Cross-Language Community(?)

It recently came to my attention that over 24% of Simutrans forum posts are in languages other than English. Some posts (including a few jokes) later FreeGameDev had its first non-English board.

Simutrans Forum Post Languages

Should we really have a section on our board for non-English languages?


Pro:

• Lurkers who would not post in English would have the chance to contribute in the international forum
• Engaged non-English-speakers are likely to improve English skills over time, attracted by the larger community

Con:

• People who might give English a try to contribute will use the international forum out of comfort instead, decreasaing growth of the English-speaking community
• People who use English now, will use the international forum and contribute less to the English-speaking community
• Moderators need to be found

It could also be that there will be no effect at all. We will add non-English forums if we find volunteer moderators as an experiment for a while and see where this leads us (few more details here).

If you would like to help moderate a language forum, please let us know in this thread.

English language map of the non-primarily English-speaking world [source by-nc-nd]

Star Fox 64 3D Review

Here is another remake of an amazing classic put onto the 3DS system.

Gameplay:
Star Fox 64 3D plays exactly the same as the original for the N64. What I love about this is it is like OoT for the 3DS. What I mean by that is they actually updated the graphics and added new features to the game to keep it refreshing. Now they story overall is very very short. I mean in roughly an hour you can beat the entire story. That is the only issue I really have with it but I will focus on the cons in a bit. Lets talk about the Pro's. Star Fox 64 3D is a great addition to the 3DS system and another great remake. Embark on your journey to destroy Andross, the evil mad scientist. In Story mode you navigate through the different planets or missions and progress through the story. What I like about this is when you beat a mission you don't have to go on a straight path onto the next planet. They added it so when you beat a mission you can go ahead and do an alternate mission instead and progress the other way. Another thing I have always enjoyed about this game is the alternate routed you can unlock in mission. The first mission (Corneria) is a prime example. If you save falco and then fly through the hoops in the water and if you go through all of them Falco will compliment you on your flying and then tell you to follow him. You follow and space ship and go through an alternate route through a waterfall. When you beat the boss in the alternate route you actually unlock the other missions and gives you the opportunity to fight Star Wolf again and go to Venom 2 where you fight a harder version of Andross. The story is the same, missions are the same.

They did add other modes to the games. They added a score attack mode where you pick a mission to go through and it's basically trying to see if you can beat your scores. By score I mean how much enemies you can kill. If you kill a certain amount of enemies you earn medal. Bronze, Silver and Gold.

Another mode is the Battle mode. This mode you can face CPU's or some friend in a battle. There are different modes within battle mode such and score attack, and survival. The only issue I have here is that you can only face friends via DS download play, no online play at all. So battle mode is only fun if you want a small challenge and kill some CPU's.

One thing I should mention in the campaign is that there are two modes to choose from. The modes are Nintendo 3DS mode or Nintendo 64 mode. The Nintendo 3DS mode is a mode that uses the Gyro feature in the 3DS. Which means when you tilt your 3DS you ship will turn that way. You use the gyro and the stick to control your ship. The Nintendo 64 mode is based off of the original gameplay. Standard stick and button gameplay like in the original.

Rating: 8.5/10

Graphics:
Yes, the graphics are and have been improved in Star Fox 64 3D. They updated all of the graphics for the 3DS and it is a very nice update. The environment, characters, effects, ships, etc... is all updated and looks a lot better than the original version and makes the gameplay a little bit more fun to play.

The 3D is also well done. The only issue is if you play on the Nintendo 64 mode and you try to view it in 3D you will be moving your head a lot to see the 3 D effect. If you play with the gyro controls then your head will already be moving with the ship so it keeps the 3D effect. 3D looks great overall and really works for the type of game.

Rating: 9/10

Audio:
Well not much to say about here because the audio is the same as in the original. The music is the same and all of the sound effects are the same as well. They did however update all of the audio to make it sound a lot more crisp and clear. With the graphical update also came with and audio update. The voice acting is terrible (like in the original) and the dialogue still sucks. Also Slippy is as annoying as ever.

Rating: 8.5/10

Conclusion:
Star Fox 64 3D is a wonderful remake for the Nintendo 3DS. I have so happy that you can experience this game again like you did in your childhood. Although a great remake, it also has some flaws. For example the gameplay is way to short, as in 45 minutes then you beat it. The extra modes really do not make up for the short gameplay because your constantly re doing all of the missions which can get pretty boring really fast. If your a Star Fox fan then you will enjoy this game.

Overall Rating: 8.5/10

GJID

GJID's first level

I have a hard time playing puzzle games when their only reward is getting to the next one. Consequently I'm usually not a fan of Sokoban games. Having a little or a lot of story bundled with the puzzle helps though.

In GJID you control a brave robot of the name GJID, who volunteered to recycle dangerous weapons from a cold war. In 14 levels you have to dispose of nuclear and disruptor weapons.

Movement controls reacts instantly and you are allowed to skip levels. There is no save function and no sound. The game runs in full-screen but thankfully does not resize the screen and scales instead. License: MIT

This version seems to be made for *nix only. ./configure && make allows to easily run the game.

From the README:

This is a clone of the eponymous DOS shareware game written in 92 by John Remyn. I spoke with John in 95, when the first version of this clone was made. He admired the 8-bit graphics (original game was done in 4-color CGA) and did not object to its existence. His email address has since expired and the few contact attempts I've made recently hit dead ends. The DOS game was $10 shareware and I include the original registration form in the README, in case you want to track John down and give him money for the excellent level design that make this game what it is.
Aside from being an entertaining puzzle, I also release this game as an example of using the XCB library for making X applications. XCB is the new lightweight replacement for Xlib that suffers from lack of documentation. This game demonstrates how to create small applications with it and also how to use RENDER for drawing text, tile sprites, and for hardware scaling of the 320x240 backbuffer.

GJID reminds me of another, even more story-driven Sokoban-style game with simple graphics: The Villany of Cat Food Inc.

Totally missed the Annex Beta 1 release :(

Wow... can believe this myself, but after hyping this cool Megaglest mod a few times here on FreeGamer I totally missed their first release last month :(

Here as a reminder how cool Annex-Conquer the World looks:

Annex - Conquer the World

Currently there is only a Windows port available, but a Linux version is promised for the next release... Edit: I was confused about the media licensing... more or less all the new assets are CC-by-NC-SA, which is as you might know not considered FOSS due to the NC clause. A pity really :-/

So... how was I reminded of this gem? Well check out this cool interview with the Megaglest developers from the Greek site OSArena (in English though) ;)

Now I am off booting into windows to have another round with Annex ;)

0AD Alpha 7 Geronium and more

Act 1

In case you've been hiding under a rock or you rely on Free Gamer for your open source game updates (and we love you if you do), there has been another release of 0AD (announcement) the 3D historical RTS game.

Lots of improvements, including an all-new and unique Carthaginian civilization, a new main menu that moves, new music, new sound effects, new maps, and likely (although not mentioned) a lot of development and the fixes and subtle improvements to go with it.

This is going to be one of the marquee open source games soon. It has the potential for mainstream appeal that is missing from a Battle for Wesnoth, no matter how polished it becomes (and it is very, very polished these days).

Since becoming open source to help save the project from an ignominious end, development seems to have gone from strength to strength with a series of alpha releases each bringing the game one step closer to being a playable title.

Act 2

Also big news coming out of the Dungeonhack Godhead project - a new release! This is the first since a tech demo over 2 years ago. This release marks the beginning of a different direction for the project. They now use the Lips of Suna engine. It is early days but the new engine already has a lot of what a now-defunct rewrite was trying to achieve in that it is server-client based, and it is 3D and the world is deformable, and there is now a workflow to get ideas straight in to a game world, giving writers and artists more possibilities to see their work immediately applied. Still, early days, it was just a black screen for me (but this was Windows 7 x64 - boo) so we'll see if this can reverse the fortunes of a project that has struggled to maintain momentum from one release to the next.

Free Gamer approves of inter-project cooperation. Huzzah!

Act 3

Finally, lady and gentlemen, for your entertainment, a fun ninja platformer!

Shinobi Densetsu is created using the OpenSNC engine, proving it is not just limited to hedgehog-based games.

I used to leave a plate of milk out for hedgehogs when I was a kid. I also had to shift through mucky half-rotten piles of leaves to make sure none were hibernating in the base of a bonfire-to-be. True stories! I digress...

Video!

Huzzah!

FPS news

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ).

So FPS news only from me today ;)

Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week.

Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above.

Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums.
More cool WIP screens can be seen here. Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently.

Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project.
So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure (and more) open sourced

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure

The quadruple-A block-style story-based, sneaky-action pandora game Adamant Armor Affection Adventure is now GPLed. Along with it some other games for that platform by the same author (AAA for one [video]) were open sourced.

Sources can be downloaded here (AAAA) and here (other games).

 

Video: 13 minutes of AAAA on OpenPandora

 Much more info about the releases along with some internet drama history can be read in this post.

I'm not sure about the assets and their license, there seem to be none included in the tarballs.

/me requesting Linux desktop ports

Slipstream Vehicle Simulation

The author of Techne has a new project:

Slipstream is a free racing vehicle simulator trying to be physically accurate and fun to play at the same time! Contrary to most simulators out there it's not designed around a single type of vehicle. It should be able to support anything from a bicycle to a car or anything else that can be driven around on a racetrack for that matter.

Help is requested on the content-side:

 The graphics are still very primitive I'm afraid but they get the job done at least. Making Slipstream pretty is still a high priority but I doubt I'll be able to create decent track and vehicle models myself. If you're an artist and want to participate in making a great racing simulator please drop me a line [dpapavas@gmail.com].

 

Video: Showcasing Slipstream

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Six-legged vehicle in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.


The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.


IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.

DungeonHack/Godhead Demo Ultimatum

DungeonHack aka Godhead imposed an ultimatum on itself: two weeks for finishing a gameplay demo using the Lips of Suna engine.

Should the demo not be finished by that time, the development team will commit Seppuku.

Just kidding. :)

It's refreshing to see an open project put some pressure on itself. I'm looking forward to the results of this.

Pokemon Black/White Review!

Yes it is finally here! The review I said I was working on and never posted it!

Gameplay: 
So the gameplay pretty much plays the same as in all of the other pokemon games. What I love about these versions is they updated the graphics and added nice little 3D effects within the game. I will explain that more in the Graphics part. Anyway you get to choose from 3 starters like in all of the other pokemon games. The 3 starters are all new pokemon you have your fire, water and grass types. You may choose from Snivy (Grass), Oshawat (Water), and Tepig (Fire). Each pokemon are as good as you want them to be, also depends which type you like the best, for me it was Tepig then secondly Oshawat who I am not a big fan of personally. You go on a quest to get all 8 badges in this region then go on to face off the elite 4. These versions have new villians than the previous games. These villians are known as Team Plasma and are much more evil than the other teams. I am not going to explain what their roll is because it has a nice twist at the end, especially after you fight the elite four the first time. The game provides a nice challenge for newbies and there are tons more and new pokemon to catch. The gameplay is pretty long which is great. If you play and don't try and rush through it (even if you do) you are looking at at least 30 hours or more of gameplay. Plus there is a lot more to do when you complete the game. What I also enjoy about this version is your not just rushing to get the 8 badges and thats it. The story is so much more in this version. After almost every badge you have to do little side quests along your journey. Which allows you to explore the new areas a lot more. In Black and White they also introduced a new environmental feature. They added seasons to the game which means at the beginning of every month the season changes to winter, fall, summer, or spring. Each of these season offer new pokemon in certain areas. Winter can grant you access to secret areas to explore and grab awesome items. In Twist mountain when it is Winter the mountain is covered and snow and you can walk up snow hills and get to areas you cannot get to in other seasons. In this version they added two brand new battle styles. Rotation battles allow you to have 3 pokemon in battle at once. The only difference is that you only fight with one and you choose wether to rotate them or not to your other pokemon. This is a great battle mode if you are a strategic person. The other mode is Triple battle. Which is well, you guessed it, 3 vs 3. Overall they are nicely added except the triple battles can kind of get crowded and last a long time. Overall Black and White are one of the best in the series.

Rating: 9/10

Graphics:
Gamefreak has finally given the pokemon series and well needed graphical update. The environments are more colorful and a lot more detailed. They even made use of the DS and added 3D enviornments. Not a lot but it is still a nice touch. What I mean by 3D is when you are walking up the loooooooooooooong bridge (they love bridges apparently) you can see the camera rotate with you as your walking up the bridge and when your on the overpass you can see vehicles drive underneath you. There are other 3D areas but you can see them for yourselves. Don't want to ruin the exploration aspect of the game. The pokemon now are constantly moving during battle which is pretty neat. The moves used by pokemon also received an update as in they are more colorful and look nice. The only graphical issue I can really think of is when you use certain moves the camera zooms into your pokemon and it gets very pixelated. But other than that it is a nice update.

Rating: 8.5/10

Audio:

Audio is the same as always. The only difference is the new pokemon cries and the new music in the background. All of the audio does sound crisp and clear and the music in the game is nice and suits the game very much. The elite four music is awesome as always and when you fight the champion or Ghetsis the music is good to. My favorite music during the game would be when you find a rare and legendary pokemon, it gets you pumped up to catch them. The epic music also suits with how huge and fierceful the legendaries look.

Rating: 8.5/10

Conclusion:
If you are a pokemon fan or even a generic RPG fan, you will love this game. For all of you collecters out there (including myself), there is a ton of new pokemon and legendaries to catch and collect. The story is basically the same but is one of the better stories. Team Plasma are much more evil than the other teams and the gameplay is nice and long, over 30 hours! There is even tons to do after you beat the game like White Forest and Black City. Obviously White Forest is for the White version and Black City is for the Black version. Each offering new opportunites to discover and catch the older generation of pokemon. They also added a lot more wireless options such as visiting a friends world and helping them out, catching new pokemon in dream world (off of the website) and tons more. I promise you will all not be dissapointed.

Overall Rating: 9/10

GeneticInvasion : a brand new Tower Defence

Hi! I'm here to show you a new game that I'm working on: GeneticInvasion

It's Tower Defence game, but it has something special: it uses evolutionary algorithms.
The idea of evolutionary algorithm is to use darwin theory to solve problems:

• We generate random solution to the problem.


• We evaluate them.


• We take some of the better ones, apply random mutations to them, and generate an offspring from them.


• The child replaces their parents in the solution population to form a new generation.


• And we do this, again and again, until we find a solution that is good enough.

Well, in GeneticInvasion, the problem, is you. So enemies evolve in order to crush you.

Download the .webm video

We used a real evolutionary computation library called EO to make this game. The library is being used for many serious projects.

So, you heard me, an army of colorful enemies are trying to eliminate you, don't just sit here, fight!

Some notes:

• For the first time since we began to develop it, the game is now interesting to play. That means that it's neither too easy nor too hard to play.


• I also added 3 levels that are supposed to be sorted by difficulty.


• There is a medal system, so you can try to get gold on all 3 of them. (I failed to get the gold medal on the third one through :P)


• There are no binaries, if someone is feeling like doing some, please contact me.


• The game is theoretically compatible with at least GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS but has only been tested on GNU/Linux. You'll need SFML, EO and Glu to build it.


• Please send us your remarks and comments.!

Also, I'd like to thanks OpenGameArt and the artists that contribute it, without them our game would probably had hand-drawing art, and we suck at it. (Also many thanks to ozzed who did the music on Jamendo)

Official website: GeneticInvasion   Controls for playin the game