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You can install the native version from http://www.freeciv.org/ Should run fine on just about any computer made in the past 15 years.

Are you embarrassed to be associated with a product that looks like this?

Look at the screenshot in the announcement article.

Really, I insist that you take a look.

The graphics quality is rudimentary.

Somebody else described it as looking like "from the early 1990s". At first I thought that was an exaggeration, but it isn't. To be blunt, it looks worse than games from that time period.

I don't see how anyone can justify 3D graphics of such a low quality requiring 3 GB or more of RAM! It's unjustifiable, as far as I'm concerned.

freeciv is light on resources, is roughly equivalent to civ 3 (well at least that's the last one I played) and it's even been ported to the web.

freeciv is light on resources, is roughly equivalent to civ 3 (well at least that's the last one I played) and it's even been ported to the web.

You should try freeciv. It kicks ass.

Freeciv can also be played online in your browser at http://play.freeciv.org/

Tried FreeCiv?

The summary and the freeciv.net main page (I'm sure it's somewhere else but that's my point) doesn't mention this: it's based on freeciv.org.

(also strange; the freeciv.org site only mention freeciv.net in their 'community news', not 'project news', so it really seems "distinct projects", they're not officially promoting the other option, yet?)

Oh, God, we have yet another "Artists are perfectly willing to work for fun and for free" thread on Slashdot.

Bottom line: The majority of artists, programmers, etc. out there won't make something for fun and for free. Of, if they do, they will create it to a much lesser degree than they would if they were getting paid for it.

"Having a day job" and "Willing to work for fun and for free" are two very different things. I am sure a lot of your artists friends would find something else to do in their free time if they were told that they would never earn a dime making their art.

Why is it that the majority of video games out there are games people legally need to pay for to buy? With a very few rare exceptions, commercial games blow open-source games out of the water in terms of quality.

For example, let's look at Civilization-type games. If you go to civfanatics.com, you can see large communities playing Civilization II, Civilization III, and Civilization IV. These games are incredibly popular. The graphics are compelling, the games includes movies, and Civilization IV even has 3D graphics.

Lets compare this to the free Civilization clones out there: Freeciv, C-evo, and the abandoned Clash of Civilizations project. Freeciv doesn't have the compelling graphics the professional Civ games have, and its gameplay is as compelling as writing a spreadsheet. While there is a full-screen SDL port, it is incomplete and unstable.

C-evo is essentially Civilization I with Civilization II isometric graphics. It has a nice full-screen interface, but its documentation is sketchy and it has issues with being too difficult for a rank beginner to start playing and enjoying. There are no voice actors, no movies when you build a wonder, no engaging diplomacy, and the game for all intents and purposes can not be modded. Did I mention it's not truly open-source, since you need the proprietary Delphi programming environment to build it?

Clash of Civilizations died a few years ago. Its developers, quite frankly, did not have enough motivation to make a full game. "For fun and for free", the delusion Slashdot keeps bringing up over and over, did not work.

When people are being paid for their work, the result is a game with far more compelling graphics and gameplay. People, plain and simple, will not make the type of compelling music, games, and movies people have come to expect if there is no way people can be compensated for their hard work.

So, will this enhance my FreeCiv experience?
-l

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

Seriously, our family just loves FreeCiv.

-l

I played the demo of Ratchet & Clank, and it's wonderfull it was the first time I was amazed by a next gen machine since I entered a VR cube. Not sure if that says something about SGI or about Sony.

But I recommend the newly released Freeciv instead, since it's infinitely many times cheaper.

Have a look at any of the 100s of games and other applications written for the Linux desktop.

Have you tried Freeciv?

One of the best open source games ever. And one of the best documented, too.

I got taken by Freeciv this year. More recently, Scorched3d.

Yes, it's true, I only play open source games.

I think wouldn't want to die without playing a week-long multiplayer FreeCiv session! However, if I was in your shoes, I would spend my money buying ergonomic equipment and paying doctors, and my time learning about my condition and trying to find a way to live without being dependent on a job.

You're gonna hate me for this... but there's a GREAT open-source version of Civ that runs flawlessly on both Windows and Linux. Customizable graphics and rules, awesome networked play, and the same crack-habit addictiveness! :-)

http://www.freeciv.org/

I played a little civ4, and i didnt like it much. The religion idea was interesting. It also was 3D... ??WHY?? wtf does it have to be 3d for?? It adds absolutely no gameplay value. Also the little movies add little value. (though the expectation of watching does a bit when you see it for the first time)
I liked civ2 also, that one did add a lot, at least in civ2 On the down side the damn militia cant kill the battleship. civ2 had a ridiculous problem with corruption being unmanagable sometimes.

(GPL-like) Alternatives are FreeCiv, and C-evo of which i personnally liked the second one best. FreeCiv seemed not to have a good AI and even magically apearing cities, while C-evo has several AI's, which are made using *.dll's, the default one is pretty good, and there is a manual for making AI's yourself. (making AI's is usually hard)
I haven't played/looked into these that much, but if you want a civ-like game, feel free to judge for yourself.

Some Open Source Games

1. Lincity-NG
2. Globulations 2
3. Abuse-SDL
4. The Battle for Wesnoth
5. Solar Wolf
6. Boson
7. FreeCiv

In http://www.freeciv.org/'s multiplayer mode, players move simultaneously.

This makes the game more fast-paced, but is a bit troublesome when results depend on who moves first, or when you get a double move in because turn ends. The game still takes longer than for example a game of Age of Empires would, about 4 times longer.

There have been lots of adjustments for multiplayer playing, since one point of recreating an old game is to be able to add "new" features like multiplayer.

Battle Isle 1 had an interesting turn-based two-player mode: On player would move, the other fire.

Civ II can be downloaded from abandonia here:

...

Fire up your favorite windows emulator. Clear your calendar.

Or try Freeciv -- versions available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. No emulators required!

Couldn't there be a way to make a FreeRisk.org in the same way there is a FreeCiv.org? And thus, bypass legal limitations?

Civ IV can even use NASA Blue Marble tiles, I don't see why a FreeRisk or not-so-free Risk couldn't make use of NASA's Blue Marble data. It would be more beautiful than a Google Map basemap. Am I wrong?

Clearly, this is another example where IP impeds innovation...

but just as the Romans couldn't even imagine in their wildest dreams a B2 bomber

Of course, it would have to be a B2 instead of a B1 or any other type of bomber so that it won't be detected by the Romans RADAR. ;-)

Well, someone had to provide this link :-)

http://freeciv.org/

Ok, graphics are not are great, but the gameplay is still interesting :-)
Opensource, of course.

Freeciv has hex map support.

For the record (in case anyone gets confused) Advanced Civilisation is not Civilisation. They are entirely different games.

Freeciv is (for the most part) a Free Software clone of Civilisation 2. It can be found at http://www.freeciv.org/.

From my own experience, games like these are an excellent way to learn history and geography.

Looks like list auther is not very well versed in PC gaming. A lot of old/mediocre games in the list but not best free or free open sourced games like
wesnoth
Steel Panthers:World At War
Steel Panthers:Main Battle Tank
FreeCiv

This is a great idea, but the Liberated Games list is a bit skimpy. I noticed that a bunch of the games were shareware demos, such as Wolfenstein 3D and such, but I remember downloading hundreds of fun shareware games from BBS'es. Anyone remember William Soleau's games? God, I played Oilcap until my fingers bled...

Also noticably absent are the amazing collection of open source software games, of which my favorite at this time would probably be Freeciv.

ET is not Free/Open source. However there are tons of fun Open Source multiplayer games that you can use.

Excellent, Civ4 will now be like FreeCivhttp://freeciv.org/, except that it won't be free, and it won't be for Linux. Years after FreeCiv has been trying to be like Civ, with rulesets for Civ1 & 2, Civ4 has succeeded in becoming LIKE FreeCiv! The irony.

Hmmm...the lowest end machine I have right now is one of those ancient Gateway Handbooks. It's a tiny little subnotebook, circa 1993, with a 486 SX25 processor and 20 megs of Ram. Firefox is a pipe dream on this machine (FF runs slowly even over the network via X). Dillo is barely usable; it takes about three seconds to redraw the screen (such as when scrolling up or down). I can't get older versions of Netscape or even the Ted word processor to run on this machine. The last major release of FreeCIV does run, albeit slowly, if I use the XAW client.

I might be able to get a Small spreadsheet to run on this antique.

I can't believe that you are running Firefox on a system with only 32 megs of RAM. The Firefox I'm running right now is using over 100 megs of ram, judging by its VSZ size. I know there is an embedded port of Firefox for PDAs, not to mention an embedded version of Konqueror.

Last time I had 24 megs of ram, I used Netscape Navigator 4.x until I could get a system with more memory; it was just not possible to run Mozilla on that machine.

If you don't want to play Madden 2021 and Halo 6 then you don't have to! To many people the golden-age of video games is the NES/SNES days, or the ULTIMA and SIMCITY 1 days on for PC gamers. This is after the reflex/memorization only games of atari but before the games got overly graphics oriented. It's now actually a hell of a lot easier to make a sidescroller or overhead rpg then it used to be when the game was coded in assembly. Here's a list of a few one man or small team games that are pretty damn amazing and fun to play.

http://www.avernum.com/ -ultima only bigger and buggier!
http://www.freeciv.org/ -not exactly eye candy, but good
http://www.chroniclogic.com/gish.htm/ -inovation!
http://www.dominategame.com/website.php?/ -addiction!

At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.

I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.

The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to say that there aren't any games available for Linux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.

I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.

Whoever modded this down missed the reference to the excelent Civilization game. It periodicaly lists the top richest/welthiest/militarized/advanced/largest nations of the World.

In fact, I've played only Freeciv (and not the original one) for a long time, but I'm pretty sure the Historian Publishes were on the original also.

Rather, it means that when /.'ers rule the earth, they are usually constructing a simulation.

To me at least the whole project reminds me of another, which has free software to construct even better simulations (multiple viruses at once) - and it allows you to rule the earth at the same time!

See

http://pubserver.freeciv.org/viewgame.phtml?game=3 74250

for an example, and

http://pubserver.freeciv.org/query.phtml?minplayer s=12&minturns=200

for a couple more.

Rather, it means that when /.'ers rule the earth, they are usually constructing a simulation.

To me at least the whole project reminds me of another, which has free software to construct even better simulations (multiple viruses at once) - and it allows you to rule the earth at the same time!

See

http://pubserver.freeciv.org/viewgame.phtml?game=3 74250

for an example, and

http://pubserver.freeciv.org/query.phtml?minplayer s=12&minturns=200

for a couple more.

There are many great GNU/Linux games available, like FreeCiv.

I think you have a lot of legitimate points here. I think the fundamental conflict we're looking at here is that Slashdot used to be a place where Linux geeks and open source developers talked about the virtues of Linux over Windows. Slowly, over the years, the audience has changed and now this site is dominated by a bunch of Windows end-users instead of Linux open-source developers.

The reason why I get so upset when open source is flamed is because the developers, well, aren't getting paid and the only reward they get is improvement to their reputation. If there is this silly idea that FreeCIV isn't a good game going around the 'net, then this will discourage the FreeCIV devlopers to work on making it a better game, since no one wants to break their back developing a program that has a bad reputation.

The most famous quote that expresses the sentiment I am conveying is Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country" quote. The way I see, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who are willing to work to make things better, and people who expect other people to make things better for them. Open Source is a reality because of the first kind of people; Slashdot seems to be full of the second kind of people at this point.

Now, any end user can right now make FreeCIV 2.0 a better game. Go ahead, go to http://www.freeciv.org and download the beta7 client. They have Linux/UNIX source and Windows binaries. Play the game. Report bugs. In addition to enjoying FreeCIV (and, yes, it is a lot easier to start up a game in FreeCIV 2.0 than in FreeCIV 1.14), you will be making it a better game.

Freeciv already has all this, and a lot more. And the upcoming release 2.0.0 will blow your minds!

Even Freeciv, that is one of the usual examples of "bigger" FOSS games, is sorely lacking in the art department. There's barely any people with artistic skills contributing to FOSS games. If there was, though, it would be a different story, but the situation does not seem likely to change any time soon.

But for the whole open source movement? Please. The only thing the top downloads shows is that people would rather pirate good windows games than bother downloading free mediocre games.

While it may be true that open source games lag proprietary ones, Battle for Wesnoth and Freeciv have taken on lives of their own. They beet out BZFlag on the happy penguin top ranked games.

We're not unaffected by this.

Periodically, there will be discussion on the Freeciv mailing lists as to whether Tibet and Taiwan should be included in the list of nations. Chinese developers disagree with this, and it never happens. See one such discussion here.

Heh, maybe we should remove China from the game. :)

Hey, it worked for Blender. (-:

How many home-baked cookies would FreeCiv need to sell to raise 15.5 megaeuros, I wonder?

Whatever you do, don't tell these two about Freeciv. Oops.

I'm in the same boat, although I do think that it takes an above-average level of computer competency to run Windows XP without spyware problems. Then again, I've always had hardware problems under Linux, so it seems like you need to excel at computers regardless of the OS you're using if you want it to be stable. Or maybe run Mac OS X (I don't know, I haven't tried it).

But yeah, I play games, do .NET coding, surf the Internet, and do school stuff all on Windows. What's nice is that a lot of what seems like Unix-exclusive software also runs on Windows. There's ActivePython, MiKTeX, a large collection of command-line Unix utilities, including wget, and even games such as FreeCiv. Other people might have different needs that necessitate Linux, but Windows runs fine for me.

With that said, Txiasaeia, you might want to try Gentoo for something different in the Linux world. Installation takes a while since it's a very manual process, but the entire distribution makes me feel "cleaner" when I use it (yes, I still take showers). Mandrake feels like absolute bloat to me, but I fell in love with Gentoo once I tried it.

It's free, gratis, ... xD

open4free ©

They should care, because if they don't support our OS, we will soon start an open source alternative. When they ignore the open source community, we always find ways to create better products than theirs. See for example http://www.freeciv.org/ where a couple of opensource programmers created a game which is better than Sim Meier's Civilisation and it's GPL.

I think Freeciv is a very good counter example.

However, I do agree that open source model does not encourage games that are graphic intensive that involves a lot of artwork.

Frozen Bubble? nah...

My Exceptions would be BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, and FreeCiv.