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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."
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."
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.
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.
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