I thought about it the other day, don't get me wrong i believe that the work that's been done with the civilization franchise it's near excellent, but what about the idea of having civilization made by the players.
Sure i have seen open source clone of civilization, but there in too early stages of development and some have been abandon.
but what i really want to know what do you think of the idea...
I say it leave it to Firaxis. I think they are doing a fine job. Personally, I bet they spend a lot of time on the Net looking for feedback to improve the game for Civ4.
Whoops, at first I interpreted this to be polling on whether Firaxis should include un-hardcoding Civ, via Python. Now that I know the issue, I would have voted no open source instead. Whatever.
I like open source if there is some organisation, but i would very much dislike to see 783468 versions of civ3 being played.
Things like operating systems are nice open source because then the whole world solves problems together.
For civilisation, the technical difficulties are minimal, the programming is more about game mechanics and graphics. The only thing open source would provide is a lot of amateur programmers would go and do all kind of little unneeded things, making different versions.
We wouldnt know what we are talking about and many people would be too busy making more versions and have no time to play and write the the excelent articles for this page. All the discussions would be about modding the game.
Good thing this game is not primarily multiplayer, then it would be unbearable
Whoops, at first I interpreted this to be polling on whether Firaxis should include un-hardcoding Civ, via Python. Now that I know the issue, I would have voted no open source instead. Whatever.
Much as I like opensource, I also have no problem with proprietary software. It has its place, and games is one of those places. If someone wants to write an OpenSource Civ3 clone, more power to them. But I am happy with Firaxis doing the "official" Civ series.
The main reason that the Open Source games never get completed or polished is simple. They aren't being paid to do it. It is hard to keep up the level of dedication day after day, month after month, for years on end if it isn't your livelyhood. (note that I said hard, not impossible).
I would really love to see Civ 3 code released under the GPL or some such. It does not happen much (at all?) with games, but then most of the games market is dominated by "blockbuster" games that sell on their graphics and marketing mainly (of course some also have great gameplay). I would have thought that Civ, which depends so little on graphics for its appeal would be perfectly suited to open source development. I may have a chance of a "career break" soon, and I will have a look at Free Civ to see if there are any prospects for it. It seems a shame it is based on Civ 2, not the strongest offering IMHO. An inteligent AI would make any game better as a one player offering than C3C to me.
I agree it can be difficult to get an open source project off the ground without funding. However I would hope that with a community as we have here, with quite a few geeks (I reakon ) willing to spend time figuring out the mechanics, people would be willing to give time to develop / fix those mechanics.
What a step forward for OSS it would be if an open source game could out compete a closed source one. I am not quite sure of the income stream you could get though, as not many people are going to pay you for upgrades. How about advertising? Anyone fancy building the coca-cola factory? What about the nike sweat shop to reduce corruption?
There are games like www.stepmania.com wich are as good as comercial relevants, why is not posible to do with Civ?.
My proposition of making Civ a opensource project comes from the idea, that Civ player are different market group than any other one out there, Civ player are more interested in gameplay and game mechanics, we have more of a community feeling wich is well noticed from this forum.
If one can apply the talents of a few, and the advise of the others, anything can be accomplished.
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