My Games Design

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch ( via the autobuilds ), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps. From the user "Antibody" ( known for his duel commentary videos ) comes this nice video overview of the new features: (please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings) On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread . Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily fo...

There's a new big remake effort a-brewing in the Free Software world, this time for prominent shooter/RPG, System Shock . under the shape of project Citadel . According to project description, the goal is to recreate the original game using the widely known GPLed platform Darkplaces Engine , upgrading the game's graphics to full 3D but keeping game aesthetics close to the origianl game. Added modding capabilities and cooperative multiplayer will also be a part of the project.  Details, however, are somewhat scarce, so far, as development is happening behind closed doors, and creator Josiah Jack just announced the existence of the project itself after months of programming in secret. While the code will certainly be all GPL or GPL-compatible due to Darkplaces licensing requirements, the game appears to rely on original proprietary assets, as well as using its own whose license nature is yet to be disclosed. With a release date planned for the the 23rd of December, System Shock...

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

Today I bring you news of yet another rather low profile Darkplaces engine game (e.g. the same engine that runs Xonotic ), called Dead Morning : As you can see in these other, more game-play oriented videos ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), it seems to be quite heavily influenced by another recent 1st person horror game... The website mentions a fully open-source release at the end of this year, so I am rather intrigued what they will come up by then!