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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.
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.
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.
Can someone explain why this was done?
Probably because the Great Wall wonder is obsoleted pretty early in the game. If you build also build a city wall around some of your cities, they won't be unprotected when it gets obsoleted.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
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
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!
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.
Yeah, it's real stupid to write your own,
free versions of old and popular software..
I remember reading something about a crazy finnish guy who was writing his own version of UNIX!
What's with these people?
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?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
But that's the whole fun about playing against the Great Wall.. Onward to metallurgy! >=)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
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.
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!
I guess that by X11 you mean the Athena widget client.
Disclaimer: I haven't been compiling from source in a long time, because I am focused on testing the Win32 binaries. So I may be misspelling some of the options for configure.
Well, the GTK client is the default, no need to specify it. For the Athena widgets, though, you will have to run configure with the option "--with-xaw" or "--with-xaw3d" (the 3D version of the athena).
I guss configure failed to find the GTK libraries on your Linux workstation. By that I don't mean that you don't have them, just that they were nor detected. Something specific to Mandrake 8.2, perhaps.
Sigged!
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.
If it were a commercially-released game, that would be considered something that would be a product of the content designers, who are developers.
In the commercially released games I've worked on, the content designers are most definitely not considered developers. "Developer" is applied to a wide range of people, including the person who picks up the game idea, finances it, and puts the team together (equivalent of a producer in the movie biz), the people who hustle to raise capital, and the programmers. But I've never heard it applied to the artists or designers.
[That's not to say that "developer" is a prestige title: on many projects the designers are clearly the most important, driving force with the most clout]
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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...
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.
The configure script will first see if the gtk development packages are on the system. If so then it will build the gtk client.
Else it will check if the XAW development packages are on the system, and if so it will build the XAW client.
If it can find neither it will say "configure: error: could not guess which client to compile".
To figure out what you need: use "./configure --enable-client=gtk" which will force it to try compiling teh gtk client. Then the configure script will stop the moment a requirement is not found, and it will be easier for you to figure out what you need to do to satisfy the requirements.
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.
Your wish is answered: there is a Colonization clone project going on, the link to it can be actually found on the freeciv.org page itself (in "projets and ports"). But anyway the direct link.
They have done most of the artwork but there is no code release, yet.
Sigged!
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