Cross-Language Community(?)

It recently came to my attention that over 24% of Simutrans forum posts are in languages other than English. Some posts (including a few jokes) later FreeGameDev had its first non-English board.

Simutrans Forum Post Languages

Should we really have a section on our board for non-English languages?


Pro:

• Lurkers who would not post in English would have the chance to contribute in the international forum
• Engaged non-English-speakers are likely to improve English skills over time, attracted by the larger community

Con:

• People who might give English a try to contribute will use the international forum out of comfort instead, decreasaing growth of the English-speaking community
• People who use English now, will use the international forum and contribute less to the English-speaking community
• Moderators need to be found

It could also be that there will be no effect at all. We will add non-English forums if we find volunteer moderators as an experiment for a while and see where this leads us (few more details here).

If you would like to help moderate a language forum, please let us know in this thread.

English language map of the non-primarily English-speaking world [source by-nc-nd]

Shana Tova

I have a few longer things to say - including last night's session report - but no time right now. So shana tova, and I'll see you on the other side of the (very long) weekend.

Yehuda

GJID

GJID's first level

I have a hard time playing puzzle games when their only reward is getting to the next one. Consequently I'm usually not a fan of Sokoban games. Having a little or a lot of story bundled with the puzzle helps though.

In GJID you control a brave robot of the name GJID, who volunteered to recycle dangerous weapons from a cold war. In 14 levels you have to dispose of nuclear and disruptor weapons.

Movement controls reacts instantly and you are allowed to skip levels. There is no save function and no sound. The game runs in full-screen but thankfully does not resize the screen and scales instead. License: MIT

This version seems to be made for *nix only. ./configure && make allows to easily run the game.

From the README:

This is a clone of the eponymous DOS shareware game written in 92 by John Remyn. I spoke with John in 95, when the first version of this clone was made. He admired the 8-bit graphics (original game was done in 4-color CGA) and did not object to its existence. His email address has since expired and the few contact attempts I've made recently hit dead ends. The DOS game was $10 shareware and I include the original registration form in the README, in case you want to track John down and give him money for the excellent level design that make this game what it is.
Aside from being an entertaining puzzle, I also release this game as an example of using the XCB library for making X applications. XCB is the new lightweight replacement for Xlib that suffers from lack of documentation. This game demonstrates how to create small applications with it and also how to use RENDER for drawing text, tile sprites, and for hardware scaling of the 320x240 backbuffer.

GJID reminds me of another, even more story-driven Sokoban-style game with simple graphics: The Villany of Cat Food Inc.

Shabbat Gaming

Nadine, Abraham, and Sara joined me for lunch. Nadine came early, and we played two-player Puerto Rico with my usual changed buildings (I changed Discretionary Hold to save one barrel, instead of three, but neither of us bought it).

Nadine had early corn and an early victory point lead. But my building was far overtaking hers, even though I let her take Factory and instead took Large Business (provides both Builder and Captain privileges). LB is underrated. It can't undo the victory point lead the way that Harbor can, but it can stop the erosion and still provide a building boost.

We didn't finish, but we were pretty sure that I was going to win.

After lunch, Sara, Abraham, and I requested Antike, which we played over Nadine's mild objections (she would have preferred Power Grid). Turned out to be a great game experience, even for Nadine.

I won the game 8 to 7 to 7 to 7 (we play to one point less than the suggested value); as you can see, very close. We played on the Arabian board. I started in Palestine, smack in between the other players. I kept tight control of my little area, using my first-player advantage (which offset my pathetic position) to nab Market for the first victory point. But I had competition for Know-hows, and Nadine ended up getting four of the VPs there. I build some temples, but Abraham destroyed one when he took Wheels. Luckily only one, as he was one unit away from sacking both.

The next round I placed dozens of units to protect the rest of my holdings and, together with Democracy, I was undisturbed for the rest of the game. Nadine floated around Greece, pulling ahead to 6 points over my 5, because no one was disturbing her. Abraham tried his opening triple temple strategy again. Sara built up a huge pile of resources and exploded suddenly from 3 to 10 areas in one turn. Then she sacked one of Abraham's temples, since he had left them open after he had sacked mine.

Then Abraham sacked one of Sara's temples, since she had left hers open to sack his. This left one of Abraham's temples open for me to sack, which gave me the one extra point necessary (together with 7 seas) to pull ahead of Nadine to 7 points. I was easily able to take my last point in the Know-hows (all 8) regardless of what the other players did, though all of them got one more point in the final round.

Totally missed the Annex Beta 1 release :(

Wow... can believe this myself, but after hyping this cool Megaglest mod a few times here on FreeGamer I totally missed their first release last month :(

Here as a reminder how cool Annex-Conquer the World looks:

Annex - Conquer the World

Currently there is only a Windows port available, but a Linux version is promised for the next release... Edit: I was confused about the media licensing... more or less all the new assets are CC-by-NC-SA, which is as you might know not considered FOSS due to the NC clause. A pity really :-/

So... how was I reminded of this gem? Well check out this cool interview with the Megaglest developers from the Greek site OSArena (in English though) ;)

Now I am off booting into windows to have another round with Annex ;)

Session Report, in which Lo Ra is intense

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Taj Mahal, Lo Ra, Yinsh, Whatzit.

Nadine gains 17 bonus points at the end in Taj Mahal.

0AD Alpha 7 Geronium and more

Act 1

In case you've been hiding under a rock or you rely on Free Gamer for your open source game updates (and we love you if you do), there has been another release of 0AD (announcement) the 3D historical RTS game.

Lots of improvements, including an all-new and unique Carthaginian civilization, a new main menu that moves, new music, new sound effects, new maps, and likely (although not mentioned) a lot of development and the fixes and subtle improvements to go with it.

This is going to be one of the marquee open source games soon. It has the potential for mainstream appeal that is missing from a Battle for Wesnoth, no matter how polished it becomes (and it is very, very polished these days).

Since becoming open source to help save the project from an ignominious end, development seems to have gone from strength to strength with a series of alpha releases each bringing the game one step closer to being a playable title.

Act 2

Also big news coming out of the Dungeonhack Godhead project - a new release! This is the first since a tech demo over 2 years ago. This release marks the beginning of a different direction for the project. They now use the Lips of Suna engine. It is early days but the new engine already has a lot of what a now-defunct rewrite was trying to achieve in that it is server-client based, and it is 3D and the world is deformable, and there is now a workflow to get ideas straight in to a game world, giving writers and artists more possibilities to see their work immediately applied. Still, early days, it was just a black screen for me (but this was Windows 7 x64 - boo) so we'll see if this can reverse the fortunes of a project that has struggled to maintain momentum from one release to the next.

Free Gamer approves of inter-project cooperation. Huzzah!

Act 3

Finally, lady and gentlemen, for your entertainment, a fun ninja platformer!

Shinobi Densetsu is created using the OpenSNC engine, proving it is not just limited to hedgehog-based games.

I used to leave a plate of milk out for hedgehogs when I was a kid. I also had to shift through mucky half-rotten piles of leaves to make sure none were hibernating in the base of a bonfire-to-be. True stories! I digress...

Video!

Huzzah!

Raanana Session Report, in which Laurie compares Puerto Rico favorably to Age of Empires III

Participants: Jon, Peleg, Abraham, Rochelle, Tal, Ellis, Laurie, Ben Ah, a normal sized game night (for Israel). It's been a while since I saw one. Rochelle is a new player. The others have experience with gaming.

Parade

Abraham 16, Tal 19, Rochelle 19, Peleg 23, Jon 23

Or something like that. First play for everyone except me, I think. Everyone enjoyed it, and there was definite direct confrontation.

Settlers of Catan

Abraham 10, Tal, Peleg, Rochelle

First play for Rochelle. She liked it a lot. She kept Longest Road for some a lot of the game - though not because she was pursuing it - until Abraham Tal stole it. I don't know much else about the game.

Puerto Rico

Jon 56, Rochelle 51, Ellis 41, Ben 33

First play for Laurie, third or so for Ellis. Ben had played before, but certainly nowhere near as much as I had. I'm guessing that his experience is limited to a small group of other players, a) considering his strategy and b) considering two rules misconceptions that he held. As to the former, his first play as Governor was Builder/Construction Hut, which he followed up with Hospice, Hacienda, and three quick quarries (and eventually a forth). He shipped only 8 points, and ended with two large buildings, one of them unmanned. As to the latter, his first misconception was that you could buy multiples of the same building, and his second was that, if you didn't like the available plantations, you could instead draw one at random from the face down supply.

Ellis also put stock in a Hospice and some early corns. His major mistake was in choosing tobacco as his trade good, even though Laurie on his right had already acquired tobacco. Laurie accepted guidance, of course, but also made a good number of her own decisions. She had a hard time keeping the roles straight, especially as to how they fit into the "production path".

As second player, I took Small Market on round one, and then Settler/quarry, despite two available corn plantations. Most of the rest of the corn showed up early, so I got some anyway. I took indigo and coffee. I had a coffee monopoly until the end of mid-game. My chance for a third row building was at the end of mid-game and I chose Harbor over Factory (I had enough money with coffee). The other players also left me Guild Hall, even after I encouraged them to take it.

Like many Puerto Rico games, unexpected choices occurred frequently. While this sometimes helped me, it also sometimes threw me off my game.

Whatzit

Tal, Rochelle, Abraham

I picked this up from someone for free. No one is interested in playing the game, but the cards are fun to look at.

Yinsh

Abraham, Rochelle

First play for Rochelle. It started off okay, but once there were a lot of pieces on the board, she started to get a headache.

FPS news

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ).

So FPS news only from me today ;)

Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week.

Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above.

Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums.
More cool WIP screens can be seen here. Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently.

Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project.
So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure (and more) open sourced

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure

The quadruple-A block-style story-based, sneaky-action pandora game Adamant Armor Affection Adventure is now GPLed. Along with it some other games for that platform by the same author (AAA for one [video]) were open sourced.

Sources can be downloaded here (AAAA) and here (other games).

 

Video: 13 minutes of AAAA on OpenPandora

 Much more info about the releases along with some internet drama history can be read in this post.

I'm not sure about the assets and their license, there seem to be none included in the tarballs.

/me requesting Linux desktop ports

Slipstream Vehicle Simulation

The author of Techne has a new project:

Slipstream is a free racing vehicle simulator trying to be physically accurate and fun to play at the same time! Contrary to most simulators out there it's not designed around a single type of vehicle. It should be able to support anything from a bicycle to a car or anything else that can be driven around on a racetrack for that matter.

Help is requested on the content-side:

 The graphics are still very primitive I'm afraid but they get the job done at least. Making Slipstream pretty is still a high priority but I doubt I'll be able to create decent track and vehicle models myself. If you're an artist and want to participate in making a great racing simulator please drop me a line [dpapavas@gmail.com].

 

Video: Showcasing Slipstream

Raanana Session Report, in which Abe wins Age of Empires III due to luck, luck, and (maybe) luck

Participants: Jon, Abraham, Sara, Peleg, Ellis, Laurie

Laurie is back from summer vacation. Sara also joined us, but opted to "join Abe's team" when we had six, and she had to take care of the baby anyway. Before settling on Age of Empires III, I set up a game of Guardians of Graxia, but we didn't get to play it (I wasn't about to try it with 5 or 6 players).

Age of Empires III

Abraham/Sara 94, Jon 91, Ellis 64, Peleg 59, Laurie 55

First plays for Laurie, Peleg, and Ellis, and second or third for Abraham and Sara. I chose this because it supports five players well and has a wee bit of combat in it. I know that Ellis and Peleg are war game fans, but I don't have many games with these elements; I'd be happy to try them on Antike. Laurie was a little nervous because it didn't look like something she would like, however.

Turned out to be a success, even with Laurie, I think. Peleg saw soldiers in his pieces and dedicated the rest of his game toward acquiring them and using them to shoot people. He did some damage, though sometimes he just shot them for the fun of it. He also had some money coming in from his soldiers discovering.

The "take $20" building didn't some out until round 2 (and I would have thrown it back to ensure that it didn't come out in round 1), and Laurie was the only one who could buy buildings in round 2. She also got the "free discovery" in round 2, making me thing that she had a decent lead at this point. However, she tried an failed to make several discoveries, often by a single person. Other people then stole those discoveries from her. This set her back.

Ellis had decent money coming in from a building in age 2 ($10 a round). I'm not sure where he went wrong, but a) he didn't seem to build up anything in particular, and b) Peleg kept shooting his guys (when he wasn't shooting mine).

That leaves me and Abe. I started unusually for me by concentrating on commodities instead of discoveries and buildings. It slowed me down for some time. Only when I got a few extra specialists and was able to take some merchant ships did I begin to pull ahead (in income, anyway). Together with placement and buildings, I was getting one of each specialist a round.

As usual, I took a number of second place victories in the New World, a position that slipped under the other players' radar, apparently. After my income was secure, I went back to concentrating on discoveries and some final buildings. The trouble was that though I at least succeeded in my discoveries, they were all low valued discoveries of 4 or 5 points.

Meanwhile, Abraham was doing as many discoveries as I was (even more) and his were all 6 or 7 points. He also ended with a lot of money. He had 61 final scoring points in discoveries, cash, and buildings, which was impressive. I came rather close to that by adding my income. However, would I have picked his cards, and he mine, the final result would have been reversed.

Or maybe not ... it's possible that if I had picked his cards that I might have failed one of the discoveries, since I generally send n-1 guys. Ok, so maybe it wasn't entirely luck.

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Six-legged vehicle in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.


The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.


IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.

JSGC Session Report, in which Emily scores the same in two games, but comes first in one and last in the other

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Lo Ra, It's Alive, Louis XIV.

Good to see game night continuing without me.

Raanana Session Report in which I win Glory to Rome using Forum but feel guilty

Participants: Jon, Abraham, Peleg, Ellis

Some others were hoping to make it, but in the end they couldn't.

Seven: Card Game

Abraham 3, Jon 2, Peleg 2

Another game I was sent to review, the review will go up on Purple Pawn in time. I warn publishers before they send me games that I'm a harsh reviewer, and I try to turn down games that I know I won't like. This one came through anyway.

It's a souped up version of Go Fish. Instead of all items in a set being the same, there are seven different items in seven different sets and you have to ask for the item by name, but only if you have an item in that set already. There are also about 20 special ability cards. A few are bad (reveal immediately), but most are good, and you can only play good one per turn.

I'm not a fan of Go Fish, and neither were Abraham or Peleg. However, they both appeared to enjoy themselves while playing the game. Abraham even took my copy home. Peleg didn't think he would play it again.

Glory to Rome

Jon+, Abraham, Ellis, Peleg

First play for all the other players. Maybe I should have, after all, not played with the building powers, as is suggested for the first play. I am pretty happy with this game - so much so that I ordered the new edition with nicer graphics - but I think that the Forum ruins the game. I don't mind broken combinations, because there are usually several, and at least everyone feels like they are still completing for the original goal. But, when you do well and play well, and then a card says that the game is over and the win handed to the player who drew and played the card, it's a letdown.

There are ways to combat a Forum, unless it is played and completed on the same turn and near the end of the game. And if these ways come into play, the building isn't necessarily broken. It is simply broken sometimes, and that's too many times for me.

Oddly enough, despite my concern that I would turn them off the game, I was the one to play a Forum. The other players had plenty of time to work against me, and did so to some extent. In fact, they could actually have ended the game by taking the remaining foundations, but, for some reason, they didn't. I ended with a Forum victory when there were two foundations remaining.

Which brings me to another note: I play with one change to the rules: each player can only be building, at any one time, three buildings. This restriction only actually hampered someone once during our game. I created the change because I thought the game play devolved when every player started six buildings all at once, and ended before pretty much before anything was built. However, I note that, by restricting the number buildings you can build at a time, I am decreasing the ability of the other players to stop the Forum. So I may have to rethink it.

Another possible change I am thinking of is having the game end as soon as one player completes one building of each color.

The rest of the game saw pretty balanced play, with no powerhouse combos brought into play. Ellis wasn't too keen on the game. I'm not sure how the others felt.

DungeonHack/Godhead Demo Ultimatum

DungeonHack aka Godhead imposed an ultimatum on itself: two weeks for finishing a gameplay demo using the Lips of Suna engine.

Should the demo not be finished by that time, the development team will commit Seppuku.

Just kidding. :)

It's refreshing to see an open project put some pressure on itself. I'm looking forward to the results of this.

GeneticInvasion : a brand new Tower Defence

Hi! I'm here to show you a new game that I'm working on: GeneticInvasion

It's Tower Defence game, but it has something special: it uses evolutionary algorithms.
The idea of evolutionary algorithm is to use darwin theory to solve problems:

• We generate random solution to the problem.


• We evaluate them.


• We take some of the better ones, apply random mutations to them, and generate an offspring from them.


• The child replaces their parents in the solution population to form a new generation.


• And we do this, again and again, until we find a solution that is good enough.

Well, in GeneticInvasion, the problem, is you. So enemies evolve in order to crush you.

Download the .webm video

We used a real evolutionary computation library called EO to make this game. The library is being used for many serious projects.

So, you heard me, an army of colorful enemies are trying to eliminate you, don't just sit here, fight!

Some notes:

• For the first time since we began to develop it, the game is now interesting to play. That means that it's neither too easy nor too hard to play.


• I also added 3 levels that are supposed to be sorted by difficulty.


• There is a medal system, so you can try to get gold on all 3 of them. (I failed to get the gold medal on the third one through :P)


• There are no binaries, if someone is feeling like doing some, please contact me.


• The game is theoretically compatible with at least GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS but has only been tested on GNU/Linux. You'll need SFML, EO and Glu to build it.


• Please send us your remarks and comments.!

Also, I'd like to thanks OpenGameArt and the artists that contribute it, without them our game would probably had hand-drawing art, and we suck at it. (Also many thanks to ozzed who did the music on Jamendo)

Official website: GeneticInvasion   Controls for playin the game

Board Game Blog World Roundup

New to me since the last roundup:

Boardgaming: A new social media site for board games, the feed includes various contributors from the site.

Boards and Beers: Michael Taylor, NH.

East Tennessee Gamers: Greg Schloesser, Talbott, TN. The original game pumbah has a new site with a feed.

Games & Grub: Eric Leath, Columbus, OH. Mostly games.

Growing Up Gamers: Randy and Angie Newnham, Eugene, OR. Gaming with kids.

Kevin and Games: Kevin O'Sullivan, Sussex, UK. Session reports.

Lillian Cohen-Moore: WA. Some sparse notes from a game co-designer and magazine editor.

My Board Game Ideas: Clive Lovett, Kamloops, Canada. Thoughts on game design.

Play the Past: Multiple contributors on multiple genres of gaming.

Raanana Gamer: Ellis, Israel. Session reports from my new game group.

The Royal Society of Gamers: Henrik, Conrad, and Karl. Podcast.

The Secret Life of an American Geek Mom: Sara Yarrington, Manchester, NH. She also podcasts.

Tim Stellmach: Arlington, MA. Video game designer who talks a lot about board games.

Warpig Radio: Ed Healy and Dan Repperger. Podcast.

Raanana Session Report in which Abraham wins Agricola because he had better cards

Participants: Jon, Abraham, Ellis, Peleg

Quest Adventure Cards

I promised the company who sent me this game to give this a review. I had tried it once before and found it lacking, so I was determined to try it one more time. It was still lacking.

Abraham and I gamely gave it a go. We drew random cards and played them whenever we could. We ran into some rules questions, which didn't matter too much.

And then, simply by luck, the game ended before we could score the  last quest, which resulted in a tie. Even though I was winning by a great number of points. Even if Abraham could have ended it, he had no incentive to do so.

Agricola

Abraham 39, Jon 24, Ellis 24, Peleg 21

First plays for Ellis and Peleg, something like third or fourth play for Abraham.

I found it a challenge to explain the game as simply as possible, even though Ellis and Peleg are both pretty smart gamers. But we started without too much trouble and everything ran pretty smoothly. Still, a few finer points of the scoring rules tripped at least Ellis up around the game's end.

Since it was the first play for two out of the four players, we simply dealt 7 occupations and minor improvements to each player, rather than do any kind of draft, which is what we would normally (and really must) do. As a result, everyone but Abraham had one or two good cards and the rest mediocre of useless cards. Abraham ended up with god-like cards, including a free early family member, lots of free early food (and the Well, nearly for free), and bonus points up the wazoo.

Abraham scored more bonus points than I've ever seen in a game - 19, but we all really thought he would be scoring even more than that. As we watched them pile up, I was sure that he was at least 10 to 20 points ahead of the nearest competitor, who I was pretty sure was me. (In fact, he would have scored another 5 bonus points if everyone didn't allow me to take back a play I made on the last round in favor of a better play that blocked him.)

Abraham's board was complete, but mostly minimum, and he scored only 12 points for people and nothing for buildings. Ellis also had an even, mostly minimum board with a full people count but only 1 bonus point. Peleg also had an even, minimum board, but he had 8 empty board spaces, which counteracted his 4 room stone house. And only 1 bonus point. I had minimum in most things, maximum vegetables, a full board, a clay house, full people, and 8 bonus points.

Ellis wasn't looking terribly impressed, mostly because Abraham had a good early lead from his cards and there wasn't much we could do about it. However, the prospect of drafting cards appeared to spark his interest in giving the game another go.