Board Game Blog World Roundup

This post lists blogs / podcasts new to me since my last roundup. Check my sidebar for a comprehensive list of active game bloggers and podcasters. If you've been dropped from the list, it's because you haven't posted anything in the last three months or so.

Board Game Development: Ema, Padova, Italy. From the company Mind the Move.

GamePeople: Ed Stephens reviews board games on a UK site primarily devoted to video games.

Games Overboard: Video reviews and general commentary by Brian, TJ, and others.

Isleworth Boardgamers: Session reports from West London.

I've Been Diced: A podcast by Tom, Scott, and others.

Santa Doesn't Make Toys: Ron Weingartner, Mass. Co-author of The Toy and Game Inventor's Handbook.

Sunblush: Stephen Tudor, Penn.

Table Gamer Weekly: Podcast by Yuri and Brett.

Tea Time Games: Rye and Mike. Mostly about game development.

The Bureau Chiefs: The creators of @FakeAPStylebook and various other online projects. Various games will be covered on Thursdays.

The Game Aisle: Kim Vandenbroucke, aka Brainy Chick. Has designed games for some major companies.

The Game Shepard: Thoughts on games from a GA store.

Purim Evening in Columbus

I forgot how American synagogues, especially the older ones, tend to echo their European counterparts: vaulted ceiling, women's sections on either side, ornate light fixture, wooden pews, raised platform for the Rabbi and President, etc. Take a look at my pictures from the Dohany synagogue in Budapest. The last few synagogues I've been in had an upside down boat for a ceiling (the Dohany one didn't, but only because its ceiling was already so high), pillars and women sections on the side.


Note the six sided light fixtures with the flame motif. The front has a stained glass wall in a flame motif (which couldn't be pictured at nighttime), symbolizing either the burning bush, or the Jewish soul, or the trials of the Jewish people out of which will arise salvation.






Most shuls have some remembrance of the Holocaust. The wall around the corner displays pictures taken by the previous Rabbi of a specific death camp in Europe.


The Rabbi, dressed as the Straw Man for Purim.


The Rebbetzin, dressed as the Tin Man


A minimalist costume.


Obligatory princess 1.


Cookie hoarding 1.


Cookie hoarding 2.


Cookie hoarding 3.


Obligatory princess 2.


Thankfully not a princess.


She lost her wings (her mom had them).


The cleaner shares a l'chaim.

Shabbat in Columbus

Spent a lovely shabbat with friendly, down-to-earth, and generous families in Columbus. The shul is a work of art, but the population is dwindling (natural attrition, and owing to a stronger, younger shul gaining ground nearby) and the immense size of the hall and building complex dwarfed the number of congregants. Secret kiddush club only served scotch.

Dappled snowfall turned the sidewalks and streams to a winter wonderland and the streets into a series of near-collisions.

I overtalked about gaming at dinner, and so tried to underplay it at lunch.

Off to the megillah.

Weekend Coming

I'm off to Columbus, OH for the weekend and Purim. So close to CABS, but probably unable to drop by, unless I drop by late Sat night.

Our backyard window is constantly filled with birds (cardinals and robins?) since Rachel keeps several bird feeders outside.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Purim.

Session Report, in which they play and enjoy Cuba

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: David & Goliath, Cuba + expansions.

First of three game sessions that I'm in the US.

Oxford Gaming Club

Tuesday night I played Magic at the Miami University of Oxford strategy gaming club, which is typically 5 to 10 Magic players, an RPG group, and occasional other strays playing heavy fantasy or horror games, such as Starcraft or Fury of Dracula.

My first game was a three-way: you need to deal 10 points of damage against both of your opponents, each of which has a separate life counter against you. Once you do 20 points, the opponent can still attack you, but you can't (and need not) deal any more damage to him. If a player is dealt 20 points each from both opponents, he is out of play. Otherwise, the first player to deal 20 damage to each opponent wins.

The above was my suggestion. I used a deck from another player (Phil Konkle) at another table. It was heavy on the landfall bonuses, but had no extra method of gaining lands into your hand, which seemed odd. Nevertheless, I was lucky with my land pick and so did well enough to toast both opponents before either could deal me any damage. Actually, what helped most was that my RHO with a burn deck was specifically concentrating on my LHO with an elf deck, and rightfully so. Elf decks are ridiculously powerful if they get off the ground.

In the second game, we played EDH, which is 100 card decks, no repeats, and "generals". A general is a card you can cast at any time, and when it is killed or removed from the game, you can cast him again with a +2 casting cost penalty for each time he is removed.

This game was slower. My deck had a cute three card combo. 1) Several creatures or cards gave me multiple token creatures. 2) Then I had an artifact that made all of my creatures +1/+1 and invulnerable, so long as I sacrificed a creature each round. 3) And then I had one creature that came into play with 2 +1/+1 counters for each creature I sacrificed when I brought it into play, and pumped out a 1/1 creature token each round for each +1/+1 counter it had on it. Ouch.

Unfortunately, I got out the first two cards, but LHO destroyed my artifact before I could play the third one on the next round. I still played it, but it got destroyed immediately.

RHO gained dominance for a while, but LHO and I took out some of his stuff, and I regained dominance. In the end, I brought out a creature that pumped out a 1/1 colored creature for each permanent already in play of any one color. Unless I read that wrong, this grows at 2^n speed and quickly dominates(d) the game. It was my game, unless something else happened, but we had to end early when Phil needed to take his decks home.

In addition to Magic, I tried a 3-player game of DD Mau, which was sent to me by the publisher to review. I only played one hand, which is not a complete game, so I don't feel qualified to review it, yet. The first game played like UNO, as I expected that it would, but the scoring options look like they may add some welcome complexity to the game. The rules - both the mechanics and the instructions for these mechanics - for some of the special power cards are somewhat obtuse, and added needless complexity to the game. So we'll see.

Review: Online Casinos Planet

The following is a paid review.

Site

Online Casinos Planet

Summary

A neat, clean, and useful directory of real casinos worldwide, and not much else.

Overview

Online Casinos Planet is a website with directory information for over 1,600 casinos around the world. The pages are neat and clear, with no advertising or extraneous flashing images. If you're looking for a casino near you, this might be a convenient location to start.

The casino guide contains (as of this review) the addresses and telephone numbers of 1,682 casinos. Of these, nearly half (803) are in the United States, with the other 879 in 24 other countries around the planet (France is second, with 201).

That's the good news. The rest of the site is not bothersome, but not really of much use.

Online Casinos

The site "reviews" a scant five online casinos, and the reviews read more like ad copy than reviews. Though they might well be genuine, they don't contain much information. The links to the reviewed casinos are affiliate links, and thus not impartial. All five reviews are positive.

Casino Articles

Several articles on the site introduce the basic rules about the types of games, from Blackjack to Slots, that you will find in casinos.These articles include short strategy sections (strategy for slots?) which mostly amount to advice not to spend more than you can afford to lose.

Free online games

The site includes six free online Flash games, including Texas Hold'em, which is the only one I actually played all the way through. The game is against 1 to 4 computer opponents, and played smoothly. It was fun enough. I'm sure you could find similar games elsewhere.

Videos

Lastly and most strangely, the site includes a few links to video clips (from YouTube) of people winning slots at a casino or music videos about Vegas (such as a dance remix of Katy Perry's Waking Up In Vegas).

Administrative

The site collects no information and sets no cookies. There is a standard contact form. The site claims to be the brainchild of a passionate casino player, with support from other such persons who work in casinos.

Summary

This site contains useful contact information for many casinos around the world, and not much else. It contains no annoying ads or pop-ups, and collects no private information. Which is not bad, for a small site. Only, what's with the fox?

Jet Lagged

 

That's my luggage for a month, except that I bought new shabbat pants at Target in Cincinnati when I arrived. Target had dozens of board games, but all were the usual or editions thereof.

The Orthodox community in Cincinnati is very welcoming and friendly. At least it was in the shul that I went to; I hear that there is only one other Ortho Jewish community, so it's not large.At shul on Saturday morning, I looked up at Haftora time and noticed that a few of the guys around me were missing, at which point I realized that no one had invited me to the secret kiddush club. I managed to find it, anyway.

Mostly I just jet-lagged all shabbat. Reading Spook Country.

Game sfx maker tool ... sfxr in flash!

What's all this then? This is as3sfxr, flash port of sfxr. It makes sounds for your games. You only have to press buttons and listen and press buttons again.

This is great: no need to understand how sound synthesis works, ability learn a little about sound synthesis by pressing buttons/moving controls randomly, no need to download/compile/install anything either. Oh how I would wish for more tools of this kind, maybe specialized stuff like (non-8-bit) fire effect generators, ice effects, explosions... There are some sfx gens for pure data but it will take a little more time to get them running.

At the top of this post, there is an embedded flash applet. If you are a user of an open source flash player: do you see it? Can you use it? How many of you already knew of sfxr but only now did try it through as3sfxr?

I hope this 'no info about games' post does not shock you.

Travel Notes and Movie Reviews

I traveled from Tel Aviv to Cincinnati on three flights, with two hour stopovers between each flight.

First flight: Tel Aviv to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. Ben Gurion Airport, one of the most secure airports in the world, did not make me take off my shoes and did not prevent me from passing through security with a 1/2 liter water bottle.

Second flight: Istanbul to JFK on Turkish Airlines. There is a special transfer desk for those traveling to the US, which includes two special check-ins: passport and additional security, in a cordoned off area of the airport (away from all the stores and other parts of the airport). No liquids allowed, shoes off, every bag opened, and everyone got a full body pat-down. I flew on a 777, and I, like many others on the flight, had an entire row of three seats to myself. It was a good flight.

Both flights cost me - total - $640, round trip.

Third flight: JFK to Cincinnati on Delta. I had to leave the airport terminal and check in to a different one. Once again, the security procedure, but no pat-down.

I had no check-in luggage for any of these flights. I had a carry-on, a laptop case, a belt pouch, and a coat with pockets. For one month of travel time. Every time I fly, I take less.

Movies

Bright Star: I had head good things about this, but ended up switching to something else after ten minutes. I probably would have enjoyed the intense parts that were supposed to come later in the movie.

All About Steve: boring and shallow, I switched to something else after ten minutes.

New York: I Love You: An excellent experience, essentially a sequel to Paris, Je T'aime (see my review).

The Invention of Lying: I have nothing personal against Ricky Gervais, but I haven't found any of his movies interesting. I'm usually not a stickler for "sense" in a movie, but I'm an old-school sci-fi aficionado, and this is essentially a sci-fi movie. In a world where no-one ever told a lie, the dialog in the movie (bold-faced rudeness, what people "really think") could never happen, because everyone's expectations would be entirely different. And a lot of what they said (such as "I'm sorry", when they weren't) was incompatible with the premise. And it still looked entirely predictable. Switched off after ten minutes.

Walk the Line: About Johnny and June Cash. Nice enough, but also kind of predictable and shallow; unfortunately suffers in comparison to the much better Ray, about Ray Charles. Good acting, but Reese Witherspoon, while professional and capable of delivering emotion and dialog, seems to be incapable of acting like anything other than Reese Witherspoon.

Joueuse (Queen to Play): About a maid who suddenly longs to play Chess. Kind of enjoyable, if you enjoy a lot of Chess matches and a blatantly metaphorical movie about a wife not getting her needs met by her husband. Mediocre cinematography and direction, and an unbelievable script mar the enjoyment.

So much for the airplane movies. Here are a few others:

Avatar 3D: A three-dimensional movie with two-dimensional characters and a one-dimensional plot. As far as sci-fi adventure movies go, it's derivative but ok. As far as movies go, it's really bad. It's the intersection of Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves (not the union; the intersection).

The 3D was impressive, and the world building "bug on every leaf" was lovely, of course. The usual action stuff, with effects. There's nothing else there. That's it. What a waste. Really, the 3D was wasted on this movie; when the action sequences began, my mind pretty much blanked out any 3D aspects to what I was looking at and reverted to standard 2D mental image. I could really only focus on the 3D when not much was happening on the screen. I think the 3D will have more of an effect for me in a romantic or dramatic movie.

District 9: While - like The Matrix - this was perhaps a little too focused on violence, this was a phenomenal movie. It's metaphor to the treatment of blacks by white was transparent, but that just made it better. The decision to use non-humans to represent the blacks was perfect; it forced us into the point of view of the racist white who sees blacks as non-human, something which can't work using any other genre. Brilliant sci-fi.

Session Report, in which we play one of Claude's new games and like it

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Claude game, Magic: The Gathering, Power Grid: Factory Manager, Dvonn.

I'm not sure that the session report is accurate and complete. It was written on very little sleep.

Two More Exceptions

Two more exceptions to consider for my classifying the games industry post:

• Should I separate companies that make supplies from companies that distribute or retail supplies (dice makers vs dice sellers)?
• Should I separate retailers of in-print games from retailers of vintage games? Many companies do both, of course.

I'm traveling tomorrow morning with no suitcase. Time to figure out what games can fit into my carry-on luggage.

Yehuda

Classifying the Game Industry

First, a few additions to my previous post Where Do Board Games Fit? (read that first)

• Games are a form of gambling
• Games are a form of marketing or promotion
• Games are a form of educational tools
• Games are a form of media
• Games are a form of hobby

I could go on, but you get the idea. Games are not a separate industry. Video games, toys, sports, gambling, media, and consumer goods are industries, each of which contains some parts of the game industry. I'm not sure where CCGs fall; probably both toys and video games. The Harry Potter CCG might be part of media, too.

Meanwhile, I doubt that any of these takes into account games made in-house for promotion or games included with educational products. I don't know whether poker chip suppliers are included (Toys? Probably adult entertainment). Are RPGs part of the books industry? Hence the impetus to create a new look at an industry that doesn't seem to officially exist.

When you start to sort through and follow links to 10,000 companies, you find yourself needing to classify them. I've got five categories, so far. A single company can belong to more than one category, though most belong to only one.

• Suppliers: produces parts or consulting to help others create games. For example: game designers, miniature casters [1], dice, paint, box, and casino suppliers, game consultants, printers, and so on. Suppliers help create OTHER people's games. If they only create supplies for their own games, they are not a supplier. [3]
• Publishers: creates games to sell, either public domain games or ones to which they have designed or acquired a license. They may use suppliers for nearly all aspects of producing the game. They may sell to both distributors or retailers. As a special note, publishers in this category must produce at least two distinctive games or game lines. Otherwise, they are single-game game companies.
• Single-Game Game Companies (aka sggc): Sggc's produce a single game or a single line of games (such as "X", "X Jr", and "X family edition"). These companies are of particular interest to me. Most create highly unoriginal games [2], and most don't last more than a year and a half. If they publish a second game that is not simply a reworking of their first game, they graduate to a full-fledged publisher. Promising to create a second game doesn't count; MOST of them promise to do that but never actually get the second game printed.
• Distributors:  Distributors take OTHER people's games and sell them to retailers. Some distributors sell both to retailers and directly to the public. If they only distribute their own games, they are not a distributor.
• Retailers: Retailers sell OTHER people's games to the general public. If they only sell their own games, they are not retailers. Retailers may be web-only or brick-and-mortar, may sell only games, or may sell other things as well as games (such as a gift shop that sells a localized copy of Monopoly or a local artisan's chess board).

These categories have held up well for the first several thousand companies, but I'm wondering if I should make a few more:

• Possibly separate game designers, miniature creators, or design consultant companies out from suppliers.
• Possibly distinguish between retailers who primarily sell games (like a game store) and retailers who primarily sell other goods (like a department store or a gift shop). Of course, what do I do with (for example) Mike's Games and Comics Shop?

Thoughts?

Yehuda

[1] Miniature companies who provide rules are also considered publishers.
[2] But don't realize it.
[3] Update: I forgot one more: licensing. License holders and license brokers also make money off of games. I currently classify these as suppliers.

Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.

Session Report, in which I finally win Phoenicia

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Dominion/Intrigue/Seaside, Aton, Saikoro, Tribune, Stone Age, Phoenicia, Le Havre, Bridge.

I don't know how to report Dominion when played with several expansions; I think I'll just call it Dominion from now on (like Magic).

Busy Busy Busy

I'm working hard at technical writing, and in my "free time" I'm working hard at building a game industry database. I'm trying to create the an exhaustive list of every company that publishes, distributes, and sells board/card games or game parts, from Macy's to custom miniatures - any company that is currently earning money from games, in any form. I'm only interested in the ones that are actually alive.

Trouble is, I'm never going to get every company. For now, I'm going to ignore every company without both a web presence and some way of contacting them (that probably takes out many - but not all - of the Chess piece factories in China). I'm ignoring games that are only available in console/computer format. Does a gas station receipt or cereal box with a game printed on it count as earning money from games? Borderline cases like these are difficult to categorize.

It's easy to find partial lists of game companies mixed in with other pursuits: games and toys, games and sports, games and education, games and marketing, games and gambling, and so on. I've never seen one that covers all games in all these areas, while excluding companies that don't make games at all. I've already learned something about 10,000 companies, and I'm working my way to 100,000.

And next week, on Thursday, I'm on my way to the US. I'll be in Oxford/Cincinnati, Columbus, Chicago, and NYC, returning to Israel on Mar 16.

Beautiful Open Source Puzzle Games

The beauty of a (puzzle) game is not only what we see and hear, but also what we feel when pressing buttons and moving the mouse. Controls are important and I prefer them crispy.

No free software puzzle game has more flavor than Krank. The player piece is a string of circles, which follow the cursor to collide with smaller pieces, which need to be connected to static pieces in different combinations. Unfortunately I fail at recording videos of the game and screenshots can't communicate the feel of the movement and sounds.. Speaking of movement, the controls are not as sharp as they should be, according to my ideal. However, this seems to fit the game very much, slow music, slow pace, 'swimming' controls. At first I was frustrated, because trying to do precise movements quickly leads to disaster (or just a harder time finishing levels than if you would do it slowly) but then I learned to relax.

Anyways, you have to try the python-based game for yourself! Just listen! :)



Cuboid-Clone is a nice and simple Panda3D-based puzzle game. If I understand correctly, the levels are cloned 1:1 as well, which would be rather disappointing. If anybody feels like braining some levels, here are instructions.

Cuboid-Clone download link here. The code license appears to be BSD (let's assume 3-clause).



I always loved Zaz' sound effects and now it has prettier backgrounds, and as I believe, freely licensed music (although author info is missing). The replay-video generation function now works without stealing focus, but I advise against uploading the resulting .ogv file to YouTube. :)

If you're a web designer, you could help the developer out with building a web page for Zaz.



In Waymark, you move a piece around in turns, your paths are defined by static blocks, that keep you from falling over the edge of the screen. Collect other pieces and reach the exit is the goal. Thanks to Danc's lovely pixel art (which is freely licensed under CC-BY) and the fitting sound effects (license unknown), Waymark is a pleasure to play.

There is one big problem with the game: movement is way too slow. This confuses me, because I am sure that I played the game a few months ago and movement was very quick. The current version number is 2009-01-10, perhaps the developer forgot it's 2010 and recently released a new version? Or am I having troubles with running Java apps once more?.. In any case, I'll try to convince the developer that this game needs quicker movement. :)

EDIT: If you have trouble starting the game (version mismatch) read this. If you happen to have troubles with Java apps in general (because you are perhaps using a tiling window manager) tell me so in the comments and I'll add a solution to that to this post.

EDIT2: It appears, that I first tried the windows version and that movement in the win version is faster, than the developer intended. The bug was a feature, and a great one. :( Also the developer confirmed that 2009-01-10 is the correct date.



PS: I totally forgot JAG! One of the zagillion connect-four-based block puzzle games, I don't even know what it is a clone of or if it is original! In any case, graphics and sounds are far from programmer art. I'm enjoying this great game from time to time and my only complaint is that the bonuses (pay points to destroy all blocks of one kind and similar) are not properly introduced. Maybe they are described in some readme, but for such a colorful puzzle game, the only proper introduction is having a shiny fat arrow pointing at them when I have accumulated enough points to use them the first time. :)

Contributors, contributors, contributors

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.

Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.

Programming

Rocket Race in Syntensity [more]

Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript.

latest UFO:AI world view

I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues.

PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.

Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.

Current PARPG status

I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)

Assets/Media/Art

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Racer r242 screenshots

Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.

A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.

jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.

irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.

A3P: Acquire, Attack, Asplode, PWN!

Hey FreeGamer crowd, I hope there are still a few people around ;)
Today there will be only a short update, as I simply can't believe this gem of a game (see below) has not been featured on this page!
EDIT: Do not miss qudobup's post about FOSS engine news directly below this one!

A unique arena shooter

So someone had the balls (pun intended) and released a completely unique arena shooter with many nifty features, described by the creator as a mix of TPS/RTS/OMG/BBQ ;)
Check out A3P, if that has sparked your interest! At it's current version (0.5) it can be described as a third person arena shooter with some small RTS/squad command elements, and it is definitely fun to play:

A3P gameplay video 4

The technical specs are rather interesting too: Based on the BSD licensed Panda3D engine (while itself being licensed MIT; the media license is unclear though) it has all the bells and whistles one can expect from a modern game (Full GLSL shader based rendering, networked ODE physics, even integration into your webbrowser).
Yet it was developed by ONE man in only ONE year! That makes us fellow free game developers look a bit bad, I guess :( Maybe that's because it was developed in Python!
Check out the development blog for further insight into this miracle ;)

Open Source 3D Game Engines Updates

Crystal Space 1.4 is out. Features include improved animations ("integrating vertex based animation with skeletal animation") and terrain ("improves rendering and handling of large outdoor areas"), OpenAL for sound and an internationalization plug-in.

Engine screenshots are very informative. This is Panda3D by the way.

Panda3D has a prettier website, it released version 1.7.0 and apparently has a web-plug in. The new version makes it easier to crash the computer, but also gives a performance boost - with the magic of 'pointer textures'.

I have a little crush on Panda3D, because it gives access to 3D and audio with no complicated setting up through a scripting language (Python). On the other hand it requires 3D models to be in its own format and I find converting not very convenient. For example there have been problems importing animations into Radakan.

OGRE mascot

Ogre has a mascot, and it might even become freely licensed, somebody just needs to confirm this (by posting in the thread). :)

Besides that, 1.7.0 RC1 has been released, which is licensed under MIT license (before, it was LGPL). Here's what seems like a changelog.

OGRE wikis

Furthermore, the OGRE wiki moves from MediaWiki to TikiWiki. I suspect that a main reason is because a nicer OGRE style was made for TikiWiki, while the MediaWiki OGRE style looks bad. That may be a strange reason, but as long as it makes people use the wiki more, why not? Here's the discussion if you have an idea.

Just for kicks: a simple comparison of OGRE, Panda and Crystal regarding lines of code. What does it tell us? Well, that OGRE has the biggest codebase (even though it only handles graphics), that Panda3D is the most compact of the tree and that Crystal Space code size had strange ups and downs. Nothing more really.

Kambi VRML v2.0 is soon to be released, as is the final version of the demo game Castle (which will only mean additional eye candy to the game). What is more important, as soon as Castle 1.0 is released, work will start on Castle 2.

Castle 1 is a three-level game and I consider it hard (easy to die) and its controls to be rough. On the other hand the level design is great: the layout invites exploration the levels are linear, each with a goal to be reached. This way the levels actually are part of a game, rather than an open-ended tech demo. This is why I have a good feeling about Castle 2.0 already. Depending on whether the developers decide to work on Castle 2 on their own or to ask the community for contributions, we might see some more use of their forum.

Morrowind scroll loaded in OpenMW

OpenMW, the Morrowind engine implementation in OGRE switched from D to C++ (because of compiler availability and language popularity) and from svn+git to git-only (because of git-svn problems). Git clone instructions here. The next feature to be implemented are animations. A video was promised as soon as they are ready.

Old news: OpenGameEngine development stopped in October 2009, until a project manager wants to take over. The form in which the project is left is described as "usable" and "still too much work to make it worth the time investment".

Enjoy another ridiculous comparison of 3D (game) engines: OpenMW, KambiVRML and OGE. I just love diagrams. :)

We have a list of 3D engines on our wiki, if you want to dig some more. Also all FOSS game engine blogs that have feeds are included in the FGD development planet feed aggregator.

When I Turned 40

When I turned 40, I realized that everyone I had ever thought was smart knew and did everything that made them smart by the time they were 40.

And I realized that I was one of those smart people. I'm as much of an expert in my own fields as they are, or were, in theirs. What I thought was unobtainable skill and knowledge was only fortitude, attitude, and practice. When I turned 40, I was no longer in awe of anyone.

When I was younger, I never did anything truly ambitious because I thought I would never be as talented as those other people who did those kinds of things. When I turned 40, I realized that someday I'm going to think about doing something ambitious and realize that it's a younger man's game, not for someone old like me.

And so here I am, at 40, willing and able to do all of those things. No one else can do them any better than I can. And to think, some of you may be smart enough already to figure this out by 30. Or 20.

Now I realize why old people can be crotchety. They've earned it. By the time you're 40, no one else has the right to tell you what's best for your own good.

Session Report, in which I enjoy playing Magic and Le Havre

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Tribune, Le Havre, Pillars of the Earth + expansion, Magic: The Gathering x 3.

I enjoyed my games of Magic and Le Havre.

jergames.com

Ladies and gentlemen:

http://jergames.com is back in my hands (lost from my hands in Dec 2005). And I only had to ignore a dozen autobots that were promising to get it for me for $100 around the time it began to become available. I simply waited and it cost me $10.

Now to figure out what to do with it.

Yehuda