The old version has been “released” on March 7th, 2006. It contained a list of projects I was monitoring (you can see the old list in the post linked above).

in November 2007 in two posts (one, two) I tried to update the list starting from reporting what happened in those projects since the announcement but somehow got distracted (yea…).

So, now I’m finally doing the update and together with a minor selective list of updates on what happened with some of the projects listed there and what are the new ones.

We lost Americas Army for Linux/Mac which made me stop playing it, but there are rumors it may return with Americas Army 3.0. Since AA was a very important game as an example of what can be made for Linux, I hope it will return.

Attal and Boson are more or less in the state of coma. Attal did not release anything for two years, but latest updates in CVS are from 2 months ago and are related to the upcoming 1.0-rc3. Boson also did not release anything since Oct 2006, but latest changes are only 5 months old, so maybe…

The problem with both is that they base on QT3, and would probably require an upgrade to QT4 while such a massive upgrade is not the most motivational thing for a small team not actively working on the code, so it may be that we wont see those two anymore. Pity, cause they filed space of HOMM like and RedAlert like games pretty well.

Glest, Vega Strike, Nexuiz, TA Spring, UFO AI and Planeshift are alive and well with new releases every once in a while, but they differ in momentum, shape and size. Planeshift it a big project, with a lot of attention, Glest also is very active. Nexuiz is being developed in a slightly less “community” approach while Vega Strike was almost dead for 2 years before last major update which stimulated project very well.

Planeshift is overall very interesting project, probably the biggest gaming project in the open source world and the team is handling a MMORPG kind of game with amazing efficiency. I believe that everyone who’s interested in how open projects work should analyze this case. It’s one of the rare diamonds.

Danger from the Deep is still very young, and still didn’t get out of version 0.3, but is surprisingly playable, and with beautiful graphics and I can’t wait to next release (which should be soon cause trunk is a huge leap forward).

TA Spring is also very active, they have solid community and a high quality playable engine. I didn’t test the game for over a year now, but videos I saw show a huge upgrades in visual quality.

UFO AI is also alive once again with recent 2.3 release it gives a nice experience to those who miss original UFO games.

I do not track Legends too close, but they also are alive and running, and regarding Eternal-Lands its one of the most mysterious projects I’ve ever met with. I follow its development because I totally don’t understand how they operate. It seems to Slackware-like one-man project, with a great gaming experience that has an extremely solid community but I cannot understand the structure in which they work. Anyway, interesting project. Will keep following

New additions are YoFrankie! – game that uses Big Buck Bunny characters and is an experimental project for a game using Crystal Space + Blender Gaming Environment, Urban Terror – simple and highly playable multiplayer FPP game (you can meet stas and me there from time to time) and Battle of Wesnoth – great strategy game with mature gameplay and great community.

Regarding gaming/gaphic engines situation is pretty good. All projects are active. Crystal Space is post 1.0, Ogre3D passed 1.6 release, Blender is growing and does amazing experiments with projects like Big Buck Bunny, Elephant’s Dream and YoFrankie!, and GIMP finally started using GEGL and passed 2.6 release. Yake is somehow less active but they release 0.7 and I hope 0.8 will come out this year.

One big missing project here was Inkscape – vector graphic tool, the other is Irrlicht – yet another good 3d engine, both added.

InitNG seems to lost momentum for the reasons I don’t fully understand. It seemed everyone likes the concept, and that it’ll get a lot of support, but somehow no major distro picked it up, and it’s not gaining much attention this days. Reiser4 is still in “mm” tree, and for obvious reasons lost main developer, but another former employee of Namesys is maintaining the code and I still hope that it’ll land in mainline kernel one day since it really seems to be a huge and great concept for a file system.

Kernel is actively maintained and developed, I’m watching the leadership style of Linus with great respect. It keeps a great balance between new features and stability which allows Linux to get more visibility and gain momentum. I can’t wait 2.6.29 with Kernel Mode Setting.

X.org is also finally alive, and beside of several delays with releases, new features are coming with each of them. Currently X.org 7.5 is on its way with multitouch support. The next big things imho will be Gaillum3D and GEM. My new pet project from this land is Nouveau – open source Nvidia driver.

Xgl on the other hand is rather dead and AIGLX won the title, or at least that’s how I see the situation.

KDE4 is extremely active these days, and I’m reading planetkde.org every morning. It seems to be a routine that the project which has nothing to loose is doing much more exciting things. KDE has been loosing ground for several years and Gnome took over almost all distros. And KDE with KDE4 is now doing more drastic and exciting steps each month than Gnome did in last 2 years. I’m recompiling KDE every 2-3 weeks and I see huge improvements. They found a good formula for experimenting and it seems that KDE4.2 and then KDE4.3 will totally rock. KDE4 is implementing concepts like Zoomable User Interface, Plasma widgets (copied by Windows 7 devs recently), Extenders, Nepomuk Semantic Desktop, and zillion other experiments that are worth watching. At the same time watching Gnome is more than boring. :/

Amarok is getting near to its 2.0 release, which I’m a bit confused about. I love Amarok 1.x and I believe it’s the very best music player on earth (Songbird – you’re the second, but you have to learn from them a bit…) and UI of Amarok 2 is too different, but maybe its a matter of habit and I’ll get use to it.

Krusader is working on their 2.0, but since I don’t use KDE as a main desktop these days, I don’t use Krusader either. But it should be a nice addition for pro’s who find Midnight Commander their favorite file manager

GCC is actively developed with 4.4 planned early next year, but I don’t see them doing really big things now. Performance, which is probably the single most user-visible expectation is not getting too much love and it doesn’t to be a major case for the project. Maybe with 4.5?

MPlayer still failed to release 1.0 and with obsolate UI toolkit and several bugs I failed to fix, they almost forced me too look for something new. VLC – here I come. VLC is multiplatform, QT4 based, powerfull player which I’m currently using on all my platforms and machines

Gentoo is having hard time and my prediction that with growing CPU performance and net bandwidth it’ll become more and more popular was wrong. Currently Gentoo is trying to restructure itself and I hope they’ll succeed since I find their project great learning of how Linux work and a great server platform (I like them way more than Debian).

Ubuntu is still gaining more visibility and for mainstream its becoming THE linux distro. It’s getting regular updates, has a great and unique community model but for last several releases seems to be slowing down. Not only nothing big happened during last 3 releases, but they even did not make any major polish improvements (upstart is still not used to its potential, pulseaudio is still non consistent with UI, compiz is exactly the same as 3 releases ago, performance and boot time slowed down) – generally, Ubuntu is a great distro, but it received only minor updates during last 2 releases and from the average Joe point of view is a bit stalled (I know, a lot is going on in Mobile and Server…). I hope for 9.04 to really shake things.

Slack is probably the most incredible one-man project on earth and I love the concept of three open source non-profit and community based distros – Slack, Debian and Gentoo – driving the ground work of what Linux is. (while three others – OpenSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu are driven by companies). I like this as a base of Linux distro land.

OpenSUSE is preparing their 11 release and I did help in translation phase. I find them being the most beautiful Linux distro and I watch their development carefully.

I added Fedora, which I didn’t like for years, but now I appreciate how much they do to polish the rough corners of Linux experience and I believe they’re crucial to the success of Linux as a whole.

Ardour is active and alive. Ardour 2 is the best audio workstation I’ve ever used and they’re working on Ardour 3 now which should be even better

On Internet things are also going pretty well. Flock released 2.0 (which my girlfriend loves!), Firefox is on the way for 3.1, new project is WebKit which is a nice addition to the pack and gained some early points from Trolltech and Google, Lightning is being planned for Thunderbird 3.0 release which should happen early next year, Bugzilla is near 3.2 release (although I never made it to finish my UI concept for it).

AwStats is a bit stalled, probably because of Google Analytics, but there are new releases, and its still my favorit web statistics tool.

Drupal is on its way to 7.0 which should be exciting, since 6.x is really good and in 7.x they focus on the biggest challenge – making UI more user friendly (plus adding some semantic web goodies). WordPress will release 2.7 soon and it’s an extremely polished piece of software this days. I’m using it everywhere I can

Dojo lost my vote somehow, and I now more watch Prototype and JQuery.

Jabber is still my favorite IM, but I don’t see a lot of progress around. We’re still waiting for audio/video support and it almost feels like nothing has changed since 2006 here. (yet my friend who’s more in jabber community claims there’s a lot of activity).

Psi released 0.12, I’m using it as my IM client on Mac and Linux, it’s working pretty well, but once more, not much activity around and still my biggest whine is not resolved (I want multicontacts!)

Azureus changed their business model and name (Vuze) and now they are doing some morph of bit torrent client and music/video platform. I switched to Transmission on Mac, but on Windows and Linux I still use Vuze.

MediaWiki is still THE wiki project, but they are totally wasting opportunity imho. It’s one of the major cases where a great tool is being only maintained for the needs of one project (Wikipedia) and somehow cannot get into modern “web 2.0″ world of professional UI and UX.

And Subversion lost its place because is not being developed at all. Mercurial is a king for me now

That’s all for today.

• Crystal Space – In January 2007, Crystal Space finally, after 10 years (sic!) of development, has reached 1.0 release. One of the most popular and important projects related to open source gaming space has a stable release! It’s a big step forward, and I consider it as a symbol. Many of the things that happened after this release could of course happened before CS 1.0, but the magical barrier, that means “you can rely on this release” is important. CS is now in 1.2 stage, with many game projects using it, and it’s joining with Blender in effort to create a new game, more on this later. CS is healthy and stays important part of currently rising open source game world. Read changelog to get an idea on where CS is in terms of new features.
• Yake – this project spent the last 1,5 year in the shadow, but surprisingly it’s alive! They have skipped 0.5 release, and went straight forward to 0.6 released on April 2007 to public and 0.7 being ready in it’s branch. On the other hand, the wiki is down for some time, it’s hard to find any changelogs. Most of the communication happens through forums, and there’s not much going on yet. I’d say that probably Yake is waiting for it’s “1.0″ to get momentum and attention. Pity, cause it seems to be the cleanest API for game writing and it bases on OGRE, so you get all the beauty of OGRE updates and Yake updates with each release.
• Speaking of OGRE 3D – In mid 2005, OGRE got it “1.0″ and it took a year to get next stabel release – 1.2. It happened on May 2006, and was followed by 1.4 in March 2007. I’m not a game dev, just an observer, but OGRE seems to be the biggest project around. With professional games like Ankh or Pacific Storm it was tested in battle, huge wiki, strong and ultra-active community, and huge amount of projects using it, it’s just a pleasure watching it’s growth. It seems that this project is getting attention beside of the Open Source/Linux walls and may be one of the best ambassadors beside of Firefox, Open Office, Thunderbird or Blender that we have.
• Blender – another success story. Since last Project Watcher, Blender upgraded itself from 2.40 to 2.45. It’s simply impossible to list all the new features between those two. Just read the release notes: 2.41, 2.42, 2.43, 2.44, 2.45.
  By the way. I love how they present themself to the community. Their release notes are the best I’ve ever seen (even a total newbie can *see* what’s going on), they have huge amount of community related websites, great video tutorials, and extremely interesting UI. It has rather high learning curve, but it’s very intuitive once you get it and feels very fast.
• GIMP – This project reminds me Mozilla Suite it many ways. It has great potential, but UI blocks it from being a success. It took them a way too much time to release 2.4, but it’s very nice and mature. The only problem that stays is the UI, which is impractical and hard to learn. Fortunately they guys know what keeps them down. MMIWorks, a company specialized in UI design, is tracking the work on the new UI. What’s interesting here is that Gimp team tends to use the community and they keep their progress in open. Read the Wiki, and the blog. I may be wrong but it seems to be the first “big” open source project that goes through major UI redesign to match the world standards and it happens in open. It’s very interesting to watch how this works.
• Elephant’s Dream – The movie is ready now. You can download it and watch, it’s beautiful, but too “artistic” in screenplay for me. I’d like something “easier” to attract wider attention. They probably can read my mind, cause they already started project “Pitch” – another open source movie made in the model of “Hack’a'ton” (well, half year of it). It’s going to be cute, pink and funny. During each movie they testing quality of Blender and influencing it’s development. Oh, it’s perfect model of development You’ve got open source movies, better 3d software, and models from the movie will be used in the open source game (Crystal Space + Blender). Tadam

Enough for today. The gaming/modeling stage is very healthy and all the projects are progressing (with Yake a bit behind) I should add Irrlicht and Inkscape to the group, and I’ll write more about it once I get through the current state of whole Project Watcher list and start adding new members.

Overall, the project seems to be my personal success. I really used it every month or two to see what’s going on there and I want to keep the project alive

Now, I’m going to prepare an update of the list, but first I’d like to summarize what happened in the project I’ve been following since  7th of March 2006.

First on the list are games:

•  TA Sprint -  it came up I didn’t follow the progress of this project to carefully. Simply, had no time to play this game. I still feel there’s a lot of potential inside and according to my knowledge progress was made from release of 0.72b into 0.75b with 4 releases in the given interval. Projects is alive and kicking
• Boson -  I really miss a good RTS for Linux (Blizzard! Open Starcraft!), so I use Boson as one of the references for “new C&C“. In 2006 Boson received two updates – 0.12 and 0.13. Unfortunately since then not much has happened. There was some planning of the campaign story line, but the last edit on their Wiki was made on April 30th, and since then  there’s not much going on. The last SVN commit was made 3 months ago. 0.13 is mostly a graphic upgrade over 0.11, the game is playable but it’s stil in it’s very alpha stage with very “generic” feeling of missions, gameplay etc.
• Attal – This was my hope for “HOMM” like game. The website is totally down now, for the whole time it was  dead and nobody updated it, but the development of the code has happened. The team (rather very small) did some coding this year, and they seems to be preparing 1.0RC release (+rewrite to Qt4 for 1.1?). The game is in non-playable state, at least for me, it requires huge update of graphics to catch up with the reality but who knows… Once 1.0 is out it may be very different.
• Planeshift – amazing project. Open source MMORPG game. They’re very active, managed to create a healthy and alive community of developers, beta testers, players. It’s an a huge pleasure to watch them growing. When I was creating first PW, it was just past the 0.3.013 release. 0.3 was a long awaited update over 0.2, huge rewrite, very needed and awaited. 0.3.x line is much more about role playing than any other RPG game I’ve ever seen. At the time there was no fighting mode at all! The game has a lot of unique concepts, like their own races, unique economy system, interesting idea of Death Real which is a separate world where you “live” once you die and can stay there or try to get back to the real world, huge, multilevel idea of Game Masters, and many more. In the time frame between last PW and today, there were many minor updates from 0.3.013 to 0.3.020, but those updates are pretty lengthy – take a look at their website to list them. Short summary is about more skins, more monster variations, better cast spellings, update to stable Crystal Space 1.0 engine, many updates to crafting system, new areas, key/lock system and tens of hundreds updates to the graphic system. Overall the game is totally playable, the world is “alive” and there’s a great future for this game, as it’s one of the examples of huge and healthy open source community and system for players. The authors are not in hurry, have time and patient, and community is happy with current state, so in result I don’t expect any stupid rush, but steady growth which will make the game better and better all the time.
• America’s Army -  unfortunately, this is a case of a regression. After many years, the game devs decided to resign from Linux version, thus I’ve been following the game progress less carefully. The game is of course free by nature (free as in beer), so you can download the latest version being 2.8.2 and enjoy if you’re Windows user. According to WineHQ AppDB it won’t run on it I’m waiting for 3.0 release which will base on Unreal Engine 3. I still enjoy playing the game but didn’t play much during last 1,5 year.
• Glest -  It’s another interesting project. RTS by nature, it’s a bit similar in structure and model of development to Nexuiz. It’s open source, but strongly driven by a solid core team and does not depend on the community itself. It gathers the community, but it’s definitely ot “driven by” a community. Since last PW it received major update to 2.0, but later there seems to be no active development in public taking place. Such projects are usually either driven by some fundings/sponsorship or as a project for studies. Not sure which happened here, but I hope it’ll go further. The current state is that the game is totally playable, it has nice graphics, but requires a lot of polishing to grow up from the Warcraft I kind of details.
• Danger from the Deep – not much market noise created by the game, but it received multiple updates since first PW. It’s a submarine kind of game (Silent Hunter, Silent Service) By the time it was 1.0 stage, I remember chatting with it’s main dev about his plans and ideas and he was rather calm and confident about what he wants to make with it. I love such attitude in open source model We have 0.3 version now, it’s pretty much playable and gave me a lot of joy, and there is a progress happening on the CVS.  It seems that authors are deeply interested in a realism of the game, as they really try to reproduce the “feeling” of submarine with all the details (not like Silent Hunter, where you have candylike simplification of what a submarine work is). I believe that they need a bit of cleanup in sources, which usually happens in the middle between first alpha and first stable (~0.5) cause currently it’s all flat in one directory. The game seems to have great future ahead, although I think it would be easier if they will switch to some external graphics engine instead of developing their own (leverage).
• Vega Strike -  this project was nearly dead for last 2 years, but all of the sudden, we have 0.5 beta now! Also, we have a new website and it seems that the project is alive again, I’m just downloading to test it. From what I remember about 0.4.x line it had very nice graphics, but the world felt “empty” and it was hard for starters to find out what to do. I’m going to keep observing the progress.
• Eternal Lands -  magical project. The whole development is being made behind the scene, there seems to be no elements of a normal open source project (say, news, changelogs are on the forum), it has extremely active community, similarly to Planeshift I think, and huge world. It’s very stable, the graphics are very simple (reminds me Ultima Online), but it’s totally enough to enjoy the huge, full of quests world, many guilds, fan sites and, of course, players. It’s very mature as for an open source project. It has tutorial system, leveling system, fighting, etc. everything that needs to be for a successful game. I think that if the author could upgrade graphics to 2007 standards, it could storm the gaming world Look at main dev’s blog for more news.
• Nexuiz -  As I mentioned before, it seems to be a project similar to Glest. No major community, small but strongly devoted group of devs (friends?) and an amazing result. Nexuiz is beautiful, and very carefully detailed game that is ready to use. New releases ( 1.5 ->2.3 since first PW) are mostly for new maps and performance updates. The team seems to be working on a new game, named Zymotic,  but Nexuiz is still being developed. As always we’ll probably see it once it’s ready to use and will be able to only say “Wow!”. (I found an SVN repo for the game.It seems that it’ll use DarkPlaces engine,  the same as Nexuiz)
• Legends -  I must admit, I didn’t follow the game progress at all. It seems to be developed actively but can’t say much about it. From what I remember it has nice graphics and platform, but that’s all I know
• UFO A.I. -  This game has interesting history – the game was initially developed in close source manner, by a small group of fans since 2003. After major slowdown in development in Q4 2005, the team decided to open the game and since then the project is pretty active, with release 2.1.1 in may 2007. I didn’t play recent releases, but from what I remember from time I did, the game is very nice and really has a “heart and soul” of UFO series. CVS repo is active (last checkins from week ago) and it seems project survived well.

In a summary I’d like to categorize the games via the development model. Please consider that all the games described here are free, and all but one are open source.

“traditional Open Source model pre-1.0″ -  strong role of a forum, wiki, bug tracker, low entry barrier. There’s a very thin line between users and a community.  Actually most users of the product are part of the community that follows development progress, report bugs,  take part in feature planning etc. Such model is usually pretty flexible,  and projects are very active, with new code commits every second day or so.  (UFO A.I.)
“traditional Open Source model post-1.0″ – still a strong role of a forum,wiki,bug tracker, a bit higher entry barrier. The split line between users and a community is getting higher, but still the community takes a very active role in the direction of the project. There’s a thin line between community and developers. (Planeshift,Wesnoth, FreeCiv)

“silent project model” – the games that are passionately developer by a very small group of people (one or two), with low noise, low activism, very small to none community involvement. Those are the projects were the project leader is driven by the fun of game creating and while he definitely feels that he creates the project FOR users, he doesn’t need a community watching his hands and screaming his name to do his job. In such case, there may be 50 downloads per year  and very small community noise, yet the game progresses with releases every year or two and exists for, say, 10 years.(examples: Boson, Attal, Danger from the Deep, Crystal Core)

“mod model” – in such model, we have a project based on some older game, usually proprietary, where fans of the game creates a community and development group of the project. It’s usually pretty much closed, the barrier is rather high, not because of the attitude but because of lack of time and interest in getting new people involved. In such model the development happens behind the scene, community knows where, while newcomers are just a potential users, there’s no effort in trying to get their energy used for the project. (examples: TA Spring, Legends)

“semi-closed model” – in such model, there’s a group of people that have some external motivator for their work (funding, university project etc.) and have no intention in raising the team. In such model the entry barrier is almost impossible to pass, there’s a strong line between contributors and users and there’s very small “community” that is made of users who stay users. The “community” in such model is just a forum users usually who may report bugs, propose ideas or talk to each others, and the dev team will respond from time to time. It’s very near to usual closed-source gaming model of community (think: community of America’s Army, The Witcher, or most other games).  (examples: Nexuiz, Glest,  Vega Strike)

Notice,that the first two  -named (traditional Open Source) follows the Bazaar model, while the other three, may or may not use it being near to Cathedral one.

I know that some of the projects could hit a few models at the same time (Crystal Core being both, traditional OS before 1.0, and silent model, or UFO A.I. being traditional and mod model), but I tried to choose most important part of the model which seems to define other aspects of how the project is being developed.

Fair enough. In the next part I’ll present new projects from games part that I care about and will update this area.

Hope you like it