FreeGameDev Planet - Games

FreeGamer - МедведьИгра - BearGame

2012-02-05T21:01:00+00:00

Please bear with me for the duration of this post.

Медвед

BearGame игра про медведя прыгуящим на воздушных шарах. Актуальная альфа-версия была написана в Java.

видео: BearGame

Plee le Porter

BearGame n'est pas le seul jeu avec un ours. Par exemple, Plee The Bear est un jeu avec un ours comme personnage principal.

Neues Pac-Bär Logo

Des weiteren habe ich letztens das Logo für eine Berliner Hobbyspielentwicklergruppe namens Berlin Mini Jam überarbeitet. Dies hat nicht direkt was mit open source Spielen zu tun, aber einige von uns mögen die offene Soße und stellen unsere Spiele unter freien Lizenzen zur verfügung.

Thanks for Bearing!

Widelands - Community Poll #1 Discussion

2012-02-05T17:14:38+00:00

First Community Poll discussion

The first community poll has concluded. You can find the results here. Frankly, I am very unhappy with how everything turned out in the end and I am unsure where to go from here. But let me start from the beginning.

How we got here

The initial problem was the following: The Barbarian inn and big inn is backwards compatible to the tavern while the empire inn is not because it can no longer produce rations but only meals. There were different opinions if this a good solution or not and I finally started the first community poll with the following three options:

Keep the empire inn as is. (30 votes, 42.25%)
Make the empire inn backwards compatible. (9 votes, 12.67%)
Make all buildings backwards compatible. (32 votes, 45.07%)

We had some trouble with people voicing their opinion multiple times so I changed the system to one vote per account. The final result is listed in braces in the list above. As you can see most people want that all buildings are backwards compatible. I will now explain why this won't happen and why this is my mistake alone.

What we won't do

Widelands is a game of three tribes. All tribes are different - the differences might seem arbitrary or even confusing for new players but they really make that a game between empire and atlanteans plays out completely differently to a game between empire and barbarians for example. If you do not believe this, take some time to study the replays of the ongoing tournament.

For example, having the axefactory only produce axes for soldiers is a great advantage for the barbarians: they can stockpile axes and be aggressive much earlier in the game than the other tribes. If the axefactory would also spend its time making tools it would not be able to produce axes so quickly and this would destroy this advantage - and unique trait - of the barbarians.

How I screwed up

This was my error totally: I offered an unspecific option (number 3) which I would veto anyways because it would destroy relations which increase the variety in the game. Also, option 3 includes option 2 so it is hard to get a clear picture of the intentions of the voters. Vote options should be disjunct, clearly voiced and real options for the game. This is obvious in retrospection - but I clearly didn't think this through beforehand.

What we will do now

There is some guesswork involved here now and not everybody will be happy with the decision.

Most voters were pro changing every non backwards compatible building in the game. This seems so far fetched for me that I cannot believe most players would really enjoy this when implemented. Its like turning all pieces in chess except for the pawn into queens - it makes the game easier but eats up its essence. We will not follow through with this - the axe factory and the brewery are knight and bishop for the barbarians. Instead, we will redo the vote, one building at a time. I restarted the poll which will run now for exactly 6 weeks. There are three options now:

Change the Empire inn to be backwards compatible.
Keep the Empire inn as is.
Either way is fine for me.

Option three will show how many people spent some thoughts on this topic and might give an idea of the priority this has to the community as a whole. Please vote again for your favorite option.

What we will change to work around such problems

I still think the community polls are a good idea and I am really sorry that it was so messed up the first time around. For the next community poll, I plan to write a news post introducing the problem and positions (just like for this one). We will then take some time to read and collect suggestions for a solution and I will compile the vote options for the poll from them.

Links:
Forum topic - http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/911/
Original News Post introducing the first vote - http://wl.widelands.org/news/2011/11/18/community-poll-backwards-compatibility-buildings/

NAEV - Naev is on Desura!

2012-02-03T00:19:57+00:00

~~I suppose I should qualify that with an almost.~~ Thanks to the efforts of #naev IRC regular oldtopman, we’re all set up ~~and awaiting final approval~~. ~~Once we go live,~~ Naev ~~will be~~ is available via Desura on all of our usual supported platforms (32 and 64-bit Linux, Windows and Mac OS X). The Desura client is presently exclusive to Windows and Linux, but Naev will still be downloadable on OS X through Desura’s site.

For those unaware of Desura, it’s a digital distribution platform. I’ll let Desura’s own about page do the rest of the talking.

Without further ado, here’s a link to Naev’s Desura page:

Update: As of now, Naev is live on Desura!

OpenClonk - What will settlement be like?

2012-02-02T22:41:41+00:00

After we already have a progress report on what the settlement development has reached so far, I wanted to give you all a quick overview about what is planned. Because a picture says more than 1000 words, I tried to make a little something showing the production-lines-to-be.

This is heavy work in progress though!

Click! ->

FAR Colony - Some Rant about the origin of FARC + 0.5.2 Status

2012-02-02T19:27:01+00:00

Do you want a good laugh ? I found in my archive the first try of FAR Colony.

The story of FARC extend as far as ...2002, before the two previous failed iterations and even before I begin to dev the universe generator...
This first try, and it's really a "try" because it never gone as far as some user's interface elements on a window, was in 2D. This thing wasn't even localized, in french only, nor had a proper license and the window itself wasn't even resizable. In fact it was my first serious try with the Object Pascal language.
The dev itself didn't lasted long (maybe one or two month), one year later in mid-2003 i began the universe generator.

Here's the link of the video: http://imageshack.us/clip/my-videos/194/q8y.mp4/

It's sometimes good to know where you come from :)

Considering the 0.5.2, what are the news? Well, I working primarilyon the interface yet, many things are to be completed some others are to befixed.

I must to completethe design of the colonization objectives, and also to complete the end ofcolonization phase with the transition to the second part of the game, thesandbox one.

Some other infrastructures will be also added because fornow it’s pretty minimalist.

I don’t think it will take 2/3 month to do that, as I saidin a previous post the CPS is already developed; it only needs to be expanded.But it will give me some time to refine this first playable alpha.

That’s all for now.

FreeGamer - PonyKart: Copyright Racer

2012-02-02T18:29:00+00:00

PonyKart Logo

Yes, this is for real.

PonyKart. Windows only. They have a SourceForge project.

I don't know what to say.

Simutrans - February’s Edition of Simutrans Monthly Screenshot Contest

2012-02-02T10:35:27+00:00

SMSC 2012 February's Edition about Central rail stations.

Simutrans - Simutrans Experimental 10.8 released

2012-02-02T08:43:21+00:00

Release of simutrans experimental version 10.8. This is a bug fix release, with some small feature changes to assist in balancing games, especially online games.

Simutrans - TileCutter v0.6.1 has been released

2012-02-02T08:09:01+00:00

A new version of Tilecutter v0.6.1, the basic tool to chop Simutrans graphics has been released.

Nikki and the Robots - Nikki’s Valentines Heart Shirts and Global Game Jam

2012-02-01T22:16:34+00:00

We added a neon pixel heart design to our shirt store. It is based on one of the first game objects that you will see when playing Episode 1 of the story mode:

One of us was at the Global Game Jam in Berlin as an organizer.

The theme was a snake biting its own tail and we made a tiny level referencing it. Too late for submission though. ;)

video: Nikki and the Snake - GGJ 2012 Themed Level

The video also shows the recently added game over screen menu (no more abrupt returning to the level selection) and a new, simple background for the editor.

FAR Colony - 0.5/0.5.1 Video - part 2

2012-02-01T21:19:33+00:00

And here's the second and final part of the video, with the production system and Policies Enforcement:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/7l3_hkYLu_w

:)

FreeGamer - GGJ License, EGP Feb 2012, STK Overworld, FG Interview

2012-02-01T16:09:00+00:00

GGJ 2012 Theme

Global Game Jam 2012 is over and you can find all the by-nc-sa-licensed games here. We talked to the organizers about allowing free (as in freedom etc.) licenses and got some positive replies, but in the end it was too short a notice.

We ask you now to write a short message to GGJ, asking for the inclusion of further licenses, for example a GPL+CC-BY-SA combination for GGJ 2013. Also feel free to discuss this in the comments.

If you participated in GGJ, we would like to encourage you to release your games under free licenses in addition to the required nc license.

EGP February 2012

Speaking of jams, the 7day-jam-during-one-month by Experimental Gameplay Project is "Infinite Worlds" for this month.

STK Overworld

As recently announced, one of the new features in SuperTuxKart 0.8 will be an overworld-connected challenge system.

Durk Talsma: AI programmer

Flight Gear's blog released a new interview. You can find the other interviews so far linked in this post.

Pyskool - A tiling problem

2012-02-01T15:11:16+00:00

Back in version 20091021 of the Back to Skool disassembly – which was the first version to include disassembly pages for data blocks – it was noted that play area tiles 1, 11, 21 and 30 in base page 144 are not used. Now that was all well and good, but it did leave the reader at least wondering what those tiles look like, and possibly also whether they had ever been used while the game was in development. Which is where version 20120201 of the Back to Skool disassembly comes in, and, more to the point, the new trivia entry Bottomless boxes. Be sure to take a look if you’ve spent the last two years scratching your head over the mystery of those unused tiles.

So, yes, in case it’s not been made clear yet, a new version of the Back to Skool disassembly has been released. In addition to the aforementioned investigation of unused tiles, this new release includes an explanation of the significance of the curiously named Q values. And the startup code has been moved back into the main skool file, which means that the ASM version of the disassembly now gives the option of changing the characters’ names. Such are the main changes since the previous release; for further details, consult the changelog.

Anyway, as always, you can browse the entire disassembly online, or download a copy for offline viewing, or build it yourself from the source skool and ref files included in the offline copy (for which you’ll need at least version 2.4.1 of SkoolKit).

FlightGear - Interview: Durk Talsma

2012-02-01T07:01:00+00:00

Q: What is your forum nickname?

Hehe, guess once.

Q: How long have you been involved in FlightGear?

Almost since the beginning, actually. I first heard about the project in 1997, when I got an email from Curt Olson, in response to a posting on the usenet newsgroup rec.aviation.simulators.

Q: What are your major interests in FlightGear?

I like the open nature of the project and the possibility to contribute at various levels.

Q: What projects are you working on right now?

I am actually doing several different things for FlightGear. My main project is developing a fully integrated AI air traffic system that contains autonomous vehicles, an ATC system that interacts with both AI controlled aircraft and with the user controlled aircraft. In addition to that, I am one of the editors of the main website, editor of the FlightGear facebook page, involved in the release process, code committer, and organizer of the annual FlightGear booth at FSWeekend in Lelystad (EHLE). In addition, I have recently taken over the administrator role for taxidraw.

Q: What do you plan on doing in the future?

I don’t expect the AI system ever to be finished, so I’m fully concentrating my coding efforts on this project.

Q: Why is it that you are interested in flight simulation or aviation in general?

As a kid I was fascinated by space travel, the Apollo missions to the moon, etc, watching every program on TV, and reading every book I could lay my hands on. As a six-year old, I visited Schiphol (EHAM) airport for the first time, and that sparked my fascination for the big jet airliners. Kind of like every kid at one stage, I wanted to become a pilot. My real interest in aviation didn’t start until I was nearly 20 though, after visiting an airshow at Leeuwarden airforce base (EHLE). This was around the same time as when I got my first PC, a second hand 286DX, which I bought from a relative living in Germany, with a 40 Mb hard disk and 1 Mb of ram. It had a German version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 preinstalled. So, in addition to learning to “fly” I learned the German word for “crash” as well.

Q: Are you happy with the way the FlightGear project is going?

Yes absolutely. We are currently in the process of further improving our infrastructure, by setting up things like the release plan, formalizing the rules for commit access, aircraft maintenance, and we’re brainstorming about feature requirements for the long term. Firm ideas are present for modularization of the FlightGear code, and some ideas for an integrated launcher GUI have recently been coined in a very informal setting. It will certainly take quite some time before these plans are all realized, but I think that the project is more vital and alive as ever. I’m also just amazed at some of the recent developments, such as Frederic Bouvier’s project Rembrandt, Thorsten Renk’s, local weather system, or Martin Spott’s ongoing efforts to build a unified infrastructure for scenery generation.

Q: What do you enjoy most about contributing to FlightGear?

I think there are a number of aspects that I really enjoy. One of them is the collaboration with other people. Being part of the development team, we’re all pretty much equals, and regardless of one’s age, background, occupation, political or religious conviction, we all share something we like and like to collaborate on. That is really enjoyable. It may also happen that somebody just jumps in and finds a solution in no time for a problem that has been cracking my brain for ages. For example, Adrian Musceac, recent work on generating AI traffic patterns was really something amazing. Likewise, I enjoy the interaction with many other talented people, such as Brett Harrison, who’s just so amazing at making convincing liveries. Obviously there are many other talented people around whom I really enjoy working with and it’s a shame I can’t name them all. Secondly, I also really enjoy having the privilege of being the first to experience a new feature for the first time. I was the first person ever to see the sun and moon appear in a desktop Flight Simulator, and that is a little bit special.

Q: Are there any “hidden features” you have worked on in FlightGear that new users may miss?

Yes, my original contribution to FlightGear was some code to calculate the position of the Sun, Moon, and even the planets. Both the sun and moon are pretty much taken for granted now, but back then (in 1997) FlightGear was the first PC based simulator that actually had a physical rendering of the sun and moon! Nobody will probably even see the planets, but I got the code almost for free, once I figured out how to calculate the solar and lunar positions, so their a little bit of an Easter egg. After finishing the celestial code, and before starting the AI traffic system, I initiated many projects that I subsequently handed over to others. As such, I have extended the time calculation code to deal with local time, and to allow the user control over the time of day, and implemented the original graphical user interface (GUI) system, and the original 2D cloud layers.

Q: What advice can you give to new contributors who want to get started on their first aircraft/new feature/Nasal script?

Be optimistic, be naïve, be realistic, and start modestly. Set yourself an attainable goal! I should probably explain what I mean by this. When we started out, back in 1996-1997, we were what I would now describe as incredibly optimistic in the sense that we believed that we could pull this off, but we were also somewhat naïve in the sense that we really didn’t have any firm idea about the challenges that lay ahead. But, we were able to pull it off, so this shows that we were right after all. But, if you want to contribute don’t start with your magnum opus. Before starting out, take some time to familiarize yourself with the project, get to know the code base, data structure or workflow. In addition, making a good first impression helps. Over the years we’ve seen a tremendous amount of grand ideas and not many of them have materialized, so we’re naturally a little apprehensive you may not find an immediate warm welcome, but if you do come up with a well thought-out idea, you may convince the development team, especially if you can substantiate your ideas with some working code to back it up.

Q: Have you previously used other flight simulators or simulation software in general?

Well, as mentioned before, I started out with FS4, and have pretty much had every version since then, until FS2004. The latter version got me interested in the AI system. When I started playing with the FS2004 equivalent of the ATC system I and began to notice its programming flaws. Determined that I could do this better, I started drawing out my own plans, and since than, I haven’t really touched any other simulator.

Q: How does FlightGear compare in your opinion?

I like FlightGear better because it’s a platform that is constantly moving. I almost exclusively run the cutting edge development version, so occasionally you’re in for a little surprise. Be it positive or negative. But that keeps things a little exciting to me.

Q: Do you remember what first got you interested in FlightGear? How did you learn about FlightGear? In other words, why did you actually download and try FG?

Yeah, that’s a long story. I was reading the usenet rec.aviation.simulators quite frequently at the time, had been exploring Linux for a few years, and finished my C++ programming course at university. This was around 1997, so the Linux distros weren’t as advanced as they are these days, and you still had to do quite a lot yourselves. One particular afternoon, I came across a usenet posting, which read “OPEN LETTER TO ALL FLIGHTSIMULATOR DEVELOPERS”. This was around the time that Microsoft FS97 was the latest version, and many users were dissatisfied. The original poster wanted to write a letter, on behalf of every dissatisfied user, to ask for a better version, asking the big game companies to incorporate their wish list. I responded to the thread, stating that if we really wanted a sim of our own, we should probably do it ourselves. I remember being a little anxious, because I wasn’t sure whether I would actually be able to substantiate that claim, if we were to follow it up. So, a few days later, I was actually a little apprehensive when I opened up my mailbox and found an email from a guy named Curt Olson, inviting me to have a look at, what would eventually become the flightgear.org website. Well, the rest is history I guess…

Q: What was your first impression about FlightGear?

That’s a really interesting question, because there was no FlightGear so to speak of. When I joined, Curt had hacked together a few proof-of-principle demos; the one I downloaded was called linux-demo-0.0.7.tar.gz, if I recall correctly, and it consisted of a small sample of elevation data from a chuck of terrain near Arizona, source code of a primitve (by today’s standards) OpenGL based viewer, a copy of Bruce Jackson’s larcsim FDM, and a simple keyboard interface. But it was exciting to get it to compile, and run!

Q: Compared to other flight simulation software, what are FlightGear’s major benefits in your opinion?

It’s scalability, open architecture, and the fact that it can be a great test bed for ideas, as well as the fact that there is no need for third party add-ons. By bringing every suitable user contribution into a single repository, we essentially create our own add-ons, and in the long run that should remove the burden from the end user to search for extensions.

Q: Do you think it is necessary to know how to program in order to contribute to FlightGear?

No way. In fact it never really has been a requirement, even in the old days when there was a lot more emphasis on C++ development, we already had a need for non-coding developers. Think about documentation writers, etc. These days, the balance is actually really shifting away from programming to artwork. The FlightGear world is essentially still largely an empty place, so we really have a need for high-quality buildings. Many of the exciting developments going on right now are in the development of new scenery textures, 3D modeling, and livery painting. These are actually skills that I essentially lack, so I have a lot of respect for the people working in these areas.

Q: Have you ever used FlightGear professionally or for educational purposes?

I once tried in my previous job, but the computer we bought for the project had serious overheating issues, so the project never really came off the ground. In the mean time, I found a different job, so the project was shelved.

Q: What about FlightGear as a “game”, do you think it can be used as such?

Probably, I like to use FlightGear purely for fun, so usually I just make up my own challenges, such as performing a bad weather landing, taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier, or playing with my latest AI/ATC code. Once finished, the ATC code will add a little bit of a game element, because it will expect you to fly specific routes, arrive at specific locations at a specific time, so as not to clash with other traffic etc etc. The system isn’t finished yet, but with some hacking I did quite recently manage to complete a traffic circuit under guidance of the ATC system, and it’s quite tricky to do right. So, there are some “gamey” aspects of FlightGear that are quite realistic and hopefully challenging. Having said that, I see absolutely no need for any formal gaming rules, or game like features such as setting off explosives and the like. Like many of the other developers, I like to keep FlightGear civil(ized). I don’t object to simulating military aviation though, as long as it doesn’t serve the purpose of glorifying death and destruction.

Q: On average, how much time do you spend working with/contributing to FlightGear?

Hard to say, it varies quite a bit with my day job requirements, but I think on average maybe one or two hours a day.

Q: Which of the more recent FlightGear developments do you consider most interesting/appealing?

There are quite a few. Of the individual projects, I really think that project Rembrandt (Frederic Bouvier’s shadow rendering code) is really exciting. But so is the new effort to unify all the shaders, the atmospheric haze and scattering, and Thorsten Renk’s local weather. I’m also quite happy with the progress we made with the AI traffic/ATC system, even though it’s not finished yet. But, what I think is perhaps even more exciting are some of the long-term infrastructural changes we have recently discussed. I can’t say too much about that yet, because many of the ideas haven’t been formalized yet, but making FlightGear more modularized by making use of HLA technology, and perhaps a more integrated GUI and launcher program are some of the exciting developments that I can see happening in a few years from now.

Q: Is there some feature that you’d truly like to see in FlightGear one day?

Yeah, there are some. Obviously, I’d like to see my own project come to it’s full potential, but in addition to that, I would like to see full scenery development of the polar regions of our planet. One year ago I visited Antarctica in real life, and this is just a very exciting area for flying. I’d also like to see the possibility of lower earth orbital space flight, more seamless terrain textures.

Q: What do you think could be done to attract even more new users and contributors to FlightGear?

Establish a good balance between developing new stuff and doing some public relations work. For the project the key question for survival is not to attract many users, but to attract potential contributors. Obviously, the way to do this is to attract many users, and to hope that there will be a few potential contributors among them.

Q: What about interacting with the FlightGear community? Any tips/experiences you’d like to share?

Nothing really special; just use your everyday courtesy, and keep realizing that we’re all volunteers. I’m usually not that active on the forum or mailing list, but I can tell from 15 years of experience that an intelligent and reasonable response is far more likely to create some momentum than a hurried response that is written in a spur of emotion. Also, I have observed that there is hardly any relation between action and words on either the mailing list or the forum. So when your new to the community, just hang around, get to know the characters and try to establish whom you can trust to be a knowledgeable source of information and who just raises a lot of dust.

Q: Have you ever recommended FlightGear to other users, friends/family?

Not really, my friends and family aren’t really into flight simulation.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

Yeah, have a lot of fun, and if you can try to contribute something to the project.

Bitfighter - Bitfighter 016 Released!

2012-02-01T01:22:36+00:00

It has been a while since we've done a release, but made those months count! We've made some fairly dramatic internal changes, including swapping out the entire UI and input systems (replacing GLUT with SDL). This means, among other things, you can use the mouse wheel in the editor now. Huge chunks of the editor have also been rewritten to make it easier to modify and add new objects in the future.

For the first time ever in the history of Bitfighter, we've added a brand new game type - Core. The object of Core is to seek out and destroy the enemy's Cores; we picture it as a kind of attack-the-castle type game, but we think you'll have your own ideas. Several modules have been updated, most dramatically Sensor, which expands the abilities you get for free. And soccer has been redone once again. No more carrying the ball, now it's all about a heavy ball. Give us your feedback on whether that was a good change or not.

We fixed a lot of bugs, made a lot of changes, big and small, but mostly this release sets the stage for a series of more rapid releases in the future. As always, we value your feedback and ideas, and look forward to seeing you in-game.

Grab a copy, and read the (exhaustive) change log on the Downloads Page.

- The Bitfighter Dev Team

PS As a special bonus, the download package includes a whole new set of levels, one for each game type.

FreedroidRPG - January 2012 Progress Report

2012-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hello, and welcome to FreeDroidRPG's first monthly progress report for 2012! Here are some of the highlights of what's been happening:

Programming department:

The formula for calculating the cost for repairing a hacked bot has been improved and simplified, as specified here. Thanks to Sebastian Offermann.
Excelling at the takeover minigame now has its rewards; if few charges were used by the player, the heat cost will be smaller to match. By Sebastian Offermann.

Graphics department:

Matthias Krüger replaced the inventory images of some items with images of a higher resolution.
A bug was fixed that involved the list of animated obstacles in a level and caused the creation and saving of obstacles with negative index values was fixed, thanks to fluzz.

Writing department:

The dialog with Dixon has been restructured and reworked a little; cookies have been replaced with variables; also, the peaceful players may find they have some more options. By Sebastian Offermann and Xenux.
Sebastian Offermann and Matthias Krüger gave the dialogs a general cleanup, with cookies replaced by variables, extra spaces removed, bugs and typos squashed (yes, typos can be squashed. We checked) and other improvements and simplification.

Some of the smaller changes:

If the player chooses to repair a hacked bot but then chooses to destroy it through the wonderful hcf.py, the costs of the repairs would not apply. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.

All in all, 23 changes were made in January.

We wish to thank everyone who contributed and helped improve the game. If you have an idea, something that bugs you or an issue you want to fix, don't be afraid to contact us and talk about it, tell us what's bugging your game or try to fix it yourself. Try it, you might even find your name on this list!

It is well worth mentioning that Arthur Huillet is going to do a talk about FreeDroidRPG in FOSDEM on Sunday, February 5th. The talk is titled "Anatomy of a Role Playing Game", and if you're attending, you might even get a T-shirt showing some of the bots! Oh joy!

-The FreeDroidRPG Team

SuperTuxKart - Challenging times

2012-01-31T22:22:00+00:00

Nope, it does not mean we are being sued by Nintendo, but it means it's time to bring some juicy updates about the recent development of SuperTuxKart. ;)

We are now progressing towards 0.8, and thus there are lots of radical new changes being made. Perhaps most notable is the new, improved challenge system, referred to as the overworld. Basically you drive around in a special large track from where you can launch challenges from certain places. But don't just take my word for it; have a few screenshots as well!

Village view

Here's a brief overview of most of the overworld. Big, innit? Outside the camera view there's a garage in which you will be able to change karts. In front you see a small mushroom village where some of the challenge start points are. To the right you can see a mountain area with three caves where the mountain-themed challenge start points resides, and further back to the right there's a small ocean with more challenges. Center left there's a small forest/plant area with some challenge orbs, and farthest from here is a technological area and Nolok's castle. To the left is a desert area with the hacienda, pyramid and Zen Garden hut. The overworld is very much a work in progress, and the screenshots does not convey the final result, but gives you an idea on what "the overworld" means.

Castle view

Here's the view from the opposite end of the overworld. Front center we see Nolok's castle with lava surrounding it. Further back we get a somewhat better view of the technological area, with a rocket made by new contributor ctdabomb, the UFO from Star Track with a challenge orb, and a few more objects plus a cave with another challenge orb. The other stuff I've already mentioned.

Ocean view

I know that usually ocean view means looking from land towards the ocean, but the other way around made more sense this time. :P
Here it's easier to see some new features in use. Most important is the texture splatting which makes texture transitions completely smooth. Also notice the brand new water shader which makes for better looking water. It's still not realistic, but it sure is better than just a plain moving texture.

Bubble shield

Not to worry; the blackness issue will be resolved when the move from multitexturing to shader texturing has been done. Also you can see yet another use of shader technology: the shields which protects challenge spots are semi-transparent, somewhat reflective spheres, resembling soap bubbles. Awesome!

The number stands for points needed to enter the area. If you don't have enough points, the shield will reject you (not a problem in this case though). You will later get points by finishing challenges, which can be driven at your difficulty of choice, giving you access to more. You would get more points by solving challenges at hard, and you could only finish the game with all points by driving at hard. You would not need to always get all points in order to progress in the overworld however, but those who finishes with all possible points may get some sort of small bonus.

There is also an intent to combine the overworld with a story line, but we're not there yet except for the brainstorming phase. How many challenges we will get in the end and many other details are left to be decided on as well, but there will eventually be more challenges than now and essentially more fun to be had. :)

The other major change being implemented is better physics. Karts are no longer as susceptible of locking together in a crash, and are pushed a bit from each other instead. Now there's also skidding implemented instead of sharp turn, like certain other arcade racing games have, with a bonus if you skid long enough. It's a bit hard to explain in words what the difference is, and it's still subject to change, so there's not much point in trying to write anything other than this: it'll be nice in the end. ;)

There's a lot more stuff in the works as well, but these are the features which the next release focuses on, and the other stuff will be very nice bonuses if they are ready in time for 0.8. I don't want to create any pressure, so I'll leave them for later when they are more ready and likely to be included by default.

That's all folks!

Bitfighter - Registration For Reserved Names for 015a Is Closed!

2012-01-31T17:33:54+00:00

It is no longer possible to reserve a name for the 015a client that most players currently use. Existing names will be preserved. Registering a new name (by creating a forums account) will only reserve your name from 016 forward. Existing names have been migrated to the new system.

Bitfighter - Bitfighter Is Moving!

2012-01-31T17:31:55+00:00

If you're reading this, you've found us at our new home. We're moving to a new server as part of the upgrade process to 016. Please bear with us as we get things organized.

One consequence of this move is that 015a players will no longer show up in the Who's Playing widget on this site. But don't worry! The 016 client will be available very soon!

FAR Colony - 0.5.2 Snapshot available for download

2012-01-30T13:10:58+00:00

I uploaded a snapshot yesterday night, it contains all the 0.5/0.5.1 updates and also the last additions in the development of the 0.5.2 (Spanish language and many user's interface refinement).
Take a note that's not an "official" release, and so has not an installer, just unpack in a directory of your choice (you must to create one). There's many things to dev to reach a playable 0.5.2 but at least you can take a look.
Also panels locations aren't very optimized for all resolutions, it should be ok for res >=1024*768.
And also since it's a manual installation you'll need to install the fonts too, in your OS' font directory, the package is included in the archive.
I'll make the part 2 of the video tonight and, if finished, i'll upload it on Youtube before SOPA and ACTA shut all of us down (sarcasm included). Since my beloved country seems to want to apply the bill C-11 (a SOPA like shit) all is possible.

That's all :)

NB: i forgot to put the download link: http://code.google.com/p/farcolony/downloads/detail?name=FARColony-0.5.2.830-Jan29-2012.7z&can=2&q=#makechanges

NAEV - Dev interview on gamingonlinux.com

2012-01-30T13:01:36+00:00

The gaming blog Gaming on Linux has published an interview with Naev’s core development team. You can read it here.

Warzone 2100 - 3.1 beta1 has been released!

2012-01-30T00:37:04+00:00

by cybersphinx on 2012 January 30

The 3.1 series is the first based on the new netcode, with new terrain renderer and many other changes. The main target are systems capable of OpenGL 2.0 (with shaders), but at least the important things like team colours should work with OpenGL 1.4+ (some things might look strange though).

Configuration uses a new directory, if you want to use old mods/maps/savegames, you need to copy them (see FileLocations). Note that savegames from 2.3 and 3.0 are incompatible, only those from newer master snapshots might still work. For mods it depends on what they do, don't expect old mods to work either.

2.3 is now officially unsupported.

Known Bugs:

Loading/saving does not always work (#3103)

See also: http://developer.wz2100.net/query?versi ... 1&order=id

Changes since the 2.3 series:

New terrain renderer
Support for 3/5/6/7 player maps

Changes since the 3.0 beta series:

New deterministic netcode that makes sure the same things actually happen for all players, should be much more cheating-resistant
Support for 9/10 player maps
Unit targeting is more intelligent, they won't all shoot one target when one shot is sufficient
Command line parameters now need a '=' (which was optional before), e.g. --resolution=1400x1050
Apple systems: Drop support for PPC and Mac OS X 10.4, add support for 64 bit Intel on Mac OS X 10.6+
Everything the master snapshots up to master_20120109 contain (and everything in master up to Jan 29, 2012, see https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2 ... eb9ac685cd), see their announcements as well:

Changelog for 3.1 beta1:
General

Change: Incendiary damage doesn't affect allies, affect features (4657de6ee7)
Fix: Incendiary armour works properly again (#3078, 666ea1050e)
Fix: Patrol order (f2104c1836)
Fix: Make pathfinding find straighter paths on average (bd38bfd28d)

Change: Redesign lobby screen, shows disabled tanks/cyborgs/vtols (617e4c01e1)
Fix: Prevent players from choosing already used colours (#3043, 7656d2f84b)
Fix: Make aborted research disappear from its research facility (#3046, 03833edf3f)
Fix: Make models on buttons (research, build etc.) rotate at all frame rates (#3082, 6e00044711)
Fix: Make sure the unit order buttons show the correct unit state, and orders are executed correctly (4b53782254)

Multiplayer

Fix: T2/T3 games (#3044, c907d5ab1c)
Fix: Don't allow games without opponents (#3049, 4d921267d0)

Challenges

Fix: Team selection, position lock, allow AI selection (10faa4c77d, 291ca23ccc)

Translations

Update: French (3c45fde143)
Update: Turkish (#3052, 311ae3b1cf)
Update: Hungarian (#3031, fadffc0556)
Update: Polish (#1347, 23d33f6fff)

Changelog for older versions: https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100/blob/master/ChangeLog
Full list of changes since master_20120109: https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100/compare/master_20120109...v3.1_beta1

Bug Reports:
This release probably contains bugs, please report them so they can be fixed. If you have trouble getting the game to work at all, consider a forum thread, you will probably get help faster that way.

See BugReporting for details, in short:

Search the existing tickets for your problem, if the problem has already been fixed in git, the ticket will be closed.
If there is an open one already, feel free to add more info to it.
If there is no report yet, make a new ticket (one per issue).
Be as detailed as possible in both summary and description, and either log in with your forum account or leave an email address so we can contact you if we need more information.
The more information we have, the easier it is to fix problems (or the other way around, the harder it is for us to reproduce a problem, the less likely it is to get fixed), so include savegames/instructions to reproduce the bug, crashdumps, backtraces, screenshots for graphical problems... whatever is relevant.
When you attach files to a ticket, please add each text/image file separately and uncompressed, so we can view them easily in trac (savegames can and should be zipped, they consist of name.gam, possibly name.es, and the files in the name/ folder).

Download:
As usual, downloads can be found on our download page or directly on Sourceforge.

(61 comments)

Battle for Wesnoth - Wesnoth 1.10

2012-01-29T22:30:58+00:00

Almost two years have gone by since we released Wesnoth 1.8. To thank you for more than 5 million downloads via sourceforge.net, we now proudly present Wesnoth 1.10. You can look at the (translated) release notes to get an idea about what has changed since 1.8. For those who just want to play, the new release is available for download. This stable release is compatible with the last two releases from the 1.9.x series. If you have any comments, we would be happy to hear them in the forum thread dedicated to this release. We hope there are no bugs left, but if you find some, please report them to help us fix them in following releases.
We are also looking for help in several areas, so that many other releases of similar caliber can follow this one. We are especially looking for translators, graphic artists (sprite, portraits, terrain, story images), music composers (a background in classical composition, and good equipment required), sound artists (for special effects), authors (writing/maintaining campaigns, creating content like unit descriptions, improving the in-game help) and, of course, coders. If you want to participate in developing Wesnoth, just have a look at the forum or visit us in the IRC channel #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net.

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

FAR Colony - 0.5.2: Spanish Language Added + Dev Status

2012-01-29T14:30:10+00:00

FARC received its first external contribution under the form of thetranslation of the user's interface texts in Spanish, thanks to nenexulo22who is now added in the credits of the game.
For my part, the update I made since the start of the 0.5.2 are purelyinterface based, some fix here, some code completion here and so on.
The encyclopaedia text formatting for the Socio-Political Matrix items isnearly finished too.
The next updates will concern interface updates again, all that concern thecolonization phase (the main goal of the 0.5.2) is in design phase yet. I needto complete the design of the colonization objectives before to implement them.
I go to upload a snapshot of the 0.5.2, it's of course not an"official" release, but will help nenexulo22 to refine the Spanishtranslation. I need also to adapt some hardcoding in the text for the Spanishlanguage.
And don't worry I’ll upload the part 2 of the 0.5/0.5.1 video.
That's all for now.

FreeGamer - Classic gaming: OGS Mahjong

2012-01-29T13:08:00+00:00

A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre:

OGS Mahjong 0.9 promo

The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of this age-old classic (like me).

FlightGear - FlightGear v2.6 Release Candidates

2012-01-29T07:01:26+00:00

This is the place to find the v2.6.0 release candidates as they become available. We would really love for everyone to download these “test” releases and give them a try. The target date for the official FlightGear v2.6.0 release is February 17.

Download FlightGear v2.6 Release Candidates:

Windows (updated January 29, 2012): Download FlightGear v2.6 RC2 here: [Mirror 1] [Mirror 2] [Mirror 3]
MacOSX (updated February 1, 2012): You can download it from http://macflightgear.sf.net
openSUSE: Follow this link to install “fgrun” which will also automatically install FlightGear as a dependency.

What’s New?

We have started a page on the wiki documenting what is new in FlightGear v2.6.0.

I think I found a bug …

Please review the following FlightGear forum topic. Here you can get some ideas on what to look for and what to test. And if you do find something wrong, where to post bug reports so they can get properly addressed.

Ancient Beast - Testing some twitter setting that should repost to the facebook page...

2012-01-27T03:21:53+00:00

Testing some twitter setting that should repost to the facebook page...

Ancient Beast - Our homepage just got better!

2012-01-27T03:14:13+00:00

Our homepage just got better!

Ancient Beast
www.AncientBeast.com
Free Fantasy online RPG

FlightGear - What would it be like to fly a rocket into space?

2012-01-26T18:11:26+00:00

Do you want to earn your astronaut’s wings?

Author: Thorsten Renk

Real spaceships aren’t actually piloted into orbit. The risk that a human being, strapped to his acceleration seat and under a crushing acceleration of 4 g for a prolonged period of time is unable to fly with the precision required to reach orbit is far too great, and real spacecraft reach orbit on autopilot.

But what would it be like? Welcome to a scenario in which a Russian Vostok spacecraft has been acquired by the USA and fitted for a manually flown mission.

This is the launch vehicle assembled at Edwards Airforce Base. The actual capsule is hidden under an aerodynamically formed protective cover. Below it is the third stage of the rocket, with its exhaust nozzle visible. All this is mounted on top of the huge first and second stage. Unlike many US rockets, which use sequentially burning stages, the first stage of the Vostok launch vehicle consists of four boosters which burn along with the long, cylindrical second stage.

The inside of the spacecraft is a very small place. There are no big windows (and currently the protective cover blocks the view outside in any case), so there is not so much to see except the instruments. In front of me is the main instrument panel, and to the right is the stage control panel, left of it the control handle.

Here’s a closeup onto the main instrument panel. Since I won’t be able to see anything of the outside during much of the ascent and the descent, this is what I will have to navigate with. The most important instruments are in the lower half of the panel – altimeter, inertial speed indicator, vertical speed indicator, dynamical pressure, orientation and acceleration. This isn’t enough to fly with any precision, say to rendezvous with ISS – but that’s not what the Vostok is for, it’s made to carry a human into orbit and back, and this is what I will do.

One of my most important aids however is a handwritten cue sheet which tells me roughly at what altitude, velocity and orientation the rocket should be at a given time. Without such reference, it is very hard to gauge whether the rocket is on a good ascent path or not.

Unfortunately, the ‘not being able to see too much’ is also a technical limitation. The Flightgear rendering engine is not designed to handle views from low Earth orbit, and even with the cutting edge development high altitude and extreme visibility rendering I’m using in the following, the view doesn’t really measure up to real views of Earth from orbit.

After igniting the engine, the thrust takes a few seconds to ramp up, but the Vostok rocket delivers a solid 2 g initial thrust with first and second stage burning, so I lift off quickly. After the first few seconds, I rotate the rocket around its main axis such that I am facing my launch heading. To make use of Earth’s rotation, launches are done eastward. As soon as I reach the desired heading, I push the ascent path out of the vertical along my launch vector to about 60 degrees with the horizon. During ascent, I will thus be more and more hanging face-down in the capsule, facing Earth at all times. Which is very reasonable, because in case of any instrument malfunction, this gives me at least a rough visual reference. Of course, the actual forces in the capsule are nothing like hanging face-down, the acceleration always pushes me back into the seat.

After passing about 20.000 ft, the dynamical pressure starts growing large, and I have to throttle back to avoid damage to the rocket. After all, a rocket is little more than a thin shell around fuel tanks: For instance, the second stage weighs roughly 100 tons at liftoff, but its empty weight is a bit over 7 tons. The air thins rapidly, however, and thus the dynamical pressure decreases quickly and I go to full thrust again. Once above the pressure peak, I push the nose of the rocket further down to 30 degrees with the horizon and start building up forward velocity while Edwards AFB vanishes below.

The full power of the JSBSim flight dynamics and atmosphere model affects this part of the ascent, and so the interaction between rocket and atmosphere is as realistic as the available data on the Vostok can make it.

After about 90 seconds, the fuel of the first stage boosters is almost spent, and the reduced mass of the launch vehicle ramps up the acceleration to 4 g and beyond. Once again, I throttle back to stay below 4 g to avoid damage to the rocket. At about 120 seconds, the first stage is out of fuel, and I separate the boosters. I am now high enough that air friction is negligible, and so I also blast the protective cover off the capsule and can take the first look outside (nothing much to see though). The second stage is still heavy at this point, and so the thrust goes back to about 2 g as we climb the 100 km altitude limit into space.

The whole flight dynamics changes quite drastically during a mission from the initial launch vehicle to the re-entry of the capsule. Also the weight of spent fuel is a significant factor. All these effects are quite distinctly felt during ascent to orbit.

At this stage, I have to start watching my ascent casefully. The second stage separation should bring me roughly to my orbital altitude with about zero vertical speed so that the third stage burn just keeps me at this altitude while accelerating me to orbital velocity of a bit more than 28.000 km/h. However, the second stage reaches more than 4 g thrust towards the end of its burn, while the third stage starts with barely 0.5 g thust, so any mistake I make at this stage will at best take very long to correct with the 3rd stage burn, at worst be unrecoverable. Thus, I control the pitch angle very carefully and monitor altitude and vertical speed.

About 5 minutes after launch, the second stage burns out and I separate it as well and ignite the third stage. Flying a rocket is very different from flying an airplane – while an airplane reacts to its immediate surroundings and doesn’t remember much of what was five minutes ago, the rocket’s current state is pretty much determined by what happened the last five minutes. If the ascent to this stage was bad, there’s nothing much I can do to correct it now. But my altitude and speed after 2nd stafe separation are within reasonable parameters, and so I continue build up speed while keeping my altitude with the half g thrust the third stage provides.

Another five minutes later, close to reaching orbital velocity, I have to throttle down. The speed must be reached quite accurately, otherwise I might go into an elliptical orbit rather than an almost circular orbit. And this is problematic, because the TDU has even less thrust than the 3rd stage, so if the 3rd stage brings me too high, I might not be able to de-orbit at all.

There are also technical reasons – Flightgear currently isn’t designed to handle an altitude above 150 km, so I have to reach an orbit below 150 km and above 100 km where the atmosphere is thin enough.

I watch the perigee indicator carefully, and as it starts rapidly climbing, I separate the 3rd stage – I am in orbit! Apogee and perigee indicators read 128 km and 140 km, so while not completely circular, this is reasonably good.

Flying to this stage isn’t easy – only three Flightgear pilots have to my knowledge reached a stable orbit with the Vostok spacecraft. You have to work for your astronaut’s wings!

From this point, I only have the minimal thrust of the TDU available to turn the spacecraft and decelerate. Rather than aerodynamical controls, I now have to fire thrusters to change my attitude, so the spacecraft handles once again completely different.

JSBSim handles the attitude control thrusters just as well as the aerodynamical controls, and the spacecraft handles again very plausibly at this stage of the mission.

There’s not much to do while drifting along in the orbit. Look out and watching the sunrise is nice though.

The cutting-edge development experimental lightfield shader brings out the Earth shadow moving across the terrain, the stark shadows in low light and the differential light dependent on altitude very nicely.

To de-orbit, I turn the spacecraft around and fire the TDU main engine to use up the remaining fuel. This lower my perigee such that it intersects with the atmosphere – the friction will have to take care of the rest. Then I separate the TDU as well. At first, the first gentle touches of the atmosphere lead to a tumbling motion of the capsule, this then stabilizes as the drag increases, and I start falling faster and faster.

If you though the 4 g during ascent where tough, then you haven’t experienced re-entry yet. As the capsule finally reaches the lower atmosphere, a deceleration force of 8 g and more brutally brings me from orbital speed to a few hundred km/h. I simply black out during this stage.

Flightgear optionally simulates blackout and redout due to extreme acceleration at set limits.

By the time I get conscious again, I have an altitude of about 10 km and most of the speed is gone. Time to get the brake parachute out and kill the rest of the forward motion. After the braking parachute has done its job, I get the main parachute out, and once my vertical motion has slowed down, the final task is to activate the soft landing sensor.

Close to the US west coast, I gently splash into the ocean. Nothing to do now except to sit tight and wait for the recovery crew to pick me up…

Ancient Beast - One of the game assets released (for free) on blendswap. Enjoy!

2012-01-26T18:09:52+00:00

One of the game assets released (for free) on blendswap. Enjoy!

Camo scout | Blend Swap
www.blendswap.com
Swap some blends with friends

TORCS - TORCS Endurance World Championship 2012

2012-01-25T23:19:26+00:00

The TORCS Endurance World Championship 2012 is set up and ready for signing in. We use TORCS 1.3.2 to start the season, have a look at the README for a list of changes. The most important changes regarding the championship are: reduced drag advantage for the leading car when slipstreaming ground effect drops quickly when air flow is not parallel to driving direction new car available (car8-trb1) some Gf* API functions operate now with const char* instead of char* I set up a test championship to make the competitors familiar with the process and to give the opportunity to iron out problems and getting used to the people before the real championship starts. Here you can join the real championship. I hope to meet you on the track and that you enjoy the 2012 season. Have fun, Bernhard

Unknown Horizons - Awesome status icons

2012-01-25T19:45:00+00:00

Short update from our visual department. Enjoy! Want more animations? Then check out a huge improvement to the looks of Unknown Horizons: Animated status icons that notify you whenever something cou...

quake2world - Quake2World Development Environment 2.1 released!

2012-01-25T16:55:39+00:00

Today I'm releasing the Quake2World Development Environment version 2.1!
http://maci.satgnu.net/files/q2wdevenv_2.1.exe
Here is a brief overview of the changes:

-mingw updated to latest toolchain
-SDL updated to version 1.2.15
-PDcurses updated to version 3.4
-libpng updated to version 1.5.7
-libjpeg updated to version 8d
-sdl_image updated to version 1.2.11
-sdl_mixer updated to version 1.2.12
-libcurl updated to version 7.23.1
-initial infrastructure for multiple architectures
-some cleanups

As before:

FreeGamer - Coldest: Mech AI and Playtesting with the Dev!

2012-01-25T12:00:00+00:00

Trees in Coldest

Video: Coldest's Crazy Bots

Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via:

git clone git://coldestgame.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/coldestgame/coldestgame coldest

Build instructions here.

Simutrans - SMSC January 2012: Winner carlbaker

2012-01-24T23:10:55+00:00

SMSC January 2012 Winners: 1: carlbaker, 2:The Hood, 3: mEGA Theme: From bridge to bridge at countrysid

FreeGamer - Mass Blaster: Ambidextrous Abstract Shooter

2012-01-24T22:00:00+00:00

Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster

Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

FAR Colony - 0.5/0.5.1 Video - part 1

2012-01-24T20:58:50+00:00

And here's the first part of the video :)
detail from the Youtube page
"This serie of two videos is to show part of game system developed in the 0.5 and 0.5.1.
The first part also show a bit of the basic interface which have already been developped prior to the 0.5 version.
0.5 part concern many changes in the Colony Data Panel, the addition of the infrastructures including their assembling/building process, the colony's storage and production matrix and finally the production process itself.
0.5.2, which will be the first "official" soooo playable alpha, will be released in april/may 2012.

Please, excuse me about the annotations, some of them show briefly, i suck a bit at making video, so don't hesitate to pause the video. It will not concern the annotations about the colony data panel, they're fine.
The second part will be uploaded this weekend (jan 28/29 - 2012)"

Simutrans - Simutrans Experimental 10.7 released

2012-01-24T19:21:23+00:00

Release of simutrans experimental version 10.7. This is a minor new release, with several bug fixes from 10.6.

Simutrans - New Simutrans release!

2012-01-24T19:11:33+00:00

Simutrans 111.1 has been released in the International Simutrans Forum.

FreeGamer - The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

2012-01-23T19:19:00+00:00

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down. Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads. A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore.

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

You may have already realized that to some extent piracy creates buzz about media. If people enjoy a movie or a game or an album or whatever, they talk about it, and the word gets out, even if the person doing the talking pirated it. This is not a justification for piracy, mind you. If someone wants to make content and then threaten to send you to jail for using it the wrong way, that's their prerogative under copyright law. On the other hand, people and companies who do that don't deserve your business, and they don't deserve the buzz that you create by talking about their media. This is particularly true given the fact that they're spending the money you give them to curtail your freedoms through draconian legislation and copyright treaties.

Ask yourself this, dear reader: Do I need the RIAA to tell me what music I ought to like? Do I need the MPAA to tell me what movies to like? Do I need crappy, DRM-loving, morally-bankrupt game studios like EA to tell me what games to like? I mean, seriously, have you seen big budget movies lately? Most of them are complete lowest-common-denominator tripe. As intelligent individuals, we can do better than that.

There's an awful lot of media out there released for free (or at least very cheaply in some cases), directly by the artists, musicians, cinematographers, and game studios that make them. Some people like to argue that piracy doesn't harm anyone if you never would have paid anyway; I would contend that by pirating big budget, mass-market crap, you're hurting dedicated artists who are releasing their work for free, because the time you spend finding a pirated copy of whatever it is you want to download could have been spent discovering and talking about their works.

Even better, you could spend some of that idle time creating entertainment rather than just being entertained. If you haven't worked on your own art, music, movies, or game projects, I would strongly encourage you to try it out. Creating entertainment for other people to enjoy and getting their feedback on it can be immensely satisfying. As an honest aside here, even a brief browse through open media libraries will make it obvious that movies are by far the weakest link in this chain, followed by games. Music, being easy now for individuals or bands to produce on a large scale at home with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, is by far the strongest. If regular people like us are willing to spend the time helping to create games and movies, we can close the gap. It'll take time, but if we can pull it off, it'll be worth it.

Media doesn't have to come from a feeding tube. Go out, look around, and see the world. There's a lot more out there than the big studios would like you to believe. And while it's not yet equal in some ways (special effects, etc) to the big budget stuff, your interest and contributions can help it get there, and at the same time help render the big studios and their anti-consumer copyright laws irrelevant. The big studios may, to some extent, be able to make it more difficult to pirate their content. What they cannot do is force us to give them money -- we can always choose not to watch their stuff.

Here are some places to get started.

Viewing:

Getting involved:

Creating:

Scirra Construct
OpenGameArt.org (disclaimer: yeah, it's my site ;) )
WeAreTheMusicMakers on Reddit
BandCamp

If you have other sites to add to this list, drop me a line and I'll add them. In the meantime, go discover something. :)

P.S. If you agree with this, tell people about it. Retweet, reblog, upvote, +1, whatever. I can talk about this all day, but we need a real movement if this is going to change anything, and that means we need people to be aware.

World of Padman - FAQ, Interview and more

2012-01-23T17:49:33+00:00

Some people may have noticed that we started a FAQ sub-forum in our forum, which is also linked here in the main menu on the left side of our website. The goal is to gather all the frequently asked questions from the community and to answer them in one place. So if you are new to the World of Padman and you need help with, for example, how to install a patch or how to colour your nick name in game, this should be the first place to look at. We hope to fill up the threads with more questions and answers soon.

The Happy Friar, the man in charge of planetquake.com, got some time to interview me about World of Padman. There you can find some information about the history of WoP, the development of the game in the past and what's new in the WoP 1.6 patch release. Also we show off some little information about future plans and community events.

Last but not least: congratulations to the ASK clan for winning its second clan war against the Los clan last Sunday. There were three matches:

Capture the Lolly InstaPad on PadAsia: ASK - Los --> 2 : 1
Team Free For All InstaPad on PadKitchen: ASK - Los --> 80 : 50
Team Free For All on Huette: ASK - Los --> 80 : 38

PadWorld Entertainment was providing the server. If you need support for events like this, feel free to ask us. We also offer clans the possibility to have their own private forum in the World of Padman forum.

DungeonHack - When the Phoenix respawns, I try again with a bucket of lava

2012-01-23T15:51:39+00:00

Scone to all, ... people still out of there.

Hem ... hello ?

I just wanted to know if we have to expect something out of here, or if people like Gladius and Freegamer should spent their ressources elsewhere, and/or reuse what they already done. Or if this site has eventually been buried away, under a pile of cobble and grass.

Personnaly I feel kinda responsible of this Berezina (not being the alone, though), but this guilt doesn't put me chains or whatever, so if we don't have responsiveness to elaborate a Nth reborn plan, it is fine to me to put an end and turn the page Feel free to comment on the matter.

And first of all, who's still here, and why ? ^^

Statistics: Posted by garvek — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 3:51 pm — Replies 0 — Views 1

NAEV - More happenings

2012-01-23T12:27:30+00:00

Hello everyone, and a belated happy 2012. It’s been rather quiet here on the blog, but I assure you that’s only because nobody has been posting on it. Elsewhere we’re all still tinkering away on the project, and we’re hoping to build toward a new release in the near future. Before we can do that though, we need to put the finishing touches on the active outfit system. You see, we plan to add outfits you can install on your ship and activate once in space for all sorts of effects… Oh, but I can see you’re not very interested in that. So, let’s move on to something else that’s been happening:

Asset and jump discovery

Discovering assets (that’s planets and stations) and jump points used to be easy. Jump into a system, glance at the system map, voila, they’re all there. But that is changing. Just as ships become undetectable if they’re far away from you, so can assets and jump points be invisible to you, using much the same mechanics. For an easy example, look at the following screencaps:

Jumping into Eneguoz... Hey, where is everything?

Oh, there you are! The planets didn't appear until I actually flew closer to them.

As you can see, it’s now possible for assets to not be shown on the map until the player discovers them. Now, I should point out that most planets tend to be fairly hard to miss in a star system, so when you jump into a new system you will usually discover all of them immediately, just like it’s always been. The example above isn’t representative in that respect – I simply modified the hide values for the purpose of showing how it works. However, if the system has high sensor interference (inside the nebula, for example), it may be more difficult to find the planets within.

Space stations tend to be a fair bit smaller than celestial bodies however (yes yes, except THAT one). You may have to scout around a system a bit before they appear on the map, and if the station actually makes an effort of being inconspicuous (think hidden military or pirate bases), you won’t easily find them.

Jump points, too, are more difficult to detect than your average planet. You usually won’t spot any jump points other than the one you entered from when jumping in, which means you can’t plot a course to the next unknown system before first finding the way there. So how will you know where the jump points are then? Well, you could fly around and look for them yourself, but there are a number of things you can do to find them more reliably:

Follow other pilots. Especially traders often travel to other systems, and they know all the major routes. If you see a trader fly away from a planet, try following it. Chances are it will lead you to a jump point.
Talk to NPCs in the spaceport bars. Not only do NPCs offer you missions sometimes, they will also give you helpful information. Some may even offer to update your map with locations of assets or jump points if you don’t know them already.
Buy maps. As of the next version of Naev, the Star Map outfit has been replaced by a collection of pre-defined maps. Each map reveals one or more star systems, and may or may not reveal jumps and assets belonging to them. Buying a map for the Empire Core, for example, will immediately update your map with systems in Empire space, as well as the jumps leading from one to the other.

There are also rumors of new, exotic types of jump points, such as hidden jump points that can’t be detected without special equipment, known only to a selected few. There also seems to be a kind of jump point that can’t be detected at all, and that only be used from the other side…

FreeGamer - Flesh Snatcher: Bloody Java Polygons

2012-01-23T03:03:00+00:00

Scenes from Flesh Snatcher

Flesh Snatcher is a bloody jME2 fps with fast movement and dodge-bullets gameplay that is low poly and low-tech enough to run smoothly on a netbook (tested: Asus EeePC 1000H).

Most models were made by the author, Arbaro was used for tree generation, FSRad (shared source, noncommercial) was used for lightmap generation. FOSS-incompatible textures from CGTextures were used.

The code license is not all that clear, I seem only to be able to find the jME license in the archive.

This active thread reveals more info and gives an opportunity to talk to the developer.

Hedgewars - GCI tribute

2012-01-23T00:10:46+00:00

One week ago GCI ended!

Why am I announcing it one week later? We needed rest!
For two months we've been literally swarmed by GCI students who needed to be mentored and helped, but we didn't expect such a successful invasion of new contributors!

So now that we gained our strenght back, let's sit down and think about our experience.

We proposed 150 different tasks, mentored 110 and completed successfully 65! Not too bad, I must add! Some of the tasks regarded documentation or wiki, but a relevant portion of them consisted of writing some actual code! You are going to see a lot of neat interface improvements in .18 as well as two new languages.

In the following days we will go through the submitted work and double check we didn't forget anything! In the meantime we prepared a new wiki page that contains all the tasks left, useful for some future projects or for beginners' contributions.

So in the end was it worth it? I've got different feedbacks from the mentors: some said it was too tiresome and didn't add much, others said that it was nice to help the kids and that there is the possibility of having long time contributors...

In the end, even though it required a lot of effort, we've taught students what is opensource and how to work in a real world team.
And that's what GCI is all about!

A BIG THANK YOU FROM ALL THE HEDGEWARS TEAM TO EVERY PARTICIPATING STUDENT

AND A WARM HUG FROM THE GCI ADMINS TO ALL THE MENTORS THAT MADE THIS POSSIBLE!!

Koda

WTactics - about throwing in the hat

2012-01-22T12:00:07+00:00

As some of you have noticed the WTactics sites have all been down the latest 2-3 weeks. It seems our net presence is jinxed: After we finally managed to settle down from the host change and first worm attack we were exposed to another one. What it did was to infect all index.php/html pages, among [...]

Coldest - Bots Have AI Now

2012-01-21T21:31:43+00:00

The server update went sort of smoothly - the site never went down for a significant period of time, but I did lose access to the server for a while due to some problems with SSH after the update. Everything seems to be working correctly again, but if you find any problems with the site, please report them in this Trac ticket. Or just use the forums if you are able (but a site problem might prevent that, hence the ticket).

Nikki and the Robots - On Selling Nikki and the Robots’ Story Mode

2012-01-21T19:53:53+00:00

Episode 1 of the story mode is ready to be released and we are very excited! This will also mark the first public beta version.

We will start selling the story mode using a pay-what-you-want model, which is strongly inspired by the Humble Indie Bundle (which on the other hand was inspired by a World of Goo sale). After one week we will then set a fixed minimum price.

When you buy the game, you pay for the game as it is, but will also get all further episodes and updates for free. With each further episode, however, the minimum price will increase for new buyers of the game. The sooner you buy, the less you pay, hooray! This is similar to the Alpha-Beta-1.0 price increments of Minecraft.

Right now we are working hard on the presale website and we hope to be able to release Nikki and the Robots' story mode until mid February.

In the next post we will tell you some more details about episode 1, in which Nikki's great adventure begins to unfold.

Xonotic - Public Xervice Announcement

2012-01-21T12:31:39+00:00

We’ve got some really important informations for mappers, please pay attention and spread the news! Over the past month or so, quite a lot of things have happened which concern mappers, and we just want to highlight the most important things for you guys so you understand the changes and can work with them in the future.

Map picture entities: info_autoscreenshot

We’ve been contemplating for a long time a way for map screenshots to be done easier for the mappers and developers in a way that streamlines the process in the future and keeps the screenshots consistent and clean, so divVerent recently implement this. Basically, the way it works is by placing an entity on the map which contains an origin and view angle, and then the autobuild system (or maybe other parts of the game, like intermission perhaps in the future) will save the screenshot at that exact position.

There are basically 3 ways you can do this easily:

Use a “target_position” entity together with an “info_autoscreenshot” entity which only needs origins. This method is best for netradiant, simply because you can create the mapshot without much effort at all, all you need to do is position the entities how you want and link them together with Ctrl + K.
Place the “info_autoscreenshot” entity, and then rotate it manually in netradiant to how you want it by using the rotate tool.
Use r_speeds to get your desired origin and angles, and then manually create the entity with a text editor.

You can see examples and the results of these on maps already in the game as of today, “glowplant” uses the first method and “g-23″ uses the second.

If the map is on the autobuild server, it will automatically make you screenshots using these map entities (up to 3 entities can be used at once). The screenshots are at 1024×1024 resolution, but you need to resize them manually to 512×512 to use them as the mapshot. Unfortunately, the autobuild system cannot automatically pack the map shots into the pk3s as the screenshots are done after compilation/building, so you will still need to handle that yourself as well.

New NetRadiant build: sRGB lighting

A new lighting method has been in the works for a bit now by divVerent, which basically uses more realistic color and shading calculations for the lightmaps created by q3map2 (you could already read about this in WoX-Blox #1). It can in many cases be a major improvement to lighting on maps, and especially it helps with maps being too dark in some cases. Of course the mapper still has full control over lighting and can still make the map dark, BUT it needs to be pointed out that sRGB lighting is by default about 2.2 times brighter than normal lighting methods! Because of this, it cannot be simply “slapped” on to a map, unless you adjust the light radius and intensities appropriately.

You can use various light flags to scale/adjust to compensate for this extra brightness, generally a factor of 0.4 or 0.5 would make the lighting look similar to the old style lightmaps.

Additionally, we have also produced a new build of NetRadiant for Windows users which has a few more features/tweaks/fixes since the last one, plus this new sRGB support enabled by default. (NOTE: Linux and OS X users have to compile it themselves using the git system, those platforms are impossible to build for different architectures normally) If you use this build version OR your map is on the autobuild server and you want your maps lighting to remain the same, you MUST use the “-nosRGB” flag! Otherwise, the lighting will default to sRGB, and that may be too bright for your map.

sRGB lighting for maps is certainly better when used properly, and it’s the direction we want to go in the future, and we expect all default maps (and all new ones) to eventually switch to sRGB lighting. Currently the most notable ones that use it are: Drain, Courtfun, g-23, and Darkzone.

Bot waypoint editor: Automatic waypointing

Finally just a quick one about a feature we added to the waypoint editor. In addition to its old functionality, the waypoint editor can now automatically map the waypoints based on YOUR movement. Using the waypoint editor normally, enable g_waypointeditor_auto and just walk around all the various paths of the map. Once all paths are plotted, you will see a very natural plot which generally is far easier and much better than manually creating all of the plots. Depending on map size, it usually takes 5 minutes or so of just walking everywhere you can. Note that you should WALK slowly as bunnyhopping can distort the paths for bots.

Thank you for your attention, and again, please spread the news! If you have any question or just would like to comment this news, state them at the original announcement at the Xonotic forum!

Neotron Games - Regeringen Kommer - Demo 2

2012-01-21T10:27:32+00:00

"Regeringen Kommer - It came from Rosenbad" is a 2D Action-Platformer designed as a homage to classic 16 Bit action games. It also parodies the current Swedish government and is filled with humorous pop-culture references. You play as Emo, who alone must face an invasion from space, armed only with his skills, his cat Mr Muffins and the items he finds during his journey. This is the second demo of Regeringen Kommer, and contains two epic levels, two evil bosses and loads of cut-scenes.

Current version : Demo 2 - 1.03.
License : Custom - See README.

Download version for Linux and Windows

Frogatto - Please protest SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-21T08:31:37+00:00

I really hate having anything to do with politics mentioned on this blog, but this is so bad that attention needs to be drawn to it.

There are two bills going through congress that will allow America’s government to censor websites exactly like China and Iran do – via a new blacklist of “bad sites”. The reason argued for this is to stop piracy by allowing copyright holders to call for any site which they think is infringing, to be immediately taken off the net without proof. We feel that nothing can justify taking away free speech. The very thing that has made the internet such a powerful force for good in the world is its absolute freedom of speech. People can expose the wrongdoings of those in power, and the internet is a tool that for the first time in history, prevents their voice from being silenced. The last thing we need is america, the “land of the free”, to establish a dangerous precedent of censorship as a default – a precedent which other countries are certain to follow.

Furthermore, because there is no “due process”, that is, because sites would be taken down immediately without having a chance to prove they’re innocent, this would destroy innovation on the internet. Because there’s no due process, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or not; if some competitor with more money just doesn’t like you, they can get you taken off the net by making a false accusation. That’s fatal for any internet company – it turns off their entire business and income instantaneously, and could be repeated as many times as necessary to drive them bankrupt. Virtually every internet service we use today; google, facebook, youtube, twitter, deviantart, itunes, netflix, anything – could not have started up in an environment with these kinds of laws on the books. Some better-heeled company that didn’t like them, would have shut them down. In fact, all of these companies did receive severe legal threats from the entertainment industry as they matured – the MPAA and RIAA have repeatedly stated that they wish these companies/services didn’t exist (especially Youtube and iTunes). They only survived because there were no laws like this on the books.

At the time of this writing, these bills have received some temporary setbacks, but they are not dead yet. Do whatever you can to destroy them – free speech for the human race, and everything you like about the internet, is at stake. You can read more about these bills, and what you can do to stop them, on wikipedia. And yes, you can do stuff about them even if you don’t live in the US – follow that link.

FreeGamer - Traction Edge: Squad-Based Tactics, Roguelike Interface

2012-01-20T16:15:00+00:00

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:
Turn based gameplay
2-4 member squad teams
Destructable terrain
Victorian Steampunk setting
SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.
Planned Features:
16-20 static levels with full story arc
Random content, procedural maps
Procedural tech tree
Civilians
Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

World of Padman - In the Spotlight #2

2012-01-19T23:04:04+00:00

Today in the spotlight we present a very nice video showing off some WoP v1.6 game play made by GameBoom, a community content driven site for gamers who like free games. The video starts with fighting PaddyBell and her sisters BadPaddy and PaddyBee in oregano4's Airplane. Second part of the video presents the CTL game mode and powerups in Kai's FridgeWars.

Furthermore we have noted some activities concerning Let's Show/Play/Test regrading World of Padman in general. Some are really funny. All are in German language. Here is a list:

2012.01.04 - Let's Play by tenzenzoma
2011.12.24 - Let's Test by xPinkCookieZ
2011.12.15 - Let's Play by GametoyTV
2011.12.11 - Let's Play Together by GametoyTV
2011.12.10 - Let's Play pt1 / pt2 / pt3 by MultiBest26
2011.09.03 - Let's Play pt1 / pt2 by molotovmultigaming
2011.08.27 - Let's Play by p90fb100
2011.06.06 - Let's ... by LetsForPlay

If you find similar stuff online which should be presented here on the front page, drop us a line in the WoP forum. Also, the Featured Pic needs an update from time to time, so feel free to submit your WoP pics. Every contribution is welcome.

FAR Colony - Final Roadmap to 1.0

2012-01-18T19:57:12+00:00

Yeah another post, incredible activity isn't it ?

This one is just to expose you the final draft of the roadmap until 1.0 beta. The list only include major versions. I put clarifications under each of these to explain what it means.

*(0.5.2): Playable Apha - first phase of the game complete w/ the full CPS
Yes the first playable alpha will not be 0.6 but 0.5.2, why ? Just because that the CPS is already implemented for most part of it since the 0.2 but not completed. This version will include most of the colonization objectives, a complete score management, and a complete end of colonization phase.

---Post First Alpha Features
*(0.5.5)-hybrid rt system

Since FARC is in realtime but need more reflexion from theplayer for post 0.5.2 features, like the research & development, i need tonot rush the player. Pausing the game during the player set his/her R&Dsettings or set up a new space unit design isn't a good solution because itkills the mean that the game is in real time, like someone said on a gamedesign website, if you need to arbitrary pausing the game for some part, betterbe to dev the game turn based... So the most logical method is to slow down thetime flow, not too much, but enough. It will be not an easy task but will beworthwhile.

*(0.6.0)-RDS incl. dynamic tech trees + incl in parts (items, equipment modules, infrastructures)

This version will be a key one, because the technology will affect what you can assemble, build and manufacture. It will include one big technology tree like for Civilization, splitted in 8 research sectors. I will try to include a static system and a dynamic one, i have already the basis of a tree management on paper, we will see if it's a failure. At worst there will be only a static tree. The tree itself is mostly completed in the game design and will include more than 150 sciences and technologies.

*(0.6.5)-FUG complete + scene cleanup + scene reload + load game + new game during in game

The FUG is the FARC Universe Generator, a design tool (not for the player) that i'll use to generate all the planetary systems in FARC. It's already implemented for part of it and requires to be completed. The rest will concern mostly of 3d scene management, for switching the 3d view from a planetary system to an another, and also will add the capability to load any saved game file ingame.

*(0.7.0)-SPUD + all design elements + space unit construction

The SPUD is the Space Units Designer, a design and ingame tool to allow to modify and create designs of spacecrafts and space based infrastructures. It will also expand the production phase to allow to build space units.

*(0.7.5)-faction's AI

Obviously this version will include the AI of the other major and minor factions. A big nightmare but well no choice eh ?

*(0.8.0)-trading system + semi automated missions

The trading system will allow products / technology exchange between faction, including the player's faction. The Semi-Automated missions will include automated mission like this: 1/load stuff from colony A, 2/travel to colony B, 3/unload the stuff to colony B and 4/return to colony A. And this w/o a constant monitoring for the player.

*(0.8.5)-unified combat system

Yes the bloodthirsty ones among you will be happy with this version. Why unified ? Because it will process aerospace and ground-based combat in the same impulse, useful thing when you attack a colony and support in the same time your troop on ground with space units in orbit.

*(0.9.0)-game events + scripted historical events

game events are semi-random events that can happen to a colony, space unit or globally in a planetary system. Semi-random because some of them will be linked to existing things like a Nuclear Meltdown event will never happen if a colony haven't any nuclear reactor. There will be also sort of missions and contract the player's faction will can take to add some additional objectives. Scripted historical events is an another beast, it will include events related to the geopolitical background of FARC, like some crysis between factions, and over happy events. Even if FARC is more positive than our real world related to the human space exploration and expansion, it's not Disneyworld and so problems exists...

*(0.9.5)-GLOCS

The GLOCS is the Global Communication System. A key part to induce some fog of war in the game and remember you and the AI that space is huge and that you aren't omniscient. This system is mostly completed on paper.

*(1.0)-diplomacy + memetic war (and even engineering if not implemented previously) / major features complete - Beta

The last features but not least concerns all possible interactions between factions with diplomacy and memetic war.

And i hope to complete all of that in... 2 to 2.5 years. Am I crazy ? Maybe, but sometimes we need some madness to reveal ourself and our creation (my philosophical 2 cents for 2012).
I know that the PC gaming will be dead until that... Ok let's go away the sarcasm and get back to work.

Hedgewars - SOPA does not RULE!

2012-01-18T14:59:24+00:00

~~SOPA RULES!~~

In case it wasn't clear, Hedgewars participated in the anti-SOPA strike, that took place all over the Internet on January Wed. 18th (a date to remember).

We are obviously against such anticompetitive and censoring legislations, but we yesterday we presented what could happen in a SOPA'd world by replacing all the homepage content with SOPA RULES messages.

If you want to understand more and know what you can do against it, please visit http://americancensorship.org/ or http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/ or http://vimeo.com/31100268 or http://sopastrike.com/

FAR Colony - 0.5 Report Part I - Infrastructures

2012-01-18T13:01:43+00:00

Ok here's it's time to talk about what have been added in 0.5.

Infrastructures:
An infrastructure represent any building and structure (like a landing pad) in the game. Since FARC isn't different from any other strategy, infrastructures represent the backbone material of a colony. they allow the player to house people, extract resources, build differents products and apply research & development.
Each of them has one basic function among 5 possibles:

Energy: regroup any infrastructure that produce energy
Housing: like the name indicating, this function focus on housing a colony's population
Production: this one focus on resource extraction and products refining and manufacturing, depending which production modes are set in an infrastructure
Intelligence: regroup any infrastructure that allow to process research & development, meme engineering and even meme warfare.
Miscellaneous: the last but not least, regroup all infrastructures that cannot be classified in any of the others functions. They're defined by the custom effects set in them.

These basic function provide additional data, like the power output for the Energy function.
Additionally with these functions there're the custom effects and production modes.

Custom Effects allow to add special effect to an infrastructure, not initially provided by its function. One basic example is the HQ (headquarter) effect which add the capability to an infrastructure to represent the location of the head of the local state.

Production Modes are sort of custom effects,excepted that they can only be affected to Production infrastructures. In clear, a production mode is related to on particular industrial process used to generate any product in the game.
As example Resource Mining is already implemented, and it's the first one. Here's a part of the game design document describing it:

======================================================================

7.3.2.2.8.ResourceMining

Concernthe exploitation of any ore type.

Infrastructure'sData:

xxx[ XXX ] xxx

Input / Output Table	Products	Part Calculations (in m3 / hr)
IN	Resource Spot: Icy Ore Field OR Ore Field	Resource Mining Production(RMP)= average( power(infrastructure surface , 0.333) , power(infrastructure volume , 0.111) ) * Mean Quality coefficient * (occupancy/100)
OUT	For Icy Ore Field: Icy Ore OR --------------------------------- For Ore Field: Carbonaceous Ore Metallic Ore Rare Metals Ore Uranium Ore	Full RMP is used ---------------------------- RMP * % of Carbonaceous Ore in the resource spot RMP * % of Metallic Ore in the resource spot RMP * % of Rare Metals Ore in the resource spot RMP * % of Uranium Ore in the resource spot

Calculations:

Theoutput is calculated conforming to the part calculations in the tableabove, considering the products, 1unit= 1m3 for all productsgenerated so there's no conversion to do.

Energyconsumption is calculated when the production matrix is updated w/this production mode and calculated as follow:

energyconsumption = [ ( SQRT(colonist)*5 ) + ( SQRT(technician)*30 ) ] * (1 - (( 1-orbital object gravity )*0.5) )

RequiredTechnosciences (only for design purpose, integrated intoinfrastructure's technologies requirement list):

-Basic Mining & Refining

======================================================================

There's also other ones, in the doc only at this moment, like Farming, Carbonaceous Ore Refining or Antiprotons Production.

When a Production infrastructure is enabled, all its production data are calculated and the results are transfered to the corresponding colony's production matrix.

Beside these production modes there's also the Energy Modes that are used for Energy infrastructures and working in the same way as the production modes. Obviously they are used to produce energy.
The ones already implemented are Nuclear Fission and Photon Energy.

Here we go for this first part, the second one will concern the production phase

FAR Colony - 0.5.1 is Near to be Completed

2012-01-18T10:13:00+00:00

Well, the 0.5.1 will be completed before this weekend. Ilost some time because of a float precision bug, but it’s fixed now since Ihave extended the float declarations with more precision.

The colony’s storage and production matrix are nowdisplayed, yet in a crude but usable form. The storage capacities are also displayedand all that is updated in real time if required.

Here’s a screenshot of the modified data panel, includingthe storage/production data display:

PS: don't mind the typos, especially for the storage capacities, it's harcoded non-localized (yet) text for fitting purpose (between english/french).

So what’s next? Well the first thing I have to do is torefine some user’s interface elements of the colony data panel (especially withthe shortcut keys) and it will be complete for this 0.5.1...

Next I’ll do a video and “perhaps” will upload a snapshot,even if frankly I don’t like that before the 0.6.

Talking about the 0.6, I’ll begin the dev of the final stepof this soplayableMaybeboringAlpha after the uploads of the 0.5.1.

With some luck I’ll be on time to release the 0.6 before May...many people believe in miracles so why not.

For the final word, I appreciate the support of some of youon this blog, it worth it more than anything else, thumbs up!

FreeGamer - Annex: Conquer the world Beta2 released

2012-01-17T22:08:00+00:00

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently:

Annex beta2 game-play

Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;)
But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

Pyskool - Cruise news

2012-01-17T14:32:26+00:00

The Contact Sam Cruise disassembly has just seen its fourth update since I announced that it had become ‘complete’ about six months ago. Since then, I’ve documented 14 more bugs, added 9 more trivia items, composed a walkthrough guide, and filled out the list of graphic glitches. If you haven’t stopped by to look at the disassembly in a while, there’s a good chance you’ll find plenty of new stuff to peruse.

Of the bugs documented in the last six months, my favourite is probably Hiding in plain sight, in which Sam evades arrest by the zealous city cops on the beat by merely standing on the edge of a roof, in plain sight of anyone who cares to look. Of the trivia items added in the last six months, my favourite is definitely Hidden ground, which reveals an underworld (kind of) in Sam’s home city that, to my knowledge, has never been seen by the CSC-playing public before. What’s funny about it is that the very first trivia item added to the disassembly – nearly two years ago as I write this – was Hidden sky, but it didn’t occur to me until very recently to investigate the nether portions of the play area for a similar phenomenon.

Anyway, for further details of all the changes, consult the changelog. As ever, you can browse the entire disassembly online, or download a copy for offline viewing, or build it yourself from the source skool and ref files included in the offline copy (for which you’ll need at least version 2.4 of SkoolKit).

Xonotic - WoX-BloX Issue #3 – Community news

2012-01-17T07:11:08+00:00

Welcome! You’re reading the third installment of WoX-BloX, the “World of Xonotic Blogs”! Development carries on at a crazy pace, and we barely have enough time outside of cleaning and polishing new maps, media, and code for the upcoming 0.6 release…

WHAT?!? WHAT IS THIS VERSION 0.6 OF WHICH YOU SPEAK?!?

That’s right folks, you’ve read it correctly – Xonotic version 0.6 is on its way! We originally wanted to give it all to you for Christmas, but unfortunately Samual got very ill in the middle of November and was unable to contribute to the project at full scale. He’s now back at 100% and is currently crushing nasty bugs. With development back on pace we expect Xonotic 0.6 to arrive in late January or mid-February.

Okay, now that I have made you excited enough, let’s have a look at what our lovely community is up to! We have news, new and ongoing tournaments, exciting challanges and many more!

Results of the Nexball mapping contest

The Nexball mapping contest initiated by Cortez was fruitful, and once again proved that the community has a lot talented mappers. There were a total of 10 ball-bouncing maps submitted for judgement, and here are the results along with their download links:

1.: Mayanball by Morphed
2.: SWAT-SD by nowego4
3.: Bloodball by Maddin
4.: Dearbumperball by Soelen
4.: Gears’n'Balls by freefang
5.: Aerial-match by forseti
6.: Ariel by kuniu the frogg
7.: Basket_Case by PinkRobot
8.: Dustball by monad
9.: Deardrugball by Soelen

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL CONTESTANTS!

For more detailed rankings and the reviews of the judges, take a look at the forum thread of the Nexball mapping contest! If you’d like to check out the maps online, feel free to hop in to Pink Robot’s Lovely Nexball Server” (IP: 159.253.4.32:26000) and kick some balls! I’m pretty sure you’ll need a little exercise of virtual soccer and basketball in preparation for the announced…

Nexball 2v2 tournament by [BOT]

The [BOT] clan is at it again, organising a very promising and fun team challenge, the first ever 2 vs 2 Nexball tourney of Xonotic!

General rules:

Gamemode: Nexball
Timelimit: 5 minutes
Fraglimit: No fraglimit
KO Stage (Single Elimination) – NO Groups!
Beggining of the tournament: After the Duel tourney (approx. 1st/2nd week in February)
Best of 5 (Bo5) (maxium 5 maps will be played and your team have to win 3 maps to be in the next round).
You can contact admins in IRC at #bot.xonotic or #xonotic.pickup
Server: Pink Robot’s Lovely Nexball Server” (IP: 159.253.4.32:26000)
Mumble server: shirkhan.dyndns.org:64740

The map list will consist of the submitted maps from the Nexball mapping contest, with Mayanball being the first map of the finals. You can sign in to http://xoneu.tourney.cc/ to find more information about the tournament and its rules. In case you don’t have a team but you’re willing to participate, or would like to discuss the tourney settings, hop in to the [Tourney] 2v2 Nexball thread on the Xonotic forums and put your name in the hat!

Race challange by Cortez

Cortez continues his monthly race challanges, for January it’s Capture the Flag race. Your goal is to do a capture on the map Tripzone (a CTF conversion of the classical DM map Darkzone) by divVerent as fast as possible. Beware – there is more to this map than meets the eye. This challenge is not an easy one, so good luck and have fun!

Rules:

0.5 physics only!
The fastest player has to make a demo or video to show off how he did it (so everyone gets a clue how to play that map).
Map download link: Tripzone
Deadline: 1st February!

Post your times, videos or demos at the Xonotic forum: The Race Challange – January!
The winners for the multi-mapped December challange were Justin, Sless and Mirio. Congratulations! You can check out their time and the total rankings here.

Community server news

We’re more than happy to inform you about a new Xonotic Deathmatch server hosted by ++ The Beer Garden ++ (server IP address: 174.37.44.42:26000)! Located in Dallas, the server adds another North American place to frag on, so players from the EU might have a bit higher ping around~150 (it’s in the red zone, but still playable when I tested it). The server runs Xonotic version 0.5, and unfortunately doesn’t gather statistics yet.

Server Rules:

No racial or blatent slurs of the like.
Don’t be annoying…
No cheating
Be respecful.. this actually covers about all of ‘em.

You can find additional information on the official site of the server at The Beer Garden, or at the Real-time Xonotic server list. Original announcement can be found here.

After a small downtime, the Amazon EC2 0.5.0 CTS Server (us-west-2) is back again to provide online defrag action for CTS fans in the US (the server is located in Oregon)! Very big thank you for liberty who paid another year for the EC2 cloud computation server. Have fun playing there!

For your eyes and for your ears

Not a week goes by without somebody showing up with an awesome map, soundtrack, or model. December was no exception. Cortez finished his Bleach retexturing project you could read about in the previous blog, Nestel released a surreal DM map with vehicles named Modern West Town, and forseti brought us some new Assault action with Safe-District. CTF fans can rejoice too, as kuniu the frogg released his Xoylent CTF remake based on the infamous Soylent CTF from Nexuiz. You can grab all the maps on the following links, though I suggest to keep an eye on those forum threads, as all maps might have future versions.

Dowload links:

Better late than never, D_W fulfilled an old promise of his and provided us with alternate sound effects. His first mini pack has various sounds, but mostly ones involving item pickups. Included are armour and general item pickup sounds, item respawn, jump pad, gib, and gib splat sounds. You can download his work here. For sources and feedback please visit his thread of “D_W’s Sound Effect Extravaganza (and Brainstorming) Thread” on the forum. Thanks D_W!

If you have a second life…

“Erebus got fed up with having to fight in the arenas all the time. He wanted a little peace and a fun place to relax, to take a break from Xonotic and all the shooting. After some searching, he decided that a good place would be the Second Life virtual world, especially the open-source grids. So he took himself a vacation from all the fighting, and went to try out the experience of being a SL avatar.”

A while ago, Second Life implemented mesh support for avatars, allowing meshes to get rigged to the avatar skeleton and worn. Since the models in Xonotic are GPL, MirceaKitsune ported Erebus and his Xonotic Pony and Vixen models from Vore tournament (Warning: slightly NSFW) as a test.

If you’d like to find out more about getting the models as your avatar in Second Life (or you’d just like to add some comments about it), you’re more than welcome to do so here in the Xonotic forum.

Closing words

That’s all for the 3rd issue of Wox-BloX, folks! I hope you enjoyed all the community related news and got excited about the new upcoming release of Xonotic 0.6. Good luck/have fun fragging and racing, and don’t forget to sign up for the tournaments and challenges. See you next time!