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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."
woohoo, first post...um to stay on topic i like me them RTS thingies...
Let Tigert loose on that game and it would be great. FreeCiv could also use a graphic overhaul. Unfortunately geek and graphic artist do not often go hand in hand. Even if we had one graphic artist who could come up with a decent isometric tileset, it might be possibly to recycle that tileset between games like FreeCraft and FreeCiv.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
That sounds like a great idea. Although wouldn't games like FreeCiv and FreeCraft have a different scale, thus making it tricky to design something that works for both?
Either way, has there been any progress towards making a Free-To-Use (Add your fave license to taste here, IANAL) tileset library?
And if not, would anyone like one? I'm crap at programming but I can knock up some graphics for starters.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
tell me that hobbyists can't make games with as much quality and well-done graphics as the pros.
Um, okay. Well, I can't tell quality from a screenshot, obviously, and I won't contradict you there (mmm... Nethack...) but as for graphics, that screenshot looks about 10 years old. *shrug*
I know graphics aren't really the measure of how good a game is, but you can't stand there and say that 'hobbyist' games have just as good graphics as professional games. Well, you can, but I won't believe you. Not without proof anyway.
I really wish I had artistic talent enough to volunteer for some of these projects that have great gameplay etc but just need overhauling in the graphics department. But I don't, so.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I can't wait to see what is produced with this, but I really hope we don't start seeing a bunch of Warcraft/C&C/Starcraft clones (sadly, I know we will).
I'd much rather see something fresh and new, with its own identity. A whole new game with its own units, storyline, game world, and so forth.
Otherwise, people trying out some human/orc game called "FanCraft" will just note how it looks like a lame ripoff of Warcraft and go back to Battle.net. But if there's something new and innovative, there would be a reason to stay and play it, and you might just have a "killer app" on your hands.
I think the problem is bigger and more widespread than just this screenshot. I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap. And i'm not referring to technological quality of the graphics - open source artists are not as good as professional artists. It seems that if an artist is good enough, then they won't work for free or in their spare time - unlike programmers.
Or is it just that the whole open-source concept breaks down when applied to things like art? Can you have 10 artists collaborating over the internet to produce a high-quality/professional looking product?
I'd also question the ability of user interface design to succeed - not only are the graphics awkward in products like this, but they seldom have the "slick interface" present in commercial games.
Maybe i'm shallow, but I require a minimum level of quality in the art/interface of a computer game for me to feel happy playing it. I'll be avoiding this one :)
Well, it's not for sale, so let's not undersell it either!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
1) _Graphics_. They need better graphics! Why do 98% of opensource game projects look far worse than Sim City and Castles on my 1980s Amiga? Programmers tend to have very poor graphic & ui design skills - they shouldn't have to do this work when there are so many wonderful art designers out there.
2) Co-ordination. There is too much chaos out there. There is no kernel.org or kde.org as such (ok, I know there are a few good newssites, but it isn't the same).
3) To co-op Mac users. Cross platform Linux/Mac OSX games are needed to bring the art design crowd. These guys more often than not don't use Linux. It isn't that they don't want to help out, just they are out of the loop.
4) To increase production and be taken seriously. Linux needs games more than 15 different webbrowsers to bring more users. More opensource games for the platform will also make commercial companies take it far more seriously for releasing their own games on it. It is a ton harder to get programmer interest for a oss game project than anything else, I've tried and couldn't catch anyones attention so had to dump the project.
5) To have clearly structured and well designed games. I think most projects have been more about the joy of programming (nothing worng with that!, but) than the endgame.
6) To aim higher. Most game projects are making things of the scale seen in the commercial game industry in the early/mid 1990s. Projects of the scale and quality of games from at least several years later is needed. 5 big projects is better than 100 small ones which make yet another version of tic tac toe.
I think there needs to be some kind of opensource games initiative. And one which is taken seriously. There are too many dead sites like http://opengames.sourceforge.net unfortunately.
It's 2D, it doesn't run under WinXP, it's buggy (sound keeps switching itself on, units keep disappearing), it's missing features that appeared in commercial RTS's years ago (unit queueing, and fullscreen. Hello, FULLSCREEN?).
I wrote a comparable engine using DOS4GW/allegro back in 1995, and canned it because it was obsolete back then. Seven years later, I'm not seeing any great improvements, nor any incentive to bring my commercial games development skills to this project.
This is a neat hobby project, and probably a great learning experience for the dev team, but that's about as far as it's going. I showed it to my (non-OS) coworkers and they laughed their collective asses off. One guy asked me if it was a GBA emulator, and if so, how come it sucked so much compared to Advance Wars, and I really had no answer for him.
Look, don't get me wrong. I'm an open source developer, and I support good open source project when I see them (like the Demeter terrain engine), but if it looks like a turkey, and walks like a turkey, and sounds like a turkey, then it is a turkey, and all the cross platform compatibility in the world (except for WinXP, of course) won't turn it in to an engine that anyone other than the development team would really choose to use.
Two final thoughts:
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
OK, let's comment on the engine. It's not a "game" engine, it's a "Warcraft 2" engine. A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this. There's nowhere (that I can see) to add behaviour hooks; you have to expand or modify the code. Modifying it to act as a DuneII or Starcraft clone, for example, would be a substantial rewrite. That means that when people add and submit their own rulesets and object types, the code base will bloat and/or fork.
A far better long term solution would have been a thin and generic object handling and UI framework, with plugins for UI, object behaviour and world rules. OK, I know the goal always was to produce a Warcraft clone, but in that case, the developers shouldn't claim that it's a generic RTS engine, because it simply isn't.
All that said, it's a well organised and very readable and clean piece of code. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of how to write a game. But keep in mind what was done wrong: too much integration of engine and behaviour (leading to lots of special cases for what should be generic behaviour, see the network "Send..." code, and the enumerated missile types), and (IMHO) loads of "object" manipulation in C, when C++ would have been more efficient.
Oh, and please remember to use a Unicode string table and not hardwired ASCII English strings. You'll save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble in the long run, especially if you get Deutsch translations done early on. German tends to be rather long winded, and doesn't abbrev. well. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Some are complaining that the game is not good looking or 3D, doesn't run on XP and that there is no OSX source:
1.It's GPL'ed, which means that nothing is stopping you from *making* it run under XP. This is of course theoretical and ignores some of the difficulties, such as GCC incompatibilities under XP, but theoretically, you could make this work with MSVC++
2.Since it has Linux (and I presume *BSD) source, it means that porting it to OSX, while not trivial, won't be the end of the earth.
3.As many have mentioned, the graphics in the screenshots look bad. This says practically nothing about the developers, who are not graphics artists, and a lot about the consumer mentality of the general public that is gladly willing to use a game if it is free, but are less inclined to accept a different level of quality even if they don't pay for it.
4.At the same time, such comments about the quality of the graphics should not be met with disdain by OSS developers. The general public is very unforgiving and will match OSS products with their commercial competitors, no matter what! While I should point out that anyone can change the graphics of this game, it should serve as notice to OSS developers to place a lot of emphasis on presentation. Apple doesn't do well for nothing.
5.To those who claim that this game is in the past, not high-tech enough etc, I should point out that the popularity of a game is not as dependant on it'stechnology as some may think. There is a commercial game on OSX called Escape Velocity Nova that is a simple 2D space adventure game, but is extremely popular. The game depends on it's playability, not on it's technology. The GBA is another example. I have a feeling that a lot of especially PC commercial game developers, have the idea that their game will only be successful if the technology is cutting edge (vis the post further down from the commercial game developer). I beg to differ. High tech FPS/RPS/RTS games have the immense difficulty in gaining acceptance in the gaming market for thesimple reason that there is very little real difference in the games and in the heat of the competition content and a good story get lost by the wayside. I think that a game can be very successful if the story is enticing and the game has depth. I personally think that the lack of Riven type games (which were extremely popular) or at least the fact that very few developers even bothered to try to take this genre further is a good clue in where the game market is weak.
6.As a lot of gamers know, the ability to mod or expand a game is one of the most important features in a game gaining success. Very many fans like to tinker with their games. Think about it. Expandable games that were/are popular -UnReal/Quake/HalfLife/Homeworld/Myth/EVNova etc.
7.Don't forget that tetris is still popular, as is online backgammon etc.