Freeciv-1.13.0 Stable 202
Martin Willemoes Hansen writes "Freeciv-1.13.0 has been released upon the world! There has been almost
a whole year of dedicated hacking. 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."
Excellent! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Excellent! (Score:1, Offtopic)
It's great to be an armchair softwareback! (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is why you must convert or you will die. (Score:1)
Re:Excellent! (Score:1)
GFX (Score:3, Insightful)
If they had better artists working on it, it would look just as "hip" and "new" as any other game. It's just some simple image files....
Besides, the fact that it has oodles of fans shows once again that there are actually people out there who play a game for it's gameplay and not the overkill of openGL graphics (Which is a big issue in the gaming industry today: most games just look good, but they suck in gameplay and have a replayabilty of 0.001%.)
The only games I still play are StarCraft and totalAnnihilation (old RTS games) and Lemmings for windows... and yes they also look "old" but atleast I enjoy the game cos it's fun, not cos it blasts a trillion polygons per seconds at my retinas...
People should return to the old philosophy: games should be fun, not perse pretty
Importance of graphics to me (Score:3, Insightful)
A game designer should IMNSHO *never* be truly satisfied with either:
1. A game with graphics, with game play coming in fourth hand.
or
2. A game with focus on game play, with graphics coming in fourth hand.
May sound harsh, but I think it's these things that can change an audience from "just" a group of true fans to a much broader range of fans and perhaps even the casual gamer. Of course I can easily see past the graphics, but I can just as easily see the obstacles to gameplay bad graphics create. And please don't see this as a complaint about the Freeciv gfx that has improved a *lot* since the last version I checked out, but as a comment to your post instead.
Re:Importance of graphics to me (Score:4, Informative)
I've also written a patch (not yet included, but probably soon, now that feature-freeze is over) that breaks up some of the map's monotony, You can see a screenshot here [umd.edu]. (BTW: if this screenshot seems too busy, remember that there are more specials here than in a default game, and that some the pure eye-candy disappears when tile is built upon.)
Re:Importance of graphics to me (Score:1)
here:http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nhscreen_big05
Re:Importance of graphics to me (Score:2)
Still prefer the old fashioned nethack with ascii graphics.
Re:Importance of graphics to me (Score:2)
There has to be a damn good gaming experience for graphics to enhance, otherwise you might as well be staring at prime time network TV; glitzy eye candy that doesn't have any substance to it. Civ2 is still around because it's damn good. Freeciv is still new because it's what the active coders want.
I can still play chess on a board. Animation and sound don't enhance it much. To me, at least.
Re:Importance of graphics to me (Score:1)
Re:GFX (Score:1)
Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, it's real stupid to write your own,
free versions of old and popular software..
I remember reading something about a crazy finnish guy who was writing his own version of UNIX!
What's with these people?
first on-topic post (Score:1)
I still spent many a night trying to get to build the SETI program, ever losing to Ghandi...
Thank you, freeciv developers.
Screenshots (Score:1)
Screen shots" [google.com]
all out of date [was Re:Screenshots] (Score:1)
I don't get this (Score:1)
Can someone explain why this was done?
Re:I don't get this (Score:2, Informative)
Can someone explain why this was done?
Probably because the Great Wall wonder is obsoleted pretty early in the game. If you build also build a city wall around some of your cities, they won't be unprotected when it gets obsoleted.
Re:I don't get this (Score:1)
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Funny)
Daniel
Re:I don't get this (Score:1)
Great Wall EXPIRES (Score:1)
why are you all negative? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:2, Informative)
Have you even played civ3? It's gameplay is better than freciv after you get used to the changes and graphically it kicks the crap out of freeciv. Seriously for being one of "the best" games out there for linux they really need to do some thing about those graphics.
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:1, Insightful)
Does CivIII have something other than the butt-ugly isometric view?
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:1)
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:2)
Ever heard of 'symbolic representation'? Like.. Do you really thing there's only 5-12 units defending 14-million city?
So think about how a 'veteran', 'classy' combat 'unit', can beat pants off some rookie units.
Like hmm. Finnish soldiers in WWII beat shit out of russians, at ratio 1 to 10. (Yeah, lost the war, but wtf, even 1:20 wouldn't have helped..)
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:1)
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:2)
The main thing I remember about CivIII is squinting at the monitor from about 5 inches away so I could tell the difference between the infantry units. YMMV.
Daniel
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:2, Informative)
That's not really true... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not a port of civ2. It's a very different game really, inspired by civ2, but it's very different. It's a much better game for network play, really optimised for that, and (last I checked at least) not really built for solo play at all. It's more like Civ3s more social cousin...
Re:why are you all negative? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Answer: this is Slashdot.
Daniel
Tips for solo play.... (Score:4, Informative)
Start the server, start the client, click join on the client.
from the server console,
)create youraiplayernamehere -- adds easy ai player
)set endyear yyyy - sets the year the game will end. Worth bumping this up the first few times you play.
)start
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I should have a go.
To open can, simply lift the ring and pull towards you. Drink.
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:1)
"Remove one. Moisten tip. Massage between gum and teeth."
See, it worked! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:3, Funny)
To open can, simply lift the ring and pull towards you. Drink.
s/Drink/Open mouth, drink./
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:2, Informative)
So how are the FreeCiv launcher writing projects coming along? Anything complete(ish) out there? It seems as if your help is very much needed. Will you be shipped with 1.14?
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:1)
The launcher is not included in the current release, but the odds are very good for 1.14 (or sooner)
In the mean time, there are some third-party launchers (some mirrored on freeciv.org) that control things graphically for you,
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:2)
Want another bonehead thing that you probably know, that I struggled with? Loading a saved game. Tons of options for Saving a game, nothing about Loading a game. No way that I could find from loading via the KDE shortcut loaded server console. For the rest of us mere mortals, you have to specify the file and a flag when you start up the server in an xterm.
Perhaps there is great info on-line, but I did not have a net connection. It was a piece of cake once I figured it out... One should not have to jump into source code just to play a bloody game, however. The help settings could use some more help.
Not to dis, but these are the type of issues software developers need to think about when they are programming for the masses. How many folks fired up freeciv, played a game where they were the only person, and just gave up?
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:2)
I played for ages, figured the AI player was really crap. I had airplanes before I realised I truly was alone
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:1)
Re:Tips for solo play.... (Score:1)
Wow, cool (Score:2)
Well, I'm off to suck really really bad at FreeCiv
Re:Wow, cool (Prince of Persia) (Score:2)
Summary of changes (Score:1, Redundant)
dialog and supports loading and saving from the client.
correspond with what they mean.
including the players' flags.
instead you can use the --info option to set the metaserver
announcement text to whatever you like. The -a option when given
to the client skips the connection dialog entirely.
defenders get only 1 firepower.
have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units.
been changed to 1, while it has been changed to 2 for the Civ2
ruleset.
partially invisible just like subs. Also, stealth bombers have
increased their attack strength from 14 to 18.
New ways to calculate technology costs. Better documentation.
Rulesets can specify starting techs. You can have more than one
bonus tech. Split settler abilities. Buildings ruleset syntax
has been significantly extended, but effects do not work yet.
"separatepoles" allow continents connected to the poles
"notradesize" and "fulltradesize" regulate the trade generated
by smaller cities.
randomly chosen city. This behaviour can be turned off with the
server option "savepalace".
"rulesetdir" command.
Freeciv has been removed.
Question (Score:2)
What exactly does that mean? Anyone know?
Re:Question (Score:1)
Eg: When you're a Roman Ceasar, for the first city you build, "Rome" will be in the edit box.
Re:Question (Score:1)
Before you Download this: The Bug List (Score:1, Redundant)
Some lines containing special characters will show up blank if your locale is set to "C". As a workaround set your locale to something else, like "en_US".
Your CMA settings are only sent to the server when you press turn done, and therefore changes you make to CMA in the same turn as you save a game will be lost.
If you use the CMA the resulting savegame isn't endian and 64 bit safe. So you can't use the savegame on a computer with a different architecture.
The easy AI is not easy enough for novice players. If the AI is beating you up early in the game, try setting the "generator" server option to 2 or 3. That is, in the server, before starting a game, type: set generator 2 or: set generator 3
The hard AI is not hard enough for very experienced players, and still does some stupid things. E.g., it prefers leaving cities in revolt rather than letting them starve/shrink.
Sometimes there may be too many advances in the "goal" menu of the science report, such that the menu goes off the bottom of the screen and you cannot select some items.
You may sometimes get the messages {ss} player for sample not found {ss} player for sample not found when using the esound sound driver. This is nothing to worry about.
Some effects of wonders and research first take effect the turn after. Fx when building the lighthouse some triremes will only get the movement bonus the next turn.
The XAW client can only display 25 citizens in the city dialog.
The autoattack generally doesn't work very well.
When planning a goto in the server, fx for an autosettler or an airplane, the server will use knowledge not available to the player.
The science dialog is not updated when you gain a tech. You need to close and open it.
In the gtk client, sometimes the area near the minimap contains garbage.
Automate routines like auto explore don't handle triremes very well.
LOG_DEBUG doesn't work with non-GCC compilers.
The color markup in the gtk message window is lost if the dialog is closed and then reopened.
When setting server variables, the server in many cases doesn't check the values as well as it could.
Bad things happen when you manipulate multiple global worklists simultaneously.
Even in singleplayer the AI will get a chance to move both before and after the human player each turn. This will sometimes give the impression that the AI moves twice.
The xaw client does not work well with the KDE window manager. Try using the gtk client or another window manager.
Version 1.13.0 will not work with version 1.12.0 or any previous versions. Note that the client will fail a bit more hard by just printing a message to stdout and exiting afterwards.
Mirrors (Score:4, Informative)
ftp.netc.pt/pub/freeciv/
ftp.freeciv.org, webaccess also provided http://www.freeciv.de
ftp://ftp.doc.cs.univ-paris8.fr/mirrors/ftp.freec
more Civ goodness (Score:3, Insightful)
Civilisation addicted me to the turn based "civ like" genre, something which I am thankful for... except when I missed a uni exam coz I was playing Colonization 8 hours straight and forgot the time
To you "people" who complain that FreeCiv is "too old" and "out of date", close you damn mouths - you don't have pay for the game and you are certainly not forced to download and play it which means you have no right to criticize the hard work of the developers. If you want to criticize, make it constructive and useful instead of the usual "negative trolling flamebait" comments.
- HeXa
And how is saying... (Score:1)
Not really (Score:2)
For example:
- "This movie sucks" would, indeed, be non-constructive for the movie, but it could be constructive for the movie-going experience of the viewer who can go and watch a movie that "does not suck".
- "The acting in this movie sucks" would indicate that the suckness of the movie has its source in the acting. The movie would probably not suck if the actors were removed, therefore this is a constructive argument for the movie. By replacing the actors, the suckness of the movie is decreased.
That said, "FreeCiv's graphics suck" is clearly a constructive argument, if it is correct. By replacing the graphics altogether, the suckness would be removed more efficiently than by attempting to fix that which sucks too much to be fixed.
I say if it is correct because I am not aware of the current suckness level of FreeCiv's graphics. I know that at some point, they sucked majestically.
It was still my favorite Linux game, but the graphics sucked at life. Replacing them was such an obviously good idea that there seemed to exist many different efforts on doing precisely that.
Nice Linux game (Score:1, Interesting)
Obvious question, but... (Score:1)
A few options (Score:2)
You can use googles cache, for instance http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:MhRKUQN18GsC: www.freeciv.org/download.phtml+freebsd+site:www.fr eeciv.org&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 for the cached version of the downloads page - I think most or all of the links there are offsite and so still might be working. Also several ftp mirrors that might help: i v.org/
ftp.netc.pt/pub/freeciv/
http://www.freeciv.de
ftp://ftp.doc.cs.univ-paris8.fr/mirrors/ftp.freec
Just remember that slashdot likes to put random spaces in URLs (why? don't ask me) so you may have to play with the URLs a little after copying.
windows (Score:1)
Yes [was Re:windows] (Score:2, Informative)
You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:5, Interesting)
But the one thing that REALLY annoyed me about Civ 1/2 was the SHORT city lists for each nation. What did I do? I took the time to do a really long list of cities for my favorite nation (you guess which one it was) and submitted it. Now my 200-names list is PART of the game. I extended/made better some other nation's city lists, and now they're part of the game. Then I created a map of my favorite country in the world, and was incorporated, too.
I can proudly say that even though I have NEVER touched one line of Freeciv source code, I can call myself a developer of the game. And I love it.
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm... (Score:1)
Funny how it changes in this context...?
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
In the commercially released games I've worked on, the content designers are most definitely not considered developers. "Developer" is applied to a wide range of people, including the person who picks up the game idea, finances it, and puts the team together (equivalent of a producer in the movie biz), the people who hustle to raise capital, and the programmers. But I've never heard it applied to the artists or designers.
[That's not to say that "developer" is a prestige title: on many projects the designers are clearly the most important, driving force with the most clout]
Sumner
Re:Hmm... (Score:1)
IMO, they are all developers. They all work together to develop the game/application/nuclear-powered toaster. That's just me, though.
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he is a "developer". Who says that developing has something to do with code. You can also "develop" graphics, the same way as you "write" source code.
Especially IMHO the free software community should treat contributing artist with great respect, since very often this is a weak point in free games, as artists and programmers seldom meet naturally in a non commercial environment.
To underline the importance of the artistic elements in a game most gaming software industrie calculate development costs for a game with 50 / 50 for source code progamming, and the artistic resources like graphics, music, and so on.
Before you get the wrong intention, I'm a programmer myself not an artist, but I highly respect and appreciate them, and if they want it we should them call developers too. remember? 50/50 !
Re: (Score:2)
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:2)
Yes thats how we treat the word "developing" in a day to day use, but is it really true? Actually the artists all together also "develop" the look and feel of a game.
Why do we call it "developing" after all, and not "making", because coding has an evolutionary aspect. You write some code, look how it runs, you improve code, you add new code, run again, etc. thaty why you call it "developing". In contrast of writing a text, like this message, One could write source code without delepment if he wouldn't do a single error...
The same is with graphics, the artists design some graphics look how they the game looks like with some of the early code of the coders, and then they improve some graphics, replace some etc. Same with sound and all that.
I mean it may not fit the normal understanding of your definition of a "developer", but IMHO looking what the word actual means, artists are as well developers.
A web designer is also a "developer" of the page, if you don't design it of scratch, but let the page "develop". Make some content, look how people react on it, how bandwith is used, organize some feedback and then improve the page, that's also developing something.
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:2)
And even if they all wanted to be called like that. Would this hurt you or me to actually do so?
I mean maybe it's something similar like you say "black" or "afrikan american", or such, but never "nigger".
Developing equals coding
Not really, you develop a whole product, but the product consists more than of code. I mean our hardware devision in example also develops new devices, do they code a single line? A single? No, all they do is drawing circuits and design plans all the time...
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:2)
Why are you sorry?
And who says the a developer is only someone who writes code? A developer is someone who "develops" something not more not less. See my other post for some explanation of my thoughts.
After all a free software project consist of so much more than the source code, and a lot of stuff has to do with "developing" something in the sense of evolutionary improvement.
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:2)
No they aren't. You use them as synonyms maybe, but actually they just aren't. Try to look a little beyond you're day-to-day thinking.
A computing game is created by a "team". Teamwork is essential. and the whole team _develops_ the game, no matter how the tasks of each particant may look like.
A programmer is also a contributer you can't differentiate on that. I'm _contributing_ code.If you want to differentiate one is a programmer or coder, and the other are artists, beta testers and all that. But they all contribute to the project, and they all develop on the whole end-product.
Re:You can ALL participate in Freeciv development (Score:3, Insightful)
And proudly so. If we gave half as much kudos to content providers as we do to coders, we'd have much more enjoyable o/s games. At a conservative estimate, a modern commercial game has three times as many content providers (sound, text/voice, models, textures, CGI, design, scripting) as developers, plus a whackload of QA, testing, localisation, and parasites. Er, management, I mean. Open source tends to make do with four coders and one guy with a copy of GIMP.
Short summary of changes (Score:4, Informative)
NEW FEATURES
- You can now automate workers and specialists in cities
- We have sound support and ship a new, improved insometric tileset
- A new and much improved city dialog in the GTK client
- Windows and GTK 2.0 versions of the client
- Lots of other changes, see the NEWS file for more
RULE CHANGES
- Leftover research bulbs will carry over to next advance
- Trade routes are more effective
- You can build city walls even though you have Great Wall wonder
- Unit food cost under Communism has been reduced to 1
- If you lose your palace, you get a new for free in random city
- Units attacking ships in cities double their firepower, while defenders get only 1 firepower.
- Helicopters defending against air units get 50% penalty, and have their firepower reduced to 1 against fighter units.
- Stealth fighters and bombers are partially invisible like subs, and stealth bombers have increased attack strength from 14 to 18
A REQUEST
We are in great need of more sound effects and better graphics. If you have some talent in either direction, please considering giving us a hand.
Re:Short summary of changes (Score:3, Interesting)
I am very surprised by this decision, since you conducted a poll [freeciv.org] specifically asking the community which tileset should the new version carry by default, and the community clearly answered Trident, while Isotrident came second with a significant margin.
I happen to know that many Freeciv developers are annoyed by the Isometric view. So what is the deal with this apparent attachment to the iso-view by some of the (more influential) freeciv developers?
freeciv vs call to power (Score:1)
Re:freeciv vs call to power (Score:1)
Fast Mirror (Score:1)
since freeciv.org is
http://shellweb.net/~filgy/freeciv/
nifty ai widget for freeciv (Score:1)
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~bmount/freeciv/
Pretty cool project.
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
and its not like there isn't plenty of nice looking games/ports for linux already.
and civII is like, what? 5$ to buy? find some old dos disks and play the original.
seems like an awful waste of man hours, but again, maybe i am wrong. why is this important?
Re:huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason freeciv is important is because it is one of the better games out there for Linux (and unfortunately there are so few). Besides, with source code available, you can hack on it and not only make it better, but tailor it to what you want Civilization to be like; no more having to depend on Microprose to release a new addon pack with cool features.
Re:huh? (Score:1)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mmm...so you're assuming that everybody has a Windows machine?
seems like an awful waste of man hours
For a long time my wife and I had an old intel box that we kept around for the sole purpose of playing the original Civ. Now that's a waste of man-hours: maintaining that machine only for that purpose.
why is this important? i really want to know. civII came out in 1997 or so, right?
It came out in 1997, and what's your point? Do you think that before 1997, all was void? Civ was a great game. IMHO, the later versions of Civ weren't even as much fun to play. Y' know, chess was invented hundreds of years ago, but people haven't stopped playing it.
A couple of lessons from the open-source movement:
Nothing -- huh? (Score:2)
And bcrowell spoketh:
I thought you said you played the original Civ a lot, so you of all people should know: In the beginning, the world was without form, and void...
-"Zow"
Re:huh? (Score:1)
Well, everyone can download Wine (if it's not included in their Linux distro)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
That said, what is the point of FreeCiv? To prove that a bunch of guys can, in their spare time, hack together an improved port of a game written some six years ago by another group of guys who happened to get paid for their work? Wowee. They've done a good job, but what for? The gameplay in Civ2 was good, as were the graphics. If you want good network play in a Civ-style game I heartily recommend Space Empires IV, which I think may get ported to Linux sometime (don't quote me, I read it somewhere).
Impress me. Create something new and original, something to hang one's hat on. No-one outside of Slashdot will be impressed by this. Many inside Slashdot are not. We need innovative games, innovative design. Not ports. Give people a reason to switch.
~Chazzf
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
So by new and different, you mean a completely new concept? Something just as addictive as Civ, but decidedly not Civ ?? As a previous poster has said, Chess has been around for quite some time and people still enjoy playing it. They also enjoy playing countless variations of Chess [chessvariants.com], with freakishly modified rules and boards and everything else. But you know what? To develop those variations there had to be an original version of Chess to build from.
I'm willing to bet that, given a few years' time, you'll see some completely new and different ways of playing Civ, thanks to FreeCiv being developed as an open project. Cloning the original version is just the starting point for FreeCiv ... where we go from there is up to anyone who feels like coding.
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:1)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:1)
Because it's a cool game that we all spend entirely too many
hours playing, and if there's a new improved version we may
as well spend those hours using that instead of the old version.
How was that not obvious?
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Yeah, and now that they've come this far, more man hours are going to be wasted PLAYING the game!
I dunno... how can you complain about a game being a waste of time? I mean duh!
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Ah, CivII...that game known everywhere for its superlative network play and freely available source code, not to mention it was one of the only games in 1997 that would run on Linux..
Daniel
(IHBT. IHL. HAND)
ITS MULTIPLAYER! (Score:2)
The network play is worth the man hours alone.
Of course it runs on FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
Of course. Both with and without GTK+. Sites slashdotted but the download page in googles cache [216.239.35.100] will give you the pointers...
Re:./configure (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I haven't been compiling from source in a long time, because I am focused on testing the Win32 binaries. So I may be misspelling some of the options for configure.
Well, the GTK client is the default, no need to specify it. For the Athena widgets, though, you will have to run configure with the option "--with-xaw" or "--with-xaw3d" (the 3D version of the athena).
I guss configure failed to find the GTK libraries on your Linux workstation. By that I don't mean that you don't have them, just that they were nor detected. Something specific to Mandrake 8.2, perhaps.
Re:./configure (Score:1)
I can't speak for Mandrake, but I'm running SuSE 7.3 and I had to symlink gtk-config, gnome-config and all those things from
Re:./configure (Score:2, Informative)
Else it will check if the XAW development packages are on the system, and if so it will build the XAW client.
If it can find neither it will say "configure: error: could not guess which client to compile".
To figure out what you need: use "./configure --enable-client=gtk" which will force it to try compiling teh gtk client. Then the configure script will stop the moment a requirement is not found, and it will be easier for you to figure out what you need to do to satisfy the requirements.
Re:So, any chance of a colonization port? (Score:2)
They have done most of the artwork but there is no code release, yet.