Looks really good.  When I finally upgrade Java6 to Java7, I'll give it a go.

Is the game or the engine or both open source?

Fun little game, although not sure whether the little peeps are supposed to regularly clean their windows!

A very good Flow-like.

What might be nice is a degree of control over what evolution your creature undergoes.  I know you get to select what upgrades but it doesn't make too much difference and the end result is always the same.

Very well done so far.  Was it even possible to get 10 tails?  At 7 it seems currently one is 'trimmed' automatically so you go back to 6.  (Your creature bleeds until it falls off although no red creatures are in the vicinity.)

You should replace the artwork, especially the bits ripped from Mario.

You can find plenty of replacement (and higher quality) art here: www.opengameart.org

For example:

- http://opengameart.org/content/breadinators-general-purpose-top-downplatformer-tileset
- http://opengameart.org/content/supertux-tiles
- http://opengameart.org/content/classical-ruin-tiles
- http://opengameart.org/content/basic-bricks

I would also echo the calls to make this an applet (you can upload applets to the forum) instead of using file sharing sites.

You could also make it open source and use Google Code or Github or Sourceforge etc.

This is a cool concept!  Don't let it die.

Great work gouessej.  Does the Ardor3D team know of your work?

Can you recommend some videos and a good game to showcase AllBinary?  I would like to write a blog post on Free Gamer about the source release.

It was this question on Stack Overflow, asking for the Best 3D Engine, that got me curious (and it is asked and again and again).

According to DevMaster / Java there are 21 available 3D engines out there.

I only really knew of JMonkeyEngine and Ardor3D before.  I see there is Xith3D but people say it is inactive.

What are the notable 3D engines, what are their best assets, the reason to choose them etc.  At some point soon I'm going to dabble with programming a basic 3D game for Java and I'd rather not get involved in a heavyweight 3D engine straight away (and risk demotivation due to overcomplication) just because it is well known when there could be a better alternative out there.

Is it worth considering JOGL even if I don't know much OpenGL at all?

Update: Of course, the term "best" is very subjective.  Best in your experience, for your requirements etc.  I'm not looking to start a flame war but an objective - positive - "I use X because of Y" etc.

It doesn't work for me!

Hi Morgan.  Is all your artwork just for use by yourself?  Or are you posting it in such detail because you'd like to see it get used in a game - yours or otherwise?

Also how do you make your buildings?  Do you model them in 3D first?

It is my experience that far more projects get lost on personal servers than they do on the free services you deride.  Nobody forgets to pay a monthly fee and lose the service, nobody suffers a hard drive failure and has no backup, redundancy means outages are rare, and when there are outages a team is on hand to fix them.

Sourceforge has been up since 1999.  It is pretty reliable.

That is really cool.  Core blimey the Warcraft I bit of the video made me feel nostalgic.

I love the parallax scrolling from Lionheart.

Not wishing to risk the ire of the mods here, but this might get good feedback in the FreeGameDev forum which is FOSS-dedicated.

Btw, how come you don't use a host like Sourceforge or Github or Google Code?

What do you gain by using JOGL over a dedicated 3D engine like Ardor3D?  (Genuine question.)

Wow that looks really good!

Are you going to open source any of the artwork as well, perhaps creative commons?

That's quite a lot of negativity.

Keep going.  10 years passes quicker than we'd all like it to, and you're on your third game - not first.  The original Freelords lives on as Lordsawar.  The 2nd is playable.  The 3rd is a new direction and a more solid foundation based on all the lessons learnt so far.  Nobody becomes a good programmer overnight and good things take time, especially when you're doing it in your free time for fun.

Looks good rikard.  Are you using php for the backend because it makes hosting easy to come by?  (PHP + xmlrpc, right?)

Down again.  This is why external hosting is better.

This link (and hence the link in the roadmap) is also a 404.

Article is here:
http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/programming/features/apg/index.html

It's great to see the progress with Tuer.  This is another project that may benefit from being cross-posted to the FreeGameDev forums.

Also since this is open source, you could post it in the FreeGameDev forums as well for extra feedback:

http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewforum.php?f=22

If you want art or models or music, there's plenty on OpenGameArt that could be suitable:

http://www.opengameart.org/

Hi N_I_C_S, this is a really good start!  I hope you keep developing this a bit more.  Obviously the current enemies are a bit strange looking but the game runs very smoothly and is quite good fun for what it is.

Will players need to own a copy of the original Lionheart or are you making your graphics/levels from scratch?  (Or do you have permission to use the originals?)

Hi Byron,

This is really cool.  If you drop us an email at Free Gamer (http://freegamer.blogspot.com) when you are done, we'll feature you there and get you some traffic.  (Open source required though that seems to be your intention.)

Good start!  I hope you keep developing it.

I'd use lines to do the skid marks instead of particles. i.e. === instead of ooo.  Also the steering seems to have an effect after releasing the key - are you simulating the turning of a steering wheel?  That is a bit unintuitive, given there's no-screen indicators.

It reminds me of the classic micromachines - a good thing!

EDIT: meant to ask, will this be open source?

I humbly suggest you investigate Ardor3D and JMonkeyEngine, both of which are far more capable 3D engines for Java as well as being open source and actively developed.

www.ardor3d.com
www.jmonkeyengine.com