Everyone's favourite (read: only) open-source spell-slinging fps, Weaver, has been crunching away with art and code over the past few months. We've given them a shout out a couple of times, mainly when XReal is mentioned; in case you've forgotten: Weaver aims to be a competitive shooter with an elemental spell casting system.
They've taken a rather minimalistic approach to publicity: they don't have a introductory website, feed or any real way to keep up to date with their development other than their ticket tracker and rather quiet forums which are really not a good indication of the amount of work being done via their ethereal IRC channel (#weaver on freenode).
Loading Screen WIP
Some of the main developments of late has been work on the Menu and HUD UI's, a bunch of concept drawings by new artists who've discovered the project through some form of divination, and work on the maps/levels.
Warning: OLD
Video doesn't reflect current UI
In this day and age of people making 10 blog posts for every line of code commited, it is a rather refreshing change in FOSS game development, but maybe a bit too much so? Well, as long as we get the high quality, beautiful and innovative FPS that Weaver is shaping up to be, they can use gopher for all I care ;)
New Player Model
And just to re-drop your jaw, have a peak at their art-in-progress thread. It might look like they have a lot of art; but they need quite a bit more before they release, so if any artists are interested in joining; sign up for the forums and join their irc channel and help out!
FaceTrackNoIR (download) enables a user to use any webcam,by moving their head very slightly, to control the free-look/xyz movement of any game, through joystick emulation via PPjoy for Windows or directly when the game developer has included support. Very popular with space/flight simulation community, this technology can be used with FPSs/3rd person RPGs as well. FaceTrackNoir uses the protocol developed for FreeTrack, among others, including FlightGear's own.
Normally this type of control through head movement was very expensive, and required specialised IR cameras/lights/markers to acquire raw data which was processed through closed source software and sent to games via protocols like TrackIR, being aimed at the high end simulation users. The FreeTrack opensource project used cheap but specialised equipment, wrote their own processing software and sent the data to games via reverse engineered TrackIR protocol/FreeTrack protocol. FaceTrackNoIR takes raw data from any webcam, processes it, and sends to games via FreeTrack or other protocols or through emulating a joystick.
Orbiter with FaceTrackNoIR.
Even used in a non-foss pinball game.
Devs note: the quick head movements accentuate depth perception a lot, and shows off the 3d art.
(The last two videos were non-FOSS games, but only a few youtube vids as it is new software, and demonstrates different uses)
This is a new project, started in May 2010, built from FreeTrack source code and using faceAPI to help with imageprocessing. Unfortunately it is not available on Linux as faceAPI is windows only at the moment, and would require substituting with one of the opensource face tracking techs. A simple face-mouse cursor example here called eViacam, 8.9mb.Apparently working well as shown being used in GIMP here.
There is no mouse or keyboard emulation for games that don't support a tracking protocol yet, but it should not be hard to port from FreeTrack.It should be possible to use a mouse/keyboard emulator that accepts joystick inputs if the game does not support joystick look.
With the advent of Kinect and PC hacks for it, movement tracking based control will become more sought after. Given the additional (upto 6) degrees of freedom easily input by the user, perhaps some quite creative uses can be thought of as webcams are very commonplace.
Games with direct support Note: anything stated as working with FreeTrack will also work.
Any of the free games running under the Freespace 2 open engine. Flight gear Combat Simulator Project, when released Orbiter
Games that (should) benefit through emulation (If any game benefits particularly well, be sure to post in comments, if any game would benefit if better joystick support was added to certain control elements, be sure to let devs know). Free look can be catered for by assigning axis displacement to angles, very simply.
Quite a lot of 3rd person RPG/RTS games have automated and often wonky cameras that would benefit from being made freelook, mouse controlled views could be utilised by linking to tracking and emulated in engines like Open Morrowind.
FreeTrack
FreeTrack is similar to FaceTrackNoIR, but requires markers,usually very cheap IR leds attached to headphones, which must be tracked. Mouse/joystick/keyboard emulation for games that don't support tracking protocols available. Linux is not supported although from the forums one or two people might be working on linux projects.
What it involves, without buying TrackIR/mocap specific equipment
Webcam
Photo negatives from an old reel to only let IR light through (if your cam doesn't have an IR mode)
A hat, headphones or similar to stick markers to
Cheap IR leds to use as markers, probably work less acurately with IR reflective tape/stickers..the idea is it stands out from the rest of the picture, and IR is an easy way to do that
Costs less than 10 euro according to their website, more info here.
Used to drive a mouse cursor.
All videos courtesy of various Youtube people. Gamers can download and try it immediately, game developers can add direct FreeTrack support, or add joystick/mouse support in a way that better accepts emulation. If you have an interest in interface tech, source code for both are available.
Have a nice new FOSS game that no one knows about? Make it known through these (rather obvious) tried and tested ( not really ;) ) methods:
Forums
A Delicate Balance
Make a nice generic post with a couple (not too many!) screenshots, relevant links etc. Also, remember to stick around and answer questions and generally contribute to the forums you are posting to, you don't want to be a spam bot ;)
Post on the FreeGameDev forums! Fastest way to get an article on the blog, and a bunch of helpful people willing to give you a hand with development ('' previous parenthesis ;).
Linux Distro Forums: Always a safe bet (links go to relevant gaming sections)
Make Video for Advertising goodness! Videos > Pictures > Words when it comes to marketing. Upload to Youtube/Vimeo/Vidsiteofchoice and attach it to the posts you make on the sites mentioned below
Post everywhere! The more places you have presence, the more eyeballs fall onto your work, the more players you attract. There are lots of places to post to, so give this task to some of those pesky FOSS hangers-on who don't code or make art (Like me! :D)
General game databases:
ModDB / IndieDB : ModDB recently split into two, IndieDB is where you want to post if you have a standalone game. Also, these sites are huge so it will be harder to get noticed
GameBoom : The site sponsoring OpenGameArt, Gameboom wants to host communities for (preferably FOSS) games
IndieGameMag : Haven't had success with this one, but it allows for user submissions so...
The Indie Gaming Source : Another database for indie games, nice categorization and more indie than IndieDB ;)
GameJolt : For freeware games only! Gives you hosting space for files as well, kinda like sourceforge like site for games - the development tools :P Has a special section for open source games
Linux Only
If the game runs on Linux, here are a couple of Linux gaming sites where you can post to:
Gaming on Linux : A community like news site for Linux games
Linux Games : Another blog (hiss :P) that allows for user-submitted articles
Penguspy : Another database like site but with strict quality moderation
HappyPenguin / LinuxGameTome : Most well known Linux game database, it has been down/sickish of late though... It's served the community well though, so lets not talk bad of it
Web Aggregators:
Kind of hit-or-miss because they require people to vote for you... Getting your audience right is key, reddit's subreddits are good for this
Slashdot : The g.old standard for geek/open source news aggregation, a tad difficult to get published though
FSDaily : A free software specialized news aggregator
Flattr and YouTipIt : Aggregators with cash backing (but more on those later ;)
Wikipedia : If you're lucky, Wikipedia can point a lot of people at your game. However, it isn't really a place to market your game/service, so you have to have some kind of proof that your game is noteworthy
Micro/blogging
Use Identi.ca / Twitter to get news to your readers fast. Identi.ca has nice groups, such as !fossgaming and !linuxgaming that you can join and post news to. Having timely updates show users (ones that don't know about commit logs) that the project is active, and all that social media stuff :P
Blogging in general is good as well, keep people updated = keep people excited and interested = get people playing (for example proprietary/open source game developers Wolfire)
Development Centric Advertisement
Knowing who you want to market to is an essential ingredient to a successful campaign; while you might pick up developers on more general sites, specialized, development centric sites have a far higher ratio of developers/users
Freshmeat : A database of open source software, with lots of game projects on it
Sourceforge : The biggest open source project hosting site (not researched, ain't Goat an exemplary journalist), it does have the best project discovery features as well. You don't necessarily have to host your code here; it's still a good place to have a presence on
Engine forums: If you use Ogre, post on the ogre forums, if you use blender, BlenderArtists is a good place etc. Not a very difficult concept ;)
Engine Databases: If your game is codeveloped as an engine (which is horrifyingly prevalent) DevMaster is an example of a place to post your engine on. Rather successful in my experience with Syntensity
Gamedev.net : A pretty active game development community
Release Early, Release Often!
And repeat all steps above on every release. Golden rule and all that
More!
The internet is big, Goat's memory is bad! Comment below if I missed anything and I'll update the post.. Or maybe move it to a wiki page...
