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Freeciv-2.0.0 Stable Released

Posted by timothy on from the better-than-a-new-vaccine dept.

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."

16 of 557 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I don't get it .. by omicronish · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Classic games. by Oscar_Wilde · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:I don't get it .. by CleverNickedName · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --


    Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
  4. the freeciv advantage by juventasone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:the freeciv advantage by ladybugfi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  5. Re:I don't get it .. by bustersnyvel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:what a great game an opensource project can cre by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://www.freecol.org/

  7. Oh dear. by ledow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Oh dear. by Targon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  8. Re:I don't get it .. by eraserewind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  9. The greatness of freeciv. by JollyFinn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
  10. I wonder how the AI is by Sarin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:I wonder how the AI is by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --
      Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
  11. Freeciv has been around for 5 years by RedLaggedTeut · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
  12. Re:Free software by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ### 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.

  13. Artist availability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.