FreeGameDev Planet - Games

I just noticed that I have completely missed to mention the nice metroidvania-like platformer The Legend of Edgar here! This exploration-focused 2D platformer with huge persistent levels, boss battles, several weapons to wield, etc. is really well made and also has the benefit of being complete, with story and all! Also you can play with a gamepad, which I always find is a big plus.

Edgar with sword in hand on his epic quest.

The Killer Klown throws klown pie at you. Rhubarb! You feel that there is a Trunk Update!

Hello fellow Klowns and Krawlers, it’s time for another Trunk Update. First let me mention that the tentative date for the 0.23 Release Tournament is February 8th 2019 at 8pm UTC. We’ll make another post if that changes and also when we have a tournament page available.

Now, on to the update:

• WebTiles display artifacts reported by many of you have been fixed. The issue was a subtle message ordering bug in our client that became relevant due to recent Chrome changes. Thanks for tracking that down, advil!
• A few Nemelex Xobeh changes:
• The Deal Four Ability no longer clears your deck, but now has a piety cost.
• The Deck of Destruction now has a card limit of 26 instead of 13, and Nemelex gifts Destruction cards more frequently relative to the others.
• New icons for Nemelex’s abilities, courtesy of ontoclasm!
• Killer Klowns have been reworked:
•  They now have a Throw Klown Pie LOS-range ability that deals 3d20 damage and afflicts the player with a temporary debuff.
• The klown pie debuffs are: -Potions, Silence, Vertigo, Stat Drain, rF-, or (less common) polymorph into bat, pig, or wisp form. Better bring those cancellation and resist potions (if you can still quaff them, LOL)!
• Klowns now have highly enchanted and branded clubs instead of af_klown melee, and no longer have fast regen.
• Klowns are a bit more common in the Hall of Zot on Zot:5.
• Translucent doors have been introduced. You can see through these even when they’re closed! Currently used in Elf and some runed door vaults, but you’ll see more of these in the future. Tiles courtesy of the faerie known as minmay.
• Net traps have been Zotified. They now try to net the player whenever anything in LOS steps on one.
• All mechanical traps except net traps have been removed from Tomb and the Hall of Zot on Zot:5. Many such traps have been removed from certain Ossuary vaults as well.
• A new ghost vault featuring moths of wrath and wrathful warriors that have nice Trog weapon gifts.
• New axe and polearm statue tiles for Baileys. They commemorate the removal of mostly unreachable decorative Bailey weapons. I say ‘mostly’ because of course Yermak figured out a way to reach them!
• Unspeakable pet dragon cruelty in an Elf vault has been rectified. The dragons now have a clear runed door, allowing their owners access for feeding and play time.
• Dispersal traps have a new tile, courtesy of CanOfWorms.
• You can no longer win by tripping up stairs with the Orb while confused. Nice try, cheaters, but CBRO admin johnstein caught you red-handed!

Thanks for tuning in! Feature freeze will likely happen shortly before the end of the month, so we may have another trunk update before the release.

The trunk update flogs you with a +12 club of flaming!

Hasn't Alpha 23 of the impressive 3D RTS 0 A.D. already been released? It has, but now it's been re-released with several bugs and other maintenance-related things fixed. Many improvements has been made to online play and security and there are also a few other fixes. If you play this game an update is recommended while waiting for a new feature-release.

A battle at sea in 0 A.D. Notice the beautiful water!

It has been around 2 months since we did our alpha release of the online racing implementation in SuperTuxKart. First of all a big "Thank You" to all the people who went through the effort of downloading and compiling SuperTuxKart themselves. They have provided very valuable testing and feedback for us, and as a result we have reworked some of the code to make it more user-friendly, and removed some bugs. I am also quite proud of our testing team: essentially no significant bugs in the actual online racing was found during the alpha - so a great job by all of our testers and coders! There was a tireless effort especially by Benau, Deve, and Alayan to constantly improve our code!

Also a big thanks to players who have volunteered their hardware to provide more servers for us. Even during the alpha we had typically more servers than actual players. Hopefully this beta release will allow more people to participate in online races.



We are now confident that our code is stable enough for a beta release: 0.10-beta1. This means that we will provide our usual set of binaries and installers for all supported platforms. And hopefully that means that many more people will be able to test this current version. Note that we consider this beta very stable, de-facto very close to a release candidate. But we are waiting for another track to be ready to be included, so we are using this time to give more players the opportunity to test (or re-test) our online racing implementation.

If you haven't read the previous alpha announcement, here a short summary of the new features in SuperTuxKart compared with the latest stable release 0.9.3:

• You can now race against your friends or people world-wide in online races, either in LAN or WAN games.
• You can either run a server on your own computer, all handled by SuperTuxKart, fire up a stand-alone server, or connect to servers already running.
• A Raspberry Pi 3 is powerful enough to act as a game server (though you need a server-only binary). We provide several game servers on VPS and Pis that are constantly up.
• On special so-called 'ranked servers' a global ranking of online players is maintained. You can see the current ranking here.

One important caveat: the network implementation is actually quite sophisticated (I might do a separate blog post about its implementation), but there are still limits in what we can do about the latency (or ping) between clients and servers. We strongly recommend to find a server with a ping of under 150ms for a smooth playing experience. The ping to the server will be shown when you connect to it. You can of course try servers with higher latency - while it should still work, you might notice more often that karts stutter, drive like drunk (though that might of course also be the skill of the other players) or are 'teleported' around. In addition you need a stable connection, so if you experience significant packet loss or jitter you will see the same strange behavior.



And new in this beta compared with our alpha (besides bug fixes and GUI improvements) is the possibility to now join a server while a race is in progress: you will become a spectator and can follow the race-in-progress. You will be joining the actual racing fun when the next race starts.


We have now pretty much declared a feature freeze to prepare for our release candidate, once we get the new track added. One noticeable difference to one of our release candidates is that we did not update all translations: this usually delays a release by two weeks, and we would like more testing to be done earlier. On the other hand, we hope that there won't be too many changes between the beta and the release candidate, and that we will soon be able to get onto the official release of online SuperTuxKart.



You can download the beta from SourceForge. Feedback as always is welcome, ideally on our forum, which is also the best location for support requests. Bug reports can be submitted to our tracker on Github. Note that bug reports and support requests here as a comment are not ideal, and might easily get missed, so please use the appropriate URL above.

We hope you are all going to enjoy SuperTuxKart with online races!