Karting Race to GPL, VDrift

I contacted the author of Karting Race with regards to open sourcing the game, and he agreed! There's something to be said for GPL advocacy after all.

I really think it's a good idea... I think the main reason, that I haven't opensourced it yet, is that I think the code is too bad. Same thing when people mail me for the sourcecode because they wanna learn from it; It's just not good enough. But maybe it doesn't really matter when it comes to opensourcing...

Do you think I should just upload it to my own homepage, with a link alongside the final game?

I recommended a sourceforge project so we'll wait and see.

On a racing-related topic, VDrift will come as an autopackage for it's next release. The VDrift forums are alive with development progress and I look forward to an update to this very promising racing game. With new features and bug fixes plus cars and tracks being imported from the Racer community, this game seems to be picking up momentum.

I fully endorse Autopackage as a means to get Free games immediately available to players without the overhead of supporting multiple distros.

I'll finish off todays post by noting a few smaller games I added:

• I remember playing Pipemania years ago and it was fun, so imagine my delight when I discovered Pipepanic last week.
• I came across Intellidiscs a while ago too. For once a Tron-game that does not base itself on light cycles.
• I also had not included Tower Toppler until now. For me the gameplay was slow-but-hard, a strange combination. Also the pixellated main character doesn't add much atmosphere.
• Super Transball 2 is a fun take on the thrust genre.

As usual I can't really give each game I mention the column inches they deserve. If you want to highlight your favourites then please write a review and send it to me. Presuming it's reasonable, I'll be happy to publish any fan reviews on Free Gamer.

ONLINE GAME - Taking Shape

The list of games is almost satisfactory (still more to come). Now I just need to sort out the layout so it's a little less tall and then start posting updates on major developments around some of the slower-to-release titles out there (you know who you are) who are lurking in the shadows and ready to strike out in the name of Free Software gaming!

Apparently good open source games don't exist. Obviously that person hasn't done much digging. I'm missing a lot of multiplayer games from the list (I don't tend to play them) such as BZFlag and Tremulus. They'll be added when it's more organised. Given I'm restricted to what can be done with a blogger template, I'm still working out how I can organise it better.

In the mean time, I'm just looking forward to Freeciv 2.1.0 since it has lovely new hi-res graphics.

online game - Football Focus

There was an update for the only well-developed Free football management simulation I know of, Bygfoot 2 was released. Sadly the lead developer is moving on so it may be the last release if nobody takes over maintainership. Saying that, open source project addiction may bring him back.

Bygfoot is fun but the user interface can be fairly non-intuitive and the game lacks depth when it comes to player management and information - e.g. there's no indication of a player's performance in the game. Outside of the players, there are plenty of features. With some UI love and elaboration on the player management it could be a very competent footy manager.

There was also an update to Alien Arena 2006; another mod-turned-standalone freeware deathmatch game. Since Q3A now is available under a Free license, I wish these mods would adopt a similar approach. Still, that is their perrogative.

Today I received a laptop with Windows installed, so if you know any Windows-only Free Software games then please let me know. I'm going to have to make the games list a little more refined (add a platform indicator of some sort) but I'd like to promote all Free games, regardless of their platform.

ONLINE GAME - Set Your Games Free

I'll start by acknowledging I've been mentioning games I've not yet added to the list. I'm redesigning the layout to be tri-columnar - 3 columns - so they are going into that design and not the current one. The new design should make browsing the list even easier.


I'm busy putting together a special on game engines. So for today I'll just make a note inspired by the fate of Parsec in the hope it will encourage freeware developers to publish their games under a proper open source license.


It is a lesson for all freeware developers to heed; just because you have glorious plans and motivation now, know that the future is known to no-one. It is as easy to lose the desire as it was to initially dream. By keeping your project closed you exclude the world from it's development. Should life take you in another direction nobody will be there to pick up your project. Your efforts will be wasted and that is a tragedy only the Freedom of software can avoid.


Do you have any more freeware come rotware stories to share?

ONLINE GAME - Stunt Playground Source Released

I'll start with the exciting news that the source to Stunt Playground was released at the end of May. This is a really cool looking game written using the OGRE 3D engine. It really highlights the spreading understanding of the importance of Free Software when reading the reasons behind the decision:

I have decided to release the entire source code for Stunt Playground 2.0, to aid those interested in Ogre / OgreNewt / Newton Game Dynamics programming. The source is available under a free license, and might be of particular interest to people using the Newton Game Dynamics vehicle constraint, as it was used for the vehicle physics in the game.

How could I forget two of the classic Free games - Liquid War and Jump n Bump, both frollicking fun. It seems that Liquid War 6 is under development.  it is always good to see the ongoing development of original Free games. I hope it brings a nice update to the rather garish graphics of it's predecessors. Still, if you haven't heard of the Liquid War games before, I highly recommend trying Liquid War 5. It is a worthy fill of a few minutes of your time.

I also spotted FreeSCI, on linuxgames.com, which is looking active. For those who don't remember what SCI is, it is the engine Sierra used to implement their original adventure titles before things got ugly. This harks back to the time when adventure games ruled the PC game market. With SCI Studio, a tool for creating SCI-based adventure games, being released as Free Software, hopefully we'll be seeing some good Free adventure games in the future.

On Freshmeat I saw an update to Rescue! Max, an action adventure space game written in Java. I haven't yet played the game but it looks interesting. Has anybody else tried it yet? If so, please comment on your experience.

Finally (for today - I have so many backed-up games to mention and link) I have added a digg.com entry for Free Gamer, so please support your favourite Free gaming resource (I mean this website) and digg FG!