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."

Comments

How long before Vivendi sues

[Aexia]

for circumventing their fun-generation process by bypassing the purchase of their products? Releasing something for free? Why they're practically thieves!

Looks Great, Needs Graphic Artist

[geoffsmith]

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

What hobbyists can do

[ObviousGuy]

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.

BTW

[ObviousGuy]

Are those little faces various representations of RMS? I'm serious!

Screen shots link.

[red5]

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.

Oh dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's face it, this makes the original Warcraft look good.

Can't wait, but...

[bonch]

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.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Decimal]

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.

Sounds good. What have you come up with?

Does art work in Open-Source?

[reachinmark]

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 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 :)

Re:Does art work in Open-Source?

[Lars Arvestad]

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.

I am by no means a gamer. In fact, I rarely play computer games. But whenever I have actually sat down in front of a game, I have been utterly confused as to what I am actually seeing on the screen and how to make things happen. I have yet to see a "slick" user interface!

I mean, standard widgets does not seem to be used, and the designers seem to prefer using unreadable fonts in order to get as much info onto screen and/or look good/cool/ethnic/timely. Also, I have not been impressed by the use of colors to help users discern what is going on.

Am I the only one to feel this way? Or am I simply too uninformed to state my opinion? I'll admit that I have not tried a game in a couple of years, but I do look at pretty pictures on the web and in magazines once in a while.

What I am actually trying to say is that this is an area where open source could actually make an impact. While writing a game engine is hard and designing graphics is cumbersome and requires artistic skills, hashing around different fonts, widget placements, quick keys, and views could well be possible without too much expertise.

Re:Does art work in Open-Source?

[werschi]

> I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap.

What about Tuxracer?

OpenGL does look nice if done right.

Re:Does art work in Open-Source?

[red5]

I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap.

Actualy the games that come with KDE don't look too bad. The reasion that MOST OpenSource projects lack good art is that it's usually done by one of the programmers in his spare time.

Worldforge

[Anonymous Coward]

Another similar project maybe worth notice is Worldforge. Also some of their screenshots seem to have quite cool graphics.

Graphics...

[Shade, The]

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.

Re:Graphics...

[Rogerborg]

• Many people here seem to be commenting on the graphics of the screenshots. Um... hello? This is a game engine

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. ;-)

Yesterday's games, tomorrow

[Rogerborg]

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:

• Writing a full game that people actually choose to play is damn hard, and it's getting harder every year as expectations rise. Trying to clone a full commercial game is egotistical folly. Try something like Advance Wars, which is twice as much fun with half of the features.
• Better yet, stop living in the past. Aim a couple of years into the future (high polygon 3D) otherwise you'll lose another player or developer every time the Upgrade Fairy pays someone a visit.

Re:Yesterday's games, tomorrow

[Jorrit]

Even though I am the project manager of a 3D Engine (Crystal Space) I strongly object towards your critique that it is 'only a 2D game'. Good games are NOT made by graphics. Good games are made by content, storylines, addictiveness, ... Good graphics are nice and certainly a very big plus but NOT essential. And 3D graphics are certainly not essential either. Some games are simply not suitable for 3D.

I still play Nethack (and I consider it one of the best games ever) and it is only ASCII (not even 2D).

Games don't have to be 3D to be good.

Greetings,

That's not fair

[pommiekiwifruit]

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...

No Windows XP support?

[W2k]

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.