I had been following this really awesome looking tile based RTS 3D engine project (think Starcraft2 like) on the jMonkey Engine forums for a while, and it is now fully FOSS including the arts assets. Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:
You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.
F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers.
Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code:
H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software with freeware data.
While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre.
CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version.
Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible. Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases.
Racer is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfortunately it does not compile on current Arch Linux.
Of our four projects, this is the only that has the classic drive-over boost fields.
Ecksdee is the oldest of the bunch and has challenging time trial single-player gameplay.
There are weapon pickups but without AI or human competitors they serve no purpose yet.
Project Comparison
H-Craft
CoreBreach
Racer*
Ecksdee
Latest Version
2015-02-23 (1.3)
2012-11-30 (git)
2010-10-10 (r349)
2006-11-24 (0.0.9)
Campaign Mode
yes
yes
no
no
Split-Screen Multiplayer
no
yes
yes
no
Weapons
no
yes
no
yes
AI
yes
yes
no
no
Gamepad Support
yes
yes
yes
no
Menu UI Look
good
ok
good
ok
Music
yes
yes
no
yes
Sounds
yes
yes
yes
yes
Linux Builds or Compiling
not tested, build used
complicated but compiles
fails
fails, win32 build/wine used
Art Asset License(s)
Mostly no-modify-no-distribute
no-distribution, GPL, CC-BY 3.0
CC-BY-SA 3.0
GPL, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND
Is It Cool?
yes
yes
yes
yes
* Could not build racer, reviewing from long term memory
Related projects
Stunt Rally has a F-Zero-esque antigrav vehicles and futuristic levels but primarily it's a car racing game. The default physics don't seem to be working for a futuristic racing style.
The cool Blender Game Engine project RGP has it's .blend file available but it does not have license information. The .blend contains no audio and only one level without AI.
HexGL is pretty but has no sound, no ai, only one level and is CC 3.0 BY-NC licensed (including code) at the moment. If anybody is interested in contributing: the developer indicated interest in the MIT license.
TheRush seem to be Windows-only and does not run in Wine.
Some nice developments on the 2D game-dev front lately, and as you will later see, 2D with full shader, real-time lights and so on can be a quite awsome way to make games, without having to hire a full team of 3D artists ;)
First of all a great new 2D editor, Overlap2D, has been released under the Apache2 license:
Contrary to other popular 2D editors (for example tiled or DAME), it is not tile based, has a modern renderer and also comes with a nice GUI editor. It currently exports to a standard JSON file and has a libGDX runtime.
Godot 1.1 BETA
Really awesome are also the latest developments of the (often described as the open-source Unity) Godot engine which you can now easily try. For me the coolest new features are the new dynamic lights (shown here in the also new isometric game sample):
This of course requires a bit more than simple 2D sprites ;) If you want to create cool 2D normal-maps, this should give you an simple way to create them. Also very nice is the now working graphical/node-based shader editor:
