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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."
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?
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.
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.
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
Does CivIII have something other than the butt-ugly isometric view?
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
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!
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.
Well, he still gets a pat on the back.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Sorry, you are not a developer. You are contributor.
No, he is a "developer". Who says that developing has something to do with code. You can also "develop" graphics, the same way as you "write" source code.
Especially IMHO the free software community should treat contributing artist with great respect, since very often this is a weak point in free games, as artists and programmers seldom meet naturally in a non commercial environment.
To underline the importance of the artistic elements in a game most gaming software industrie calculate development costs for a game with 50 / 50 for source code progamming, and the artistic resources like graphics, music, and so on.
Before you get the wrong intention, I'm a programmer myself not an artist, but I highly respect and appreciate them, and if they want it we should them call developers too. remember? 50/50 !
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
And proudly so. If we gave half as much kudos to content providers as we do to coders, we'd have much more enjoyable o/s games. At a conservative estimate, a modern commercial game has three times as many content providers (sound, text/voice, models, textures, CGI, design, scripting) as developers, plus a whackload of QA, testing, localisation, and parasites. Er, management, I mean. Open source tends to make do with four coders and one guy with a copy of GIMP.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.