Freecol

[Fullerene]

I'm just curious to see what other civ4:col modders and players think of Freecol?

I recently played it a bit after long time and liked it a lot. Although I'm not the biggest fan of the isometric view, I like the retro feeling of it. Since it's also open source it's very moddable too. So the question is, why did you choose to mod Civ4:Col instead of freecol?
Is it graphics? Or is it that Civ4:Col is more finished product, or maybe that it potentially has bigger audience for mod? Or maybe some technical reason or maybe you just didn't knew about Freecol.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

I'm just curious to see what other civ4:col modders and players think of Freecol?

I recently played it a bit after long time and liked it a lot. Although I'm not the biggest fan of the isometric view, I like the retro feeling of it. Since it's also open source it's very moddable too. So the question is, why did you choose to mod Civ4:Col instead of freecol?
Is it graphics? Or is it that Civ4:Col is more finished product, or maybe that it potentially has bigger audience for mod? Or maybe some technical reason or maybe you just didn't knew about Freecol.

Freeciv allows the game to be played from a top-downish view (if you have a graphics pack that allows that). Does Freecol also allow for that?

EDIT: From this discussion, apparently not, although seemingly it would be easy to do it.

 

[Nightinggale]

I'm not too happy with Freecol. It has come far and has potential to be interesting, but it has a major flaw: it's written in java. Java adds a layer at execution time, which mean it executes slower, use more memory and the virtual machine can screw up in ways you have little control over. That is what I said in 1999 and it's pretty much how I view it today as well. My experience since last century adds that "java runs on all platforms" is wrong. It is surprisingly easy to end up with code, which doesn't work identically on all platforms and since the differences appears to be internal issues in the virtual machine, they can get tricky to solve.

C/C++ on the other hand is optimized code where the programmer have the full control. It's great for performance as well as debugging and weird issues are always in your code. If the goal is cross platform support (the main argument for java), then C/C++ can do that too. Just look at openttd which can run on more or less anything.

In short: I'm not touching anything written in java. Whenever I have done so I ended up regretting it.


As for freecol itself. It looks like it would be a great experience, but then stuff happens due to java (mainly really slow wait for next turn) and I end up never getting very far. Java is a very poor choice for any application/game where you have to wait for it to finish, like this end of turn.