Highlights in this release include integration of the FGCom voice communications client within the simulator, improved terrain rendering, faster scenery loading, and improved usability. This release also coincides with the release of FlightGear World Scenery 2.0 – massively improved scenery data covering the entirety of the planet and incorporating OpenStreetMap roads and detailed terrain information from a variety of sources.
Also interesting is the "Bombable" add-on, which adds combat mechanics:
So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before, and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon.
However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam:
The video is shot with FlightGear, everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here, the system itself is not FlightGear specific though.
The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV, which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;)
Less resource demanding are infrared LED tracker version, which do not need to follow a face and also work rather nicely in a dark room. For those, some propitiatory solutions have been available for some time, but you can also find Linux compatible open-source code for such a system here (instructions for FlightGear here).
Personally I was always to lazy to build myself a proper 3 dot LED cap, so I think the face tracking solutions are more convenient. If you are into non-FOSS games on the Windows platform, I can thus also recommend the partial open-source FaceTrackNoIR software, which supports quite a few really nice flight-sims, racing games and even FPS.
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.
Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.
Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset
Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.
Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.
Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map
The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.
Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature
Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.
Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.
Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.
Skeletons no longer bleed and other assorted bug fixes.
BASE Pro is a Windows-only base jumping simulation game. Its community and news can be found on this forum.
Community member LedInfrared got the hang out of gameplay video recording and shared videos of STK and Xonotic on this YouTube page, including download links to original video material!
Stuart Buchanan: FlightGear contributor
FlightGear's news section has seen quite a high activity lately, including three interviews:
