19 ms·
Open Source Game Clones
- dang 7y ago2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468487 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184463 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775714
- melling 7y agoIt would be great to have these listed on the right and permanently linked (like StackOverFlow). We could crowd source submissions that are resubmits.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tantalor 7y agoIt already is, click the "past" link
- dang 7y agoI'd like to do something like this eventually. But how would the crowd sourcing work? There needs to be a way to weed out the ones that aren't actually the same story.
- melling 7y ago"Trusted users"? Voting on links? Trusted users submit links. Other trusted users can vote up/down. Push them towards bottom, color code, etc. if ratio is not great. Have a few people review and finalize?
- Already__Taken 7y agoShout out to CorsixTH making theme hospital wonderful to play.
- TheCycoONE 7y agoThanks! We are always looking for contributors too.
- srgpqt 7y agoCorsixTH is indeed a great piece of work. For the fans of the game, some of the original Theme Hospital people released a successor called Twopoint Hospital, available on Steam.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoI took a look at one of the FOSS clones for Ace of Spades, and elation turned to horror when I glanced at the "Recommended" Requirements[0]: - 3GHz quad-core processor - GPU: 1GB or more VRAM - GPU (NVIDIA): GeForce GTX 680 Really, guys? You took a game that had a reputation of "Runs on your grandma's rig!" and turned it into that monstrosity, while somehow still keeping the same low-res polygon models? For what? Photorealistic water effects and lens flare? [0] http://openspades.yvt.jp/ http://openspades.yvt.jp/
- dcbadacd 7y agoYou can play using a "minimum" requirement PC as well. Out of all the things getting heavier, some remake opting in to better visuals is not the one you should be calling a "monstrocity".
- floatboth 7y ago> Recommended Who wouldn't "Recommend" something decent? The minimum is HD Graphics 3000 still. GTX 680 is kind of a "grandma's rig" card at this point. It's from 2012.
- maeln 7y agoYou can still play Ace of Spades or make you own fork without post-process effects if you want. No need to get angry at some people who decided to make a prettier fork.
- striking 7y agoIt's really pretty, runs really smoothly (especially on OSes not previously supported by AoS), and those requirements really aren't that high (minimum Intel HD 3000 with 512MB VRAM + 1GHz dual core processor, that's basically any computer this decade). If you still need to play using the original launcher, you can do that here https://www.buildandshoot.com/download/ https://www.buildandshoot.com/download/. Additionally, if you don't love the models, feel free to switch them out. There are plenty of pak files available for download across the web, the first to appear in my search result list was https://gamebanana.com/skins/137550 https://gamebanana.com/skins/137550.
- 7y ago
- Tokkemon 7y agoOpenTTD and OpenRCT are obvious amazing ones.
- kuu 7y agoHow complete is the OpenRCT?
- darkpuma 7y agoVery complete. I've not noticed any deficiencies at all. They added a lot of features too: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/wiki/Changes-to-original-game https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/wiki/Changes-to-origina... If you're a fan of the original games, I can't think of any reason to not play them using OpenRCT2.
- kuu 7y agoI'll check it out, thank you! :)
- pierreyoda 7y agoWow, my shitty C++ Rodent's Revenge remake from highschool is there too! I will submit a PR though as I since switched from Sourceforge to Github [1] and now use the MIT license. In any case, great work! Only suggestion I could make is maybe make an "Engine" category for projects like OpenMW? [1] https://github.com/pierreyoda/o2r https://github.com/pierreyoda/o2r
- ElCapitanMarkla 7y agoAwesome :D I spent hours in that pushing blocks around making little forts when I was a kid
- xzn 7y agoJust a few months back I was porting your version of Rodent's Revenge to Flutter for fun. Maybe I should polish it up a bit and publish it somewhere...
- pierreyoda 7y agoThat sounds awesome, please do! Testing Flutter myself, it's great but I'm not convinced about Dart so far, for instance (de)serializing JSON is a pain.
- baroffoos 7y agoHah, I remember playing this game on the primary school computers but didn't know what it was called. Might I suggest adding a section to the readme explaining how to install/compile this?
- pierreyoda 7y agoI will do that! Problem is, I switched to Rust for my side projects like 5 years ago and Open Rodent's Revenge would probably benefit from something like CMake but it's so confusing compared to Rust's Cargo.
- siffland 7y agoSome open source clones are great, "Bust A Move" on the SNES is fun, but the open source clone "Frozen Bubble", come one who has not spent hours with that game......
- roschdal 7y agoFreeciv-web: https://www.freecivweb.org/ https://www.freecivweb.org/
- dgellow 7y agoWhat’s the legal aspect of such kind of projects? I’m working on cloning a quite popular board game that doesn’t have any software version, but didn’t consider releasing it publicly because I assumed a huge risk of legal issues. So currently it’s only for myself and close friends ...
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoI think as long as you're only copying the mechanics, and not the artwork or name you're usually fine. edit: The "legal aspects" section of this wikipedia article mention a case in 2012 that may have changed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_clone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_clone
- jordigh 7y agoIf you're referring to the 2012 case of EA vs Zynga, it doesn't look to me like it established different jurisprudence. The artwork in that screenshot comparison looks very obviously copied. For copyright, copying something doesn't mean that you have to copy it verbatim without modification, as derivative works where you take the original and modify it slightly can still infringe upon the copyright holder's rights. This is why projects like Freedoom or Hedgewars recreate all game assets to make them look quite different. Just making minor changes that make it obvious that the original artwork was used as a guideline is not enough of a defense against an accusation of infringement. What is a defense, however, is when copyright infringement is not willful. If you and I happen to make the same artwork but we can prove that neither of us looked at each other's work and the similarity is just a coincidence, then it's unlikely that we can claim copyright infringement.
- TehCorwiz 7y agoIANAL, but based on my reading this is my opinion. Consider the release and success of the mobile game `Words With Friends`. Not only did it largely clone the scrabble experience, but it completely dominated the mobile game space for a time. I found a Quora[1] question which gives some details about the legal relationship between Scrabble(Hasbro) and WWF while researching the topic. Short version, can they sue you? Yes, just like anyone in the US can sue anyone else for whatever reasons valid or not. In Hasbro v Scrabulous, Hasbro dropped the suit given that they were losing and Scrabulous had run out of money. Had they continued the suit they would have had a judgement on the record regarding the legality of cloning the game experience and possibly been ordered to pay legal costs had they actually lost. As it happened they didn't need to win because they just buried their competitor with legal fees. [1]: https://www.quora.com/Did-Scrabble-sue-Words-with-Friends-What-happened https://www.quora.com/Did-Scrabble-sue-Words-with-Friends-Wh...
- TehCorwiz 7y agoMinor Nitpick: Xonotic isn't a clone of Nexuiz, Nexuiz was the original name of the project until the project originator sold the name and rights. This caused the community to fork the project from the last stable version and continue development with the new name, Xonotic. Today Xonotic has a small but passionate community whereas Nexuiz languishes in obscurity.
- mrguyorama 7y agoI didn't know the "real" nexuiz still survived! It was cool to me because I didn't get to enjoy the unreal tournament days and had some interesting maps.
- TehCorwiz 7y agoYou can find Xonotic @ http://www.xonotic.org/ http://www.xonotic.org/ It's still very fun and progress on development has continued.
- james-skemp 7y agoIs the filter doing an OR instead of an AND? Search term: Playable Language: TypeScript Returns more than just %Playable% TypeScript games.
- bdz 7y agoI wish there was a filter for games that are playable on their own, not just the engine, don't need the original game files. OpenTTD is successful because it's readily available, you don't need an original copy of Transport Tycoon.
- derefr 7y agoIt's strange, too, how rarely the developer will just think to make an alternative asset pack to accomplish this. It doesn't have to look great! It can be eyebleeding programmer-art. But having it there means the game can be run, after installing it, without first having to load some assets into it. And that's valuable for e.g. knowing whether your setup is working.
- dspillett 7y agoI don't find it that strange. Even eye bleed causing assets take some time to produce and a game may need a fair few for the result to be practically playable. When a project is small perhaps no one on the team (maybe a team of just one) has the time and/or they all hate the idea of the task and they have the original assets initially to hand anyway so the time and effort is likely better spent elsewhere. OpenTTD didn't always have its own asset sets available. There may be a fear of greater copyright issues. The clean-room defense for clone code isn't going to work as well for graphics and sounds, because they have seen the originals and there are not many ways you can draw an inter-city-125-a-like (to use a TTD example) if you desire to maintain the same overall feel for the clone as the original. And bad imitation art may put off more potential players than having to extract the original assets does.
- derefr 7y ago> There may be a fear of greater copyright issues. To be clear, I’m not suggesting they actually attempt to mimic the assets of the game you’re cloning. Rather, symbolize them. If you’ve ever seen the game Baba is You, the text-tiles in that game are perfect examples of “symbolic assets” you can create to stand in for the real assets of a missing asset pack. Creating such a symbolic asset pack should be the work of five minutes. The result will not-at-all resemble the real game; but it will also obviously be “not the way the game is intended to look”, so players won’t think that the game is just “a game with art made by programmers” like SuperTux/TuxKart/etc. It’s clearly “the game in a state where it’s missing something.” But it’s still playable in that state! And, intriguingly, creating a fallback asset pack like this, and showing it to people by default (if just for a minute), will also get into people’s heads the idea that these assets are skinnable. So this will implicitly encourage creatives to look at how asset packs for the game are made (with your symbolic pack as an example), and maybe make one—or dozens!—of “real” packs.
- vntx 7y agoA Warcraft 3 world editor clone would be really good for game innovation. If someone was willing to start up a project like that, I would definitely help fund development. Blizzard’s world editing tools helped players innovate new genres like the MOBA but its restrictive IP terms killed innovation dead in its tracks. All Blizzard does now is make reskin of old game(but excellent games) and release classic version of MMO’s. What happened to the company?
- Fnoord 7y agoBlizzard will release a remaster of WC3 at 31 Dec 2019. They send a C&D to the platform which hosted bnetd an open source battle.net clone (IIRC Sourceforge). All of their games run well in Wine. Heck, I played WC3 in 2005 in Wine.
- atm0sphere 7y agoman, i miss blizzard north. the company was co-opted some time after d2 LoD and everything has been downhill since then.
- WaxProlix 7y agoVivendi Games bought them in the late 90s and started trading long-term quality for results. Blizzard North, Diablo creators, were laid off due to slow development of D3 in 2005. Insiders say that the culture shifted slowly towards business and away from caring about games per se. Blizzard's big thing was that they'd innovate and build without fear of costs, famously canceling numerous games (Titan, eg) with no ROI because they felt it just wasn't right. In 2008, Activision bought Vivendi and took Blizzard along with them. For a while now we've just been seeing the long-term effects of those shorter-term profitability policies. It's sad, but it kind of happened a long time ago.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Fnoord 7y agoPeople say the same about WoW. After WotLK (2008-2010 era being WotLK) it went downhill. ArenaNet/NCSoft's Guild Wars 2 consists of former Blizzard employees. Then there's Max Schaefer's Runic Games with Torchlight (2). They went poof a while ago though. Blizzard/Activision are still very profitable (record this year), yet what they come up with is Diablo mobile (reskin by a Chinese company, of the infamous quote "don't you guys have phones?"), and fired a lot of employees.
- chkuendig 7y agoWould be great to have a platform-support filter (at least for Android/iOS/Windows/Mac/Linux)
- aw3c2 7y agoNot too useful in its current form as it freely mixes third-party engines with actual free games.
- afandian 7y agoMy mind was cast back to "LEMINGS", an amusingly named clone for the Acorn Archimedes. Don't know the license status. https://youtu.be/c-WrhrA6ny0?t=228 https://youtu.be/c-WrhrA6ny0?t=228 Some amusing messages if you run `strings` on the binary: http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads
- kzrdude 7y agoRttr is a solid settlers 2 clone, And not to forget, endless sky is a great escape velocity alike.
- haolez 7y agoI strongly recommend OpenTTD and OpenMW. They surpass the original games, in my opinion.
- kevin42 7y agoThese aren't all clones. Many of them are just playable versions of games that have had their source code released. IMO a clone refers to a new implementation, but a lot of these are just modified and re-released versions of the actual game.
- reshie 7y agothe term clone has been used that way a lot even commercially just pointing to game mechanics and other game elements. i do believe what this list is showing is probably more in line with the term clone though where it is basically a copy but their own assets or the original assets(you had to buy the game and thus have the assets) but their own engine which is less common but to name a couple openmw, and gemrb.
- smcameron 7y agoAlso some of them aren't clones at all as I understand the term. The "similar" tag covers this, I guess. "Playable" also seems to have a pretty nebulous meaning. The absence of "playable" certainly does not mean "not playable."
- astrobe_ 7y agoI understand the meaning of the "playable" tag. I know for sure that Minetest and Oolite are 100% playable, and yet they don't have the tag?
- account42 7y agoYou should send a pull request. https://github.com/opengaming/osgameclones https://github.com/opengaming/osgameclones
- Abimelex 7y agoI believe 0 A.D. is missing in the list https://play0ad.com/ https://play0ad.com/ EDIT: ah sorry, it's there. But really nice Age of Empires / Empire Earth mix up / clone. :)
- arendtio 7y agoI wonder if ioquake3 qualifies as a 'clone'. I mean, isn't it based on the original source code? Nevertheless, it is a nice list of open source games with quite a few old friends :-)
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoThis list should be ranked by popularity of such games. It would make it much more useful.
- Fnoord 7y agoVery nice curated list! Its going to be an ever ongoing battle to keep it accurate. Something like this would be great on Wikipedia or collaboratively editable in some other way, or allowing forks on say GitHub.
- chirau 7y agoIs there anything close to Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheCycoONE 7y agoFrets on Fire X (https://fofix.github.io/ https://fofix.github.io/) is one. And I guess the original Frets on Fire. Edit: Clone Hero looks more recent/active. However I'm not sure it's open source. https://clonehero.net https://clonehero.net
- rafaelvasco 7y agoClone Hero appears to be the most active. Made in Unity, nice.
- l8nite 7y agoRocksmith is good too, but more serious
- noname120 7y agoAnother one that works great but is little known is Guitarrero. It has a website[1] and it is open-source as well[2]. When I still played Guitar Hero clones, it was the one with the best performances. [1] http://playguitarrero.online.fr/index.php?en http://playguitarrero.online.fr/index.php?en [2] https://github.com/fontaromain/Guitarrero https://github.com/fontaromain/Guitarrero
- tazard 7y agoHey cool! I made one of these too. If anyone is interested in minesweeper: https://minesweeper.zone/ https://minesweeper.zone/ And the GitHub: https://github.com/reed-jones/minesweeper_js https://github.com/reed-jones/minesweeper_js Doesn't work well on Mobile unfortunately, but it's pretty good for killing time in desktop (if I do say so myself)
- ludde 7y agoNice to see this list. I'm the original author of both ScummVM and OpenTTD. Feel free to ask me anything :)
- chubs 7y agoWow, that's quite impressive! I love playing old sierra games on ScummVM. Don't really have any questions, just wanted to say thanks :)
- mkesper 7y agoHow did you manage to get free assets for OpenTTD? It's a barrier for including many of the listed games in, say, Debian.
- ludde 7y agoAll the assets were recreated by various designers/people. In the early days it depended on the original game's resources.
- LyalinDotCom 7y agoThe number of games on this list surprised me. Kudos to all these developers!
- wheresvic1 7y agoGreat list! I was surprised to see that wesnoth is not tagged as playable though!
- VectorLock 7y agoThis was useful for scrolling through and rediscovering old classics like Abuse and Stars! Its amazing that so many old games are under if not active development being reimplemented.