Unknown Horizons: An open-source 2D realtime strategy game | Hacker News Reader

Unknown Horizons: An open-source 2D realtime strategy game

unknown-horizons.org

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Growing up, we always had Macs, so when my grandma got an old Windows box from a surplus auction, I went to OfficeDepot and bought Anno 1602, a game no one I knew had ever heard of, for $9.

Actually it was a pretty awesome game, despite having different controls from every other RTS; the focus was more on trade than military which was pretty cool. They ended up making a few higher budget sequels as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_(series)

Unknown Horizons is basically a clone of the original Anno 1602, and I've been sort of following the development for 6 or 7 years, always thinking "that would be the perfect open source project for me to contribute to" but sadly I haven't really spent much time playing it and haven't written any code for it.

Just wanted to say that I loved that game as well. It's one of those games that I like for some inexplicable reason, and yet dislike the much slicker sequels.

I've never managed to get into the Anno series, but in Germany all the Anno games were huge. Like "Call of Duty"-huge, not in sales numbers, of course, but in mindshare.

Pretty fascinating how games don't necessarily cross cultural borders. "Patrician" was also huge, and there were lots and lots of similar games. Also football managers like the "Bundesliga Manager" series.

Actually, Anno 1602 sold 2 million units, which is very much for a PC-game from the 90s and on CoD-level, adjusting for market size.

But in general you're right of course. The other parts of the series sold less, and there are a bunch of other great german games that weren't even registered on the international market. Not sure that this is still a problem though, with steam and internet distribution in general those culture specific games maybe disappear.

Those football managers and most of those German economy simulations have already disappeared, precisely because the German-speaking market (D, A, CH) is considered to be too small nowadays.

They just have been replaced by games like "Farming Simulator".

This reminds me of my elem school days (which was like 2003) when I bought Anno 1503 whilst looking for any game that looked like Age of Empires on its cover.

Initially, I regretted my purchase as a kid. By the time I got the hang of the game I was in high school, and now I look back and say "Wow, I got into this series before it got any sort of following"

>> looking for any game that looked like Age of Empires on its cover.

Story of my life!

1602 AD was one of the real treasures of the bargain bin. I'm pretty sure I picked up my copy way back in the Walmart $5-$10 jewel-case section.

I love Unknown Horizons as one of the rare desktop games that's both open-source and built with Python.

On revisiting my past contributions to it some years ago, realized it could use more publicity. Kudos to the team for maintaining it all these years.

Direct github link: https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons

Code repo https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons/

Also checkout 0 A.D. - https://play0ad.com/

I play this game every day.

They are looking for translators for the next release:

http://www.unknown-horizons.org/devblog/115/114/Unknown-Hori...

Direct link: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/

This is great. As a kid learning programming (hell, as an adult programmer) I wish I would have had access to open source games! Kudos to the team.

Keep an eye on GitHub's Game Off then! [0]

[0] https://github.com/showcases/game-off-winners

Anyone else having graphic bugs in the sprites on the Mac? Makes it sadly unplayable as text/icons are often unreadable.

Could you open a new issue here (with a screenshot if possible)? https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons/issues

A while ago I got access to a mac, so we should be able to test things better now. Contributers come and go, I'm not even sure we have someone for macOS packages right now.

I'm not really using macOS, but I just tried the last release, and I think we might be having the same problems.

I'll try to test the current git version, since the last release was in 2014.

Remind me of FreeCol [1]

[1] http://www.freecol.org/

It's more like Anno than Civ

Reminds me on the face of Banished

Do I have to learn python to contribute?

You could contribute artwork or translations.

They are using weblate for translations https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/

Supporting only one language is a very big limiting factor imho.

On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install unknown-horizons

Is there any MMO or multiplayer elements in this game?

Yes, you can play the game together with others.

We do have reports of games getting out of sync though. The multiplayer code definitely needs more love, but there is only so much time. For the next release, we will evaluate the current state of multiplayer and decide if we can fix the issues. Otherwise it's probable that multiplayer will be a focus in the next year.

(I've been contributing to the project from time to time in 2012/2013 and getting more active recently, hence me writing "we".)

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