Godot Winter Game Jam

Godot winter icon

A game dev jam to create a winter-themed open source game was community-initiated at the Godot forums. The (vote-determined) winner will get a budget of USD 50 to have donated to an open source project of their choice.

What is Godot?

Godot editor

Godot is a game engine. No wait, it's actually a game development IDE with its own Lua-based scripting language.

As far as I can tell, it's a promising project that is a bit buggy, especially when it comes to mobile exports. It has some UI flaws (subjectivity warning) but still, open source Godot is more appealing than proprietary Unity 3D.

If you want to try making a game in Godot, I recommend this official tutorial as a starting point. Good luck & great success to you!

What else?

Another way to support Godot: "like" it as a Unity 3D alternative on alternativeTo.

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Progress on Octaforge

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge. It is basically a fork of Tesseract, which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine.

The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua.

Read about their progress on the latest beta here, which also includes this nice video showcasing the new player model and an test map:

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Asylum: Free-as-in-Freedom Horror Adventure, Successfully Crowd-Funded

This is a guest post by Hythlodaeus on an interesting FLOSS game engine project, being developed by a professional games company.

ASYLUM video

I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence.

Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-funded game project isn't exactly the same thing as buying a video game. From the backers' part it's an investment and a risk. It's about depositing your faith on other peoples' words, in hopes they will eventually deliver what they promised. When you buy a game, be it good or bad, you at least know that you're dealing with a finished product. When you pledge on a crowd-funded project, completion is only a possibility regardless of the campaign's success.

So, in my personal opinion, I've always thought crowd-funded game projects should strive to provide the level of trust they request from their backers. In this case,  that means allowing people to have access to the game's source code under a permissive / Free Software license, preferably starting right at the end of the campaign. Why? Simply because that allows for a tighter control of what's going on in the development backstage, and will allow every contributor to provide better feedback on the work being done. Raw engine code also gives backers something that can eventually be picked up and used for other personal purposes, if the project happens to fail for some reason.

With that said, let's talk a little about this project, which is, after all, what lead me to write this post. Asylum is the brainchild of Agustin Cordes, the Argentinian developer behind Scratches, a horror game that managed to get some degree of attention way back in 2006. The project aims to create a Lovecraftian-inspired horror point-and-click adventure game that will focus on an intense and immersive atmosphere, followed closely by engaging storytelling. From the trailer and screenshots provided so far, it seems like a rather professional endeavour, but for me the most pleasant surprise, was that the developer's in-house engine, Dagon, will be Free and Open-Source. On top of that, Cordes himself actually took the time to explain why he believes the engine should be free, and how such a decision aims not only to help preserve Asylum for future generations, but also to empower other indie developers by providing an open platform anyone will be free to use.

Asylum Kickstarter Video (Bonus)

Since there is no information available about specific licensing on the project page, I actually went on to ask the developer about which specific license was being used for the Dagon engine:

Me: Hello. I have one question regarding Dagon. You already stated it's going to be free and open source, but exactly under which software license are you going to release it?
Agustin Cordes: Hi! We're currently using CDDL but I'm expecting to re-license with the more popular MPL 2.0 very soon. Cheers!
Me: Fair enough. Do I have your permission to quote this conversation in a news blog about Free Software gaming?
Agustin Cordes: Absolutely! :)

“MPL” referring of course to the Mozilla Public License, which despite not being a strong copyleft license, it is both Free Software and GPL compatible. So perhaps Dagon can motivate a new generation of graphic adventure lovers to innovate upon the work started by Asylum. We can only hope future Kickstarter projects and indie developers adopt a similar perspective on Open-Source development.

With little less than a few days to go (I'm ashamed to say I only heard about this project very recently), Asylum is already fully funded, but if you still wish to contribute to this genuinely FLOSS project, or simply purchase the game for a special price, you still have a chance. Extra funding goals have already been set, and some additional rewards may also seem worthy to you.

The source for Asylum's engine, Dagon, can already be found here, currently licensed under CDDL (Thanks to Evropi for pointing this out).

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Winter Shorts 2: Physica, SkyRiot, OpenMW

Physica screenshots

Let's play Physica - a hard casual platformer game played on Linux

Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down.

SkyRiot screens

SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [forum post].

SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps.

OpenMW v0.21.0 Commentary

OpenMW 0.21.0 has been released. Changelog:

• Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements
• Torch flickering improved to better match vanilla Morrowind
• Fix for attribute fluctuation when infected with Ash Woe Blight
• Adjusted activation range to better match vanilla Morrowind
• Fixes for the Journal UI
• Fixed crash caused by Golden Saint models
• Fix for beast races being able to wear shoes
• Fix for background music not playing
• Fix for meshes without certain node names not being loaded
• Fix for incorrect terrain shape on inital cell load
• Fix for MWGui::InventoryWindow creating a duplicate player actor at the origin
• Added video playback
• Added support for escape sequences in message box and dialogue text
• Added AI related script functions, note that AI is not functional yet
• Implemented fallbacks for necessary ini values in the importer, unused in OpenMW as of yet
• Implemented execution of scripts of objects in containers/inventories in active cells
• Cell loading performance improvements
• Removed broken GMST contamination fixing mechanism

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D3 BFG source drop, and new hosted forum

Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here. It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games.

In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally. Join the discussion here.

Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;)

One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here. Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D

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Engine reimplementation day!

This is a guest post by user Hythlodaeus, discussing GPLed video game engine reimplementations, and presenting several projects related to the topic.

I thought I should take some time to discuss in detail one form of project that has been sometimes featured here, on FreeGamer, and is generally quite popular in the FLOSS gaming world: engine rebuilds / re-implementations.

Rather than being wholly original projects or Intellectual Property-free clones of more popular games, engine rebuilds (also known colloquially as “engine clones”) are essentially an attempt to completely reconstruct and improve upon the features of a given original game, without going trough the trouble or replacing original game art assets and without creating a new whole, free-of-restrictions and copyrights IP. Thus, engine rebuilds merely reproduce the rules, mechanics, and game logic of the original game, while still being dependent on some other form of original data.

These projects frequently arise as a form of preservation: the need to ensure and expand compatibility of a proprietary game out of its original borders, and to make sure the target game will not only be able to run on future systems, but also to be ported to different platforms where it wasn't originally available, without damaging the profits of the original developers or breaking any form of copyright. Better than that, engine rebuilds are a great way to fully enjoy many video game classics in a purely free-as-in-freedom environment, while still rewarding the original developers by purchasing the original game. As of now, I have four particular projects under my radar which I would like to talk to you about.

VCMI

VCMI is an engine re implementation of New World Computing's turn-based strategy classic, Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It aims to replicate the original game, and introduce many new features that will make it a more pleasant and customizeable experience, as well as providing a platform for scenario building, mod making, and even the creation of completely new games.

VCMI has also been noted for its portability outside of the desktop computer environment, with some developers outside of the main dev team apparently creating an Android port, and other similar mobile versions.

With the recent release of version 0.90, and bordering closer and closer to the 1.0 release, VCMI is the brightest hope for the huge Heroes of Might and Magic fan community which still holds HOMM3 as its all-time favorite game in this long-running series, and whose official releases and reeditions tend to run poorly on modern operating systems, including Windows.

FreeSynd

The second project is the Syndicate reconstruction known as FreeSynd. For those that are too young to have ever played the original game, Syndicate was a dystopian organized crime simulator, in which the player controlled a team of cybernetically enhanced zombies (!!!) in a campaign to achieve complete global domination.

Syndicate was known for its fast-paced, guns-blazing gameplay, and, after many years since its original release, it's still highly regarded as one of former British developer Bullfrog's best titles. FreeSynd is currently on version 0.6, with updates oozing out slowly, once in every few months.

The goal of the developers is to replicate the original game as it was, when released, with further upgrades and improvements coming only after version 1.0 is finished.

At its current form, many missions can be fully played, but the game still has many bugs and much to is left to be made. However, as a fan of the original game, I still felt it was my duty to talk about it and maybe motivate some of you to lend some help to what promises to be a fantastic game. Naturally, you will still require the original game data to run FreeSynd.

NXEngine

Next up we have NXEngine. So far, I'm really surprised how come this one escaped most people's attention, especially at the FLOSS gaming sphere. NXEngine is none other than a free, open source recreation of the legendary freeware game Cave Story. Now the original game is not only freeware, it has already been ported to as many platforms you can shake a stick at (including GNU/Linux). However the game creator, Daisuke Amaya, AKA “Pixel”, always requested people in charge of porting the game to never share the source code, due to the deal previously signed by Pixel to distribute the game commercially. This, however, did not stop programmer Caitlin Shaw from rebuilding the whole game engine from scratch, requiring only for the user to download a copy of the original freeware version, and extract all art and music assets from its bowels.

As of the current version of NXEngine (1.0.0.4), the game runs flawlessly, even more swiftly than the freeware original. Having played both in their entirety, I can say the only slight inconsistencies going for NXEngine, are a couple of enemy attack patterns which are slightly different, and barely affect game experience in any way. All in all, it's Cave Story, running free-as-in-freedom. And that's a great achievement by itself.

OpenXcom

Finally four our fourth project, we have OpenXcom. Many of you might be familiar with the game it is based on, as it was considered many times as one of the best PC games ever made. OpenXcom is a full reconstruction of this great tactical simulator, once again aiming for expanded compatibility and a more stable, smoother gameplay, along with many improved features and mod support planned along the way.

If you disliked the Firaxis remake, maybe you should keep an eye on this one. It's pure, classic X-COM with all the rough edges trimmed, and even at its 0.45 release, it already seems like an impressive achievement. If you feared for the future of X-COM, fear no more. OpenXcom is here.

That's all for now! I'm sure there are other great engine rebuild projects around there, many of which have been discussed here on FreeGamer previously. Feel free to post your own suggestions or comment on this matter.

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Twine: interactive stories builder

Creating a simple story in twine

Twine is a tool for creating non-linear stories that can be played in HTML. Here are some examples. It's available under GPL and runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

There's also a tutorial available by a game designer I follow.

Beginning this Thursday, there will be a one-week-long Virtual Game Jam in a community of gamers that are feminist, queer, disabled, people of color, transgender, poor, gay, lesbian, and others who belong to marginalized groups, as well as allies. They have an IRC channel.

I will give this tool a try at the next Berlin 8-hour Jam.

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Torque 3D engine liberated

The people behind the always very indi friendly and well renowned commercial Torque 3D engine announced a fews weeks ago that they will release the quite fully featured engine and tool-box under the very liberal and FOSS MIT license.

Well, and today they made an release announcement and opened up their repositories!

Some of you might remember the engine from the good old days of Tribes 2, but as you can see it has advanced quite a bit since then. Sadly it also lost its Linux and MacOS ports along the way, which is something the creators hope to have restored more quickly in the open-source version. Other show-stoppers on non-Windows platforms are a few remaining to be removed propitiatory qt-lib in the editor framework and so on. So if you think you can help them with either or those problems, have a look at their git repo here (click on "zip" to download you local copy).

Hmm... what does that mean for the FOSS gamer (besides some commercial game ports to Linux probably soon)? Well Torque is a really good tool-set to create new FOSS games, and they really tried to keep the entry barrier low, which is something that sadly can not be said for most other FOSS 3D engines. So in the longer run there might be some cool new games utilizing it. But for now I hope to see a fully FOSS version of this little gem soon ;)

As always... we will keep you updated with our irregular posts ;)

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OpenMW 0.17.0: Changes and Freedom(!?)

video: OpenMW v. 0.17.0 Commentary

The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0.


Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite.

A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game?

The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it.

The project uses the "Release early and often" mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon.

If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum.

An editor for OpenMW!

The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn't capable of. It's currently a one man project and he could use some help. Visit the OpenMW Editor forum.

Additional links:

• OpenMW Homepage
• Download
• Roadmap

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Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #2

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features.

Sintel: The Game, currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet).

Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator.

Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog.

Frogatto is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started "making friends" on their blog by talking about projects they like.

idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article.

Summoning Wars, a 3d-visuals hack'n'slash needs a new lead developer.

A discussion about OpenGameArt's usability for game developers started on their forums. Improvements were recently added to the texture section and this is a chance to formulate enhancement to the other sections.

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OpenMW 0.14: Changelog Video (Commented)

OpenMW 0.14 has been released [blog announcement] half a month ago.

I'm a fan of commented video changelogs and highly recommend theirs (embedded below)!

As an experiment, I created an audio-only version [ogg Vorbis, 4m12s, 3M] using youtube-dl, ffmpeg and sox, in case you prefer that over YouTube.

video: OpenMW 0.14 Commented Changelog

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Arx Libertatis 1.0 "Bloody Gobblers!" released!

Walking in the underground city hub in Arx Libertatis

Looking up magic recipes and managing inventory while a vision enhancement is active in Arx Libertatis

[more screens]

Arx Libertatis 1.0 has been released. We already wrote about the engine a month and a half ago but this is the first official, stable release of the GPL-licensed engine for the proprietary first-person cave RPG Arx Fatalis.

But being able to play the proprietary game is not the end of the development. There are plans for future milestones, for example a Qt-based modern game editor and support for modern shaders. I look forward to it!

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Tesseract, Cube2 next-gen'd

A FOSS gaming engine stalwart made a major leap forward today. Sauerbraten/cube 2, everyone's favorite octree, in-game editing game engine has finally implemented modern dynamic lighting, making its innovative mapping system a lot more intuitive and easy to use, as well as allowing for all kinds of new game play. Tesseract loses the backwards compatibility of Cube 2 in order to take full advantage of modern gfx cards.

Personally, I'm looking forward to games that utilize to implement destructible terrain, and the inevitable Minecraft clones that come with it. So go out coders, and create!

                            

You can find the sourcecode on Github here

EDIT: Well, that was quick! Hirato from Sandbox / Redeclipse pointed out this day/night cycle made with the new code: 

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April Snippets

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets.

A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread.

219 bytes tron is:

<body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload=
  z=c.getContext('2d');
  z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325);
  setInterval("
    0<x%n
    &x<n*n
    &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1)
      ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++)
      :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s
  ",9)
><canvas id=c>

Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post, is:

• A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file
• A small part of your build chain

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OpenMW 0.12: Character Animations

image: Sky in OpenMW (scheduled for 0.13)

OpenMW 0.12 has been released:

This release notably includes NPC and Creature animation, though no A.I. has been implemented, so animations must be activated through console commands. Please review the following:

Regressions:

• Sounds other than music not working
• Scroll and button background graphics in launcher not working in Linux package

Important notes:

• You must remove all old openmw.cfg files in order for the automatic detection of Morrowind installations to work.
• If the data path is set manually and it contains spaces, it needs to be put inside quotation marks.

Changelog:

• Various rendering fixes and optimizations
• Refactored engine class
• Automatic package building
• Various build fixes and cleanup
• Various configuration fixes and cleanup, including detection of existing Morrowind installations
• Basic NPC/Creature animation support added, must be activated from console
• Basic implementation of Journal Window added
• Fix for local scripts continuing to run if associated object is deleted
• Fix for crash when taking screenshots
• Fix for crash when visiting Akulakhan’s Chamber
• Added catching of exceptions thrown in input handling functions
• Fix for NPC Activation not working properly
• Allow the player to move away from pre-defined cells

video: character animations in openMW

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Arx Libertatis: promising GPL engine for proprietary RPG

Arx Libertatis logo

Arx Libertatis is the name of the GPLv3-ed Arx Fatalis (proprietary game) engine. It features a unique "draw symbols to cast spells" magic system and has an own scripting engine (described as "a mess, but at least a human readable mess").

video: Arx Libertatis status Feb 2012

The game engine runs the proprietary game with tolerable lag in some game areas on an ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook on Linux and I am close to completing the game from start to end. It can also be compiled on Windows and OS X. A stable release is not yet finished.

Can Arx Libertatis be used to create a free-as-in-freedom game?

No. Not yet.

As-is, i don't think creating custom models, etc. will be easy. We will add support for more common formats in the future, but for now our focus has been on porting and cleaning up the engine and there is still lots to clean up.

dscharrer of #arxfatalis

While image and sound files are in common formats, 3d models are in a format that mostly has not been explored.

If you're interested to dig deeper into the project's status, I recommend starting with reading the mission statement and filetypes wiki pages.

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Morrowind Open Source Projects: Who They Are, What They Do And What They Will Become

Hey Freegamers, 

My name is Antoine and I’ve been a devotee of this site and the Linux Game Tome for years. Now I have the priviledge to contribute back an article. Thank you qubodup for helping me out with this article. I love open source games, but I have a particular soft spot for those that allow creativity and collaboration from their users. Imagine if there existed an open source, and therefore completely editable, game engine with as much content as Morrowind’s fans have created available for it? As many of you are aware, there are currently fan projects working to extend the life, reach, and functionality of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind far beyond what’s possible using Bethesda’s Construction Set modding tools.

Can you guess which screen is rendered by what engine? :)

About Morrowind: Morrowind is an enormous proprietary game loved by fans for its atmospheric and immersive world filled with bizarre giant mushrooms, homes built into giant vines, and barren wastelands. However, it was plagued by software bugs, had many elements that were half-baked in their execution, and its game engine took poor advantage of GPUs. Some of these problems fans were able to address with unofficial patches and mods, but others could not be solved without changing the actual game engine.

When I found an open source reimplentation of the Morrowind engine I had to become involved. I’m very new to the group, but I’m helping out the PR team. However, just days after finding OpenMW, I discovered two more such projects existed, with rumors of a fourth. Mark Siewert of The Crystal Scrolls (and soon OpenMW), said the multitude of projects are a testament to the interest people still have in this game’s strange world. Indeed, look at the massive undertakings of fan projects like Tamriel Rebuilt, MGE XE, MGSO, or type in on YouTube “Morrowind 2011” or “Morrwind 2012” and you’ll get a sense for the countless hours fans continue dedicating to improve Morrowind a decade after its release.

I spoke with the developers of the different engines about their projects to get an idea of what their development status is, what their goals are, and how they’re accomplishing them. A quick disclaimer; you need a legal copy of Morrowind to use any of these engines for playing Morrowind. You can get one from steam (it goes on sale every couple of months) or by purchasing one on ebay.

OpenMW began in 2008 by Nicolay Korslund, it uses ogre3d, bullet physics, OpenAL, OIS, NifLib, and MYGUI. Nicolay stepped down as project lead last year and was replaced by the developer Marc “Zini” Zinnschlag and is joined by many great developers.

Project Aedra, was started by Tom Lopes in 2009. It employs NifLib, Bullet Collision, Quake 3 Arena for "pmove" character controller code, and the FastLZ library.

The Crystal scrolls was started by Mark Siewert in 2007 and it employs the Crystal Space 3d engine.

So what do these projects have in common? Well, they are licensed under some form of the GNU GPL license, written in C++, and aim to have all the features of original Morrowind, including compatibility with all official and unofficial expansions and plug-ins (and those based on external programs such as the Script Extender). Their individual goals are listed below. 

Additional Goals:

OpenMW	Project Aedra	The Crystal Scrolls
Allow greater modification: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc through scripting. Fix system design bugs, like the "dirty" GMST entries in mods, and the save game "doubling" problem Post 1.0: Improve the interface and journal system (possibly) improve game mechanics, physics, combat and AI (possibly) support multiplayer (possibly) improve graphics to use more modern hardware	Be blindingly fast Multi-thread support Multiplayer support Modern graphics engine Upgraded physics engine Upgraded AI	Fix bugs in Morrowind (mostly related to data merging) Add many functions of FPS Optimizer including a fix for the world map Support for multiple .ini files, with each capable of overwriting some of the default settings. Post 1.0: Support for external tools that modify the Morrowind.exe like Morrowind Script Extender Multiple world spaces like in Oblivion (would reduce mod compatibility issues)

Features:

	OpenMW	Project Aedra	The Crystal Scrolls
Windows	Done	Done	Done
Mac OS X	Done	-	-
GNU/Linux	Done	Wine	-
Game launcher	Done	-	Planning
Console	Nearly	Nearly	-
HUD	Early	Partial	-
Render Interior	Done	Nearly	-
Render Exterior	Partial*	Nearly	Done
Sky Rendering	Early	Done	Partial
Day/Night Cycle	Done	Nearly	Partial
NPC Rendering	Nearly	Partial	Done
NPC Animations	Nearly	-	Nearly
NPC Dialogue	Nearly**	-	-
Sound effects	Partial	Done	-
Music	Done	Done	-
Object Collision	Partial	Done	-
Object interaction	Nearly	Nearly	-
Water Layer	Nearly**	Nearly	Partial
Scripting	Nearly	Partial	-
Multiplayer	-	Early	-
Plugin Merging	-	-	Planning
Graphical Replacer Support	Done	Done	-
Multithread Stream Loading	-	Partial	-
Hardware Animations (Shaders)	Planning	Partial	Nearly
Load Doors	Done	Done	-
Render Particle Effects	-	Planning	-
Read Scrolls and Books	-	Done	-
Menus	-	Partial	-
Ground Blends	-	Early	-
Distant Land	-	Partial	-
Journal	Partial	-	-
Nearly** = Code is in the repository, but not in the latest release.
Partial* = Code is in repository, but likely to not be activated in a release for quite some time.
- = No code or planning done yet, or possibly not intending to include.

When is your next release?

OpenMW: No exact date, but we are on the verge of our big 0.12.0 release.

Project Aedra: One was just released. The latest download is r163.

Crystal Scrolls: After recently returning from an unexpected and prolonged hiatus, I released a new snapshot two weekends ago.

What’s next?

OpenMW: Work on version 0.13.0 has already begun.

Project Aedra: Everything (in no particular order); scripting, multiplayer, key binding, animated textures, GUI, conformance (tweaking every little thing to be the same as in Morrowind), ground blends, bug fixing, animated skins, distant Land, 3D SFX, and shaders.

Crystal Scrolls: I am going to join forces with the OpenMW team and help them in getting their own project out of the door. While I will still continue developing this project, I also want to see one of the many Open Source Morrowind projects completed. And from my point of view, OpenMW is likely to reach maturity first. I am planning to do more work on things that do not depend on the renderers, so this should be of use to OpenMW as well.
Concerning Crystal Scrolls 0.3:

• Plugin/Mod support. Possibly with a launcher which lets you disable/enable plug-ins 
• Support for original save games (it's no that different from plug-ins). 
• Object interaction. This will enable many additional features, such as picking up objects, entering internal cells, and more. 

How big is your team?

OpenMW: We have eleven active developers (with varying degrees of involvement with OpenMW) and five people working on things like package maintenance, public relations, and website administration. Our team list is here.

Project Aedra: 1 person, me!

Crystal Scrolls: Myself.

How can people contribute?

OpenMW: If you are skilled with C++ or have game programming skills please register at our forum, look at the version 0.13.0 thread and find an unassigned task, assign it to yourself and get started. Also we want people with fast computers and video editing skills to record demonstration videos for Youtube. We hope that releases post 0.13.0 will be playable enough to necessitate many bug testers. If you are learning how to code, download and have a look at OpenMW.

Project Aedra: I'm looking for C and C++ game programmers with prior experience who can help program.

Crystal Scrolls: There are many ways to help out. Now that rendering and animation is mostly out of the way, it is feasible to start implementing more features. My primary goal for 0.3 is to add plug-in/mod support, and object interaction, but one can easily imagine things that are not blocked by this feature: sound, the console, scripting, etc. So if you want to help, install the program and find something that is missing and that might not depend on plug-in support or object interaction.

There you have it folks; three projects sharing a lot of common ground, but with some different goals and feature sets. Which is the best? That depends on who is asking. I suggest trying out all three every six months or to see how their changing and defining their own style. No doubt they will influence each others development with ideas and solutions. It is very exciting that Mark Siewert is joining the OpenMW team. Here’s to open source, games that facilitate creativity, and the preservation and improvement of games for posterity!

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Dev corner: FOSDEM about Games

Fosdem Game Dev

We already mentioned the FOSDEM 2012 role playing game development talk but recently I found links to more open source game development and game design "devrooms" here.

• Alistair Riddoch - The Dynamic Data Driven Worlds of WorldForge.mp3
• Arthur Huillet - Anatomy of a role playing game.avi
• Erik Ogenvik - Getting Started With Ogre3d For Game Development.mp3
• Jeremy Rosen - Balancing a game - the open source way.mp3
• Thomas Kinnen - Data-Driven and Component-Based Game-Entities.mp3

I also recommend "A New OSI for A New Decade" here, which starts with explaining how not to be annoying when advocating freedom.

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Open Source RPG Development Talk, #AltDevConf

Arthur Huillet of Freedroid talked about RPG development at FOSDEM 2012:

video: FOSDEM 2012 - Arthur Huillet - Anatomy of a role playing game

In two and a half hours, the online #AltDevConf starts. There seems to be no way to attend live unless you use Windows or OS X but the talks will be recorded and made available online later.

There will be 25 talks from the range of game programming, education, design and production.

AltDevConf is an online community-driven conference...

We aim provide free access to a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts, and to create a space where bright and innovative voices can be heard.

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Video Change Logs: Make Your Own!

[video: OpenMW 0.10.0 Change Log]

OpenMW has been steadily reporting about latest progress on their blog and now also released some video change logs with audio commentary.

Freedroid is another project that has been reporting their progress regularly. You can follow them and many more projects on our game planet or dev planet.

To me, short video commentary reports of progress are a delight. While it might be ineffective to make a video for each release, if the changes are not so many and the effort is high, but from time to time having a video change log might be better at getting players interested or developers impressed enough to contribute than a simple CHANGES.txt.

An interesting middle ground is what M.A.R.S. did for their last few releases: screenshot changelogs.

GLC is one of the two nice ways I use to record game videos - here STK

When it comes to gameplay video recording on Linux, I spent some time on the subject and for me it all boiled down to two methods:

1. GLC is ideal for games that use both OpenGL and ALSA
2. FFMpeg is an all-rounder, that is a bit slower but works fine if the machine is powerful enough or the resolution low enough

I will gladly offer my experience in recording videos and editing them on Linux to help you make your own. Just post in the comments, start a thread on the forums or email me via qubodup@gmail.com.

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