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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
yes it's not art that makes the game.
but why play a crap looking game when you can play a beautiful looking one?
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.
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.
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
Did anybody read the article? They have an abundance of programmers, but hardly any artists. The two groups are mostly disjunct. Adding "art" would not make the game worse. Hell, they have two almost finished sound systems but no sounds.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.
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.
No statement is true, not even this one.
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 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.''How about Avalon Hill's Civilization board game, that Sid Meier drew on when making the original Civ?
Or the many empire type games that came out on various computer platforms before Civ? Civilization only came out in 1991, after all.. there were lots of games on the TRS-80 a decade earlier that had similar themes.. remember Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio? Or Populous? Or Seven Cities of Gold?
I remember a multi-user AppleTalk networked Conquest game that involved the exploration and conquest of a large world that was blacked out until you explored it, back in the mid-to-late 80's.. Conquest or some such thing.
Sid Meier's Civilization was a great, innovative game, but that doesn't mean there were no predecessors that were drawn from.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
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.
No, it wouldn't make it (necessarily) worse.
Better artwork would surely be positive.
But better graphics usually doesn't mean better artwork alone. Changes might include a new graphics engine, or generally a new UI, a.s.o.
This could _potentially_ lead to worse gameplay.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Did anybody say that it was art that made the game? No. Hell, I've been playing Slime Volleyball recently. It has some of the lamest, most childish graphics I've ever seen, but it also has very engaging game play. Nonetheless, better graphics in both SV and FC would be nice, and their implementation needn't affect the game play one bit.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
What is needed is a group of open source artists. They don't need to be attached to any given project, but as a team, they would move from project to project to work on artistic stuff on each. Musicians, sound people, and graphical artists would be needed. If such a team could be formed it would be a boon for open source development.
But just judging from the comments, most FreeCiv players also play the various versions of Civilization. (I actually prefer the original one. It's nice that the Linux one was different, but it's too bad that the original one wasn't also ported.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
... 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
I don't know if it was networked, but I used to play a great civ-like game called "Lords of Conquest". on the apple ][ in the mid 80s. I downloaded an emulator and found a copy on an abandonware site, and it was nearly as much fun as I remember.
I can see this being a problem for commercial games, but an Open Source game's resources are only limited by the interest from contributors - and maybe by management issues (IOW "This is too much for me to handle"). The problem is that you have too little of a specific kind of resource.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
>Please, do you know of any game empire building
>game before original Civ ?
How about 1981's "Utopia" for the Intellivision?
It wasn't networked, and it was much simpler (but what do you expect on that level of machine?), but it had (fairly simple) resource management, various structures, multiplayer...
Fun stuff. YEARS before Civ on the PC.
-l
>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. :-)