The last months have changed quite a lot. I’ve landed a traineeship that got me into IT security. Maybe not what you’d expect from someone who advertises himself as a game developer. But on the other hand there was a connection. I’ve always been securing myself with numerous addons and kept up to date with security stuff. I used to be the only person I knew who had GPG encrypted mail (My GPG key). I’ve learned a lot already and it’s been surprisingly fun to work in this area, even coming from game development. I might be going back to game development sometime in the future, and I’ve certainly not forgotten about it. It’s great to program things which are fast and fun to play. I’m still planning to make a Daggerfall-inspired game with SFML/C++(Or Rust if I find a good 3D graphics library) sometime as a hobby project.

I’ve got worse news for the OpenRA map generator. I haven’t worked on it actively since almost a half year now, since I graduated. I had some ideas for what I wanted to do before it’d be merge-worthy, like adding water tiles, vegetation and civil structures for RA1 and CNC. It’s just that it hasn’t been my focus to work on it and really I don’t feel like going back to it. Maybe some time in the future, but not currently. One of the things that is really annoying currently is the code needed to support the weird RA1/CNC tilesets(never made for random generation). pchote advised me to focus on Tiberian Sun instead, as it has a more map-generation-friendly tileset, but it’d be a lot of work to start adding TS features as I’ve focused more on RA1/CNC for their superficial simplicity. If anyone else is interested on working on OpenRA map generation, this could be your chance. You’re of course free to check out my code, rebase it, and start working on it until it’s good enough to merge into OpenRA. You could also just use my repository as a resource and work on it in your own way. Either way I’d be open to answer any questions via mail, IRC or other channels. Questions about my code or about ideas I had for further development. So there’s that.

Other stuff worth mentioning

  • I noticed today that my webhost fixed my site’s SSL certificate! I now have HTTPS support! Woo! I immediately set up a rule in the .htaccess to redirect HTTP to HTTPS, because encryption is good.
  • I was working on a part two of the “open source games” post but it turned out to be a lot of work. I’m not a good blogger I guess, I don’t have the stamina to write a lot. In case you’re interested, I appended the list of games I wanted to discuss to the end of this post. You might want to look into them yourself, because a lot of them are great.
  • My deployment tool (ftp-deployment) doesn’t seem to work well with my host’s set up(SFTP access without SSH). It’s basically broken. I’m uploading this post manually (including RSS and front page update), but obviously that’s really not what I want. I don’t really know how to fix it without adding an alternative SFTP implementation which doesn’t seem nice. I’m still not sure how to fix it. If anyone knows how to do nice incremental updates like rsync using SFTP then send me a message. Maybe I’ll write my own script.
  • I really like Jonathan Blow et al.’s movement to make programming better. It’s amazing how inefficient some modern software is becoming, like Electron, and it seems many developers really don’t care about performance for their users. The user-centered, high-performance approach is really inspiring and something I can definitely get into.
  • Follow me on Twitter for (somewhat) faster updates on stuff. It’s easier to Tweet than to blog.

Games I wanted to talk about for the part 2 of the open source games post

  • Xonotic, fast paced arena shooter based on Quake
  • Tanks of Freedom, really cool pc/mobile(!) turned based strategy, available on F-droid (Made with the very interesting Godot open source game engine)
  • OpenXcom, haven’t played it myself but was recommended it in reddit comments after my previous blog post
  • Pixel Dungeon and its mod Shattered Pixel Dungeon, one of the coolest mobile games I found. Beautiful graphical roguelike, quite hardcore. Also available on F-droid
  • The Dark Mod, haven’t played it yet either but seems very interesting. A thief-inspired game based on the Doom 3 source code
  • OpenAge, the Age of Empires II community is still very much alive, as can be seen from recent tournaments, so an open source clone is very interesting indeed. If made up to feature parity it could make the game more easily moddable and improve the Linux/OSX support.
  • Spring RTS, many scolded me for not including this, but I actually didn’t know about it when I made the blog post. It’s apparently a free software RTS engine. The screenshots definitely look impressive.
  • falltergeist, interesting open source Fallout 2 engine implementation.
  • vcmi, recreation of the Heroes of Might and Magic III game engine
  • jsettlers, reimplementation of The Settlers III that also supports Android
  • Pioneer, a space simulator, remake of Frontier: Elite II