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

[Thomas Strub <ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 08:12:10PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> 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:
> >
> 
> 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.

You can't grow all the time. There have to be breaks where you can
breath. Think freeciv is in a phase where it is breathing. Many changes
are made to make the codebase better and clearer. When work is finished
there will be a time where freeciv will grow. But freeciv doesn't need
to grow only because it is nice to grow.
 
> > 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.

Good ideas don't help all the time and they have to satisfy many
constraints:

Realism (most time)
Playability
More fun (not more micromanagement)
Simple (i should be possible to play freeciv with paper and pencil)
Balanced (the ideas shouldn't prefer a small amount of players)
The AI should be able to play with the new rule 

You are saying that freeciv is static. 
Have you looked into the changelog? Have you seen the big number of
small changes which are made?

Freeciv is doing one step after another. With to fast development you
can get something which is named freeciv, but it doesn't behave like it.

The goal from the first programmers was to make an over net playable
clone from civ I. 

> 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.

What is a "major" rule change? 
I think your "migration" is a minor rulechange. 
The benefits are marginal when it isn't well-balanced. With your
micromanagement idea there wouldn't be a benefit which is bigger than
the cost for the player and the developpers.
 
> 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.

Perhaps the rules don't differ that much. But the freeciv-engine is much
different. 
We have other land-generators and the multiplayersystem is concurrent
against nothing? Or at maximum turn based.

> 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?

Why are there that many people playing chess? Or other games. Think of
freeciv as a game. People want to play a game. And when you do major
changes between 2 releases people will ask why the game doesn't behave
like in past. And they will hate you and use the old version.
 
> 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.

I would like to make my own game, but in another genre. I like paper and
pencil games, and it's fun to play that sort of game against other
people. Freeciv isn't a game with to much random or where you need a to
fast reaction. 

Why should we try something new? We know that freeciv is successful and
we know that it is.

> 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.

The current maintainers are the 3rd or 4th generation of maintainers and
they haven't change to much. I think that is great work. Freeciv has
nothing to do with feauturism. It is slowly developping. 

> 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.

What is "4X TBS"?

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Strub  ***  eMail ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
jb: people are stupid, they don't want to learn.