Friday, January 8, 2010

0-A.D. Commercial grade FOSS RTS?

We have mentioned this great project before, and especially since they have gone fully open-source earlier this year all eyes of the FOSS community are probably on this gem. So far a consumer ready release seems to be still distant however, even though some parts of the game look quite playable already:
Development is progressing though and you can have a look at this interview with the current project leader for some background infos and nice new screenshots. Further news can be found on Moddb.com.

Upcoming Warzone2100 developments

Warzone2100 is one of the few really playable FOSS RTS games out there. There are steady improvements and sometimes you can even find someone to play online ;)
With it's Playstation 1 art assets it is quite a chore to look at however. There is light on the horizon though; A new terrain renderer was recently developed for it and is expected to be released with Version 3.0.
Let's hope this will reach us gamers ASAP!Their forum has also some other nice upcoming features to offer. There are plans to update the GUI, with some really nice mockups. Furthermore MaNGusT is working on new units:

And there is a nice mod project involving mechs :)

Bloodfrontier Beta2

So what news are there actually? Today a new beta of Bloodfrontier has been released! It is a FPS based on Cube2: Sauerbraten, which tries to do some things a little different while still keeping it a fun FPS.

Changes you can expect include running along walls and kicking of them (Parkour like features seem a bit of a trend in gaming lately... War§ow also has a similar feature), all new secondary fire-modes and a precursor to coop campains amongst the usual new maps and graphical updates.

Tremulous 1.2 gameplay beta

Shocking news! After years of waiting there is some movement on the Tremulous 1.2 front. You can now download and update to your existing 1.1 install with which you can test the new game-play changes of the upcoming 1.2 release (when ever that might arrive). Changes include mostly balancing fixes and some "rearrangements" in game-play. Sadly it does not include all the nice graphical updates which have leaked from the dev team now and then.

Some news from the Nexuiz forum

No new release from Nexuiz yet, but some interesting news never the less. There are some nice upcoming new player models (link1, link2); Something which really is the last graphical department where Nexuiz doesn't shine. And ODE physics have been implemented into Nexuiz:

Besides these great news, there is a nice modification in the works which adds zombies and spider-bots (awesome combination if you ask me ;)