Call to Power 2 To Get Open Sourced?
An anonymous reader writes "Winnie Lee (st_swithin), who did the GUI programming for CTP2, has announced at Apolyton Civilization Site that Call to Power 2 should become available as open source in the near future. She says the news comes 'straight from the horse's mouth', as well as the lead, network, and gamestate programmers. This ends a month-long hunt and negotiation for the code with Activision." This looks close to a done deal, and is excellent news for strategy gamers and fans of this Civilization-related title if everything comes through.
Some suggestions for use of the code :
1. Use it to improve freeciv
2. Continue developing it making improvements and such
3. Add the code into emacs so it can have a civ mode
Either way we all benefit!
In linux libertas
Gah. Please, do something about the graphics (you know, the ones for which Firaxis had to "fix" for people who happen to be colorblind), then. :p
In all seriousness, I was greatly disappointed with SMAC. Sure, I loved the unit customization feature (probably the best thing about the game on the whole), but the remainder felt terribly unfinished. The AI was a joke, endgames were nearly always bore-a-thons (related directly to the weak AI), and it really struck me hard that not enough attention was paid to balancing the game. It was too frickin' easy compared to the Civ titles that came before and after, and SMACX didn't do much to improve things. Fun for the first couple games, but thereafter it really lost any charm that it had (have I mentioned the color palette for the graphics yet?).
At the time, I was an avid reader of the user forums for SMAC, and logged a fair number of bug reports or game shortcomings myself -- to join the chorus of hardcore players with similar complaints. No game is perfect, and I've never been duly impressed with the stability or feature completeness of most Firaxis products, but SMAC had more than its fair share of flaws the dragged it down off the pedestal and into the gutter.
But unit customization sure was cool. It would be nice to see the source for SMAC/SMACX, if only to see whether anyone is up to repairing its internals.