Greets!

I'm very excited to announce a new feature that's been in the works for some time now, and will likely be pushed out to production in the next couple of weeks.  By popular demand, we are now including Digital Rights Management on all of the art we archive.  This will allow incredible new options for our art, such as:

• Only working on certain devices, like as the MicroApple ZunePod
• Demanding a 60-digit serial number at inopportune moments
• Only being usable on alternating Tuesdays
• Randomly failing on some systems
• Causing games to freeze up and dump you out to a command prompt the moment there's a glitch in your internet connection
• Limiting art to being installed on a total of two devices
• The ability to remove features from games you already own

Until now, features such as these have only been available on closed, proprietary devices.  How many times have we heard people say things like, "man, I wish I could only listen to this music on my ZunePod" or "why isn't there a feature in Linux that shuts it down if it thinks my copy isn't 'genuine'?" or "gee, I wish this single-player game required me to be connected to the Internets at all times"?  Now, OpenGameArt.org is bringing you what you've been demanding -- a proprietary experience in Open Source software!

You can thank us later.

Bart

P.S.  Happy April Fools' Day. ;)

Just wanted to give props to Anton Lapshin for developing Bart's Game, based on an idea by yours truly and conceived right here on the OpenGameArt Forums.  The basic idea is that it's an arcade/puzzle game in which there's a human in a maze inhabited by monsters.  The catch is that you don't control the human at all (who is constantly freaked out and running in random directions) and instead you move the walls of the maze to corral the human toward the exit while preventing the monsters from catching him.  Check it out!

Please note that, while it works in its current form, it's still under heavy development.

Peace,
Bart

Hey folks!

I'd like to start pushing toward creating more 3D content for the community, including high-poly, rigged 3D models (perferably with textures and basic animations).  As things stand, we just don't have the budget to do that right now, as such a job would run between $1000 and $3000 or more for male and female models.

So, this is where donations come in.  To the right of this blog entry, there is a "Donations" box, and contained therein is a button marked "Donate to OpenGameArt.org".  In particular, I'd like to nudge people toward the small subscriptions ($3 or $5 per month) which, despite the small denominations, would go a long way toward purchasing more art for the FOSS community, particularly if a lot of people decided to help us out.

Also, I've mentioned this in the past, but it bears repeating: For the forseeable future (as long as our bandwidth usage doesn't exceed the capabilities of the fairly hefty dedicated server I'm renting), every penny of the donations to OGA will go toward commissioning art for the community.  In addition to that, I will continue to put money from my own pocket toward commissions on a monthly basis as I am able to do so.  You can see more about our costs in the "More Information" section of the donation page.

Finally, if you're interested in creating some art for OGA, we are always thrilled to accept art contributions.  If you'd be willing to donate some of your time and talent but don't know what to contribute, consider stopping by our IRC channel (linked in the upper right corner of the site) and asking around.  There's always something to do. :)

Peace,

Bart

It's been mentioned several times in the past that one necessary thing OGA lacks is a decent selection of fonts.  In fact, I would venture to say that in general it's been very difficult to find good, free fonts out on the internet.  Of course, there are a lot of sites out there with tons of "free" fonts, but when you look closely at them, you'll discover that the random and arbitrary licensing restrictions on most of said fonts prevent you from using them for any sort of serious work, either Open Source or commercial.

So what's a FOSS developer to do?  Well, until recently, the only options were to (a) rely on certain standard font families that come preinstalled on most machines, (b) package some of the few existing fonts (such as the Liberation fonts) that are known to be safely licensed, or (c) roll your own, which is a ton of work.

Enter the Open Font Library.  As of the time of this post, the Open Font Library hosts 170 different fonts (and growing), all licensed in such a way (either Public Domain or the Debian-approved SIL Open Font License) that they're completely safe to use in any Open Source or proprietary software, commercial or otherwise.

But don't take my word for it.  Go check the site out for yourself, and if you're feeling up to it, contribute a font of your own!

Bart