Ask HN: Favourite open source game? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#101

Post by vyrotek » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

flashgordon wrote: post #83

Apologies in advanced for not submitting a game. Does anybody feel an unbreakable urge to just break from free of the dreary day job and write games for fun each time you see a HN post like this? My fantasy is to just go and Browserize a game (and not just by wasming it). Gaaaaah the tragedy of limited time!

All the time. I get the itch every few months. Luckily my day job is all C# so I've been able to pick up Unity on the side.

I'm terrible at making games but working on them brings back the joy I had when I first learned to program. The feedback loop between code and something interesting on the screen is quick and refreshing. Lately I even managed to make a basic VR game with my Quest2.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#102

Post by pull_my_finger » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

I put a lot of hours in Tales of Maj'Eyal/ToME4[1]. Solid graphical roguelike and very active/responsive dev in DarkGod

[1]: https://te4.org/

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#103

Post by busterarm » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:51 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #73

Surprised nobody has mentioned bzflag[0]. I played that a lot in its heyday. Playing hepcat pillbox CTF was some of the sweatiest, most intense gaming I've had. However I probably had the most hours into Armagetron Advanced[1], which is basically "2D-isometric Lightcycle-From-TRON Deathmatch: The Game" and allows for many interesting gametypes that you wouldn't necessarily expect, from CTF to Sumo, which is kinda but…

I came here to rep this game (bzflag). I also used to play quite a lot of armegatron & GLtron.

Other mostly forgotten games that I'd like to spotlight here are XEvil (https://www.xevil.com/) and Heroes (http://heroes.sourceforge.net/) which ate up tons of my time in younger years.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#104

Post by rrrodia » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

It's nice to read all these experiences with open source games. Something wholesome about these things (not just nostalgia).

It also made me realize there should be an community driven overview / list of these things (genre, inspiration, description, screenshots, version etc). Does this exist?

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#105

Post by CyMonk » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

Star Ruler 2

"Massive scale 4X-RTS set in space. Control hundreds of planets, manipulate galactic politics, research numerous advanced technologies, and command thousands of units and hundreds of planets in your quest for galactic dominance."

available from steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/282590/Star_Ruler_2/

and from github (excluding the music): https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#106

Post by kaetemi » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:55 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #75

ryzom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom i only played it briefly, but i believe it is the only FOSS MMORPG out there. if there are others, i'd like to know

Ryzom leveldesign and sound assets are not open source.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#107

Post by Obsnold » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:59 AM UTC

If anyone likes the Thief games check out The Dark Mod.

https://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads/

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#108

Post by brokenkebab2 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

Wesnoth Nexuiz

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#109

Post by Tade0 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 7:02 AM UTC

flashgordon wrote: post #83

Apologies in advanced for not submitting a game. Does anybody feel an unbreakable urge to just break from free of the dreary day job and write games for fun each time you see a HN post like this? My fantasy is to just go and Browserize a game (and not just by wasming it). Gaaaaah the tragedy of limited time!

Yes and yes.

I've been trying write a game from scratch (emphasis on "scratch" considering the scale of the itch) as a side project, but that quickly evolved into an excercise in overcoming analysis paralysis.

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 get an average of 2h a week to do this, so I need to be really careful not to go into one of the many rabbit holes there.

In any case I recommend Entity Component System as an architecture for games. You can write 20 lines of code at a time and still make demonstrable progress.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#110

Post by dividuum » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 7:05 AM UTC

pull_my_finger wrote: post #94

CGamesPlay wrote: post #45

Screeps, the open source game for programmers. It’s really, really hard though. https://screeps.com/ Side note: I don’t think downvotes should be for comments you “don’t like” or even “disagree with”. Downvotes should be used to discourage people from posting bad content, but on HN we try to be a bit more objective about what “bad” is rather than “I don’t like it”.

There's an older FOSS game Infon[1] that has a similar gameplay, but scripted in Lua. [1]: https://github.com/dividuum/infon

Oh wow. Didn't expect anyone to remember. It was fun to program that one as the programming game for our local hacker conference and then seeing players compete. At some point later IIRC someone even wrote an somewhat advanced AI and created a small paper for it. The game should still be usable, but didn't get any love for a while now.

Fun anecdote: infon itself is a followup to my own teen programming project written in Quick Basic (see https://github.com/dividuum/infon/wiki/History) and all the Lua embedding and experience I gained from it ultimately ended up being used in a followup project (info-beamer) which is now at the core of my own company and my full-time job.

So write more games everyone!