Open Game Art is a newly started site for exchanging free Artwork. While one can easily get the impression that there are loads of such sites around, Open Game Art is one of the very few that actually is done right.

As a Member of the Debian Games Team and the Unknown Horizons Project I was way too often in the need for good artwork searching around the web. I've also already reported once about my trouble.

There are quite some sites like Free Sounds around offering free artwork -- but only free as in beer as the saying goes, not as in speech which of course is really unhelpfull for FOSS projects. And even most of the sites that have free content often only tell you the license on some special pice of arts details page.

Open Game Art is quite different from that. All the license you may choose as a contributor are free (both in Debian and in FSF terms) and the license is available through a search filter so you can find stuff that fits you project's licensing policy. This list, and that's another thing I really like about that site, is the availability of choice among common licenses including, next to the copyleft class of licenses a fair share of more liberal licenses like my personal favourite, the zlib License.

And because such a site is just as good as it's amount and quality of data I've started sharing some recordings. I'm currently really new to audio recording so I guess it'll take some time for me to become really good. I'm considering putting some of my experiences and stuff I've learned here.

Looking around old files I have put online ages ago I stumbled upon a Unknown Horizons Code Swarm Video I have created back in September 2009. Feeling more than a bit sad this piece of software died soon after being released. Searching the web for "Code Swarm" still finds lots of old Videos created back then.

What is Unknown Horizons?

Unknown Horizons is a Free Strategy game I have written about from time to time about and do from time to time contribute. I also build Packages for Debianoids. Unknown Horizons is not a new thing, it has been there for some years now. It currently gets boosted by 3 very active GSoC Students and evolving steadily.

Preparing for 2011.2

Unknown Horizons is Preparing for another Release, 2011.2. As part of the effort I have updated the official Unknown Horizons Debian and Ubuntu weekly archives with new rc builds to get some more testing before the release happens. Please test!

Why isn't it in Debian main yet?

Unknown Horizons hasn't been uploaded to Debian yet. This is mostly due to 2 factors: The game engine Unknown Horizons build upon, FIFE isn't in Debian, evolving fast and not providing much of a stable interface and therefor Unknown Horizons has traditionally had a strict dependency to some VCS state of approximately the same age. Not good for a Debian package obviously. And second, Unknown Horizons got rid of some content that was not free (as in "main") just recently.

Personally I'm hoping we can have some packages soon as the freeness stuff is sorted out now and I haven't seen any troubling breakages with regard to the engine recently.