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Freeciv-2.0.0 Stable Released
Settler writes "Freeciv 2.0.0 has been released upon the world! 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.
To see what this game looks like, check out screenshots here and here. This goes to show what a great game an open source project can create."
...by blatantly copying a commercial product.
:)
Not that I'm not on the edge of my seat for FreeOrion, though.
Thats harsh. This is a civ-clone. Civ is not going to attract anyone who cares about graphics to linux full stop. I'm very excited about this.
While flashy graphics are often viewed as important in more arcadey genres, you will note that Freeciv is aimed at a different audience. When the game is based around mental concepts the game UI tends to be designed around funtionality, changing far less over time. An example of this is the sucess of Civ 3, which has essentially the same UI as Civ 2. The only thing (and even this is not a priority) that Freeciv needs to come up to the standards of commercial Civ games is to port some of the nicer tile/unit graphics from some of the Civ 3 mods.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
What all modern open source games lack though is decent content and polish. There have been some great classical text games (e.g. rogue, mud, nethack etc.) but this hasn't translated well to the new world of graphics and 3D.
Surely there must be designers and artists willing to produce content to go with a game engine?
Exactly, FreeCiv is a great game. But the truth is FreeCiv is not the best game to show off how great Open Source Software (OSS) can be. It is like using some version of Tetris to show off any gaming console past the original Nintendo or Gameboy. Sure they are great games but if the OSS community wants real acceptance in the gaming market they will need to show the consumers that uses a bit more juice then FreeCiv. Dont get me wrong I like FreeCiv but unfortunatly it is one of those games that are on the OSS see what we can do list.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Welcome to the reason why I've given up writing free software in my spare time. Too many people like the parent poster, not enough people who are actually willing to help out. I still haven't even updated my sig to reflect the mentioned project's abandoned status -- that's how little I care about some of the free-software USERS these days. If they aren't bitching about one thing, they're bitching about another.
I tell you, my hat's off to those programmers who keep going in the midst of what all-too-often seems like a huge population of spoiled brats.
More and more developers go under, and it gets harder and harder for programmers to get a job doing anything creative, because these idiots are copying other peoples' ideas and giving it away.
And I'll tell you, one of the reasons why you don't see more innovation in the free software world is because of idiots like yourself who would rather bitch about what is out there that they don't like, rather than put a little effort into finding a game they might like and helping them out, even if it's only testing builds. Want original games? Here's a starter's list: Wesnoth, Worldforge, XConq, Holotz's Castle, Glest, S.C.O.U.R.G.E., Cube, Gate 88, Globulation, Adonthell... oh, who am I kidding? If you weren't willing to look before, you're probably not going to now. That's not even including the really neat ones that are in development right now.
By the way, the preceding rant is no indication of my feelings towards simonc4, pronobozo, or lordsatan. Three great guys. Too bad those three great guys who helped out with the project were outnumbered by whiners with complaints or useless suggestions.
It's not the graphic engine. The grahics are 2D and any engina can do that with decent speed.
The problem is the lack of artists and animators. Copy the unit-pics from the original and you will quickly get a cease and desist letter.
Also good free sound-files are hard to find.
If YOU have free above mentioned content, pls publish it under a free license!
At the same time let's get rid of such concepts as sea and land, simply have 2 different colours to distinguish between different types of square. Any why have named units? After all, the important thing about a unit is its stats. Hills, Mountains, Forests? Let us not think we are actually talking about real features, replace them with abstract concepts such as squares of type A, B and C. Continue this process to it's logical conclusion and what do you get? A game with identical gameplay but which is blander and less fun to play. As an intellectual exercise this would have merit, but as a game? There is more to graphics in civ than to simply provide a convenient shorthand for the different statistics of each element of the game. Provided the graphics do not obscure the gameplay mechanics I cannot see why they cannot be used to improve the game. In summary, I'm sure I'm not the only person who would rather order a persian warrior to attack a fortified german spearman than to make a 1-1-1 unit of Team 1 attack a 1-2-1 unit with a defence bonus of Team 2. The concepts from the second part still apply in the first, but there's more to it than an abstract intellectual exercise.
Maybe I should congratulate the dev team for their release and offer up some code instead of complaining.
I don't think code is the problem, programmers might be willing to work for free but professional artists expect to get paid.
In terms of the game engine there is very little difference between Civ 1 and Civ 3, its just that the latter has much prettir graphics.
To me, the key thing to freeciv is network play. In fact, when I first played freeciv (around early '97 I think), there was no AI! Network play was the only thing. At this time, the only comparable commercial product was CivNet (Civ I multiplayer), which I have never tried. But freeciv would work over the internet, and being free, there was no problem setting up large games with many players.
A few years later, an AI was made for freeciv, and that AI kicked my butt without cheating! It was far, far better than the AIs of Civ I/II (and even Civ III, I think!), although it didn't handle all aspects of the game at the time. That AI tought me how to play the game!
So while the game design was not new, there were many small things that made freeciv a better game than the originals.
Atgeirr
"Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital"
That is so very true, but its only news to the crowd that started gaming when it became "cool". Cool demands cool graphics, cool explosions and a quick turnaround - you want the next new thing because its cool and you don't wanna be left behind.
Having said that, i believe the true gold, la creme de la creme in gaming occurs when a game comes out, its patched to stability, and then a brilliant mod comes out. Mods to stable, 1 or 2 year old games are in my opinion the best thing to play. Mods is also where i believe the open-source community should work on gaming, at least for now. Just get the engine at the game store instead of licensing it at the original software house. Many mods are much much better than the original game, often addressing its shortcomings that become obvious some time after launch. Of course, mods require another installation and looking it up in the first place, so once again there are some technical barriers to what are IMO the best gaming experiences. Desert Combat is an amazing game/mod and on a totally different style there are great mods to the totally scriptable Warcraft 3.
Right now buying a game at a store without having tried a "trial" version off edonkey is like gambling with really bad odds.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Why does everything these days have to be about the "power of OSS" or some like minded politco statement? I'm willing to counter that the reason this project has been so successful is because they rather focus on their passion as opposed to the politics of their development method. Reminds me of an article from The Onion's "Our Dumb Century" ... Normandy Invasion Force Crippled by Nostalgia - Thousands of GIs Die as They Pause to Reflect on the Momentous Day.
You are not the first to think about this. Making an OpenGL client of Freeciv is harder than you might think, and for different reasons. While the client-server design is very clean, and the common client code is neatly separated from the client specific front-end, making a graphical design that would work with a Freeciv map is non-trivial.
Rotating a flat map would look odd. Adding elevation makes it very hard to add units, cities, terrain improvement and so on. Not to mention that doing the elevation in any sane way is difficult, as well, since you are pretty restricted as to how you can do it (if you use only existing freeciv maps). A lot of other games (SimCity eg) of elevation by sacrificing some tiles to slopes. We cannot do that. SMAC has smooth slopes but no mountains. We can't do that. One person tried to make a mapview that had rugged mountains that had sharp mountaintops. We can't do that - we might have to draw cities, mines, and so on on it. Some games solve this by having mountains (and rivers) as items between tiles. We can't do that. So if you manage to jump through all those difficulties, can you make it look good?
That remains to be proven. If you have ideas, try making a map demo first to test them out and show us.
See http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/OpenGL in the Freeciv wiki once our web site is un-slashdotted to learn more about this, and add your thoughts.
- Per
(freeciv dev)
I accept that Civilisation is not a game for everyone but if I don't mind you racing round a track in a car sim, why do you give a damn about this?
Not everyone, particularly the older generation like me, believes that graphical complexity lies at the heart of a good game - it's as much about mechanics and gameplay which is why retrogaming is so popular currently. Some people agree, others disagree, so what?
I'd remind these same people that original Doom is over ten years old now, the mechanics of it serve as the basis of just about every FPS ever written & original Doom is still being commercially ported to platforms like the Gameboy Advance even to this day.
Civilisation is, in itself, a milestone in computer gaming, albeit one focused more on strategy rather than action - however, again, its mechanics are at the core of many current day RTS games also...
As far as I'm concerned, the fools are the people who ignore a game purely because its old, not the rest of us who enjoy playing old and new games purely because of their entertainment value.
And, while we're at it, a big pat on the pack to the programmers involved in FreeCiv - kudos to them for their devotion in making FreeCiv one of the longest on-going OSS game projects there is.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.