouse on it. It should be automatically associated with the Python interpreter after installing ActivePython?.

The editor tool can be found within the <FIFE>\clients\editor directory. You can launch it by running run.py.

Last but not least there is an example client residing in <FIFE>\clients\pychan_demo that shows how the pychan GUI library works. Start the GUI demo application by running pychan_test.py.

Configuration

The engine utilizes special settings files for configuring FIFE. This file is called settings.py and resides in the same directory as the run.py scripts. You can customize FIFE by editing this file.

Known issues

• All included maps are still really early work in progress versions that lack proper blocking. Furthermore a lot of planned map objects are missing because we're still searching for 3d artists who could help us with the creation of those.
• Despite the Rio de hola client is labeled as a game, it does not feature any relevant kind of gameplay yet. We can hopefully improve this over the next releases. We released FIFE in its current form nevertheless because the license switch as well as the engine and editor improvements are huge steps forward in our opinion.
• Win32 users tend to suffer from problems with the OpenAL drivers. If you don't hear the background music playing while running Rio de hola, run oalinst.exe that ships with the Win32 package. This is the latest OpenAL driver for Win32.
• The unittests are broken on Win32 (if used in combination with scons & mingw). We plan to address this issue but we're lacking active Win32 developers to look into these kind of problems as the vast majority of the active developers are running Linux. If you would like to help out with Win32-related issues please contact us at our IRC channel: http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=IRC

Feedback

We appreciate every kind of feedback concerning the release, the project in general and the bundled techdemo. Feedback is a great way to help us to improve FIFE. If you would like to get in contact with us and provide feedback you can either visit our IRC channel or our forums:

• http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=IRC
• http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?board=5.0

Signature

Have fun with the release and let us know what you think about it! -- The FIFE team.

http://www.fifengine.de/

2008/07/13

Posted in: gpl, 2008.1, lgpl

Frank and mushroom from Apricot

There was a change of focus in the Apricot project: From create full functional industry quality game prototype to create a full functional level in the Crystal Space engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions and create several levels in the Blender Game Engine, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping.

Now this may sound worrying, as "some levels" are only one of many parts of "a game". And to be honest, I am a bit worried that the project will not prove the "you can make awesome open source games" theory, and instead be a demonstration of how nice-looking things made with Blender can be.

The apricot team members come from Blender and Crystal Space backgrounds, which means that they are likely to be most interested in visuals. So perhaps my expectation of "an awesome game" was wrong and should have been "an awesome looking game" (which is actually the only thing able to make the industry pay attention to Blender and Crystal Space. ) Nobody cares about story and depth and such after all, right?

However, the svn repository will be opened this weekend and who knows? Maybe with some community help, the project will reach a higher level of what is now intended before it's deadline of 31, July?

FreeCol map editor

FreeCol and it's editor are both written in Java, which saved me some compilation minutes. The map editor is pretty simple and unproblematic to use.

Battle Tanks 0.8-rc1 has been shipped! Capture the flag! Team deathmatch! Internet play! The few existing servers are empty though, so why don't ya go and fill them up? Get it here in Windows-binary or source flavor! The team asks for feedback, which is pretty common with open source projects and might be even superfluous to tell, but it always gives me a good feeling when teams ask for criticism on their products.

In case you have never before seen Battle Tanks in action, I recorded a video of AI-aided defend-the-base-style cooperative gameplay.

Battle Tanks' maps can be edited via Tiled, as demonstrated below. The editor is a general-purpose tile-based map editor written in Java, which means that it's cross-platform and relatively easy to run. It's feature-rich but also pretty simple to use : there are layers and you draw tiles on them. Effective! It resembles RPG Maker in some ways, but as a map editor it is far more advanced.

Item placement in Battle Tanks is being done via a specialized, also pretty simple editor, which has no documentation as far as I can tell and which tends to crash a lot.

• basic impact form to decrease or increase all kind of points with the given act form - so you can create normal spells or combat attack forms that decrease stamina or health etc.
  
• weapons / ammunitions with BonusSkillActForms for spell and such effects - for creating artifacts (of course with attribute/resistance bonus modifiers too if you want that)
  
• armors body part dependent, that can also contain bonus Resistances/Attributes for enchantment
• State effects - so you can create long time effects for spells like sleep, poison, an elemental shield, long term burning spells etc.
• act forms can specify contra attributes/resistances that help the attacked resist them
• usable objects with bonus act forms - to create potions, kits etc. even with long term effects (with the help of the new State effects)

Five months and 1679 commits passed since build 0.7.5800 has been published. Finally we decided that we should no longer wait for release, and we must publish it ASAP. But the code is not yet free of bugs, and we present an intermediate build 0.8-RC1. It has so many new features that our small team needs your help in testing it.

Here is a brief list of innovations:

Muliplayer

• Ability to play in teams. Two new modes: Team DeathMatch and Capture the Flag.
• World-wide-internet-network game. We have established three servers that are available across the planet; each one serves one type of network game (CTF, TDM and good old Cooperative). Currently, the servers are in test mode, but everybody may connect: just click Scan button in Join the Game menu and find btanks.media.netive.ru in a list.
• Enthusiasts may set up their own standalone servers.

Video and Audio

• Thanks to our D3dSDL library, BTanks for Microsoft® Windows™ now use DirectX™® and not OpenGL™. This has really increased the overall performance.
• Screen resolutions are now taken from SDL.
• We no longer support OpenAL because we have our own Clunk library now.
• Some new sounds are added.

Controls and Gameplay

• The effect of slowing/speeding-up is eliminated.
• Diagonal shooting is improved (yeah we did that!).
• Shilka looked a bit boring, so we have improved its turret: now it rotates and self-aims.
• Grenades and mortair missiles now fly over obstacles.
• Frags are counted better; a telefrag trick is added (if two people enter the same teleport, only the last one survives).
• Join/leave/death messages are sent to chat automatically. Messages from players are coloured according to colors of teams.

Maps

• A new ‘Four Rooms’ map is added for CTF anf TDM.
• The map editor is now shipped with the game. It is still user-unfriendly. We are not sorry.
• Timers and OBEY effect are added to scripts to help controlling objects with LUA. Now scripting is much more powerful!

Code
An incremental network protocol, a new serialization model, compression with dictionary made it possible to decrease network traffic in times! All code is ported to g++ 4.3. All game resources are packed into a single resources.dat file (DEB, RPM and other ebuilds builders must be happy). sigc++ is no longer used because we now have our own library. Random number generator is improved.

Phew… These are only the most important things, so if you want to find out more–see the changelog. And we look forward to your bugreports!

P.S. Oh, dear Mac users, you will unfortunately have to wait for the new build. But we do remember you!

Deadlines and work-related stress continue to stomp on my head. I have very little energy / motivation left for anything else, lately.

What’s that? <q>Go cry, emo kid,</q> you say? You’re right, enough of my whining.

Two things are becoming increasingly clear:

1. I really need to figure out a way to reduce the work stress, and have more motivation for other things.
2. Rubygame’s development model is very fragile.

#1 is not very interesting to you, so I’ll talk about #2.

Rubygame’s development model is fragile, for the simple reason that I’m the only “active” Rubygame developer. This has been true for most of Rubygame’s lifetime, aside from brief periods where some developer would come along for a while, then wander off.

And given the amount of time I’ve been able to put into Rubygame lately, calling me an “active” developer is stretching the word quite a bit. Really, there aren’t any active Rubygame developers. Nobody’s actively working on it. It’s just sitting there. (Sadly, this too has been true for most of Rubygame’s lifetime, aside from brief bursts of productivity.)

Clearly, that’s a problem. The obvious solution is to get more people involved, so that even when I’m busy, Rubygame doesn’t stagnate.

How would somebody get involved? Maybe like this:

1. Choose an open ticket that you think you could handle. Or something new. Whatever floats your boat. I’m not picky, I just want to keep Rubygame active and relevant.
2. Create a fork of Rubygame on Github.
3. Do the work in your fork.
4. Send me a pull request.
5. I’ll pull the changes, and if it looks good, merge them into the “official” Rubygame and close the ticket.

The nice thing about that system is that you don’t have to dedicate yourself to Rubygame if you don’t want to. Yeah, it would be really nice to have a dozen developers making weekly contributions to Rubygame, but not everybody has the time for that. The system would work fine even if you only make one contribution to Rubygame.

Anyway, that’s my idea. If it still seems sane in the morning, I’ll see if I can write up a call for developers and go fishing.

The tool allows you to create a map and to raise and lower the terrain and paint textures on it via brushes. You can place objects on it, which will automatically be at the correct height relative to the ground.

It is fun to play around with (though not for too long, as the art asset is tiny and I don't know how to import additional media and because all I can do is make a map, not walk with a character on it or place items or monsters. - Mind you, the editor is in an early stage.)

While using it, I got the thought that if such tools were developed enough to be able to produce content to truly enrich games, their ease of use would attract many potential contributers and could turn a player into a contributor. Even if the advanced features (like creating characters with dialog options) would be more complicated, the simple things would be easy to do, which means that there will be motivation enough to learn how to do the more complicated work.

I haven't given much thought to game-specific editors before, but I will take a closer look at the ones I can find and figure out where their limitations are and if there are any faults with them and write my findings here. Please tell me if you know of any such tools (besides the ones for SilverTreeRPG, Sauerbraten, SuperTuxKart and FreedroidRPG that is. ;) )

In not so dashing news: you can vote for Apricot's official name now. The suggestions are kind of cute ("point blank frank", "frankie’s reign of terror") but I really would prefer "Apricot". Do you like the name "Bick Buck Bunny"? I don't too much..

Click to make the image bigger (and much more readable)
Hooray! See my last post for more information about this. It’s from Linux Format Magazine, issue 108. Huge thanks to Mike Saunders for this scan.

UPDATE: I got a scan of it!

Wow! Big news!
According to a friend of mine in the UK, the open-source game I created, Pillows, has a short write-up in Linux Format Magazine! It’s in the latest issue, #108!
If I can get ahold of a scan of it, I’ll post it, but here is a excerpt of it:

Finally we have Pillows, a deceptively simple yet hugely addictive game which doesn’t really fit into any regular genre. Here’s the plot; an unknown aggressor is firing huge missiles at the Earth. Using a giant catapult and “ridiculously overstuffed” pillows, your job is to cushion the blow of those missiles protecting the world from impending doom. All you need is the space bar: watch the indicator in the top left, hit space when you’ve chosen the right angle, and hold down space until the correct power is set. You’ll fire a pillow into the air, and if it lands in the path of the missile the world is saved (and you go onto the next level!).

Very awesome! Thanks a bunch, Linux Format Magazine! Apparently a copy of the game is included on the DVD that comes with the magazine, too!
Also, if you haven’t already, you can check out the game right here.

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world.

Blood Frontier, the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release.

Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel

There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think).

There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, this and his other portaits are available under an open source license (CC-by-SA or GPL3) and you can find out more information, lavish praise, or even make requests (!) in this topic in the FreeGameDev forums.

In other fantasy-game news, DungeonHack progress continues and they finally have the project in SVN (direct link) so interested people can check out their progress which is apparently pretty good. It's a Daggerfall-inspired game, which can only be a good thing.

Did you know FreeOrion will soon have 3D combat? Check out this topic on the Ogre forums for some preview screenshots. In the meantime, they released 0.3.10 with the usual raft of bug fixes and minor improvements. Downloads are available, from different places, for Linux and Windows.

The White Chamber

Studio Trophis have released the source for their very lovely looking game The White Chamber. It's an anime themed 2D point and click horror adventure game. It requires the WinterMute engine and I'm not sure whether that's Free Software although it seems the source is available but under no specific license EDIT: - it's not open source at all. The White Chamber source is at the bottom of the Studio Trophis downloads page. It looks like it's all Windows-only =( but I could be wrong.

A while back I made some hullabaloo about Portalized, a perhaps-to-be-open-source better-than-Portal engine. Well, the guy working on it (who, by the way, is only 16 - shame on us all who are older and less productive than him) now has a blog with some interesting commentary on his efforts as well as some gorgeous screenshots. It doesn't look like it'll be open source any time soon but I don't think he's ruled it out either, and now he has help so it'll be worth watching. Version 0.1 is on the way, so there's something to look forward to.

Well, hopefully that satisfies your Free game news needs for another day or so...

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll, then download this .blend file, open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :)

Edit: An unofficial OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release was posted. Testing it is encouraged, so that the official release can become a great one. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new