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

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

From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 04:58:01AM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> > > experience about what works and what does not.
> >
> > What are your goals then?  Really.  State them plainly in your own
> > terms.
> >
> > I can tell you one thing.  Right now, nobody at the Game Developer
> > Conference would ever give you guys a standing ovation for
> > what you've done.
>
> They probably wouldn't give developers of Infocom games a standing
> ovation either.

Ha, a fat lot you know!  Brian Moriarty's lectures are the best thing at
the GDC!  Why?  Because he's *original*.  He does cool things with
harpischord music, slowly changing lunar eclipses, and cloaks and
candles.  He doesn't sit around saying, "You know, what this industry
really needs to do, is to sit around cloning all that good stuff we did
back in the early 80's at Infocom."  He's still alive and kicking.  We
respect his early career, and we respect that he has continued to
innovate throughout his ongoing career.

Chris Crawford, well, some people would cheer him, others would boo him.
I'd cheer him.  He didn't sit around trying to *clone* someone's
storytelling engine, he tried to build a fundamentally new technology.
Pity he's disappeared down that rabbit hole and shows no signs of coming
out.  I'd like to see him produce relevant work again.

> Fact is, there is nothing else quite like FreeCiv out there.

How do you square that against Civ II, Civ III, Call To Power II, and
Alpha Centauri?  And, now the CTP2 source code has been released,
although it's a fairly restrictive license.  Still, it's as moddable as
it's gonna get... once they get it working.  Activision had to rip out
some sound libraries that they couldn't distribute.

> If I were to
> compare it to something, I'd compare it to The Sims or SimCity -- all
> three are very open-ended with extreme flexibility as to how
> the game is played.

Have you even played the various other Civ genre games?

> Anyway, having said that, another benefit of FreeCiv is that it's free
> software.  If you don't like the direction the project leaders are
> taking the project, you have all the code, and thus are
> empowerd to fork off and start your own project.

Yes, that is true.  If your conservativism is unworkable, and your code
turns out to be any good to work with, I *might* start a project with a
"kitchen sink, add everything, no restrictions" mentality.  A rapid
prototyping project.

But, I will be weighing this against my true mission, Ocean Mars.

> Version control systems like Arch/tla
> (www.gnuarch.org) make it easy for you to integrate upstream FreeCiv
> patches into your tree (and likewise, for FreeCiv developers to
> integrate your patches into theirs if they so choose).

Actually, that could be an interesting piece of the puzzle.

> As a final point, nobody is getting paid to work on FreeCiv.

And I don't get paid to work on Ocean Mars.

> Everyone
> is a volunteer here.  One thing you must understand is that people
> volunteering their time to hack on projects will only hack on things
> that interest them.  If what you want people to do has no interest for
> them,

Right.  This is all to establish whether any of you guys are Game
Designers.  It's a good chance that none of you are.  I don't think a
Game Designer would tolerate Civ II cloning indefinitely, nor avoiding
the ICS problem.  Because that basically means the game designer is not
designing anything.  Asking a Game Designer to regurgitate Civ II is
like asking a Linux techie to regurgitate Microsoft APIs.  Forget about
it!

> Constructive criticism is generally welcome in Free Software projects.
> "You guys suck," which is what your more recent comments boil down do,
> seems rather pointless to me.

Nice words can make you very lazy about your problems.  You either think
cloning Civ II forever is a problem, or you don't.


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

"Desperation is the motherfucker of Invention." - Robert Prestridge