The CTP fans Discord owner Ninjaboy announced a surprise on New Years and informed us that he's been working on a Call To Power Online Single & Multiplayer Server Project for both CTP games hopefully stop all the current issues with people not being able to play multiplayer games on modern machines I'll keep an eye on his progress and post more here...
Github page: https://github.com/justinfarrelldev/open-ctp-server
More details here...
https://discord.gg/mVBDgyVRhT
https://discord.com/channels/924072012295585842/924075114130198559/1191184442669154415 (use join link above first for this link to work)
Github page: https://github.com/justinfarrelldev/open-ctp-server
More details here...
https://discord.gg/mVBDgyVRhT
https://discord.com/channels/924072012295585842/924075114130198559/1191184442669154415 (use join link above first for this link to work)
The Open CTP Server Project
For a month now, I have been crafting a server project in secret which should allow us to play multiplayer in the future!
This project is the Open CTP Server Project, which you can find on my GitHub here: https://github.com/justinfarrelldev/open-ctp-server
Goals
The goal of this project is to recreate the original Civilization: Call to Power and Call to Power II server functionality in a modern server style. Another part of the goal is to add extra game modes - long-turn (as seen in Freeciv), simultaneous and hybrid turns, as well as a few others - to really bring the CTP experience into the modern era.
Connecting Clients
This will NOT be a drop-in solution - the original unmodified games will NOT be able to find these servers. The servers will have extra functionality, bug fixes and will be in an entirely-different language to the original servers. Therefore, you will need to be using a client modified to connect to the Open CTP Server in order to play. Additionally, the server is not deployed yet, but has a ticket in the Trello board to automatically deploy the server when new changes are added.
I have chosen to use Go, gRPC and protobuffers (with gRPC-Gateway for HTTP support) to make it fairly easy for client developers to connect to this server. Since protobuffers are export-able to C++ 14+, Rust, Go, Java and many other languages, the server methods should be accessible in a fairly language-agnostic way. Of course, my main focus at the moment is C++ and I hope to make an example client in C++ to demonstrate how to connect to the server. My hope is that, eventually, we will have multiple clients connecting to the server and able to play.
If you are interested in helping to develop the server, please select the Server Developer role in roles! This will give you access to the Open CTP Server category in Discord. All experience levels are welcome! I have created a Trello board to aid us in development (and not stepping on each others' toes). Please also see CONTRIBUTING.md and README.md in the repo for more information.
How long will this process take?
It is impossible to say - this project is only a month old, and we have no idea how many developers will take part.
Work is also needed client-side before playing the game is feasible, which may also take some time.
More Info
This server is also meant to be fork-able for non-commercial use (remember, CTP is still owned by Activision)! If you would like to create a modded server in the future (when the server is actually usable haha), please see LICENSE.md.
Feel free to ping me as well if you have any questions!
