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The freeciv windows client(www.freeciv.org) uses gtk for win32. It's sloooooow and somewhat buggy, though, IIRC.

Here goes a quick list of features (shamelessly copied from its website):

• Generally comparable with Civilization I & II.
  
• Up to 30 players!
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) players.
  
• Internet & LAN multiplayer (TCP/IP).
  
• Support for a great number of platforms
  
• Premade maps & scenarios!
  
• 47 units and 61 nations.
  
• Modpack support!
  
• Internationalization (i18n).
  
• In game help system.
  

Who needs Civ3 when there's FreeCiv?

FreeCiv! Ever since I got RedHat 7.1 I've been an addict. Game is incredibly fun alone, even more fun online, and customizable to the extent that it's like having several games.

Here is my list:

1. Freeciv - the open source flavor of the epic strategy game. I purchased Civ3 when it came out, but TBHWY, it doesn't provide a compelling reason to reboot into Win-doze, and I still opt to play freeciv. Freeciv is much more customizable and plays quicker, allows multitasking, and was set up specifically for mulitplayer (even if I haven't ventured online to play much MP). I hope the freeciv team is entertaining notions of a Civ3 ruleset, or some variation ...
2. Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns - innovative, evolutionary RTS (real time strategy) game - instead of the "Age of Buildings", clickety-click nature of other RTS games in the genre, Kohan is the wargamer's RTS, with company-based battle, zone of supply, and zone of population constructs, and as opposed to the micromanagement of resource collection, resources are earned/spent on a per minute basis, and constructed companies have a maintenance cost. Plus you have magic wielding units that gain XP and cast some cool spells. Multiplayer with Windows gamers is possible (though with large maps you won't be able to view films after)
3. Pysol - the vastly superior Linux alternative to solitaire
4. Sid Meier Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack - great game, but I have a big beef with the multiplayer support - you can only MP against other Linux users, unlike Kohan. So it gets downgraded to the bottom of the list for that reason.

I am too mean to pay for games, but many of the open-source games available for various flavours of UNIX are superb. (albeit, without fancy graphics in most cases.)

freeciv has to be the best civ-like game.

I am addicted to a couple of things and one of them is Games, although i am less addicted since i started using Unix only, but still freeciv and freechess are a bit addictive...and the 4 years a kept playing the massive multiplayer games like Ultima Online and Planetarion before where pretty hefty addictive....
and there for it was my Atari-ST for which had about a 1000 floppy disks with games on it...and some other stuff ofcourse :)
But after all i learned how to use computers pretty well, i learned some programming and wrote a Arkanoid version once and now i have had some Sysadmin jobs and now i am Programmer or so they say, i still lack good hacking skillz...

Still i think my game addiction wasnt really bad for me, only it made me forget there was a real world out there although i dont really lack social skills, i have a handfull of friends and i go out to the pub since i was 14 and i still do now when i am 22...i have a girlfriend...so life seems pretty oke...still i live in a fantasy world, but i dont think thats cause of the games....

Now i am addicted to more things like IRC, Smoking and Sex...
I learned a lot of nice people tru IRC which are really very nice,
IRC also keeps me from doing my work at 100% cause i can use it at my work ;P
Smoking yes is a bad habbit i guess....and Sex well figure....

Overall aslong an addiction doesnt harm you in the real world around you and you can live a life you want to everything is great....

Quazion.

• nethack
• Xpilot
• freeciv
• Tux Racer
• MAME

And you know what is most embarassing? You can get a log of your ass getting whooped at civserver.freeciv.org. With crunchy graphs, and meaty maps.

What can I say? Yes please!. I'm not a developer, but I did contribute screenshots .

The developers are fairly active on #freeciv on Openprojects so drop past. You can probably guess my nick. :-)

Just do it... I can promise you that someone will reply... ;)

/Daniel

I haven't seen the code but I am willing to bet that the game's graphics can be upgraded without changing the gameplay.

The isometric engine is compatible with the civ II one. We got the current isometric graphics from a civ II mod pack. You can pretty easily convert the civ II standard gfx (which people seem to like) for use with freeciv. Of course those can't be distributed due to copyright.

freeciv with civ II gfx

(I coded the Freeciv isometric view.)
Note how Freeciv has goto lines and Fog of War displayed, unlike civ II. :)

• Danish
• Dutch
• English (British)
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish

No, patching a game doesn't necessarily violate copyright, but the sort of patch this guy is writing does.

By translating the original Civ 3 text he is creating a derivative work which he cannot distribute without permission from the original work's owner.

The people who have been given distribution rights to that work in Germany stand to lose real money if his patch is distributed, so it's no surprise that they are suing him.

His motivations were very nice and all, but still, he's messing with another person's copyrighted works.

If he really wants to volunteer on a project I'm sure the Freeciv folks would be a bit more gracious about the help.

Following a recent /. article, I've reinstalled and started playing FreeCiv.

I'm gonna wait to buy this game until it goes multiplayer.

(See www.freeciv.org for a free, multiplatform, multiplayer Civilization.)

TimeLine

• Elvises
• Scientists
• Taxmen

• Elvises
• Scientists
• Taxmen

What is it about the interface that bothers you? I'm sure the people that write the game would love your constructive feedback.

You can reach them at freeciv-dev at freeciv dot org, or check out their website at http://www.freeciv.org
for archives.

This "common open source software problem" is more likely that there's not enough feedback regarding what would improve the UI, and/or not enough people or time to do it. It's really difficult for most people to provide a nice UI to software they spend a lot of time working on. FreeCiv has 4 clients in the code base now, and different people work on different parts. There are several nice pending patches that we'll probably see in later days as the source base was being stabilized for the 1.12.0 release. FreeCiv dev people are constantly trying to improve the user's experience, just look at the changelog, almost everything there is for usability or a gameplay enhancement. Many users also contribute new parts for the GUI when they have an approach they like better, like the new city dialog patch for the gtk client(don't know what the current status is, but it doesn't look like it got in 1.12.0). The feelings you have shared would be the most productive if you used them to motivate yourself to do something similar.

Users are the most important part of usability and when you don't know what they want or how they think it should work then it's pretty difficult to give them what they want.

The command line interface on the server makes perfect sense. Are you always going to be wanting to run the server on a machine you have a GUI on? I sure don't. It's better than requiring a GUI to run the server... I'd rather there was more focus on improving the clients than the server UI, but perhaps you could write a little shell script or some server gui add-on that would simplify or render transparent setting up the game environment for single and possibly multiplayer games. That would likely be quite well received.

You can complain, you can contribute. You can even complain while you contribute, but contribution is the only way to get it done the way you want it to be done.

This project is a great example of the things open source can accomplish.

This is fine for games like freeciv, where the game is mainly gameplay and not fancy graphics; the goalpost isn't being moved.

But what about things like first-person shooters? These games are always pushing the boundaries of hardware, and so it needs a lot of time and effort just to keep up. Can open source keep up with this?

Another issue is with map design; in a game like Half-Life (for example), a huge amount of effort has to go into designing the story, and you can only play it once, unlike freeciv. This means that there would be have to be a single point where the game would be considered complete and released; otherwise both the designers and the gameplayers would lose interest.

So games like freeciv are fine, but what about the rest of the computer game market? Is it practical for open source development to continue? Or are companies like Loki going to be producing most of our decent games?

So go grab the tarball directly!
ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/stable/freeciv-1.12. 0.tar.bz2

Or a UK mirror on a big uni pipe:

http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/ug/cs00/pjw/freeciv-1.12.0 .tar.bz2

One processor could be running civclient while the other is running civserver. :-)

One processor could be running civclient while the other is running civserver. :-)

Not that Slashdot chose to report it.

Here's an article I wrote on the subject:

According to the open source movement [this article is concerned with open source, not free software (although free software certainly shares some of the funding problems), to clear up any ambiguity], considering a piece of software someone has written, one should not use it unless one has the source code. The reasoning is that if one
has a problem with it, one cannot resolve the issue without outside help. As far as I can see, although this is certainly a distinct advantage for say Google, who with a staff
of highly trained engineers could easily tweak the Linux or BSD kernel to suit their requirements, its advantages in ensuring quality and reliability are far from assured. For
example, in propounding the open source solution in John Goerzen's paper on the ethics of free [open source] software he says that the
famous case of the USS Yorktown, that the 'problem behind all this is proprietary software'.

This claim is one that Mr. Goerzen fails to adequately establish. His arguments can be summarized as follows:

• lack of peer review means that closed source software is intrinsically untrustworthy
  
• the 'fact' that closed source means knowledge is not shared, something he says is unethical
  

By contrast he argues that from utilitarian grounds open source is better insofar as it tends to maximize the sum total of happiness, and, most specifically that 'free software is the most beneficial for the greatest number of people.'

To consider his first argument, namely that the absence of peer review makes closed source software untrustworthy, I would argue that in fact peer review is *more* rather than less
common with closed source software. To take an example, Microsoft operating systems typically spend upwards of a year in external testing, whereas open source software tends to follow Eric Raymonds's famous
Bazaar principle, where software is released little and often. The difference between the two can easily be seen. Anyone who used an open source OS and GUI environment, simply by
clicking through each option. In my experience there would also be a considerable number of software crashes.

There are a number of reasons for this as I see it:

• lack of money
  

  Since the open source movement is associated with software that is without price, there is little money to fund fulltime programmers, marketing to attract new people to the project,
  or commercial testing.
  

• lack of direction (i.e. the ability to be able to say: 'Right, you get that bit done or you're fired')
  

'We need x programmers, x video guys, and x voiceover artists.'

They will then hire those staff and the product will be produced. By contrast, the free equivalent works on a haphazard basis whereby that which is produced is determined by those people who happen to volunteer for the project.

Thus Freeciv is without any sound effects, video, etc., and also has inferior graphics, all of which detract from one's enjoyment of the game (not to mention that it exhibits one of the major problems with open source, namely lack of innovation). Indeed it is my contention that open source is a fundamentally incorrect model for software aimed at the consumer.

Characteristics of the consumer:

• 
  little or no programming knowledge (and therefore the so-called advantage of having the source code is no such thing)
  
• 
  low tolerance of technology for its own sake
  
• 
  little understanding of computers
  

For them, open source software holds no benefits compared to the leading commercial equivalents from Microsft and Apple. As such, the consumer Linux distributions I believe are
doomed. The problems are:

• insufficient funding. Open source businesses typically depend on business models that stand no chance of ever making any money. Because of the mistaken believe that making money
  out of software is somehow immoral (a bizarre belief, considering that everyone must make money to survive), they rely on 'donations', on selling services, and on limited and voluntary sales
  of products they could download for free. Although to a certain extent the market has wised up to this, as seen by the fact that Corel's Linux division was sold for a miserly £5million,
  I still believe that businesses like thekompany.com, and Nautilus, which rely on selling vague services or on giving the core product and charging for addons, it still persists.
  

  
  It is unfortunate for open source that this socialist tendency persists so much - Microsoft would not be able to afford produce the world's best word processor if they had given
  Word away and just charged for the thesaurus.
  

  
  Still further, the belief that making money out of software is somehow damaging is fundamentally misconceived. While closed source software has grown up, so to has the economy -
  high software spending is a *good* thing, not bad.
  

  
  The massive growth in the economy has been fueled by commercial companies making money, whereas open source ultimately aims at making all software 'free', which would undoubtedly be harmful.
  

  
  
• inadequate product - whereas commercial companies such as Microsoft have armies of people employed in usability testing, the fact, as explained above, that open source can *never* match
  the resources of closed source means that the product will never be as advanced or as easy to use as the paid-for alternative [note that there are certain circumstances where open source can compete].
  

  
  The common reply to this is that absence of resources is not an impediment, since open source depends on volunteers, but this makes the fundamental assumption that there are enough
  people who would rather make software for free than make money making commercial software.
  

Thus:

• the pool of volunteers or the quantity of their free time will never be large enough to build a 'complete' open source software ensemble
  
• as explained above, commercial companies producing open source are not typically viable, and so do not have anything like the resources of the commercial sector with which to compete.
  
• the lack of money and commercial incentive means that open source produces very little innovation, and so is always playing catchup
  

This is a very flimsy argument, and I would in fact argue the reverse - at present colleges and learning schemes are heavily funded by profit-making businesses, but if open source succeeded
these businesses would be redundant, which would in fact cause even greater damage to learning since this funding would stop.

Furthermore, the net result of this would be that people would be discourage from software production as a career, since it would no longer represent a profitable career path, and so they
would probably pursue a career as a doctor or a lawyer. This would be a great loss to the nation, since the quality of software would decline, as highly intelligent students
would go elsewhere.

In conclusion, I'm not arguing necessarily that open source is always necessarily inappropriate, but rather that for consumer software it certainly is.

In more specific cases, it might present a useful solution - for example, for high-end military applications or servers maintained by experts there are certainly advantages to
an open system; however, these cases are relatively restricted - since I see little commercial potential in free software, these have to return to the roots of open source - to
the limited number of highly dedicated hackers producing a small range of software (such as Unix kernels). It is here that there can be union between the two opposites - a movement
that believes in free software, and those who make money out of it. Thus OSX represents a good example of the sort of project open source is ideally suited for - a defined Unix kernel
is the ideal project for open source, in that it requires relatively few resources other than programmer time.

Order a pizza and run a freeciv server. That never gets old for me.

Another great idea for boring nightshifts is to hold a make-believe radio show. Seriously, this can get entertaining, especially if you invite new and interesting guests to your "show".

If things at your job are getting old, then maybe it's time for a new job. :)

It might interest the readership to know that there is a free (speech) version of Civilization, Freeciv.

The basic principles of Civilization are always the same. Playing Civilization III will be the same thing as playing Civilization II or I. The only thing that does really differ is the graphic. Civilization is like chess: The game is always the same, no matter what type of chessboard you are using.
Ok, there are always some little changes and new technologies, but in the end, this is only a marketing gadget.
For me, freeciv is completly ok and a don't know why I should speed money on Civilization III. The graphic of freeciv also gets improved all the time, and if want some finetunning of the basic rules you could also do it yourself.

> second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems.

You mean like Mysql?

Or perhaps PostgreSQL? NASA recently gave up Oracle in favor of MySQL, if I recall correctly. Besides which, on the gaming end, I recently purchased Tribes2, but I still find myself playing GLtron and Freeciv and Nethack more than anything else.

Surprisingly enough, all those games are also under the GPL.

The difficulty of making a game engine is exactly why Free Software is an ideal solution.

i'm not sure what other high-tech (3d action etc..) games there are but freeciv is a clone of civilisation (with multiplayer etc...) that's been going for many years.

i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.

---

In no way does GTK provide enough human interface abstraction to be used as a cross platform tool

Maybe we really won't need proprietary games? Judging by the progress made by freeciv we really won't need CivIII. Check out this screenshot for example. It's stunning!

Maybe we really won't need proprietary games? Judging by the progress made by freeciv we really won't need CivIII. Check out this screenshot for example. It's stunning!

But... but... NetHack already works. Who needs anything else?

Seriously, though, Linux does have a number of games:

• Tux Racer (previously mentioned /.)
• Various FPSes (Doom, Quake, ...)
• Pengus (a Lemmings clone)
• FreeCiv (a Civiliazation clone)
• All the stuff port by Loki games
• Star Control: TimeWarp, an unofficial, open-source game in the Star Control universe (caveat: Getting it to compile under Linux took a bit of effort when I tried, but it was doable)

That being said, I do agree that Direct3D support in Wine is A Good Thing (except for the possibility that it decreases the likelyhood of true Linux ports). But don't sell Linux short.

(Random "It probably won't work, but..." thought: Running a WinCE Dreamcast game under WINE running on Linux on a Dreamcast. That'd be cool. Useless and probably impossible, but cool none-the-less.)

I highly recommend freeciv for this one. It's got all the strategic elements of starcraft (and then some) and it will allow more actual planning rather than quick reflexes as starcraft requires. There are more dimensions to measure too, such as what successful academics spend their time researching, building, or planning in the game(i.e. what they value in the mock civilization could reflect what they value in the real civilizaion.) Plus, as the name says, the game's free :-)

"I may not have morals, but I have standards."

My family is probably an odd case, but all four of us have our own machines in the same room, and they're all iMacs or G4s. One of the reasons that I went this way is that the CPUs don't need an additional cooling fan, which really adds up when you're talking about four boxes in a room with wood floors. All of these machines have both a Debian/PPC partition and a MacOS/9 partition. When MacOS X is released, we'll switch over, and keep the Debain partitions. I love my Sawmill environment too much to give it up, and FreeCIV hasn't been ported to MacOS X yet anyway. Even if it were, the real game is the computer, and it's more fun on freenix than anywhere else, IMO.

> 1.Linux users will have to overcome their desire for Open-Source. Gamers probably don't have this problem, but it bears mentioning. See also #3.
> 3.Linux users will have to get used to the idea of paying for software. If the games are ripped off left and right, then there will be no money for the people producing the games. And then there will be no games.

You are assuming that "success" is defined by how many units can be sold. What if we defined it by "being able to play lots of nifty games under Linux"? In that case, "Open Source" and "free" might be advantages rather than disadvantages.

Take Freeciv as an example. It's open source, and it's successful in the senses that it has lots of dedicated players and it is still getting attention from programmers even after 5 years "on the market". It has also started moving away from being just a clone toward being an innovator.

How many commercial games still get bug fixes and enhancements after 5 years? In the commercial world, bugs get fixed exactly when businessmen think the fixes will contribute to the bottom line, which is rare indeed. Indeed, a steady stream of bug fixes might be seen as a conflict of interest with getting people to buy the next shoddy product.

Also, your favorite genre is at the mercy of a handful of businessmen. What if you love FPSs, and they decide this year that FPSs are declassé, and move on to the next big thing? You're screwed. No new titles, no bugfixes for the old ones. It has happened before, and it will happen again. With OS games, it's not a risk at all, because it only takes a handful of volunteers to keep a game evolving.

OK, so I named Freeciv. Granted, that's not much. But remember, Linux still has a very small share of the desktop market, and even a smaller share of the gaming market. As those shares grow, mindshare will grow too, and you'll see more games of Freeciv quality popping up.

Remember too that the PC world had a thriving shareware market long before Linux was born. The itch and the will to scratch has always been there. What happens as more and more of the shareware author type become aware of Linux and the joys of OS programming?

My brother used to tinker with shareware games, but he was stuck with QBASIC because he didn't have money for development suites, and of course it takes years for one person to develop a nice game if he can only work on it a few hours a week. But suppose he installs Linux on his system? He suddenly has more development tools than he knows what to do with. And between OS licensing and the internet, he can suddenly round up a handful of like-minded comrades to help make his game become a reality.

I think we are headed for an OS revolution in gaming just as we are in desktops, and just as we have already experienced in servers and supercomputing clusters.

We may even experience a catastropic collapse of the game production sector. Game programmers already work deathmarches for low pay, with a low probability of producing a hit. Any substantial spread of OS gaming is going to put pressure on a system that is already ill. (Did I say already ill? Look at the release-day pricetag of games that are coming out now, and compare that to what they sold for five years ago.)

As for scratching the itch... I quit buying games altogether. I bought a few for Linux, but every time I play one I find myself asking "Why should I play this, and deal with the bugs and screwball features, when I could write my own game, or take Freeciv and tweak it to suit my own tastes?"

If only 1000 people develop the same attitude, OS games will start popping up everywhere. And the more that pop up, the more mindshare they attract.

No, I don't think the desire for open source and the unwillingness to pay for certain kinds of software is going to hurt the "success" of Linux gaming at all. No more than they hurt the success of OS operating systems. The same factors still apply.

--

You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.

The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.

The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.

I abosutely HATE to do this to you guys, but....

Lookie here, it's not dead.

I *was* going to claim that the little-known but much-played "Colony" on the Speccy was my all-time addiction, but then I read this thread and somebody up above there talking about buying a HD to boot Civ reminded me that I spent a month or two putting together a reset-proof RAMdisk for my AtariST that intercepted calls to the A drive, only so I could preload Civ.

Yes, I know the links on my homepage are all buggered cos they've gone into CAPS. I will fix it. One day. I promise. Maybe.
---------------------------

Linux users don't buy stuff. We're all cheap.

Any chance of porting any of the Sid Meyer games to it? (e.g. Civ, Civ II, Colonization, Alpha Centauri, et. al.) Or better yet -- FreeCiv!

Give it an external PC/MAC-linkable port (USB, 1394, or Ethernet...hell, even RS-232) and I'd shell out some buckage for it.

I think a lot of it comes down to personality. Different people (obviously, I guess) have different ways of coping and getting problems worked out.

Most people who I know tend to go for the attack coding binge type of approach. That is to come in stacked up with 16 hours worth of the high energy drink of their choice, and just sit there and code.

I've never found this to be very productive for myself because my mind doesn't work instantaneously on demand like that. What I tend to do is look at the problem so I know what I'm dealing with, then just ignore it for a few days. During this time an idea of how to do it just forms in my head, and if I can I'll probably scribble bits of it down on paper as soon as I have the opportunity.

Even then, I usually can't code it immediately. I wake up in the morning knowing what I want to have accomplished, and during that day it's virtually impossible for me to get very far past that point. If I manage to get the whole lot done in half an hour, I still can't get much further than that point. I'll just end up sitting around playing freeciv or something.

To make more progress means waking up again with a new goal in mind, knowing what I want to get done. Sometimes these goals take all day but they're usually not too big to take much longer. If they are, I just stop when I get tired and finishing it becomes the next day's goal.

So I guess my way of attacking the coding block that I get is to break it down into small day-by-day problems. If I can't think how to do something, I'll work on a different part of the project instead. Usually in the beginning I don't have any detailed idea how I'm going to do something, but as the bits build up and it takes some shape, it gets easier to see how to finish it off and what parts (if any) need to be recoded.

It probably wouldn't be much help if your mind works differently, though.

Umm...then download Freeciv and stop your bitchin

FreeCiv, NiL, Pingus, XPilot, NetHack, Crystal Space, GFingerPoken, Koules, Liquid War, XConq, WorldForge, SpellCast. To name the tip of the iceberg; I don't have time to do this all day :)

Or, in other words: The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

Cheers,
Daniel

The first point has already been covered many times here on /. but it is the second that interests me the most. Whereas some games aren't in particular need of new features or concepts, others can hugely benefit - think strategy games like Civilisation or role playing games like Worldforge as mentioned by another poster.

Freeciv! version 1.11 should be released today or tomorrow. www.freeciv.org btw, freeciv really need someone to implement isometric view... :)

Damn!

Damn Damn Damn!

Why does Loki have to release all these games? I get so much done at the moment when I'm booted into Linux because there is not much in the way of games installed to distract me (apart from FreeCiv which doesn't complain if you leave it for a while). But now I see that Loki are about to port my nemesis of productivity - racing games. I mean, look at this quote:

Well, we definitely want to support different gaming genres, and are in discussions now to license a racing game.

Just how cruel and heartless can you get?! If it turns out to be Mobil 1 Rally Championship my coding days are over ... *sob* :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Hey, how about freeciv?

Although it misses some fancy things as video and cool animations, it has the same game engine as the Civ2 from Microprose.

Seriously making a game is a very labor intensive process

Well, so is coding just about anything. Yet a lot of volunteer open source work gets done. One example of this is the FreeCiv Project which came up with a rather interesting GPL'd clone of Civilization II.

As for one person revolutionizing the gaming industry, that's not exactly something that happens every day, but still a possibility, but I think that it's more likely that it has to be a group effort.

-Valur