Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

news.ycombinator.com

171–180 of 381 posts

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#172
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great game, but not Open Source; it's under a restrictive license.

Certainly open source. The source is there. In the open. You're just not allowed to reuse it in the ways that we have come to expect from free software. So it's open, but not free, software.

No, that makes it "source available". Not "open source".

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#173
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm currently stuck on "can I count on the HTML Canvas to optimise cases where a tile is out of view or should I make a fancy system to calculate that now?"" I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but since I did wrote a canvas game from scratch, I can tell you that you cannot count on the canvas to optimize anything (and likely not what you want in this case) Every browser does it a bit different and it will…

> I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but since I did wrote a canvas game from scratch, I can tell you that you cannot count on the canvas to optimize anything (and likely not what you want in this case) Bad wording on my part. I noticed somewhat of a performance difference when drawing an image at coordinates that are outside of the canvas boundaries and was wondering if the scale of this is significant. Do…

"I noticed somewhat of a performance difference when drawing an image at coordinates that are outside of the canvas boundaries and was wondering if the scale of this is significant."

You mean you have a canvas of 1000 px size and make a drawImage at x> 1000?

Well in that case the image does not get drawn at all, so most browsers should indeed be more performant by ignoring this call. But there might still be a overhead of loading the image, so I would check the boundaries and not make that call, if it is not necessary.

(The canvas itself is just a large array of numbers after all. And if you do not manipulate that array when your new values are outside of that boundary, nothing happens. And a image is usually just a pointer to another large array/blob, so if the browser is smart, it does not load that array, when it finds out it does not have to)

"Do you have the source of your game published anywhere?"

Unfortunately not yet, but soon I will release. I hope.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#177
post #118
post #31

OpenTTD is probably my favourite, but let me put a classic that I really enjoyed into the mix: XBattle [1]. Real-time strategy with an emphasis on area of control and supply line “flow”. All while “abusing” X11 to get multi-player support. It gave me many hours of joy at the Solaris boxes we had at university in the mid 00s. My only concern would be whether it counts as open source with its home-made license [2]. [1]…

I really liked Xbattle, but seemed pretty dated, and at least when I played required players to xhost + the server, which back then wasn't that unusual. There was a similar game, written in java (server and client I believe), called Europa. Had a grid of X's, simple UI (tell units where to go) and the "water pressure" would slow from the cities that make armies to wherever you pointed them. Even included things like…

XbattleAI did a TCP connection version, I can't remember if it was good enough. See. https://github.com/robertjschulz/xbattleai

The closed source javascript game https://generals.io is a good simplification of XBattle, I've seen one OSS server reimplementation of it.

If you can find the code for Europa I'm interested, I think it was released as OSS but I couldn't find it when looking around.

Post reply on HN