Saturday, May 19, 2007

Spacetastic

There's an interview with Ryan Gordon - more well known as icculus - over at Linux Games. I spotted the link over on Linux Gaming World. Whilst he is more associated with commercial "open source" titles [quoted because they usually are not free games, more free engines] it still makes for an interesting read although I'm not too sure I agree with all his assessments on how relevant (or irrelevant) some technologies are to the future of Linux gaming.



Continuing on my spate of reporting on the progress of FreeTrain SE (well, I did campaign for nearly a year to get it ported to English) there's now a tools package up for download to assist in the creation of plugins - almost all the game's features are implemented as plugins.



I heard from a rather good source that the next release of Privateer Gemini Gold is pretty close. They may do one more beta before the final release. Still, with better graphics, refined gameplay, and lots of play testing, this version will really shine and be a standout game for the open source world. :-)



Speaking of space games, I just came across a new one! SFZ (I have no idea what that stands for) looks to be ambitious but, aside from the screenshots/devblog, there's not that much information on the key goals of the game. It will run on Linux and Windows and seems to contain a lot of Privateer-ish gameplay elements, but I get the impression it's designed to be multiplayer i.e. online. Anyway, the game is downloadable but I'm not sure how playable it is.



The SFZ link came from a post in the Free Gamer forums, where one of the SFZ developers [ghoulsblade] is starting a discussion on the concept of applying casual games to open source game developers. Anyway, I thought I'd give others a chance to voice an opinion before weighing in with my rather weighty weighed weighable, er, onion. I mean opinion. :-D



Looking for cutesy spacey graphics for a game? Well, over at lostgarden.com (another game development blog) there's efforts to produce a set of free reusable flexible cute spacish [random adjective] graphics called SpaceCute! Kudos to Ben for pointing it out.



These days I blog so much I sometimes struggle to remember if I have already mentioned something or not. So apologies for any repeats... I got hit in the head a few times today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi, thanks for mentioning sfz =)
(means "stress free zone" by the way)

about key goals :
The Main goal is to create a spacegame thats fun to play with a few friends in LAN or over the internet, we don't want massive multiplayer.

SFZ is a very young project (pre alpha),
so we haven't posted it anywhere yet, (besides the link in my forum sig ;).
Its all not so well planned out yet, we still have to do some experiments to see whats feasible.

Coop gameplay like the players fighting together against waves of enemies defending a base and salvaging destroyed ships and bying new equipment between the waves might be nice, but we'll have to try and see.

also i think its a shame that "modern" games don't have planetary landing, that has been possible in some games about TWENTY YEARS AGO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy, ...).
I guess "modern" just means fancy graphics and no gameplay behind it,
so we might do some experimentation in those directions as well.

What we are currently working on (in a branch, not in the svn trunk) is an ingame shipeditor for building spaceships from a few simple basic shapes, much like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego blocks. We're trying to make this very intuitive so people don't have to learn how to use 3d modelling software to make their own spaceships.

The code in the binary download and the code in the trunk might be a bit playable, but its not much yet to play, just blasting asteroids and some stupid ai-ships that try to fly into your direction while constantly firing their weapons.
Even Multiplayer mode has started to work a while ago, but i think its broke in the trunk, but we are currently redesigning a few things in a branch anyway.

Anonymous said...

I have located game like privateer < Vega Strike(Good game) If privateer doesn't work for you, check this one out.

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