WebGL dungeon crawler Moonshades now FOSS

More browser-based RPG goods for you today: the developer behind the game Moonshades recently indicated on the Opengameart.org forums that this neat old-school (ok not as old-school as Heroine Dusk) dungeon crawler is now fully open-source.

Have a look at the alpha game-play:


It seems the entire game (including the source-code) is released under the rather art focused Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by 3.0) license, but since that is pretty compatible even to the GPL, this shouldn't really matter at all.

Have fun playing!

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Browser based MMO: Ironbane

I wanted to write about this browser-based MMO game called Ironbane for a while, but never actually got around trying it (it's easy though, no need to register for the alpha currently, just hit play; but for me under Linux with Firefox 23 it just kept loading and loading... could have been my very slow connection though). Luckily the creator got into contact with us to remind me about it.

Here is an slightly older video of the tutorial level:


The code (GPLv3) can be accessed on Github, and there is a nice contributors guide. The author also confirmed that there are plans to release all the artworks under CC-by-SA soon, so it can be called a proper FOSS game.

But regardless of that, I feel they need to work on the huge pixel (ok actually texel) density spread, e.g. the strongly different size of individual pixels on the screen ;)

We also asked the creator about any longer plans to commercialize it and this is what he got to offer in that regard:

When we reach beta we would like to offer optional stuff like houses, special clothes and other things for donations (nothing that can give an unfair advantage). So in a way this can be classified as F2P, yes.

Which I guess sounds like a good idea to fund further development and hosting costs.

Anyways... unless you live in the same internet darkage like me, there is no reason not to give it a try!

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Assault Cube reloaded, version 2.5.8

I'm a bit hesitant to cover this game, as media licensing is a complete mess, but well some might enjoy playing it and the source-code is there ;)

Here is a longish game-play video of Assault Cube Reloaded:



You can follow the latest development and see the change-log here.

P.S.: Funny to see some of the Red Eclipse artwork and Xonotic sounds (I think) reused, but I wouldn't want to open the can of worms in regards to them being copy-left licensed...

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Lips of Suna 0.7.0 released

After a long hibernation a new version of the 3D RPG Lips of Suna was released today!

Take that you, ermm brown something?

More screenshots here, and there are quite a few great new features:

• New terrain system.
• More responsive controls.
• Real single player mode.
• New spell and enchantment systems.
• Many graphical improvements.
• Added limited scope game modes.
• Improved script performance.
• Extended character modeling support.
• User interface improvements.
• Improved mod loading.
• Major code cleanup.
• Several less interesting changes.

Looks like the developers are back at it full-force, so give them some encuraging feedback over here!

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GSoC 2013 pushes SuperTuxKart forward!

If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.

Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character:



But their blog has many interesting technical details (and other screenshots + videos) to show off the new features.

So if you like to also contribute, or just want to praise the great work, have a look at their FreeGamer hosted forums :)

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Summer break

After finishing the hex guide and then playing with emscripten I decided to collect all the techniques I used for html5 visualizations. I wanted to see what there was in common among the articles I had written so that I could turn it into a library that I could use for future articles. Unfortunately there wasn’t much. That left me a bit disappointed. I also tried to solve some performance woes with my hex guide when viewed on an iPad. I got some improvement but not as much as I had hoped. That also left me disappointed.

I’m also finding myself spending more of my time helping people privately, over email, and am trying to decide how much time to spend there. I’d rather be helping thousands of people with an article than helping one person with an email, but maybe I can turn some of the emails into short articles, less polished than the ones I’ve been writing.

When I was a kid I spent most of my time on schoolwork. I seemed to learn slower than my friends did, so I was the one reading and re-reading the book while they were out playing. I learned to value 16 weeks of summer break and 3 weeks of winter break as the times when I could learn new things in unstructured time, with no expectation of doing something useful.

So I thought back on those times as a kid when I just learned something without a specific goal in mind, and decided to take a break from writing articles for the rest of the summer. I pulled out my list of things I’ve always been curious about, and decided to study sound & music. That’s a pretty big area, so I explored a little bit and ended up looking at digital audio signal processing.

I’m reading David Cottle’s tutorial to learn about procedurally generated music. I’m also reading Andy Farnell’s Designing Sound to learn about procedurally generated sound effects. I’m also reading Steven W. Smith’s The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing to understand the math and algorithms.

SuperCollider is an app that lets you program sound and music. Cottle’s tutorial uses it. Here’s an example of using one sine wave to set the frequency of another sine wave, and then removing the high frequency sounds using a filter:

{ LPF.ar(
    in: SinOsc.ar(
       freq: SinOsc.kr(freq: 70, mul: 100, add: 440)
    ),
    freq: 300
  ) }.play

Pure Data is a more visual way to program sound and music. Farnell’s book uses Pure Data for its examples. Here’s a Pure Data example of the same thing as above:

It’s not as compact (especially every add and multiply having to be a box with connections) but you can click on numbers and change them easily. That makes it easier to explore the space of values; the space of structures is still inconvenient to explore. My programmer background makes me lean towards SuperCollider, which is why I’m trying to spend more time in Pure Data to learn a different way of approaching problems.

Will I do anything with this? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’m just learning it because it’s interesting!

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Stunt Rally 2.1 released

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;)

Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now:

Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1

A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here.

All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

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Assorted news #1024

*hrmmpf*

• New FreeOrion 0.43 release.
• Unvanquished Alpha 18.
• Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake.
• Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again.
• OpenMW 0.25.0 released.
• New Ya3dag 1.42 release.
• Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0.

tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

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