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FreeRails, Sister Project of FreeCiv

Posted by michael on from the railroad-gnucoon dept.

lukel writes: "Recently development on the freerails project - an open source Railroad Tycoon like game - has been making good progress. Clients are being written in C++ (SDL/Qt) and Java. There are screenshots, notes on design, and a wish list on the homepage We're still in the early stages of development - slashdotter's insight please!"

1 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nifty by lukel · · Score: 2, Informative

    The graphics could certainly be improved. At the moment we're using the freeciv trident tileset which I adapted a little myself to get something to work with. What we really need is someone artistic who can dedicate a bit of time to the graphics. I'm not sure what the best approach would be. A couple of people on the mailing list have said they would like freerails to have isometric graphics. Personally, I'm not a big fan of isometric graphics and don't think they add much to a 2D game other than making the screenshots look better, but it would be possible to have an isometric mode as well as a square tiled mode.

    Something I was thinking about some time ago was using a 3D package to build models of trains and buildings and then use them (pre rendered) instead of hand-drawn graphics. This might make them look a bit better, but on the other hand, rendered graphics often seem to lack character.

    Are there any similar games (i.e. tile based) that stand out as having good (but relatively simple) graphics? I haven't been following releases recently.