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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."
But where are the games? I presume there's a few projects on the go, but which one would people recommend as a good introduction to the engine?
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Take a look at this screenshot and tell me that hobbyists can't make games with as much quality and well-done graphics as the pros.
I have been pwned because my
I would have like to have it released under the LGPL license so I could use it w/o GPL'ing my game.Would the LGPL license not be more appropriate for a library of this kind?
AFAIK I cannot write a game, which is not GPL'ed and uses a GPL'ed library. Is that not so? In order for me to release a game that is (for example) free to use on top of an open source OS but costs money if used on a proprietary OS (read: windows users should pay - the rest of us should go free!)
I could convince my employer to start making a game that is free for non-windows users, but I would be unable to convince him to go ahead and make a totally free game - he wants to earn some money off it (and could still be convinced to ignore the OSS users).
So, for this to be usable for me I would like to have a less restrictive license on this project
Yeah, great music is more addictive than cool graphics, although it is much more difficult to produce. Why not use musical works that are already in the public domain? I am sure that I could make a lot of good loopable MIDIs extracted from Bach's "Art of Fugue". Of course, I would love to submit my own loopable MIDIs, but I have always felt that there is already so much stuff that is perfect for gaming. Baroque music is great because it doesn't require a strict instrumentation, and is therefore very "cross-platform". Portability is an art whether it is in computers or music.
I am definitely going to look more into this.
# make clean sig
Sure MP3/Ogg music is too big or too hard to produce.. but whatever happened to using good ol' Amiga-style MOD music in games? MODs are similar in theory to MIDIs, except that they contain wavetable information in the file, so they always sound about the same on any system. They've been popular in the demoscene for quite a while, and even games like Unreal Tournament use MODs for their soundtrack.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
I'm an open source programmer - and I suck at designing graphics. This is why I asked other people to design logo's for me.
Thankfully there are capable artists who are prepared to give their work away for free, (or perhaps for recognition .. who knows?).
I have to disagree with your claim that open source games suck - picking an arbitary example Armagetron (a 3D tron game) looks great
This looked like a cool little project, shitty graphics nonwithstanding, but then I read (in the FAQ):
Q: Why is Windows XP not supported?
A: Because I decided it. I do not support any product, that forces anybody to register it. Please read the FreeCraft (GPL) license and visit www.boycottxp.com (down) and more boycott.
This is pure idiocy. Firstly, shutting out XP users from FreeCraft will not make people ditch XP, it will make them ditch FreeCraft (and any game which uses it). Thus, game developers who use FreeCraft will undoubtably want to remove the XP block, and if that's not possible for some reason, many will choose another engine. There are a LOT of XP users, and a lot of people who will be upgrading to XP from 95/98/Me/2000 soon. Shutting them all out is stupid, stupid, stupid, no matter what you personally think about Microsoft or Windows XP as an OS.
Second, while I have not personally seen the source of FreeCraft, I doubt that what's keeping the engine from working with XP is hard to fix (it works under Win2000!) - I wouldn't be suprised if there's just a bit that says "if( bWindowsXP ) Crash();" at the beginning. Isn't the FreeCraft team just lowering itself to Microsoft's level (remember how early versions of Windows purposefully wouldn't work on DR-DOS?) by doing this?
Anyway, let's hope that for some future release, the FreeCraft team stop with this silliness and more importantly, stop discriminating against the thousands of people who have chosen to use Windows XP - or, maybe more commonly, had it pre-installed on a new computer.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
I think the problem is that most people are simply not good artists, and when do programmers usually talk to artists? Exactly.
I admit it, I am not a programmer, I am not a graphic artists, but I am told I am a pretty decent writer (as a hobby mind you), so creating a background for a game wouldn't be all that hard, but even a good story without a halfway decent graphic wouldn't go anywhere (man do I miss text adventures).
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
I think that we wouldn't have such diffulty if the MIDI standard were more discrete. I would like to see a new draft that defines patches by aural primitives rather than by instrument. Look at how game developers deal with video. Games use visual primitives all the time, and it seems to have worked pretty well. If OpenGL were designed like MIDI, you would have to draw all of the monsters out of trees and rocks, and the weapons would never look the same.
MOD could be used as a decent default until the standard is adopted, kinda like Quake's software rendering. You could even texture aural primitives just like in video. I don't mean like soundfonts, but more like envelopes, reverb, and other meaningful effects.
# make clean sig
Why not have a game where the object is not to GAIN territory and resources, but to lose them? Seriously. Say you start out with a certain amount of infrastructure - weapons, territory, energy plants, etc. - which will allow you to do all the standard RTS things. But all this pollutes horribly, or maybe it's radioactive, so it's slowly killing your side. But if you unilaterally disarm, the other side will destroy the uber-structure you need to keep from being destroyed in order to win the game. So the object becomes to build the smallest possible army you can to accomplish the job at hand - killing the other guy - and then destroying your own base as fast as you can. In other words, this makes huge armies and unit-hoarding counterproductive.
What do you think?
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