What is Reddit's opinion of Open Source Game Clones?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Sibling comment is correct (you need the game assets).

To further expound upon this, a lot of games open-source their engine.

XCom wasn't one of them, but it's common for someone to take the engine to an old game, update it to run on modern systems, fix some bugs, add a couple of non-game-altering features here and there, and then publish it. If you want to actually play the game, you still need the assets.

Examples: Doom (Zdoom, countless others), Duke Nukem 3D (eduke32, countless others), Arx Fatalis (Arx Libertatis), Theme Hospital (Corsix-TH), Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD*)

Some games go further and try to replace the assets, with varying results; OpenTTD used to require Transport Tycoon Deluxe's assets, but no longer does.

Big ass list: http://osgameclones.com/

Many popular old games with high replayability have open source engine replacement projects and there even few projects that started like that and then become better than original: Dark Mod, 0 A.D, Spring RTS, OpenTTD, etc.

There also multiple games that original developers released source code, but sadly not all of them was properly ported on Linux (Jagged Alliance 2, JA2 v1.13) and not all of them open source (Free Space).

Of course there is plenty of games where source code is are actually lost forever long time ago, but for anything else it's reasonable to encourage IP holders to release source. That would always give longer life for old game you like.

So from one point of view I support what GOG was doing, but I would be more happy if some developers released their code as open source instead. Fans would put much more time and love than any "porting" company would. Rewriting from scratch is sadly not really feasible in case of many games that you can't extend or improve gameplay-wise.

PS: Good collection of projects can be found there:

http://osgameclones.com/

I meant internal compatibility for RPCS3.

Emulation is about preserving, not gaming.

It it was about gaming, someone would start a libre implementation of the Heavy Rain/Persona/Final Fantasy engine as OpenAGE2/OpenRCT2 or zillions of engines at http://osgameclones.com

There are fundamental differences.

Back then, graphics were primitive as crap, no matter what the developers did. So the developers focused on gameplay. Most of the games with depth, crap graphics or not, have staying power. People still play that old shit, like Thief, any early Sid Meier game, Age of Empires, Baldur's Gate, even old school Doom. Many are still so popular that open-source clones are being made right now.

Nowadays, great graphics, mostly shallow gameplay. When the developers are on a budget, they often have to choose between gameplay or graphics. And pretty pictures sell. People often buy games based on visual presentations where it's impossible to show any depth. Pretty, pretty games, finished in a day or three, never played again. But they make for great income.

So I mostly agree with /u/jojotmagnifficent. Hardcore gamers want gameplay. Weeks of gameplay, and damn the graphics. But todays average gamer? Mostly casual gamers. They prefer bite-sized entertainment, at least based on what they spend their money on.

Condescending or not, he has a point.

I'm just going to point you at the Steam debian wiki page because I've just skimmed it and it starts with the most important things to check you've got setup. It's a pretty simple process so long as you're happy editing a text file and running simple commands.

On the other hand, I would encourage you to look through the list of Debian finest games to see if there's anything native that takes your fancy, or many of the OS Game Clones that are packaged (usually without data files, checkout game-data-packager for safely converting those).

If you're talking about clones or reimplementations of existing games, there is also this list: http://osgameclones.com/

(Which includes my own project xoreos </shamelessplug>)

lost source, lol? free open source homm 3 WoG: http://forum.vcmi.eu/portal.php with a launcher that downloads and installs selected mods automatically. other open-source clones: http://osgameclones.com/) @locked source code issue.

I would've expected from a HD remaster to look a bit better graphically.

In Steam there are about 1.5 k, and I have about 50 other games that have linux version through Humble Bundle but that version never made it to steam. Or Achron that offers a Linux client through their website but not on steam.

There are also some few games out there that aren't listed anywhere, because they offer the client through their website (like Minecraft).

And then there are the games that we were able to play even before steam, like super tux kart, super tux (world), tremulous, Open Arena, the list is pretty big here you can see a list of some of this games here http://osgameclones.com/

Finally there are some games that had a native implementation of the engine made by the community, like theme hospital, or doom 3. You have to own the game and probably use wine to extract the content folder, but after that it's a native title.

PS: there are also a ton of emulators, but I don't know if you count that as native.

Like here. It's fun for me to just browse that list, try stuff out. Sure, lot of it is crap compared to commercial games, but the happier you are when you find something really good.

Absolutely true. A surprising number of them have open-source game engine recreations, though.. Only a minority of the listed engine recreations are good enough for a full playthrough, but there are a lot listed.

Then there are emulators and compatibility libraries like Wine.

Diablo I and Outcast.

I don't really care of Linux ports, I want F/OSS cross-platform ports, this is the only way the game can live forever. And I strongly believe that all worthy games will be reimplemented as free software sooner or later, which a great list of existing reimplementations proves.

we already have a libregamewiki link, maybe osgameclones could be added, and maybe this drm free steam list for people concerned with drm on steam, some other might find this icculus FAQ page useful.

This list is a bit redundant to http://osgameclones.com/ and less precise. What is free (the engine, the content, the whole game) and more important is the project in a playable state and still being developed.

• Open source mechanical CAD, 3D/parametric.
• Marketing of the thousands of great open-source applications, if only to deny the field to competitors from which users will later complain plaintively that they just can't migrate for vague reasons.
• Some of the actively-developed open-source game engines and open-source game clones.
• Narrow tools to assist refugees from Windows 7, whose support ends January 2020.

There's openrct2( roller coaster tycoon 2 game assets are needed) and NFS2Se for Linux too. I forgot to mention them. They're great. And most console games can be played with emulators so I put retroarch on there. Makes nice gaming computer. One more thing here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

http://osgameclones.com

These are by no means exhaustive. I work mostly on OpenRCT2, we already have multiplayer (synchronous lockstep over TCP), but there are still lots of items to work on.

I can also recommend openage (https://github.com/SFTtech/openage), they still are up to implementing multiplayer so you can test various things.

Thanks but not really :D I just copy-pasted the links from the Open Source Game Clones list. I was chatting with the project leader through email early this morning so it was fresh in my head! http://osgameclones.com/

Along with OpenTTD, there's also OpenXCOM, freeCiv, Arx Libertatis, Freespace 2, and OpenRCT. System Shock 1 is supposed to have its source code released sometime soon too. Open source isn't really the same thing as free to play though, most of them require you to have the original game to import art assets and levels and stuff.

http://osgameclones.com/ seems to be a decent list.

From a quick Google, you could check out Open Source Game Clones. There are a few Java projects on there (like FreeCol).

As dleskov said though, you might want to check out libraries (like libGDX) and tutorials surrounding the area instead. Reading the source code of a complete game isn't going to help you that much, as you'll first have to understand the project structure, then the tech/libraries, then any developer quirks, etc. It may turn out that after all that, the code isn't what you're looking for.

As manbearkat mentioned, Minecraft was written in Java (and still is). While it's not at the pinnacle of developmental best practices, it is a fully functional, and more importantly, released game. A lot of people criticise the code quality, but it isn't terrible, and striving for perfection (by constant rewrites and optimisations) takes second place to actually having a functioning game.

> So Mech Commander was basically a video game version of the tabletop game?

Not exactly; it's realtime squad-based tactical with isometric portrayal. A version of the boardgame would be turn-based instead of realtime. Other than that, pretty close, I'd guess.

Quite a good game. MechCommander 2 three years later seems to have gone with 3D and a mobile camera, and although I never played that one, i think it might be the worse for that decision. But then I'm really fond of isometric, and I think despite increasing display resolutions over the years that it ages very well.

OSGameClones.com lists nothing for a reverse-engineering effort on the first game, even though the second is open-source. That might be something I'd look into in the future, but then I'd have to use Windows and figure out some reverse-engineering toolchain for that system.

This puts things in a new light for me. I can't say if I would enjoy these kinds of problem solving tasks since I have never tried it, but I tend to be good at it when applied to other things. I have done a website before, but had to technical skills to figure out more complex things or knew where to look to get information. I want to try out looking at source codes of other games. I found some source files for various games at http://osgameclones.com/ but have nothing to take a peek at the files.

What free software is available to look at the code and compile it?

Yes, indeed selling would be illegal, but I won't be selling it and keeping it open sourced.

Then you are saying all the games here are actually illegal then. But I can see that they are still available online.

> Sadly, while a lot of these games get a lot of love by windows gamers, so many linux gamers overlook games because they're not FPS or AAA style games.

> I would say Windows gamers are more biased towards FPS/AAA games, Linux gamers tend to be much more into strategy, RPG and quirky indie platformer games. What is giving you the impression a greater proportion of Linux gamers are into FPS?

Are there any statistics on this? Most of what I can find is per game games sold per platform , not enough to say where we are more into this or that type of game.

Maybe a proportion of active projects in OpenSourceGameClones games grouped by type could do it at least for open source ones.

There are open source versions of a bunch of these old games out there - I'd recommend checking out Open Source Game clones, there are open source versions of all three of those games linked there.