FreeCiv now playable as HTML5 game, including on mobile devices | Hacker News Reader

FreeCiv now playable as HTML5 game, including on mobile devices

play.freeciv.org

151 pointsdanso26 comments

Hi! I'm one of the developers of the Freeciv web client. Feel free to ask me any anything about the game! Bugreports, feedback, suggestions etc. welcome!

This is fantastic. I remember playing freeciv way back in 1998 (it was the best linux game at the time). This looks like it might solve my problem of finding interested people to play with.

For me, it's still one of best linux game, as is nethack. Some games just never die given their very high replaying rate.

I remember playing a HTML5 version of Freeciv years ago, yet this is being announced now. I bet there's an interesting story behind the amount of work it took to get it from a nice demo to something production-ready. Care to share?

Getting from the demo stage to the current state has been about making small incremental improvements. There was a huge list of things not working, and now there is an even bigger list of things not working. The game is by no means complete yet.

I find it very useful to use HN and reddit to get feedback from users. That feedback is very important to know that I'm working on things which are useful to the users. Also, the demo was hosted by me personally, this server is hosted by the freeciv project, on the freeciv.org domain.

The demo was supported by ads, this version is supported by donations. Supporting the game by ads was not sustainable, so let's see how it goes with donations this time around. It is quite costly to host a powerful enough server to be able to run the full game server-side for each player.

The source code can be found here: https://github.com/andreasrosdal/freeciv-web

Feature suggestion - stealth mode with custom favicon and page title for stealthy in-work-browser tabbage ;)

Really excellent work.

Freeciv was one of my first programming projects when I was little. I always wanted a mobile, multiplayer freeciv—for me it was freeciv-gtk on a Sharp Zaurus.

This is a fantastic system with a clever combo of server and client.

Thanks!

When I try to load it on my chrome mobile browser (iphone 4s), I am able to get to the login screen, but after that it shows a black screen with buttons. Is this what it is suppose to look like?

http://i.imgur.com/1JV6I9D.png

Would it be feasible at all to try to port FreeCiv, or compile it with Emscripten, to pure client side JavaScript?

It looks like there is a SDL graphics backend: http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/freeciv/trunk/client/

Emscripten implements some of SDL.

What game engine (if any) did you use?

What are the biggest challenges of the html5 platform particularly when running in mobile environments?

Thanks

Here's the project, looks like a custom game engine was rolled: https://github.com/cazfi/freeciv-web

More than anything: Thank you!

So how's the performance vs the native client?

Hi, thanks for helping create such an awesome web game.

Couple of suggestions / bugs:

- Unit actions at the bottom should either have the label on top or permanently showing. Yes, we all know that F = fortify and etc but the mouse covers up the label (I have a large mouse pointer on my computer, just preference) and makes it unable to be read.

- Civilization that I just met says "We are tired of this constant bloodshed." after suggesting a treaty. What bloodshed?

- When I click Map, the current City window should close.

- Workers don't have Road or Automate buttons (but pressing R works, haven't tried A)

Is there a more official bug report system / tracker?

The github page says it requires python. Why? I thought the server was in C and the webclient in java. Why and what for do you user python?

Hi guys. I'm trying this from an iPhone 5 and it doesn't do much. I choose a single player game, then Start Immediately, and a grey tiled background appears with buttons across the top "Start Game" etc, and an empty text input at the bottom. Hitting buttons doesn't do anything.

Can you try again? The server is under a lot of load right now.

Just wanted to chime in to say I'm having the same issue on iPhone 5 @8:29AM EDT

Tried it again just an hour ago and got the same thing.

Great...now I can waste company time AND my own time :P

you beat me to it :P,

From this day on global productivity decreased by a significant degree

I believe this has been around a year or two already, which makes it a bit more impressive in my mind.

Looks good but it doesn't really work on Chrome. Units dissapear, fail to respond to commands etc.

pretty cool.

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