FGDPlanet FreeGamer FGChat FGDForums FGDWiki FreeArtSearch LibreGameWiki OpenGameArt
Also check out the development planet.
Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 10 Jhelum", the tenth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features Hellenic factions such as Athens, Macedonia and Sparta; technologies, civilization phases, click-and-drag walls, healing and more!
Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. You can redistribute it and modify it as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC-BY-SA. No "freemium" model, no in-game advertising, no catch.
Top new gameplay features in this release:From top left: 1. Specularity; 2. Celtic walls and revamped selection rings; 3,4. "Drag" (3) and "drop" (4) to build all types of walls, including Roman siege walls pictured. All works CC BY SA Wildfire Games.
We are especially seeking contributors in sound contribution management and in documentation, and, as always, in programming, art, sound, taking YouTube videos and more. These roles on the 0 A.D. development team are great if you want to brush up on your skills and update your portfolio, if you're seeking a project for school with real-life applications, or if you care about the cause of free culture and software and are willing to work pro bono with a group of dedicated volunteers from all over the world.
Specifically, we invite contributors to guide us in ancient Indian history and architecture as we collaboratively design the Mauryan Indian faction in 0 A.D.
Interested? Please register on our forums and start participating! (If you are applying for a role on the team, we request you start a thread in the applications and contributions forum following these instructions. Thanks!)
We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...).
"Jhelum" is the Indian name for the Hydaspes River in the Punjab region, and the site of a major battle between Alexander the Great against King Porus of the Hindu Paurava kingdom in 326 BC, located in modern-day Pakistan. Alexander victored, but at a heavy cost, and the bravery, war skills and princely attitude of Porus so impressed Alexander, he allowed him to rule Hydaspes in Alexander's name.
In honor of the decision to include Mauryan Indians in 0 A.D., we decided to dub Alpha 10 "Jhelum". (Thanks for the name idea, zaphzaph!) The setting for the battle of Jhelum is represented in the "Punjab 3" map included with Alpha 10. For the meantime, Persians replace the Mauryan Indians on this map, but this will be corrected as we include the Mauryans in 0 A.D. within the next few alphas.
For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter K. Keep it original and within the 0 A.D. time-frame (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC)!
Wildfire Games will keep releasing new versions of 0 A.D. from time to time. Watch our news feed to get updates, or follow us by e-mail, RSS, Facebook or Twitter. And you're always welcome to join the 0 A.D. community on our forums.
Contact info for press, bloggers, etc.: aviv@wildfireHYDASPESgames.com without the Greek name of this alpha version written in all caps.
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.
The image to the right shows the old encoding sprites had. TTexture described a sprite/texture as a single, shared entity defined by it's width (s.w) and height (s.h), together with the actual image data of the sprite (the rect portion within the black rect). However due to hardware restrictions the actual texture might need to be of a certain size and thus to be larger.
The new encoding splits TTexture to two independant entities. A sprite now stores information about its size and references to physical image by storing a link to it and a position where the sprite is located.
This encoding allows to pack multiple sprites (red rects) into a shared image (black rect). Doing so may reduce the amount of unused empty space as well as the total count of black rects. Graphics hardware generally benefits from both.
Right now however each sprite (red rect) will be created together with a unique texture (black rect) and stored in the lowever left of it, mimicing exactly the original behaviour. The next step on this frontier obviously will be taking the rectangle packer and allocate multiple sprites within shared textures.
Before doing this step however, I'll continue with removing as much deprecated OpenGL1.x as possible and probably write some GL2 renderer.
For part 3 of the tutorial on developing a game with the Frogatto engine, I’ve decided to do a series of videos demonstrating how to add walking, jumping, and crouching to Elisa. I recommend watching the videos in as high resolution as you can. Here are the videos: