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."

Comments

I don't get it ..

[Adult film producer]

I've taken a look at the screenshots and this game still looks like it's stuck in 1989. Is the game engine they're using remained the same over all these years ?

I'm sure the gameplay & strategy is up there but these graphics are not the kind of thing that'll attract users to the platform :(

Re:I don't get it ..

[omicronish]

Yeah, it's sad that a lot of gamers concentrate too much on graphics. I'd take Civilization 2/3 over most FPS games out there (1 is pushing it :). I actually like the simple graphics and windowed mode. Makes it easy to treat Freeciv and Civilization 1/2 as just another application you're doing work in.

Another thing to note is that even if it had excellent graphics I think a lot of people would be put off my its turn-based nature.

Re:I don't get it ..

[CleverNickedName]

I've taken a look at the screenshots and this game still looks like it's stuck in 1989.

You could say the same about the excellent Advance Wars 2.

Personally, I think the basic, "icon-like" (As opposed to "iconic") graphics enhance the strategic element. The pieces are not living characters, deserving of our empathy. They are simply abstract tokens representing various statistics, strengths and weaknesses. This abstract nature promotes the cold, logical reasoning required for the game.

My 2c.

Re:I don't get it ..

[bustersnyvel]

It looks nice enough not to be offended by it. Really, it's the gameplay that makes FreeCIV such a nice game, not the looks. Compare it with a tabletop game - that's pieces of wood and carton as well. Yet, many people play tabletop games.

Re:I don't get it ..

[eraserewind]

I'll give the new version a whirl, but to be perfectly honest the last time I tried it I found it unusable. Unlike toe others, I don't mind about the graphics, but the basic usability just wasn't there. This from someone who actually wanted to play the thing.

Re:I don't get it ..

[m50d]

How about you and me write an opengl frontend that looks nice and is completely rotatable? The server and client are completely separate so you don't need to know any game logic, just good programming.

Re:I don't get it ..

[lawpoop]

This brings up an interesting point -- I think that even if you had a game of circles vs. triangles, people would naturally anthropomorphize them ("My circles are attacking the triangle base"). There was an experiment where children where shown a film of circles being knocked around like billiard balls. When asked what when on, they gave responses like "The ball got hit" or "the ball bounced". Another group was shown a film of circles moving on thier own, knocking each other, knocking back, etc. All of a sudden, the balls had personalities, wills, emotions: "The balls were scared of the big ball", "The red ball hit the green ball back", etc.

Re:I don't get it ..

[Sparr0]

Your extension does not follow. The difference in $100/hr designer graphics and free sprites is completely different from the difference in free sprites and abstract tiles. Yes, the game would technically be the same with A B C tiles, but it would be harder to play because you would have to dedicate (human) memory and brainpower to keeping track of the unit types. By using recognizable units you can build on things we "all" already know. A tank wont work in the water, and wont be able to aim through a forest. Infantry with small caliber weaponry wont be able to damage tanks. etc. I can look at a tank icon and a water icon in any game and immediately understand that they dont go together (barring amphibious tanks from Civ2(?)), without having to delve into a unit/landscape relationship chart. However, taking that same tank icon and replacing it with a 5000-polygon model of an A1 Abrams assault tank with 40-frame animations for movement, firing, etc... doesnt add anything. It is still a tank, it still works the same way. If anything I have to spend MORE time recognizing what it is, and my system has LESS time to run the AI if its wasting time on such pretty graphics.

This same thing applies to CRPGs. I have trouble playing nethack because I cannot remember the hundreds of keymappings, dozens of unit types and item/environment characters, etc. However I have no problem using even the simplest of GUI front ends (I believe nethack includes a tile engine itself now?). No matter how pretty the tiles get the game wont get any easier for me to play, and more 'realistic' tiles end up being harder to distinguish in some cases (where contrasting colors have to be abandoned because they look cartoony).

Re:I don't get it ..

[Rei]

Hey, nethack itself might have graphics stuck in the 70s (or the late 80s/early 90s, if you use the qt version), but Nethack - Falcon's Eye has graphics from the mid 90s :) They're getting there - we're running out of retro!

Re:I don't get it ..

[Gr8Apes]

Sure, the AI doesn't actually have to build anything, generation of items and wonders are done based on a random die percentage.

In Civ 1, if you save the game at every turn (for the truly paranoid) you can effectively stop all your computer opponents from generating any wonders ever by just going back to the last save prior to the computer opponent "building" a wonder.

What I was never able to prove is that on the most difficult setting, the computer's probability of building a wonder within 1 or 2 turns of you building a wonder greatly increased, and if the computer did build a wonder, the odds that it would build the wonder you were building would also increase.

Lastly, it appeared that the computer did not necessarily need the "tech" to achieve a wonder. This was ascertained by checking the save file and confirming that a computer AI did not "build" any of the better units indicative of the tech required to build a wonder.

Classic games.

[Oscar_Wilde]

I just can't get enough of remakes of classic games, there are some real gems out there.

My personal favourite is Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, it's multiplayer gameplay makes a nice change from the shoot everything that moves action of most things people play over the net.

Anyway, I'll end this post now, I'm feeling the urge to go play freeciv.

the freeciv advantage

[juventasone]

While I think FOSS stuff is cool, is there any actual advantage for Windows/Mac users to play freeciv over Civilization 3, besides the price tag?

Re:the freeciv advantage

[ladybugfi]

Well, there's the thing that Civ 3, at least the version I have bought years ago, does not work anymore when we have switched to Windows XP SP2.

Re:what a great game an opensource project can cre

[KiloByte]

FreeOrion? Where???????
Oh, www.freeorion.org. I see it's still in very early alpha stages.

You see, I still consider MOO2 to be the very best strategy game ever (and MOO3 to stink so badly to be next to unplayable).

Re:Free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Hungry, so I'll bite:

wolfenstein
DukeNukem
Half Life
Unreal tournament
quake 3
andsoon.

All have very "original" gameplay ?????

or as you type it:
Free from original ideas (except for the first ofcourse:)

Re:what a great game an opensource project can cre

[01000011011101000111]

Which was a copy of a board game (imho the best strategy board game ever) in the first place - and given some of the appauling boardgame-pc crossovers that have been done, I have my doubts about Civ being as popular today is it is were it not for Sid's guiding hand... As an aside, anyone know if there's a working OSS version of Colonization (much better than Civ I, and a lot of the later "new features" in civ 2/3 city management hail from here) around? I've found a couple in pre-beta, but nothing that is actually playable :(

AI?

[leuk_he]

Does it now have a reasonable ai for singleplayer use? or is it still "ther is an computer player, but th eAI still has many limitation".

Re:what a great game an opensource project can cre

[DrXym]

http://www.freecol.org/

Oh dear.

[ledow]

People do seem to have missed the point, probably because it's not FreeCiv 2008 Super-charged Turbo Hyper Championship Platinum Edition.

Games do not suddenly become non-games because they are old. In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years. Games are not just eye-candy, expensive system requirements and physics-driven. Games are fun.

"Chess? Cor, that game's just ancient. You should be playing Super-hyper Chess 2005, it's got cool 3D pieces, seven hundred different pieces, two-hundred new rules, every piece has 'hit-points' now and there's fifty types of board."

"No thanks. Checkmate."

People who think that "games" can only ever mean whatever is on display at your local videogame store are severely out of touch. Games are fun. These people like FreeCiv because it is, to them, fun to play, engaging, interesting, challenging.

There are not many games that have been released in the past few years that I would call engaging or interesting once the sheen wears off or the next game is released. I've seen people with cupboards full of games that they've bought, completed and never played again. That's not the sign of an engaging game.

There are 20-year-old games that I played then and still play now and still get as much enjoyment out of. My brother and I, both in our late twenties, the primary game market, love to play Age of Empires 2 and OpenTTD precisely because they are engaging games that have lasting appeal. In fact, we still even have the occassional game of Chaos, via the magic of a Spectrum emulator, because we enjoy it.

My brother recently invested in Half-life 2, which I must say looks fantastic. I played about half an hour of it while I was round there and already the sheen had worn off. Yes, I would still play on today if I could because the story was engaging, it's quite good to have a little experimentation with the engine etc. but once I've completed that game, there'll be next to no incentive to go back and play it.

Counterstrike, however, is a different story. Counterstrike I could still see myself enjoying playing when I'm 90.

Projects like FreeCiv and OpenTTD and the UFO remakes are existing precisely for this reason. They are/were great games, they are not just eye-candy and hype that lasts for about a week, they are based on good principles with well-balanced gameplay.

The fact that I can still play TTD on my modern Windows machines, my Linux machine, even a Mac, if i had one, increase the utility of the games. The fact that OpenTTD allows me to plug-in new, clearer graphics, even change the code and interface to suit myself like I couldn't do in TTD, that's the reason these sorts of projects exist.

Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.

Now go back to telling all your mates what your latest waste of $100 was at your latest game store.

Re:Oh dear.

[Targon]

My own thought is that you missed the point that many old-school gamers have been trying to point out.

I agree that there are SOME people who will never be happy, but most want to see an evolution of the game industry to allow for new innovative titles. We see sequels, and games that are a clone of other pre-existing games with slight improvements, but there are very few games that break out of the mold set by the original game.

The most popular for example, is the first person shooter. Since Castle Wolfenstein 3D came out, there were some decent upgrades added such as multi-player. But aside from game engine upgrades, the whole genre hasn't evolved all that much when it comes to how you play the game. It's still about shooting everything that moves. In multi-player, it's still deathmatch, or team vs. team this or that. Some RPG elements would be an improvement in the multi-player game. Add things like medics for example where if a player "dies", they are out of action until a medic gets to that player and either applies some healing or drags the body back to base or something.

RTS games are all too often a copy from Warcraft 2 with extra features. You gather resources, tell a building to make a unit out of thin air, and you advance. Games like Populous: The Beginning had a new approach where your population can grow, then you train the new people to become whatever unit. You don't make units out of nothing, you make units from your general population. Your limits are in the raw materials needed to make a training structure and houses for your people, as well as other structures.

Roleplaying games in general fall into the Dungeons and Dragons CLONE market. Almost every fantasy RPG in the computer industry uses a lot of the old stupid rules of D&D. If it's not a Dungeons and Dragons licensed product, then chances are the game rules follow something similar.

You get the Diablo clones, which are still evolving a bit, but any attempt to add RPG elements to them tend to be poorly implemented without giving any choices. I keep watching this segment because there IS the potential that this type of game will grow closer toward the true RPG type. But there is still the D&D copy element that these games also tend to have.

The old adventure games are gone for the most part. The old Sierra adventures and games like them have mostly faded out of existance.

City simulators are still around and there is still a lot of growth possible for this type of game, but you also don't see many new ones comming out.

Graphics will help support a decent game, but the problem that many of us old-school players have is that we look for gameplay upgrades beyond a tileset or a re-hash of the original just with a new set of rules or new graphics thrown on top of the old game.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but after playing games on a computer since 1978 or so, is it any wonder that I keep looking for something new that will make me say, "Wow, now THIS is a nice upgrade from the last game", or to see a GOOD blend of two different types that arn't done half-way on each part?

Going forward, with multi-processor or multi-core CPU computers comming closer to being mainstream(it will happen, but who knows when), it will be possible for games to have many different layers that you can switch between which you can't do well with a single-threaded design. I can see the possible combination in a single game of city simulator plus civilization, or a Sims-type game merged with a city simulator. There are so many ways that things can get BETTER, without needing to just copy the conceptual work of others.

Bioware is one of the few companies that seems to "get it". They are evolving game concepts and pushing to avoid stagnation. Neverwinter Nights for example may not have been the most wonderful game, but it was a good attempt to bring the tabletop game experience to a computer game.

The greatness of freeciv.

[JollyFinn]

Is in its configurability.
What about standard size planet filled with great AI and slow research, no huts giving random military units. I just loved it. 2 settlers you start with, find a place to start then, its war for expansion immediately.
Basicly freeciv lets me hack with options that can change the gameplay of old game a LOT, and make it even more interesting. You can alter the population growth rate so that you get different variations on what will happen.

I can change the game options to play WAY different way compared to original civ. And there are lots of minor differences that make it different from CIV & CIV2 atleast in way of the strategies goes.

I wonder how the AI is

[Sarin]

I remember in the commercial civ games, the ai's winning strategy was knowing the complete map and a big cash bonus every round, so a little bit lame.
I wonder how the freecivs ai compares to that

Re:I wonder how the AI is

[GreyWolf3000]

I can beat many AIs on "hard" with only about 20 cities, each with either 2 or 3 tiles in between them (2 is preferable, as a unit can move in one turn from one city to another). My trick is to get the Great Library straight up (going for Republic anyway), let them research the "important" techs, and go straight for theology.

By the time I have theology, I usually have 20 cities each with a defensive unit and a workers. (more around "border" cities). I have the workers build roads to the cities, and set them all to build caravans. Then I pump out JS Bach's Cathedral and Michelangelo's chapel. Then I set my luxuries to 80% and use rapture growth to get all my cities to 8 (I use workers to ensure each city can get to enough food). At that point, I go for economics, get Adam Smiths, and build a granary, marketplace, temple, courthouse, city walls, aqueduct, etc. in every city. The aqueducts cost 2, but everything else is free! So I then rapture grow to 12 and keep luxuries at 10%, taxes at 10%, and science at 80%.

At that point I'll be about even in tech with the Great Library (electricity will be a ways off for the AI), and have the highest population and research techs the fastest. At that point I'm unstoppable.

I recommend you don't play on a huge map, since after a while the unchecked expansion of the computers will make turns take all day.

Freeciv has been around for 5 years

[RedLaggedTeut]

The freeciv "clone" has been around for 5 years or more, so it is not like it took 10 years just to get started. There are also lots of improvements, you probably don't know both civ1 and freeciv to appreciate this. It is far from the 16x16 screen of the DOS game, with city screens popping up every turn.

Freeciv's strength at the moment is that it cares about multiplayer, and that it actually has people playing it multiplayer.

The main reason it hasn't changed more is that cool ideas are not by themselves fun ideas, and that people love the standards set by the initial civ, and would be put off by big changes.

Not to mention that the game borrowed from "Empire" and the technology names from the AH boardgame, so everyone is standing on the shoulders of someone else.

Wesnoth has better graphics than freeciv, but for me, it hasn't yet delivered something strategy-wise that e.g. the Battle Isle series and free implementations don't do better. Especially the unavoidable skewedness of battles.

Re:Free software

[Anonymous Coward]

"Games Designers to Programmers ratio in the world is rather one sided to actually try and base your argument off. A good game designer is indeed a rare find. Programmers, on the other hand are a dime a dozen (in comparison)."

Amen to that.

I'm not a GD but I am a software developer. Piss poor programmer compared to the guys that work under me, but thats not my focus...my focus is soley in designing the best application out there.

Programmers rarely get it -- they think *THEY* are doing the hard part. Well they are -- its just they are the equivelent of bluecollar employees doing the heavy lifting. *ANYONE* can program...I can pick up a book and get something done a few days later. I have to admit, ASM wasn't this way, but I muddled through and got some of my applications working in under 64k to deal with embeded environments (I would have never survived in the days when guys were doing the same things in 4 or 8k or worse).

But it always pisses me off when I hear my programmers badmouth me as a lousy programmer -- if I have ever claimed to be one, I'd gladly accept the criticism, but I don't even claim to have the skills past getting something done enough to give to the guys that know what they are doing. But to then given them responsibility to come up with subdesigns to fill in my gaps, its obvious they don't have a fucking clue about what it takes to deliver software to the end user. To them its all about code. If they can copy someone elses work, its dead simple. If they can't -- 'there isn't an obvious solution to this, so lets just have them edit a text file to get to this' (a paraphrase of an argument one of my guys gave me a few weeks ago). Or -- but you *CAN* do it -- see watch, you click here, and then you do this, and then you select this from the menu and then then go back here and its done...do you want me to make a Macro pulldown and let the do it from here. Its obvious these guys don't understand workflow nor care that the average person doesn't want a hundred ways to get to the same thing -- especially if this is a core function and one they need instantly accessable without workarounds.

And again, this is one of the problems I have with the OSS nerds -- the know how to copy other peoples works and thus think the application was easy to make, Sure, it was an obvious idea when they copied it, making themselves feel better about it, but then why did no other application, OS or otherwise have this function until someone else walked in and put it in their own. Patents EVIL. Copyright EVIL. I have no problem with OSS but the attitudes. I use F/OSS almost every day. Its the hippy attitude that everyone is equal and should share equally and that anyone with a novell take on something should be put in their place and have this idea taken away from them as it was 'obvious'.

Again, the idea of F/OSS software is great. Its the negative attitude towards the creatives in the field that get to me.

Re:Free software

[grumbel]

### Is it really that hard to find someone with an original new idea for a game?

No, but its extremly hard to find developers when you have an original idee and that is really not that suprising. When you clone a game, everybody in the team instantly knows what the goal is, most of the developers know the game to develop more or less in and out. There are forums, newsgroups and such for the game to clone that you can use to find new developers. In the long run you can even switch maintainer and the programmers without much a problem, since everybody knows what the goal is.
Now with an original idea this all falls apart, first of knowbody knows your idea, so you have a hard time finding people interested in it in the first place, but then you also have a very hard time to explain the idea to them. You can also not just swap out developers, since every newcome will have to be introduced to the idea again. If the gamedesigner drops out you can basically close the shop, since nobody will be left knowing exactly what the goal was. Last not least it all happens over the internet, which makes explaining stuff even more difficult then in a person to person meeting. In the end you can't even be sure that your idea actually works, stuff that might sound cool on paper might suck as game. So even if you get all those talents you need, you might still fail.

All this is not special for games, applications are as well much easier cloned than created from an original idea, KDE, Gnome and such are all just clones of Windows and a bit MacOSX, they are improved here and there, but the concept are pretty seldomly touching new ground and if they ever do they only to it in very small steps.

Re:status of freeciv AI?

[RedLaggedTeut]

The AI completely thrashes players who are new to freeciv, even old civ players, and without resource cheating. It has even turned into a problem by itself, sort of, because in most difficulty levels, the AI does well, only differently.

However, the AI has problems adapting to special settings(islands, min/full tradesize) and strategies that are prevalent in the online games, which means the AI does well especially when it has land contact with you or when it got a little economic lead to make up for its initial deviations from human strategies(read:stupidity), which are noticeable if control is turned over from human to AI. Maybe stupid is the wrong word, it just has a different battle plan.

Re: Help me in understanding why this is news...

[Black Parrot]

> Are there any real breakthru's in OSS here?

Is OSS about breakthroughs, or about continual refinement?

> Considering when Civ2 was released, I could have only used money I found on the street and under my couch and still had the real game in my hands 5 years ago. What is so important about freeciv?

It would be interesting to know how many people are playing Freeciv vs how many are still playing Civ2.

Re:two words

[KDR_11k]

So, what other game had you rolling around a ball that picks up all kinds of crap and changes its dynamics in the process? Because Marble Madness only had balls rolling around, it lacked the picking up part.

Artist availability

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you look at sites like elysiun.org and deviantart, it's obvious that lots of talented artists are happy to put their work online, just for the hell of it. What we need to do is market Free Software as a place to explore and exhibit their talents.

Even the artists who use GIMP, Audacity, or other free software are often unaware of how they could contribute to that same cause that helps them. More integration would be great.

Maybe a standardised link from every free software app that goes to some site which requires talent related to that kind of app would help. You know, like a DMoz of free software projects, but with GIMP pointing to the "Projects in need of Artists" section. It would be even better, if apps let artists automatically update and release their work to a Free repository.

Re:Free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to point the last truly _original_ game (that does not suck)?

liquid war And its free software too.

Re:Retrogaming For The Masses

[__aamkky7574]

So would one or more of those people who posted negative comments about FreeCiv like to explain what's so wrong with enjoying old game formats.

Nothing at all. I've played Civ in the last year, loved it, and hold my hat up to the longevity of Mr. Meier's game. My criticism is nothing to do with the game, but why someone is bothering to copy it.

P.

Planeshift

[Jon Taylor]

I haven't seen Planeshift discussed here yet. It is the coolest looking FOSS game I have yet seen. It is a bit like EverQuest. The download is an astonishing 250MB, most of which is artwork. It is based on the CrystalSpace 3D engine, a truly great piece of code. If you look at the "related projects" link on the CS mainpage, you will find links to many, many other FOSS games based on the CS engine. Truly a vibrant community, yet mostly unknown. Check it out.