WIP "OpenFlashpoint"

Here is another post about a project I found in the far ends of the internet ("here be dragons"), but which seems really promising never the less.

But first of all a disclamer by the original creator:

The screenshots you are about to see are not yet an eye candy, they're rather to be seen as a 'proof of concept' with lots of crappy placeholders. Work so far has mainly been done on the internal mechanics of game handling such as object interaction (player can carry gun which again can 'carry' a mag and the like), realistic calculation of trajectories, hit testing etc.

So what am I talking about? A (most likely) open-source Operation Flashpoint type of game running on the Irrlicht engine with the current working title OpenFlashpoint:

All there is so far is a thread on the Irrlich forums (with a few more details and development screenshots) and sadly the main developer seems to be bogged down by "real-life" ATM. But it seems like a worthwhile project to support.

Oh and get this: it is developed primarily for Linux :D

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Comprehensive lists of open-source game engines for proprietary games

Recently came across these two very comprehensive lists of open-source game engines for proprietary games edit: and various clones and inspired projects:

• Reddit post
• Open Source Game Clones website

I feel the latter has an a bit misleading title, as none of those are game clones (e.g. similar remakes) and most of those are based on the liberated original source-code also... but well I guess people get what the list is supposed to be about :) (Edit: see comments).

However talking about an actual engine reimplementation project: OpenMW has recently released a new update (0.23.0) with some impressive additions (as usual) and version 0.24.0 is already tested as a RC right now.



Feel free to comment about this release on our forums!

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Uclan's Games Design Alumni

We're really proud to introduce just some of our Game Design Alumni below featuring examples of their work and what they have to say about their study experience with us at Uclan.

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Aaron Foster, Graduate and recent Tutor on the games design course,
currently Artist/Games Designer at Lunar Software has just granted us permission to post this fantastic image from his game, 'Routine' as part of our Alumni feature.

Following graduation, Aaron spent 2 years working as a professional 3D Environment artist
for www.Eurocom.co.uk on projects such as G-Force and Disney Universe.
He moved on from there to pursue his love of game development as a whole and to
develop his own games.
You can see some of Aaron’s past work at
www.razorb-art.com

Lunar Software is an independent games company based in the UK that currently consists of 3 people, Aaron Foster, Artist, Jemma Hughes and Programmer, Pete Dissler.

We're all waiting with great excitement to see the release of 'Routine' which promises to be quite an  'experience' with it's Retro-Scifi Horror theme.

So delighted to have the Lunar Software poster here amongst out Hall of Game Fame :)

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Peter Field graduated from our Games course with a first class honours in Games Design 5 years ago. He's now a games designer at Naughty Dog in California which is one of the very top games studios in the world!

He's worked on some fantastic titles including Uncharted 3 and recently 'The Last of Us' which is featured in the image attached that we now have permission to use in an alumni banner!

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The White Paper Games team was initially formed by UCLan graduates on the BA and MA Games Design course and the BA Music Practise course.
White Paper Games is a small game development studio based in Manchester, UK. They're currently a team of 7  working on their first release as a studio.'Ether One' is a first person puzzle game for PC and Mac.
Pete Bottomley, Co-founder / Games Designer 1st Class BA Hons Games Design, Masters with Distinction MA Games Design.
Ben Hill, Co-founder / Games Designer 2.1 BA Hons Animation, Masters with Distinction MA Games Design.
Oliver Farrell, Environment Artist 1st Class BA Hons Games Design, Masters with Distinction MA Games Design.
James Burton, Technical Artist 1st Class BA Hons Games Design, Masters with Distinction MA Games Design.
Nathaniel-Jorden Apostol, Sound Design / Composition 2.1 BA Hons Music Practice

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Christian Fell  is currently working as a Concept Artist at Riot Games, Santa Monica, California.

Christian is German. He grew up in Dortmund until the age of 12, then moved to England where he studied Games design on the BA course at Uclan. 
Following graduation he worked as a concept artist for Travellers Tales Ltd. 
and then moved to in Shanghai to work for Gameloft.
Christian is very versatile and can produce a variety of artwork from 2D, 3D down to Sprite animation.

See his online portfolio here. 

 

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 Max Davenport
is a recent graduate, currently working as a contract Concept Artist
at Rare Ltd. - Microsoft Game Studios.
During his study at Uclan, Max had a work placement at Rare, which was a brilliant experience for him, which culminated in his current role with them.
You can see Max's artwork at the following link:
http://maxdavenportart.blogspot.co.uk/

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Paul Bannon is a 3D artist at TT-Fusion, Warner Bros. in Cheshire, where he recently
worked on LEGO City Undercover

You can see Paul's website at the following link:

http://www.xaku-designs.com/

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Alumni, Moh Mukhtar  creates 2D art for a Facebook game,'Village Life' which he designed and executed for Playdemic in Wilmslow.
Moh's is a versatile concept artist and his website can be found at the following link:

http://mohzart.carbonmade.com/ 

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Andy Kerr graduated from Uclan Games design course and initially worked as a Junior Artist at 'Travellers Tales Fusion' in Wilmslow, Cheshire UK. Following this he began work as a 3D artist at 'Gaia Technologies' developing assets fro ground breaking educational systems. Andy has been with Gaia in Bangor, North Wales, for several years now.

You can see some of his spectacular work here. 

http://andy-kerr-art.blogspot.com/

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Katie Clague completed her Games Design degree at Uclan and went on to work at  

Travellers Tales Ltd. as a Junior Level Construction Artist on their range of Lego game titles. 

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Alumni, David Woodman is Art Director at Travellers Tales Fusion

Dave Graduated from Uclan Games Design course in 2005 with great 3D modelling and digital painting skills and has worked in the games industry ever since.  

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These are just some of our talented and successful alumni.

There's lots more to be featured very soon.

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Dead Morning, an open-source horror game

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!

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Rhythos RPG Builder Kickstarter

There seem to be not too many Kickstarter projects that promise open-source results (and I have to admit, incentives are lower if you don't get a copy of a cool game at a discounted price ;) ), but the Rhythos RPG builder project looks like one very much worth of support:



The guy behind it (don't miss the slightly goofy video on the kickstarter page ;) ) seems to be quite far along development already, basing the editor on a previous game of his and utilizing the Liberated Pixel Cup graphics.

He is also asking for non-monetary contributions, so check out his newly set-up community website to learn more about how to contribute.

While personally I don't see myself playing such 2D RPGs much, I contributed because it seems like a great platform for young game developers to start out with... and you have to catch them early as they say (no pedobear reference intended :D ).

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Introducing Pinterest to students as a visual research tool

In the last year, we have introduced Pinterest to our games design students as a visual research tool.
We've been exploring images from Pinterest's rich variety of sources to create annotated moodboards and we've been gathering and sharing imagery to inspire and inform design.

Our games design course began using Pinterest in Sept. 2012 as a means of storing and sharing images that inspire. At this point there were many images to be found that would spark the creative imagination but it seemed that few were directly connected with 'game art.' Since then we have seen an increase of games design/art related pins from around the world filling the screen at Pinterest.

We always encourage students to add a reference to their pins,
(Author, date)
In addition to the usual link to the original source, I would love to see a referencing tag option added to each pin which would use Harvard referencing format to cite and link to further sources of reading and study such as academic papers, books, journals, magazines, images etc.

This could either be integrated into Pinterest as it stands,
or their could be a special area within Pinterest for visually based academic research.

This would create a place where students could not only gather inspiration, but could openly share their research pathways with a direct IMMEDIACY that has never before been attempted within academic circles. This would appeal so strongly to young people who think in visual terms and love to work with digital networks.

Click on the image below to see our Games Design course Pinterest network as it currently stands.

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Play FreeCiv in your browser (HTML5)

FreeCiv is now available as a HTML5 implementation that runs right in your (modern) browser:

Load times are quick too, so give it a try. It even supports multiplayer.

Tip: Moving units is either done via the arrow keys (preferably the number key-pad ones as those allow diagonal movement) or by dragging a red line from the unit to the desired location.

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Two times (0.)2.0

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ).

Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games:
There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally, and I guess I can quote Twain here too:

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!

Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold, but even increased in pace :)

Anyways, here is a great video:


And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs":
And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release.

This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine, brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!

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Notes on implementing interactive articles

While writing my guide to hexagonal grids I ran into some html+css+js issues that I need to spend more time learning about. Here are a few things that are on my mind.

Responsive layout

I got a little frustrated with the layout options I had in HTML+CSS. I want to write HTML one way, then use CSS media queries to reformat the layout to work with wide desktop, narrow desktop, and mobile widths.

For some of my previous articles, I used floats. It works nicely in the simple case.

narrow

A

B

wide

A

B

However, for this article I often found that the best layout for narrow would be to put diagram B in the middle of the text A+C:

narrow

A

B

C

wide

A

C

B

But now the diagram is aligned with C; I want it to be aligned with A.
I don’t know the best way to do this. I ended up using three different patterns.

1. When A and C were taller than B, I used absolute positioning to take B out of the flow and line it up with A:
   
   
   
   
   
   narrow
   
   

   A

   
   

   B

   
   

   C

   
   
   
   
   
   
   wide
   
   
   

   
   

   A

   
   

   C

   
   

   
   

   B

   
   
   
   
   



2. When A and C were shorter than B, I didn’t have a good solution, so I moved C’s content into A’s and used floats. This hurt the layout on narrow devices, where it ended up in the wrong order:
   
   
   
   
   
   narrow
   
   

   A

   
   

   C

   
   

   B

   
   
   
   
   
   
   wide
   
   
   

   
   

   A

   
   

   C

   
   

   
   

   B

   
   
   
   
   



3. Occasionally I just wanted things to be side by side but not floating, so that I could get this:
   
   
   
   
   
   narrow
   
   

   A

   
   

   B

   
   

   C

   
   
   
   
   
   
   wide
   
   
   

   A

   
   

   B

   
   

   C

   
   
   
   
   

In the end I wasn't happy with the different CSS rules that I used,
but they seem to work. I could have reformatted with Javascript but kept hoping CSS alone would do the trick. Flex boxes don't seem to help here (unless I'm missing something). It's possible CSS Regions would do what I need; it's not widely supported yet. I'm a novice with floats; it's quite possible with some cleverness I could've gotten what I wanted.

Update: [2013-05-29] With help from Jimminy on Friendfeed, I was able to simplify all of the above into one set of rules that handles all three cases. Anything that will be potentially in two columns goes into a div with clear:both. The left column elements are all float:left;clear:left. The right column elements are all float:right;clear:right. On a narrow browser, the containing div will be one column wide, so all the floats are in order. On a wide browser, the containing div will be two columns wide, and the left/right floating elements go in the left and right columns. Much simpler!

Browser compatibility

Some things that bit me:

1. In WebKit I can use SVG’s baseline alignment to vertically center text. This becomes very handy when I want to write generic code that places text no matter what size the hexagons or what size the text. However in Gecko, I can’t use this. Instead I need to adjust the text position downwards, which depends on the size of the text. But I don’t know the size of the text in the generic code because it’s set later by the CSS on the page. So I fudged it. Also see Nelson Minar’s post on this topic.




2. In WebKit I can use the DOM node’s .clientWidth and .clientHeight to get the size of the SVG. I then use that to center the diagram in the SVG frame. In Gecko these were returning 0, so I ended up reading the width= and height= attributes of the SVG instead.

Performance

I wrote the animations in a straightforward way but there are way too many animations running at once. I have a single toggle for the orientation (pointy top vs flat top) of all the diagrams on the page. When you change the orientation it rebuilds all of the diagrams. This is slow.

I guess I was hoping requestAnimationFrame would magically solve everything. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t know where the output will be on screen, and therefore whether the code needs to be called. So I need to do that. I need to look at each diagram, figure out whether it’s on screen, and decide whether to change it immediately or to delay it. But if I delay it, and you toggle it back, then I have stacked timer handlers to deal with. So I haven’t finished implementing this.

A simpler approach would be for me to not link the orientations together, so you’d separately toggle it for each section of the page.

Touch screens

Although I did a little bit of testing on touch screens, I didn’t spend enough time getting the interactions to work well with touch events. Instead I’m (mostly) relying on the emulation of mouse clicks. There’s a ~300ms delay for this emulation though, so it doesn’t feel smooth. There’s a library to fix this but I haven’t tried it. It’d also be nice on touch screens to tap and drag to select multiple hexagons, but I didn't implement click and drag either so I'm consistent in my not supporting the nicer UI.

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Guide to hexagonal grids

A few weeks before Game Developers Conference, I thought to myself, what article can I write that’ll just take 2 weeks? I decided hexagonal grids, as a subset of my bigger article on all grids, would be a reasonable choice. I already have all the material; I've collected it for nearly 20 years on my site.

I was wrong.

I was wrong about how long it would take. It took me roughly 8 weeks. I was also wrong that I already had all the material. The more I dug into hexagonal grid algorithms, the more cool patterns I found — things I hadn't seen elsewhere. And I wanted to not only write about them but implement them and create interactive diagrams. I printed out sheets of hex grid paper (from here), played with the algorithms, tested things out, and discovered new things. I implemented the data structures in Haxe and visualizations in d3.js.

And there are still so many things I wanted to do but didn’t!

For example, I wanted to generate code on the fly for each the grid types. I thought, if I represent the core algorithms in an abstract syntax tree format, I can compose parts together, write an expression optimizer, and generate new code. For example, the neighbor algorithm is written in hex cube coordinates. To use a different coordinate system, like odd-R offset, you’d use convert_cube_to_odd_r( neighbor( convert_odd_r_to_cube(hex) ) ). If you compose these functions, inline, and optimize, you could get a neighbor algorithm custom designed for the odd-R coordinate system. I could generate that, on the fly, in Javascript, and display it to you. I could then give you a menu asking you which of the 74 grid types you use, and then I could generate a hex algorithm library for you, based on your needs. And maybe even in the programming language of your choice.

Is that feasible? I think it is.

There are lots of other things that I would like to do but decided to cut. I would’ve liked to clean up the code to produce a reusable library for others to use. I’ve made a list on Trello with all of the things I could've done, but didn’t.

Instead of doing all those things, I decided it’s better to finish and publish (ship!) than to delay it to do the more ambitious things. I can leave them for version 2. It's like shipping a game. You have to cut things. It's better to ship something good enough than to never ship the perfect game.

Take a look at my new guide to hexagonal grids. Let me know what mistakes I made. Let me know what questions you have. Let me know what you’d like to see in a future version. Quick fixes I’ll make soon; bigger changes will wait for version 2. Thanks!

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OpenXcom takes a giant leap

Main menu

OpenXcom is one of those projects I've been following religiously, not only because I'm a huge fan of the X-COM series, but also because it promised to deliver a fully stable and bug free engine port released under a Free Software license.

The last time I talked about it, it seemed like there was still much work to be done, but apparently things have changed, as the developers suddenly just went from a fairly incomplete version 0.4 to a fully playable and enhanced version 0.9.

In game

This is obviously great news to all X-COM fans. OpenXcom now ensures the game can be ported to practically every modern device or OS you can think of. It also allows improved mod support and further enhancements to gameplay and graphics to be made by the community. Sadly the infamously hard sequel to X-COM, known as Terror from the Deep, is yet to be supported, something that will hopefully change in the upcoming versions of OpenXcom.

You can download OpenXcom v0.9 here.

The engine requires an original copy of X-COM: UFO Defense/UFO: Enemy Unknown in order to run, which can be purchased here.

Finally, if you're interested in modding or downloading mods made specifically for OpenXcom, you should check this page.

Code License: GPLv3

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Heroine Dusk, cool in browser retro dungeon crawler

Clint Bellanger, the awesome guy behind the Flare RPG (engine), just landed a surprise hit for the #OneGameaMonth competition(?):

Heroine Dusk

The fully JavaScript (and thus in Browser game) is called Heroine Dusk, and can be played here as a first demo. Game play seems to be heavily influenced by those early 1990ties pseudo 3D dungeon crawlers (similar to the recent indie-game hit "Legend of Grimrock").

Code and art assets are of course fully FOSS!

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