OpenRA also has a new release

OpenRA is a Free Software recreation of the famed Command & Conquer engine, and it aims to support and enhance all Westwood games originally built upon it, namely Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Dune 2000. However, unlike most engine remakes, OpenRA isn't a simple 1:1 recreation with a little streamlining here and there, as the project also aims to optimize and rebalance the gameplay for purposes of online multiplayer. The project has recently released the latest stable version, fixing a lot of bugs and adding plenty of new features, as seen on the following release trailer:

Interestingly enough, in order to play all the games supported by OpenRA, you are not forced to own an original copy of any, given that all three ones were released gratis a few years ago. Though the package comes without any of this data, it immediately invites the player to download it from the project's own repositories, thus making all the games readily available to play.

The campaign mode is still not fully supported by OpenRA, with only some missions available for playing and no cinematics support at all, but we can only hope this will change in the future. In the meantime, you're free to enjoy all the supported games in skirmish mode, or play online against friends. So here's to the OpenRA team, and keep up the good work.

Code license: GPLv3

Assets license: Free-as-in-beer (available gratis, but still subject to copyright, as the C&C franchise is still intellectual property currently owned by EA)

Official website

Source code (Github)

YSoccer out of Beta

Since football is all the rage right now - unless you are hiding under a rock then you can't have escaped the World Cup - then a little bit of football game news seems appropriate!

The game formerly known as Yoda Soccer has left beta and been unleashed upon the classic pixel soccer game world as YSoccer.

YSoccer version 14

If you never played Sensible Soccer, then you may not yet get what the fuss is all about - if that's the case then you should download it and give it a try!

Sadly football games are a little under served in the open source game community. Bygfoot and Eat the Whistle are quite playable, if a little raw. Project Football is almost a game. Open Football and Open World Soccer never quite got off the ground.

Project Football looked great but was last updated 4 years ago

YSoccer stands out amongst them and deserves a bit more attention than it probably gets.

EDIT: I feel I was a little unfair to Open World Soccer. If you download 0.5 (the most recent release, from 2010) you can see it is quite close to being a playable game. It is by the same guys as YSoccer and was originally an attempt to get away from the proprietary language that YSoccer is written in. You could even say it was intended to be a full port of YSoccer from Blitzmax to C++ (the author suggests so).

Shabbat in Berkeley, Back in Israel

Gamification conference post still to come. Here's the rest of my trip:

I spent shabbat in Berkeley around the synagogue Congregation Beth Israel. The area was pleasant and suburban. The shul does not arrange places for visitors to sleep (there are many every week), but they arrange meals. The couple Ruchama and Avraham Burrell took me for Friday night meal. They invite any stray travelers for shabbat meals, as they have been hosting people for over twenty years now and they consider it a life mission of sorts. Contact me for details.

Another couple hosted me for shabbat lunch. At both meals I ran into souls who had gone through, or were in the process of going through, difficult times: who had MS, who had been (in the past) homeless in San Francisco, who were estranged from their families, whose mother had recently died but who had no support network for grieving and no connection to a Jewish community (this was her first time in a synagogue). They were offered community, support, and meals.

At shul, they said psalms multiple times for the three boys who went missing and appear to have been kidnapped by Hamas.

BART took me to the airport on Sunday morning and the trip home was uneventful, which was surprising for me. Even the TSA agents who patted me down were more relaxed than the ones in Philadelphia.

OpenXcom hits 1.0

We have previously mentioned OpenXcom on several occasions before, but now the massive UFO: Enemy Unknown engine reimplementation project finally hit the long-awaited 1.0 mark, and they decided to celebrate by releasing this lovely trailer that sums up quite well the insane amount of detail and improvement put into the project over the course of 4 years. I'll let it do justice by itself, but not without thanking all the contributors for raising one of the most acclaimed DOS-era strategy classics from the stagnating swamps of buggy unsupported legacy releases and platform incompatibility.

On a final note, the engine is, of course, free-as-in-freedom, though it relies on original game data of proprietary nature. You can download OpenXcom here, and buy an affordable digital copy of the original game on Steam, or somewhere around the web.

Code License: GPLv3

Assets License: Relies on original proprietary data files. All new original art assets included in the OXC package available under CC-BY-SA

Official Website
Source Code (Github)

The Both (Aimee Mann and Ted Leo) in Concert

I saw The Both in concert at the Great American Music Hall, with the opening act Nick Diamonds (Thorburn) of Islands.

Nick Diamonds of Islands

Nick and his accompanist were interesting. He plays indie rock. It was hard to hear the lyrics because the mics were too low; the music and melodies were pleasant; they were not catchy hit songs, but they also sounded like they were not trying to be. I think his music would be best at an acoustic house concert. Nothing in the arrangements stood out, and without full access to the words, it was just ok (he also performed a number of covers).

The Both

Aimee Mann is famous for her hit song Voices Carry from the band 'Til Tuesday in the 1980s, after which she has had additional success as a solo artist (Academy and Grammy awards, though no other top ten hits).

I know less about Ted Leo, but his guitar playing was very good. The two spent a lot of time bantering and telling stories with each other and to the crowd (too much time, I thought, though they were funny). The crowd knew a number of their songs, collectively and individually. Their melodies and arrangements were exceptionally good, and their play (including a drummer) was tight. Everything they played could be a hit record. Like with Nick, the mics were low and it was hard to hear the singing; what I heard was serviceable. I'm inspired that Aimee Mann still rocks out at age 54, but she doesn't (can't?) belt it out like she once did in the above video. I was pleased she played the one song I knew during the encore.

Meanwhile

A description of the gamification conference is in the works.

The rest of my SF trip has not been notable. Pier 39 is so over-commercialized and so touristy I would compare it to visiting a web page that contains nothing but (mostly irrelevant) splashy and shallow advertisements. Shudder. I saw some sea lions that looked depressed.

Sea lions

Chinatown is funky if you dig Chinese groceries, but similar to what I saw in Sunset. Downtown is unremarkable and has lots of homeless. The one kosher restaurant is ok but overpriced. The area I stayed in, near the freeway entrance/exit, is bare and impoverished.

The only other moment of interest was a short trip to see my friend L'vannah and her baby. She lives in a gorgeous home in San Carlos.

L'vannah and baby

The view from her backyard

Think Your Game is Educational? Here’s How You Can Prove It

GlassLab's Evidence Centered game Design (ECgD) assessment engine can prove scientifically if your game really helps players learn [1]. Alternatively, it can help you redesign your game so that it does. That makes GlassLab’s approach to playification different: rather than construct games to provide education, they discover and elicit education from within existing games.

GlassLab’s assessment engine can be hooked into video games using an API on a variety of platforms. Players’ choices while playing the game are sent to the assessment engine, which provides multiple views into the metrics generated during each game session. Each player’s performance can then be assessed to determine if they are actually learning.

On Monday I visited Zynga’s San Francisco HQ in the company of Tamas Makany, a learning designer at GlassLab Games. GlassLab is a non-profit put together by the Institute of Play, Electronic Arts, and other entities interested in the intersection of digital games and education.

Creating the right hooks requires not only the API, but also the assistance of GlassLab's learning experts and statisticians to:

• Identify what students are supposed to learn.
• Construct metrics to measure that this learning process is actually taking place.
• Identify (or create) the game mechanics that provide these metrics.

For GlassLab's own games, they also design the user interface and experience and provide assistance to teachers to help them implement the games in the classroom.

GlassLab currently has two games. The first is a modified version of SimCity called SimCityEDU that GlassLab built using the actual SimCity code under license. The game provides multiple missions that start SimCity at specific states and require students to handle specific problems, such as how to reduce carbon emissions in their city while still providing the city with sufficient power. The second game is Mars Generation One: Argubot Academy, an original game from GlassLab featuring squabbling Martians that requires players to assess whether and how much certain sentences support an argument. The Martians then simulate a debate using the players’ arguments as weapons.

Both games are built to teach lessons based on Common Core educational standards.

[1] ECgD is based on the principles of evidence centered design, a methodology that ensures that what you think is happening is really happening.

Day 3: Two San Francisco Festivals

The first was Union Street Festival. This was a festival like any other, with light entertainment, local and chain food stands, and local and chain artisans. Mostly local. What made it San Francisco, or California, was the high proportion of products and services that are new age, artisinal, fair trade, vegan, gluten-free crystal, yoga, etc. People were very supportive of "kosher", too; though much of what they sold wasn't kosher, the idea of kosher in California is apparently new-agey, like gluten-free and hand-sourced.

The second was the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair. This festival is more like retro hippieville than like actual hippieville. Many vendors were posers making a lot of money selling generic products (like tie-dyed shirts and stuff) to tourists, but some of the people and products looked authentic. There were drugged out looking guys lolling about on the street and the smell of hemp was pervasive. The music was raucous, and the bands were actual bands of the sixties/seventies or bands that played similar music.

The Union Street Festival had items like cold-brewed coffee, soy kale shakes, and light brunch foods, in addition to barbecue and beer, while the Haight-Ashbury Fair was mostly barbecue and beer.

I walked back from HASF through the park.

Plaque dedicated to Allen Ginsberg

Sign reads: Herbs to help you feel happy, healthy, horny, and naturally high

In today's Haight-Ashbury, the freaks and the pigs mix comfortably.

Haight-Ashbury

Duck and turtles in Golden Gate Park

Boats on the lake in Golden Gate Park