
Freeciv founded 20 years ago today - roschdal
http://play.freeciv.org/blog/2015/11/freeciv-founded-20-years-ago-today/
======
rav
> The irony of it all is that last year when i had a couple of computer
> science applying for a job, they told me that they had assignments of doing
> bits and parts of a civilization clone at the university as part of the
> studies, so i guess that the university got smarter in the meantime.

Yes, indeed. The Software Architecture course at Aarhus University (which is
where the FreeCiv founders are from) now contains the HotCiv project: "This
project develops a framework for defining strategy games similar to the
classic computer game, Civilization." The lecturer, Henrik Bærbak, wrote a
textbook for the course:
[http://www.baerbak.com/description.html](http://www.baerbak.com/description.html)

~~~
reycharles
FWIW I remember the book to be not very good.

------
roschdal
Hi everyone! Just a note that you can play Freeciv today at
[https://play.freeciv.org](https://play.freeciv.org) \- source code here:
[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-
web)

We're always looking for more good developers!

~~~
erikb
I'm curious what are people working on in a 20 year old project? I only know
young efforts like these. They mostly focus on getting anything close to the
featureset of the original game. But I figure after 20 years that's not a
problem with freeciv anymore, right?

~~~
roschdal
We have recently spent a significant amount of effort on making Freeciv
playable in a browser. Porting the game to new platforms is a continous
development effort. Freeciv-web is now playable in any HTML5 browser, but
there are still many things to improve in the game.

------
DiabloD3
Dear God, I've been playing this for that long? Its just as bad as nethack.
Okay, almost as bad as nethack. Goddamnit nethack, go away, I have work to do.

~~~
Scarblac
How can you say that during the yearly /dev/null tournament? :-)

------
digi_owl
News like this brings to mind a guys age...

------
seviuqyelsdnirb
Thank God, in all that time, they've never been tempted to apply any graphic
design talent to the project. The 'Win 95 Look' never goes out of style!

~~~
eeZi
Those are vintage screenshots.

It appears to look like this nowadays:
[https://play.freeciv.org/webclient/?action=new](https://play.freeciv.org/webclient/?action=new)

~~~
notahacker
Still has a very vintage vibe to it; I'm not sure how favourably it compares
with Civ II (1996)...

Some people appreciate retro looks, but everything from the sprite resolution
to the colour palette feels like a nineties aesthetic.

~~~
CapTVK
Thanks, the Amplio used the original Civ2 sprite resolution and colour palette
as a starting point. It seems to have hold up well.

There's also some layout logic at work. If you look at the way the units are
aligned in the tileset you may notice that defensive units point right and
offensive units point left.

