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At Long Last: Stable Version of FreeCraft Game Engine
Posted by
timothy
on Mon May 27, 2002 03:27 AM
from the go-forth-and-conquer dept.
from the go-forth-and-conquer dept.
jimmcq writes: "After two years of active development the long awaited stable release of FreeCraft is available.
FreeCraft is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It is possible to play against human opponents over LAN, internet, or against the computer. The engine can be used to build C&C, WC2, SC and AOE-like real-time strategy (RTS) games. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X, MacOS/Darwin and MS Windows. Souce code and binaries are available from SourceForge."
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How long before Vivendi sues (Score:4, Funny)
Looks Great, Needs Graphic Artist (Score:5, Insightful)
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Re: Looks Great, Needs Graphic Artist (Score:3, Informative)
> We do have some decent graphics for Freeciv. There is the Cevo tileset, which looks quite good. Head and shoulders above the rest.
Unfortunately, the consensus is that Cevo contains copyrighted material that would be illegal to distribute with Freeciv.
What hobbyists can do (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:What hobbyists can do (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, okay. Well, I can't tell quality from a screenshot, obviously, and I won't contradict you there (mmm... Nethack...) but as for graphics, that screenshot looks about 10 years old. *shrug*
I know graphics aren't really the measure of how good a game is, but you can't stand there and say that 'hobbyist' games have just as good graphics as professional games. Well, you can, but I won't believe you. Not without proof anyway.
I really wish I had artistic talent enough to volunteer for some of these projects that have great gameplay etc but just need overhauling in the graphics department. But I don't, so.
Re:Well, I looked at the screenshot and (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it's not for sale, so let's not undersell it either!
TWW
Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is bigger and more widespread than just this screenshot. I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap. And i'm not referring to technological quality of the graphics - open source artists are not as good as professional artists. It seems that if an artist is good enough, then they won't work for free or in their spare time - unlike programmers.
Or is it just that the whole open-source concept breaks down when applied to things like art? Can you have 10 artists collaborating over the internet to produce a high-quality/professional looking product?
I'd also question the ability of user interface design to succeed - not only are the graphics awkward in products like this, but they seldom have the "slick interface" present in commercial games.
Maybe i'm shallow, but I require a minimum level of quality in the art/interface of a computer game for me to feel happy playing it. I'll be avoiding this one :)
Parent
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am by no means a gamer. In fact, I rarely play computer games. But whenever I have actually sat down in front of a game, I have been utterly confused as to what I am actually seeing on the screen and how to make things happen. I have yet to see a "slick" user interface!
I mean, standard widgets does not seem to be used, and the designers seem to prefer using unreadable fonts in order to get as much info onto screen and/or look good/cool/ethnic/timely. Also, I have not been impressed by the use of colors to help users discern what is going on.
Am I the only one to feel this way? Or am I simply too uninformed to state my opinion? I'll admit that I have not tried a game in a couple of years, but I do look at pretty pictures on the web and in magazines once in a while.
What I am actually trying to say is that this is an area where open source could actually make an impact. While writing a game engine is hard and designing graphics is cumbersome and requires artistic skills, hashing around different fonts, widget placements, quick keys, and views could well be possible without too much expertise.
Parent
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about Tuxracer? [sourceforge.net]
OpenGL does look nice if done right.
Parent
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actualy the games that come with KDE don't look too bad. The reasion that MOST OpenSource projects lack good art is that it's usually done by one of the programmers in his spare time.
Parent
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, wait... You must not have heard about their 30 day money back guarantee. But you have to act right now before this offer expires.
And, just because they really want you to try this game, they'll throw in, at no additional cost, an operating system on which to play it. And even if you decide to return the game for you full refund, they'll let you keep the operating system as a free gift, just they're way of saying 'thanks' for trying the game. So ACT NOW!
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess that's because good art is instantly recognisable even by guys in suits. Good code is recognisable only by the absense of broken parts, and that's something that takes weeks of analysis or testing to prove.
Um, did you miss the point? The graphics are up to you. If you don't like them, you can change them. Yes, you. Not the guy standing behind you.
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an open source programmer - and I suck at designing graphics. This is why I asked other people to design logo's for me [gnump3d.org].
Thankfully there are capable artists who are prepared to give their work away for free, (or perhaps for recognition .. who knows?).
I have to disagree with your claim that open source games suck - picking an arbitary example Armagetron [sourceforge.net] (a 3D tron game) looks great
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
I admit it, I am not a programmer, I am not a graphic artists, but I am told I am a pretty decent writer (as a hobby mind you), so creating a background for a game wouldn't be all that hard, but even a good story without a halfway decent graphic wouldn't go anywhere (man do I miss text adventures).
Michael
Re: Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Funny)
That's not fair (Score:4, Funny)
at my work there's a coder who gets laid at least three times a weekend by interested parties. He also washes regularly and wears clothes he bought in this century.
Of course, everyone just assumes he's an artist...
Parent
Re:Does art work in Open-Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Code is not art. Code is more like engineering in that you do it to perform a practical job. As a bi-product, it might have certain aesthetic qualities in much the same way that a well designed bridge is beautiful to look at.
Re:What hobbyists can do (Score:3, Informative)
This is an Open Source game. It is still in the early stages of development (just released their second tech demo a week ago) but the artwork is really very good IMHO.
Greetings,
Oh dear. (Score:5, Funny)
Can't wait, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather see something fresh and new, with its own identity. A whole new game with its own units, storyline, game world, and so forth.
Otherwise, people trying out some human/orc game called "FanCraft" will just note how it looks like a lame ripoff of Warcraft and go back to Battle.net. But if there's something new and innovative, there would be a reason to stay and play it, and you might just have a "killer app" on your hands.
Re:Can't wait, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can't wait, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds good. What have you come up with?
Parent
What do you think of this? (Score:3, Interesting)
What do you think?
Yay! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*Scratches head* (Score:3, Funny)
It's Come A Long Way (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that the engine is all done, things like better sounds and graphics can be turned to. That said, this project has come very far. For all those comments bashing on the graphics, while it might not look like it, there have been many improvements in the art since the project first began. The splash screen and menu screens are good examples of this that really shocked me when I loaded it up again recently (it was packaged for Debian about a month or two ago).
All those of you who are naysayers on the art really would do well to consider how far the project has come so far. I'd be surprised if they couldn't recruit some artists to help do some major cleanup on the game, seeing as the code is essentially complete now. If there's one thing that's true about open source, it's that a project might be horrible at first, but once it gets momentum going it reaches a high level of quality in time. Have patience, and you'll see this happen here.
Worldforge (Score:4, Informative)
Graphics... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Graphics... (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, let's comment on the engine. It's not a "game" engine, it's a "Warcraft 2" engine. A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this. There's nowhere (that I can see) to add behaviour hooks; you have to expand or modify the code. Modifying it to act as a DuneII or Starcraft clone, for example, would be a substantial rewrite. That means that when people add and submit their own rulesets and object types, the code base will bloat and/or fork.
A far better long term solution would have been a thin and generic object handling and UI framework, with plugins for UI, object behaviour and world rules. OK, I know the goal always was to produce a Warcraft clone, but in that case, the developers shouldn't claim that it's a generic RTS engine, because it simply isn't.
All that said, it's a well organised and very readable and clean piece of code. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of how to write a game. But keep in mind what was done wrong: too much integration of engine and behaviour (leading to lots of special cases for what should be generic behaviour, see the network "Send..." code, and the enumerated missile types), and (IMHO) loads of "object" manipulation in C, when C++ would have been more efficient.
Oh, and please remember to use a Unicode string table and not hardwired ASCII English strings. You'll save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble in the long run, especially if you get Deutsch translations done early on. German tends to be rather long winded, and doesn't abbrev. well. ;-)
Parent
Yesterday's games, tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
It's 2D, it doesn't run under WinXP, it's buggy (sound keeps switching itself on, units keep disappearing), it's missing features that appeared in commercial RTS's years ago (unit queueing, and fullscreen. Hello, FULLSCREEN?).
I wrote a comparable engine using DOS4GW/allegro back in 1995, and canned it because it was obsolete back then. Seven years later, I'm not seeing any great improvements, nor any incentive to bring my commercial games development skills to this project.
This is a neat hobby project, and probably a great learning experience for the dev team, but that's about as far as it's going. I showed it to my (non-OS) coworkers and they laughed their collective asses off. One guy asked me if it was a GBA emulator, and if so, how come it sucked so much compared to Advance Wars [gameboy.com], and I really had no answer for him.
Look, don't get me wrong. I'm an open source developer, and I support good open source project when I see them (like the Demeter terrain engine [terrainengine.com]), but if it looks like a turkey, and walks like a turkey, and sounds like a turkey, then it is a turkey, and all the cross platform compatibility in the world (except for WinXP, of course) won't turn it in to an engine that anyone other than the development team would really choose to use.
Two final thoughts:
Re:Yesterday's games, tomorrow (Score:4, Insightful)
I still play Nethack (and I consider it one of the best games ever) and it is only ASCII (not even 2D).
Games don't have to be 3D to be good.
Greetings,
Parent
Re:Yesterday's games, tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but they do need to be well designed to be good, and from messing with Freecraft, I have to agree with the orignal poster that it has serious problems.
While I certianly don't feel that a game needs to be 3d, or even graphical for taht matter, ot be good it DOES need to have a good look, feel adn interface in whatever it's chosen medium is. Zork is good, despite being text, because it does text WELL. It is intiutuive to speak to (if a bit pickey at times) and the story and descriptions are good. It really feels like an interactive novel, and the text medium feels appropriate.
FreeCraft is just, well, ugly and clunky, and it has nothing to do with being 2d. There are lots of great, modern, 2d games out there. Baldur's Gate 2 and Civ 3 are my current favourites. The thing is, they both look good, and they both have good interfaces.
When you get right down to it, FreeCraft is ugly. This doesn't mean that it lacks graphical eyecandy, it means it's ugly, pure and simple. It is valid to make a game that uses simple icons and represeantsations instead of detailed graphics. I believe Army Men is a current title that does that. However this is not what FreeCraft does. It just has ugly 2d graphics that want to look Warcraftish, but don't.
There is no justification for this either. The reason older games used to have poorish quality graphics was due to system limitations. You could only work in 320x200 with 256 colours, so you had to make sacrafices. This really isn't true anymore, I have spare parts from old systems I don't even use any more that can easily handle 800x600 at full 32-bit colour.
For a good example of what's I'm talking about, look at the interface panel. It is hideous. The background is horrable, if that's the best texture they can do, they should just go with no texture at all. The font is hideous too. It looks all wrong, they are doing a drop shadow, but in white not black, which just looks wrong to us (it's a shadow, supposed to be dark). The layout is also rather poor, clumping objects together. I'm no graphic artist, but I could do a much better job on the interface panel with the slight amount of arts training I have.
What it really comes down to is that no matter what visual theme you pick for a game, it needs to look good. If you want to do a 2d overhead or iso game, fine, but you need to take the time to make it look good. Now maybe you can't, because you don't have the talent, that's fine we all have our skills and weaknesses. However in that case you need to try and find someone who does, and who can help you, and not try and make up excuses for why poor graphics are ok. Or just do the game in a non-graphical medium. Like you said, NetHack kicks and it's all ASCII (I guess it's kinda graphics, but not really).
This is important to OSS projects as well because people DO judge based on appearence. This just screams amature. Now you could ahve a really great technical engine and fun game under there, but the graphics are going to scare people off because they are so childish. It's just the way humans are, look are just about teh first thing we judge on, and often people have trouble getting past that. Espically gamers.
No Windows XP support? (Score:4, Interesting)
Q: Why is Windows XP not supported?
A: Because I decided it. I do not support any product, that forces anybody to register it. Please read the FreeCraft (GPL) license [sourceforge.net] and visit www.boycottxp.com (down) [boycottxp.com] and more boycott [arachnoid.com].
This is pure idiocy. Firstly, shutting out XP users from FreeCraft will not make people ditch XP, it will make them ditch FreeCraft (and any game which uses it). Thus, game developers who use FreeCraft will undoubtably want to remove the XP block, and if that's not possible for some reason, many will choose another engine. There are a LOT of XP users, and a lot of people who will be upgrading to XP from 95/98/Me/2000 soon. Shutting them all out is stupid, stupid, stupid, no matter what you personally think about Microsoft or Windows XP as an OS.
Second, while I have not personally seen the source of FreeCraft, I doubt that what's keeping the engine from working with XP is hard to fix (it works under Win2000!) - I wouldn't be suprised if there's just a bit that says "if( bWindowsXP ) Crash();" at the beginning. Isn't the FreeCraft team just lowering itself to Microsoft's level (remember how early versions of Windows purposefully wouldn't work on DR-DOS?) by doing this?
Anyway, let's hope that for some future release, the FreeCraft team stop with this silliness and more importantly, stop discriminating against the thousands of people who have chosen to use Windows XP - or, maybe more commonly, had it pre-installed on a new computer.
Game graphics, OSX and XP (Score:3, Insightful)
1.It's GPL'ed, which means that nothing is stopping you from *making* it run under XP. This is of course theoretical and ignores some of the difficulties, such as GCC incompatibilities under XP, but theoretically, you could make this work with MSVC++
2.Since it has Linux (and I presume *BSD) source, it means that porting it to OSX, while not trivial, won't be the end of the earth.
3.As many have mentioned, the graphics in the screenshots look bad. This says practically nothing about the developers, who are not graphics artists, and a lot about the consumer mentality of the general public that is gladly willing to use a game if it is free, but are less inclined to accept a different level of quality even if they don't pay for it.
4.At the same time, such comments about the quality of the graphics should not be met with disdain by OSS developers. The general public is very unforgiving and will match OSS products with their commercial competitors, no matter what! While I should point out that anyone can change the graphics of this game, it should serve as notice to OSS developers to place a lot of emphasis on presentation. Apple doesn't do well for nothing.
5.To those who claim that this game is in the past, not high-tech enough etc, I should point out that the popularity of a game is not as dependant on it'stechnology as some may think. There is a commercial game on OSX called Escape Velocity Nova that is a simple 2D space adventure game, but is extremely popular. The game depends on it's playability, not on it's technology. The GBA is another example. I have a feeling that a lot of especially PC commercial game developers, have the idea that their game will only be successful if the technology is cutting edge (vis the post further down from the commercial game developer). I beg to differ. High tech FPS/RPS/RTS games have the immense difficulty in gaining acceptance in the gaming market for thesimple reason that there is very little real difference in the games and in the heat of the competition content and a good story get lost by the wayside. I think that a game can be very successful if the story is enticing and the game has depth. I personally think that the lack of Riven type games (which were extremely popular) or at least the fact that very few developers even bothered to try to take this genre further is a good clue in where the game market is weak.
6.As a lot of gamers know, the ability to mod or expand a game is one of the most important features in a game gaining success. Very many fans like to tinker with their games. Think about it. Expandable games that were/are popular -UnReal/Quake/HalfLife/Homeworld/Myth/EVNova etc.
7.Don't forget that tetris is still popular, as is online backgammon etc.
No MacOSX support (Score:3, Informative)
However, if it got ported over, I'd seriously consider throwing my graph-artist skills over to the program. Brian.
Screen shots link. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Nifty engine, but sound and music need work (Score:3, Interesting)
I am definitely going to look more into this.
Re:Nifty engine, but sound and music need work (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure MP3/Ogg music is too big or too hard to produce.. but whatever happened to using good ol' Amiga-style MOD music in games? MODs are similar in theory to MIDIs, except that they contain wavetable information in the file, so they always sound about the same on any system. They've been popular in the demoscene for quite a while, and even games like Unreal Tournament use MODs for their soundtrack.
Re:license (Score:3, Funny)
"For those concerned about the 'virality' of the GPL, a suggestion: Write Your Own Damn Code."
Re:license (Score:3, Informative)
While this means you're not required to redistribute the game under the GPL, you're also not licensed to redistribute the FreeCraft engine with your game -- unless you redistribute the game under the GPL.
From section 2 of the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
I.e. you may redistribute your game under any license you want, but it must not include the FreeCraft engine unless the license you want is the GPL.
I have read an article written by a lawyer who claimed that for libraries it would be better to use the LGPL because it is questionable whether the above section would hold up in court while the LGPL's terms for the redistribution of works using the library were more clear. This was in reference to German copyright law, though. Also note that IANAL, this is not legal advice, and you ignore that section of the GPL at your own risk. Even better, don't ignore it, because even if it were legal, it is probably not what the authors want you to do.