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OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
- tigerlily 7mo ago> The game logic is Based on original DOS Civilization 1 game version 475.05 disassembly. Love more details on how this was done and the translation to human-readable code.
- indy 7mo agoSince this requires some files from the original Civilization how do people obtain legal copies of the game? It's not available on Steam or GOG (Or am I being hopelessly naïve by asking such a question?)
- chocochunks 7mo agoYou go on eBay or similar site and you pay for a used copy on floppy or CD-ROM. Then using the appropriate tool you back those files up and use them for OpenCiv 1. Cheap, no. Convenient, no. But legal. If you're lucky you stumble across it in a thrift store that wasn't paying particular attention and assumed it was a puzzle or a board game.
- jstummbillig 7mo agoSo: Yes, hopelessly naive.
- hdgvhicv 7mo agoI still have the floppies and manual in a box in the attic. Bit of a hoarder in that way I’m afraid. Question then is do I need to find a floppy drive to obtain the files or can I get them elsewhere. Of course who knows if the floppy’s still work. I remember having problems with my Star Trek 25th anniversary floppies around 1996ish, and today it’s 30 years later.
- caminanteblanco 7mo agoI mean from a legal perspective, original media is the only recourse. But if we expand the options we're willing to avail ourselves of, there's a lot of high quality backups online. So far as I know, Take-Two Interactive is extremely lenient, especially since they don't offer any way to purchase Civ1 or 2
- j16sdiz 7mo agoOwning the original game does not automatically grant you right to make or use in derivative works.
- wtallis 7mo agoNot 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 the concept of an "essential step" stretches to cover modifying your program to run on a new OS decades after its original host platform has gone extinct. Regardless, making such a modification for personal use only would be hard for a copyright owner to win a lawsuit over even if they could find out about it. But publicly distributing your derivative work like this is definitely violating the original's copyrights.
- rahorvat 7mo agoWell, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use doctrine.
- j16sdiz 7mo ago
- dvh 7mo agoTime to pimp up my throne room
- ixv0 7mo agoIn Civ 1 you bring ameliorations to your palace, not throne room. Please hand in your geek card.
- mmastrac 7mo agoThis 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 -- lots of other recompilation efforts work this was as well, but it's a muddy place to be.
- lstodd 7mo agoIt 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.
- miki123211 7mo agoNobody cares until the original company wants to release a remaster in 10 years.
- lstodd 7mo agoThen 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.
- rahorvat 7mo agoWell, the 'intel opcodes' are just a proof of concept. It was important, for me, to prove it could be done. If you look deeper in the available code there is already a bunch of code that has nothing to do with 'intel opcodes'. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design is the best practice in this situation.
- 1313ed01 7mo ago> 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.
- AtlasBarfed 7mo agoThere is a win 3.1 port for wider screens that do box will run
- Joel_Mckay 7mo ago86Box runs on modern MacOS, but is not very performant for games on ARM. https://github.com/86Box/86Box https://github.com/86Box/86Box There are also patch sets available for modern PCs to support legacy MSDOS, and Windows 3.1/95/98/ME. Attempting to install/run on modern hardware will usually blue-screen without the workarounds. =3 https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x
- thih9 7mo ago> Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Until you want better graphics, network, touch support, etc, etc. Some people may not want that; and there are workarounds, even in dosbox itself; still, they are just that. The page lists similar plans in FAQ: “To add additional functionalities (features) to the game (like online gaming, scalable HQ Grahics, HQ Audio, plugins, etc.).”
- _the_inflator 7mo agoWhat 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 combined with design. If it matches optimally it will make you marvel otherwise not so much. So there is no right or wrong only what do you want?
- haolez 7mo agoCan anyone give some hints on what made Civ 1 special compared to other classic entries in the franchise? Despite the nostalgia factor, of course.
- Macha 7mo agoHonestly it feels to me that Civ1 - Civ2 is the most direct upgrade in the series. Civ 2 was mostly just a better civ 1. From civ4 onwards, the series was a lot more willing to shake things up in its gameplay.
- Narishma 7mo agoCiv 3 already started to shake things up.
- vintermann 7mo agoCiv 2 was without doubt a much uglier civ 1, though. Isometric graphics in win 3.11 wasn't a good bet. Civ 1 had good pixel art (look at those mountains! Not to mention the intro), good colors (and more of them!) and clean iconography. For me the look was part of the magic, so I never got into Civ 2.
- antihipocrat 7mo agoI considered Alpha Centauri as the sequel, both in the continuation of Civ 1s final goal and the expanded gameplay.
- caminanteblanco 7mo agoIn my opinion, Civ1 was fundamentally simpler than any other Civ game. It is like the difference between playing DOOM and Halo. Civ 1 has very few units, very few civ types, very few anything really. That means that it is easy to keep the whole game in your head at once. For me, its a totally different experience.
- SL61 7mo agoIt's simple (both in terms of gameplay and graphics) and it's the fastest Civ game to complete a full playthrough. Later releases made the game slower and more complex.
- yitchelle 7mo agoWhile not exactly the same, there is also https://www.freeciv.org/ https://www.freeciv.org/
- ixv0 7mo agoAlso worth mentioning is C-evo, even if it's not being developed further afaik http://c-evo.org/ http://c-evo.org/
- boredhedgehog 7mo agoC-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon. https://app.zdechov.net/c-evo/ https://app.zdechov.net/c-evo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago> C-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon. What was the reason for this?
- PeterBBB 7mo agoThe forks built with Lazarus in instead of Delphi, and are cross platform, Linux as well as Windows.
- culi 7mo ago- civ 1 --> OpenCiv1 - civ 2 --> FreeCiv - civ 3 --> OpenCiv3 - civ 4 --> ??? - civ 5 --> UnCiv
- netbioserror 7mo agoI really wish the FreeCiv team would focus on their SDL build instead of all these fiddly and very fickle UI toolkits. They have an incredibly cool hex-based hybridized Civ 2/3 ruleset that might be the best of all worlds, IF it could actually start consistently on all systems. Drop GTK and Qt, clean it up, add some modern quality of life keybinds and UI info, make it the universal target.
- wiseowise 7mo agoLooks like C# completely taken over gamedev.
- loganhood 7mo agoThere are also some folks working on a similar project for Civilization 2. https://github.com/axx0/Civ2-clone https://github.com/axx0/Civ2-clone
- rahorvat 7mo agoYes, also a great project :)
- leptoniscool 7mo agoIs there a similar project for Masters of Orion?
- hyperpl 7mo agohttps://github.com/1oom-fork/1oom https://github.com/1oom-fork/1oom is the one I recommend
- GauntletWizard 7mo agoThere's another recommendation that I haven't tried, but I've played a bunch of https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors and can recommend it. I wish there were one for MOO2, though. With some modern rebalancing...
- danielparsons 7mo agoI 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.
- port3000 7mo agoTrue, found this study fascinating, basically coming to the same conclusion: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11846-020-00378-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11846-020-00378-0
- Tarks 7mo agoIs there anything similar for Civ IV? So many top tier mods break after a while due to the same memory issues.
- ixv0 7mo ago"OpenCiv1 uses .NET 8 and Avalonia UI framework" So.... way bigger filesize than the original game + dosbox running on a html server? Nice exercise though, but I'll stick to the original. By the way CivNet (civ1 + networking for Win 3.11) runs perfectly in Wine
- whizzter 7mo agoAvalonia is a native UI toolkit (kinda WPF inspired).
- polski-g 7mo agoWe got civ 2, civ 3, and civ 1. But when will we get the greatest civ ever, civ 4?
- TiredOfLife 7mo agoThose who like civ 4 are playing civ 4. Even with dll mods it works great in linux
- BirAdam 7mo agoThis is a great idea. I do play Civ1 on my XT class machine (NEC V20 @ 10MHz, 1MB RAM, 64MB IDE, 256K Trident VGA, NE2000, Adlib) but the turn times are horrendous as this is a 1991 game being run on a 1982 CPU. Realistically, most people would have been playing on either a 286 or 386. Having the game available on modern hardware, I imagine it’d be far more enjoyable. I’ll give it a go.
- j45 7mo agoEmulators are ok
- thomasmarton 7mo agoI'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.
- applfanboysbgon 7mo agoWithout looking at the codebase, I can already say this is a big ask because it uses the Avalonia framework for cross-platform deployment. .NET Framework 3.5 is Windows-only, and there was a heap of massive breaking changes when the .NET Framework was replaced by the superior .NET Core (now just .NET), so it would be a pretty big maintenance burden to try to maintain a separate build target for that.
- rahorvat 7mo agoFor Win 7, you can easily compile with .NET core 6 and Avalonia framework for .NET core 6. I have tested it and it works :)
- sehugg 7mo agoI really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)
- pugchat 7mo ago[dead]
- krb5 7mo agohttps://github.com/Solen1985/CivOne https://github.com/Solen1985/CivOne Worth mentioning this one also
- rahorvat 7mo agoSadly :( It was abandoned years ago...
- port3000 7mo agoNice one! Wish someone would make a browser based version a la Chronodivide's RA2
- damotiansheng 7mo ago[dead]
- damotiansheng 7mo ago[dead]
- 0xkilroywashere 7mo ago[dead]
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoI'm looking for similar colonization rewrite. FreeCol lacks that retro look and feel
- whizzter 7mo agoIt's on that list of things I would've love to do with infinite time. Especially as it actually had a hotseat multiplayer-mode that would be awesome to put in a networked context (iirc it might've been a hack enabled with a hex-editor but it was fun).