A walking little guy

Usually I do not follow requests for graphics coming from random people for projects I am not interested in, as anyone else my plate is more than full. But this time is a small, GPL licensed little web game, so I may have a bit to spare and here is a quick animation (made frame by frame with Inkscape and animated with GIMP):

Now if I find some time to animate the guy walking in the other 4 directions... and 5 monsters (animated too)... and some walls and obstacles... and power-ups... Uh! I told you my plate is full...

Turn Based Strategy: 8 Kingdoms

Battle for Wesnoth is the Free TBS game, arguably the Free strategy game: the best known, the most played and probably the best looking. But beside it, there are other smaller, less known gems, like 8 Kingdoms, a game which got packaged for Fedora after the F8 release, so I believe it is not part of any spin or media release, but is only a yum install away...

Before the obligatory screenshot I feel I need to put a warning: the user interface sucks and the graphics are quite ugly, but I like its gameplay better than Wesnoth's and find it really addictive.

Surely, there are some other things I would like to see in such a game, like more depth, a single player campaign, a backstory and maybe some role playing elements and features which might come handy (like a movable camera angle, which one would expect from a 3D game). And less crashes.

But considering it started by some students as an university project and it has about a couple of active developers, it is really awesome. A must play. Maybe also a must contribute, too bad I know jack about 3D modeling.

Pac-Man baddies with Inkscape: clipart, tutorial, screencast and challenge

My not so secret Pac-Man project is finished, the clipart images are available on my collection as well as on openclipart.org, the tutorial is on the tutorials page, a screencast too, so now is the time to talk about them.

Ladies and gentelmen, here are some Pac-Man bad buys and bad girls:

The idea started months ago, when I made a silly cartoon about Fedora Games and I quickly realized the potential: is easy and fun (at least I think so), anybody can create such graphics and a tutorial is obvious and quick enough to be covered also by a screencast.
It got stuck in my head for a long time, screaming to get out waiting for me to get in the right mood for that. And in the end I gave up.

I started by doing a screencast (as I said, is based on a concept I was already familiar with), sorry for the Flash abuse, it is made with Istanbul in Ogg Theora and I have the original, but until fedoratv gets usable, its temporary home will be on YouTube.


Then I made in Inkscape the base shape, taking at each step screenshots for a future tutorial.

When done the next step was to create various derivatives, changing either the texture or the shape, there are many of them I like, for example the ninja-pirate duo (who would win in a fight?):

or the textured stripes and camouflage:

The original plan was to create 9 distinct images but the ideas came over and over so I jumped first at 16 and ended with 25 images (and still have a lot of ideas, but enough is enough).

Then I uploaded the images: both in a pacman gallery of my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (check the arcade tag).

After that, crop the screenshots, combine them, put together in a HTML, add some English text and the Pac-Man baddies Inkscape tutorial is made. Translate everything into Romanian language (yup, I write in English first), put everything online, including the screencast and I am almost done.

The last step is this: blog about them and throw a challenge: look at the gallery and find one baddie representing you. If you can't find one, read the tutorial and draw one yourself. Enjoy it. Show it to the entire world. Maybe upload it to the Open Clip Art Library.

And with that, enough for me with clipart for a while...

How it's made: my map elements with Inkscape

I imagine such a preamble is not very inviting, but it is the preamble of the latest article from my tutorials website:

It's been a while since I wrote a tutorial (in fact quite a while, as "wrote" != "published") and that was for good reason: I was not able to come with a tutorial fitting the rest of my my tutorial site and did not want to break the tradition . So it was a hard decision to write this piece, which comes as a conclusion to my quest to create a RPG tileset of over 50 clipart images, a decision I made mostly because I already was asked about how I made the images and expect even more questions in the future.

It is not really a tutorial, more a "how it's made" for my map tileset (available also from the Open CLip Art Library), it describe the process I used in creating those images, a very short sketch of the workflow (described in more detail in the article) is like this:

[read more]

Of course, there is available as usual a Romanian translation.

And now I can really consider this topic closed.

Quest complete: RPG map tileset

I can consider complete my quest for a RPG map tileset, 50 images are done (outline and full color), uploaded to my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (look at the cartography tag).

Now is the time to sit back, relax, upload some samples in various places (like here), annoy people with that and maybe think at the next step, which should be something different. Or should I do more pieces for the set, considering I have a long list with additional ideas? This is a good think to think about while sitting back.

I don't know how transparent is from those clipart images how much I miss the time when I used to fight orcs and be happy about that. I guess it's quite obvious (is a long time, about an year and a half).

PS: the samples above are JPEGs, the PNG version was to big in file size, so I had to use lossy compression (with high quality), but load the JPEG, change the extension and will get either PNG and SVG.

Uploading to OCAL is killing me...

So the time has come: the set is done, it have to be uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library. Unfortunately by hand, one by one, the full color image, the outline and a PNG thumbnail.
Question again: what are the computers build for? By any chance to help us automate repetitive tasks? Anyone wonders why I hesitate re-uploading my images (some hundreds) from the old site? Look at the pretty screencast (2.8MB, Ogg Theora) and multiply the operation with 50 (the number of images I have to upload):

Php coders badly needed... anyone available?

Coloring the map

The other day I talked about the outlines for my RPG map tileset, naturally I went to the next step: adding pretty colors (as planned) and it progress quite fast, it is the easy part.

I tried to get a balanced result: at the same time shiny enough but also simple enough, I could have added a lot more details but this is my current trade-off (feel free to start from the outlines and do your own colorization).

One decision I made will surely come back and bite me in the ass: I used gradients. They make the look prettier but after importing a few images with gradients Inkscape gets confused very fast (it is a known bug).

But enough for now, I spammed enough with this topic, will talk again about it when the set will be complete and uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library (hopefully next week considering the current speed). Until then I will quietly update my gallery, one by one.

Halfway to an empty pledge: a RPG map tileset

One of my many failures in 2007 was to get the people at the Open Clip Art Library into holding a "month of cartography", such a benign defeat is a good show of how bad I react at losing.

A few years ago I made a proof of concept about how Inkscape can be used to create RPG maps and a (small at the time) number of terrain SVG tiles. This showed to be one of the hottest topics on my blog, with important traffic, many reactions and follow-ups (I got many people contacting me offline about it). It can be considered a success.

Recently on the Inkscape users mailing list the topic of cartography came to attention so I got the idea about holding a "month of cartography" at OCAL, we used to have such things, but the (still unfinished) migration to ccHost shifted the focus. They are good for channeling energies, gaining momentum, generating buzz and potentially bringing new contributors and users.
My approach was to make a pledge: if at least two other people back me and will contribute, I pledged to contribute at least 50 new, original, images.

The idea didn't got enough traction, nobody backed me. So here is me bad at losing: once the idea was developed in my head, I continued working on it and created (at a slow pace, due to the low motivation) the above mentioned quantity of images. So today I am halfway to this pledge: I finished the outlines (this was the hardest part) for 50 images, they still nedd to be colored (that is the second half), see below a few highlights:

For now the images are available for download as part of my own clipart collection, after I add colors they will be uploaded (both as outline and full-color) to the Open CLip Art Library. The coloring process will follow at the same slow pace, probably I will make enough noise when ready.

The set is not consistent as style, scale, perspective or quality but, hey, I pledged 50 images, not 50 quality images... (could it still be labeled as a set?) see also a screenshot with the entire set:

When approaching the target number a motivational issue appeared and I got confused about what to do next: start coloring, as originally planned, draw more new shaped, as I have in my head a large list of items which could be drawn or just call all this thing off, freeze and upload as it is.
Most likely I will stick to the plan but he work speed may have to suffer, watch the tileset to monitor the progress.

GNOME playing cards

There is an undergoing vote trying to get better default in GNOME games, I don't know why there are so few votes, only a couple so far, maybe it was not publicized enough.
So go ahead and vote your favorite, maybe we'll get a shinier desktop.

note: of course I voted for my own set, but everyone should vote what he likes best.

Linux games: best of breed

While I find such lists of must have games an interesting read and I think is wonderful to have all those games (big thank you to all packagers), my opinion is that the focus should be on a "best of breed" selection and promotion of this particular selection.

These days I play a lot less than I used to and my area of interest (and expertise, if I may say that) has closed a lot (and is badly represented by the available Free Linux games) but I see a lot of redundancy, for example Alien Arena, Cube, Cube 2 "Sauerbraten", Digital Paint's Paintball, Nexuiz, Open Arena, Tremulous, Urban Terror, Warsow and World of Padman are all the same for me: they are First Person Shooters. They all have they own particularities, strengths and weakness (sometime even the same engines), but for a non hardcore gamer like me, the similarities are more than the differences.
And yes, if I am an expert in one of them, I will be pretty good in the others, but honestly, I will never be an expert in the area, I play FPS games only occasionally.

What is the best of the FPS genre? I really don't know, I mostly play Open Arena because this is what I am most used to from the Quake 3 legacy.

I understand defining "best of breed" is very hard, each person has his own option. And also defining what "breed" is hard but important in this: for example for the "Strategy" genre, Battle for Wesnoth is "the best", but refining the genre in turn based and strategy, then Wesnoth is the best TBS with something else (Widelands and Glest are my current favorites) for RTS.

So, what are your favorite genres? The favorite games in those genres?

Glest - a promising 3D Real Time strategy game

Winter holidays: some are on vacancy, some are happy, some are relaxing, so I think a little post about a game is on topic.

Glest is a free 3D RTS (real time strategy) game available one yum away for your Fedora desktop:

yum install glest

I hate to use that label, as it usually indicate a game with a great potential which lacks some fundamental features (and there are no signs about them in the near future), but Glest is a promising game.

The good part: is easy to learn, with a classic Warcraft feel, nice graphics, a good concept of two factions, magic versus tech, 3D with a modern look, balanced research tree, unique units and buildings and more. It has lot of the things needed to become "the" Free RTS.
On top of that, it can be easily extended and modded: new maps, units, factions.

But, as I said, it is "promising", despite being at version 2.0.1 (with a 3.0 in alpha stage) it lacks so many things: event making the screenshots for this post was a pain - edit a config file to change the mode to windowed and modify the screen resolution, no GUI for this and no screenshot key.
Some notable missing features: no network play, no savegames, no campaign. Aa a 3D game, it may tax your computer heavily, so an in-game resolution selector is, I think, a must have, and, again for a 3D game, I expect as a must the ability to change the view, rotate the camera and zoom in and out.

But install, play and judge for yourself, I am a RTS wuss, I got my ass kicked big time in Glest.

IcedTea and games

Has everyone read the new interview about IcedTea and Free Java in Fedora 8?

Update: as Hans points out in the comments, the game was already packaged for Fedora (my mistake was to look only at the games spin live DVD).

Here is my anecdotal experience with it: being bored, I was looking at a list of Free games when I noticed FreeCol, a game based on the old Colonization, the screenshots were nice but the game written in Java. So my curiosity exploded: does it work in Fedora with IcedTea? Yes, it worked very well, see the screenshot below (so the next step was to add it to our games whishlist.

UFO: Alien Invasion

I have strong feelings about this game, so I'll start by stating my bias: I was introduced to the X-COM series with UFO2 X-COM: Terror from the Deep, which I liked a lot and played for years. After that, I tried X-COM: Apocalypse and not liked it enough: it was too complicated, too hard and had too brighter graphics (which have not helped with the mood). Only after that I discovered X-COM: UFO Defense (A.K.A.: UFO: Enemy Unkonwn), the first game of the series, which was about the same as TFTD but smaller and uglier.
Later I tried the demos of a two spin-offs, X-COM: Interceptor and X-COM: Enforcer and did not liked them: they were different kind of games.

Enter Open Source clones: I found UFO2000, a Free implementation (with multiplayer!) of the battlescape portion of UFO1 but nothing more and UFO: Alien Invasion about which I will talk in depth.

The franchise was revived with UFO: Aftermath, a games I skipped without even looking at a demo, based on reviews with its two sequels: UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight.

Now back at UFO: Alien Invasion. It uses a heavily modified Quake II engine and despite this it manages to re-capture the feeling of the classic UFO: Enemy Unkonwn.
My first encounter with the game was years ago, when I saw a small preview, containing (IIRC) only a single battlescape area, with fixed team, no inventory management, no bases, no geoscape, no strategy.

I keept in my mind and checked the progress from time to time, in 2004 the project had the so-called "x-mas release", another tech demo. I was so disappointed by its status that I totally lost my confidence in the project and completely forgot about it for a long time.

A few days ago I got a reminder about the game and went to the website and noticed the release number, 2.1.1, which gave me hope. Also, the screenshots look cool. Do I downloaded the binary installer (the game is not yet packaged in Fedora, but is on the whishlist and the Loki installer is working).

For about a few days I play it heavily and I like it: the look and feel, the engine, the implementation, the attention to detail, the faithfulness to the original, the improvements. Instead of a long review, here are some more shiny pictures:

But the conclusion is not very optimistic: I played it for a few days already, but the games does not appear winnable. It is so complete in some areas that it hurts, it could be the best Linux game I ever saw.
The hopes? According to the TODO, the developers evaluate even an engine change, so fat chance to ever see the game in a "complete" stage.

Now back with me to the playing field to see what happens next (not much, I think I exhausted the research tree)...

Widelands

Naturally, I tried the Fedora Games Live DVD (is easier than downloading all your games to your Fedora desktop, try them and remove) and one of the few I could see me playing is Widelands.
It is basically a reimplementation of the classic Settlers II which I used to like and play about 10 years ago, but with a slightly worse interface, a bit more buggy and with less maps. However, it has the same look and feel and some additional benefits: larger screen resolutions, network play, freedom...

Games: retro style

Somewhat a continuation of my first games cartoon has a "retro" style (in fact, is not very original, it is based on something I made a few weeks ago but with a different perspective):

Games!

I promised yesterday a Fedora Games related cartoon, not is the time to keep my word:

Did you know we have a strong Games SIG and one of the awesome things coming in Fedora 8 will be an official games spin in the format of a live DVD (and maybe a live CD also)?

GPL for Heretic and Hexen? That would be a good thing

About 10 years ago I had a group of friends (or should I cal them gaming-buddies? anything, but not acknowledge they were my coworkers) who preferred Heretic for network play (in the detriment of Doom or Quake), so I had a lot of fun with it. As a consequence, I will always have a bit of nostalgia about it and enjoy a run of the game.

As we can see from the Doom example, GPL is a real chance for such a game to get new life injected into it, so I pretty much agree with the open letter to Raven Software and Activision for a license change to GPL and signed the petition. Not last, that would be awesome also for the Linux gamers.

Bible Fight - cool Flash game

This cool Flash game,, seen on Planet linux360, thanks to Starlog.

It bring me a bit of nostalgia about a time around 10 years ago when I used to enjoy a little Mortal Kombat match, but I am a little too old for that now and my fingers are not fast enough.


BTW, are there such fighting games released as GPL and available for Linux? (bonus point: funny, cartoonish look, maybe SVG graphics, kind of Monkey Bubble style)

Sinclair Spectrum Nostalgia

My celebration of the 25-th anniversary of the Sinclair Spectrum is to highlight some games or applications that influenced me in some way.

• Rygar - because it was my first and you will have a soft spot for your first forever. Well, it was not the first computer game I ever played, but it was the first I really liked and the first I won. Later I grew bored by the genre and stopped playing this kind of games, I revisited it years after in a improved version (MAME), but it have not captured the old feeling.
  
  


• Elite was in those years my backup game, something I played when I wanted to play something but didn't have something interesting to play (note: later, in the PC era the backup game became Heroes of Might and Magic II-IV). Sure, I tried later the PC version and some clones, but it was too little, too late.
  
  


• The Dizzy series I liked so much that I tried to do my own clone, directly in Z80 assembly language. I started by drawing a complete set of tiles for graphics (with pen on graph paper, no less!), creating a game map of about 20 rooms composed from those tiles, an engine to display the game world and move the main character in this world (complete with keyboard input and sprite animation) and display of text messages using a custom font. Then I got to the hard part: implementing the game logic, so I put the game on hold to get some ideas and life took me away from it.
  
  


• Art Studio was a graphics software, not a game, and it defined my way of drawing for many years. Later, in the Windows 95 era I kept using MS Paint and missing its version from Windows 3.x because it resembled better some "features" from Art Studio.
  

Oh, and BTW, in that era my "computer monitor" was a black and white 14" TV.

Branding in desktop games

I wonder how appropriate is to use themes for the games in GNOME to "promote" a distro. I was told by someone to send such themes upstream.
Now, if i would be the upstream maintainer, i would feel the need to be distro-impartial and reject such contributions, this is why i am reluctant to propose those upstream.
But i, as a theme creator, i am not sure creating such themes in the first place is a god idea, still weighting it. Opinions?

Anyway, just for fun, i did such a theme:

This Same GNOME theme is available for download.