New Open Soure Game Developer

Recently the new game developer Sixth Floor Labs started its business with the aim is to improve the Linux gaming scene. Their concept is to continue improving their own Open Source games when the community is willing to pay a certain amount of money.

Gaming Miniconf 2008

The next Gaming Miniconf will be at the linux.conf.au in Melbourne on Tuesday, 29th of January 2008. It aims to promote both FOSS Gaming and FOSS Game Development.

GIMP 2.4 Released

Developers, artists and user interface designers from all over the world worked together to make GIMP more powerful and easier to use than ever. The changes from version 2.2 are too numerous to list here, please check the Release Notes to get an overview.

If you want to compile GIMP 2.4 yourself, you can grab the tarball from ftp.gimp.org or one of its mirrors. Binary packages for the various supported platforms are becoming available as we speak. Our Downloads section should help you to locate the package for your system.

EA wants 'open gaming platform'

The BBC reports a cry from EA for an open gaming platform,

"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible."

Unix Game Development closes

I am sorry to announce the Unix Game Development project will close soon. Due to lack of feedback and overlapping interest with other similar projects we decided to collaborate with Freegamer and shut down the board, wiki, and Irc the next days. I may continue with this blog, because of private interest in this subject. Unless there is no good reason to revive this project I recommend you other communities.

• Freegamer
• The Linux Game Tome
• The Game Programming Wiki
  

Linux GameDev V - Marketing and Distribution

The next part of Troy Hepfner's Linux Game Development series is published at GameDev.net - his last article, but as he stated perhaps his most important, and is about how to sell games for Linux. Indeed that's a little difficult, 'cause the market is very, very small.

New Project: Search Engine For Free Media Content, Developers & Projects

I'll announce the development of a search engine for free art, and a developer/project database starts to get serious. It's work is done in collaboration with Freegamer. A more detailed description is found at Ghoulwiki, but I'll give a quick an overview of the basic ideas:

• bring artists and developers closer together
• search engine for existing free art
• a database for projects and developer
• using the CakePHP framework
• thread at freegamer
• thread at unixgamedev

At the moment we're in the planning phase and probably have three developers for this project. It seems we all have to learn how to work with CakePHP, though this shouldn't be a big problem.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or even think about helping us, feel free to contact - we appreciate the feedback.

Btw. Ghoulsblade has collected an awesome list of free game development links. It's definitely worth to have a look at it.

UNIXGAMEDEV.ORG - Our New Domain

You may have noticed our stealthy process in establishing a new domain for our project:

UNIXGAMDEV.ORG

This is our new home, and hopefully it won't change for a long time. This blog and the board have a new address, though you can still access by the old blog address. The wiki remains at the same place, 'cause we like to continue using wikispaces, but unfortunately using own domains costs money there. I quickly created an butt ugly and temporary front page for this project and the domain, to have a unification of all major elements [1, 2]. Anyway, here's the list of all UNIXGAMEDEV addresses:

• unixgamedev.org
• www.unixgamedev.org
  
• blog.unixgamedev.org
  
• board.unixgamedev.org
• unixgamedev.wikispaces.com

Actually we would like to give UNIXGAMEDEV a facelift soon, and already started a discussion about that at the forums, though it may need its time.

I'd also like to thank Tuxfamily for providing free hosting of the Unix Game Development project. They offer a very nice service for the Open Source community, and also plan a gaming server.

Ryzom is rising for a second time...

Yes, it seems that the Open Sourcing initiative for the MMORPG game "The Saga of Ryzom" is getting into the next round. Developers have started a new fund for it. More information can be found here. The fund has a new page, too.

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