The amazing libre 3D modeling tool Blender needs no introductions at this point. Suffice to say that what began as a humble Free Software alternative to most heavy-duty proprietary 3D software is slowly becoming a new industry standard. The newly released version 2.80 is a testimonial of this.
The new release adds not only a much needed upgrade to the UI, but along comes an improved real time renderer and much more. All new features and improvements can be checked here.
Finally, some of you might have already heard in the past few weeks the gaming industry titans Epic Games and Ubisoft have officially began sponsoring the Blender foundation with grant funds. These are welcoming news since it means Blender will only see better and more regular updates from increased sources of income. Even if the money comes from proprietary software business, libre developers alike can also reap the benefits.
Blender can be downloaded for free on its official download page. Code license: GPLv2
Sintel The Game Alpha 0.2 was released years ago but you might have missed it, just as have I.
The three levels have the following features:
1. Snow landscape, puzzles, no fights, no ending (I think) 2. Desert landscape, no puzzles, 2 enemy types to fight, no ending (I think) 3. Village/port environment, one puzzle with one variation, 1 enemy type to fight (maybe more), has an ending, possibly has multiple endings (not tested).
As a alpha game made in Blender Game Engine (BGE), it is actually impressive: controls and window behavior feel OK, compared to smaller games I sometimes run into, which often seem to have resolution, mouse control/sensitivity or window manager related issues.
The first flipper pinball machine was released 68 years and 1 month ago and yet there is only a handful of open source, cross-platform pinball video games available! Oh well, let's take them for a spin, shall we? UPDATE Dec 1st, 2015: 1. Added Libre Pinball, see Honorable Mentions below. 2. Added conclusion section. UPDATE Jul 17th, 2016: Updated Emilia Pinball links
The ancient 3D Emilia Pinball project has a recent fork on GitHub that adds more tables (the last official release had only 2, the new one has 5). The code is the ancient but consistent original SourceForge project and some new tables are flowing around patches/mailing list posts https://sf.net/p/pinball/
The game has 4 perspectives (F5-F8)
The models are very low-poly, which is fine and fast but the textures are sinfully low-resolution. However editing textures appears to be simple in existing tables, simply by overwriting them with higher-resolution files, as demonstrated with the angry gnu head in the screenshot above.
Creating new tables requires an editor, which I unfortunately was not able to compile yet (possibly due to lack of old Qt libraries).
Devil's Pinball is a Blender-made pinball table. It's quite buggy when played in recent Blender and there is no license information.
Conclusion
I find the open pinball games on Linux more entertaining than I expected them to be. The major downside is decoration and context: while the themes of some tables are intriguing, they unfortunately exist in a widescreen world without a proper background that adds to the experience.
And of course some accessible (video) documentation on how to create new tables would be a huge plus.
Got theme ideas for open source pinball tables? Write them in the comments!
While not necessary only for FOSS games, all will be done with the Blender3D included game engine (BGE). Check out their website here and/watch the video below:
The overall theme will be announce on the 20th when the contest starts.
