Michael (lgp-michael) Simms updated his blog to announce he is leaving LGP. The company will carry on however under the new direction of Clive Crous.
Timothee (TTimo) Besset has also announced his departure from Id Software to join a new startup in Dallas. Best of luck!
Thank you for all the hard work. Linux games would otherwise not have such a bright future.
This post was submitted by Nemoder.
The first release candidate of the 1.4 development tree of Wine has been announced. This marks the beginning of the code freeze period for this release. This release candidate has the following new items in the release.
Download: [ Wine 1.4-rc1 ]
Unigine’s naval real-time strategy game OilRush has gone gold!
We have finally completed development of Oil Rush, naval strategy game: http://oilrush-game.com/
Version 1.0 will be available worldwide on January, 25 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Distribution channels are: Steam, Desura, UNIGINE store, Ubuntu Software Center and some other digital stores.
Retail release in UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, Australia/New Zealand, South Africa and Benelux will be provided by Iceberg Interactive a little bit later.
Courtesy of the Khan Academy:
OpenXcom 0.4 preview!
There’s a preview of the first 2012-era character slated for Heroes of Newerth, Artesia:
Guild Software’s space combat massive multiplayer game Vendetta Online has had a few gameplay updates of late, revealed in their latest community newsletter:
Gameplay Change Recap
- Dropped cargo persists for 15 minutes, regardless of sector shutdown. Crates will eventually time out by class, making certain drops last much longer than others.
- New missions from the PCC.
- Scoring issues with Deneb War have been fixed. Deneb web-stats coming.
- Bounty Hunter report consolidated to a weekly post. More uses of in-game news are coming.
- Sound effects tweaked. Audio limiter also added to more platforms.
- Improved the game launcher (Updater) handling of certain timeout cases and network conditions, across all platforms.
- Xang Xi Self Propelled Concussion Launcher now has double the ammo, double the prox radius (60m) costs 1/10th to reload.
- Many, many bugfixes, great and small. No more “lost” convoy ships, etc.
- PC game startup and load process have been changed to use the same loading graphics as the mobile versions.Our Next Priorities
Revamping the faction system is currently the top “big” gameplay priority. Triple-PoS will go away, and there will be tradeoffs to different factional alignments, along with other long-discussed changes.
Before this drops, however, you may also see some cool Deneb War stuff (web stats, etc), along with more addons for capships, improvements to capship ownership and management, and improvements to station conquest. Some of this work isn’t super time consuming, and we like to drop in quick gameplay improvements whenever we can.
Beyond that, there will be major changes to how missions are visible and available throughout the galaxy, along with a lot of updates intended to bring people together more effectively in the galaxy.
We’re working towards a major update, hopefully slated for an April timeframe. Like all our best laid plans, this could be de-railed by some amazing new opportunity or other, but the current goal is to fix and tweak a lot of areas of gameplay in the near future.
Quick note that PC Gamer has named the team behind the Humble Indie Bundle (who include but are not limited to the developers of Wolfire Games!) as their community heroes of the year:
But one of the main reasons these guys are our community heroes this year is what they’ve done with that success: they’ve used it as a platform to launch (or relaunch) a range of great indie games that deserve a broader audience. Four times this year, they’ve released new bundles that showcase a particular game or developer: Trine, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron, and most recently Introversion’s whole catalogue. Each one has taken more than $700,000, a vast success for games that genuinely deserve it.
Yamagi Quake II is an enhanced client for id Software’s Quake II, focusing on maintaining the original gameplay experience:
Version 4.0 was just released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the engine source code (!).
Ryan “icculus” Gordon has made a .plan update describing the various open source tools he developed to port one of the most recent Humble Indie Bundle titles, Shank, to Linux:
We try to get at least a little open source out of every Humble
Bundle. Sometimes it’s epic–like a big pile of games–and sometimes
it’s bits and pieces, like the engine underneath Hammerfight.It’s something we push for.
X-Plane 10, “the world’s most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator for personal computers”, has been released (thanks mike4!):
Changes:
The sim retails for $79.99 US, and a demo is also available:
Demo Download: [ x-plane.com ]
Thanks to JeZ+Lee for letting us know they’ve released TetriAttack 2 with source code:
Download: [ 16bitsoft.com ]
A new development release of Wine has been announced. This new release has the following new items included in it.
Download: [ Wine 1.3.36 ]
Alien Arena version 7.53 is now released (thanks irritant!):
Version 7.53 features some very signifigant performance gains for people who like to run the game on higher settings, as well as some very nice improvements/bugfixes to the bot AI. We have also added two new maps, as well as the entity definition files which now allow for custom reconfiguration of a map’s entities, plus a number of other updates and bugfixes. For a complete changelog see http://icculus.org/alienarena/changelogs/7.53.txt
Alien Arena also has some new 3rd party content portals where you can grab the latest and greatest 3rd party levels as well as some of the “retired” classics:
http://code.google.com/p/aa3rdparty/http://3rdpartyalien.3r.funpic.de/index.html
A new developer release of Wine has been announced. This version being 1.3.35 has the following new items included in it.
Download: [ Wine 1.3.35 ]
Thanks to onionman77 for letting us know about the Kickstarter campaign for Ensign 1, a space combat game where players can leave their ships.
Cheeseness sent in the following:
Ever wanted to know how many Linux users have purchased the Humble Indie Bundle? Ever wanted to see how the average payments for MacOS have varied across every promotion? Perhaps you’re interested in the amount of money contributed by Windows for just the “Indie” branded bundles?
Wish granted!
With approval from the Humble Bundle guys, I am proud to present the results of a couple of days’ worth of work: The Humble Visualisations, a set of self-updating charts, graphs and calculated statistics that explore and compare the performance of Humble Bundles past and present.
Feedback is welcome, discussion encouraged :D
OpenGOO is a free and open clone of World of Goo project; new developers welcome!
GBGames has released the first alpha version of “Stop That Hero!“, a “deceptively simple” strategy game where you play the villain. Features:
The game sells for $7.50 US.
Ars Technica has taken a look at the latest Humble Indie Bundle, complete with quotes from the project’s volunteers:
One of the most exciting aspects of the bundles is that they mark the first time many of the games have been ported to platforms other than Windows, with each title offering full support for play on a Mac or on Linux. “The most ambitious aspect of a Humble Bundle is definitely the cross-platform porting,” Esguerra agreed. “Some developers are ready for it from day one, but usually a game is Windows-only and needs to get ported to Mac and Linux. Ryan Gordon and Edward Rudd have been instrumental in this, but a lot of developers will do ports internally as well.”
The Humble Bundles have done more for gaming on the Mac and Linux than maybe any other single thing in the past few years, as the team can go to developers who may be leery of cross-platform work and both provide talent to help with the porting and point to a proven business model so the developers understand that porting their game is a winning strategy.
Also, the current offering has been expanded to include the soundtracks from every title!
Any other notable titles on Desura of late that I’ve missed? Thanks!