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A recent article posted here reminded me of all of the great FOSS games that I've gotten to play over the years.

To be honest, while FOSS games do feel kind of rough and unfinished sometimes (though it really does depend on the game; BosWars and LinCity feel like very well made games), they tend to be on a level of stimulation and creativity that really hasn't been seen since the 1990s.

1. LinCity (as well as LinCity-ng)
LinCity, while likely to draw a direct comparison to a similarly titled game by Maxis, really is in a league of its own. LinCity is a construction and resource management simulator that actually leads its players to think about how to design and build a city at a far more involved level than traditional city planning games.

2. BosWars
BosWars is an awesome RTS game that is absurdly easy to modify and improve (the game engine interprets plaintext scripts written in LUA). While the AI either lands in the categories of "Lacking" or "absurdly hard", I could see that it would be an awesome multiplayer game.

3. Globulation
Yet another RTS game, except that this one puts you in a far more interesting role. All the player can do is set construction and general goals/waypoints for the glob creatures presented. From there, they automatically go about their work and assign themselves to different buildings and waypoints. I think that this game would also be really awesome in multiplayer, though the AI is geared very well for every level of skill ranging from beginners to advanced players.

4. OpenTTD
OpenTTD is a free and open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. As such, it inherits its parent game's features while adding a wide variety of tweaks and improvements, such as a built-in modding utility/package manager.

5. OpenArena
This is a fork of the classic Quake III Arena, and thus inherits that game's fast paced action. While I'm not really too much of a fan of FPS games, this one is really fun to play. Please note that the character models used have quite a few polygons, so it is worthwhile to roughly double the system requirements listed on their page for a playable experience (though I would expect someone with SLI'd Voodoo 2 graphics cards to do pretty well on the processor listed).

6. KSpaceDuel
This is a clone of Space Duel. Nothing more need be said except that it has quite a bit of customization options available.

These are just the games that I have personally played and enjoyed. Wikipedia has a far larger list, and I encourage anyone reading this journal to check it out and reply if they so wish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

It's been a busy week between class, and doing my Let's Play series; I've found doing Let's Plays a good way to unwind after a stressful day, and I've also done a bit more livestreaming. To avoid spamming the journal list, I'll likely just do weekly updates until I have communities implemented properly in rehash.

Dwarf Fortress
For those who missed it, I've started a livestreaming series where I play one of my favorite games of all time, Dwarf Fortress. I'm keeping a recap thread going alive on the official DF forums at Bay12. For those who are fans of the game are recommended to check it out. My schedule is somewhat fluid from week to week, and is complicated by a trip to New York City Sunday-Tuesday, but I will try and stream at least once week, or two; I'll usually announce streaming times 24-48 hours in advance, and on Twitter.

I'll name dwarves after those who commit story snipits, or those in the Livestream chat. My next broadcast date is tentatively late Wednesday, but that's subject to change.

NetHack
I have uploaded episodes 2, 3 and 4 (scheduled to go live at midnight tonight), with hope of having regular updates on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I have footage through episode 7 recorded, but episode 5 requires considerable editing as I do Sokoban in that, and I edited out most of the boring parts (which will be uploaded as a "special" video) with, or soon after 5.

Episode 2
  - On this episode of Let's Play NetHack, we wander our way through the Gnomish Mine's, groaping our way through the dark in hopes of finding Minetown.

Episode 3
  - As our first character meet an unfortunate end, a shocking revelation is revealed that sending our poor host into a mental breakdown.

Episode 4 (goes public at midnight)
  - We learn that Barbarians can fight well in the dark as multiple events conspire to drive us crazy.

If you enjoy my videos, please, leave comments, and subscribe to my channel. Furthermore, I'll offer shoutouts and credits to anyone who'd be up for creating titlecards for my series, and perhaps offer them an exclusive chance to choose a game to me livestream or do a LPs. Given requests, I'm also going to record a special video at some point that goes more into detail on how to play NetHack specifically.

So, I've been feeling the urge on doing another livestream this weekend, and was debating what game to stream. I've had an urge to play Dwarf Fortress as of late, which also allows for good interaction with those in the community due to nickname and assigning roles; and perhaps keep playing the same fort over a series of streams. The tentative time of this livestream would be 12-6PM EST, on my Twitch channel. I'd be up for fielding questions from the community, talking about gaming and tech in general, basically the insanity of April Fools, only a more reasonable block of time.

I think I got all the kinks out of my recording setup, so I should be more reasonably be able to edit and post the stream (for those who missed the previous post, my recording of the 24 hour livestream was corrupted due to stupidity and user error). I'd be interested in suggests of what biome to play in, as well as names for the initial dwarves (6 remaining, excluding the one I claim for myself).

In other news, I've continued my Let's Play of NetHack, with Part 2 posting on Wednesday. Part 3 was supposed to go live on Friday, but got released a day early by mistake.

As promised, I've started a Let's Play series going into the details of NetHack as I once again quest for the Amulet of Yender through the Mines of Menace. For those who've never ascended, or just wish to understand the game better, I'm going into detail on much of the mechanics behind the game such as wand identification, price IDing, curse testing, and so forth. Hopefully with my guidance, you too can one day ascend into a demi-god. I'll try and update the series Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, but I may miss a day if life gets too hectic.

All my content, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareLike-Attribution license, and encoding in a WebM container with the VP8 and Ogg Vorbis codecs. I'll be uploading the raw WebM files once I have a suitable host to do so.

Introduction to NetHack
  - In which the interface, goals of the game, and dungeon layout are explained.

Let's Play Nethack #1
  - In which we start off as a Dwarvish Valkerie, get our first artifact, and run into trouble.

So, given the success of the livestream, I'm discussing with the staff doing future livestreams to sit back, discuss things with the community and such. We're thinking about once a month, and perhaps doing a multiplayer game that everyone can join in on (I'm thiking either Civilization or Europa Univeralis IV).

However, given my own experiences doing it, I'm going to try my hand at doing a Let's Play. Given its where we started, I thought it would be most appropriate to start with a series based on NetHack, and am working on recording an introduction video which will go over the basis of the game, and help prevent the series from being too repeative (I'll only upload runs which have a decent chance of ascending; generally ones that make it to Mine's End and finish Sokoban, maybe a bit further).

I'll post the intro video and my first episode hopefully this week. I'll probably upload them to YouTube and provide raw files. I'm encoding my raw videos in VP8+Ogg Vorbis in a WebM container, and will be licensing my content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Once I figure out a place to upload large WebM files, I'll also provide the edited source files for anyone who is YouTube allergic. I'll probably enable monetization on my account and let YouTube place ads in my video, to hopefully get a little money out of it. Beside NetHack, I may feature other games on Linux and open source gaming in general.

NOTE: This is a personal project and not related to SN directly. Unless something is on the main page, assume this is non-SN related, and I'm just writing about it here (since this is the closest thing I have to a blog)

I can't stand April Fools Day. It's juvenile, and a complete waste of my time. Spare time is not something I have a lot of.

I can see the appeal it once had, when newspapers used to sneak ONE fake story in, somewhere on page 5 or 6. This days though, it seems as a news website you are not trying hard enough unless 90% of your stories are fake, with bonus points for how plausible they are. It means that reading news online on April 1st is completely pointless - you might as well just boycott all news sites for 24 hours.

Which is what I did, including SoylentNews - I'm sure the VT100 theme was funny to some - thankfully I didn't see it.

A day that will live in e-fame-y.

This is just a place to hang some UTF-8 character regression tests.

Finally got the first set of code committed to rehash to allow use of IPv6 properly (dev.sn.org has had a AAAA record for ages, but IPv6 address handling has been hosed since day 1, that's why we don't publish one for production). Just need to add some UI tags so admins can see if a ipid/subid is IPv4 or IPv6, and we're more or less set here.

I made some small improvements to my typing-testing and training game: http://typerise.com/

All the source texts are public domain classics and a strange thing happens if you play for a few minutes at once. The act of typing becomes less and less conscious until you start reading the text properly, instead of just copying it. You might be interested what the book is and where you can read the whole thing, so now it tells you the title and links to the project gutenberg page for that book, which has a variety of text/ebook formats you can download.

There's also some minor formatting and labelling changes. Any suggestions or feedback is welcome.

Feel free to take the code and adapt it to your own purposes.