What is your favorite fully open source, open content game?
Edit: please vote on the comments people post too. Up if you like, down if you dislike, don't vote if you haven't played it or are neutral on it.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20011128105604/http://cns-web.bu...
[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ninjin/fdd615d6e32e1316014dece892128697...
Anyone looking to get started with hexagonal grids should check out [1] from Red Blob Games. Comprehensive tutorial on hex grids explaining coordinates, fields of vision, pathfinding and more.
A very dangerous game to play though, you'll boot it up in the morning for a way to kill an hour and... it'll suddenly be midnight.
There was a similar game, written in java (server and client I believe), called Europa. Had a grid of X's, simple UI (tell units where to go) and the "water pressure" would slow from the cities that make armies to wherever you pointed them. Even included things like using 3 armies to make 1 paratrooper that could jump a square or two.
The author even sent me a copy, not sure I still have it though.
The closed source javascript game https://generals.io is a good simplification of XBattle, I've seen one OSS server reimplementation of it.
If you can find the code for Europa I'm interested, I think it was released as OSS but I couldn't find it when looking around.
To download: https://web.archive.org/web/20050925030417/http://www.cgl.uw...
I've played a bit of Simutrans, where each prospective passenger has an origin and a destination, and if you can take them there, they use your services, otherwise they don't.
Now I'm sure the simulation isn't perfect but it seems to make enough sense for game logic.
you can go way complex with orders, like only depart when 50% full or 100% full, to optimize your lines.
I think Railroad tycoon 3 had a good system. Cargo flowed towards a destination, even if there weren't methods to transport goods. Cargo would prefer to take the easiest path though, so if you built a rail line between a source and destination, the cargo would prefer the line.
Why does it need to make any more sense than that to be enjoyable?
[1] https://giphy.com/gifs/unity-game-dev-xbattle-stdR5qYdqrgNll...
Dungeon Crawl https://crawl.develz.org/
OpenRA https://www.openra.net/
Battle for Wesnoth http://www.wesnoth.org/
FreeCiv http://freeciv.org/
Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/
You see a Jelly in the second floor? You die. You see a Goblin? You die.
You don't get "experience points" for killing anything, and there's no "leveling up" (though drinking potions of life increases your max HP). You can see your HP (and your nutrition) as liabilities but they're also resources -- if you go several dungeon levels without losing any HP, maybe you're being too picky about your fights. If you end up popping a bunch of life potions in the first few levels, maybe you're not being picky enough.
Stealth is a totally valid tactic (press ']' to turn on a view of the stealth radius, notice that spending a turn waiting reduces your stealth radius to 1/2 normal, and also I like to press '\' to turn off the dynamic light effects to make it easier to see my stealth radius). You can get through the game in leather armor (especially if its a special one that lets you reflect incoming spells or that lets you blithely breathe otherwise-harmful atmospheric effects).
"Mobility" builds that let you be super choosy about your engagements are also workable (lots of obstruction, blinking, and tunneling).
Tank builds where you've got enchanted plate and broadsword and you're smashing everything also work, but really only to a point. You won't win going head-to-head with dragons.
"Mage" builds with a couple enchanted damage staves and a ring of wisdom are fun, but I scarcely ever find the items I need to make it work.
Oddly enough, the majority of my deaths are to eels :\
I love love love Brogue. Read the code too, the author is great about doing things like building gradient descent maps for the dungeon level and only invalidating them when the dungeon configuration changes, that kind of thing.
This is a favorite. And just to add, after I got a bit tired of roguelikes I tried out Flare and got hooked on the old version in my distro's repos. It's an isometric 3D action RPG.
Later I found it is still under active development and really fun, with a greatly improved base campaign and community mods available as well.
Be sure to get the AppImage rather than whatever might be in older repos if you're running Linux.
Recent presentation by Justin, the lead developer: https://flarerpg.org/2022/02/21/i-love-free-software-day-202...
I wanted a game like wordle, which I can play in like 5 to 10 minutes, but I don't really like word-puzzles. But everything else about wordle is great: no barriers, easy to pick up, replayable. So I made rrpg and intend to add content to it.
I haven't really thought about licensing, but I guess I will open-source it, if people like it. Right now it's just js in the browser, so anyone could copy it. Written with nx in typescript.
I’ll return later to finish my run, but wanted to point out the opening quote character is wrong (it’s the same as the closing quote): it shows up as ”some dialog” instead of “some dialog”. Also, I’m on a phone and occasionally one of the options is highlighted. At first I thought it might mean something, but on closer inspection it may be a selection bug.
Both are minor issues which do not detract from the experience, but they may also be quick fixes.
According to Wikipedia:
> Released to critical acclaim, Star Control II is widely viewed today as one of the greatest PC games ever made, and has appeared on numerous publications lists of the greatest video games of all time.
It was open sourced in 2002, and is available in most package repos (as “uqm”).
They even updated the Super-Melee mode to be playable over the Internet.
Does anyone know how to get sound working on WSL1 + VcXsrv?
Side note: I don’t think downvotes should be for comments you “don’t like” or even “disagree with”. Downvotes should be used to discourage people from posting bad content, but on HN we try to be a bit more objective about what “bad” is rather than “I don’t like it”.
> Edit: please vote on the comments people post too. Up if you like, down if you dislike, don't vote if you haven't played it or are neutral on it.
Fun anecdote: infon itself is a followup to my own teen programming project written in Quick Basic (see https://github.com/dividuum/infon/wiki/History) and all the Lua embedding and experience I gained from it ultimately ended up being used in a followup project (info-beamer) which is now at the core of my own company and my full-time job.
So write more games everyone!
that said, in a topic like this, can there be any bad comments? (other than someone throwing insults at a game or recommending a game that is not actually FOSS?)
so why not use downvotes for games that you played but didn't like?
let the most popular games rise to the top.
[1] https://xonotic.org/ [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shattered...
I see there's even a release of it that's not that old - I remember it from about 15 years ago and it still seems to be developed.
https://www.strlen.com/lobster/
2021 interview at sauerworld: https://www.sauerworld.org/celebrating-20-years-of-cube-an-i...
If you want to run latest without compiling yourself: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/-/wikis/Autobuilds
I'm terrible at making games but working on them brings back the joy I had when I first learned to program. The feedback loop between code and something interesting on the screen is quick and refreshing. Lately I even managed to make a basic VR game with my Quest2.
I've also found the unity editor to be pretty unstable on Linux so if you happen to have any tips there I'd be all ears
I was also looking for books, and the Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects Book[2] looks promising, and I just got a used copy (still being sent to me). Again since it's from 2020 there might be a couple things out of date, but it looks like it could be worth it.
I use Unity in Windows so I can't help on the Linux front.
Good luck! You can ping me if you get stuck somewhere, I might have had the same issue and might be able to help you get unstuck.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYtahQjmWQ
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Unity-2020-Virtual-Reality-Projects/d...
I've been trying write a game from scratch (emphasis on "scratch" considering the scale of the itch) as a side project, but that quickly evolved into an excercise in overcoming analysis paralysis.
I'm currently stuck on "can I count on the HTML Canvas to optimise cases where a tile is out of view or should I make a fancy system to calculate that now?"
I get an average of 2h a week to do this, so I need to be really careful not to go into one of the many rabbit holes there.
In any case I recommend Entity Component System as an architecture for games. You can write 20 lines of code at a time and still make demonstrable progress.
I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but since I did wrote a canvas game from scratch, I can tell you that you cannot count on the canvas to optimize anything (and likely not what you want in this case)
Every browser does it a bit different and it will depend on the hardware and OS what optimisation features are avaiable.
On average the canvas is quite performant, though.
Performant enough, that in my case, I draw everything on a big map - zoom in and then move the map around, when the player moves.
On a gaming PC, maps can be quite large - but on an average mobile not so much.
But I autogenerate the levels which means I can dynamically adjust size, so this works for my game.
But in general yes, you want a small canvas, the size of the screen - and then only draw what is needed.
EaselJS may help with that. It is basically flash on the canvas, but does exactly this. You put all your graphic objects on the stage - and easelJS will figure out which one of those needs to be drawn at the current frame. I initially used it, but not anymore as it was not optimized for my use case, making LOTS of new draw calls on the map every tick. But for a classic game with limited entities, it is very performant.
Bad wording on my part. I noticed somewhat of a performance difference when drawing an image at coordinates that are outside of the canvas boundaries and was wondering if the scale of this is significant.
Do you have the source of your game published anywhere?
You mean you have a canvas of 1000 px size and make a drawImage at x> 1000?
Well in that case the image does not get drawn at all, so most browsers should indeed be more performant by ignoring this call. But there might still be a overhead of loading the image, so I would check the boundaries and not make that call, if it is not necessary.
(The canvas itself is just a large array of numbers after all. And if you do not manipulate that array when your new values are outside of that boundary, nothing happens. And a image is usually just a pointer to another large array/blob, so if the browser is smart, it does not load that array, when it finds out it does not have to)
"Do you have the source of your game published anywhere?"
Unfortunately not yet, but soon I will release. I hope.
By the way I wonder if it is reasonable to expand the "requirement" to - wasming is ok if you are writing the game from scratch in say rust instead of just compiling old binaries to wasm?
Another, way more generalist source for tilings :
I first knew many of them by the Nikoli/Japanese names, under which they were released on Nintendo portable platforms.
KenKen -> Keen
Hitori -> Singles
Slitherlink -> Loopy
Sudoku -> Solo
Akari -> Light Up
Relatedly, there's a nice book with a mildly embarrasing title called "Puzzle Ninja: Pit Your Wits Against the Japanese Puzzle Masters" that works as a nice intro to many of these games, and has interviews with creators. Though I find discovering the strategies for new games to be part of the fun, so it is a bit spoilerish that it walks you through some of the basics, but ideal for someone new to the whole area.
But I've never been a fast RTS player, I'm more of a casual civ turn-based player, so is BAR playable for me? Does it cater to the South Korean Zerg rush pros or the base builders?
I don't know if more recent RTS games improved in that, but Springs UI was way ahead of other RTSs at the time.
Without going into detail, BA had very tense gameplay without getting too bogged down by micro managing units.
It had fog of war, 3D terrain and viewer, many kinds of units, and a nice UI for taking arbitrary groups of units and giving them 1 or more commands. Even some nice automation (at later levels) to avoid the tedium of telling a unit to repair itself, then putting it back in formation.
One somewhat unique feature is that in campaign mode (playing a computer, not a human) you can control time, so you never get overwhelmed with trying to control your units, but of course as your skills get better you can speed up time to not be bored.
If controlling tanks, infantry, and (at the later levels), planes/VTOLS sounds fun then give it a try. The 1st level of the campaign is a tutorial and you'll know pretty quick if you enjoy it.
Ah, sorry, just realized you named Warzone2100, well maybe someone else will find the suggestion useful.
BTW, it's easy to forget to include the cut scenes when building from source, which IMO do add to the game.
And even less unique in low budget / open source RTSes ?
Special mention to Achron with literal time travel as a game mechanic !
One annoying thing (even if it's an intentional part of the game), when a unit dies, it doesn't tell you which unit. Most importantly if you are trying to level up your units, it doesn't tell you if it was a unit that gains experience (like all fighting units), or doesn't like a truck or repair unit.
Took me 5 minutes to track down the line of code and add a print statement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark
I've been playing for a full on decade, the game was your typical third person shooter but around 2015 a mod came out that allowed fast completion of puzzle like maps, then it diverged and it now has two versions. Everyone mostly sticks to its ddnet counterpart. but the quake style, deathmatch/ctf/team is still fun at times. though nobody plays it.
Minetest is a block building game engine (like minecraft) built around the idea mods add all content. There are a bunch of games built for it, and last I checked a active modding community. https://www.minetest.net/
The other is AlephOne, a engine to play all the Marathon games (story FPS, pre-halo bungie made games) along with a bunch more community created ones. I've sunk a good bit of time into both the trilogy and the additional 6 big community made ones. https://alephone.lhowon.org/
Now that they are playing other games, I still find that I occasionally log into Minetest servers just to look around at all the amazing builds.
In one of them I found a working MS Paint emulator (a wall with the icons and canvas on it), as well as a very impressive and huge ancient Greek temple.
there are hundreds of add-ons enabling various features.
which minecraft features in particular are you thinking of?
myself i only play minetest on a public server without attacking mobs, so there is no hurry to build a base, and i can focus on building interesting stuff. i still have to get food, mine for materials and fix my tools so there is plenty to manage while building. and with other players on the server we can also build in collaboration.
my son likes to add mobs, so he is building and fighting mobs.
It has lots of mods and customization hooks, way more than Minecraft, and if that works for you that's great. But for a lot of people the experience just can't compare.
there is a minecraft mod in minetest: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
Basic things like the hand animation when breaking blocks were subtly worse. Monsters didn't have AI or pathfinding or animations. Etc.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is the one I enjoy daily, also enjoyed the predecessor. Play it every time I'm on the toilet. ;)
Konquest was a really fun old game that came with KDE back in the late 90s, early 2000s. I assume it was open source, I was just a kid playing it.
Nethack of course, enjoyed many hours in that dungeon.
Doom counts right? I played a lot of Doom in the 90s and it's open source now. Quake too I believe.
Edit: How the hell could I forget Cataclysm: Dark days ahead.
This is a hard list to make, partly because I love open source and there are so few titles I've enjoyed on a regular basis.
Quake III Arena had Open Arena, which was an open source clone. Did anybody ever do anything similar with the original Quake engine?
Kittens: https://bitbucket.org/bloodrizer/kitten-game/src/master/
I'm not sure how different it is to the git version but there are always recent updates.
The game itself is fun, but the best stuff I've seen is it being reused, modified, and adapted for LARPs and crowdplay.
Out of Orbit is a great and ongoing example, a Finnish escape room-ish experience that also has a Twitch game putting stream chat in the role of the ship's AI: https://outoforbit.fi/ and https://www.twitch.tv/outoforbitgame/about
Empty Epsilon powers the game part, with integrations using its DMX interface and HTTP API to provide hardware interfaces and things like Twitch chat commands modifying the game state.
Even though I didn't manage to code a single line of Lisp for the game's internal code or actually get a single level done, the fact that it was theoretically possible was amazing to me.
Also WASD for movement + mouse for shooting in a 2D game was a novel mechanic for me and I still like 2D two-stick shooters quite a bit.
A car race simulator in mildly offroad tracks (think WRC). I spent a decent amount of time glued to the screen with it; the game is especially stunning with regards to its visuals, a rare quality in the world of open-source games.
Notes to the beginners: don't be afraid to dial down its quality settings if your machine is struggling, the defaults seem to require crazy beefy hardware; and yes, with some practice you will start to overcome the "ghost car", but you should ignore it in the beginning and just focus on staying in track, doing your best, having fun and watching the views :)
it was a bit tricky to get it to run on fedora. i used the generic binary from sourceforge since there is no fedora package.
it kept crashing with missing symbols in libraries. it took some searching before i realized that this was because the game included libraries to replace system libraries, but the games libraries were loaded through a system library and were to old and didn't have all of the symbols that the system library was referencing
once i removed the libraries from the game directory (StuntRally-2.6-linux64/lib/64/) that had an identically named library in the system directory (/lib64) and i replaced libSDL2-2.0.so.1 with a symlink to /lib64/libSDL2.so then the game started to work.
i just played through the tutorial and a few other tracks before it crashed again. i'll probably have to try to replace a few more libraries, maybe even all of those that have an equivalent standard fedora version. but so far this is looking good.
A rougelike where you can have your legs severed, pray to a god to have them regenerated and have them regenerated as bananas.
Edit: you can try it in the browser! https://attnam.github.io/ivan-050-wasm/
Would recommend.
"Massive scale 4X-RTS set in space. Control hundreds of planets, manipulate galactic politics, research numerous advanced technologies, and command thousands of units and hundreds of planets in your quest for galactic dominance."
available from steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/282590/Star_Ruler_2/
and from github (excluding the music): https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source
FreeDoom, Nexiuz, Xonotic, Warsow, Urban Terror, World of Padman, Tremulous, OpenArena are popular examples of wholly free games based on id's engines, though some of them may be more actively maintained than others.
Quake3e is my favorite, despite requiring a copy of the game.
And ultimately the original games go on sale for digital purchase for a few dollars all the time so they're not a huge expense to eventually get and then play all the free levels people create as they intended.
Edit: if you download it and install it, be aware that there's a script buried in 'misc/tools/rsync-updater' that updates to the latest autobuild. The last official release, 0.8.2, is really old.
I thought about including it as a suggestion, but the modding community doesn't seem to care about licensing. The code is all properly licensed (Apache/MIT), but FAFAICT none of the content mods come with a license file, which means it's all free as in beer, not free as in speech.
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The first has a very focused philosophy of removing all tedious and spoilery game mechanics, optimal strategies and no-brainers from the game. Some hate that, I love it. DCSS is the anti-Nethack. You can play online on your browser, with graphical tiles, spectators and even information bots for all your queries.
The second has an extremely passionate and vibrant community of contributors, and they're adding everything and the kitchen sink. Blink and a whole subsystem will have been merged into master. I reckon CDDA will be the first universe-scale quantum simulator, a couple years before the entire humanity will transfer its consciousness inside a Dwarf Fortress world.
Just try playing it as a Doppleganger Monk.
However I probably had the most hours into Armagetron Advanced[1], which is basically "2D-isometric Lightcycle-From-TRON Deathmatch: The Game" and allows for many interesting gametypes that you wouldn't necessarily expect, from CTF to Sumo, which is kinda but not exactly like king of the hill.
The best part of armagetron is the keybind system. If you bind, say, Z to "turn left" and . (period) to "turn right", then your right and left hands will turn you right and left, respectively. But if you also bind X and C to turn left, and m and comma to turn right, then you can press Z and X simultaneously to perform a quick 180-degree turn. You can also do funky stuff like press Z, X, C and M and Comma (that's 5 keypresses) to do a sort of outside-hairpin turn which makes for a devastating trap against anyone riding along your wall for speed.
I wasted so very many hours on tron. If anyone here played on the Swampland or Mud Puddle servers, they know how addictive it can be. A small but tight-knit community except for that one insufferable jerk who went under various handles but primarly "Xdude". Fuck you, Xdude.
Anyways, armagetron is an awesome game that's probably dead now, but is really fun for LAN parties.
Other mostly forgotten games that I'd like to spotlight here are XEvil (https://www.xevil.com/) and Heroes (http://heroes.sourceforge.net/) which ate up tons of my time in younger years.
Eventually someone reimplemented it faithfully! I love FOSS!
----
OpenMW is my current vice, but obviously content is not open source.
I remember having many good days with classmates in our computer high school class "studying" thanks to LieroX
Also see Webliero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980676
And there have been many other clones in the past like Gusanos.
Soldat is also similar, and has recently become open sourced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058312
And Teeworlds (always been open source) as well.
All super basic, but always ready to go when you've got a few minutes to kill.
SS13 is a wonderful game, but it's so old and its codebase is so messy that people have been trying to remake it for years. Attempts had mostly gone nowhere until all of a sudden SS14 took off with a few dozen OSS developers. Now they're making fantastic progress (see [1]) and have a game that isn't just playable, but enjoyable! (Not to mention being almost completely on-par with SS13 at this point, with several distinct maps and hundreds of items ported over.)
[0]: https://spacestation14.io [1]: https://spacestation14.io/post/22-05-25-progress-report-34/
Eventually the game gets super complex - stock markets, gangs, automations, combat systems, corporate espionage, etc. Its got a healthy open source community and discord as well
Open content is still hard; a lot of sound, music, and textures might be under a relatively free license, but often source material is lacking. I've given a talk about this at FOSDEM 2017[2].
[1]: https://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/games/
[2]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/ogd_gpl_asset...
If you are already experienced with them then "Counterfeit Monkey" takes it to the next level with a great twist based on anagram-like magic/technology for turning objects into other things by adding/removing letters from their name:
> Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.
> Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.
> Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.
> Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.
> Good luck getting off the island.
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl
https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey
If you're new to the genre then "Lost Pig" is a good place to start, though technically it's licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0) is not open source.
The first real-time graphical team game on the internet!
It requires both fast reflexes and strategy and there were international leagues as early as the 1990s. These days there aren't many players, however.
Office mate even hacked on netrek to enable a soccer like experience.
Team play, fast respawn, and the game mechanics lead to some epic games. Having more planets meant more armies, but the last planet stands where everyone the defenders respawn where they are needed made for some amazing come backs.
Saw a few players that were amazing with the star bases, allowing remote repair, using tractor beams and repulsors, and helping the team be more coordinated.
Fun stuff, on the surface kind of like xpilot, but much more strategy and team work.
But I do not play it anymore. I fear it would become too addictive again.
I don't know of any other games that do this, having a realtime multiplayer editing toolset. (if you do, tell me and I'll certainly play them too!) Maybe Halo's Forge mode, but that's a bit more limited, though still good fun.
It's incredible that there's some people still playing. I boot it up once a year, it's always like returning to a piece of my youth frozen in time :-)
Text mode, turn based dungeon crawlers aren't for everyone, but I love them: they are very tactical, but don't feel like a typical tactics game, have a fun fantasy based lore, and are just a blast. And most importantly, you can pause and quit at any given moment, and continue just as easily.
I only discovered this game a few months ago and only put of a couple of hours into the game so far. For me it takes the best bits of both FE2 and FFE, modernises the UI, improves on the graphics (some of the developers were GL/D3D mod developers of Elite - Frontier). It manages to keep the essential ingredients that made FE2 good and picking out the few extra nice bits from FFE.
[1]: https://veloren.net/
As an aside, does anyone have any sort of insight into how these open source games come about? Is it the force of one individual mostly or is there a place to find likeminded gamedevs for a project?
There are some places to discuss libre/open games:
https://libregamewiki.org/ https://libregames.gitlab.io/ https://freegamedev.net/
There is also Game jams; events where you have to make a game alone or as a team in a limited time. A few successful commercial games come from these jams. The biggest jams organize meetup places all around the world, usually at colleges or cybercafés. (i don't know how it is now with the covid thing).
Itch.io maintains a calendar with all jams: https://itch.io/jams
edit:
notch minecraft post on tigsource: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0
It’s a theme hospital clone, similar to open ttd. I played theme hospital as a child and now contribute to this project. It’s nice to exceed my past ability and see the game grow through my efforts.
You might be interested by another open-source RTS : Zero-K/Spring, where moderators take care to nurture a good experience for everyone, for instance :
Official open source reimplementation of the rhythm game osu!classic that is planned to replace it. It's mostly equivalent except in that you can't submit competitive scores online.
Osu probably has one of the biggest communities surrounding an open game, with some ~15 million active players around the world.
Gameplay revolves around playing community-generated "beatmaps" in one of 4 rhythm-based modes, the most popular of which involves clicking circles.
Amongst them one my favorites: Alien vs. Predator (Sierra Game Studio). Proprietary game content though, unsure about the code licence.
Edit: typos fixed
[1]: https://te4.org/
Now I'm going to lose another few days to it, everytime I have to ween myself off it, then I get sucked into it all over again for some crazy adventure.
Pity it's not GPL.
By comparison, when I tried to play NetHack I managed to get stuck in a pit due to heavy armour, a more satisfactory death.
Huh, if it was designed with a PlayStation controller in mind it might actually control nicely on a Steam Deack. And it has Linux support!
A more recent one is Remnants of the Precursors, a rather cool remake of Master of Orion 1. Haven't played it as much, though.
If we limit the restrictions to just open source, maybe Quake? And Civilization IV is not fully open source, but all the game code is.
And you can download ALL of Morrowind at archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/morrowind_202103
And if you look at who uploaded it: Bethesda did. You can play this 100% legally from the authors.
So yeah, I think it qualifies.
(though i haven't checked it for years so i don't know how it is nowadays)
Although I can see why you'd be disappointed at single-player not getting much attention, I think the devs made the right move by focusing mostly on multiplayer which had the largest player base by far. Multiplayer was really my thing for the most part. I just wish it didn't take them something like 9 years to finally ship an update to the game.
Space Station 13 (and the remake, SS14) is an incredibly unique and feature rich multiplayer role playing game that takes place on a rickety space station in a wacky retro-futuristic setting. It's hard to recommend this game as the learning curve is more like a cliff, but it is far and away the best game that exists for creating unique (and often very funny) stories in. It has a long and complicated open source history that has fragmented it into several unique popular forks, but the most popular one that's fully open source nowadays is tgstation. https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation
On that topic I've been playing an SS13-inspired browser based game lately. It's fully open source and takes inspiration from Melvor Idle, but is a much shorter and nicely compacted experience. https://github.com/TBartl/space-station-13-idle https://spacestationidle.com/
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead is the kind of community project that could never be the product of a traditional game company, the game is far too vast, intricate and inventive in every little corner of itself.
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA
I wish the developer of ChronoDivide would open source their code. I read it was implemented in TypeScript.
The mana world- a 16 bit inspired MMO rpg http://www.themanaworld.org
And EDOPro, a YGOPro fork (You-Gi-Oh client) with improvements
Funny how that project directly lead to Tiled
Of course, not everyone necessarily agrees with that definition, but one would typically use the term "source-available" for code that is publicly available with restrictions.
It also made me realize there should be an community driven overview / list of these things (genre, inspiration, description, screenshots, version etc). Does this exist?
But something SimCity like is also great!
The hardest part about setting that up is likely the servers.
https://github.com/sim-museum/esports-for-engineers
the source code is here: https://github.com/gondur/BOB_Src
There are tons of clones and forks: https://github.com/JoergStrebel/xgalaga-sdl
Teeworlds, Fast-paced 2D shooter that has had an undying community for ages. https://teeworlds.com/
Stepmania, DDR-like rhythm game. You know the drill. Also consider the Etterna fork if you're a keyboard fanatic. https://www.stepmania.com/
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Android), a very good roguelike to fill the void when you only have a phone nearby. http://shatteredpixel.com/
NXengine (or nxengine-evo), an open source engine that can be used to play cave story. Apart from some minor bugs a really good way to experience the game. https://nxengine.sourceforge.io/ https://github.com/nxengine/nxengine-evo
All of these are games I've put countless of hours into. There's a bunch of other good games, SuperTux, Pingus, Tux Racer, Neverball/neverputt, Armagetron Advanced, Minetest, 0ad, some of the KDE games, and more that I've played and liked but haven't lost nearly as much time with.
I actually forked and added a JS audio engine to play sound effects, ambience, etc. and it made it back into the official browser version of the game at http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com
SuperTuxKart is truly cross-platform and even has an online mode.
[0] https://www.supertux.org/ [1] https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page
> Teeworlds is a free online multiplayer game, available for all major operating systems. Battle with up to 16 players in a variety of game modes, including Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag. You can even design your own maps!
However I stopped playing openarena because the only well-cared server was still full of people that would cheat in various ways, and that would make me extremely angry and would ruin the whole game experience. Also kinda addictive of a game, it is.
I don't programming game where you do assembly-like coding these days. Perhaps the closest one is Zachtronic' TIS-100
[1]: https://shapez.io/
It hits the sweet spot between simplicity and depth for me, like Advance Wars.
https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/
Video demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdPfI5B9Cjc
Its just so silly - editor (vi/emacs) wars manifest in a Defender-like arcade game - but extremely fun, and the source code is fun to read also.
Plus, its been my go-to for a "quick code base to port", its really fun to port.
This is not a 3D technical achievement nor is it highly replayable, but the first playthrough is marvelous for any fan of scifi or cyberpunk.
Hard AI, trying to grow and avoid discovery. It plays very well.
In fact, I say that, but I haven't played it in 10 years and I see there was a 1.0 release in 2020, so I'm going to go check that out right now.
I am mostly playing PokerTH (https://www.pokerth.net/) now.
Unknown Horizons https://unknown-horizons.org/
There is also ZZT and Free Hero Mesh, but those are engines with different licenses for different game worlds. A few ZZT games which are free cultural works. But for both engines, games can be made with any licensing.
i only played it briefly, but i believe it is the only FOSS MMORPG out there.
if there are others, i'd like to know
with the whole engine and other code accessible as FOSS we can fix bugs and improve the game. and we can run our own servers and create our own stories. only the lack of sounds is a pity. that would be some work to recreate. i don't know if there are efforts underway
https://www.siedler25.org/index.php?com=dynamic&mod=1&lang=e...
Play it here: https://attnam.github.io/ivan-050-wasm/
Opensource, active hosted solution and great.
(It's a good game.)
I'll also take street craps as a backup.
It's similar to geometry wars. It has lots of game modes, great controls, and great music.
Minetest (years ago, haven't kept up with it in a long time)
Widelands
gmult