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Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

378 points by pabs3 ↗ HN
While there are fewer of them, there are quite a few fully open source, open content games out there, like Thrive, 0ad, Warzone2100, Endless Sky etc.

What is your favorite fully open source, open content game?

Edit: please vote on the comments people post too. Up if you like, down if you dislike, don't vote if you haven't played it or are neutral on it.

380 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] thread
muzani
Battle for Wesnoth: https://github.com/wesnoth

Kittens: https://bitbucket.org/bloodrizer/kitten-game/src/master/

hifikuno
I just installed the Kittens game on my phone. That may have been a mistake. I am already hooked.
muzani
It took me months to break the addiction. It's an idle game and years later, I'm only halfway through the content. I am sorry, I should have added a warning.
3np
Just be happy you never got into Antimatter Dimensions...
mcv
Battle for Wesnoth is absolutely epic. I played it over a decade ago, and it a brilliant story and many great, epic battles. I have no idea what they added since then, but it's probably worth checking out.
bee_rider
Battle for Wesnoth is like the Blender or Firefox of open source games, in the "I can't believe something could have this much polish and not be a commercial product" sense. It is really well done.
Kelamir
Upvoting for Battle of Wesnoth. It's a great game and feels rewarding to succeed at. It's got a great ecosystem of addons, such as user submitted stories that you play along, so there's a plenty of content to explore.
yjftsjthsd-h
I enjoy 0ad and xonotic
ramtatatam
+1 to 0ad, when I allow myself to play games then 0ad is usually my choice.
guhcampos
I'm not sure it qualifies, as it was open sourced posthumously, but Warzone 2100 https://wz2100.net/ - was so original I've never played any other game with similar mechanics.
vanderZwan
> Warzone 2100 was originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. In 1999, it was released commercially for Microsoft Windows and Sony PlayStation. Pumpkin Studios ended their support for Warzone 2100 on January 5, 2000.

Huh, if it was designed with a PlayStation controller in mind it might actually control nicely on a Steam Deack. And it has Linux support!

bitxbitxbitcoin
Battle for Wesnoth!

As an aside, does anyone have any sort of insight into how these open source games come about? Is it the force of one individual mostly or is there a place to find likeminded gamedevs for a project?

t-3
A lot of the older projects got started in the days when webforums, IRC, and Usenet were popular. Wesnoth must be over 20 years old by now if I remember accurately, some roguelikes are probably nearing 30 or 40. Nowadays it seems like people have specialized groups on Reddit/Facebook/Discord etc., but it all somehow feels much less discoverable and organic, or maybe I'm just getting old.
CodeArtisan
tigsource is probably the biggest amateur gamedev community, open source or not.

https://forums.tigsource.com/

There is also Game jams; events where you have to make a game alone or as a team in a limited time. A few successful commercial games come from these jams. The biggest jams organize meetup places all around the world, usually at colleges or cybercafés. (i don't know how it is now with the covid thing).

Itch.io maintains a calendar with all jams: https://itch.io/jams

edit:

notch minecraft post on tigsource: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0

DantesKite
I don't currently have one, but I would love to see an open-source version of MOBA's and CS:GO complete with map editors and game "seeds" so players can experiment with different rule sets.

The hardest part about setting that up is likely the servers.

RazeLighter777
Catacylsm: Dark Days Ahead is fantastic.
tstrimple
Fantastic game and very actively developed. If you play the latest experimental version it can get a bit chaotic with the rate of change in the game. It’s quite different than what I played six months ago. Being able to play a cave man who works his way through the Iron Age or a modern mad max customizing his death mobile to a lab grown mutant busting out of a science lab adds a ton of variety. I’m not a fan of every change, but it trends towards realism and simulation and overall keeps getting better.

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

thejosh
noooooooo

Now I'm going to lose another few days to it, everytime I have to ween myself off it, then I get sucked into it all over again for some crazy adventure.

goodpoint
Nice to see a game with the packaging status in the main readme!

Pity it's not GPL.

HelloNurse
Once I tried to play Cataclysm DDA, and I managed to get stuck in a defective submenu during character creation.

By comparison, when I tried to play NetHack I managed to get stuck in a pit due to heavy armour, a more satisfactory death.

dleslie
Easily the best:

Dungeon Crawl https://crawl.develz.org/

OpenRA https://www.openra.net/

Battle for Wesnoth http://www.wesnoth.org/

FreeCiv http://freeciv.org/

Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/

wchar_t
Since we're talking about roguelikes, Brogue[0] is awesome as well.

[0]: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

gnulinux
Brogue is great, but I personally found it extremely hard. I have to admit I'm not a huge gamer, but I did sink a couple dozen hours to Brogue with what felt like no improvement at all.

You see a Jelly in the second floor? You die. You see a Goblin? You die.

philsnow
Brogue is a spiritual successor to the original Rogue, where the goal is not to Kill Anything That Moves but rather to get the Amulet and escape by any means necessary.

You don't get "experience points" for killing anything, and there's no "leveling up" (though drinking potions of life increases your max HP). You can see your HP (and your nutrition) as liabilities but they're also resources -- if you go several dungeon levels without losing any HP, maybe you're being too picky about your fights. If you end up popping a bunch of life potions in the first few levels, maybe you're not being picky enough.

Stealth is a totally valid tactic (press ']' to turn on a view of the stealth radius, notice that spending a turn waiting reduces your stealth radius to 1/2 normal, and also I like to press '\' to turn off the dynamic light effects to make it easier to see my stealth radius). You can get through the game in leather armor (especially if its a special one that lets you reflect incoming spells or that lets you blithely breathe otherwise-harmful atmospheric effects).

"Mobility" builds that let you be super choosy about your engagements are also workable (lots of obstruction, blinking, and tunneling).

Tank builds where you've got enchanted plate and broadsword and you're smashing everything also work, but really only to a point. You won't win going head-to-head with dragons.

"Mage" builds with a couple enchanted damage staves and a ring of wisdom are fun, but I scarcely ever find the items I need to make it work.

Oddly enough, the majority of my deaths are to eels :\

I love love love Brogue. Read the code too, the author is great about doing things like building gradient descent maps for the dungeon level and only invalidating them when the dungeon configuration changes, that kind of thing.

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kevdev
+1 for Endless Sky. Excellent game!
tarentel
I've been playing DCSS on and off for about 12 years now I highly recommend it to anyone even knowing the learning curve is wildly steep and most people probably won't be able to win without putting in a lot of effort.
vintermann
I played DCSS for a while, but they kept turning it into a different game. I think the real problem with that game is that only the heaviest players take an interest in developing it, and those players eventually get bored with the game as it is.
adamrezich
this has been my experience playing on and off for over a decade now. it's wild to check back in after a couple months/years and learn about how the game has completely changed in some radical way again—"btw no food anymore lol" etc.
thebeardisred
Big ups for FreeCiv. I've spent more than a few minutes in that.
themodelplumber
> Dungeon Crawl

This is a favorite. And just to add, after I got a bit tired of roguelikes I tried out Flare and got hooked on the old version in my distro's repos. It's an isometric 3D action RPG.

Later I found it is still under active development and really fun, with a greatly improved base campaign and community mods available as well.

Be sure to get the AppImage rather than whatever might be in older repos if you're running Linux.

https://flarerpg.org/

Recent presentation by Justin, the lead developer: https://flarerpg.org/2022/02/21/i-love-free-software-day-202...

Blog: https://flarerpg.org/blog/

Forums: https://opengameart.org/forums/flare

mrslave
id Software open sourcing the Doom* and Quake 1..3 engines was very generous and all engines have since seen improvements through public contributions. Unfortunately game data is proprietary, however there are many open games using these engines.

FreeDoom, Nexiuz, Xonotic, Warsow, Urban Terror, World of Padman, Tremulous, OpenArena are popular examples of wholly free games based on id's engines, though some of them may be more actively maintained than others.

Quake3e is my favorite, despite requiring a copy of the game.

username923409
i wish they were popular examples :/
qbasic_forever
Freedoom is an IWAD that's meant to replace all of the assets in the original game files with free versions. You can then use it to play any addon level, like the massive total conversions or level packs that win awards every year. A lot of modern level packs use a free texture set called otex that's a massive/near complete replacement of doom textures too. Sure you won't be fighting exactly the same monsters but Freedoom is surprisingly high quality and worth checking out.

And ultimately the original games go on sale for digital purchase for a few dollars all the time so they're not a huge expense to eventually get and then play all the free levels people create as they intended.

username923409
Sorry, I'm not sure how this is related to my comment. All I wanted to say was that the examples the person I replied to listed (xonotic etc.) are good games, just not popular.
raffraffraff
Xonotic is absolutely amazing multiplayer. Extremely competitive and fast paced. There isn't a large number of online players but I can always find a Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch to burn 15 minutes on. The weapons are excellent, like a mix of Quake and Unreal Tournament. I play it almost every day.

Edit: if you download it and install it, be aware that there's a script buried in 'misc/tools/rsync-updater' that updates to the latest autobuild. The last official release, 0.8.2, is really old.

Hitton
Not all of these are wholly free games. For instance World of Padman's resources (models, textures, ...) are proprietary. I think at least some versions of Nexuiz and Warsow had same issue (not sure what is current status).
tremon
In the same vein, there is the Freespace source code project (https://www.hard-light.net/about/freespace) which is the continuation of Descent: FreeSpace 2 after Volition opened their source code in 2002. The original game data is not open, but there's been a lot of community effort into creating new content and updating the original content, to the point where there's even been community translations of the original voice acting.

I thought about including it as a suggestion, but the modding community doesn't seem to care about licensing. The code is all properly licensed (Apache/MIT), but FAFAICT none of the content mods come with a license file, which means it's all free as in beer, not free as in speech.

trynewideas
Empty Epsilon bridge simulator: https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon

The game itself is fun, but the best stuff I've seen is it being reused, modified, and adapted for LARPs and crowdplay.

Out of Orbit is a great and ongoing example, a Finnish escape room-ish experience that also has a Twitch game putting stream chat in the role of the ship's AI: https://outoforbit.fi/ and https://www.twitch.tv/outoforbitgame/about

Empty Epsilon powers the game part, with integrations using its DMX interface and HTTP API to provide hardware interfaces and things like Twitch chat commands modifying the game state.

akavel
Ahhh, a spaceship command bridge, not a connecting the banks of a river bridge!... I assumed a physics simulator, but fortunately the readme explains it's a FOSS remake of Artemis.
bongobingo1
Total Annihilation-like: [Beyond All Reason](https://www.beyondallreason.info/). There are also a few others (or supreme commander-likes) run on the [springrts engine](https://springrts.com/) including zero-k.
INTPenis
TA is one of my top 5 games of all time, one of the first games I could afford back in the day.

But I've never been a fast RTS player, I'm more of a casual civ turn-based player, so is BAR playable for me? Does it cater to the South Korean Zerg rush pros or the base builders?

beherith
BAR caters more towards the slower pace, with a lot of base-building PvE modes. Its hard AI is quite relentless and will give SC2 players a decent fight.
fho
Spring is an amazing engine! It's been a while, but we used to have regular sessions of Balanced Annihilation (BA) decades after TA came out.

I don't know if more recent RTS games improved in that, but Springs UI was way ahead of other RTSs at the time.

Without going into detail, BA had very tense gameplay without getting too bogged down by micro managing units.

beherith
Beyond All Reason descends from BA, and has absolutely magnificent graphics.
dumpsterlid
The spring engine and community around it really is amazing, it has been around for such a long time and games on it like BAR are just plain damn good rts games.
justusthane
My friends and I played Total Annihilation growing up, and have been playing Zero-K recently. It's a great remake!
anjbe
The Ur‐Quan Masters, better known as Star Control 2.

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

According to Wikipedia:

> Released to critical acclaim, Star Control II is widely viewed today as one of the greatest PC games ever made, and has appeared on numerous publications lists of the greatest video games of all time.

It was open sourced in 2002, and is available in most package repos (as “uqm”).

agiacalone
Second this. I played the hell out of the original SC2 back in the day...and UQM improves on the entire experience.

They even updated the Super-Melee mode to be playable over the Internet.

fullstop
This was one of my most favorite games as a teenager. It still holds up!
willis936
This looks pretty cool.

Does anyone know how to get sound working on WSL1 + VcXsrv?

nmz
Teeworlds https://teeworlds.com and its mod ddnet https://ddnet.tw

I've been playing for a full on decade, the game was your typical third person shooter but around 2015 a mod came out that allowed fast completion of puzzle like maps, then it diverged and it now has two versions. Everyone mostly sticks to its ddnet counterpart. but the quake style, deathmatch/ctf/team is still fun at times. though nobody plays it.

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tpxl
Teeworlds is a great game for warming up in a LAN party :)
nmz
Aye, took me a while to notice how crucial the ping is.
TheRealDunkirk
OMG! I used to play this with my kids 100 years ago. Totally forgot about it.
Kelamir
Teeworlds is fun, I have spent hundreds of hours in it. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's hard to stop playing once I start, and I regret ever finding out about the game. Thanks to automated solutions I don't play it much anymore.
t-3
Others have mentioned Wesnoth, Oolite, and Cataclysm: DDA, but Angband and all of it's variants hold a special place in my heart. MAngband, ZAngband, TOME, all drew countless hours from my youth. FreeCiv is excellent. I think the name has changed (or it's been forked?) but Tremulous was a lot of fun.
ninjin
OpenTTD is probably my favourite, but let me put a classic that I really enjoyed into the mix: XBattle [1]. Real-time strategy with an emphasis on area of control and supply line “flow”. All while “abusing” X11 to get multi-player support. It gave me many hours of joy at the Solaris boxes we had at university in the mid 00s. My only concern would be whether it counts as open source with its home-made license [2].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20011128105604/http://cns-web.bu...

[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ninjin/fdd615d6e32e1316014dece892128697...

kqr
Does OpenTTD have fully open source content by now?
assbuttbuttass
Yep, it has replacements for the graphics and audio assets. Just "apt install openttd" :)
ninjin
I would still highly recommend digging up the proprietary assets though, in particular the music [1] is far superior.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3-Wwl5Xtg

fps_doug
Yes, if only for nostalgia. The modern graphics look smoother/friendlier, but I just want it to look the way it always looked back then. :)
spacetraveler11
XBattle looks so cool, amazing that this game was made 30 years ago. Kind of similar to a game I had been working on (and might just get out of the dustbin to reactivate).

Anyone looking to get started with hexagonal grids should check out [1] from Red Blob Games. Comprehensive tutorial on hex grids explaining coordinates, fields of vision, pathfinding and more.

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

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matthews2
Designing your rail network in transport tycoon feels like software engineering sometimes, having to refactor old lines to fit the new ones in neatly.

A very dangerous game to play though, you'll boot it up in the morning for a way to kill an hour and... it'll suddenly be midnight.

bshipp
I have played enough OpenTTD in my life that it silently sits in my library, tempting me, but I refuse to open it for exactly the reason you highlighted. it's a massive time sink and I'm far too old to suddenly realize the birds are chirping and the sun is coming up.
sliken
I really liked Xbattle, but seemed pretty dated, and at least when I played required players to xhost + the server, which back then wasn't that unusual.

There was a similar game, written in java (server and client I believe), called Europa. Had a grid of X's, simple UI (tell units where to go) and the "water pressure" would slow from the cities that make armies to wherever you pointed them. Even included things like using 3 armies to make 1 paratrooper that could jump a square or two.

The author even sent me a copy, not sure I still have it though.

emj
XbattleAI did a TCP connection version, I can't remember if it was good enough. See. https://github.com/robertjschulz/xbattleai

The closed source javascript game https://generals.io is a good simplification of XBattle, I've seen one OSS server reimplementation of it.

If you can find the code for Europa I'm interested, I think it was released as OSS but I couldn't find it when looking around.

sliken
It wasn't opensource ... till the author decided to just shelve it. See above for download link.
tasuki
I never understood OpenTTD. Passengers just board your vehicles and go wherever you take them? That makes no sense to me. How is that supposed to work?

I've played a bit of Simutrans, where each prospective passenger has an origin and a destination, and if you can take them there, they use your services, otherwise they don't.

kevincox
I think the logic is that they only show up at the station if there is a train that goes where they want. Much like in real life how the trains go on a schedule and you get on if it is going where you want.

Now I'm sure the simulation isn't perfect but it seems to make enough sense for game logic.

tiku
It depends on a lot of factors, like the size of the town etc. traffic will increase if you make stations, promoting travel between cities. money can also be made by connecting factories with farms etc, fairly simple.

you can go way complex with orders, like only depart when 50% full or 100% full, to optimize your lines.

AaronM
You can enable a feature called cargodist. This adds the functionality, where passengers have a destination in mind.

I think Railroad tycoon 3 had a good system. Cargo flowed towards a destination, even if there weren't methods to transport goods. Cargo would prefer to take the easiest path though, so if you built a rail line between a source and destination, the cargo would prefer the line.

andruc
Passengers in OpenTTD are just a type of cargo like any other resource in the game. They're different from industry cargo in that the building that "consumes" them is the same as the one that "produces" them (residential areas), but there isn't any more to it than that.

Why does it need to make any more sense than that to be enjoyable?

jjice
What was the X11 abuse? Did they have an X server and serve multiple X clients, each acting as an individual player? If so, that sounds super clever.