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Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

I've always liked OSS games, for the big reason that they're usually multi-platform, so you can play them on Linux and Mac OS too.

I also recommend:

Spring RTS (amazing RTS engine, clone of Total Annihilation) UrbanTerror (unfortunate name, reasonable clone of Counter Strike)

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If we're doing "best of OSS games" in this thread, we can't leave out Endless Sky (https://endless-sky.github.io/), a very competent Escape Velocity style game. I played it a number of years ago and quite enjoyed it. Been meaning to come back to it now that (presumably) the galaxy and storyline is a bit bigger.

If you're a fan of the old school Heroes of Might and Magic:

Battle for Wesnoth will be right up your alley

https://www.wesnoth.org/

BoW is hands down the best opensource game, but it's more like Panzer General / Fantasy General than HoMM.

Wesnoth's Paper-Scissors-Rock-Spock-Lizard combat is actually much better that in Panzer/Fantasy General games.

My bad, its been years since I last dipped into BfW and many more years since I played a HoMM game.

Don't forget:

* OpenRA; Red Alert & Command&Conquer clone https://www.openra.net/ (a personal favorite of mine, first RTS I played)

* Warzone2100 https://wz2100.net

If we're giving shout-outs I would like to give one to etlegacy* - the assets needed from Wolf:ET are not open but the engine/game/mod etc all are.

Very important project for me as I've been playing W:ET since 2005!

* https://github.com/etlegacy/etlegacy

W:ET is the game I've played the most in my life! Such a good FPS!

Same here! At some point there were rumors that Splash Damage was going to announce a remaster at E3 but it didn't happen due to Covid :(

So many good memories. Excellent game.

Adding to the list the only games I have played in 10 years:

- xonotic (Nexuiz/Quake3-like)

- hedgewars (Worms clone; written in Haskell, C++, Pascal, Lua)

- tome4 (isometric Roguelike)

Another shout out goes to maxr: https://www.maxr.org/ It's an open source clone of M.A.X. - Mechanized Assault and Exploration. An imho excellent turn based strategy game that has aged very well. It's pretty much multiplayer only though.

Holy crap, I haven't heard that name for a long long time. I played the heck out of M.A.X. back in the day. I'll check maxr out!

Note that Urban Terror is not open source.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (C:DDA) yet! Highly recommend!

I hadn't heard of Spring RTS, but my friends and I played Total Annihilation as kids and have recently started playing Zero-K, which is apparently a fork of Spring. Can recommend! Free on Steam, actively updated.

Since we're listing well-made OSS games, I'm going to add Empty Epsilon to the list. It's a multiplayer spaceship bridge simulator. Like in Star Trek, you have a captain, a helmsman, a weapons engineer, and so on. Great fun for LAN parties especially.

https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/

Are you me? We used to play Spring (Balanced Annihilation) and UrbanTerror for years while the rest of the world advanced around us.

I really don't get it, despite having written my first game over 20 years ago. How can a large company publish a game for multiple systems, but fail to support cross platform play? I was really disappointed a couple times.

A couple of pitfalls:

- Using unsized C types (long in particular) that are sized differently between Windows and macOS/Linux. Combine that with cast-to-structs for (de)serialization and suddenly different platforms are incompatible.

- Different float rounding modes (possibly changed by some external code) that will lead to desynchronization.

Nothing that can't be fixed but considering that non-Windows PC platforms tend to be an afterthought its not hard to imagine that things like cross play are often cut.

Another thing that can happen is that the different platforms don't all have the same version. This is usually only a problem with external porting companies that don't get the code until it is finished for the main platform, but could also happen for in-hosue ports when issues crop up that only affect secondary platforms and the release is not held back for the main platform as well.

Oh my, thanks, that makes sense. But damn, that almost sounds like a problem solvable with a regular expression :/ Well, at least before you released the game and nobody will protest about save game compatibility yet.

Two possible reasons: one is that console platform owners don't like that idea and they have torpedoes it in the past. The second one is that gameplay and control schemes may be radically different across platforms. Controller input on consoles vs. Keyboard and mouse on PC does lead to platform specific differences in some games ("auto aim" in shooters, for example). Balancing that so that only a minimum number of players feel cheated is hard.

Ah no. I'm thinking about games on Steam that I couldn't play between Windows and MacOS.

I can also highly recommend SpringRTS. Balanced Annihilation is fantastic. I've played it casually for years .

I can recommend nethack.

recommendations: Veloren (voxel based Dwarf Fortress inspired), minetest (extensible MineCraft engine), Mindustry (Factorio-like factory builder)

Don't sleep on Space Station 13.

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