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Open Source Game Clones

osgameclones.com

219 pointspiranha81 comments

I'm not sure that I would call some of these "clones". ioquake3 for example is the community maintained modernized fork of the Quake 3 engine source that id released. You can't do much with it without your own assets (either the original Quake3 assets, the OpenArena assets (that game is what I would call the Quake3 "clone"), or assets from any number of Quake 3 mods (tremulous, urban terror, etc).

I think ioquake3 is an example of where open source game devs are at their best. Providing modern engines (ideally from the original source, but not necessarily) to old games so that people can continue to reasonably play them. OpenTTD would be another example.

You are right, ioquake3 is not a clone. It's still really prominent and I don't want to omit it.

As for OpenArena, this is more 'inspired by', since in my opinion 'clone' follows original game a bit closer. I agree that the difference can be subtle, but that's how I've chosen to treat those words. :)

How about Megaglest? Very active development, very playable, lots of modders.

But it had no precursor. While the project certainly looks nice, it's outside of objectives of this site.

Edit: Hm, I'm sorry, original Glest is from 2004. Maybe I should include this in the end...

OpenTTD created their own assets a while ago so they can distribute the entire game libre, it is like UrbanTerror + ioquake3.

Except Urban Terror is not open source. You cannot get the source code anywhere. (It is gratis/無料 but not libre/自由.)

Why the japanese characters ? :) You could have use the free beer, free speech analogy :)

They're Chinese characters, which are used to write the Japanese language. Just like we use Latin characters to write the English language.

Similarly, Abuse is not a 'clone' but was released into the public domain in its entirety and has had some work done to it since (cross platform porting, etc.)

Like the Ur-Quan Masters of Star Control 2. They only had to change the name for legal reasons.

Why wouldn't a forked distribution be considered a "clone"? If bio-clones start from the same DNA, distribution "clones" start from the same source code...

A reverse-engineered game might be better termed a "dopple-gamer", since if didn't start from identical source.

I was giddy when I discovered Ur Quan Masters a few years ago. I had played a lot of computer games as a kid but for me (and my friends at the time) Star Control 2 was one of a handful that I continued to play over and over again. It was the first time I'd played a game realizing that the artistic relevance of a game could exceed a book or a movie.

I know it wasn't necessarily a "first" in these categories, but it was my first experience with a game that: (1) Was primarily quest driven with the player having a great deal of choice on which quest to take when (it wasn't spelled out the way it's done in modern implementations). (2) Had excellent dialog (it was legitimately funny at times and poked fun at itself). (2) Had a universe that felt impossible to succeed in exploring all of it. (3) Had a great balance of strategy, exploration and arcade elements. At no point did it seem like any one of the three components were after thoughts.

The problem I have seen with Open Source games is not usually with the game itself, but the art work. I wish someday these games would compete with proprietary games on "beauty" as well as functionality.

i find it unlikely that an opensource game would have similar production value as a game funded by money.

True. I hope crowdfunding will help change that. This site list looks like excelent material for http://freedomsponsors.org

A difficult proposition when you considered that millions of dollars are poured into proprietary games. Open-source games do not make any significant money, and therefore can not afford to pay artists to spend a lot of time on their product.

The cost argument can not always be made. Millions of dollars are also poured into commercial software. Yet open source alternatives exist that are really good. For example icc vs gcc.

This happened because a lot of computer scientists / engineers donated their time willingly for these projects. My original statement was meant to point out there is a lack of designers in the open source community.

So, where can you sign up as an open source / creative commons artist? There are a lot of great hobby artists, but who will introduce the artists to the projects?

This is a problem I would like to see a startup try to solve. There must be a shortcut.

openCaesar3 make me worry. Because if the intent is merely to clone the game, with the same basic mechanics, I am not sure I will enjoy it, despite having spend countless errors on the original, Caesar 3.

Part of the problem - in this case at least - lies in the original game's mechanics, particularly its walker mechanic. If you look up any videos or guides on how to play Caesar 3 well (or rather; best), you'll notice that most of these guides try to abuse the walker mechanic - which in itself doesn't make much sense - to the limit, creating cities that effectively doesn't really look like cities, because they avoid connecting them, inserts gatehouses everywhere, etc.

Sure, this is gamey, you say, but it actually proves a fundamental flaw in the city-building games because of the walker mechanic. If you are to make a clone of Caesar 3, it would be sad to copy this mechanic, but then some would argue that it is no longer Caesar 3, because you'd have to replace it with something else. Something radically different.

Which ends my argument with basic idea; don't clone Caesar 3, make something better.

It actually says in the open Caesar page that it is intended to be a 'near copy' f the original and one of the changes they are making is to walker AI- 'they just go where they're needed now'

It's been ages since I played Caesar 3, and I don't remember ever discovering abusing the walker mechanic, but on the Github page for the project it notes that one major change is "new AI for walkers. They just go where they are needed."

Well, technically, I never discovered them myself or rather performed the abuses myself (I always tried to build cities that looked like cities, because it felt right to me, even if it meant my cities weren't performed as well as they could have), but I discovered them online.

And when I did, I felt dishearten, realising the problem that to play this game best, I'd have to do what I did not want to do; create non-realistic cities. So I have not played Caesar 3 since then.

However, new AI for walkers in openCaesar3 sounds good. Now I am intrigued.

The people who made Caesar 3/Pharaoh later made Children of the Nile, which has a much more refined mechanic.

That said, I still play Pharaoh and the walker mechanic is part of the game, it's part of what makes it an interesting game.

can you give a link to the walker mechanic you talked about? i've never played caesar 3, and googling didn't really turn up (with my 5 seconds of googling...)

It is mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Building_Series#Services

Note that its parent section specifically mentions that Children of the Nile does not use the same mechanics as the other City Building games.

I am not sure if Minetest qualifies for a Minecraft clone already. It is certainly the most playable clone. In contrast, Terasology has amazing graphics, but no fun.

http://minetest.net/

I have send email to vsevolod.solovyov@gmail.com, and alexander@solovyov.net.

>http://osgameclones.com/

Please add Minetest, open source clone of Minecraft.

Alexander Solovyov replied.

>Hi,

I'm a bit reluctant about adding it since idea of most clones is that you can't play original anymore. And this is untrue for original Minecraft, it's still easy to play it.

It does not seem any easier to play Minecraft than to play Homeworld, Starcraft, or Touhou 6. I guess the real distinction is that someone is still trying to sell Minecraft...

Minecraft servers are alive, there are a lot of free servers, you can download official client and play without any problems at all. This is not exactly true with Starcraft (crappy resolution, not sure if Battle.net is still running, where to buy it?).

After googling "buy starcraft", "buy homeworld", and "buy touhou", I've discovered that you can buy Starcraft and Brood War for $15 from Blizzard at http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=110000124 , you can buy a sealed copy of Touhou 6 at http://www.paletweb.com/selectpage.asp?code=00053 , and you can probably only buy Homeworld used.

Homeworld's official Battle.net-equivalent (WON?) survived less than two years after the game's launch, but I think you can still play Starcraft on Battle.net. Fortunately both of these games are from an era when devs shipped games with LAN support, so you can play normally over hamachi or garena even after Battle.net and WON disappear. Touhou 6 is a single-player game, so there's not much use worrying about servers.

Ok, as I thought more about it, Stargus with it's halted development and non-playable state doesn't make any sense, so I removed it. Homeworld-SDL still makes sense as it's playable under Linux. I'm not going to add minetest as it makes absolutely no sense there.

Last time I checked Minecraft wasn't free software, nor open source. And when I've seen the OP title, I expected the list to be a list of FOSS re-implementations of proprietary games.

Not all of them though. Things which are dead and not playable are not included. Things which have code of questionable source (i.e. stolen or something like that) are not included. And clones of Minecraft are not included as well, just because this doesn't make sense to me.

Two more games not on that list:

SuperTux – http://supertux.lethargik.org/ – a Super Mario Bros. clone. It actually has a lot of original level ideas.

SuperTuxKart – http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/ – a Mario Kart clone, though with more simplistic kart physics.

SuperTux is loosely based on Mario and there are tons of scrollers out there, so I don't think it's worth to add it. SuperTuxKart is similar in that it doesn't even mention Mario Kart anywhere, which I take for being a bit more separate/independent from franchise than most games in this list are.

It would be good if this listed the level of completion: openCaesar3 and OpenTTD may be both be under active development, but the latter has been playable for years (active development is mostly on features the original never had) while the former says it isn't "still not quite playable."

Yes, I need to include a bit more information. But sometimes it's just hard to find it. I'll mark openCaesar3 though.

As a fan of many games by Bullfrog (especially Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper), I wanted to create an open source clone for Theme Park.

Eventually I've decided to leave it for now. My research is summarized in the following post: http://kshahar.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-open-source-clone-for...

I hope this could help someone to have an easy start.

Is it just me who finds it sad that the majority of open source game development energy goes into cloning existing proprietary games.

Yes, I understand that designing a game from scratch is a lot more work, but I would much rather lower number of original games than a larger number of worse versions of existing games. I also suspect this would have a larger positive impact on open source software as a whole.

Where's the creativity?!

> Where's the creativity?! i suspect its poured into the indie scene. If i had an idea that's really original/innovative, i would try to expoit it commercially, and not make an open source project. These open source projects are there for other reason other than commercial, and therefore, unlikely to have the type of innovative ideas you seek.

There are non-clone open-source games as well, check out this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games

Don't forget Wing Commander!

http://privateer.sourceforge.net/

(I helped)

But it's already in!

I loved the old MSI Forgotten Realms Games, especially my first, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, which had a German release. I was very new to Computer Games and AD&D, and I briefly thought you had to wait 8 real time hours for your wizards to memorize their spells. I played the sequel in English, and I didn't understand anything from the story. Show how simple the gameplay was for an RPG; go to X, kill everything, repeat. I faintly remember having success playing some of the games on a DOSBOX, so I am not sure if you'd need a rewrite in .NET

I'll mention here a blog post of mine written a while back on the subject of Open Source Games entitled "Cool Open Source Games you should contribute to". It lays out a dissemination of issues OS games face and how you could help(touching most of the issues debated in comments here), along with a nice list of projects to get you started.

http://shinnok.com/rants/2011/07/18/cool-open-source-games-y...

Wow, suprised tuxkart is not listed there. Used to love playing it in 8th grade with my buddies. It was my go-to answer when people asked me "can you play games on linux?"

Nice list!

Xash3D is an open-source recreation of the GoldSrc engine used in Half-life 1 and friends (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, etc).

You should check out the games available for the Open Pandora, you get many Open Source Game Clones/Engines there : http://repo.openpandora.org - like the recent Dune Dynasty and many others.

Can open source do sports games? Where is a Madden or FIFA or NBA Live clone?

There is no reason to do that in my opinion. Most of the games were done since someone loved original, but were unable to play it on modern systems. In case of FIFA or others new games are out every year and they are often arguably better than previous incarnations, so there is just no motivation, it's much easier to buy a game and play it.

What are the parameters for "active development"?

The "Mario World" clone hasn't been touched in a year, but is listed as having active development.

Edit: Sorry.. was 1 year. The only more recent commit was a translation update 6 months ago

I need to setup some automated checking rules. Mario World was added some time ago and it looked like actively developed. I'll change status now.

Yeah. I'd probably list that as sporadic at best.

The dungeon keeper "clone" is not really a clone, it takes the assets from the original game and hack the executables to make it more friendly to recent pc (i'll check it anyway!)

It would be nice if it could mark the games that requires the original assets.

It's not a problem, it could be added to 'info'. But now all games need to be processed... if you want to help with that, you're very welcome! :)

I will look at that tonight if I have time.

I'm surprised there's no mention of MarioKart / TuxKart

Oh, I see. I'll add a comment about that.

Similar to this is "demakes", where a new game is made in a lower complexity than the original, such as Gang Garrison 2, an 8-bit style TF2 demake.

https://github.com/Mandarancio/OpenGOO

It's impressive to see how many of those games have working ports on my OpenPandora... good times

Can I also suggest OpenGTA:

http://ogta.fifengine.de/

How about the licensing? Is it OK to host these games on your server and publish?

I don't host them on my server, but as they are open source, I think it's ok.

There are many different kind of "open source" licenses and they do not all give the same rights. Not saying you are doing anything wrong here, but you should be a little more careful which such statements.

Yes, I should, I thought a bit more after submitting my comment. :) I only host links though and every case should be checked on it's own. I probably should add license information to entries... but that won't happen soon, too many of them already. :)

A number of items on that page aren't clones, they're the original game. Strange.

Yes, but they still are great and unmodified originals are often hard to run. :P

It looks like most of these games were written in C++, or C. Why no Objective-C?

Prior to OSX and the integration of obj-c as a first-class citizen in GCC, Objective-C made very little sense.

It still makes very little sense for a game, as C/C++ have a broader spectrum (in both tooling and target audience).

Most of these game clones predate OSX/iOS (which popularized Obj-C) by a large margin.

This is an excellent resource, thanks a lot for this.

I wish they had titled it... Game of Clones!

:-) That would be fun, but it wouldn't be very descriptive. That's sad, as I like it. :)

I would like to see a Braid clone

Super Mario War?

It's in.

Can't wait for someone to make Open Rollercoaster Tycoon

A small anecdote about the original RCT: while building your coasters, trees weren't automatically removed if they were in the way, you had to manually click them away. Chris Sawyer, who basicall built this single-handedly said it would be too resource intensive. I wonder if this was true, or if it was based on some architecture decision he made early on that would have been to costly to fix, given that he was the only programmer (it was possible in RCT 2, though).

If you haven't yet, try playing OpenTTD (TTD is a precursor to Roller Coaster Tycoon), it's really a great game!

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