https://github.com/Solen1985/CivOne Worth mentioning this one also
Sadly :( It was abandoned years ago...
OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very likely that no one cares if anyone cares about copyright. If someone do in fact care, I'm sure someone else can organize an online donation for them tissues those who care can cry into. Otherwise please accept that Civ I is effectively public domain.
Nobody cares until the original company wants to release a remaster in 10 years.
Then everyone proceeds not caring like it happened with openttd recently. Or for example OpenXcom -- when those new-Xcom titles started appearing it changed exactly nothing.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#73> 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.
I bought some DOS games wrapped in DOSBox on GOG, and I'm not sure if GOG uses some bad version or bad config, but it's pain the the ass - you can't resize a window to be able to actually see something on 4k screen, no obvious way to switch to fullscreen and back, etc. It's one thing to be able to emulate DOS games (something which worked 20+ years ago), it's another thing to offer reasonable ergonomics in a modern e…
Yeah this is key - in order to get out of full-screen you have to find and navigate some some ini file, then its still doing the mouse capture thing, which I think is also a setting, but all this faffing about just to get it into a usable state is pretty user hostile
I want the window to be open like any other window, and the mouse pointer to work transparently in and out of it - like when I hover the mouse over the dosbox window, change the pointer but keep the same mouse speed, momentum etc
I think this would be really hard to do in an emulated environment, maybe even would require patching each game executable to get the mouse speed right (not sure?), the modern environment integration, like you say, is what Im after too
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 demo scene died when the constraints were gone 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.
Building stable software for all varieties of PC hardware was part of the challenge of course. Lots of demos had problems with all kinds of hardware varieties.
Lots of low-level optimizations also made their way into compilers that sometimes do a better job than a human. There's not much to be gained by writing everything in assembly which means it doesn't interest people as much as in the 90s.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The demo scene died when the constraints were gone 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.
Building stable software for all varieties of PC hardware was part of the challenge of course. Lots of demos had problems with all kinds of hardware varieties. Lots of low-level optimizations also made their way into compilers that sometimes do a better job than a human. There's not much to be gained by writing everything in assembly which means it doesn't interest people as much as in the 90s.
> There's not much to be gained by writing everything in assembly which means it doesn't interest people as much as in the 90s.
There is a lot to be gained from writing your code in a way that makes use of SIMD instructions. Also, a lot of things that you can write in assembler code is insanely hard to express in higher-level languages, so of course
- the compiler may implement some specific low-level optimization
- but the compiler can (in general) not easily change the programming language so that low-level programming tricks can (without "contortions") be formulated in the programming language.
I agree that if the compiler was "allowed" to change the (higher-level) programming language, too, by quite a lot, so that quite a lot of low-level programming tricks can be formulated or much better formulated in it, then I would somewhat agree that the advantages of low-level coding have become smaller.
But this is currently clearly not the case.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#76Can anyone give some hints on what made Civ 1 special compared to other classic entries in the franchise? Despite the nostalgia factor, of course.
1. It was the first civ. 2. The Settler unit was a big eared bat
> The Settler unit was a big eared bat
You validate my feelings. I always knew that at heart.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
C-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon. https://app.zdechov.net/c-evo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/
> C-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon. What was the reason for this?
The forks built with Lazarus in instead of Delphi,
and are cross platform, Linux as well as Windows.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#78> 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.
I bought some DOS games wrapped in DOSBox on GOG, and I'm not sure if GOG uses some bad version or bad config, but it's pain the the ass - you can't resize a window to be able to actually see something on 4k screen, no obvious way to switch to fullscreen and back, etc. It's one thing to be able to emulate DOS games (something which worked 20+ years ago), it's another thing to offer reasonable ergonomics in a modern e…
I run the GOG installer, then copy the game files to where the virtual C: is for my DOSBox-X (in a git-repo). Then there is usually some small BAT script to write to launch the game (what is required can be figured out from the config GOG installed). I play all the games from within DOSBox-X, so I start that up in fullscreen and then run games as if running real DOS (from COMMAND.COM prompt).
It is of course possible to launch games from outside of DOSBox the way GOG does it, using host OS (non DOS) launch scripts and config for each game, but I prefer to have more like a virtual DOS fantasy console with all games installed. It also means DOSBox is fully self-contained, with no dependencies on the host OS. Once set up there is no maintenance. There is no code rot in DOS of course, so when something has been set up it will always work.
Re: OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, I claim that there is no violating of Original copyright whatsoever. The repository doesn't contain any of the contents of the original game disks or any of the files. You could argue that I used a small parts of the work, but that can only fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use doctrine.
It is complicated.
Many games license art works from third parties, in which the game house agreed only to use that art work in one game title.
E.g. a sound track on a game may feel like a small part of the whole game, but it can the complete work from a music producer.