Open source games roundup

Week of July 6 - July 12, 2014

In this week's edition of the open source games news roundup, we take a look at Epic Games' donation to the Blender Foundation, Oculus VR's new open source acquisition, and more.

Epic Games contributes €10K to Blender Foundation

Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal confirmed via Twitter that Epic Games has become a sponsor of the Blender Development Fund by donating €10K to improve Blender's FBX export capabilities. In a post on the Unreal Engine forum, Epic Games engine support technician Alexander Paschall writes, "Mostly we are trying to get a solid pipeline for exporting from Blender to UE4. So far things are going really well and we hope to see some cool stuff in the near future."

Oculus VR acquires and open sources networking engine

On Monday, the virtual reality tech company announced that they had acquired RakNet, a networking middleware application used by games companies like Unity, Havok, and Mojang. Oculus is also open sourcing the tool under a modified BSD license and making it available on their GitHub repository. Oculus has used RakNet in their existing software, including its high-performance cross-platform network communication, voice chat, and logging. Chances are good the acquisition will allow more control over the application's direction, which will better serve their virtual reality product.

Adafruit celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Game Boy with PiGRRL

With a Raspberry Pi, some touch screen components, a spare SNES controller, and a 3D printer, you too can build Adafruit's PiGRRL handheld emulator. "Since it's a Raspberry Pi Linux computer, we can run different emulators on it. We happen to be partial to 8-bit NES but there's also MAME support and maybe you could even hack-in support for your favorite old console!" What the heck are you waiting for?!

Rare chess set now available for 3D printing

Sculptor and chess player Marcel Duchamp hand carved an Art Deco-inspired chess set in Buenos Aires sometime around 1918. It's gorgeous—especially the knight piece, which has a fantastical whorl to its cheek that I absolutely adore—but, until now, held in a private collection and unavailable to the public. Now, chess aficionados with access to a 3D printer can grab the print-files for the Readymake from Thingiverse and build their own Duchamp-inspired chess set.

I'll be out on vacation next week, so no games news for July 19. If you like our open source games coverage, be sure to follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news. If you have any news you'd like to submit, shoot us an email through our contact form or reach out to me directly on my personal Twitter account.