Teh Dogz

Hey everyone!

This was a week with lots of interesting events in the world of Linux gaming and game development! Developers, reaching for the stars, have awakened in masses, hungry for code, writing designs like lunatics... and of course, like very often in the Open Source world, searching for artists.

The Challenge Promode, a gameplay mod for Quake 3 (works only partially with Open Arena), is assembling an open Art Division. The CPMA project is searching [1] for artists to replace the stock Quake 3 media, thus making it possible to play CPMA without Quake 3. Said media will be released under a Creative Commons license to support other mod, indie and open source developers. I hope they mean the CC-by-SA, otherwise I'll get really mad =P

By the way, do you remember 'Saga of Ryzom'? That innovative MMORPG project had financial problems last year. Whereas the owners of the project searched for a buyer in the gaming industry, Nevrax' members, the guys behind the game, took the initiative by raising a fund and sent a help call to the community. They wanted to make 'Saga of Ryzom' open source and they needed to buy the rights off the owning company first.

Before they finally collected around 300'000 dollars, with around 25'000 donated from the Free Software Foundation, the owners had found another buyer ,Gameforge, a company that develops browser games,
who could naturally pay even more money.

A year after the deal, 'Saga of Ryzom' seems to be a burden for its owner... again. [2] And it's rather unlikely, that the Open Sourcing scenario will repeat.

In the other news, LordHavoc released a new version of his Quake engine modification, Darkplaces. [3] This time's addition: Reflective Water \o/

And the FIFE 2D isometrics engine has made some serious progress. [4]

By the way, we're moving our stuff to our new domain, unixgamedev.org. We still have problems though. So the Forum is currently unavailable. Will be fixed as soon as Micheal has some time to set up our DNS correctly.

[1] http://www.promode.org/?p=537
[2] http://www.golem.de/0710/55117.html
http://www.ryzom.com/ - The official game site
[3] http://linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identiferID=9600&action=flatview
[4] http://freegamer.schattenkind.net/index.php?t=msg&th=114&start=20&S=b5b15fd9c2897a29221209c118d5d0fb