Blender 2.80 released, gets industry sponsorship

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

Via GamingOnLinux.

Got comments? Post them on our forum thread.

Sintel The Game has 3 playable Levels (Alpha 2)

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).

Gameplay Video

As a game alpha, it is OK.

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.

And it looks nice.

Download the Alpha (1GB) from https://github.com/jonburesh/sintelgame/releases

Top 3 Open Source Pinball Games

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

Nexus Pinball

Nova Pinball Gameplay

Started only a month ago, Nova Pinball's simple sole 2D table is a lot of fun and development has made good progress.

Emilia Pinball

Emilia Pinball Gameplay on Five Tables

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).

Emilia Pinball Zombie Table Gameplay

There is a zombie/horror/Halloween table, which unfortunately contains non-free content.

Linball

Linball Gameplay

The 2D Linball table is crazy fast but suffers from some sounds ripped from proprietary games (maybe there's more non-free content).

Honorable mentions

Libre Pinball Gameplay

Libre Pinball (thread) is very atmospheric but has no missions and only very few table elements right now. It was made using the Godot Engine.

Sadly, Visual Pinball only runs on Windows (wine page).

Vector Pinball for Android unfortunately has no instructions for desktop/Linux compilation.

Devil's Pinball Buggy Gameplay

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!

Blender Game Making Challenge starts on the 20th of this month

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.

DevCorner: Liberate some great Blender game art!

UPDATE: First set of files has been released (license CC0) and on my advise he added some stretch goals:

• 600$ > 3 game ready Enemies! (models, sfx, animations, effects)

• 650$ > Dynamic optimized lighting system! (rich dynamic lighting with low resource usage )

• 750$ > 4 new weapons!(model, texture, sound)

• 850$ > Triple the amount of the actual props! (interactive objects,explosibles, new walls, doors windows etc.)

• 900$ > New player model (model, textures)

Currently it is standing at 530$ and there are 22 days to go, so chances are we will see some more nice stuff out of this.
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Way too many closed-source game projects never see the light of the day, and their code and assets are forever lost. Now at least one developer thought he could at least make a few bucks by liberating this content under the CC0 license:





There is some seriously nice stuff in that pack, and the 500 US $ he is asking for on his indigogo page is a bargain for it.

At the time of writing this, 200$ have been already pledged, so with your contribution it should be easy going to reach the goal. Update: 515$ contributed, thanks to everyone! Maybe the guy should think about strechgoals ;)

But I sure wish more developers of failed projects would release their assets like this.