SIGs/Games/WishList

ROADMAP

Scratchpad of ideas for reviving Fedora Games SIG

General Goals / Objectives

• Bringing more games into Fedora to support it as an ideal distribution for gaming with free and open source software (Four Foundations: Freedom, Features, First)

• Supporting developer libraries / tools for creating games and making it easier for game developers to create and make the existance of these libraries more apparently to onlooking developers.

• Trying to create collaboration between projects, and promote sharing of the projects where possible (be it assets, developer time) to take advantage of the tenets and spirit of free software.

Short-term vision

• We should set up some projects we actively cover and endorse and give support to. And projects can apply to achieve the status of our endorsement, we should have requirements that these projects must adhere to.

• Identifying lists of FOSS games public and well-known, seeing if we can package and get them into the distribution

• Create resources for game developers who are looking to get started with Fedora (e.g. "How to game dev with Fedora")

• Create an area where community members can post articles that they found helpful with their game (like my VLC playlist idea)

• Create criteria for what we deem acceptable (the FSF free software definition would work for this) in terms of software. And Free Culture licesnes according to the Creative Commons people.

Long-term vision

• To create a movement to endorse, encourage, support, and hold social solidarity with projects and aspiring individuals who are commited to user freedom.

• Improved communication and visibility of existing resources for anyone wanting to create games for Fedora

• "Quick" place to look for information, clearly visible, in more places than just a wiki page

• Demonstrate the capabilities of free and open source gaming and its advancements with Fedora

Next steps for moving forward

• Grow interest with the SIG, gain new members, build up membership by explaining what our objectives our and sharing that across the project (see: Community Blog, even Fedora Magazine, maybe)

• Begin working on some of the short-term vision items

• Setting up a weekly or every other week meeting time for the SIG may be useful to coordinate time to discuss and work on objectives. I have a mumble server, but perhaps someone would be willing to give us a server for this purpose.

• Good opportunity to address questions like gathering resources (where are they? where do we put them? how are they communicated to a wider audience? – this isn't libraries / tools, per say, but resources for getting access to those tools)

Other details / notes

• We should be as inclusive of other people as possible, even when individuals have opinions that are deemed unpopular.

• Try to get people to collaborate more often, and remove unneeded fragmentation between projects (try to unify the workforce)

• But to do this we need to create an environment where someone can show up, tell us what kind of game they want to be involved with and we can get them to a person involved in that project as soon as possible.

• Reaching out to certain software projects (either games or resources for game developers) and querying their interest for packaging Fedora (working closely with upstream should always be a priority) (e.g.engines such as https://godotengine.org/ which are not currently packaged)

Fedora Games WishList

Games

• Blackvoxel - a new sandbox game based on a voxel engine PENDING ON FREE ASSETS
• CRRCsim - rc model flight simulator (GPL)
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - very popular modern roguelike game. (There's a previous attempt at packaging this from a few years back: Bug 570803)
• freeorion - moo rewrite
• levelhead - Augmented Reality logic game using webcam and printed out cubes. Check out video: youtube
• Nikki and the Robots - Cute non-violent gameplay with wall-jumping and remote robot controlling
• oolite - elite remake - under review
• Pachi - Strong text based (GTP) Go player. Best together with GoGui.
• Pathological - Marble Puzzle Game
• pax-britannica - one-button real-time strategy game
• Race into Space - full opensource release of a once closed source game, including vorbis sounds / music and theora videos!
• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a collection of one-player puzzle games.
• UFO2000 is free and opensource turn based tactical squad simulation multiplayer game.
• Unvanquished - Fork of Tremulous that is getting active development. Probably requires this NaCl issue to be resolved first... and also depends on librocket (unpackaged).
• danger from the deep 3d submarine simulation
• Zero-K free, multiplatform, open-source RTS game based on the Spring engine
• Warsow Warsow is set in a futuristic cartoonish world where rocketlauncher-wielding pigs and lasergun-carrying cyberpunks roam the streets. It is a completely free, fast-paced first-person shooter
• Wyrmsun A strategy game which features elements of mythology, history and fiction.
• Tales of Maj'Eyal Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME) is a free, open source roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building. Play as one of many unique races and classes in the lore-filled world of Eyal, exploring random dungeons, facing challenging battles, and developing characters with your own tailored mix of abilities and powers.
• Violetland In this game the player should help a girl by name of Violet to struggle with hordes of monsters. For this purpose the various weapon, and also the special abilities of the heroine which are opening with experience can be used. In game there are elements of RPG in the form of strength-agility-vitality and derivatives. Also there is an unique feature: dynamic change of day and night.
• Jag Simple puzzle game
• Zero Ballistics Zero Ballistics is a unique blend of first person shooter and tank combat, focusing on multiplayer gaming exclusively.
• PipeWalker This is a puzzle game in which you need to combine the components into a single circuit:connect all computers to a network server, bring water to the taps, etc.
• TripleA TripleA is a turn based strategy game and board game engine, similar to Axis & Allies or Risk. Free to play online
• Blood Frontier Blood Frontier was a single-player and multi-player first-person shooter game, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2 (Sauerbraten).
• Rigs of Rods Rigs of Rods is a sandbox-style vehicle simulator.
• Micropolis Micropolis is one of the oldest and grandest of city simulation games.
• Xmahjongg Xmahjongg is a simple implementation of the popular solitaire Mah Jongg game. The object is to remove all 144 tiles from the playing area by matching them two at a time. Xmahjongg is the classical version with little in the way of requirements and enough aesthetical and gameplay features to provide hours and hours of fun.
• Spring 1944 Spring:1944 is a WWII themed game based on the open source Spring Engine. Our goal is to create four fully functional sides (US, Germany, USSR, Britain) with period-accurate units and strengths. Realism is a primary design goal, second only to creating a game that is fun and accessible to play.
• Freeminer Freeminer is a Minecraft-inspired sandbox game.
• Terminal Overload Free and open-source first person shooter / spiritual successor to Revenge Of The Cats: Ethernet
• Nimuh Nimuh is a project puzzle game destined to improve the knowledge of Andalusia.
• battleship You play versus a computer controlled opponent.Instead of firing blindly you get hints about the enemy's ships' positions.
• Freegish A free version of the game Gish
• Maze of Galious A very addictive game where you have to kill thousands of enemies, collect items in order to obtain new powers and defeat some really great demons at the end of each level
• CorsixTH Open source clone of Theme Hospital
• Toy Cars Toy Cars is a physics based 2-D racer.
• SDL Asylum Young Sigmund has a few problems. To help him resolve his mental instability you must enter the surreal world of his inner mind and shut down the malfunctioning brain cells. A port of Andy Southgate's 1994 Acorn Archimedes platform shooter.
• choria An MMORPG that's all about grinding and doing chores.
• MegaMek MegaMek is an unofficial, online version of the Classic BattleTech board game. MegaMek is open source, free software. It is licenced under the GPL.
• Zod Zod Engine is a remake of the 1996 classic game by Bitmap Brothers called Z. Z is a capture the flag style RTS. In this game you command robots and vehicles with the purpose of destroying the enemy's fort.
• 2048-Qt The 2048 Game implemented in Qt
• StuntRally Stunt Rally game with Track Editor, based on VDrift and OGRE.
• bombermaaan A classic Bomberman game with multiplayer support, cloned on original SNES games. Also similar to Dynablaster.
• trainspoted TrAInsported is a game about trains, Artificial Intelligence and lots and lots of passengers.
• goatattack Probably the best game involving goats and shotguns!
• Seven kingdoms, Ancient Adversaries RTS game in a medieval world. Opensourced since 2009 under GPL (without some music and translations).

Tools

• Doom3 - now opensourced! (GPLv3)
• Fuego - Text based (GTP) Go player using Monte-Carlo tree search. Best together with GoGui.
• GoGui is a graphical user interface to programs that play the board game Go and support the Go Text Protocol, such as gnugo and Fuego.
• tyrquake - Conservative Quake 1 engine (initial SRPM, needs desktop entry/icon, integration with autodownloader for data files)
• ryzom free 3d mmorpg client/server

Games with Dead upstream or other issues

The packaging of the following games is not recommended. The packager should be able to fix any reported bugs. In some cases upstreaming them may not possible so a lot of downstream patches will have to be included in the package, revival or forks of the projects are other options. These also probably include half of the games in our wishlist at the moment.

• automaniac - 3d car deathmatch game
  • Last Release: August 2006
  • Last Commit: July 2008

• BabyChess
  • Last Release: March 2005

• Battles of Antargis - goodlooking free RTS Upstream is not dead, but it's not very active
  • Last Release: December 2007
  • Last Commit: July 2009

• Bloodmasters - Arcade, oldschool multiplayer and bloodshed.That's what the game Bloodmasters is about. Play with friends on your LAN or online and experience this oldschool top-down shooter. The game supports Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag and Scavenger game modes. The game is completely freeware and without ads, spyware or other unwanted garbage.
  • Last Release: February 2008
  • Last Commit: No public VCS

• Biniax-2 puzzle game with higly original game mechanics (will need to be patched to look for datas elsewhere than beside the binary, preliminary spec here, feel free to grab)
  • Last Release: v1.30 released in May 2009
  • Last Commit: No public VCS

• brickshooter - puzzle game
  • Last Release: May 2008
  • Last Commit: No public VCS

• ClanShip - battleship game (source)
  • Dead Upstream
• Dungeonhack - Ambitious RPG that never got past a minimal demo state.
  • Dead Upstream

• Dave Gnukem - platform game inspired by Duke Nukem 1 (might be too similar)
  • Last Release: August 2004
  • Is this fully GPLv2+ and only?

• gillo is a two player game in a 3D ellipsoid playground
  • Last Release: July 2005
• Go Ollie Nice platform game using TuxCap
  • Last Release: June 2009 - Upstream active
  • Last Commit: No public VCS
  • May not compile on x86_64 No longer true. It compile fine under x64_64 with TuxCap 1.4.0.

• JVGS - a "minimalistic platform game" with elements based on xkcd. Music is non-commercial use only, closed pkg review

• Kraptor is a classic shoot 'em up scroller game, where you must fight against tons of bad dudes (will need to be rebranded, raptor is a trademark for a very similar game).
  • Last Release: April 2004

• Operation Citadel - Operation Citadel is a WWII, turn based platoon, company level war game on the Eastern Front. The game is somewhere in between CLose Combat® and Steel Panthers®.
  • Last Release: Unknown. Seems old
  • Last Commit: No public VCS
  • source is distribute as MSVC 6.0 project, I guess it will not compile, upstream seems dead

• Open Quartz Free GPL data combined with the Quake 1 GPL engine
  • Last Release: Aug 2004

• Open Raider. Not sure if it'd qualify, but it's a Tomb Raider clone.
  • Last Commit: 2004

• Peg Solitaire - A simple peg-jumping game similar to Hi-Q. No idea if Hi-Q has trademark protection.
  • Last Release: Jan 2008

• Race - 3D top view racing game
  • Last Release: Jan 2003

• Snowballz - fun RTS game (with penguins!) Review Request (cancelled)

• Super Transball 2
  • Last Release: 2005

• tux-football - 2d soccer game
  • Last Release: Nov 2004

• VoR - Dodge rocks until you die. "it's fast-paced, difficult and addictive." -- Linux Format
  • Deesn't seem active I may be wrong

• XShipWars A 2d Multiplayer Space battle game.
  • Uses ESD, so it needs to be cleaned up for PulseAudio compatibility or would need to also package developers own YIFF Sound System, http://freshmeat.net/projects/yiff and their own JSW joystick support program, http://freshmeat.net/projects/libjsw
  • Upstream doesn't seem active
• Zatacka - arcade multiplayer game for 2-6 players on one keyboard
  • Last Release: 2007
  • Last Commit: Oct 2007
  • Review request

References

* http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Suggested