FOSS RTS Game Glest Gets Revival — Enter Mega-Glest 103
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."
Re:Just in time! (Score:5, Informative)
as a former blizzard fanboy who loved every single game they released in last 15 years (maybe except wow) let me say this:
sc2 is bad - everything but core multiplayer pretty much sucks
- you are 'encouraged' to be always online, you have to deal with authorizations to even dream about playing offline on some shitty guest account (your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch)
- no LAN
- regions with no possibility to play across borders (unless you drop another $60 for the other region's version)
- 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)
- 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)
- no clan/tournament support
- 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)
- 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
- horrible custom maps - maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining
- for sc1 lore nerds - poor story, an awful lot of retcons, completely redesigned personalities of core characters, large amounts of meaningless filler and everything you know and love going down the shitter. Only technical side to the campaign and missions themselves are good, everything else is incoherent, self-contradictory and cringeworthy. Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
doesn't sound like blizzard of old, eh?
read this rather blizzard-centric blog devoted to games for in depth analysis of the current state of affairs in blizzard
http://www.the-ghetto.org/ [the-ghetto.org]
Re:awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
total annihilation spring > that game
also open source and windows/linux.......
http://springrts.com/ [springrts.com]
Re:Just in time! (Score:5, Informative)
I wish I were kidding. Section 7 of the EULA flat out states that you can never "sublicense or transfer" the game to any person or entity. The funny (and sad) part is it even goes on to say that *IF* a court overturns that little nugget, then you agree to call Blizzard customer service so that they can charge you a "processing/handling fee" just so you can sell the game.
It's one hell of a nasty EULA. :\
Spring RTS (Score:1, Informative)
If you want a really good real time strategy engine/game try spring (http://springrts.com) it is far more robust and fun than any other rts I've ever played (including this one), it's interface easily surpasses starcraft 2 and supcom.
For example It's great because you can select a bunch of units, and then draw a line of attack and have your units attack each position, instead of cluster fucking together.
All projectiles are actually calculated out as to whether they'll hit something, and everything's affected by terrain and wreckage.
Check it out. It's really cool.
Re:Just in time! (Score:5, Informative)
Bothered by executable installer, give me a deb! (Score:3, Informative)
I downloaded it but I notice the installer is an ELF executable. This is sort of a Windows-style way to distribute an application. If I run it, I have no idea where it will put files on my system. I'm not too comfortable with that, why not distribute a deb that will allow my system's package manager to let me uninstall it easily?
(Or next best thing, just a tarball that unzips to a predictable location and runs from there.)
As it stands, if I want to be careful I'd have to create a low-priviledge user with a clean directory just to easily track what happens during install without worrying about it writing to my system directories or to a weird place in my home directory. Kind of a lot of work just to check out a game.
Re:The graphics in FOSS games.. (Score:5, Informative)
Hey folks!
Founder of http://opengameart.org/ [opengameart.org] here. I noticed the bandwidth spike, so I thought I'd take a look at the referrer link, and I'm glad to see someone finally mention us on Slashdot. Honestly, I'd love to have a *real* slashdotting. The server's hefty enough to handle it, and the publicity would be immensely helpful. :)
At any rate, one of our underlying missions is to help FOSS games move beyond "programmer art", and we do that by taking donations and then using those to commission artists to do art. I run the site mostly out of pocket, and with all the commissions, it costs me a good $500 monthly, in addition to the roughly $100/month in donations that we bring in (mostly community members with recurring subscriptions). Shameless plug: If you subscribe, even for $3/month, that's money we can use to buy art for everyone that will never go away. :)
One of our current projects is an art revamp for a Smash Bros. clone called Ultimate Smash Friends. ( http://usf.tuxfamily.org/wiki/Main_Page [tuxfamily.org] )
Here's are the first two characters we've commissioned:
Xeon: http://opengameart.org/content/xeon-ultimate-smash-friends [opengameart.org]
Awesome Possum: http://opengameart.org/content/the-awesome-possum-ultimate-smash-friends [opengameart.org]
It's a lot of work, and it's not cheap, but there's a lot of FOSS game code out there with a lot of potential, and I think it's worth it. Plus, all of the assets we commission are CC-licensed, so they're reusable as part of the commons.
Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or ideas. If you have thoughts about the site interface (we're still working on it), there's a forum thread discussing planned changes for OGA 2.0. I'd love to hear what you think!
Peace,
Bart K.
http://opengameart.org/ [opengameart.org]
Re:awesome! (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you, you just ruined my weekend. I'll likely be sucked into playing that w/ a friend...
Likewise, there's Warzone 2100 [wz2100.net], which I thought was quite a bit like TA (with acknowledge for the fact that I maybe spent 20 minutes playing the original, 5 years after it came out, and got my ass swiftly handed to me by the computer.) I've sunk many an hour into this one.
There so many enjoyable, well-one multiplayer games for Linux (and open source in general) I've not had the desire to pay for a game in some time/with any significant frequency. (Note, I fall in the 5-hours-or-fewer per week demographic by quite a bit.)
That said, Glest kinda sucks. It's boring and slow paced, even when you speed up the game speed. The gameplay does not feel fluid, either, even when run on a higher end system. It's like the Warcraft (original) of Open Source RTS: the sides are (For all intents and purposes) identical, and the gameplay is painfully simple.
Re:Again no x64 Windows build - why? (Score:3, Informative)