LINUXGAMES

A patch for The Battle for Wesnoth, the lauded open source fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game, was released to fix a few bugs:

• Fixed a coordinate bug that caused ‘Hills of the Shorbear Clan’ to not end when it was supposed to.
• Fixed a bug that allowed one to finish ‘The Dragon’ by defeating both enemy leaders.
• new portraits: Silver Mages, White Mages, female Mage of Light, Arch Mages, Red Mages, Dark Adepts, female Necromancer/Dark Sorceress, L1 Mages, Lich.
• updated translations: Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish.
• Fixed OOS bug when giving control and having move in undo stack.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ wesnoth.org ]

GFire, a Pidgin plugin which connects to the XFire network, had an update we missed (thanks Nemoder!). Features include:

• Friends list
• View friend’s current game (games list updated weekly)
• View friend’s profiles
• Join friend’s server
• Detects games and logs game time

Download: [ site40.net ]

Boondog is a platforming game with puzzle-oriented level design.

Download: [ bazosoft.com ]

The Apricot project’s open-source game, being developed using Blender, Crystal Space, and Python, has acquired a name since the last time we mentioned it: Yo Frankie!. Additionally, Linux test packages and a video preview were posted recently.

The game should be released by the end of this month, and you can pre-order the DVD from the Blender site.

Vulcando Games sent in a new update regarding their upcoming massive multiplayer game Celetania:

The website of Celetania now contains the ship modules of the Grogg. The variety of modules will allow you to develop your ships to a more advanced state.

There are active ship upgrades such as the shields and the EMP module, which is able to paralyze enemy ships. The colonization module is essential to expand your empire and the invasion modules allow you to take over the planets of your enemies. Many more modules await your visit behind this link.

Vulcando Games has also announced the precise release date and the start of the beta phase: The game will be going live at February 13th 2009 and the beta phase will be starting over a month before.

It is already possible to sign up for the beta phase on the Celetania homepage!

2D Boy posted a blurb about the Linux version of their upcoming eclectic puzzle game World of Goo, which was an award winner (Design Innovation) at the 2008 Independent Games Festival:

Mac/Linux versions are in progress. Linux peepz – how do you like your games distributed? Pre-built? Manually link the .o whatever things? What has worked well in the past?

Consequently, there’s lots of discussion in the comments about optimal Linux game distribution.

vitetris, a terminal-based Tetris clone, is at version 0.50 (changes), which includes netplay improvements.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ victornils.net ]

Version 0.8 of Battle Tanks,an open source multiplayer desktop battle game, was released last month, adding numerous gameplay updates, interface changes, and bugfixes.

Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

Version 1.1.5 of Mumble, the open source, low-latency, high-quality voice communication tool for gamers, is out, which adds support for controlling Murmur through the Internet Communications Engine and key suppression.

Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

Delta3D, an open source game engine, is now at version 2.1.0:

Its modular design integrates other well-known Open Source projects such as Open Scene Graph, Open Dynamics Engine, Character Animation Library, and OpenAL. Rather than bury the underlying modules, Delta3D integrates them together in an easy-to-use API — always allowing access to the important underlying components.

A number of projects use the engine, and there are online tutorials.

Download: [ delta3d.org ]

A new mod for Quake III: Arena, Tanks and Rogues, has been released:

The core idea of Tanks and Rogues is that everything is a team effort. To kill an enemy tank, first your rogue has to disable the enemy’s shield, then before it regenerate, your tank must hit the enemy tank with conventional weapons to actually kill him.

An in-game help system was also recently added.

Download: [ moddb.com ]

I’ve been behind the curve on news of late, so here’s a quick rundown on the various commercial Linux game-related items in the past week or so:

• Frictional Games’ has announced that Penumbra: Requiem, the expansion pack for Penumbra: Black Plague and conclusion to the Penumbra adventure-horror trilogy, will be released for Linux soon:
  

  Mac & Linux users can look forward to a release as soon as possible, the game is in the process of being ported. More news on this as the ports near completion.

   

• vadi4 let us know that he received a letter on the status of the Linux version of Multiwinia, the sequel to Darwinia, from Introversion:
  

  We don’t have a Linux version of Multiwinia for day 1 I’m afraid. We will be making one, but it won’t be out for a couple of months. We did everything we could to keep the two branches in sync, but I’m afraid it was not meant to be.

   

• S2 Games has published a new patch for Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, a mixed-genre fantasy-themed multiplayer game, with the requisite bugfixes.
   
• Shrapnel Games has released a new patch for Dominions 3: The Awakening, a fantasy-themed strategy game; version 3.20 mostly has modding improvements, but it also has new units for late Atlantis and bug fixes.
   
• A trailer for the second episode of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the adventure RPG series based on the popular webcomic Penny Arcade is up at Hothead Games’ blog. There’s also a hands-on preview at Wired.com.
   
• Speaking of Hothead Games, a forum post explains that their next game, DeathSpank, will probably see a Linux port (thanks to Ferocious for pointing this out):
  

  Our plan is to support Mac and Linux with all our games, wherever it makes sense. So while we’re still a ways off from DeathSpank’s release, it is part of our current project plans.

We first mentioned this game about a year ago, and it was released in the interim at some point:

levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver.

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

The game was developed with open source tools on/for Linux such as Blender.

Download: [ julianoliver.com ]

LordsAWar version 0.1.1, a clone of the turn-based strategy game Warlords II, has been released with the following changes:

• added network play
• added a graphic theme to lordsawar windows
• added online help
• added more artwork for cities and shields
• improved the tileset editor, and armyset editor
• fixed various crashing bugs

Download: [ lordsawar.com ]

The newly supported game Dráscula: El Vampiro (Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back) in ScummVM 0.12.0, developed in spain by Alcachofa Soft 1996, has been released two days ago as freeware under an open source licence. Alcachofa Soft lent the source code to ease the inclusion in ScummVM and allowed the release as freeware, as Revolution Software and Interactive Binary Illusions have done before and will be followed by others.
There are three packages to download from the ScummVM downloads page, which are the game with English voices, the game music and other languages, including voices in Spanish and text in French, German and Italian. The English and Italian text has been cleaned of translation errors and the audio is compressed with Vorbis, they are still in search for someone to host the FLAC version.

Then there is a recently released German adventure game called Edna bricht aus (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout), which has gotten surprisingly good reviews, considering most of it was done by one person as a university project, before he co-founded Daedalic Entertainment. It is written completely in Java but only has an installer for Windows, so someone called ‘d0k’ wrote an installer in Java as well. The game is available in stores for €25 in German-speaking countries “with additional territories to follow”, hopefully.

The latest development release of Wine, the Windows emulator for Unix has been released. This release has the following new features:

• Substantial chunks of WinHTTP are implemented.
• More JavaScript support.
• Beginnings of shell AppBar implementation.
• Several fixes for Google Chrome support.
• Chinese translations.
• Various bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 1.1.4]

Speaking of Flash-based games, the game taking up most of my friends’ time this week has been Fantastic Contraption, a physics-based puzzle game with established challenges for each level and support for saving of your creations, like foo’s conveyor belt thingie.

Edmund McMillen, an author of the Linux game Gish, and the Flash games Triachnid and Coil, let us know about his latest project, Aether:

In the game you play as a boy who leaves the earth in search of life in outer space, someone he can relate to. in the process he discovers lost planets that need to be saved, solving puzzles on these planet bring life back to them and the galaxy expands.

Please feel free to try the game out yourself, the story is left open to interpretation and if your into exploration and problem solving then you just might really like it.

All the controls and info are in the game.

The Game was created by Myself and Tyler Glaiel of http://www.glaielgames.com/. We made it in 14 days.

I hope you enjoy our labor of love.

James ‘Quasar’ Haley reports that James Monroe from Raven Software has surprisingly released the engine source code to both Heretic and Hexen two days ago, this time as GPL with the approval of copyright holder Activision.

It took many years of nag^Wconvincing to get the engines relicenced. They had been released with a non-profit EULA almost ten years ago. As both are based on the Doom engine, they can now be integrated in all the GPL Doom source ports.

There has also been a new version of Wolf4SDL with the following changes:

• Demos are fully working now (at least for the 1.4 Activision and Spear of Destiny versions).
• Removed last busy waiting (which led to very unstable framerates on BSDs).
• Fizzle fade now works for resolutions up to 8191×4095 (that should be enough for years to come).

And finally, icculus.org’s Rise of the Triad for Linux (with the appropriate abbreviation RotTfL) has reached version 1.1 after five years, with support for higher resolutions (taken from WinRott) and more CPU architectures (taken from Debian package), oh my!

Platinum Arts sent in the following update concerning Sandbox, their educational game design tool:

Platinum Arts Sandbox is the game design tool based on the Cube 2 engine that allows users to quickly and easily create and edit their own worlds in game, even cooperatively. It is free, open source, and easy to use for Kids and Adults! We have lots of updates, many more than I could fit in a single news post so here are some goodies!

For anyone who needs some help with the basics of Platinum Arts Sandbox we have a new video tutorial for you to check out! This is only the first of many tutorials to come so be sure to check back! Watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g44Ww2bg2_E

Thanks to Xenios and Malte Fiala Sandbox is now translated into German! If you wish to have the 2.2.0 release in German you need to download the language file and put it in /data/lang/de then when in Sandbox go to options and select German! Here is the file:

http://www.svn.kids.platinumarts.net/32pas32/trunk/data/lang/de/menus.cfg

We have a lot of news on the way, including several new maps, ways to make movies in Sandbox, video tutorials, the results of the Game Design Camp for kids, a new version on the horizon and lot more! Take care and have fun creating!

Download: [ platinumarts.net ]