On Stratagus and Open Source Strategy Games 15
Thanks to LinuxDevCenter.com for its profile of open-source strategy game engine Stratagus, interviewing the creators of the multi-platform engine formerly known as Freecraft, before the makers "received a cease and desist order" from Blizzard over name/design similarities. The author explains: "There are no essential technical differences between Stratagus and FreeCraft - Stratagus continues where FreeCraft left off. The goal of making a customizable RTS engine remains the same, although the designers now de-emphasize compatibility with WarCraft 2." The piece also discusses future plans: "The big new technology under development for future versions of Stratagus is a meta-server which will enable the engine to connect Internet players to play together. 'We intend to add a team play mode where you can share resources and technologies with your allies. [This] will allow for a much better community with features such as online chat and user statistics,' says [lead programmer] Russell."
No more emphasis on WC2? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No more emphasis on WC2? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No more emphasis on WC2? (Score:2)
When they say "compatible", I think they meant in a User Interfacelook/name sort of way. It probably appeared they were designing a non-Blizzard WarCraft.
--LordPixie
Re:No more emphasis on WC2? (Score:3, Informative)
You could also load Warcraft 2 data and play it with the Freecraft engine.
It only worked with the original WC2 and not the Battle.Net edition (which I have, grr).
huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it didn't resemble WarCraft?
I thought freecraft was basically a open source warcraft,
Re:huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly .. (Score:1)
Someone wanted to play StarCraft with Stratagus; Stratagus can be used for any strategy game, but for StarCraft this would require configuring stratagus by scripting and probably also coding new features into stratagus. And graphics.
Personally, I looked at stratagus' scripting and it just scared me stiff
Starting a game based off this engine (Score:3, Interesting)
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~tsiripur
A brief description of the game: its going to be called University, and as the name suggests, you'll be responsible for the functioning of a university. You start off with a building with some administrative staff and some academic staff. You also have some funds to build a building or 2 to start with.
It sounds like a sim, but it isnt. It has a crazy side to it - as in you fight with other universities. Use your Computer Science students to hack and disable competing university's network. Or have sports matches - with your jocks competing against theirs.
Its very disorganised right now, but I will try to get some order into these ideas while making the page. Any help / suggestions will be appreciated.
Re:Starting a game based off this engine (Score:3, Informative)
my first suggestion would be to setup the project page on a wiki, may I suggest Kwiki [kwiki.org]?
I have found that wikis make putting your ideas down easier, and allowing group collaboration to work seemlessly. They especially work well as you are just working out details and ideas.
Re:Starting a game based off this engine (Score:1)
Battle for Wesnoth (Score:5, Interesting)
Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org]
They pretty much hit the mark on this one in terms of gameplay. It is definatly worth the download.
Re:Battle for Wesnoth (Score:2)
I just tried it out. You're right, it is worth the download. They even have rpms.
-jim
Re:Battle for Wesnoth (Score:2, Interesting)
Wesnoth is awesome. If you ever played Panzer General or Fantasy General, you'll *love* this game. Age of Wonders fans won't feel too out of place, either. The game's only about a year old, but its stable as hell (have yet to see a crash in over 2 months of using it), cross platform (Linux, Windows, OSX, *BeOS*), and very challenging.
Bill
oss and games (Score:3, Interesting)
This is very cool to have an rts engine available to anyone who wants to add to it. It seems odd that there aren't more high quality, successful open source games (it seems like every computer nerd who ever lived dreams of someday writing a computer game and/or graphics engine). Maybe everyone tries to start from scratch and discovers its too much work.
Stratagus looks like it could be a cool platform for testing computer AI. Pitting one AI player against another could be more fun than playing the game manually, from the standpoint of the developers. Maybe they should have a contest to define the best AI player at some point, like this year's ICFP contest [upenn.edu].
-jim
Why not create a generic metaserver ? (Score:1)