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.

Comments

Better art?

[Chardish]

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

Re:Better art?

[yobbo]

yes it's not art that makes the game.

but why play a crap looking game when you can play a beautiful looking one?

Re:Better art?

[kafka93]

If Linux is ever going compete with Windows on the desktop (don't laugh), then attention to eye-candy is essential. While it's doubtless true that great gameplay doesn't necessarily demand great graphics, it's also true that many games benefit a great deal from them. The whole "gameplay vs. bells-and-whistles" debate has raged ever since computer games first started to appear; in the meantime, computer games have continued to advance in terms of visuals and sound. And the situation right now is that there are a number of very good games for Windows that _do_ have fantastic graphics; given that, why would anybody choose to play more rudimentary Linux-based games?

The great thing about Linux is that the options are always going to exist: a parallel with this issue is the desktop, which continues to become more sophisticated (via KDE/Gnome/etc.) - but where it's still entirely possible to run older setups, modify/roll your own desktop, or do away with an X environment entirely. Equally, the appearance of graphically impressive games isn't going to take anything away from the games that already exist; it's only going to provide the user with more oprions.

Why freeciv?

[Naum]

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.

• Performance - my box is well above the "recommended" civ3 requirements and it generally runs good UNTIL the map is loaded up with units. Then it is a dog and I really miss the rapid keystroke progression possible with freeciv. I can complete a game in freeciv in the fraction of a time of a similar civ3 game.
  
• Superior user interface - I'll probaly get flamed here, but I prefer the freeciv interface. The civ3 GUI is "pretty", but civ style games are all about information. I hit F1 in freeciv, it pulls up a city report where I can easily examine and edit worklists, center on any city, sort by any possible report category and customize report, briefly scan for cities in state of disorder, instantly pop in the help browser informing me of what benefits of potential city improvments or what unit stats are for build consideration. Yes, it's sort of there in civ3 - but a lot of space is devoted to giving rows of bread icons instead of giving me a simple readout. And finding cities in civil disorder is a challenge - especially when I have a message log in freeciv, but that's all gone in civ3. And the civlopedia deal is nice in civ3, but it hits the CD drive and there is a second or two delay - not a lot but not the instant retrieval I'm accustomed to in freeciv. And not all of the unit commands are even labeled in freeciv or on the civlopedia. I guess it's a part of "safecopy" protection or something, but a lot of the unit commands are only available in the manual.
  
• Infinite customization - 61 civs to play with (current count), and you can easily add any tileset, ruleset, techset desired. The graphics are not the greatest, but you can easily change them and there are a variety of tilesets available now - and you can go with the isometric view or the old-style civ1 flat view. Instead of selecting from a general parameter palette (60%, 70%, 80% ocean coverage), you can set whatever generator percentages you desire - sure, some of the settings might be really wacky, but hey, it makes for much more replay value. And if you don't like something that can't be changed or added on by creating a new unit, building, tech ruleset, then you have the source so you can dive in and change however the game works for yourself.
• It runs on Linux - I usually am in Linux but reboot into Win-doze (like many others) for games - however, with freeciv available it allows me to play without rebooting. Freeciv is also available for a bunch of other platforms (Windows, BeOS, etc.), though I've not had experience with them.
  
• Improved multiplayer - freeciv was setup to be multiplayer. The AI is good - the "easy" AI is probaly too good - will smack down the inexperienced player, and the "hard" AI probaly isn't enough of a challenge for the expert player. Only negative is that the AI doesn't do diplomacy so it's either conquest victory or race to space (if enough map space for the number of opponents).
  

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.

Freeciv is long-term fun...

[DocSnyder]

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. :-)

Re:Civ3 Ripped Off FreeCiv!

[chazzf]

Be this as it may, Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition also featured trading cities for technology, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri featured production queues. These ideas are nothing new.

Re:This is not flamebait

[geomcbay]

This complaint is valid not just for FreeCiv, but most Open Source software in general. For all the snickering the OSS crowd does when Microsoft talks about innovation, what exactly has Open Source done in the past 10 years or so that is really original?

I really do support the concepts of OSS in theory, but over the years I've come to see that the vast majority of Open Source projects are poorly implemented, perpetually three-steps-behind, clones of closed source projects.

Re:Just an observation.

[Hobbex]

Mailing lists. Almost all free software projects revolve around their mailing lists, just join, lurk for a while (listen to the tone, learn the basics) and then start producing sounds.

A thing to consider is that free software projects do not usually have any real management, and posts like "I am really good, how do I join?" or other attempts to offer your services will often be ignored or given a very lukewarm response. In a free software project you need to be self managed, and the only thing that will buy you status in the project is work. So simply start off by finding a set of sounds that are not very good, make new ones, put them on the web, and post about it to the mailing list. If people see that you are actually producing results on your own, you will get accepted very fast.

What I like most about Freeciv...

[mfarah]

... 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.