For those not interested by this week's Valve/SteamOS Linux gaming news due to being devout open-source game enthusiasts, the GNU Rpge engine is out with a new release. Sadly, progress on GNU Rpge isn't too much better than the rate of development for GNU Hurd.

Rpge is a GNU project that seeks to provide an engine for 2D role playing games. The engine has support for a two-dimensional tile grid, sprite rendering, movable objects, windows, and event passing... That's about it and decades behind the commercial RPG game engines.

The new GNU Rpge 0.0.3 release just has bug corrections and compilation fixes. The release announcement for this new version of Rpge can be found at GNU.org. Below is a screenshot of the sample engine with the skeleton/test implementation, well, for what they have working so far.

For those looking towards more serious open-source RPG game solutions/engines, I would recommend the RPG'ish Battle for Wesnoth, Flare, and others.