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SourceForge.net has "Project of the month" to promote communities supporting their favorite projects.

December 2012: UFO:AI battles against JStock in the poll for "Project of the month". It's a close race.

You know what you have to do.

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Great changes upcoming for UFO:AI

One of the FOSS projects I really hold dear (mainly because they chose to include a few models made by myself :p ) is UFO:AI.
For those totally out of the loop: it's a turn based strategy game based on the classic game X-Com utilizing an improved Quake2 engine.

Recently they had a new release, version 2.4, but the changes upcoming are even cooler (new soldier models and a greatly improved GUI):

More cool screens of those upcoming changes can be found here and here. And here you can find some more as part of a slightly older, but still interesting interview with the developers.

Besides these development news, there seems to have been an informal competition of who can do the nicer Let's Play videos of UFO:AI ;)

FrontFox's UFO:AI Let's Play video part1

Click here for Part 2 and Part 3, or check out this series of Let's Play videos as the alternative: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Part 1 starts out with an outdated version though).

So if you are hooked now by this awesome game, you might as well check out some alternatives: OpenXcom and XenoWar. Neither of which has as much polish and nice graphics as UFO:AI however.

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The Big corrections round-up post (and TA contest)

So... you might have followed the lengthy discussion in the comment section of this blog entry of mine from last week... if you didn't don't worry you didn't miss anything important :p

However I was corrected in quite a few things (besides all the disagreements), so I though it would be good to post a sort of "counter statement" to clear up some recent mess-ups by me:

First of all, the developers from Q2W informed us that in fact most (but not all) of their art assets are CC-by-SA or GPL, which is great. They have also released a Linux installer now, so feel free to check it out if you are gaming on this platform (like me). Oh and I have also updated the video to a newer one, in case you didn't notice yet.

Also, and I am to be honest quite surprised by this, OverDose does in fact have an open source-code repository since some time now, where you can download the source to the engine and some of the cool in-house tools they have developed. No clearly visible notice on the website about this however :-/ Even on the wiki they have no link to it I think.

Ah, and I was also informed that UFO:AI has now released an Linux version of the mentioned 2.4 RC.

Otherwise? Stunt-Rally does indeed have a player-collision option, which I somehow missed... but at least I am not the only one who feels that the physics are a bit off :p

Last but not least, and that is the only real news in this post:
The rather early in development steam-punk themed MMORPG Tempest in the Aether are hosting an art contest in collaboration with OGA too (to celebrate their first release). A bit of a pity that it will probably be somewhat overlooked due to the big OGA contest mentioned in Bart's previous post, but maybe you want to contribute to this game as well.

P.S.: Criticize me all you want, and I am open to corrections as you can see, but don't expect me become a "proper" journalist! After all this is the "splatter zone" :p

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The Big idTech 2 round-up post

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news!

And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2).

The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World, which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta, which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet).

Edit: Updated to newer video

But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well).

So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p

Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar:

AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements:

What's new in AlienArena

Ya3dag, also released a new version recently and I still think its cool in-game editing features should be picked up by some other idTech2 engines. Can't be that hard to port...
Especially for UFO:AI it might be a nice way to modify missions. Speaking of which... they are also preparing a new version 2.4 and released an RC (changelog) recently. Again no Linux download, so I am skipping it for now. They have however almost reached full FOSS status of their sound-effects... at least that is what they say, the graphic they posted says CC-sampling plus though, which is AFAIK not FOSS compatible :(

Now to the games that don't show any real visible progress: War§ow is just posting stupid stuff interesting trivia on their blog. However I don't consider the long awaited 0.7 release vapourware yet.
Another matter in the vapourware category is OverDose though... in development since what feels like at least a decade, and still no release anywhere near (which is also their excuse why they don't share their nice engine improvements or for that matter any source-code all together >:( ). However they recently posted a lengthy news on Moddb in what seems to be an attempt to jump on the current "Kickstarter" bandwagon. Think what you want of that... but they are for sure not getting any of my cash before there isn't a engine-source release...

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