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.
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.
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.
Alien Arena version 7.53 is now released (thanks irritant!):
Extended use of VBO for big performance increases
Signifigant improvements to bot AI
“Dm Lights” server option
Improvements to menu code
Improved stats algorithms
Entity definition files
Optimized and improved vegetation rendering
Variety of bug fixes and code cleansing
Two new maps
Optimizations to IQM and MD2 rendering
New “Ultra” skill level
Speed hack detection improvements
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:
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.
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!
This latest version of Bastion is built to run right in your web browser, using Google’s new Native Client technology. This really is the full Bastion experience, featuring our highly acclaimed 1080p artwork, musical score, reactive narration, and play experience, all built to run fast and smooth just like our Xbox 360 and PC versions. And, much like those versions, you can play through the prologue for free. The full game can be unlocked for $14.99.
We’re very excited to have Bastion now available on Chrome since it makes getting into the game easier than ever before, and opens up the experience to tons of new players… including players using computers other than Windows-based PCs.
The Chrome version of Bastion requires:
- Processor: 1.7 GHz Dual Core or Greater
- Memory: 2 GB
- Hard Disk Space: 1.0 GB
- Video Card: 512 MB graphics card (shader model 2)
(Note: Gamepad controllers are not supported in this initial release.)
Moreover, Ubuntu Vibes has some tips on getting the game to run if you have issues.
