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FreeCiv 1.12.0 Released
wmulvihillDxR writes "For you Civilization addicts, check out FreeCiv. They have just released version 1.12! Highlights of changes include the isometric view we all know and love. You can download here(gz) or here(bz2). This project is a great example of the things open source can accomplish."
So go grab the tarball directly!. 0.tar.bz2
0 .tar.bz2
ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/stable/freeciv-1.12
Or a UK mirror on a big uni pipe:
http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/ug/cs00/pjw/freeciv-1.12.
When I bought RedHat 7.1 a couple of months ago, I was entranced by FreeCiv 1.11.4. This really turned my thinking around on open-source/free software games. Previously, I had thought games were a good place to make an exception to the free software philosophy, but FreeCiv changed my mind.
I think the community should try to win over proprietary software lovers by cloning games right and left. Yes, this means imitation instead of innovation for awhile. Guess what? Richard Stallman did the same thing when he decided to copy UNIX for GNU. Eventually, the free software/open source community will reach a critical mass and innovation will begin to outpace the imitation.
So, speaking of imitation, what are the odds I might see an open source game like XCOM some time soon? I also understand Linus Torvalds really loved Prince of Persia. Either of these would be great to clone.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This project is a great example of the things open source can accomplish.
/.]
Fatal error: out of dynamic memory in yy_create_buffer() in Unknown on line 0
[Moderator, if you miss the humour, you are obviously not smart enough to read
What is Sid Meier's role in the making of Civilization III?
Sid is the Director of Creative Development at Firaxis Games. He is overseeing the project, making game play and design decisions.
Like anyone would prefer B&W over Civilization (no matter whether in 2001 or 2034)
I would. I'm still miffed that I'm forced to buy a new Win box just because I can't run Black and White under WINE.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
In many ways, this is really Civilization IV, as both Sid Meiers and Brian Reynalds (one of the main guys behind Civilization II) developed "Alpha Centauri" for Firaxis Games. Quite a few of the "new features" for Civilization III (like borders, for one) made their debut in Alpha Centauri.
The cake is a pie
And I'd finally broken my addiction...
Well, there go my plans for the weekend.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
- Elvises
- Scientists
- Taxmen
Elvises?! This game has gotten... a little silly it seemsAs a game? Nothing.
As an example of open source, a clone of a game that's quite old may be seen as not a great example.
In other news, Civilization 3 is due October 17.
It is true that FreeCiv is more a clone of Civilization II than Civilization I these days, but it still hasn't really hit that mark yet. Certainly not in the AI.
The cake is a pie
Open Source version: 2001
I know it's a troll, but I'll bite:
Civilization II Gold (first multiplayer version): 1999
Freeciv multiplayer: 1998
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
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?
There is some hope. The Sid Meier's game "Alpha Centauri" is available for Linux, though it did take Loki forever to get it out.
The cake is a pie
Well to be fair, diplomacy isn't done, and AI is a fairly low priority, because the developers and users of the game have never made it a high priority. It's rarely run as a single player game - the focus of the project is and has always been multiplayer network games. And at that it excells.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Call to power isn't one of Sid Meier's civilizations. (Neither is the second one). Thats why both civ 1 and 2 have the titles Sid Meiers' Civilization. They kept the basic idea though, although Sid Meier appears to be doing a much better job with his series.
I've mirrored the latest release to:
http://planetmirror.com/pub/freeciv/stable/
ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/freeciv/stable/
this mirror is located in australia and is provided by http://planetmirror.com
cheers,
-jason
I recommend people try starting the client with --tiles=trident, to get the old view. It would be nice someone should draw some new, improved isometric graphics.
Why does all open source software tend to have bad user interface?
Two reasons: First, because most folks *capable* of _creating_ a decent GUI are by definition competent enough to use the command line interface. Second, because people who are *that* dependant on the _graphical_ interface are too damn freaked by the commandline nature of compilers that they don't do anything about it.
Short answer: Either get used to the commandline or be friggin' brave enough to make the GUI better.
And for GOD sakes, some of the BEST software has ONLY a commandline interface, so NEVER equate commandline interfaces with commandline interfaces. Hmph!!!!!
I liked freeciv, but I liked the civ 1 interface a lot. The amount of info they were able to cram into a few oversized pixels was cool. :)
Freecraft is my fave GPL'd game though. Even if the graphics aren't the best, it runs well under BEos!
It's been a long time.
Hmm... I'm not scared of the command line. I know exactly what it does and how to use it.
My point, however, is that I (and many others) are much more efficient working in a proper GUI. That's all.
It seems that in much open source software, the programmers do the bare minimum in order to get the program to work, then stop.
This is release 1.12.0.
Thanks again to all our developers, who continue to work so hard.
This release includes lots of changes, outlined below. Those who
are interested in seeing the detailed changes should check the
ChangeLog file.
WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 1.11.4
- Internationalization extended. Still needs improvement.
Current localizations: de en_GB es fr hu it ja nl no pl pt pt_BR
ro ru sv.
- Isometric view in gtk and amiga clients using the mostly civ2-
compatible HiRes tileset. This is on by default, but the old non-
isometric tiles are still available by giving a --tiles argument to
the client, fx "civclient --tiles trident".
- While planning a goto (after hitting "g") a line will be displayed
showing the route from the selected unit to the mouse pointer.
Hitting "g" will insert a waypoint at the mouse pointer.
- The server now has readline completion. This works at all levels,
fx "cu" completes to "cut", and if there exist a player named
"paulz" "cut pau" will complete to "cut paulz".
- Players can agree to give shared vision, which means that you
automatically see everything the other player sees.
- Layer view menu items allow you to only display some map info on the
main map. Fx you can choose to not show roads.
- The server will ping all connected clients and cut off those too slow
to respond.
- Smarter placing of partisans.
- The server no longer automatically starts when the maximum number of
players have been reached.
- If commandlevels are used and the controlling player disconnects a
connected player can assume the "first" level with the "/firstlevel"
command.
- "Restrictions and Limitations" section added to the README.ruleset
- Caravans, diplomats and spies can move into allied cities.
- Elephants, Crusaders and Fanatics activated in civ 2 ruleset.
- The size of the city foodbox is now controlled by the ruleset
variables "granary_food_ini" and "granary_food_inc".
- Limit on number of improvement types in rulesets removed.
- Capitalization is available from the start of the game in the default
ruleset. (renamed coinage)
- Cities can have 0 trade. (used to be at least 1)
- Settlers can only be added to cities less than size 8, as in civ 2.
- If you paradrop a unit into unknown terrain and the terrain contains
an enemy unit the paradropping unit is lost. If you drop into terrain
you thought was land, but which has changed to water, the unit is
also lost.
- diplomats/spies can't take action from a ship.
- Refueling air units at turn update will refuel units with only 1 fuel
first. Secundary criteria is unit cost.
- Trireme loss percentage depends upon known technologies.
- Leonardo's workshop will upgrade a random unit each turn, and not
just the next one.
- Allied cities count as friendly when determining whether a unit is
being agressive. (gives unhappyness under some govs.)
- Deserts are created primarily 15 to 35 degrees off the equator.
- Only arctic tiles generated at poles.
- The server will report when a new government becomes available.
- Changed wording of message "famine feared" to "famine occured". New
"famine feared" message just before food runs out.
- "wonder soon build" message when another player is about to complete
a wonder.
- Players are notified when one of their wonders has become obsolete.
- In the players dialog it is now reported which nations have an
embassy with you. Your embassies are also listed.
- Wonders being built are listed in the "wonders of the world" popup.
- Server "save" command saves to m.sav[.gz]
if it is not given any arguments.
- "quitidle" server commandline option makes server quit if there has
been no connected players for the specified amount of time.
- When turning on the autotoggle option existing human nations without
a connected player will be put on AI.
- Server doesn't block as long when writing to a slow host, controlled
by variables "tcptimeout" and "netwait".
- "savename" server variable controls the prefix of autosaves.
- "allowconnect" server variable lets you control which types of
players (new players; human players; AI players; dead players;
barbarian players) can connect.
- More nations added.
- New maps in data/scenario: british-isles-80x76-v2.51.sav,
iberian-peninsula-136x100-v0.9.sav,
hagworld-120x60-v1.2.sav (earth map).
- Amiga internationalization/localization.
- Amiga client: history added to chatline.
- Lots of bug fixes and code cleanups.
Besides, it's not so much just the fact that you can play Civilization for free that makes FreeCiv a triumph of the open source community. What really makes it great is that people who wouldn't normally have access to game source code can see inside the guts of the game, learn how it works, and make changes. The alterations could be as sweeping as an entire new ruleset which could be distributed over the net or as simple as altering a few #DEFINEs just to see what happens, but in any case, the ability to work with the source of a project like this is invaluable.
Hacking this sort of project is a big part of what the open source movement is all about: having a good time, growing intellectually, and inviting others to do the same.
This seems to be a recurring trend in open source software - it's very stable, low/no cost - all ideal qualities! Except the interface blows.
Something tells me that in the original "Civilization", the end user would not have to use a command line to configure and play the game. Why couldn't they "clone" the setup process?
Why does all open source software tend to have bad user interface?
http://www.civ3.com
this game looks incredible! god i can't wait
i could live a little longer in this prison
This is a great example of what open source can accomplish? A (not-quite-primetime) clone of a decades-old game that's already been re-implemented several times commercially with better graphics and gameplay?
No, I don't think so. This may be nice to have around in the game-poor Linux world, but it's not an example of what open source can do. For that you'll want to look to Apache, to Postgres, to BIND, and to any of the other programs that do what they do _better_ than the comparable commercial alternatives.
Freeciv seems to have a lot of the look-and-feel of xconq (with lots more detailed city development and unit types) - and that was available at least back in 1988 when I recall wasting hours on it - actually the first version came out even before X was synonymous with X version 11 (we ran version 10 for a while...).
So, I think the OSS version actually came first...
Energy: time to change the picture.
It doesn't help that while all UI designers and graphic artists know that they shouldn't be writing code, many programmers don't have any such insight about their limitations.
In a previous thread, I asked that Bero guy from Redhat about this, basically "Does Redhat have a staff of user experience people?". I don't remember getting an answer, although he did write a nice reply to another post of mine.
I suspect the answer is no, because to my knowledge, there are few, if any, user interface people working on open source stuff. They are, however, desperately needed, and RedHat should be able to hire 2 or 3 to supervise the installer, contribute to Gnome, etc...
In Civilization II, the only pollution that has any effect on the world is that generated by the player....the AI doesn't make any. In FreeCiv, the rate of pollution seems to be about the same....but now its counted for each player, human and AI! So if you're playing with 5 AI's, you have 5 times as much pollution, so you tend to get massive global warming by the 1950's.
Yeah, gotta hate those commercial apps, like Red Hat Linux and Zope...
I believe the word you're loooking for is closed source, proprietary or non-free. Many Open Source projects are commercial in nature and both the FSF and OSI and any dictionary (combined with some logic) will tell you that whether soemthing is commercial or not has no bearing on whether it is Open Source or Free Software.
That, and some other things, is what I mean by "hasn't hit that mark". It is all well and good to say that your AI is better, but if you haven't got around to implementing everything, it is only better in theory, not in practice. That seems to be where open source projects often break down. They are often perpetually not quite done. (Don't flame: I know damn well that many projects are done.) Freeciv suffers from that. I've played it, and enjoyed it, but there is still work to be done before it is a real game.
The cake is a pie
I could, if I were a programmer, I suppose. However, like 99% of software users, I am not. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to start the game with one executable, and setup the game and start if from there.
I could describe the changes I perceive to be necessary to someone in ten minutes - but maybe it's difficult to implement? Seems like if it was easy, someone would have done it already.
I'm guessing that Open Source project are only populated by programmers, and don't have either UI designers or graphic atrists on board. For a good game you need all three skills well prepresented.
It doesn't help that while all UI designers and graphic artists know that they shouldn't be writing code, many programmers don't have any such insight about their limitations.
Just as an anecdote I talked to someone at a major game company last week, and they have less than 10 programmers out of over 50 people working on building their current next big game.
I never understood why Civ didn't use hexagonal plots of land. All distances would be nicely evened out...
Let's see, Civilization (Sid Meyers) release date: 1991
Open Source version: 2001
So, I should see an Open Source clone of Black & White by around 2034.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Open source works fine for the scaffolding that holds games up. Things like SDL, OpenGL, various other APIs, rendering and logic engines are all things that open source can work very well for. The maps on the other hand are pretty much going to have to be developed by paid artists and it will require profit to pay them. For instance, there are all sorts of nifty projects that have been made out of the Doom and Quake source but the maps are not free. You will have to find an old copy of Quake to obtain them legally.
And yes, some fairly innovative things are being done with this old source. prboom.sourceforge.net seems to have merged many of the independent improvments to Doom into one place:
Game engine
* Player bobbing improved, optional (BOOM, MBF)
* Friction effects (BOOM), affecting players and monsters (MBF)
* Wind, current, conveyor effects (BOOM)
* Far more flexible scrolling wall/floor types (BOOM)
* Always run (BOOM)
* Weapon change logic overhauled and improved (BOOM)
* Support for friendly monsters, helper dogs (MBF)
* Monster target finding code improved (MBF)
* AI improvements (MBF)
* Bouncy and touchy things (MBF)
* New code pointers (MBF)
* Per-level and animated skies (MBF)
* Generalised line types system gives complete flexibility (BOOM)
* Elevators (BOOM)
* Translucent sprites, walls (BOOM)
* Independent floor and ceiling lighting (BOOM)
* Silent teleports (BOOM)
* Deep water, true underwater areas (BOOM)
* Icon of Sin telefragging made more consistent (MBF)
* Fix large numbers of game bugs (BOOM, MBF, LxDoom)
* Support arbitrary texture heights (BOOM)
Screen
* High resolution support (PrBoom)
* Optional message console, multiple message lines (BOOM)
* Status bar shows health/armour/ammo in colours (BOOM)
* Heads up display, showing ammo, health, keys overlayed on view (BOOM)
* OpenGL renderer which renders as original to software Doom as possible while greatly
improving the visual quality (PrBoom)
To be sure, most `big' games for Linux will come from porting houses like Loki but Loki has to use most of the same tools everybody else does. Healthy contribution to those `scaffolding' API will make it easier and quicker for those porting houses to get the game to us.
For a very promising (if unfinished) public domain alternative, try Civ Evolution. It's gradually evolving away from its Civ II inspiration, to focus more on the strategy and AI aspects of the game. It also looks very pretty, if somewhat Civ II-like: shot1, shot2, shot3. At the moment it's Windows only, but the source is out there...
www.civ3.com
Freeciv is great, don't get me wrong (it's much better than CivII IMHO), but I'm drooling just by thinking of a new version of the classic we all know and love.
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."