It has been one year since Heroes of Newerth was released and to kick off the anniversary celebration, S2Games is offering 11 days of FREE play. Starting today (Thursday, May 12) at 9 p.m. EST new players will be able to sign up and play at no cost. Grab your friends and get your game HoN. The F2P session ends Sunday, May 22nd at 12 a.m. EST. To join, new players simply need to download the game and register a HoN nickname at: http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/create_account.php
Entar: Talk about some of the benefits of using the Darkplaces engine as your engine of choice for this game.
Alexander: The first and foremost benefit is that Darkplaces engine is a complete, solid game engine. All we had to worry about is the game logic and art assets. We didn’t have to worry about creating state-of-the-art technology, it was already there for us.
Linux is much difficult environment to run the game on, but we love to support it because community is much more responsive. In fact, volunteers who do translations are Linux users…
tiny Build GAMES (capitalization is important) created a Kickstarter campaign (for those unfamiliar with the site, it’s a pledging system for creative efforts) for their upcoming platforming game No Time to Explain. They’ve already met their funding goal (with help from Notch of Minecraft fame), which meeeaaaans:
I just want to clarify some things which weren’t clear enough:
The game will cost around $10 on launch day if you haven’t pledged. “Around” because it will differ based on currency exchange rates, processing fees, vendors, etc.
You will get it BOTH ON MAC AND PC (as standalone apps, will follow up on Steam/Mac App Store later) if you pledged; – note that we are unsure of what conditions Valve or Apple may offer us and if we’d be able to give away free copies to backers there When we release on LINUX, you initial pledgers will also get it for free. This will be AFTER PC/MAC launch.
At the time of writing this post, we have a STEAM BUILD pending review by Valve
The LEVEL EDITOR & Beta test are in the pipeline for PC, but if enough people request a MAC Editor/Beta, we will make it
GOL: What would you say are the main improvements over the original game as it stands right now?
MB: Well the main unique feature which we have is the ability to enter and leave a game at any time. At the moment the features which stand out from the original however are the ease of starting a multiplayer game, the ability to have more then one bot per game, being able to replay single player maps as multiplayer maps, new gui, much more improved control system, a map editor, open source, and the ability to tweak any of the unit stats with an easy to read script file. I’m sure there are more I am forgetting…
Two new release of Wine have occurred. The first being an update to the stable release, 1.2.3, which has updates to translation and various bug fixes. The second is an update to the development release which has the following updates listed below.
Gish is back this Spring! Every few days we will be releasing one of eight new levels each with its own challenges and secrets. Between speeding trucks, motor boats, out of control gears, lava, falling drills, and some classic baddies Gish has his work cut out for him. Best of all, these levels contain chances to win Plantronics merchandise! So leave your Valentines behind and grab your plumbing equipment because we’re going back into the sewers this Spring.
Level 1 – April 5th 2011
It has been a few years and Gish is back in trouble, unpredictably, this time Brea has been kidnapped! The last thing you saw was Brea being grabbed and pulled into a Plantronic’s headset factory by a mysterious figure. What could be going on? No time to think, break into that factory any way possible and find your lost love.
Lips of Suna is a tongue-in-cheek dungeon crawl game that takes place in the chaotic dungeons of Suna. The five intelligent races of the world descend to the dungeons with their goal to save the world from a conclusive disaster.
In your journey to the depths of the dungeons, you will, among other things, have to fight creatures of different varieties, solve quests, explore new places, and craft custom items. Luckily you don’t need to do all this alone since you can crawl the dungeons with your friends.
Ryan “icculus” Gordon will be among those speaking at this year’s Flourish! open source conference:
Ryan “Icculus” Gordon – Gaming on Linux
This talk will explore the history of video games on open source platforms, from Zork to First Person Shooters. We will discuss the games, the companies, the players, and which games and business models created an Epic Win.
Free Gamer also pointed out this interview ABC Linuxu conducted with Ryan about a variety of topics:
17) What’s your favorite Linux game? How much time do you usually spend playing games (incl. Wii and the like)?
My favorite Linux game at the moment is Braid, without a doubt. I loved it before I was working on it. I actually offered to do the Mac/steam version of Braid for free, just so I’d have an opportunity to look inside Jonathan Blow’s brain a little.
Version 0.5.6 of PlaneShift is out for players of the MMORPG; changes include:
GUI:
A huge amount of fixes and improvements to the windowing system (paws) and mouselook management
Improvements to weather support and fixed the option to disable weather in pslaunch.
Fixed some issues in the char selection/creation screens which could lead to bad graphics or crashes
Several fixes/optimizations/improvements to shaders and lights management.
First version (BETA!) of the HotBar/quickspell bar (you can open it by typing /show quickspell and remove it with /show quickspell off ) which allows you to drag and drop spells or items in the quickbar, then click on the icons to cast the spell or use the item
fixed a display issue which could show skills to be completely practically trained even if it wasn’t so.
added a simple animation to pterosaur transportation load screens
Optimizations:
major rewrite of several parts of the background loader, which now should be more stable and faster.
several optimizations, leak fixes and crash fixes
Quests and Factions:
Major rework of the quests! In the past the quests were most likely one off and with little purpose. We decided to radically change the concept by creating chained series of quests with a purpose and where possible a story. So we looked at the quests we have in game and started to tie them together.
After char creation a friend’s letter is now guiding you to the major NPCs, which will explain the associations and factions present in Hydlaa. Players can start to follow those trails and learn more about the associations/factions. This is the foundation of a complex social system based on jobs and affiliations that we continue to develop to create a more immersive roleplay experience.
Many new quests were added, and many reworked, reaching a grand total of 320 quests!! In particular a whole new set of Magic quests is present, allowing access to bracers, robes and wands items in the different Ways of magic! (for graphics associated to those items, see the art section)
Art:
New Amdeneir tavern! Thanks Nikodemus and zweitholou for building it!
Added new female ynnwn wizard robe!
Made available all bracers through Way quests
Fixed many sounds for game areas, including gugrontid and the road to bronze doors
several improvements to sound management (including a startup crash when the sound system failed to init)
Improved sounds and graphical effects of many spells, including: crystal aura, invigoration, life infusion, relaxing sleep, flaming weapon, flame spire, and many more. Work is still under going to progressively improve/fix all of them.
Improved hydlaa grass, sky and trees
For GMs/Devs:
expanded the scripting system in several ways for example quests can now use scripts also to give specific items, factions and money depending on variables passed to them allowing faster balancement changes in them. Additionally in mathscripts it’s now possible to output messages.
Additional scripts used in crafting, which were before hardcoded in the sources, where now converted to math scripts. Making it easier for rules developers to change them.
complete rewrite of the adminmanager allowing a more generic targeting system and sane interface to gm and developers, also awarding anything to players uses a single functionality shared also in the manager of the events. expanded also killnpc to allow loading of new npc and runscript to allow more scripts to be run through it.
several expansions and expansions to npcclient to allow npc to do things not possible before like sitting, do emotes, teleport…
Others:
pets will now follow automatically
added support to define what type of chats should be logged, in which file and with what prepended brackets (check chat – logs)
added support for a spell checker within the chat input using hunspell. It’s disabled by default and it requires to be enabled by hand for now, and the dictionaries added in a dict folder inside your ps data folder. This feature is considered experimental and unstable (and could be not available on all platforms yet)
removed forceful removal in operating systems different than windows of the code which allowed the hardware mouse to be used.
The Unity engine/game development environment, which supports many other platforms today, will soon be getting a Linux web player according to this post on their official forums:
Hello Everyone,
Vectrex, it seems you’ve got us on this one
We are in fact working on Linux support to be released initially as a preview feature. We have no set release date yet.
You can see a list of titles that have already been developed using Unity here; in particular, Star Wars: The Quest for R2-D2 looks neat.
arand let me know that there’s a new Linux FPS in town:
A single-player and multi-player first-person shooter, it was built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2. Red Eclipse, a fork of the now discontinued bloodfrontier, lends itself toward a balanced gameplay, with a general theme of agility in a variety of environments.
Static binary tarballs are available for 32/64bit Linux; unofficial Debian packages (tracking SVN) are available from Arand’s PPA (when using these packages, report issues to PPA maintainer first).
I’m a bit late to the party, but Unigine has announced that their upcoming naval-themed real-time strategy game Oil Rush is now available for pre-ordering. Announcement after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »
To test the linux versions of my games, I made a build of Jasper’s Journeys with bundled SDL libraries. If it works then the others should too. So please try it out! It’s the full version *nudge* *nugde*
Free Gamer has an in-depth post examining the history and current status of what was originally just Glest, a real-time strategy game effort that splintered into several projects:
After much pressing by Internet trolls and well wishers, it seems that a joining of efforts is in the offing.
Even if the efforts do merge, they may still remain separate entities. Reading through the post, there’s talk of official liasons between the projects and all sorts. It seems a bit more complicated than you might expect.
Greedy Car Thieves is an overhead-perspective sandbox action game with single player and multiplayer game modes. Features:
single-player story mode where you play as both a lawman and a thug
multi-player mode with various game types: free for all, 1v1, team deathmatch, capture the flag, hunting, bombmatch, race
a lot of cars, weapons, power-ups and destructible objects that succesfully diversify the gameplay
fire to enemies while seating in a car as a passenger
precise aiming mode makes it no problem to accurately fire to enemies even from a roof (despite the fact the game exhibits an old-school top-down view)
delightful visual effects including ambient occlusion, dynamic per-pixel normal-mapped lighting, real-time dynamic shadows (cars headlights and sunlight with varying day-night cycle), water reflections, blooming and antialiasing
fast and reliable networking, based on UDP/IP protocol, minimizes game lags and provides continuous multi-player gameplay
map editor that lets players to easily create new cities with a lot of predefined objects and tiles
randomnine let us know about his adventure platformer set in… OUTER SPACE!!! Behold, Beacon!:
Beacon’s a short free-roaming platformer, in the vein of Metroid, but with a strong focus on narrative rather than upgrades. It’s been getting great feedback since launch. RockPaperShotgun called it “a lovely bit of work, with some happy platforming and a touching ending that I think might get you lot talking”.
It only takes around 15 minutes to play, which has been about as much time as I’ve been able to devote to gaming of late (doh!).
