The 2D RTS
Bos Wars (BW) 2.6 has been released, after two years of release-silence. The new release includes
- Enhancements to the editor and map format
- New units, tilesets, maps, translations (italian and portugese)
- A campaign
About the campagin, which is called "swindler", I can only say that the story drawings are beautiful and that the first mission is unbeatable boring (which is why I can't say anything about follow-up missions, if there are any): you need to navigate a weak unit through a maze of high-damage towers - blind. You only have a chance when you have a good memory and accept having to restart the mission 20 times. The only other scripted scenario is the tutorial level, which has (computer-generated) mission voices even! You can see both missions being played (and the mentioned story drawings) in
this video [
tinyogg].
The new map format is 'patch-based', which is like 'tile-based' I suppose, only that it allows you to use tiles of any dimensions. The editor works well, it could only use a 'tile draw mode' which would continue to draw tiles while holding down the mouse button (this happens for units, but not for tiles).
Here's a video [
tinyogg] demonstration of the editor, make sure to skip if it gets boring, I show off tile, resource and unit placement and then test-play the map.
What I really really want BW to have is a tower defense map/mode. :)
Since I started talking about editors, I'll just go ahead and show the
PARPG one:
The editor is all right, it seems to be a bit hard to get existing resources into the game though: they need to have a xml definition file for each image (hand-written I assume) and then you have to import them into the map with multiple mouse clicks.
You probably know of the
lack of a maintainer for PARPG but there are also
coding and asset-making jobs to do for Techdemo 2 - enter "2D" and "3D" into your browser's search function to filter out the art tasks. A list of '
good tasks for new programmers' was written, you also ask for guidance
here. The current programmer's hot topic is "
inventory and objects".
Formido is a short top-down shoot-until-aliens-kill-you game. It is well-made, but I won't be coming back to it as I will be doing to
Violetland.
Damnation of the Gods aims to become an enhanced Dungeon Master clone. Right now it is an old-school engine with a pleasant GUI which relies on freeware
DMJ's assets. Assets is what the project mainly needs.. and maybe some guidance for a plot?..
Dragon History is a Czech-language (with some horrible but fun text translations) adventure game for
scummVM. Its code is GPLv2-licensed. I got no reply yet after asking for the gfx and audio's license..
Did I already mention that my Linux game video recording troubles were over the day I discovered
this guide to use ffmpeg for it?
Remember my
high praise of
krank? Well now thanks to above post you can finally
witness [
tinyogg] visuals and sound in motion!
Also, dear Linux users: get youtube-dl if you're unable to use the youtube website. It owns. Look for it in your software repository.
Oh wait, I forgot one piece of news:
Search and Rescue 0.9 was released. Contrary to FlightGear I was able to get my vehicle into the air (on the third try ;) ). Sounds would not work but I kind of like the low-resolution textures. I'll have to play it a little more to figure out if there's more fun things to do besides crashing helicopters. ^^
