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53-538: Freeciv is a single- and multiplayer turn-based strategy game for workstations and personal computers inspired by the proprietary Sid Meier's Civilization series. It is available for most desktop computer operating systems and available in an online browser version . Released under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later , Freeciv is free and open-source software . The game's default settings are closest to Civilization II , in both gameplay and graphics, including

106-424: A project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch , but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism . Grounds for forking are varying user preferences and stagnated or discontinued development of

159-448: A word processor for IBM PC compatible machines and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on having the same look, feel, data format, and behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share and thus pay back the associated extra development costs created by

212-538: A civilization, its wealth, and cultural and scientific advances. At the computer science department at Aarhus University , three students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier 's Civilization , which was a stand-alone PC game for MS-DOS , decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X -based multiplayer Civilization -like strategy game. The students—Peter Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg—started development in November 1995;

265-529: A fork, with examples: Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch". With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git , the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub , Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that

318-490: A games-as-a-service model ( Overwatch , Destiny 2 , and Star Wars Battlefront 2 ), were indicators to many that the single-player model for AAA was waning. Manveer Heir, who had left EA after finishing his gameplay design work for Mass Effect Andromeda , acknowledged that the culture within EA was against the development of single-player games, and with Visceral's closure, "that the linear single-player triple-A game at EA

371-501: A narrative in a particular direction, and so multiplayer games tend not to focus heavily on a linear narrative. By contrast, many single-player games are built around a compelling story. While a multiplayer game relies upon human-human interaction for its conflict, and often for its sense of camaraderie, a single-player game must build these things artificially. As such, single-player games require deeper characterisation of their non-player characters in order to create connections between

424-540: A proprietary grant in the form of a Contributor License Agreement .) Examples include macOS (based on the proprietary NeXTSTEP and the open source FreeBSD ), Cedega and CrossOver (proprietary forks of Wine , though CrossOver tracks Wine and contributes considerably), EnterpriseDB (a fork of PostgreSQL , adding Oracle compatibility features ), Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary ESM storage system, and Netezza's proprietary highly scalable derivative of PostgreSQL. Some of these vendors contribute back changes to

477-543: A remake of the Dead Space franchise. Around the same time, head of Xbox Game Studios Phil Spencer said that they still see a place for narrative-driven single-player games even though the financial drivers of the market tended to be live service games. Spencer said that developing such games with AAA-scale budgets can be risky, but with availability of services like cloud gaming and subscription services, they can gauge audience reaction to these games early on and reduce

530-614: A single player; although many of these games have modes that allow two or more players to play (not necessarily simultaneously), very few actually require more than one player for the game to be played. The Unreal Tournament series is one example of such. The earliest video games, such as Tennis for Two (1958), Spacewar! (1962), and Pong (1972), were symmetrical games designed to be played by two players. Single-player games gained popularity only after this, with early titles such as Speed Race (1974) and Space Invaders (1978). The reason for this, according to Raph Koster ,

583-400: A single-player element either as the core or as one of several game modes, single-player gaming had been viewed by the video game industry as peripheral to the future of gaming, with Electronic Arts vice president Frank Gibeau stating in 2012 that he had not approved one game to be developed as a single-player experience. The question of the financial viability of single-player AAA games

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636-540: A version of the program. The term was in use on Usenet by 1983 for the process of creating a subgroup to move topics of discussion to. "Fork" is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs ) (1991) or the Berkeley Software Distributions (BSDs) (1993–1994); Russ Nelson used the term "shattering" for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore . However, "fork"

689-546: Is available in the PortableApps format. Freeciv21 is a fork of the original Freeciv project started with the intention of modernizing the code and the client interface, and also adjusting the software more to the needs of multiplayer longturn variant. It was started by enthusiasts within the Longturn.net community. As of January 2023 it is in late developing stage. The first standard Longturn game played on Fc21 software

742-585: Is configurable: originally, map display was always in overhead mode (like in Civ I ). Isometric mode (like in Civ II and III ) and optionally hexagonal tiling (like in Civ V and VI ) were added later. In both modes, look can be further customized by switching to an alternative set of graphics (called a tileset ). The sounds can be replaced as well. Freeciv supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players. While

795-517: Is dead for the time being". Bethesda on December 7, 2017, decided to collaborate with Lynda Carter to launch a Public Safety Announcement to save single-player gaming. A few years later in 2021, EA was reported to have revived interest in single-player games, following the successful launch of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2020. The company still planned on releasing live service games with multiplayer components, but began evaluating its IP catalog for more single-player titles to revive, such as

848-441: Is distributed with many Linux distributions , offers installers for Microsoft Windows , and has been known to run on Mac OS X , MorphOS , Solaris , Ultrix , QNX , OS/2 , Cygwin , AmigaOS , AROS , RISC OS , Maemo , ZETA , SkyOS , various BSDs , and smartphones and tablets running Android . As of version 2.4, Mac OS X , and as of version 2.3, Windows versions older than Windows XP SP3 are no longer supported. Freeciv

901-462: Is down to a combination of several factors: increasingly sophisticated computers and interfaces that enabled asymmetric gameplay, cooperative gameplay and story delivery within a gaming framework, coupled with the fact that the majority of early games players had introverted personality types (according to the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator ). Although most modern games incorporate

954-418: Is sometimes made when the forked software is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the original project, e.g. MariaDB for MySQL or LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org . The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and copyleft proponents say that commercial incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable. (Copyleft licenses can, however, be circumvented via dual-licensing with

1007-664: The Freeciv-web client is released under the GNU Affero General Public License . Freeciv-web supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players. Its features are similar to the Freeciv C client, although not all of the user-interface has been ported from the C client yet. The Freeciv-web server on play.freeciv.org was shut down in March 2018, but the project

1060-530: The Noosphere , stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community". He notes in the Jargon File : Forking is considered a Bad Thing—not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between

1113-438: The change as they did not have confidence that a studio with an AAA-scale budget could produce a viable single-player game based on the popular Star Wars franchise. Alongside this, as well as relatively poor sales of games in the year prior that were principally AAA single-player games ( Resident Evil 7 , Prey , Dishonored 2 , and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided ) against financially successful multiplayer games and those offer

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1166-545: The circumstances of each turn. Matches can last anytime from a few weeks to months, and commonly involve 20 to 30 players in each one. Longturn's first game, now called LT0, started around 2004 on the Polish Civilization fanpage civ.org.pl and is now conducted at Longturn.net. It was decided that the game is a bit too slow-paced, so a new "3X movement" ruleset was devised – basically, all units had their movement points and vision radius tripled. As of December 2022,

1219-428: The community project, while some keep their changes as their own competitive advantages. In proprietary software , the copyright is usually held by the employing entity, not by the individual software developers. Proprietary code is thus more commonly forked when the owner needs to develop two or more versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version, or versions for differing operating systems, such as

1272-409: The construction of new city buildings and the deployment of new units. Players can wage war on one another or form diplomatic relationships. The game ends when one civilization has eradicated all others or accomplished the goal of space colonization , or at a given deadline. If more than one civilization remains at the deadline, the player with the highest score wins. Points are awarded for the size of

1325-429: The desktop game into a version which can be played online. Freeciv-web introduced several new features, such as play-by-email support freely available to anyone online, and support for playing the game on any real-world map location by choosing a map using Mapbox, which is not available in commercial games in the genre. The game's default settings are closest to Civilization II , both in gameplay and graphics (including

1378-479: The dominance of the city smallpox strategy that left many of the game's features unused; developing one's empire now necessitated a careful plan for city development, including the used of trade routes and phases of rapture , in which city populations grow quickly, under relatively peaceful conditions. As a result, multiplayer games were almost always played in teams and typically took longer to finish when compared to 1.x games. In 2006, TCP and UDP port number 5556

1431-463: The first playable version was released in January 1996, with bugfixing and small enhancements until April. The rules of the game were close to Civilization , while the client/server architecture was basically that of XPilot . For the developers, Freeciv 1.0 was a successful proof of concept , but a rather boring game, so they went back to XPilot . Other players and developers took over; they made

1484-581: The game available on many other operating systems, including Linux , Solaris , Ultrix , AmigaOS , and Microsoft Windows . Linux distributions started to include Freeciv . The main development goal remained to make a Civilization -like game playable over the Internet, with participants on different continents, even when connected with 14400 bit/s modems . Freeciv achieved this by using an asynchronous client-server protocol: during each turn, human users play concurrently, and their actions are sent to

1537-438: The game is turn based, human players move simultaneously. The AI players move separately, partly at the start of a turn, partly at the end. In releases before 2.0, AI players could not engage in diplomatic relationships with human players. Under the current releases, AI players will engage in a very predictable, rules-based diplomacy. Version 2.2.0 included a map editor, termed Civworld. It can create new scenarios, as well as edit

1590-408: The game map, and assigns every player to either a Freeciv client or a computer player, as specified by the configuration. From that point on, the game will run until it ends or is terminated; the server can never get back into pre-game state. The user can also start a game directly from the client: this automatically starts a Freeciv server, connects to it and starts the game. Freeciv's graphics system

1643-399: The game rules. Typically modified rules are: In order to play a game of Freeciv, a user must start up a Freeciv client and connect it to a Freeciv server . Initially, the server is in pre-game phase; in this phase, clients can connect and game configuration parameters can be changed. At some point, the server may be ordered to start a game; in response, it creates game players (nations) and

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1696-454: The larger group, or whoever controls the web site, will retain the full original name and the associated user community. Thus, there is a reputation penalty associated with forking. The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter. On the other hand, a friendly fork or a soft fork is a fork that does not intend to compete, but wants to eventually merge with the original. Eric S. Raymond , in his essay Homesteading

1749-400: The latest game was LT76. Changes to settings or rulesets are discussed in the Longturn forum. and, recently, Longturn Discord server where the community is currently centered. There is ongoing development of a few non-standard rulesets specifically adjusted for longturn multiplayer games, diverging from the rules of the original Civilization which was created as a single-player game. Greatturn

1802-553: The map currently being played. Basic scripting is available with Freeciv, but is not available in Civworld. Version 2.3 increased the limit of players from 30 to 126. There are different clients available SDL , GTK+ (version3) and Xaw3D A Qt client was added in version 2.5. The Freeciv interface is available in over 30 different languages. The addition of Gaelic was covered on BBC TV . Originally developed on IRIX , Freeciv has been ported to many different operating systems: it

1855-543: The map with many small cities as fast as possible; whoever could develop fastest would win the game, and growing and developing individual cities was not worthwhile. In practice, from around 2002, experienced players would form teams at the start of the game; a fork of Freeciv included specific features for team play. Version 2.0, released in 2005, introduced several important changes. New team playing features and advanced diplomacy made cooperative gaming more attractive. Adjustments to various costs and benefits put an end to

1908-419: The original software. Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, and without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software ( e.g. Unix ) also happen. The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century. In the software environment,

1961-554: The player and the sympathetic characters and to develop deeper antipathy towards the game's antagonists . This is typically true of role-playing games (RPGs), such as Dragon Quest and the Final Fantasy , which are primarily character-driven and have a different setting. These game elements are not firm, fixed rules; single-player puzzle games such as Tetris or racing games focus squarely on gameplay. Fork (software development) In software engineering ,

2014-515: The risk involved before releases. As the narrative and conflict in single-player gameplay is created by a computer rather than a human opponent, single-player games are able to deliver certain gaming experiences that are typically absent—or de-emphasised—in multiplayer games. Single-player games rely more heavily on compelling stories to draw the player into the experience and to create a sense of investment. Humans are unpredictable, so human players - allies or enemies - cannot be relied upon to carry

2067-462: The server for processing without awaiting the results. This kept the game playable with network latency up to a few hundreds of milliseconds. In 1998, computer players were added; they could soon beat newcomers to the game with ease, using only minor forms of cheating. Computer players are implemented directly in the server; they do not play concurrently with human players, but separately, in between turns. The game grew in popularity. A public server

2120-481: The successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs / XEmacs split, the fissioning of the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are remembered individually in hacker folklore. David A. Wheeler notes four possible outcomes of

2173-401: The technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork" as its term for this method of contribution to a project. Forks often restart version numbering from numbers typically used for initial versions of programs like 0.0.1, 0.1, or 1.0 even if the original software was at another version such as 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0. An exception

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2226-501: The units and the isometric grid). The proposal to create a web-version of Freeciv was made 6 April 2007 on the Freeciv mailing lists, and documented on the Freeciv.org wiki. Freeciv-web was originally created by Andreas Røsdal, but is now maintained by several Freeciv developers on GitHub. Freeciv-web is free and open-source software . The Freeciv C server is released under the GNU General Public License , while

2279-468: The units and the isometric grid. However, with a lot of multiplayer games being played in longturn communities, rulesets and additional variants have evolved away from the original ruleset. Freeciv is playable online at Longturn.net, freecivx.net, freecivweb.org and some temporary private servers. Players take the role of tribal leaders in 4000 B.C. who must guide their peoples through the centuries. Over time, new technologies are discovered, which allow

2332-463: The whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. 3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. In free software, forks often result from a schism over different goals or personality clashes. In a fork, both parties assume nearly identical code bases, but typically only

2385-404: The word evokes the fork system call, which causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to perform different tasks. In the context of software development, "fork" was used in the sense of creating a revision control " branch " by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of Source Code Control System : Creating a branch "forks off"

2438-454: Was LT75, started in November 2022. FREECIVX.NET is a variant of Freeciv which focuses on 3D graphics and is playable for free on www.freecivx.net). It uses the Three.js 3D engine. Freeciv-web is a version of Freeciv playable online in any modern web browser . It supports 2D isometric graphics or 3D graphics using WebGL . The game is a fork of the Freeciv project, with the goal of redesigning

2491-533: Was a similar concept on another server. FreeCivWeb.org also offers longturn games (more than fifty have been played before mid-2021) with a multiplayer ruleset which is documented in great detail. Power of Planets – Earth (formerly known as GaCivs ) is a free-to-play MMO-RTS variant based on FreeCiv. The ruleset was devised to support long-term time-based gameplay instead of turn-based strategy. Single-player video game Most modern console games and arcade games are designed so that they can be played by

2544-589: Was assigned to Freeciv by IANA . In 2017, after being hosted on Gna! for 15 years, Freeciv moved its source repository to GitHub . In 2000, CNN placed Freeciv among the "Top 10 Linux games for the holidays". In 2005, in an O'Reilly article on "Open Source Mac Gaming", Freeciv was recommended. In 2008, APC named Freeciv among the "Top 5 best (free) open source games". Linux Format selected it as "HotPick" in April 2010 and in October 2014. Freeciv

2597-508: Was described as an example in The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond . Studies and courses have used Freeciv as a platform for experimenting with the design and programming of intelligent agents . Freeciv is very configurable, down to the specific rules, so it can be played in Freeciv (default) mode, Civilization mode, Civilization II mode, or a custom mode. One or several players act as game administrators and can configure

2650-577: Was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996. Free and open-source software may be legally forked without prior approval of those currently developing, managing, or distributing the software per both The Free Software Definition and The Open Source Definition : The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this, you can give

2703-453: Was installed on which games could be played around the clock; it retained the games and published a post-game analysis webpage with per-player statistics and an animated map replay. Subsequent 1.x releases improved the GUI, improved the gameplay, optimized playability over poor connections, and added many small features. Over time, the winning strategy proved to be city smallpox , i.e. sprawling

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2756-524: Was raised following the closure of Visceral Games by Electronic Arts (EA) in October 2017. Visceral had been a studio that established itself on a strong narrative single-player focus with Dead Space , and had been working on a single-player, linear narrative Star Wars game at the time of the closure; EA announced following this that they would be taking the game in a different direction, specifically "a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency". Many commentators felt that EA made

2809-577: Was revived by a group of volunteers on freecivweb.org. Freeciv-web can be played online at a number of servers such as freecivweb.org. All the features required to play a full game of Freeciv are in place. Most servers offer multiple varieties of the game: single-player, multiplayer free-for-all, play-by-email and longturn . Freeciv Longturn is a specialized large-group-multiplayer-online-strategy variant of Freeciv featuring daylong game turns with large amounts of human opponents per map, allowing for optimal timing to build up strategic plans and readapt them to

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