Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #1

Knights, a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements.

Tales of Gydia, a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC, was started on SourceForge.net.

Unknown Horizons, a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor.

Black Dog, an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released.

Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).

ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.

SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.

FLARE, a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.

Winter Shorts 3: Wizznic Cursor, TORCS Music, Knights Deathmatch, Humm and Strumm Specs, SuperTux Contest

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [video (00:57@YouTube)]
TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [.ogg (05:50/7.1MB)]
Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [description]
Humm and Strumm is an in-dev co-op game engine [design .pdf (156kB)]

SuperTux' level contest has four entries so far [submission thread]

SuperTux Forum and January 2012 Level Contest

SuperTux level design mistakes to avoid

SuperTux just got a forum on FreeGameDev.net and started a level contest.

Rules:

• A snow tileset theme 
• Submit your levels here until the 27th of January, when voting will start
• Voting on levels will end on the January 30st
• Winners will be announced January 31st
• Have fun
• One level per person
• Top few levels will/can be made into an add-on or
• If admins are okay with it top levels will get added to incubator island (if winners are okay with it - pick cc0 or cc-by-sa for your level)
• One entry per person
• Please make a new level. (not from and existing worldmap/levelset)
• Don't vote for your self.
• Voting will take place in a new forum topic.
• Feel free to comment on peoples levels, most people would like to hear what was wrong or good with their level.

Get the editor, read the editor guide (and just play around, as the guide is incomplete ;) ) and check out the style guide.

You can upload submissions in this thread.

Ripping off Open-Source-Engine Games: Lugaru

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL. The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license. Here's an explanation by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository.

Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say:

"we have every legal right to market and sell the software"

"the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge."

Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down.

The implication, according to Wolfire:

"While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it is apparently enough to make scammers think they could get away with it, and that may be enough to discourage other developers from risking it."

STK on ebay

SuperTuxKart is the project I first knew about is being sold by third parties although I can't find any discussions on that topi any more (see comments for info from their side). SuperTux' archives contain a bit of reading material about what problems they had.

ILLUSION MAGE!!! THIS IS NOT BLENDER!!

Blender is also having problems with scammers. (Thanks to Peragro Tempus for the info)

Quite a few foss software on ebay too. This seller seems to be specialized in selling foss games and apps while trying to hide their name. Assuming all they do is sell open source software for $6.65, then they earned $14,277.55 in at least 2147 sales since November 2009 (about $950/month). That'd be kind of lame.

Side note: I just found a Lugaru fork, which claims the animation data is CC-BY-SA'd, which according to file size (didn't do a diff check) is the original data. The original Lugaru repository's license file states no such thing.

I wonder though, would have Lugaru's incident have happened, if they did not put code and data in the same repository? What do you think? And do you know of more incidents of this kind?