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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."
for circumventing their fun-generation process by bypassing the purchase of their products? Releasing something for free? Why they're practically thieves!
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
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
Are those little faces various representations of RMS? I'm serious!
I have been pwned because my
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.
Let's face it, this makes the original Warcraft look good.
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"
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
Another similar project maybe worth notice is Worldforge. Also some of their screenshots seem to have quite cool graphics.
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.
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.
I would have like to have it released under the LGPL license so I could use it w/o GPL'ing my game.
"For those concerned about the 'virality' of the GPL, a suggestion: Write Your Own Damn Code."
deus does not exist but if he does
at my work there's a coder who gets laid at least three times a weekend by interested parties. He also washes regularly and wears clothes he bought in this century.
Of course, everyone just assumes he's an artist...
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.
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
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.
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?
I'm the stranger...posting to
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.