Slashdot Mirror
Freeciv-1.13.0 Stable
Martin Willemoes Hansen writes "Freeciv-1.13.0 has been released upon the world! There has been almost
a whole year of dedicated hacking. A big thanks goes to the
people,
who made it all come true. Remember to read about the exciting
news and hurry up and get it here."
Let's hear it for duplicated work! While the rest of the world marches on, it is inspiring to see that at least a few are still toiling away to make software look like it did 5 years ago.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Freeciv was the first lnux game I ever tried out, it was still very young then, and it was almost as slow as the Amiga version of Civilisation I knew.
I still spent many a night trying to get to build the SETI program, ever losing to Ghandi...
Thank you, freeciv developers.
my
at the risk of sounding like a troll, i agree: why is this important? i really want to know. civII came out in 1997 or so, right?
and its not like there isn't plenty of nice looking games/ports for linux already.
and civII is like, what? 5$ to buy? find some old dos disks and play the original.
seems like an awful waste of man hours, but again, maybe i am wrong. why is this important?
Hurry over and get it /. the FreeCiv site 'til you can't.
Yep, and
Maybe the fact that the site is already slashdotted (about 5 minutes after the story came up) might explain something.
The reason freeciv is important is because it is one of the better games out there for Linux (and unfortunately there are so few). Besides, with source code available, you can hack on it and not only make it better, but tailor it to what you want Civilization to be like; no more having to depend on Microprose to release a new addon pack with cool features.
Use google images to get some screen shots:
Screen shots"
Live web cams
Sure, because all that work is *truly* useless.
:P
After all, noone would possibly think of taking all that code and doing something besides duplicate Civ II.
The code is there, do what you will. Make a Freeciv-engine based game that plays with the Civ III rules. Or maybe create a Master of Magic clone. Or a HOM&M clone, so long as you made a combat engine to go with it..
Use the source, dammit. Do something with it. Have fun with it, make something new. That's why it's there! Perhaps people need to realize that the Open Source model is less about the product and more about the journey
Microprose no longer exists. It was bought up by Hasbro and then that by Infogrames. They have long since stopped supporting Civ II. After all it came out in 1996. Not many games supported that long after release. Especially since a new sequel, Civ III, just came out last fall.
The most important question is whether or not native FreeBSD binaries are available.
Isn't it fun telling people what they enjoy creating and giving away for free is worthless and without merit! :) You're right, why don't they do something else I might find more worthwhile? Kernel hacking is cool, their free game sucks, therefore they should do what I say! Fuck their personal coding enjoyment, what I want is paramount. And I want it NOW! Hey... you want it? Go code it yourself. Be glad someone created and gave away something, even if you find it of no use. Because someone else out there DOES like it. Me, for example.
Can someone explain why this was done?
Another mere mortal who felt the so call "Slashdot Effect" ...
muuuuaaaahhhhhh muuuaaahhhh
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
Freeciv is a fantastic port of civ2, care to tell me what win->linux port has been better? After more hours than I will admit to, I still think freeciv beats the shorts out of civ3. I must admit that someone should make a freealphacenturi. While civ3 has some polished graphics, freeciv still has better gameplay. mkay.
Anyone with an irc client an a little bit of sense has been able to download this for free for nearly a decade.
Sure, the game lacks a lot of nice features, like context clicking, and queue lists(yes, it does have queues, but not lists I can use instead of manually adding all the stuff I want), but I'm sure they'll come one day, and certainly the graphics are better than Civ2 had...and it's probably not as resource intensive as Civ3 is, though I've not played it to know.
Mmm...so you're assuming that everybody has a Windows machine?
seems like an awful waste of man hours
For a long time my wife and I had an old intel box that we kept around for the sole purpose of playing the original Civ. Now that's a waste of man-hours: maintaining that machine only for that purpose.
why is this important? i really want to know. civII came out in 1997 or so, right?
It came out in 1997, and what's your point? Do you think that before 1997, all was void? Civ was a great game. IMHO, the later versions of Civ weren't even as much fun to play. Y' know, chess was invented hundreds of years ago, but people haven't stopped playing it.
A couple of lessons from the open-source movement:
Find free books.
I don't know why you say "make software look like it did 5 years ago", can't you see past the graphics?
If they had better artists working on it, it would look just as "hip" and "new" as any other game. It's just some simple image files....
Besides, the fact that it has oodles of fans shows once again that there are actually people out there who play a game for it's gameplay and not the overkill of openGL graphics (Which is a big issue in the gaming industry today: most games just look good, but they suck in gameplay and have a replayabilty of 0.001%.)
The only games I still play are StarCraft and totalAnnihilation (old RTS games) and Lemmings for windows... and yes they also look "old" but atleast I enjoy the game cos it's fun, not cos it blasts a trillion polygons per seconds at my retinas...
People should return to the old philosophy: games should be fun, not perse pretty
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
A few tips if you want to play on your own...
Start the server, start the client, click join on the client.
from the server console,
)create youraiplayernamehere -- adds easy ai player
)set endyear yyyy - sets the year the game will end. Worth bumping this up the first few times you play.
)start
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I'd forgotten about this project. Really, its been a long long long time since I've played Civ...I'm sure I'll enjoy this. Like a throw-back to the old days when there was Prince of Persia.
;-).
Well, I'm off to suck really really bad at FreeCiv
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
dialog and supports loading and saving from the client.
correspond with what they mean.
including the players' flags.
instead you can use the --info option to set the metaserver
announcement text to whatever you like. The -a option when given
to the client skips the connection dialog entirely.
defenders get only 1 firepower.
have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units.
been changed to 1, while it has been changed to 2 for the Civ2
ruleset.
partially invisible just like subs. Also, stealth bombers have
increased their attack strength from 14 to 18.
New ways to calculate technology costs. Better documentation.
Rulesets can specify starting techs. You can have more than one
bonus tech. Split settler abilities. Buildings ruleset syntax
has been significantly extended, but effects do not work yet.
"separatepoles" allow continents connected to the poles
"notradesize" and "fulltradesize" regulate the trade generated
by smaller cities.
randomly chosen city. This behaviour can be turned off with the
server option "savepalace".
"rulesetdir" command.
Freeciv has been removed.
This lists only the most obvious bugs. If you find a bug in the latest version of Freeciv and it is not listed here, please look for it in our bug tracking system JitterBug. If it is a new bug, you can use JitterBug to report it. JitterBug also conatains information regarding previously fixed bugs. For more information about Jitterbug, read JitterBug.txt
Some lines containing special characters will show up blank if your locale is set to "C". As a workaround set your locale to something else, like "en_US".
Your CMA settings are only sent to the server when you press turn done, and therefore changes you make to CMA in the same turn as you save a game will be lost.
If you use the CMA the resulting savegame isn't endian and 64 bit safe. So you can't use the savegame on a computer with a different architecture.
The easy AI is not easy enough for novice players. If the AI is beating you up early in the game, try setting the "generator" server option to 2 or 3. That is, in the server, before starting a game, type: set generator 2 or: set generator 3
The hard AI is not hard enough for very experienced players, and still does some stupid things. E.g., it prefers leaving cities in revolt rather than letting them starve/shrink.
Sometimes there may be too many advances in the "goal" menu of the science report, such that the menu goes off the bottom of the screen and you cannot select some items.
You may sometimes get the messages {ss} player for sample not found {ss} player for sample not found when using the esound sound driver. This is nothing to worry about.
Some effects of wonders and research first take effect the turn after. Fx when building the lighthouse some triremes will only get the movement bonus the next turn.
The XAW client can only display 25 citizens in the city dialog.
The autoattack generally doesn't work very well.
When planning a goto in the server, fx for an autosettler or an airplane, the server will use knowledge not available to the player.
The science dialog is not updated when you gain a tech. You need to close and open it.
In the gtk client, sometimes the area near the minimap contains garbage.
Automate routines like auto explore don't handle triremes very well.
LOG_DEBUG doesn't work with non-GCC compilers.
The color markup in the gtk message window is lost if the dialog is closed and then reopened.
When setting server variables, the server in many cases doesn't check the values as well as it could.
Bad things happen when you manipulate multiple global worklists simultaneously.
Even in singleplayer the AI will get a chance to move both before and after the human player each turn. This will sometimes give the impression that the AI moves twice.
The xaw client does not work well with the KDE window manager. Try using the gtk client or another window manager.
Version 1.13.0 will not work with version 1.12.0 or any previous versions. Note that the client will fail a bit more hard by just printing a message to stdout and exiting afterwards.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Just a couple of mirrors from the MIRRORS file on the FTP.
i v.org/
ftp.netc.pt/pub/freeciv/
ftp.freeciv.org, webaccess also provided http://www.freeciv.de
ftp://ftp.doc.cs.univ-paris8.fr/mirrors/ftp.freec
I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
I don't care what you others think, all I know the more "Civ" goodness I can get.... THE BETTER !!!
:(
Civilisation addicted me to the turn based "civ like" genre, something which I am thankful for... except when I missed a uni exam coz I was playing Colonization 8 hours straight and forgot the time
To you "people" who complain that FreeCiv is "too old" and "out of date", close you damn mouths - you don't have pay for the game and you are certainly not forced to download and play it which means you have no right to criticize the hard work of the developers. If you want to criticize, make it constructive and useful instead of the usual "negative trolling flamebait" comments.
- HeXa
Don't know about you, but to me graphics enhance the gaming experience. This is probably the simple reason to why I prefer Diablo II over Nethack in ASCII mode anytime. I've found several Nethack games a blast and in a perfect world, someone would preserve Nethack's replayability and gameplay while adding a state of the art 3D (or at least 2D - and I'm not talking about the lousy tilesets out there) engine.
...
A game designer should IMNSHO *never* be truly satisfied with either:
1. A game with graphics, with game play coming in fourth hand.
or
2. A game with focus on game play, with graphics coming in fourth hand.
May sound harsh, but I think it's these things that can change an audience from "just" a group of true fans to a much broader range of fans and perhaps even the casual gamer. Of course I can easily see past the graphics, but I can just as easily see the obstacles to gameplay bad graphics create. And please don't see this as a complaint about the Freeciv gfx that has improved a *lot* since the last version I checked out, but as a comment to your post instead.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
seems like an awful waste of man hours For a long time my wife and I had an old intel box that we kept around for the sole purpose of playing the original Civ. Now that's a waste of man-hours: maintaining that machine only for that purpose.
How many hours could it possibly waste to leave a computer off until you wanted to play Civ, turn it on, and then turn it back off? If that was its sole purpose you shouldn't have actually had to maintain it.
Don't particularily care if you think freeciv is the greatest thing ever or not, just wasn't sure how having an extra useless computer lying around dwarfs the colossal amount of time that freeciv apparently takes up (a year for a new version? bug fixes from here until next Tuesday?) as far as wastefulness is concerned.
If you want a nice linux game check out Plane Shift. It's a MMORPGH done using crystal space. Very cool too. Finally something to challenge evercrack.
> why is this important?
Because it's a cool game that we all spend entirely too many
hours playing, and if there's a new improved version we may
as well spend those hours using that instead of the old version.
How was that not obvious?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
that you think a game's graphics are outdated non-constructive, I honestly think that the freeciv graphics suck nuts. Sure it's strategy, and I realize that OSS has a tough time in this area, but they really do suck.
Photos.
Mirrors, anyone? The freeciv server is quite /.ed.
All these screenshots show either the old rectangular view or the old (ugly) HiRes tileset. While both of these are still available, Freeciv now ships by default with isotrident -- the trident images (old overhead default) in an isometric arrangement. Two other new isometric tilesets (Lexxy and Cevo) are also available. There are screenshots on freeciv's site (or will be once the slashdotting ends), but google doesn't have any of them.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
This may come as a shock to you, but there are essentially two groups of posters on Slashdot. The first, trolls, recognize the sheer meaninglessness of it all and are living it up anyway. The second, you for certain and everybody else I presume, actually believe that all our hot air is being put to practical use somewhere. You can use all the pretentious French you want but it isn't going to change the underlying equation.
Did they ever get a stable windows version out yet?
seems like an awful waste of man hours
Yeah, and now that they've come this far, more man hours are going to be wasted PLAYING the game!
I dunno... how can you complain about a game being a waste of time? I mean duh!
The windows port is reasonably stable, and protocol-compatible with the *nix version. It's client features are somewhat out of date, but it's playable. (And no, it doesn't require X)
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
And bcrowell spoketh:
I thought you said you played the original Civ a lot, so you of all people should know: In the beginning, the world was without form, and void...
-"Zow"
Of course. Both with and without GTK+. Sites slashdotted but the download page in googles cache will give you the pointers...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I first met Freeciv back in version 1.11.4. I loved for its superior user interface, and wasn't really bothered by the inferior (compared to Civ II) graphics.
But the one thing that REALLY annoyed me about Civ 1/2 was the SHORT city lists for each nation. What did I do? I took the time to do a really long list of cities for my favorite nation (you guess which one it was) and submitted it. Now my 200-names list is PART of the game. I extended/made better some other nation's city lists, and now they're part of the game. Then I created a map of my favorite country in the world, and was incorporated, too.
I can proudly say that even though I have NEVER touched one line of Freeciv source code, I can call myself a developer of the game. And I love it.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
No, it's not a port of civ2. It's a very different game really, inspired by civ2, but it's very different. It's a much better game for network play, really optimised for that, and (last I checked at least) not really built for solo play at all. It's more like Civ3s more social cousin...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
What exactly does that mean? Anyone know?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You know, maybe you should give up and do something else.
seems like an awful waste of man hours
Ah, still pulling the slashdot party line?
My guess is that they are neither your personal man hours, nor have you paid for the man hours in question. I could make a similar argument about your hobbies, such as collecting cola can pull-tabs or feeding your pet rock.
Here is a summary of the changes, pluss a request:
NEW FEATURES
- You can now automate workers and specialists in cities
- We have sound support and ship a new, improved insometric tileset
- A new and much improved city dialog in the GTK client
- Windows and GTK 2.0 versions of the client
- Lots of other changes, see the NEWS file for more
RULE CHANGES
- Leftover research bulbs will carry over to next advance
- Trade routes are more effective
- You can build city walls even though you have Great Wall wonder
- Unit food cost under Communism has been reduced to 1
- If you lose your palace, you get a new for free in random city
- Units attacking ships in cities double their firepower, while defenders get only 1 firepower.
- Helicopters defending against air units get 50% penalty, and have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units.
- Stealth fighters and bombers are partially invisible like subs, and stealth bombers have increased attack strength from 14 to 18
A REQUEST
We are in great need of more sound effects and better graphics. If you have some talent in either direction, please considering giving us a hand.
"Schadenfreude" is a Greek word, not French. Hope this helps, don't let it happen again.
I'm running mandrake 8.2 and trying to install the latest version of freeciv... having a problem though
./configure I get this at the very end "configure: error: could not guess which client to compile"
When I
My question is how to I tell it which version (gtk or X11) to install?
Thanks
Troll I can understand, but off-topic? Puh-lease.
Mmm...so you're assuming that everybody has a Windows machine?
Well, everyone can download Wine (if it's not included in their Linux distro)
civII came out in 1997 or so, right?
Ah, CivII...that game known everywhere for its superlative network play and freely available source code, not to mention it was one of the only games in 1997 that would run on Linux..
Daniel
(IHBT. IHL. HAND)
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
You idiot. Schadenfreude is Vulcan for "help, there's a hog in my kitchen."
It is not ideas that crush ideals. Only ignorance and indifference do that, and apathy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Software Engineer, Software Architect, Software Designer.. All are Ego-stroked titles for the same job:
Programmer!
It's even worse in the HTML-monkey world. Titles like "Web Architect" make me laugh.
Let me preface this comment by noting that I've been playing Civ2 since it came out, and that I have played FreeCiv as well. I run Windows but I admire Linux, GNU, Open Source...etc.
That said, what is the point of FreeCiv? To prove that a bunch of guys can, in their spare time, hack together an improved port of a game written some six years ago by another group of guys who happened to get paid for their work? Wowee. They've done a good job, but what for? The gameplay in Civ2 was good, as were the graphics. If you want good network play in a Civ-style game I heartily recommend Space Empires IV, which I think may get ported to Linux sometime (don't quote me, I read it somewhere).
Impress me. Create something new and original, something to hang one's hat on. No-one outside of Slashdot will be impressed by this. Many inside Slashdot are not. We need innovative games, innovative design. Not ports. Give people a reason to switch.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
I bought Loki's (bless those guys) port of Call To Power after ditching windows and CivII along with it. I've never played FreeCiv beyond starting it up and thinking, "cool. I'll have to try this someday." How do these two games compare?
You don't need a brain to karma whore you "small step for a whore".
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
If it were a commercially-released game, that would be considered something that would be a product of the content designers, who are developers.
Funny how it changes in this context...?
So by new and different, you mean a completely new concept? Something just as addictive as Civ, but decidedly not Civ ?? As a previous poster has said, Chess has been around for quite some time and people still enjoy playing it. They also enjoy playing countless variations of Chess, with freakishly modified rules and boards and everything else. But you know what? To develop those variations there had to be an original version of Chess to build from.
I'm willing to bet that, given a few years' time, you'll see some completely new and different ways of playing Civ, thanks to FreeCiv being developed as an open project. Cloning the original version is just the starting point for FreeCiv ... where we go from there is up to anyone who feels like coding.
"Sucks" is vague, indeed, but it doesn't mean it's non-constructive. It usually indicates a general lack of quality that, if no further clarification is given, can only be solved by replacing the source of the problem altogether.
For example:
- "This movie sucks" would, indeed, be non-constructive for the movie, but it could be constructive for the movie-going experience of the viewer who can go and watch a movie that "does not suck".
- "The acting in this movie sucks" would indicate that the suckness of the movie has its source in the acting. The movie would probably not suck if the actors were removed, therefore this is a constructive argument for the movie. By replacing the actors, the suckness of the movie is decreased.
That said, "FreeCiv's graphics suck" is clearly a constructive argument, if it is correct. By replacing the graphics altogether, the suckness would be removed more efficiently than by attempting to fix that which sucks too much to be fixed.
I say if it is correct because I am not aware of the current suckness level of FreeCiv's graphics. I know that at some point, they sucked majestically.
It was still my favorite Linux game, but the graphics sucked at life. Replacing them was such an obviously good idea that there seemed to exist many different efforts on doing precisely that.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I really like that game, though I can't play it on any PC I have around now, it's similar enough to Civ, that it wouldn't be too much of a chore, I would think.
Maybe I should check the freeciv mailing lists.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
You can use googles cache, for instance http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:MhRKUQN18GsC: www.freeciv.org/download.phtml+freebsd+site:www.fr eeciv.org&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 for the cached version of the downloads page - I think most or all of the links there are offsite and so still might be working. Also several ftp mirrors that might help: i v.org/
ftp.netc.pt/pub/freeciv/
http://www.freeciv.de
ftp://ftp.doc.cs.univ-paris8.fr/mirrors/ftp.freec
Just remember that slashdot likes to put random spaces in URLs (why? don't ask me) so you may have to play with the URLs a little after copying.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That's a good point, and I agree completely. I meant my comment in a broader sense, in that I would like to see, in general, inventive stuff that is not simply a windows clone. But I would definitely agree that it's a starting point, and I do hope that it develops from that starting point.
No statement is true, not even this one.
I agree, and would even extend it to perhaps this is one of the impediments to Linux on the desktop. If only clones are made, there isn't alot of incentive to switch over to Linux. While the tools that are freely available for linux are bar none the best at the price, the desktop applications still don't have anything that does much more than rival Windows. Nothing against free civ, but I think that tux racer is a better example of what I believe would be more successful in attracting new Linux desktop users. It's different, it's quite fun, and it was written for Linux at least initially.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The Great Wall wonder expires. City walls don't.
[insert witty comment here]
Now try to find a good Civ version that plays good on the internet... with more then 15 people for example.
The network play is worth the man hours alone.
Schadenfreude
n : (German) delight in another person's misfortune
Too bad none of the download links work.
Its a piece of shit.
Well, since you brought up Prince of Persia...
How do you get past the evil copy of yourself in the last few levels? You kill him, then you die. You drive him off the ledge, he splats, you die. Is the point really to just get on the other side of him and pass him by?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your evil copy walks opposite the way you do -- everything mirror image. So you manipulate it so that he will fall off the ledge.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
FreecivAC is an ongoing project to add an Alpha Centauri mode to Freeciv (which already has "native Freeciv", Civ2, and Civ1 modes). It still has a long long way to go, however...
The trick is that he is just a copy - not really evil. He only fights if you do. All you have to do is putting down your sword and stop fighting. Btw, this did cost me a lot of lifes to figure out, i mean who thinks of peace in a fighter game?
The point isn't that all these people are dumping their time & effort to produce a game that is years behind in graphics & technology, etc., to make money or be better than the top-of-the-line stuff coming down the road to an EB near you... Most of them see and play a game that they love, and if they see anything they want to change or improve, they can do it themselves. I'm convinced a lot of it stems from the fact that so many of (us) want to do development of some sorts, but most of us don't have the opportunity to do _real_ development in our jobs, that so many times turns to maintenance, red-tape untangling, and what-not.
I can relate - many of us play the game Stars!, which has been out for ages....it's obviously at the end of it's life cycle, but I would KILL to have the game made open-source so that we could all add the enhancements that we are all begging for - enhancements that will never happen as long as it's shelved by the current developers.
In short - I think it's more of a hobby for many open-source contributors/developers.
System Architect ..... :
...and please...don't take it as a flamebait, that's far from being my intention.
Programmer / Analyst
Web Architect
Software Engineer
It's not all the same. It as if you were saying
Plane Pilot
Bus Driver
Cab Driver
Automobilist. All are Ego stroked titles for the same job : Drivers!!
As in any industry, there are severals variants of a job. Each variants having more or less tasks involved than another.
I'd be insulted if I was a Software Engineer and that someone would call me a Programmer.
The Software Engineer thinks about all the design, the high-level thinking required to have all the pieces of a software tie together.
If I was a programmer, I'd actually be writing the code according to the design & schematics thatthe software engineer guy made.
Of course, LOTS of programmer have the bad habit of boosting their own jobs just to look more "powerful".
I can still remember what my old teacher used to tell me : A square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square.
So.... A software engineer is a programmer but a programmer isn't a software engineer.
Anyway, not that it really matters and its really really off-topic but I felt like throwing my 0.02 cents
Eniac
Programmer
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
"A very different game?!" It's almost an exact clone. I'm not criticizing; I really like freeciv. But to say it's very different is ridiculous. The set of units is almost exactly the same, except for no elephants in freeciv. The identical units all have the identical move, attack, and defend numbers. The improvements are identical, the wonders all have the same names but a few of them behave differently. (Leonardo's workshop, for example.) How is that "very different?"
Because maintaining a computer requires time and effort, e.g., for making backups.
Find free books.
play Freeciv. you'll last longer