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The History Of FreeCiv
dizzyPhoenix writes: "O'reilly net is running an article on FreeCiv and how the game came about." As is often true on O'Reillynet, the article's well-thought and interesting reading.
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It came with my Mandrake distro. I played it. Then I went online, and played against other people. I got my ass whooped. Then I got beat again (and again, and again, and again). That's the history of Freeciv (from where I'm sitting).
SIG: HUP
The game's "wish list" includes "better art."
When are people going to learn that it's not art that makes the game? And sometimes it's what slows down the game? Freeciv is a marvelous program with art comparable to Civ2. Why do we need better?
Is it because we've become too eyecandyish of a gaming society?
-Chardish
It being one of the more successful projects in the open source community, one would think after being in such active development for so long that Freeciv might rival its commercially-sold counterparts in quality and features. It does not, and similar strategy titles like Civilization II and Alpha Centauri clearly have slicker user interfaces, smarter AI, and generally better gameplay overall.
As anyone who was played Civilization III can tell you, FreeCiv is far superior to its commercial counterparts when it comes to quality. It may be behind in graphics, but most serious players aren't going to care about eye candy. When it comes to music, I think I prefer FreeCiv's silence over Civ3's awful music. The Civ3 sound effects are okay, but some of them are really annoying (some of the ships are too loud).
Two bugs in Civ3 that come to mind immediately are the fact that civilizations on the world map can not be made to start in their historic locations, instead you have stupid stuff like Japan starting in Africa, and Russia starting in California. Just plain stupid. The other bug that has given me problems is corruption is laughably unrealistic in Civ3. A city just one screen away will be practically unusable because of corruption -- a city two screens away is totally useless, even under Democracy. How is this realistic, or fun? It isn't. It's just plain stupid. You can tell that Civ3 is another game that the manufacturer decided to sell while it was still a beta test, rather than a 1.0 release.
So what is my point in all of this? My point is that instead of going to the store and spend $50 to beta test Civilization 3, instead we should help the community effort of FreeCiv. With Civilization 3 the entire user community is stuck with an unplayable game while we patiently wait for Firaxis to release a 1.0-quality version. But with FreeCiv we have the source code so we are not held at mercy to a company that couldn't care less. This is the strength of the GPL and why we should support FreeCiv.
I recently bought Civ3 but I still find myself playing freeciv as much if not more. Civ3 is a "pretty" game as far as graphics go (with the animations and all, though I still have a hard time distiniguishing gold from barbarian villages and a few other nuances) and there's been some nice improvements strategy wise. OTOH, Civ3 has evolved into "Civ for the masses" and to me thus far, there seems to be less variation in strategy (Age of Empires style tech tree, corruption, unforgivable bugs like tech trade exploits, air superiority bugs, etc. ...).
Anyway, here is a list of reasons why I'm still playing freeciv over civ3.
If I had the time, I would love to contribute to the freeciv project (I don't know current state of developers - I know that it is a dynamic deal, with new developers joining and old ones departing ), so I'm not sure if there is enough dedicated enthusiasm for development of a civ3 ruleset and/or revising the AI.
AZspot
Another multiplayer issue stems from the fact that players makes their moves simultaneously. A battle unit in Freeciv has both an attack strength and a defense strength. During a multiplayer game, when two opposing units are placed close to each other at the end of a round, the game turns into an action game at the beginning of the next round, since each player wants to either attack or run away as quickly as possible. The only good solution to prevent this would be to disallow simultaneous movements. This, however, says Unold, "would turn the game into a boring waiting game."
If it was possible to manage your cities while the other players moved their units you might be able to minimize the waiting, while still having non-simultaneous moves.
A 2-player game could then go like this:
-player 1 moves his units.
-player 1 finished moving, and passes the control. The production in player 1's cities is updated, new structures build etc.
-player 2 moves his units. (player 1 can still manage his cities, and assign orders to his units, though move or attack orders will not take effect until it is his turn)
-player 2 finished moving, and passes the control. The production in player 2's cities is updated, new structures build etc.
etc.
Freeciv was the project to teach me how free-software development works, especially in a quite complex piece of software.
:-)
I remember playing Freeciv about three or four years ago: the client was based on libXaw, which is far from the GTK+ eye candy, and the AI was uncomparable to what it is today (yet still being improved). It even crashed and behaved obscurily. Since there wasn't any game of this kind running on GNU/Linux, I gave it a try. Nonetheless it was fun to play, and I was really happy when I won in a 100x60 map against three AI players for the first time, after playing for two weekends.
Some time later, the client has been ported to GTK+, matching my desktop theme and looking like most other applications. The AI became better (and harder to beat, as it behaved differently after a major upgrade), worklists and some other useful stuff went in. Freeciv got the space race and finally the isometric tiles.
The special fun on Freeciv is seeing it evolving over several years, getting a new version and see the differences, following the discussions on the developer mailinglist, even just "playing Lego" in single player mode with a 200x100 map is really fascinating.
It is rather wrong comparing Freeciv to any closed-source Civilization-like game, as most of the fun with Freeciv isn't available on proprietary games. If all you want is eye-candy, go with one of the eat-or-die Civ* variants. If you want to be in between the "making of" a great, complex and fascinating game, you're welcome to give it a try.
By 'slicker user interfaces', he means 'better graphics'.
By 'better gameplay overall', he means 'better graphics and sound' (Freeciv has no sound, so SMAC and Civ:CTP have better sound, unless you think that their sound is worse than no sound... which is a valid point of view)
Actually, I think FreeCiv has a much better user interface than old Civ games (certainly CivI/CivII and arguably SMAC) -- it just hasn't been rendered in pseudo-3D ;-(
The gameplay is, AFAICT, identical. And FreeCiv's AI isn't that bad - though it lacks diplomacy and doesn't handle air/missile. units yet.
Why don't you homos get out of your houses and experience RealCiv?
I can't believe that in what is essentially a valentine written to FreeCiv, the author didn't mention the fact that Civ3 stole multiple innovations from FreeCiv. These include things like city production queues and the ability to trade non-like items (e.g. cities for technology) during negotation with other players. The latter improvement is really trumpeted in the Civ3 manual , so us open-source supporters should get some satisfcation from the fact that it has been available in FreeCiv for almsot a year now :)
Isn't it amazing that so many programmers gladly give away their hard work in free software, while so few artists, musicians, and writers do? Like the article says, it's a shame that there aren't any (or enough) contributers in areas such as sound. (The programming is there--it's the actual sounds that are missing.)
At the risk of losing any karma that I might have, let me make a few points here:
Freeciv is a very nice game, and very fun to play. However, all things considered, it is nothing more than a souped-up version of Civilization II-minus the graphics, sound, and impressive documentation. Building queues and simultaneous turns are great, but really don't represent evolution.
As far as the eye-candy goes, I consider it to be PART of the gameplay experience. I have played the Heroes of Might and Magic series for a long time not just because the gameplay is good but because the game is visually pleasing.
Finally, I have to ask why the Linux/GNU/FreeBSD/Open Source/Free Software community is so obsessed with trumping the "closed" community by producing open source replicas of hard work. Don't you think that Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, or Jeff Briggs are geeks, hobbyists, innovaters. They created this game. You've reverse-engineered. The open community ought to dedicate itself to creating something original, something that it can call its own.
Sensible replies please, no flames.
No statement is true, not even this one.
A thought keeps occurring to me whenever I see anything about FreeCiv -- why on EARTH hasn't someone set it up for Mac OS X installation?
/.'ers would see as an obvious impediment...
Admittedly, I'm a medical-geek, and my hobby/interests lie in history and not coding, so I could very easily be overlooking something that most
...but still -- I was under the distinct impression that OS X/Darwin was very BSD-ish, and that a package allowing easy Mac installation should be easy...Not trivial, but certainly more do-able than the Windows port.
So, I ask again, is there a good reason why I can't install this on my OS X machine?
I don't beleive there are any original ideas (in regards to gaming) left, just original ways of presenting those ideas.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
I don't know what's worse, that Hemos is quote whoring* for O'Reilly now, or that he's so bad at it. I mean, god damn, show some tact man! It's like when Jon Katz tried to claim that an Afgani emaied him from a war zone, everyone knew he was full of it from a mile away. If you're going to be so obvious about blasting away your journalistic integrity (does slashdot have any left?), you might as well get a job reviewing movies for the LA times or something.
*For those who don't know (and will probably moderate me down for using a 'naughty word') a "quote whore" is somone in some imagined place of authority on a subject who is paid by a cooporate entity to say good things about it. Like a film critic being paid off by a movie studio.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''It was great day when FreeCiv was ported to Darwin/Mac OS X. I love FreeCiv; its eye candy lite, solid and playable. The music in Civ III is a Kenny G Greatest Hits parade. I'm sure I'll play Civ III when it comes to the Mac in January but I wont be in a rush to do so.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
To be honest I'd be more than happy to contribute sound/music to any opensource project out there. Sourceforge tends to focus purely on technical development. Where are projects putting their ads for musicians?
It's hard to say, but Freeciv is much worse than any Civilization, when you play in single player mode. Simple reason - there is no diplomacy with AI. So it's war only game. When you play Civilization3 you survive for a long time without single fight. In Freeciv you must fight, you can't trade, you can't share science, you can't have peace, you can only destroy, steal and conquer.
Of course Freeciv is very nice when playing in the Net. Old versions had big problems with lags (one lagged player could destroy whole game!). When you are in multiplayer for a first time - you see that you just can't play - it's completly different game than with AI. And that is bad thing.
Pffff
"We soon gave up on the game, as it performed terribly. At that point, the idea was born to write our own version in C," says Peter Unold, now a 30-year-old graduate student in Aarhus, Denmark.
Man... I thought I spent a long time in grad school because I wasted too much time playing Civ... I guess even more time gets sucked up when you write it.
Just pointing out the obvious. :)
This isn't a troll, but it's interesting that everybody hates Microsoft because, to compete with Netscape, they released a free browser and made it available on the 'net, thereby ruining Netscape's chances for profit. But nobody seems to mind when an open source project writes a free version of a retail project and makes it available. Hell, FreeCiv is probably lucky they never got sued by Microprose. Other game companies have shut down similar projects (even simple conversion mods, like Doom conversions for Quake or Duke3D for Unreal).
Having said that, it's cool that FreeCiv exists, and I still like to play it (though Civ3 is getting more of my time).
- bonch
stay animated
One of the things I find most interesting about technology is that it's pushed forward by the strangest things-- here's an open source program, the prime example of open source theory, and it's pushed forward why?
Because it's a game. "It's geeky."
Funny.
... is that is open source.
What really annoyed me about Civ/Civ II was the fact that the nations's cities lists were SMALL (20 names or less) - considering that I like to build large empires (and that I have the nasty habit of renamig the cities I conquer), it was really annoying to have to think of a new name each time. Even nations (my favorite being Spain) with lots of cities available in any decent map were prone to this problem.
In Freeciv, nation rulesets are as open as the source code. So I made LARGE lists of cities for several of my favorite nations (the spanish ruleset's list has 200 entries, thanks to several days worth of work), and now I play happily.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Just do it... I can promise you that someone will reply... ;)
-- No, no -- Not that one!
First of all, kudos to all who participated in FreeCiv. Nice stuff :)
My question is: how does FreeCiv stand on legal grounds? I mean, it's
basically a reimplementation of an existing game (whose owner is Hasbro, at
the moment, if I follow company acquisitions correctly).
I ask this, because some years ago I started implementing
Advanced Civilization (originally a tabletop game by Avalon Hill, now bought
by Hasbro). The server part is 90% finished, and the GUI client could be
ready in 2-3 month if I put some effort in it. Unfortunately I don't have
much time to work on it nowadays, but I'm reluctant to make it available to the
public so that someone could finish it up, 'cos I'm afraid that simply making
it available "free" won't save my hide if Hasbro's lawyers wanted to come
after me.
I tried contacting Hasbro on this matter, but I only got back some sales
brochures.
Could someone with some experience or legal background enlighten me on this
matter?
cheers,
mitch
// "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips,
// their brains start working." -- Ford Prefect
That sounds kind-of silly, perhaps "volunteer artists" for the project would be more appropriate.
"Errr, my source was photoshop, the "aged film" plugin, and a picture of my aunt mabel!"
>the past 10 years or so that is really original?
LyX. It's only relationship to anything else is its early role as a latex front end.
It's different enough from everything else that it *caused* my switch to full time unix.
hawk
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. :-)
Well, the problem is with AI. Not, it doesn't perform very bad, it is quite reasonable and even too difficult for many beginners, even when it lacks features like diplomacy. The problem is that it is coded terribly. The code is covered by the mist and fear, marked as 'hic sunt liones' and things like 'int a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i;' aren't very rare, as opposite to blank lines and spaces, not even mentioning any explaining comments. The AI was generally developed by one man, who disappeared magically around 1998, and we are still trying to clean it up in order to be able to make any changes into it. Diplomacy support is really high in the TODO after the major cleanup then, but still someone has to do the dirty work before... It looks we are speeding that up now and hopefully we will be able to push that forward soon. Let's hope... :)
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