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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."
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.
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
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 always found it amusing when a Warrior took out a tank. What on earth was that sword made out of anyway?
What?
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?
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.
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.