Carthaginian - Credit: wildfiregames.com

Wildfire Games has decided to make their work-in-progress RTS game 0 A.D. free content by releasing the source code under the GPL v2 and putting all of the artwork for it under a CC-BY-SA license. While it is not yet playable, the developers hope to attract new developers to the project:

We’ve been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We’ve come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can’t devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.

While Wildfire’s initial contribution is free content, whether or not future contributions will fall under that category is up in the air at the moment:

Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we’re not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we’d like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we’d be interested in discussion of this issue.

The cynic in me wants to say that they’re doing this to revive a dying project that lacks developers, but even if that were true, this is a significant contribution to the free content gaming world, especially since the current offering of open content strategy engines don’t look nearly as good as 0 A.D. does. I’m a bit wary of the licensing of future contributions, but they seem open to discussion about keeping it free. Time will tell, I guess.

• Phoronix article
• 0 A.D. open source page

Uknown Horizons - Credit: Unknown Horizons

Unknown Horizons 2009.1 (a major release) has been released recently.

We have made many improvements to our previous release, 2009.0. Here is a list of the most important changes:

• All new user interface.
• Gettext supported muiltlanguage support. This release comes with complete English, French and German translations and mostly complete Norwegian and Portuguese translations.
• New main music theme.
• A boatbuilder to build new ships for your fleet.
• Hunter graphics added. No functionality yet.
• Some revamped ingame graphics, like new inhabitants.
• Some performance improvements for the build process. Previews are now shown much faster.
• Lots of bugfixes.
• Removed all drop down widgets to ensure crashfree setting changing.
• Lots of code refactoring. More to come.
• Saving and loading of games.

It’s bad how many posts I’ve mad about this one, and have not yet played it.

• Unknown Horizons

ZeXx86 has created ArenaLive, an MMOFPS that can be accessed from the Web. According to ZeXx86’s Slashdot submission, ArenaLive is based on OpenArena.

Arena Live is a free, open source, Quake-based massive multiplayer, first person shooter.

This work is distributed under the GNU/GPL2 License, which means that you are free to use and modify it for any purpose.

When you are interested in development or you need answer for question around Arena Live, join to IRC channel #arenalive on irc.freenode.net server.

The Slashdot submission says that only GNU+Linux and Firefox are supported right now, but more platforms will be appearing soon. Sounds like an interesting project.

• Arena Live
• Slashdot

TMW 0.0.29 - Credit: elpirate on TMW

The Mana World 0.0.29 has been released.

This release clearly is our largest ever. First, many improvements and new features were merged in from the Aethyra project. Then, we spend a month merging our own two grown apart clients, one that supported the eAthena server and one that supported the tmwserv server (support for this server is currently a compile-time option). Finally, we spent two months fixing, improving and generally cleaning things up in order to prepare for this release.

The list of changes is way too long to go through, but I’ll mention a few of my favourites. The client now supports more eAthena features, among them is the ability to form a party, which allows you to see who else is online and to share experience and pickups in combat. Also, direction changes are now propagated properly, support for NPC storage was added and you can now specify the initial attributes of a new character. Then, there is the new tabbed chat window, which makes it much easier to keep track of private conversations. Finally, archers will enjoy seeing their arrows fly through the air.

So I’ve decided that for video games I’m going to start posting things that aren’t that major of an update, because videogames are fun to hear about.  BTW, I’m “conley” on TMW.

• The Mana World

Atomic Worm - Credit: Charlie Dog Games (CC BY-SA)

Charlie Dog Games has released Atomic Worm 0.16 under GPLv3/CC BY-SA.

Atomic Worm has flown into the light. A new game which features: Simple mouse control Exciting challenges and puzzle oriented game-play It takes the snake genre to a new dimension.

Nice.  I really wish I used a distro that brought new releases of free games in faster.

• Tweeler
• LinuxGames

Electronic Arts will release The Sims 3 with CD keys, forgoing SecuROM and online authentication.

The game will have disc-based copy protection – there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.

We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future.

I can’t say I’m not surprised at this move. What did surprise me is that they would do it so quickly after what happened with Spore.

• Electronic Arts
• Eurogamer
• Slashdot

HotHardware reports that id Software has released an official free software port of Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone. The source code for the port can be downloaded from id’s Web site.

Earlier this week id Software released an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D as open source, but at the time it wasn’t in the App Store. Wait no longer, it’s there.

Besides having its own website (which you absolutely have to visit, right?), the game that id Software calls “the grandfather of the FPS at your fingertips” is located here in the App Store.

Sorry, you can’t have everything. While the code has been released as open source, the game itself is a relatively high for the App Store $4.99. But come on: it’s Wolfenstein 3D.

While I detest the iPhone, and really wish id would go ahead and release the media for such an old game under a free license as well, it’s good to hear that their port is free software just like the PC version. Hopefully it will be ported to Android and the FreeRunner soon.

Also, when is id Software releasing id Tech 4?

• HotHardware
• Digg

Photo : Credit : kartooner of flickr (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Lovers of both games and Free Open Source Software will be pleased to see that the popular indie puzzle game World of Goo has been released for Linux. It was designed by a small team of two ex-Electronic Arts developers, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who used their entire combined savings of $10,000.00 USD to create the gooey game aimed at guiding goo balls to salvation. The developers built their gooey world with open-source technologies such as Simple DirectMedia Layer, Open Dynamics Engine for physics simulation, and TinyXML for configuration and animation files. Subversion and Mantis Bug Tracker were used for work coordination.

Comments I received from friends who played the demos after this news are “the feeling that i completed the tower was a bit orgasmic”, “well there is a *lot* more awesomeness”. May be its time when I should start wishing that the games I used to love will be ported on Linux. And I will again play them.

• Slashdot
• 2D Boy

Warzone 2100 - Credit: wz2100.net

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has posted a review of Warzone 2100.

I’ve played through a few levels, and fought a skirmish match against AI. It really does make you think: visually we’ve come a long way, but Warzone 2100 does so much that RTS games still struggle to get right today. There’s lots of gaps where excellent GUI design and player feedback fill in for modern games, but it’s still challenging, playable, and instantly comprehensible. More tantalising still are the recent blog updates on the Resurrection site, promising new terrain renderers and sky boxes of cloudy delight.

Pretty positive.

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Federal Judge David G. Campbell issued his final ruling Wednesday in a case brought by Blizzard Entertainment last March, stating that the popular WoW bot Glider can be classified as a circumvention device and thus violates the DMCA:

Judge Campbell has distinguished between the actual bits stored on the World of Warcraft disk (which he called the “literal elements” of the game) and the interface elements the user encounters as he’s actually playing the game (which he dubbed “non-literal elements”). In his ruling last summer, Judge Campbell ruled that Glider did not violate the DMCA with respect to the “literal elements” because Warden did not “effectively control” access to those elements: they are stored, unencrypted, on the World of Warcraft disk. But he deferred until this month’s trial the question of whether Glider violated the DMCA with respect to the “non-literal elements.”

In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Campbell found that [Blizzard's anti-bot program] Warden did effectively control access to the “non-literal elements.” That is, while Warden does not prevent users from accessing the individual elements of the game separately, it does effectively bar users from accessing all of the elements together while playing the game. Therefore, Judge Campbell concluded, [Glider creator] MDY violated the DMCA when it evaded warden’s checks.

In addition, Judge Campbell affirmed Blizzard’s theory that violating an EULA is indeed copyright infringement:

Blizzard argued, and Judge Campbell agreed, that when users violated the World of Warcraft EULA, they no longer had a license to play the game and were therefore guilty of copyright infringement. As Siy noted in a blog post last year, Blizzard’s theory, if taken literally, would mean that violating any of the rules in the EULA and Terms of Service, such as choosing a screen name that didn’t meet Blizzard’s guidelines, would be an act of copyright infringement. And distributing software that helps users infringe copyright itself constitutes secondary copyright infringement, which could expose MDY to copyright law’s draconian “statutory damages” of $150,000 per act of infringement. The law gives aggrieved parties to contract disputes much less potent powers.

This is horrible. True, Glider is a big way for people to cheat, and some would argue that’s against the spirit of the game, but hauling every EULA violator into court for copyright infringement is nuts. Not only would it clog the courts, but it gives large corporations another big stick to use against people who might do something innovative with their products outside the sphere of approved uses.

• Ars Technica