51–60 of 79 posts
I love how obsessed HN is with civilization. I put over 1000 hours into Civ 5 alone and was proud to beat diety (and then consistently beat diety). It's funny how many founders are big on civ. Zuck and Elon both apparently spent a lot of time during college on the series.
> The game is still very popular and easy to play. But the obsoletness of DOS Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Thanks to DOSBox and other emulators (FreeDOS is also not bad though) it is a fantastic OS (or virtual machine). DOS as a platform for (2D) games has never been better than it is today, on modern hardware running DOSBox.
What I like about DOSbox are its constraints and limitations. Of course there plenty of good features missing but on the other hand that’s the point. Why start in 2d when in reality you want a 3d game? DOSbox is delivering constraints. The demo scene died when the constraints were gone and all that was left was showing a movie. On a C64 for example there are no animations per se but maxing out technical prowess combi…
The problem was in my opinion not that the constraints were gone, but the fact that the PC did not provide a very stable platform anymore on which you could do some crazy low-level optimizations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also worth mentioning is C-evo, even if it's not being developed further afaik http://c-evo.org/
C-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon. https://app.zdechov.net/c-evo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/
What was the reason for this?
> The game is still very popular and easy to play. But the obsoletness of DOS Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Thanks to DOSBox and other emulators (FreeDOS is also not bad though) it is a fantastic OS (or virtual machine). DOS as a platform for (2D) games has never been better than it is today, on modern hardware running DOSBox.
This is a cool project, but the author should note that they _are_ likely creating a derivative version of Civ1 here. It might look somewhat different, but that's clearly just 16-bit (?) intel opcodes in a slightly spicier form. It's very unlikely this sort of approach will end up with a copyright-free codebase, though it might be useful as a source for a cleanroom approach. The author shouldn't be discouraged -- lot…
On 'It's very unlikely this sort of approach...' I will say Why not?
The process of rewriting the code is that the one side is describing the functionality in details and the other side writes the 'clean' code. That's what I'm trying to do. The 'intel opcodes' describe the functionality, and I'm writing the clean code.
I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design is the best practice in this situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Owning the original game does not automatically grant you right to make or use in derivative works.
Not exactly, but under US copyright law there is a limitation of exclusive rights that grants the owner of a copy the right to make an adaptation provided "that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Unfortunately, the law doesn't specify what "adaptation" means, and I'm not sure th…
There are also some folks working on a similar project for Civilization 2. https://github.com/axx0/Civ2-clone
I'm commenting this blindly so apologies if I'm wrong, but if it's possible I'd try and compile this against .NET Framework 3.5 instead of .NET 8. A lot of people (myself included) have XP/7 machines for retro games like Civ1 and I'd personally love to use that machine instead of my modern one to play the game.
I have tested it and it works :)