Much activity for Zero-K and some other news

Zero-K, the probably coolest fully FOSS offspring of the SpringRTS engine has seen at least two new releases since it last crossed my mind to check their page... a pity actually as the new features of version 1.1.7.0 (and prior) seem quite nice.
And for those not into the game (yet), there is now a channel with commented multi-player matches like this one:



Just a pity that the game-play doesn't really allow much zooming in to see the graphically really nice units ;)

In unrelated news:

• New release of Arx Libertatis (1.1.1)
• Tesseract is getting its own "base game" it seems
• There is a constant stream of new betas from Octaforge
• The Unvanquished summer tournament is under way, but matches so far have been a bit one-sided ;)
• Check out the new 3.8.0-beta1 version of MegaGlest

Hmm, there is probably much more... so please comment below :D

DevCorner: Open (Game Art) Bundle

An interesting mixture to "pay what you want" and "ransom funding" has recently surfaced with the Open Bundle:



You can buy all the offered game art and use them under the CC-by license and if the total threshold is reached (10k, 1 day remaining, 9.3k already pledged) all the game art (2d sprites and music) will be officially released under the CC0. A split of the funds is btw. shared with the EFF and Creative Commons.

For those wondering: no, it is not done by our friends of OpenGameArt.org, but they think it is a good project anyways. Interestingly the creator is also thinking of expanding the idea:

Do you want to host your own "public domain ransom"?
I'd love to help you! Email me at nick@commonly.cc

P.S.: While we are on last day notices: Today ends the registration period for the Unvanquished summer tournament. Also check out their latest Alpha 17.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, funded!

The self described open-source rogue-like survivalcraft / driving game in a sci-fi zombie apocalypse has successfully reached its goal on Kickstarter, and one of the developers will now be able to work on it full-time for a few months to implement for example a back-end for proper graphics.

But see and hear about it yourself:


The first stretch-goal is close too, with 12 days remaining to pledge money towards this cool project.

Less rosy does it look for the previously featured Data Dealer project. With only 48 hours to go, but still about 10k missing it will be a close finish if at all. They got some remarkable press lately though and jumped up about 10k in the last days, so it is still possible. So if you haven't done it yet, pledge here.

Open Source Never Dies

The beauty of open source is that projects never officially die as long as the source is available.

Some classics simply keep moving forward because of this.  They get written off, domains expire, progress seems non-existent, but then somebody with a bit of knowledge and drive does something and the project is alive again!  That is the beauty of Free / Libre & Open Source Software.

Super Tux

The last Super Tux release was 0.3.3 in March 2010; that isn't even labelled stable.  The last stable release was, y'know I couldn't even find out.  It was before 2007, that's all I know.

Progress is slowly made though behind the scenes - something more obvious since the project recently acquired a forum with FreeGameDev.  There are several 'clones' (a GIT term) that have been worked on in the last year or so, with the master branch receiving plenty of love this year.

One of their problems is that some things are hard to find out without quizzing the developer(s).  For example, the editor for the development version is a separate project (as explained here), but that doesn't appear to be documented for the time being.

Status: Release required, Web News or Blog required

Extreme Tux Racer

Now here's a blast from the past.  Extreme Tux Racer, long ago losing its domain/forums, has come back to life seemingly from the brink.  With the forums moved to Sourceforge, there's been a stream of development activity.

(I even helped by managing to acquire admin access to the project in order to give it to the new developers.)

And it isn't just background noise; version 0.6 beta1 has been released!

Still, without a website or much PR beyond the forum they could do with a few fresh faces.  Forums can be quite closed communities - if you don't check it, you wouldn't know of this release.  I bet they would appreciate some feedback, so check it out if you can.

Status: Website required, Outreach required

Other News

• Cataclysm, zombie survival game, kickstarter campaign!!!
  (Deserves it's own blog post)
• Speed Dreams is moving away from PLIB to Open Scene Graph
• GSoC 2013 sees some graphical panache coming to Super Tux Kart
• Flightgear shows off some sumptuous weather graphics
• VDrift released a new build last month
• MegaGlest team pushed out 3.8.0beta1
• Probably a million more FLOSS game goodness I missed; comment!

Are there any other open source games that look stalled on the surface but are coming back to life?  Comment!