CisLunarFreighter/Open source tools

Scriptwriting

GIMP - Graphics Image Manipulation Program is useful for a wide variety of graphics image tasks including creating tilesets and sprites, translating file formats, and creating background and foreground stills and masks.
Inkscape

OpenOffice - A productivity desktop suite. Contains word processor which will create and export a pdf file. Useful for storyboarding. One file contains all pictures and text.

Art of Illusion - An easy to learn powerful 3D modeling and animation environment. There are few import/export paths for this program but it is written in Java with an extensible object oriented framework. Probably worth reading the code for graphical programming techniques and possibly classes.
w:Blender_(software) - A 3D modeling and animation suite with additional capabilities to support game programming. It has been confirmed that blender will import 3ds files. Exporting from a now out dated version of 3DSMax to 3ds and imported into Blender3D has been accomplished successfully. An external introduction to blender set of video tutorials.[1]. Wikibooks has several online books on Blender.b:Blender
Make Human - Allow for quick and detailed modeling humans.

Arianne - An open source 2D massive multiplayer online role playing game engine.
HiperGL - Game Framework - Framework for hardware accelerated 2D graphics.
Crystalspace3d - a 3d game engine
ImageJ - Written in Java this is an image processor focused on Scientific processing. It may also be useful for lifting techniques for graphics programming using the Java standard library.
Panda3D - A BSD-licenced 3D graphics and game engine.

Ant - A build and test automation tool. Has worked well so far with Beans and jFreeRails and ImageJ. Well worth someone learning to package our distribution effectively.
ArgoUML - An open source UML editor. I have seen it alleged that this does not yet implement the full UML specification. Anybody who can illuminate us please do so here.
Beans IDE - This is a very sophisticated and so far robust integrated development environment. It works well with ANT. I have successfully compiled and tested ImageJ and jFreerails using the build xml files that came with them.
JVM - The Java Virtual Machine platform runs on most desktop or better hardware, making it ideal for widespread distribution of our applets.

3D No Plugin - Uses Java and python to display 3D models online without plugins. A little slow. Useful for model evaluation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants_Dream This article on the FOSS short creation process has a list of tools used within the project.