[Freeciv-Dev] Why are you cloning Civ II? (was Re: Migration)

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I apologize in advance for feeling it's now time to raise the hardest
hitting questions.  I've played quite a lot of Freeciv now, at least in
single player mode, so I feel it's now reasonable for me to pass
judgement on certain issues.  This may make some of you mad, but some of
you may need to hear it.  I hope you realize I'm saying it for your own
good.

From: Mike Kaufman [mailto:kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 04:03:14PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> >You can either take the view that Freeciv is a
> >precious tower
> >whose game design integrity should be defended, or you can
> >start working
> >towards Freeciv being a game design engine rather than such
> >a specific game.
>
> That's unfortunate. If you want a game design engine, I
> suggest you look up Xconq.

I already did that before talking at any length with you guys.  Because
of some early things I said, I was ultimately unable to get along with
one of their developers.  Having made several mistakes of communication
and tone with them, I did not feel a need to repeat them here.  :-)

> One of freeciv's goals is flexibility in gameplay options, but I
> have no interest in the kind of redefinition I think you have in mind.
> And "you won't know until you try." is usually the type of
> statement that's
> impetus for the kitchen sink approach. It also tends to breed
> a lot of hurt
> feelings when a lot of time is spent coding for an eventually
> rejection of the idea on whatever grounds.

Time for the "fair criticism" dept.  Privately, I've heard you guys get
that criticism anyways, just for having slow turnaround times for
incorporating certain people's patches.  I can't remember what exactly.
But you definitely appear to be pursuing a "Gatekeeper" management
strategy, and you can't get lotsa people working on something doing
that.  You seem to have plenty of labor for your purposes, but you also
seem to be limited by your purposes.

Creating a framework for more game variants is pretty much synonymous
with creating a managerial infrastructure that allows lotsa things to
get quickly checked in to a source pool.  It's a question of project
growth.  Do you want to grow Freeciv more, or are you happy where it's
at?  To get a project past a certain size, you have to give contributors
significant ownership and control over a project.

> I think there's plenty of room for doing more than simply
> tweaking left for
> freeciv, but face it, freeciv is a mature project as open
> source projects
> go. There's still a ton of room to play in ai/ and agents/
> and what have you
> for client modification, but at its core, freeciv is still a
> game based on Civilization-type gameplay.

So is the Migrants concept.  It wouldn't be at all difficult to
implement in the codebase you have, it's not a complicated idea.  What
you are really saying, is you don't like ideas greatly different from
Civ II.

You don't have to like every / any idea I might offer you, or someone
else might offer you.  But the litmus test is, have you *ever* agreed to
make a major rule change away from Civ II?  That says something about
the dynamism or stasis of your efforts in terms of Game Design.

I see nothing significantly different in Freeciv from Civ II, so I think
my question is already answered.  You are cloning, not innovating.  Even
in areas where you might offer "merely" technical innovations, like AI,
you have nothing profound.

If you are happy, be happy... we wouldn't / couldn't both be happy the
way you think about things now.  I just hope you don't confuse the
perception of "Oh, we're open to something different..." with the
reality that you don't allow any noticeable differences.  It has nothing
to do with the maturity of your codebase, it's about what you think is
or isn't valuable to develop.

Why are you cloning Civ II?  What's the endgame for you guys?  Why
didn't you just buy copies of Civ II and play them?  Civ II has always
been highly moddable, that's part of why it was so popular compared to
SMAC.  For all this coding effort that you have done, what feature did
you get that's "worth it" over spending $30 for Civ III?

Don't any of you guys want to make your *own* game?  A game isn't yours
just because you cloned it.  Cloning will teach you something about AI
coding, or whatever.  But clearly it hasn't taught you anything
*profound* about AI, or UI design, or networking, or whatever.  It has
taught you about tried-and-true methods that were au courrant in 1995.

Please.  Move on.  You guys clearly have some talent, to have kept this
project running as long as you have.  But you haven't *achieved*
anything over Civ II, or Civ III.  Please *achieve* something.

It's sad enough how little *Civ III* has achieved.

I hope you realize I'm saying this for your own good.  If not for your
collective good, at least for the good of certain people in your group.
There are better things you could be doing as Game Developers than
cloning Civ II forever.  Especially if you care about the 4X TBS genre.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.