THE DARK MOD is a free, first-person stealth game inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. It recreates the essence of the original Thief games on a more modern engine. This project is both a game and a mission-creation platform, The Dark Mod allows players and mappers alike to enjoy missions in a gothic steampunk universe.
0 A.D (pronounced “zero-ey-dee”) is a historical Real Time Strategy (RTS) game under development by Wildfire Games, a global group of volunteer game developers. As the leader of an ancient civilization, you must gather the resources you need to raise a military force and dominate your enemies. Have never played a RPG or RTS for more then 15 minutes, but look forward to getting deep into this game.
Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for University research and education, for a variety of aerospace engineering and visualization work in industry, and even for interactive exhibits in museums.
FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide seamless scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language, and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.
Have heard that with the right equipment playing the FlightGear simulator could be used as pilot hours towards a pilots license. The features available in this open source project are amazing, not to mention just the scenerey would fill more then 3 DVDs. Check out the feature list at http://www.flightgear.org/about/features/
Speed Dreams is an Open Source motorsport simulation (sim) and it is freely available. Speed-Dreams is brought to you by an international team of developers and artists, who aim to bring the very best of Open Source racing to your PC.
Speed-Dreams simulates a wide range of cars from high-tech Open Wheelers and Super Cars, to 1930's 'monsters'. It includes Grand Prix tracks located around the world, as well as Ovals and Road courses. Am personally a really big fan of rally racing games and am glad to see rally cars and tracks in this game.
Speed-Dreams is available for Windows and Linux, and available for free download from http://www.speed-dreams.org
Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous open racing car simulator Torcs, aiming to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.
In other words, Speed Dreams is the place:
where developers can try their ideas and have every chance to get them released to the end-users (democracy is the main principle ruling the dev team),
where end-users can enjoy the completion of these ideas and give their opinion about it, and/or make new suggestions.
So, if you find your or some people's Torcs patch proposals don't integrate the official release as quickly as you would have loved, you have reached the right place!
Anyone can join the development team, contributions to Speed Dreams may take place in many domains:
The core code itself, and its numerous subjects : user interface, physics engine, 3D graphics engine, race management, input device related code, file formats, ... to enhance, optimize, make more up-to-date, fix bugs, port to another platform ...
the robot(s) code (AI racing)
the cars design or tuning
the tracks design
the documentation
Current features of Speed-Dreams as of 2.0 beta:
38 tracks
16 tracks with full scenery and terrain
28 cars
Animated drivers with some cars
10 camera modes
Close to realistic physics
Experimental full 3D physics engine (user selectable)
The open source community is always providing an amazing array of useful software. It also has great set of tools to work with. I'll introduce you to a combination of a couple tools that I'm using for 3d game development.
jMonkeyEngine (jME) is a game engine made especially for modern 3D development, as it uses shader technology extensively. jMonkeyEngine is written purely in Java and uses LWJGL as its default renderer.OpenGL 2 through OpenGL 4 is fully supported.
jMonkeyEngine is a community-centric open source project released under the new BSD license. It is used by several commercial game studios and educational institutions. The default jMonkeyEngine 3 download comes readily integrated with an advanced SDK that makes it more like a studio.
By itself, jMonkeyEngine is a collection of libraries, making it a low-level game development tool. Coupled with an IDE like the official jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK it becomes a higher level game development environment with multiple graphical components.
Here is a Demo reel of jME from early 2011
Using Blender3d you can save models with textures, animations, particles and more as a blend file then open them in the jME3 SDK and drop them into your game. On top of all that jME3 will compile to an android install package, if you point it to the android sdk.
Another piece of free and open source software in jME3 is the Nifty GUI. Below is a video demonstration of some of Nifty GUI's features. More on jME3 to come soon.
Blender has so many features it is more like a studio of software it's just amazing what it can do. Being Open Source and free there is a huge community of users helping noobs! Such as Andrew Price's website www.blenderguru.com where there are many in depth tutorials on using blender, plus a file that you can open in Blender and compare yours with his. There is also place to download free models such as www.blendswap.com and with creative commons licenses they can be reused and built upon.
Blender has a physics engine and tools in place to create games without knowing any programming, which is awesome but for programmers to simple. That's where jMonkey Platform comes in.
Check out the links, get the software and have fun creat!
Have been using Linux Mint LXDE on a Acer aspire one netbook with a half a gig of RAM, and it has been pleasant. Most of the time am running chromium and firefox with around 10 tabs open amongst them, and the little netbook keeps pushing with out any major slowdowns. It's quite responsive actually.
Lately though have been doing java development on the netbook. Have installed eclipse and the android SDK, eclipse is versatile enough to be usable on the small screen of the netbook with out having a negative effect on the workflow. Of course using the android emulator could be an issue, one which I choose to avoid by just testing on a real android device.
What really makes using the netbook for my development purposes possible, is libGDX. libGDX is a cross-platform library that allows you to simultaneously build for the desktop and for Android devices. With libGDX I can be doing little tests while at the desk and then do more in depth tests on the couch or in bed with an android device.
Here is a video of a libGDX demo game
and here is the creator of libGDX showing a demo of the UI library
To get started developing with libGDX watch the video below to see how.
Thanks for reading, and look forward to more details about libGDX as I get more into it and a detailed post about another java game engine called JMonkey.
Been working for awhile on my game and now it is ready to be played! ^^ I posted it at an online game site All Blocked In
The game was made from the scratch with in Unity3d with a little help from Blender and the GIMP. Unity3d is a pretty amazing tool. With Unity my code can run on MacOSX, Windows, on mobile devices, and in a web browser. Mainly used Java-script, but one source file was written in C#.
Have come across a cool brain training game it is called Brain Party
Brain Party is a fun, free puzzle game for all the family that's made up of 36 minigames designed to push your brain to its limits by testing memory, logic, mathematics, reaction time and more! Brain Party is split into two modes: test mode gives you five minigames in a row and adds up your brain weight to see how smart you are, and practise mode lets you play your favourite minigames as often as you want. If you do well enough, there are six extra minigames that can be unlocked as well as a new game mode designed to keep you playing and enjoying your favourite games even longer
Brain Party is licensed under the GPLv3 and is compatible with Linux and Mac OS X - it's free to download, share and enjoy. To get started, download the source code from the link below, then extract the tarball and run "make". Have fun!
