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FOSS RTS Game Glest Gets Revival — Enter Mega-Glest
Softhaus writes "Many readers here are likely familiar with the popular, open source RTS game Glest, which comes packaged with nearly every Linux distro. Unfortunately, all development ceased on the original game back in 2008, disappointing many around the world. During the past year, a new fork (called Mega-Glest) has endeavored to take this great game and bring it to the masses. This new fork can provide hours of fun at your next LAN party, as it supports up to eight players in real-time (with or without CPU AI players), and the newly released v3.3.5 offers Internet play via a master server lobby. Cross-platform network play is now a reality, which could help bridge the gap between Linux and Windows users in a cohesive manner. One of the best features of Mega-Glest (and indeed Glest itself) is the ease with which new 'factions' and mods may be produced via a Map editor, model viewer, Blender plugins, XML files describing your unit traits, particles, weapons, and LUA scripting for scenarios and AI. Full installers for Windows, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit are available on SourceForge, promising hours of fun. But one warning: the game can become highly addictive. You can provide feedback for the game through the official forums."
your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch
This isn't true. You can go in there and copy saves over just like you can on SC1. They are in a folder in Documents by default. It contains a Save subfolder.
- only 1 account (no separate stats or single player progress for different people using it, in fact that $60 is not per game copy, but per account, you are not allowed to share)
The stats part is true, however the single player progress bit is not. You can have more than one. Just hit new campaign.
- pathetic ways of communication (no easy to use and very social at their core chat channels, instead you get poor man's instant messenger which makes it total pita to run a clan or organize anything bigger that 2v2)
Social chat channels? They were just bots spamming for clans or (if some D1 or D2 was involved) item selling sites... The more private channels were useful for sure, but they have a party system for that now. Also how is a 3v a pita? Works just fine for me... Now a clan you might be spot on about, I wouldn't know.
- creators of custom maps pretty much hand the rights to blizzard and map distribution is solely through battle.net, pretty much no option to have custom maps on disk and play them offline, not to mention ridiculous restrictions (max 5 maps, total 20MB)
This also isn't true. You can put maps in a map folder and play them just like in SC. And you can load them for single player use or fire up the editor and launch them from there.
- hard to understand, intransparent ladder with leagues and thousands of divisions that doesn't show anything even remotely resembling global ranks so players can feel good about themselves
Eh hopefully they add this for you. I think it is a valid request even if I am not interested in it personally. However I doubt the vast majority of players need "global ranks" to "feel good about themselves" so it probably wasn't given priority over making leagues that work well for prompt and equal matchmaking.
maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining
Huh? You can invite who you want and pick the map you want and change rule options.
Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
This one is just kind of ridiculous. What POSSIBLE measurement do you use to get that figure? Did it take you 30 minutes to read the little quick story panels in SC1 or something? Might want to take off those rose-tinted glasses and actually go review the Story presented in vanilla StarCraft. It is fine that you don't like SC2. You made some good points (no real LAN play is sad, though you can still play over LAN provided you have internet to auth there. and the logging in every time can be annoying. can't sell the game etc) but some of that was distorted to say the least. Personally I rather enjoyed SC2. If I had to guess I would say a good number of people ragging on StarCraft II never played it. Hence comments that just aren't true or are exaggerated like some of the stuff you had or "graphics overhaul is all it is".
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