Naev 0.5 released!

A new release of the 2D space trading and combat game Naev is out and available as binaries for Lin/Mac/Win here.

For those using Ubuntu (or other Debian-derived distributions), Naev is available from PlayDeb. Naev is also available in Arch Linux, Gentoo, and from the openSUSE Games repository.

 Have a changelog:

List of changes since 0.4.2:
For Players

• Larger universe

• Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire and Pirate territories

• All-new Sirius and Soromid territory

• Big systems

• More planets per system

• Much larger planets, many new planet and station graphics

• Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system

• Overlay map for in-system navigation

• Mouse interactivity

• Planet, ship and jump point targeting

• Contextual click actions (board, hail, land, etc.)

• Optional mouse-controlled flying

• Electronic warfare

• Ships have cloaking and detection abilities

• Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection

• Turrets no longer track all ships equally

• Time model changes

• In-game time progresses in real-time

• Dynamic time compression speeds up long journeys

• On-map security rating abandoned in favour of faction presence indicators

• System backgrounds (nebulae, stars and more!)

• Fancier new GUI

• Brand-new tutorial that is independent from the main game

• Outfit slots now have sizes

• Weapon sets allow easy configuration of different weapon combinations for each ship

• Ship and weapon heat system

• Weapons start with perfect accuracy, and become inaccurate as they overheat

• Severe overheating causes rate of fire to drop

• Damage absorption and penetration system

• More diverse planetary inventories (see the tech system below)

• Random bar NPCs

• Sound system improvements

• Smarter autonav behaviour

• … and plenty more (new missions, ships, outfits, portraits, etc.)

Battle for Wesnoth Architecture

The popular open source game Battle for Wesnoth has been featured in the new free online book The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

We believe that the beauty of the Battle for Wesnoth as a program is how it made coding accessible to a wide variety of individuals. To achieve this aim, the project often made compromises that do not look elegant whatsoever in the code. It should be noted that many of the project's more talented programmers frown upon WML for its inefficient syntax. Yet this compromise enabled one of the project's greatest successes. Today Wesnoth can boast of hundreds of user-made campaigns and eras, created mostly by users with little or no programming experience.

Read the full section online for further insight into the design and design decisions of Battle for Wesnoth.

bfxr = sfxr + flash + omg awesome

Sfxr is a simple retro sound machine. It has undergone some iterations and the latest software based on its principle is bfxr, which also has valuable management tools.

Their feature list:

• 5 new waveforms : triangle, breaker, tan, whistle, and pink noise.
• 3 new filters : compression, harmonics, and bitcrusher.
• Ability to lock parameters during mutation/randomization.
• Expanded pitch-jumping abilities - good for arpeggiation effects.
• Visualisation
• Mixer
• Keeps your sounds and mixes in persistant lists.
• Can reverse synths
• Ability to link directly to sounds

Needs flash. Might be a problem. Can anybody with free flash implementations run this?

LibriVox Hacked

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The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post] but as a forum user I received an email:

A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our completedatabase including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them outof the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have ourdatabase.
In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information:(1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through theforum, including all private messages. This information is now in thepossession of the hacker.
(2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if yourpassword was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break theencryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactlythis, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, youshould immediately change your password at those services.
We are very sorry that this happened, and once this is sorted out as bestas it can be, we’ll be doing a more thorough security review.

Well, I'm glad they are open about this. A great time to update the passwords I use to more secure ones. :)

I would like to appeal to the community to look out for each other and report strange activities like spam posts or random content deletion to site admins, pointing out this recent hacking. Everybody who had a LibriVox account and used their password elsewhere should change it ASAP, especially if moderative or administrative accounts are involved!

... Let me just add a little bit of positive open content news though: I was looking for car blinker sounds, contacted three Freesound contributors and got permission from all of them to re-distribute under CC0, which I did on OpenGameArt. j1987 even added a "all my sounds are public domain" note. :)

Assorted strategy game news

Quick Sunday afternoon rundown of recent strategy game updated...
0AD got a new beta 5 release, which improvements in rendering & AI code, a completely new faction (Iberians), and a new map:
MegaGlest also got updated recently (Version 3.5.1), bringing various fixes and performance improvements. Furthermore I can report that both the sable and the development version of Battle for Wesnoth have been updated, and I strongly recommend everyone (who has not played this game for a while) to retry this classic in the newest development version.
EvolutionRTS, a nice looking (but sadly CC-by-NC-ND licensed) game based on the SpringRTS engine also saw an update to version 1.3 this month (check out this gameplay video).
Hmmm, what else? Ahh, UFO:AI was ported to Android, and and the change of Warzone2100 from SDL to qt (which is not exactly a game framework) raised some eyebrows, but will probably make the game more easily portable and better integrated into your favorite desktop.

LanPower Game Key v2

On 2. July, the second Free-as-in-freedom USB Game Key will be released by the French-language based team LanPower.

The GameKey light serie 2 is a compilation of portable FOSS games, mostly compatible with both Windows and Linux.

English, German, French, Italian and Spanish translations are available for the GUI. If you would like to add your translation to the mix, here are the translation files: English | French. (contact: asso.lanpower A✜T free.fr)

Naev Sound and Xonotic Map Devolution

Spoiler alert regarding a video of a NAEV mission that shows off the sound capacities of the game. The project relies on OpenAL Soft.
You should come for the sound [10MB vorbis rip]* or for the HD version.

Effects to notice:

• Positional sound (basic for OpenAL)

• Doppler Effect (depends on velocity)

• Air absorption factor (sounds like you’re under water)

• Reverb (also helps make it sound like you’re underwater)

• Speed of sound changes (depends on nebula density – also for sounding underwater)

* It'd be great if more project took so much care of audio licensing so there could be f-a-i-f game sound walks. Great distraction from urban noise. Game soundtracks are disturbing though mostly.

An amazing screens-video of the different stages of modernizing/Xonoticisizing CBCTF1 - Space CTF to Newtonian Nightmare was posted.