Warsow is now Warfork and on Steam
| 4:19 AM

By On 4:19 AM

Warfork Gameplay (livestream - skip ahead 1m20s)

Last updated 2019-08-22 (see bottom of this article).

The title says it all. Warfork is the revival of Warsow. Warsow is cool (and super hard to master) but does not have servers running and no development ongoing.

Warfork is an ironically-named fork of Warsow, has CC0 art assets and is for now only released on Steam. The source supposedly is mostly based on qfusion, the source code is supposed to be available as a DLC.

I recognized one of my own CC0 sounds in the game (dong.wav) without attribution (which is totally fine both legally and morally) but it's too bad that assets (especially the nice announcer voice) can't be re-used/re-shared with voluntary attribution without digging around for it first.

Some art is limited by containing trademarked logos. Would be cool to have clean versions if anybody plans on packaging Warfork for official distro packages eventually.

Shortly after launch time there were around 50 people on all servers, later it was even more. Let's hope it ends up being a success and that many other open source games will dare following!

Warfork on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/671610/Warfork/
Warfork on Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/VY95TKZ

Fun for me: I found out about Warfork two hours before release time as I was checking out a discussion about bringing Unvanquished to Steam.

Y'all better start with itch.io for distribution first. ;)

Discuss about this article on our forums here.

Update 2019-08-20: 

  1. To my knowledge, the Warfork team is not required to publish the source, the offer to provide the source in the license included in the Steam release might suffice. Somebody who cares enough might try to contact them and ask for the source. [Oh wait somebody already did]. This worked when I asked for the source of an OpenArena Android port on the Play Store years ago.
  2. I was wrong about Warsow not being under development - Its Beta was updated just days ago. However I'm there are no regular servers available for players.
Update 2019-08-22:

Warsow 2.0 is now almost fully FOSS!
| 3:21 AM

By On 3:21 AM

Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND).

Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0
You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here.

Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included.

So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now...

Happy fragging :p

Xonotic 0.8.1 released & related news
| 10:41 PM

By On 10:41 PM

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch (via the autobuilds), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps.

From the user "Antibody" (known for his duel commentary videos) comes this nice video overview of the new features:

(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)

On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.

Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.

Xonotic community frag movie and other FOSS arena FPS news
| 7:52 AM

By On 7:52 AM

Very nice new movie from the Xonotic community:


It gives a pretty good idea about the vanilla game mode, although the very popular (some say too popular) "Minstagib" (one shot kills) and the total conversion mod Overkill (All new player-models and weapons, with team-spawn etc.) are also shortly shown.
Not shown are the popular vehicle mod and the recently added lightning gun (still WIP), but you can try everything yourself easily by getting the auto-downloader of the latest development build here.

As with most FOSS games, they are looking for more developers (& players) and if you have some cash to spare you can currently also pledge for the creation of some NPC characters for a single-player or COOP-mode here.

Speaking of FOSS crowd-funding, another great FOSS arena shooter, Red Eclipse this currently preparing a campaign for porting their somewhat aging Cube2 engine to the much nicer Tesseract (which is technically something like Cube3).
Oh and a new version (1.5) but still with the old engine should be out very soon ;)

Happy fragging!

First public release of Terminal Overload!
| 12:59 PM

By On 12:59 PM

You might remember the crowd-sourcing campaign from the beginning of this year to make a fully FOSS remake of a rather unique game.

Well, a bit later than promised, but really awesome never the less:


Note that this is a really early alpha and most of the art still has placeholder quality. It is quite playable multiplayer game already though, and there is a Linux and a Windows version for download on their website.

Please don't forget to give feedback on our forums (also if you are interested in helping out).

This is by the way to my knowledge the first FOSS game utilizing the open-sourced version of the Torque3D engine and also the only one that uses the work in progress Linux port so far.

Help to ROTC:Ethernet to become fully open-source
| 5:55 AM

By On 5:55 AM

The creator of the nice, but pretty niche, freeware game (but with Creative Commons licensed assets) Revenge of the Cats: Ethernet has just informed us that he started a Indiegogo campaign (target US$ 1500) to liberate the game.




The current version still runs on an old closed source build of the Torque3D engine, but with the somewhat recent move to MIT licensing, it has now become possible to go fully open-source.

According to the author:
All I need is about a month's time and some cash to make it happen.
So lets give him the help he needs ;)

The only not so great part of it is that the Linux port of the Torque3D MIT engine is not yet available. Several people are slowly working on it, but after a failed attempt to crowd-fund it, there seems to have been some setbacks.
But optimistically speaking, this could give it the needed push to also motivate the finalization of a working Linux port.

Progress on Octaforge
| 2:43 AM

By On 2:43 AM

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge. It is basically a fork of Tesseract, which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine.

The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua.

Read about their progress on the latest beta here, which also includes this nice video showcasing the new player model and an test map:



New Alien Arena, with included alpha-demo of in development commercial spin-off
| 12:05 PM

By On 12:05 PM

Yes, it looks like the developers behind the long running idTech2 based AlienArena are going make a more slower paced & 'tactical' spin-off and try to sell it. As before the engine will stay open-source (GPLv2), but the assets for the spin-off will stop being free-as-in-beer.

Here is the official launch-trailer of the new update and the alpha demo:


Beside the new game-play mode, they have also finally updated the menu, and the new version of it is rather spiffy. You can see it in action and more of the regular game-play in this recently uploaded random YouTube vid (warning: goofy British accents and profanity). GamingOnLinux also recently had a small preview-article.

Last but not least (while we are on the topic of idTech2 based games), a small game-developer's advertisement of a new project currently unfolding in our forums. If you know your way around Quake(2) based engines and/or pixelish art, please join the effort ;)

Today: Glamour, or how to hide irony about gender stereotypes very well...
| 11:28 AM

By On 11:28 AM

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour):

You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances.
Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt.
Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart.
At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot...
Source-code is available here for those that wonder...

*stalkes slowly away*

But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly:

Unvanquished Alpha 19
-BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound like a game for -BAM- real men!

Hmm BAM?