[rrreese]

What I find fascinating about this project is it’s longevity. It was started in 1995, a year before Civ II came out. I remember playing it in 2000. And here it is still going. Development is pretty active and there is even a 3D mode.

[catach]

An interesting thing about Open Source game projects is that, if successful, they only ever work on that one game.

[mikepurvis]

It depends on the game/engine. ScummVM plays dozens (hundreds?) of games of course, but even something like OpenRA plays Dune 2000, C&C, and also Red Alert.

[catach]

Projects dedicated to the preservation and modest enhancement of existing games is even more illustrative of the vague point I'm attempting to gesture towards.

[DaedPsyker]

Is this in terms of contributors?

[catach]

To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done", with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new game.

[hombre_fatal]

I think that's just the nature of software never being done + the only reason games have been declared "done" in the past is when you had to master a single boxed release.

[catach]

I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.

You allude to the reasons why though, with the box release requirement--though that's a part of the greater economic reasons.

[account42]

> I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.

I wish that was the case because then you as the player could be done with paying for the game once. Instead, the current trend is to make games into live services that have continuous development funded with continuous revenue streams. Moch more predictable for the companies to see their revenue slowly go up or down than invest in a completely new game that might be a hit or might flop completely.

[AaronM]

And there are a fair number of open source recreations that keep games alive like OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and OpenRCT (Roller Coaster Tycoon)

[account42]

Does that really mean anything? For an open source project the "apparatus" is whatever community forms to maintain that project and yes, the community won't just decide that as a whole they are now going to create a different game. But individual contributors absolutely can and do decide that they are done with the game and move on to something else.

[keyle]

A miracle or a curse?

[Silverback_VII]

sounds more like a curse.

[Hamcha]

I beg to differ, the real beauty is how anyone can fork them to follow their own vision e.g. Open TTD has a fork with bundled community patches dating decades that never landed in the main game, or Space Station 13, a game that plays completely different depending on which codebase you play (they don't even have matching licenses anymore, and all of them copyleft).

There's even a nice talk on SS13 specifically since the project is massive and sees changed ever hour (in a single version, let alone all versions or even the multiple remakes currently in development): https://youtu.be/z5sjwqUten0

[aasasd]

For some reason Youtube's offerings for ‘Space Station 13’ look like a supply of memery straight from elementary school, at least going by what I see in the list. I managed to find one vid by ‘MandaloreGaming’, whom I watched one time in the past and pinned as vaguely decent, but even that didn't evade the attention-deficit mode of editing.

[Arrath]

Stories of utter ridiculous shenanigans in SS13 from Something Awful's thread on the game are my go-to.

EG https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=28...

[Kinrany]

I would never guess to search for a GDC talk on Space Station 13. Thank you for this!

[kubafu]

Care to share a link to the OpenTTD fork you mentioned?

[Hamcha]

Sure: https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches

The Readme includes the list of applied patches.

[kubafu]

Thank you!

[mschuster91]

Probably https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches

[catach]

That is also an interesting attribute, and for similar sociological reasons.

[wing-_-nuts]

I've recently installed freeciv after struggling in vain to get civ II running on linux. I'll admit I haven't really given it a full chance, but I dearly miss civ II. Apparently one can get it working by installing dosbox, win 3.1 on dosbox, then civ II, but I haven't gotten around to attempting that.

[AlecSchueler]

You can also use the civ2 ruleset and grab a civ 2 tileset in Freeciv. That way you get the same look and behaviour as you may be missing.

I'm sure someone has probably recreated the campaigns too, though you would be missing the memorable FMV sequences.

[aasasd]

If neither Wine nor VMs work for you for some reason, you might actually have an easier time with emulating classic MacOS. There are emulators specifically for it, they have to impersonate just very few models of the hardware, so success is basically guaranteed. The most annoying parts of the experience are if the emulator is too barebones, and that some sites insist on distributing Mac software in ‘StuffIt’ archives, which require a proprietary program in Mac itself, and can't just be uncompressed on the host system.

[spapas82]

I'm using this setup (win 3.1 on dosbox) to run mordor, an old shareware rpg. It works great I totally recommend giving it a try with civ II!

[suby]

I have civ ii working on wine without a problem. It's worked with every version of wine I've tried going back to like 2017. I have both the multiplayer gold edition and the original and I'm pretty sure both should work without any fuss.

[antifa]

Last time I tried, I had an easier time getting Civ2 MGE working on wine than freeciv.