
Open Source Game Clones - piranha
http://osgameclones.com
======
jlgreco
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.

~~~
piranha
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. :)

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

~~~
piranha
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...

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mdip
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.

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pavanky
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.

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

~~~
pavanky
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.

~~~
blots
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?

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Svip
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.

~~~
majormajor
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."

~~~
Svip
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.

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qznc
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/>

~~~
darkhorn
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.

~~~
anonymoushn
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...

~~~
piranha
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?).

~~~
anonymoushn
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.

~~~
piranha
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.

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roryokane
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.

~~~
piranha
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.

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taejo
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."

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

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kshahar
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...](http://kshahar.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-open-source-clone-for-theme-
park.html)

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

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fractalsea
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?!

~~~
chii
> 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.

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spiritplumber
Don't forget Wing Commander!

<http://privateer.sourceforge.net/>

(I helped)

~~~
piranha
But it's already in!

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Narretz
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

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shinnok
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...](http://shinnok.com/rants/2011/07/18/cool-open-source-games-you-
should-contribute-to/)

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syassami
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?"

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mappu
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).

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ekianjo
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.

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

~~~
piranha
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.

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rrouse
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

~~~
piranha
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.

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

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gateaumoisi
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!)

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hiena03
It would be nice if it could mark the games that requires the original assets.

~~~
piranha
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! :)

~~~
hiena03
I will look at that tonight if I have time.

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jimmaswell
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.

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galapago
<https://github.com/Mandarancio/OpenGOO>

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

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twai
Can I also suggest OpenGTA:

<http://ogta.fifengine.de/>

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ardiyu07
How about the licensing? Is it OK to host these games on your server and
publish?

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

~~~
ekianjo
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.

~~~
piranha
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. :)

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justin66
A number of items on that page aren't clones, they're the original game.
Strange.

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

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

~~~
tenfingers
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.

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a3_nm
This is an excellent resource, thanks a lot for this.

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

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

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rilut
I would like to see a Braid clone

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galapago
Super Mario War?

~~~
piranha
It's in.

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workbench
Can't wait for someone to make Open Rollercoaster Tycoon

~~~
Narretz
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).

