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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."
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?! :-)
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."
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.
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
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.
Yeah, DOOM 3 proved that to me...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Better multiplayer, better AI, better tweakability, more balanced rules, choice of rectangular, isometric or hex tiles.
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.