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At Long Last: Stable Version of FreeCraft Game Engine
jimmcq writes: "After two years of active development the long awaited stable release of FreeCraft is available.
FreeCraft is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It is possible to play against human opponents over LAN, internet, or against the computer. The engine can be used to build C&C, WC2, SC and AOE-like real-time strategy (RTS) games. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X, MacOS/Darwin and MS Windows. Souce code and binaries are available from SourceForge."
We do have some decent graphics for Freeciv. There is the Cevo tileset, which looks quite good. Head
and shoulders above the rest.
It looks to me like it's a complete game screen shots. Because it's opensource you can take the engine and build a game with it if you REALLY want to.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
> We do have some decent graphics for Freeciv. There is the Cevo tileset, which looks quite good. Head and shoulders above the rest.
Unfortunately, the consensus is that Cevo contains copyrighted material that would be illegal to distribute with Freeciv.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Have a look at Frozen Bubble then.
Another similar project maybe worth notice is Worldforge. Also some of their screenshots seem to have quite cool graphics.
Also check out the art work at http://www.planeshift.it
This is an Open Source game. It is still in the early stages of development (just released their second tech demo a week ago) but the artwork is really very good IMHO.
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Many people here seem to be commenting on the graphics of the screenshots. Um... hello? This is a game engine - a device for driving games. Just because you don't like the test graphics doesn't mean that it's a bad program. Furthermore, there are quite a few Opensource games with good graphics, like Vegastrike or Race or Armagetron to name three.
While this means you're not required to redistribute the game under the GPL, you're also not licensed to redistribute the FreeCraft engine with your game -- unless you redistribute the game under the GPL.
From section 2 of the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
I.e. you may redistribute your game under any license you want, but it must not include the FreeCraft engine unless the license you want is the GPL.
I have read an article written by a lawyer who claimed that for libraries it would be better to use the LGPL because it is questionable whether the above section would hold up in court while the LGPL's terms for the redistribution of works using the library were more clear. This was in reference to German copyright law, though. Also note that IANAL, this is not legal advice, and you ignore that section of the GPL at your own risk. Even better, don't ignore it, because even if it were legal, it is probably not what the authors want you to do.
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Sorry to hear it, but there doesn't actually seem to be any MacOSX support - I can't find a download. And I'm not technically inclined enough to compile.
However, if it got ported over, I'd seriously consider throwing my graph-artist skills over to the program. Brian.