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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."
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
Let's go easy on their servers, eh?
http://screenshots.freeciv.org.nyud.net:8090/gallYes, it looks good, but does it run under.... Windows?! :-)
...by blatantly copying a commercial product.
:)
Not that I'm not on the edge of my seat for FreeOrion, though.
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.
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?
.. game engine and game graphics?
Clearly, you are clueless. The engine has nothing to do with the graphics.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Freeciv is neat and all, but as of late, I'm quite partial to the battle for Wesnoth when it comes to turn based strategy. Great community, excellent game, yet not well known. It's getting closer to a 1.0 release, albeit slowly.
I want to rant at your post, but im not sure on the right words to use... 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). To say that OSS games such as this put programmers out of a job is a bit far fetched (especially after you first complain about this game being a clone of an old game). Programmers generally dont get creative jobs - thats what designers are for. Copying ideas, and giving it away is one of the main thrusts of OSS. You will find that the most creative and original ideas in OSS come in the form of programmers tools because the programmers know what they want themselves. Its hard being a game designer when your not a game designer. Different groups and cultures go about life differently.
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).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Care to provide an example? Care to point the last truly _original_ game (that does not suck)? And last but not least - are you sure that an original game will be more fun than not-so-original but more polished?
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?
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".
Bloody Norwegians naming one of their cities 'Reykjavik', clearly trying to confuse the international community and steal our fish.
Thieving bastards the lot of them.
Concerned Icelander.
Being a civ2 clone, I hope this doesn't get a cease-and-desist order like http://freecraft.org/. So far it's been out of the radar. It would be a pity if the big guys went after such a great game like this. No, freeciv isn't just a copy. I actually like it better than its commercial counterparts. It's one of the best open-source games out here!
http://www.freecol.org/
NEWS-2.0.0
From Freeciv
(Redirected from NEWS-beta)
WARNING: This is a tentative list, by no means exhaustive. See the NEWS or ChangeLog files contained with the source for more information.
WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 1.14.2
Rules changes:
* (Beta2) Research cost has doubled, effects of science buildings doubled. SETI now improves Research Labs instead of giving free Research Labs to every city. Isaac Newton's College now improves all the player's universities.
* New units: AWACS and Workers.
* New option: national borders. Units inside your borders do not cause unhappiness under Republic and Democracy.
* It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player who is at war with another player you are allied with.
* The Civ2 ruleset now has waste. Default ruleset does not.
* Incite costs changed, now cities closer to capital, with units and with buildings have much higher incite cost.
* Killing a defending diplomat now costs you 1 movement point.
* Units now have multiple, configurable veteran levels.
* Team mates now pool their research. You may opt out and research individually by cancelling the 'Team' treaty.
* Server has voting on commands and options. You need over 50% of votes.
* When moving a unit from a transport on an ocean tile to a land tile, you lose all movement points.
* You can specify a list of players that you would like to share victory with, using the 'endgame' command.
* Nations added: Swiss, Afghanistan, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Columbian, Elvish, Galician, Hobbits, Indonesian, Kampuchean, Malaysian, Martian, Nigerian, Quebecois, Sumerian, Taiwanese, Austrian, Belgian, Phoenician and Mexican.
* New wonder: The Eiffel Tower. Makes AIs love you and improves reputation.
* The building requirements of several buildings have been changed.
* The whale special is reduced to 2 food, 1 shield and 2 trade.
* Settlers / Workers / Engineers can never get veterancy.
* Trireme's high sea loss now considers veterancy level (green 50%, veteran 25%, hardened 5%, elite 0%) before being divided by 2 if you have Seafaring or 4 when you reach Navigation (previously only fixed at 50% before being divided).
* Glacier terrain is now unsafe for land units (15% chance per turn of being lost). Also doesn't count as coastline for Trireme safety or Fish and Whale generation. Roads/railroads can be built but all unit (worker too) get 15% chance per turn of being lost any way!
* King Richard's Crusade now made obsolete by Robotics (previously Industrialization).
* Fixed tech costs based on the number of prerequisites of the tech in the tech tree.
* Nations have preferred nations to fork off when civil war occurs.
Gameplay changes:
* AI is much improved, and does not use 'double-move' any more.
* AI now conducts diplomacy with you (and against you).
* New difficulty level: Novice. It severely handicaps the AI players.
* Smarter autoexplorer and autosettler code.
* Modpack options vastly improved: You can customize buildings, add buildings as requirements to units, restrict technologies to certain nations, have split technology trees, gold upkeep for units, new units and terrain flags and lots of other options. (This is still done by editing configuration files with a text editor.)
* Fewer popups (eg choose the new government from the menu directly)
* Alternative map topologies, e.g. real support for isometric and hexagonal maps, "donut" map wrapping.
* Incomplete support for drawing civ3 graphics. See the civ3gfx (ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/contrib/tilesets/ci v3gfx/) tileset.
* Global observer can observe the entire game.
* New method of settings map dimensions: Just use 'size'.
* Modified map generators.
* Initial units can be selected with a server option.
* 'Home' key centers on
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.
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.
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.
See this is what happens when everyone gets a chance to add their input... Hobbits okay Elvish alright whatever... Galician.. uh... Martian.. alright thats enough... Quebecois... are you crazy?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
We've managed to clone a game that's 10 years old. Fantastic work, guys...
We ?!?
YOU haven't done anything !
...by blatantly copying a commercial product.
Err which commercial Civ game has 30 player online multiplayer? Or provides a choice of rectangular, isometric or hex tiles?
All we need is a few great games...
Well, how about:
No Gravity http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
Vegastrike (and mods) http://vegastrike.sf.net/
Bzflag http://bzflag.org/
glest http://www.glest.org
cube http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
globulation http://www.ysagoon.com/glob2/
foobillard http://foobillard.sunsite.dk/
trigger http://www.positro.net/trigger/
netpanzer http://netpanzer.berlios.de/
I just don't know what you are talking about.
There are plenty of good games out there.
Can anyone else remember some good ones?
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
but... everyone *hates* the French right? ;-)
;-).
Not quite everyone, but only T.H.E.Y., which stands for The Holy Empire of Yanks. As you probably know, THEY usually call themselves US.
Well, in my currently running freeciv game year 1913, Washington is a small Hungarian village sized 2 near the north pole. I will buy it from Hungarians for tech advance of Monotheism next turn. Will be a good strategic port stationing my Czech submarines stuffed with nuclear missiles. Now, tell me about *hate*
Technically, best upgrade ever since classical Civ are visual borders.
There you are, staring at me again.
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
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.
So, for example, you could take this as evidence that it's not "just a clone" of the original game, it's what games should be: a constant and ongoing maintenance that will continue for as long as people are interested in playing it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
### 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.
Not to mention square, cylinder and donut maps.
Is it really that hard to find someone with an original new idea for a game?
So what? They're doing it for their own fun, not yours. Why should you judge them by market standards which are inapplicable: Its free. Therefore, it doesn't have to push the event horizon in order to lure suckers...
Honestly. What is with you "oh, this is passé" dilettantes? Must everything be fresh and new? That route leads to fascism, you know...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Whoah. I thought you was joking, but a bit of googling shows it actually exists... just in pre-alpha now. Now look what you're done! I'm on the edge of the seat, too!
Let's see, my strategy thirst has been largely quenched - we have FreeCiv, MegaMek, Stratagus, and one day we'll have FreeOrion. Now I just wish someone hacks FreeCiv to have Alpha Centauri stuff, and I'd be happy happy happy! (Hope that happens before Linux SMAC stops working! Or alternatively hope it will never stop working!)
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I still prefer the Simtex originals though. Even with their SVGA graphics.
Mirrordot link.
OLPC Australia
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's our fish. We can't steal what belongs to us.
And since everything belongs to us, we can't steal at all. That makes us the most honest people on the planet.
Honest Norwegian.
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.
This goes to show what a great game an open source project can create.
More like, this goes to show that an open source project can clone a great game. Isn't FreeCiv just a free remake of a game created by non-free developers?
### How long have most of these games been around? Why aren't they getting talked about more?
Most of them have been around for at least a year, some of them more, some less. If you never heard of them before, you should probally visit:
* http://www.happypenguin.org/
Which has those and a lot more.
You remember incorrectly.
Please read some of the FAQs on CIV, the AI while not overly complex, is many times more complex than you state... perhaps in the first CIV that's the way it worked but it has not been that way in many years.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
Don't forget Scorched3d! It's one of the best games ever.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
You say, "In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years." I suspect you were going for hyperbole to illustrate a point, but still... that's wrong.
Now we could aggree that on the average the chance to pick a good game has went down, and doubly so for the chance to pick an _original_ game. But claiming that no game in years even came to the level of "decent", no, sorry, that's just not true.
I'll also argue that judging a game _only_ on replay value is a piss-poor criterion. That excludes from the start any story-based game, and a lot of us actually like those. Pick your own favourite movie or book: could you see that movie or read that book, again and again each day, for years? Probably not. Does it make it automatically a bad book or movie? I'd say definitely not. Well, then I'd say the same ought to apply to games.
Anyway, if we're talking about no good games being released in years, just off the top of my head (and bearing in mind that my favourite genres may not match yours), I can think of games like:
- Tropico (and more recently Children Of The Nile, as a clone of it set in ancient Egypt). Very nice game, and very nice job of simulating your subjects as living beings instead of building statistics.
- Knights Of The Old Republic. Not only a very nice RPG with a very good story, but also a better prequel to Star Wars than what George Lucas ever made. I'm not even a SW fan at all, and I found the game to be worth every cent on its own merits as an RPG.
- Fable (ok, so it's not yet released on the PC.) I was _very_ weary of buying a PM game again, after the shameless fiasco that was Black & White, but I can honestly say that Fable was one of the most entertaining things I've ever done with my pants on.
- The whole Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts Of Iron/Crusader Kings series. "Real Time Strategy" doesn't only mean "Dune 2 clones", you know. Paradox's games are actually about _strategy_ and at a strategy level. Very welcome change, if you ask me. (And BTW, they still have 2D graphics.)
- Vampire Bloodlines. You know, this is one game which I really didn't play because of the graphics. See, I had the resolution set to 1600x1200, 8x FSAA and 16x aniso, so the game engine compensating by a piss-poor texture resolution and polygon-count level-of-detail, to keep the frame rate playable. So I had graphics that looked debatably worse than in some Playstation games, if the PSX character had stuck his/her face in a clogged toilet. Even in that context, I found the game most entertaining to play.
- Die Gilde ("Europa 1400 - The Guild"). Very nice take on the business strategy sim genre, and probably taking third place as number of hours played among the games I've played. (Right after The Sims and Fallout 2.)
- "Rome: Total War". If you ignore the RT combat (i.e., skip them and let the AI play for you), it _is_ a turn-based Civilization-type game. A very nice one, too.
Etc.
I realize by now I could go on for hours. (That's what not having a life and buying almost every game released will do to one.) So let's just say, a lot of us _do_ find good games to play, among all the crap being released.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Wesnoth is not about all powerful characters. Yes a level 3 character is powerful (some get to level 5, but most stop at level 3), but a few level 1s can take it out. Wesnoth is designed so that those high level characters die once in a while. You should always have some low level characters moving up so you can afford to sacrifice those high level characters without losing much.
As for tight passes, Don't fight in them, retreat a little so you have some room to work. They can only fight on low level character at a time. Keep wearing them out.
Not all the maps are balanced. If you were not playing the Heir to The Throne map, start there because it is generally the best balanced. Some maps are impossible.
Your other criticisms are by design. Part of the game is working around limits. The game is designed so that you cannot use overwhelming numbers to win. In fact getting 2000 gold is generally a sign of a map that isn't working anyway. You should be fighting an enemy that is for the most part equal to you. (except for the controlling intelligence)