Spring news: QtLobby 1.0alpha released!

QtLobby is a new lobby for Spring. It's under rapid defelopement and written in C++ using Qt class library. It's crossplatform. They are trying to make it user friendly, fast and bug free.

Spring News: Easy Facing Widget

A widget to rotate buildings with your mouse while placing.
How to use when placing buildings:

• Hold left mouse button and move mouse in the direction you want to face the building


• If you are placing a factory, it shows a green arrow representing the buildings facing
  
• Press META-key (Space) to rotate buildings when placing rows/queues with Shift

Tremulous News: Master list tightening

I'm sure everyone's noticed that a lot of servers on the master list have no name, and that this makes it sometimes very difficult to differentiate between them. As of a few minutes ago the new Python master server (undergoing live testing at master.tremulous.net:30700 if you remember) has started ignoring servers that do not report a hostname, so if your hostname is blank you may wish to consider filling it in with something more descriptive and unique.

Starting next Tuesday (the 18th) we will also be extending this same restriction to the default 1.1 master, so you may find that if you do not use a more reasonable name your players will no longer be able to see you on the server list. Note that this is not an invitation to name your server something else ridiculous, and if we find that people are continuing to use similarly illegible or homogeneous names, we will further restrict the acceptation criteria, or manually delist individual servers if necessary.

Work on 1.2 is, as ever, gently coasting along :)

This months game: Tremulous

Tremulous is a multiplayer aliens vs. humans shooting game, where you play via internet with over 30 players. Biggest games can have up to 60 players. When you start to play, you first choose the side. You cannot join if your side has too many players. Then you choose are you builder or soldier. And then... Its time to let the game begin. Tremulous has quite small maps and when there are many players you easily find yourself in the middle of a chaos. Aliens jumping all over and going on the walls, humans shooting around and hoping that they are shooting to a right direction with different kind of weapons, autoturrets and acid tubes attacking to nearby enemies... And everything you have to do is to join this caos and hope that you will get few kills so you could by new weapons or evolve to better alien. Both sides have main building. If it gets destroyed, you can not build any buildings and defense structures won't work. Other structures can only be built near this main structure or repeater (aliens have eggs). Trmulous don't have any bots or AI, so playing through the internet is the only option. This game don't need powerfull computer and it is surely worth of trying. This game allmost got the "Best free game"-price but Spring engine remains in the lead.



game name: Tremulous
homepage: www.tremulous.net
operating system: Windows (xp/vista), Linux, Mac OS X
license: open source (media isn't)

graphics: 8
extensibility: 7
gameplay: 10
multiplayer: 10
singleplayer: -
system requirements: 9
rating: 10

Good:

• quite good graphics
• different weapons and alien types
• system requirements
• gameplay
• structures
• game system allows strategic playing
• funny caos
• multiplayer
• game is never going so badly that you couldn't win

Bad:

• no singleplayer
• building system
• you lose your weapons if you die
• joining to a game can be tricky when everybody else have good weapons
• battles can be quite long