Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: Favourite open source game?
378 points by pabs3 on June 2, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 373 comments
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.



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...


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.


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.


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/


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.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


It wasn't opensource ... till the author decided to just shelve it. See above for download link.


I found the download on the wayback machine (very cool). It's basically a modernized xbattle that has a server/client that doesn't rely on X11 trusting remove server.

To download: https://web.archive.org/web/20050925030417/http://www.cgl.uw...


I made a first version of an XBattle remake over the weekend with Unity [1]. Still needs a lot before it can be released but the basic features are working already.

[1] https://giphy.com/gifs/unity-game-dev-xbattle-stdR5qYdqrgNll...


Does OpenTTD have fully open source content by now?


Yep, it has replacements for the graphics and audio assets. Just "apt install openttd" :)


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


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. :)


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.



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

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


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.


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.


> 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


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.


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.


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.


Big ups for FreeCiv. I've spent more than a few minutes in that.


DCSS for life.


+1 for Endless Sky. Excellent game!


Shameless self promotion: Reverse RPG https://r-rpg.com/

I wanted a game like wordle, which I can play in like 5 to 10 minutes, but I don't really like word-puzzles. But everything else about wordle is great: no barriers, easy to pick up, replayable. So I made rrpg and intend to add content to it.

I haven't really thought about licensing, but I guess I will open-source it, if people like it. Right now it's just js in the browser, so anyone could copy it. Written with nx in typescript.


Played it for a few minutes and found it pretty fun!

I’ll return later to finish my run, but wanted to point out the opening quote character is wrong (it’s the same as the closing quote): it shows up as ”some dialog” instead of “some dialog”. Also, I’m on a phone and occasionally one of the options is highlighted. At first I thought it might mean something, but on closer inspection it may be a selection bug.

Both are minor issues which do not detract from the experience, but they may also be quick fixes.


Thank you for taking the time to give me feedback! Indeed the quotes are wrong and I noticed the focus(?) bug as well on the phone. I think there are also some CSS-related bugs in safari, that I still need to fix.


Real fun! Very clever idea and well written, engaging story. And the bits of humor are nice.


Thank you! I feel super cheesy most of the time, writing those.


I died from infections, but at least I was a rich man.


It's very fun! Would love to dig around in the source code.


I had enough fun to save and play again


Wow, thanks everyone! I am a bit overwhelmed :)


This is very fun, thanks for the link.


This is pretty amazing, thanks for sharing!


This is pretty fun! Thanks for sharing :)


Charming wee adventure!


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”).


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.


If you haven’t had enough, https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/ might be relevant…


This was one of my most favorite games as a teenager. It still holds up!


This looks pretty cool.

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


Screeps, the open source game for programmers. It’s really, really hard though.

https://screeps.com/

Side note: I don’t think downvotes should be for comments you “don’t like” or even “disagree with”. Downvotes should be used to discourage people from posting bad content, but on HN we try to be a bit more objective about what “bad” is rather than “I don’t like it”.


There's an older FOSS game Infon[1] that has a similar gameplay, but scripted in Lua.

[1]: https://github.com/dividuum/infon


Oh wow. Didn't expect anyone to remember. It was fun to program that one as the programming game for our local hacker conference and then seeing players compete. At some point later IIRC someone even wrote an somewhat advanced AI and created a small paper for it. The game should still be usable, but didn't get any love for a while now.

Fun anecdote: infon itself is a followup to my own teen programming project written in Quick Basic (see https://github.com/dividuum/infon/wiki/History) and all the Lua embedding and experience I gained from it ultimately ended up being used in a followup project (info-beamer) which is now at the core of my own company and my full-time job.

So write more games everyone!


i have read elsewhere explicitly stating that downvotes may be used as a sign of disagreement.

that said, in a topic like this, can there be any bad comments? (other than someone throwing insults at a game or recommending a game that is not actually FOSS?)

so why not use downvotes for games that you played but didn't like?

let the most popular games rise to the top.


> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


The parent is probably referring to this part of the OP:

> 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.


Ah true. Apologies.


I've loved the idea of this game for a long time, but have avoided it due to the perception that it's basically just Code Golf: The Game. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts, though.


I very much like the new version, Screeps: Arena, which is much more bounded and doesn’t require nearly the same time investment.


Xonotic[1] is excellent (Named Nexuiz in the past, but that name was essentially stolen). Hours of Quake like fun with beefed up graphics and a bunch of interesting gameplay twists. One the mobile side there is Shattered Pixel Dungeon[2], also to be found on F-Droid. The polish behind that project is insane for something FOSS and the hours I put into it are something to be embarrassed about.

[1] https://xonotic.org/ [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shattered...


Sauerbraten (previously known as Cube) was always a favourite of mine, with the added twist that the game itself was also the level editor, and different players could be in different "modes" in the same map - a group of people CTFing, while others deathmatched, and a couple of others were literally redrawing the map as they played.

I see there's even a release of it that's not that old - I remember it from about 15 years ago and it still seems to be developed.

http://sauerbraten.org/


Wouter, one of the original Cube developers / creator of the Cube engine, has started a new game studio. He also made a new programming language that was introduced here, called Lobster. He has a really interesting Twitter feed.

https://www.strlen.com/lobster/

https://twitter.com/wvo

2021 interview at sauerworld: https://www.sauerworld.org/celebrating-20-years-of-cube-an-i...


I used to chat with him on IRC all the time, I should see if the channel is still on the go.


For anyone wondering, Xonotic is still very actively developed despite the lack of releases.

https://gitlab.com/xonotic

If you want to run latest without compiling yourself: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/-/wikis/Autobuilds


I just completed my 1000th game in SPD, only 70 runs ended with the amulet. I am not ashamed.


How many with the happy ending?


69 of them I think. I went back up every time except the first.


Xonotic is an incredibly good evolution of quake


Apologies in advanced for not submitting a game. Does anybody feel an unbreakable urge to just break from free of the dreary day job and write games for fun each time you see a HN post like this? My fantasy is to just go and Browserize a game (and not just by wasming it). Gaaaaah the tragedy of limited time!


Yes and yes.

I've been trying write a game from scratch (emphasis on "scratch" considering the scale of the itch) as a side project, but that quickly evolved into an excercise in overcoming analysis paralysis.

I'm currently stuck on "can I count on the HTML Canvas to optimise cases where a tile is out of view or should I make a fancy system to calculate that now?"

I get an average of 2h a week to do this, so I need to be really careful not to go into one of the many rabbit holes there.

In any case I recommend Entity Component System as an architecture for games. You can write 20 lines of code at a time and still make demonstrable progress.


"I'm currently stuck on "can I count on the HTML Canvas to optimise cases where a tile is out of view or should I make a fancy system to calculate that now?""

I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but since I did wrote a canvas game from scratch, I can tell you that you cannot count on the canvas to optimize anything (and likely not what you want in this case)

Every browser does it a bit different and it will depend on the hardware and OS what optimisation features are avaiable.

On average the canvas is quite performant, though.

Performant enough, that in my case, I draw everything on a big map - zoom in and then move the map around, when the player moves.

On a gaming PC, maps can be quite large - but on an average mobile not so much.

But I autogenerate the levels which means I can dynamically adjust size, so this works for my game.

But in general yes, you want a small canvas, the size of the screen - and then only draw what is needed.

EaselJS may help with that. It is basically flash on the canvas, but does exactly this. You put all your graphic objects on the stage - and easelJS will figure out which one of those needs to be drawn at the current frame. I initially used it, but not anymore as it was not optimized for my use case, making LOTS of new draw calls on the map every tick. But for a classic game with limited entities, it is very performant.


I also found Canvas a bit challenging - not the programming model per day but just the work of coordinating scenes and objects. I got overwhelmed with the number of frameworks at the time and didn't want to go down the path of investing in a single one (not a good move in hindsight).

By the way I wonder if it is reasonable to expand the "requirement" to - wasming is ok if you are writing the game from scratch in say rust instead of just compiling old binaries to wasm?


> I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but since I did wrote a canvas game from scratch, I can tell you that you cannot count on the canvas to optimize anything (and likely not what you want in this case)

Bad wording on my part. I noticed somewhat of a performance difference when drawing an image at coordinates that are outside of the canvas boundaries and was wondering if the scale of this is significant.

Do you have the source of your game published anywhere?


"I noticed somewhat of a performance difference when drawing an image at coordinates that are outside of the canvas boundaries and was wondering if the scale of this is significant."

You mean you have a canvas of 1000 px size and make a drawImage at x> 1000?

Well in that case the image does not get drawn at all, so most browsers should indeed be more performant by ignoring this call. But there might still be a overhead of loading the image, so I would check the boundaries and not make that call, if it is not necessary.

(The canvas itself is just a large array of numbers after all. And if you do not manipulate that array when your new values are outside of that boundary, nothing happens. And a image is usually just a pointer to another large array/blob, so if the browser is smart, it does not load that array, when it finds out it does not have to)

"Do you have the source of your game published anywhere?"

Unfortunately not yet, but soon I will release. I hope.


All the time. I get the itch every few months. Luckily my day job is all C# so I've been able to pick up Unity on the side.

I'm terrible at making games but working on them brings back the joy I had when I first learned to program. The feedback loop between code and something interesting on the screen is quick and refreshing. Lately I even managed to make a basic VR game with my Quest2.


I don't suppose you would have any good tutorials / resources for quest 2 development with unity. I've had a brief go recently but as someone who's never used unity before I found myself floundering a bit.

I've also found the unity editor to be pretty unstable on Linux so if you happen to have any tips there I'd be all ears


I just went through some tutorials a couple of months ago and had some good luck with this series by Valem on Youtube[1]. It's from 2020 and a bit outdated in a couple parts (like I think the input system changed in more recent Unity versions, but you can select the old version, it just has different names, and also I think some of the links for the controller assets were broken somehow, but I was able to download a package that had them I think), so read the comments near the top, which show timestamps and where things might be different now, but overall I was able to get things working fine in my Quest 2 device.

I was also looking for books, and the Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects Book[2] looks promising, and I just got a used copy (still being sent to me). Again since it's from 2020 there might be a couple things out of date, but it looks like it could be worth it.

I use Unity in Windows so I can't help on the Linux front.

Good luck! You can ping me if you get stuck somewhere, I might have had the same issue and might be able to help you get unstuck.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYtahQjmWQ

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Unity-2020-Virtual-Reality-Projects/d...


I just want them to be done programming FPS games, employ all artist graduates, and have them design textures and models for an open source FPS game.


Definitely. I slake my thirst for game dev by creating games in between job contracts as well as on some weekends. I've written a few interactive fiction pieces, but my most downloaded titles are in the category of retro RPGs in the style of the old 8-bit Ultima games (as found on the C64/128, but playable on modern hardware). It's admittedly a niche. They are Minima https://feneric.itch.io/minima and Anteform https://feneric.itch.io/anteform and are both open source.


Holy crap these are amazing. Good on you mate. I wonder if there is some kind of game dev guild for folks who want to just get together for a weekend hackathon and build games/engines!


Thanks! I don't know of anything exactly like that, but there are plenty of hackathons and the like that are similar. It's not to hard to sit down with the docs and/or tutorials for systems like Godot, Inform 7, Ren'Py, etc. and put something basic together. Expect to throw away your initial one or two projects, but after that you should be good to go. I built Minima & Anteform using PICO-8, a virtual console. The RPG game system they use I had to build from scratch first. For me it was mostly a challenge to see if I could fit that much gameplay and story into the available footprint, but if you're starting out with one of the systems I mentioned it should be a lot easier. Also, don't get discouraged if you seem to be "almost done" for a long time. It often takes as long (or longer) for the last 10% and polish than it does for the initial 90%.


Yes, in fact it's what I've been doing the past few days. Luckily there's a long weekend coming up with lots of free time for me to work on it: XBattle style game rewritten in Unity. Plan is to get a basic version browserized so I can get some feedback from players. My list of features I want to add is already starting to grow exponentially (e.g. persistent multiplayer world: hop on to play the game whenever you have time, then leave your troops in a defensive position and hopefully nobody is able to break your defense while you're not playing ^^).


Yes all the time, my go to topic for learning new techs is usually hexes (I don't know why I'm obsessed with HexMaps...). Anyway when I dabbled with F# I did exactly this, browserize it with Fable(https://fable.io/). Usually I loose interest after a while so I implemented HexGrids + some strategy/tactical stuff on various techstacks, but never finished anything. It's ok its more about learning the stack than actually releasing.


I also love hexes. Have you seen this guy's blog before? It's a treasure:

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/


Thanks a lot for this !

Another, way more generalist source for tilings :

http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/geoms.php


Start doing that in your spare time. You will likely find that write your own game is way more dreadful than your day job :^)


I indeed played with the thought to "browserize" OPENTDD. Similar logic, but real time, everything slower, so you can built and earn money only very limited. So that a Game could last like a year or so and playing a few minutes per day would be enough.


Oh yeah, I keep telling myself I'm going to work through the raylib tutorials at some point. Still hasn't happened. Probably doesn't help I play games in that downtime instead of thinking about making them.


Yes, but my experimentation with game development has shown me that I am no good at making games that are actually fun to play or indeed interesting in any way, so I don't quit my day job.


Yeah I dabble a bit in game dev every now and then. Released 2 small games, but nothing spectacular. Gonna keep at it whenever time allows, more fun than my day job ...


Nice. Is it possible to get this monetized? Not necessarily for the financial reward but for the publicity/accomplishment feel?


Just a few US dollars total over the course of last year. But perhaps in the future I might get lucky ... And either way, it's fun to work on games regardless ...


Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/


Yes! I'm always having a quick game of Inertia, Pattern or Slant while waiting for things to download, compile or just because I felt like it. It's nice having so many tiny little fun games available.


Inertia is really cool IMO. I haven't tried Pattern or Slant, thanks for those recommendations. I usually show up for Cube, Flood, Guess, or Same Game.


Some of the puzzles are also (better?) known under other names

I first knew many of them by the Nikoli/Japanese names, under which they were released on Nintendo portable platforms.

KenKen -> Keen

Hitori -> Singles

Slitherlink -> Loopy

Sudoku -> Solo

Akari -> Light Up

Relatedly, there's a nice book with a mildly embarrasing title called "Puzzle Ninja: Pit Your Wits Against the Japanese Puzzle Masters" that works as a nice intro to many of these games, and has interviews with creators. Though I find discovering the strategies for new games to be part of the fun, so it is a bit spoilerish that it walks you through some of the basics, but ideal for someone new to the whole area.

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21160241W/Puzzle_Ninja


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.


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.


Beyond All Reason descends from BA, and has absolutely magnificent graphics.


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.


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?


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.


Yeah, BAR is a hidden gem


My friends and I played Total Annihilation growing up, and have been playing Zero-K recently. It's a great remake!


Warzone 2100. Open source, I believe their goal was the ultimate real time strategy, and I believe they landed pretty close to that. You can design your own units, each with strengths and weaknesses that reward different strategies. The campaign was fun, rewarding, and had a fair bit of variety. There's even a few AI projects to make smarter teams of tanks (which allows MUCH more complexity than controlling an AI).

It had fog of war, 3D terrain and viewer, many kinds of units, and a nice UI for taking arbitrary groups of units and giving them 1 or more commands. Even some nice automation (at later levels) to avoid the tedium of telling a unit to repair itself, then putting it back in formation.

One somewhat unique feature is that in campaign mode (playing a computer, not a human) you can control time, so you never get overwhelmed with trying to control your units, but of course as your skills get better you can speed up time to not be bored.

If controlling tanks, infantry, and (at the later levels), planes/VTOLS sounds fun then give it a try. The 1st level of the campaign is a tutorial and you'll know pretty quick if you enjoy it.

Ah, sorry, just realized you named Warzone2100, well maybe someone else will find the suggestion useful.


Just to point out Warzone 2100 was a commercial game by “ Pumpkin Studios”, that had all the features you mentioned, and it was later open-sourved.


I spent many hours playing WZ2100 on Mplayer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer.com


Indeed, I never played the original, but I believe a fair bit has been done since then.

BTW, it's easy to forget to include the cut scenes when building from source, which IMO do add to the game.


Time controls are not that unique - you can have it even in Dawn of War 1 !

And even less unique in low budget / open source RTSes ?

Special mention to Achron with literal time travel as a game mechanic !


Heh, I believe I played Achron (chess like) on a C64, don't recall the time travel aspect. I never played Dawn of War 1. In any case I enjoy being able to control time from 1.5x faster than normal, all the way down to literally zero (paused) if you want.

One annoying thing (even if it's an intentional part of the game), when a unit dies, it doesn't tell you which unit. Most importantly if you are trying to level up your units, it doesn't tell you if it was a unit that gains experience (like all fighting units), or doesn't like a truck or repair unit.

Took me 5 minutes to track down the line of code and add a print statement.


No, you played ARCHON on a C64, as did I. The first time I ever played a new video game straight through to the next day. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark


Ha, amusing that moving the r two spaces is another game. Thanks for the correction.


No, this Achron (2011) Tutorial - Time Travel :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGmMenc1jCY


Seconding Warzone2100. I love how much research there is to do, and designing your own units is just great.


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.


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.


Teeworlds is a great game for warming up in a LAN party :)


Aye, took me a while to notice how crucial the ping is.


OMG! I used to play this with my kids 100 years ago. Totally forgot about it.


Haven't seen these two so thought I'd add them to the list.

Minetest is a block building game engine (like minecraft) built around the idea mods add all content. There are a bunch of games built for it, and last I checked a active modding community. https://www.minetest.net/

The other is AlephOne, a engine to play all the Marathon games (story FPS, pre-halo bungie made games) along with a bunch more community created ones. I've sunk a good bit of time into both the trilogy and the additional 6 big community made ones. https://alephone.lhowon.org/


Minetest is awesome. It is a lot of fun to play with kids on LAN. We played countless hours on the base game only and then there are tons of mods.


I played Minetest a lot with my kids too. We still have tons of those old maps from our co-op on various computers.

Now that they are playing other games, I still find that I occasionally log into Minetest servers just to look around at all the amazing builds.

In one of them I found a working MS Paint emulator (a wall with the icons and canvas on it), as well as a very impressive and huge ancient Greek temple.


Minetest is kinda crap, honestly. Unless it has radically changed since I played it, the game feel is just lightyears behind.

It has lots of mods and customization hooks, way more than Minecraft, and if that works for you that's great. But for a lot of people the experience just can't compare.


the good thing about minetest is that it runs on a raspberry pi 400 with acceptable framerate, better then minecraft.

there is a minecraft mod in minetest: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/


Yeah, I tried those mods when I tried Minetest. Still wasn't remotely comparable.

Basic things like the hand animation when breaking blocks were subtly worse. Monsters didn't have AI or pathfinding or animations. Etc.


Is there any well-documented configuration of Minetest that provides as much fun as Minecraft?


I think what you are looking for is the MineClone2 game for MineTest. It is basically a recreation of the Minecraft mobs, items, realms, etc in MineTest. I have played it a lot and it is great if you are looking for the MC experience!

https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/


as much fun is very subjective.

there are hundreds of add-ons enabling various features.

which minecraft features in particular are you thinking of?


Just in general, that there's a lot of stuff to do. I can make a base and slowly do various upgrades, try to finish the game as quickly as possible, or just fool around in creative mode.


that sounds like no different than minetest.

myself i only play minetest on a public server without attacking mobs, so there is no hurry to build a base, and i can focus on building interesting stuff. i still have to get food, mine for materials and fix my tools so there is plenty to manage while building. and with other players on the server we can also build in collaboration.

my son likes to add mobs, so he is building and fighting mobs.



There we go. Big fan of the work that's been done to emulate the popular tech build games.


Yeppp


Thinking back I can probably list all the open source games I've enjoyed on one hand.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is the one I enjoy daily, also enjoyed the predecessor. Play it every time I'm on the toilet. ;)

Konquest was a really fun old game that came with KDE back in the late 90s, early 2000s. I assume it was open source, I was just a kid playing it.

Nethack of course, enjoyed many hours in that dungeon.

Doom counts right? I played a lot of Doom in the 90s and it's open source now. Quake too I believe.

Edit: How the hell could I forget Cataclysm: Dark days ahead.

This is a hard list to make, partly because I love open source and there are so few titles I've enjoyed on a regular basis.


Doom is not an open content game. Neither is Quake.


FreeDoom is an open source game running on the Doom engine, but no, Doom's assets were never open sourced.

Quake III Arena had Open Arena, which was an open source clone. Did anybody ever do anything similar with the original Quake engine?


Both have open source imitations; I think.


You need the wads (where's all the data). If you have doom on steam, you can compile something like GZDoom, and copy the wads from steam over


Doomsday is great (apart from the occasional segfault at the end of a level). It works well with Steam files and it has its own launcher so you can customize things easily.


Of course, but even Romero has released free WADs so content is not an issue for true Doom fanatics.


I played HEAPS of Konquest back in the day.



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.


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.


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.


I just installed the Kittens game on my phone. That may have been a mistake. I am already hooked.


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.


Just be happy you never got into Antimatter Dimensions...


How to install it on the phone?


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nuclearuni...

I'm not sure how different it is to the git version but there are always recent updates.


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.


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.


Abuse will always have a warm place in my heart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_(video_game)

Even though I didn't manage to code a single line of Lisp for the game's internal code or actually get a single level done, the fact that it was theoretically possible was amazing to me.

Also WASD for movement + mouse for shooting in a 2D game was a novel mechanic for me and I still like 2D two-stick shooters quite a bit.


That game was a huge inspiration to me when I was a teenager and trying game development out. Both the mechanics and the visual style. I had no idea they released the source code to it!


Exactly the same for me. I've developed a similar style game in Delphi with multiple weapons, rocket jumps and everything. I've never been more excited to learn about trigonometric functions to get the arm movement right to follow the mouse cursor. I had no idea about the source code being public either!


https://stuntrally.tuxfamily.org/

A car race simulator in mildly offroad tracks (think WRC). I spent a decent amount of time glued to the screen with it; the game is especially stunning with regards to its visuals, a rare quality in the world of open-source games.

Notes to the beginners: don't be afraid to dial down its quality settings if your machine is struggling, the defaults seem to require crazy beefy hardware; and yes, with some practice you will start to overcome the "ghost car", but you should ignore it in the beginning and just focus on staying in track, doing your best, having fun and watching the views :)


great visuals is what i enjoy most about racing games, which is why many games with artificial tracks feel boring. i'll have to check this out


wow, this has to be the best racing game i have been playing yet.

it was a bit tricky to get it to run on fedora. i used the generic binary from sourceforge since there is no fedora package.

it kept crashing with missing symbols in libraries. it took some searching before i realized that this was because the game included libraries to replace system libraries, but the games libraries were loaded through a system library and were to old and didn't have all of the symbols that the system library was referencing

once i removed the libraries from the game directory (StuntRally-2.6-linux64/lib/64/) that had an identically named library in the system directory (/lib64) and i replaced libSDL2-2.0.so.1 with a symlink to /lib64/libSDL2.so then the game started to work.

i just played through the tutorial and a few other tracks before it crashed again. i'll probably have to try to replace a few more libraries, maybe even all of those that have an equivalent standard fedora version. but so far this is looking good.



IVAN (https://github.com/Attnam/ivan)

A rougelike where you can have your legs severed, pray to a god to have them regenerated and have them regenerated as bananas.

Edit: you can try it in the browser! https://attnam.github.io/ivan-050-wasm/


Thanks for the suggestion; Just had a go. It was a blast. Things seemed to be going well until I ate a giant mushroom, got confused and then eaten by some kind of hybrid giant mutant plant bunny or some such. Bookmarked.

Would recommend.


All roguelikes have an element of "losing is fun". My memory of playing IVAN is one where losing is often hilarious.


I love IVAN due to its difficulty(spend hours building character, get killed by invisible landmine) and polish(got a banana? Make a banana sword!). The little carcastic plot is fun as well.


Oh man, I haven't played IVAN in a decade! That was a lot of fun back in the day, I wonder if I still suck at it :).


rogue, not rouge :-)


pedant, not pendant :P


Star Ruler 2

"Massive scale 4X-RTS set in space. Control hundreds of planets, manipulate galactic politics, research numerous advanced technologies, and command thousands of units and hundreds of planets in your quest for galactic dominance."

available from steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/282590/Star_Ruler_2/

and from github (excluding the music): https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source


Wow! I didn't realize that was open source. Very cool, though I do prefer the first game.


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.


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.


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.


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).


i wish they were popular examples :/


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.


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.


Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — the absolute best roguelikes around.

--

The first has a very focused philosophy of removing all tedious and spoilery game mechanics, optimal strategies and no-brainers from the game. Some hate that, I love it. DCSS is the anti-Nethack. You can play online on your browser, with graphical tiles, spectators and even information bots for all your queries.

https://crawl.develz.org/

The second has an extremely passionate and vibrant community of contributors, and they're adding everything and the kitchen sink. Blink and a whole subsystem will have been merged into master. I reckon CDDA will be the first universe-scale quantum simulator, a couple years before the entire humanity will transfer its consciousness inside a Dwarf Fortress world.

https://cataclysmdda.org/


CDDA is certainly a much more enjoyable game than Dwarf Fortress, but I have to admire the audacity of something that attempts to simulate thousands of years of history in a world, which you can step into any time, alongside the social structures of entire civilisations. Perhaps the only thing more amazing than DF's scope is the fact that it exists.


I loved playing CDDA in ASCII mode, but Dwarf Fortress is absolutely impenetrable to me, so I never had the chance to dive in properly. I'm waiting for the graphical version to be released, the screenshots I've seen of the new UI are incredible, I can't wait to buy it when it's out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/


Best is subjective. Slashem it's good if you need the anti-DCCS ;).

Just try playing it as a Doppleganger Monk.


Surprised nobody has mentioned bzflag[0]. I played that a lot in its heyday. Playing hepcat pillbox CTF was some of the sweatiest, most intense gaming I've had.

However I probably had the most hours into Armagetron Advanced[1], which is basically "2D-isometric Lightcycle-From-TRON Deathmatch: The Game" and allows for many interesting gametypes that you wouldn't necessarily expect, from CTF to Sumo, which is kinda but not exactly like king of the hill.

The best part of armagetron is the keybind system. If you bind, say, Z to "turn left" and . (period) to "turn right", then your right and left hands will turn you right and left, respectively. But if you also bind X and C to turn left, and m and comma to turn right, then you can press Z and X simultaneously to perform a quick 180-degree turn. You can also do funky stuff like press Z, X, C and M and Comma (that's 5 keypresses) to do a sort of outside-hairpin turn which makes for a devastating trap against anyone riding along your wall for speed.

I wasted so very many hours on tron. If anyone here played on the Swampland or Mud Puddle servers, they know how addictive it can be. A small but tight-knit community except for that one insufferable jerk who went under various handles but primarly "Xdude". Fuck you, Xdude.

Anyways, armagetron is an awesome game that's probably dead now, but is really fun for LAN parties.

[0] https://www.bzflag.org/

[1] http://www.armagetronad.org/


I came here to rep this game (bzflag). I also used to play quite a lot of armegatron & GLtron.

Other mostly forgotten games that I'd like to spotlight here are XEvil (https://www.xevil.com/) and Heroes (http://heroes.sourceforge.net/) which ate up tons of my time in younger years.


Liero is high up on my list. The original wasn't open source, of course, but a really good game with a few bugs. The author lost the source code in a crash and that precluded any future bugfixes.

Eventually someone reimplemented it faithfully! I love FOSS!

----

OpenMW is my current vice, but obviously content is not open source.


There is OpenLieroX (https://www.openlierox.net/) (disclaimer: I'm one of the main developers) and then there is also a almost exact reimplementation of the original one (https://www.liero.be/).

Also see Webliero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980676

And there have been many other clones in the past like Gusanos.

Soldat is also similar, and has recently become open sourced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058312

And Teeworlds (always been open source) as well.


I did look at all the clones (there are many!) But I felt like none matched the dynamics and mechanics of the original -- hence my excitement when someone ported OpenLieroX and made the almost exact reimplementation!


Hah, I didnt know that about Liero, that's a great story.

I remember having many good days with classmates in our computer high school class "studying" thanks to LieroX


Emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Am...

All super basic, but always ready to go when you've got a few minutes to kill.


oh god I remember the IF game in emacs (I think it's dunnet?). I played that a ton. I liked the part where you had to copy yourself via FTP to some other room :-D


Try Malyon.el from Melpa and fetch some IF Z-Machine games.


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.


I forgot about one of my favorites! LiquidWar, a distillation of RTS into one the most engaging multiplayer games ever.

https://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/


There's a web(wasm) port of Angband too! https://github.com/ridiculousfish/shelob


The tremolous fork is Unvanquished.




Sonic Robo Blast 2 - https://www.srb2.org/ ... and especially ... SRB2Kart - https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/SRB2Kart (!)


Space Station 14 [0], which is the remake and spiritual successor to Space Station 13, mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

SS13 is a wonderful game, but it's so old and its codebase is so messy that people have been trying to remake it for years. Attempts had mostly gone nowhere until all of a sudden SS14 took off with a few dozen OSS developers. Now they're making fantastic progress (see [1]) and have a game that isn't just playable, but enjoyable! (Not to mention being almost completely on-par with SS13 at this point, with several distinct maps and hundreds of items ported over.)

[0]: https://spacestation14.io [1]: https://spacestation14.io/post/22-05-25-progress-report-34/


I agree on every point expect that it's "on-par" with SS13. SS13 has a lot of content; it's one of the most feature-rich games that I know of, up there with Dwarf Fortress. In terms of porting content, SS14 is still several years off from being completely finished.


BitBurner. Its an incremental game, which means you do some work, get to a point of diminishing returns, cash out with some upgrades and restart. Each time you restart you get a little further. Normally these types of games are super boring, but everything in BitBurner has an API.

Eventually the game gets super complex - stock markets, gangs, automations, combat systems, corporate espionage, etc. Its got a healthy open source community and discord as well

https://github.com/danielyxie/bitburner


Parallel Realities[1] has made several nice games, including Blobwars, Starfighter and Legend of Edgar, which have fully open source game engines, and they tried to use free sounds and graphics. However, the devil is in the detail with many "free" assets, and it turns out a lot of them actually did not have a free enough license for most Linux distributions. I've been involved in getting Blobwars 1 and 2 and Starfighter updated with truly open content with some success, unfortunately Blobwars 2 still needs a lot of work.

Open content is still hard; a lot of sound, music, and textures might be under a relatively free license, but often source material is lacking. I've given a talk about this at FOSDEM 2017[2].

[1]: https://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/games/

[2]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/ogd_gpl_asset...


Various old skool text adventure games are open source (-ish, in some cases).

If you are already experienced with them then "Counterfeit Monkey" takes it to the next level with a great twist based on anagram-like magic/technology for turning objects into other things by adding/removing letters from their name:

> Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

> Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

> Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

> Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

> Good luck getting off the island.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey

If you're new to the genre then "Lost Pig" is a good place to start, though technically it's licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0) is not open source.


One of the Linux-Libre maintainers has a good chunk of free as in freedom libre text adventure games.

https://jxself.org/git/


My favorite open source game is figuring out how to navigate GNOME's file picker.


I was asking myself "Why?" so many times, but then I saw MacOSX and understood where all the bad ideas in Gnome file picker came from.


It’s ok I think they have thumbnails for files now


Netrek

https://www.netrek.org/

The first real-time graphical team game on the internet!

It requires both fast reflexes and strategy and there were international leagues as early as the 1990s. These days there aren't many players, however.


Ha, wow, forgot about this one. I played on a CMU server, which I was local to. The saying then was GPA - Rank (0-4) = 0.

Office mate even hacked on netrek to enable a soccer like experience.

Team play, fast respawn, and the game mechanics lead to some epic games. Having more planets meant more armies, but the last planet stands where everyone the defenders respawn where they are needed made for some amazing come backs.

Saw a few players that were amazing with the star bases, allowing remote repair, using tractor beams and repulsors, and helping the team be more coordinated.

Fun stuff, on the surface kind of like xpilot, but much more strategy and team work.


I'll mention nethack just because no one has said it yet


The other day I modified the source to give me 3 blessed potions of gain ability to start. Then I realized that it's better to just update the character generation to allocate more stat points in the beginning. Then I realized that having high stats doesn't automatically make the game fun and went back to the main branch..


And in the same vein, Pixel Dungeon / Shattered Pixel Dungeon


Seconding the latter. It's very well done, and at this point I think it's much better than the original.


If anyone likes the Thief games check out The Dark Mod.

https://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads/


I've spent way too much time on Shattered Pixel Dungeon

http://shatteredpixel.com/


Sauerbraten: http://sauerbraten.org/

But I do not play it anymore. I fear it would become too addictive again.


15 years ago my friends and I were playing daily. Our clan, the ICC, were regulars and for a while the strongest on one of the main EU servers (PSL: Premier Sauerbraten League). So many memories of that game, and the LAN parties.

It's incredible that there's some people still playing. I boot it up once a year, it's always like returning to a piece of my youth frozen in time :-)


Heck yes, I love this game. Instagib is very satisfying, and I have many memories making maps with its embedded level editor together with friends.

I don't know of any other games that do this, having a realtime multiplayer editing toolset. (if you do, tell me and I'll certainly play them too!) Maybe Halo's Forge mode, but that's a bit more limited, though still good fun.


After years of playing it and putting probably thousands of hours into Angband, I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (https://crawl.develz.org/) and I love it to bits.

Text mode, turn based dungeon crawlers aren't for everyone, but I love them: they are very tactical, but don't feel like a typical tactics game, have a fun fantasy based lore, and are just a blast. And most importantly, you can pause and quit at any given moment, and continue just as easily.


Pioneer Space Sim - https://pioneerspacesim.net/ This is an Open-Source remake of Frontier Elite 2 AND Frontier First Encounters.

I only discovered this game a few months ago and only put of a couple of hours into the game so far. For me it takes the best bits of both FE2 and FFE, modernises the UI, improves on the graphics (some of the developers were GL/D3D mod developers of Elite - Frontier). It manages to keep the essential ingredients that made FE2 good and picking out the few extra nice bits from FFE.


Veloren[1], a voxel RPG made in Rust and heavily inspired by Cube World

[1]: https://veloren.net/


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?


Some of them are companies who open sourced their proprietary game. Many others are individuals tinkering alone in their spare time. Some of those eventually grow a player and then developer community.

There are some places to discuss libre/open games:

https://libregamewiki.org/ https://libregames.gitlab.io/ https://freegamedev.net/


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.


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


Corsixth - https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH

It’s a theme hospital clone, similar to open ttd. I played theme hospital as a child and now contribute to this project. It’s nice to exceed my past ability and see the game grow through my efforts.


OpenTyrian! Open source port of one of the BEST shmups of all-time. Awesome Hitchhikers Guide-like narrative. Secrets galore. Great upgrade system. I think you can find it available for most platforms, including Android.


I came here to post this, I just disagree it is "one of the best" shmups - it IS the best. Fully recommended.


0ad is my favorite with my son. We can play as a team against the AI. It is a blast. I wish online was a better experience - right now, you sit around being shunned unless you have a high rating (you also can't get a rating since the highly rated players just game the settings and map).


Hmm, I heard this often about long-ran games that don't have much of a player turnaround...

You might be interested by another open-source RTS : Zero-K/Spring, where moderators take care to nurture a good experience for everyone, for instance :

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1377877


osu!lazer: https://github.com/ppy/osu

Official open source reimplementation of the rhythm game osu!classic that is planned to replace it. It's mostly equivalent except in that you can't submit competitive scores online.

Osu probably has one of the biggest communities surrounding an open game, with some ~15 million active players around the world.

Gameplay revolves around playing community-generated "beatmaps" in one of 4 rhythm-based modes, the most popular of which involves clicking circles.


Brogue is an excellent roguelike: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/




Not a game, but hosting. here i got ports/patches for open core/open source games, especially for Loki games like 1.5 decades ago:

http://icculus.org/

Amongst them one my favorites: Alien vs. Predator (Sierra Game Studio). Proprietary game content though, unsure about the code licence.

Edit: typos fixed


Speaking of Icculus, Neverball was great fun.


Had a lot of fun playing the online multiplayer shooter AssaultCube many years ago. I remember it had a builtin map editor and people would make insane maps, like one for sniping between several-hundred-meter tall skyscrapers


I put a lot of hours in Tales of Maj'Eyal/ToME4[1]. Solid graphical roguelike and very active/responsive dev in DarkGod

[1]: https://te4.org/


I remember when it was Tales of Middle-Earth! Darkgod must have been working on it for a generation now. Really a labour of love.


Openscope[1] - an air traffic control simulator. I used to spend hours playing it. I don’t know if it’s my favorite open source game, but it’s the only one I know of.

1. https://github.com/openscope/openscope


Catacylsm: Dark Days Ahead is fantastic.


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


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.


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

Pity it's not GPL.


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.


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.


> 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!


Fully open source and open content is a pretty strong constraint. Nethack and Angband are probably the ones I've spent most time with. I also had a phase where I spent time with springrts and the games built on top of it.

A more recent one is Remnants of the Precursors, a rather cool remake of Master of Orion 1. Haven't played it as much, though.

If we limit the restrictions to just open source, maybe Quake? And Civilization IV is not fully open source, but all the game code is.


My favorite right now is Open Morrowind: https://openmw.org/en/

And you can download ALL of Morrowind at archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/morrowind_202103

And if you look at who uploaded it: Bethesda did. You can play this 100% legally from the authors.

So yeah, I think it qualifies.



Years ago i had a lot of fun playing the SP maps and the MP maps in SP mode of Cube and Cube 2: Sauerbraten.


Loved this game! I forget why I stopped playing. I played it for many years.


Personally i stopped because people stopped making maps for Cube and the SP mode in Cube 2 didn't get much attention :-P. So after a while i had played pretty much everything there was there several times.

(though i haven't checked it for years so i don't know how it is nowadays)


They might have stopped making SP maps not just because the development for that feature was (and still is) weak, but because Quadropolis gradually became barely functional, if I remember correctly. Now it seems that Quadropolis is gone, along with a mod I once wrote to prevent the removal of blood decals. haha

Although I can see why you'd be disappointed at single-player not getting much attention, I think the devs made the right move by focusing mostly on multiplayer which had the largest player base by far. Multiplayer was really my thing for the most part. I just wish it didn't take them something like 9 years to finally ship an update to the game.


>Scorched 3D is a free and open source artillery game modeled after the MS-DOS game Scorched Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_3D

https://sourceforge.net/projects/scorched3d/


I really enjoy Scorched3D, happy to say I've been playing it for over a decade now :-)


Open Hexagon is an open source game that started as a clone of Super Hexagon and has since then surpassed it. It also gives the ability for users to make their own level packs with a very robust lua scripting system. The custom levels can be insanely creative, sometimes creating entirely new games within the game, though most are only hosted on the Steam workshop which requires the user to purchase it there. The GitHub repository also lacks music files for the base game. The game itself is otherwise completely open source and free to play if you compile it yourself. https://github.com/vittorioromeo/SSVOpenHexagon

Space Station 13 (and the remake, SS14) is an incredibly unique and feature rich multiplayer role playing game that takes place on a rickety space station in a wacky retro-futuristic setting. It's hard to recommend this game as the learning curve is more like a cliff, but it is far and away the best game that exists for creating unique (and often very funny) stories in. It has a long and complicated open source history that has fragmented it into several unique popular forks, but the most popular one that's fully open source nowadays is tgstation. https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation

On that topic I've been playing an SS13-inspired browser based game lately. It's fully open source and takes inspiration from Melvor Idle, but is a much shorter and nicely compacted experience. https://github.com/TBartl/space-station-13-idle https://spacestationidle.com/



Not open content, but OpenLara is a fun open source project to follow - https://github.com/XProger/OpenLara


First-Person-Shooter Xonotic https://xonotic.org/


Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has to take the cake even though I love Xonotic, Beyond All Reason/Spring engine games, Battle For Wesnoth and others.

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead is the kind of community project that could never be the product of a traditional game company, the game is far too vast, intricate and inventive in every little corner of itself.



I remember this crazy game when I was a teenager, and followed its development on and off for many years -- the combat was just so ahead of its time. Glad that they found a narrative to back the action, and an appreciating audience with Overgrowth.


veloren, voxel rpg: https://veloren.net/


This is my fav too! I love to just fly around on the hang glider. It’s so peaceful.


OpenRA

https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA

I wish the developer of ChronoDivide would open source their code. I read it was implemented in TypeScript.

https://chronodivide.com/


Indeed! I have been playing OpenRA with friends semi-regularly and it is excellent, very stable and an overall great playing experience.


I have tried various over the past 20 years and they've been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, but the main two I use are:

The mana world- a 16 bit inspired MMO rpg http://www.themanaworld.org

And EDOPro, a YGOPro fork (You-Gi-Oh client) with improvements


Wow, The Mana World still is actively used? That's pretty cool. Also a weird Baader-Meinhoff moment, I just saw Thorbjørn Lindeijer last weekend at the 40th birthday of a mutual friend, and we briefly talked about when we were still studying together and he, his brother Frode and a few other guys just started that project.

Funny how that project directly lead to Tiled

https://www.mapeditor.org/


One great Open Source game that comes to mind is definitely VVVVVV.

- https://thelettervsixtim.es

- https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV


Great game, but not Open Source; it's under a restrictive license.


Certainly open source. The source is there. In the open. You're just not allowed to reuse it in the ways that we have come to expect from free software. So it's open, but not free, software.


The OSI definition for open source includes the right to use, modify, and redistribute it.

Of course, not everyone necessarily agrees with that definition, but one would typically use the term "source-available" for code that is publicly available with restrictions.


No, that makes it "source available". Not "open source".


My own game, because I’m biased and it’s a shameless plug. The source code is MPL and the content is CC-BY. You’ll need a Nintendo 64 emulator to play though!

https://danbolt.itch.io/wizard-of-the-board


It's nice to read all these experiences with open source games. Something wholesome about these things (not just nostalgia).

It also made me realize there should be an community driven overview / list of these things (genre, inspiration, description, screenshots, version etc). Does this exist?


Here's something similar, though it's limited in scope to just clone games: https://osgameclones.com/


I liked Hedgewars a lot!!!

https://www.hedgewars.org/

But something SimCity like is also great!


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.


Nobody's mentioning old commercial games that were later released by their publishers as open source. One example is the classic combat flight sim "Rowan's Battle of Britain", initially released in the year 2000. You can find it packaged to run under linux/wine, along with other free games, here:

https://github.com/sim-museum/esports-for-engineers

the source code is here: https://github.com/gondur/BOB_Src


Shameless plug: I have been working on Pixel Wheels, a top-down, arcade racing game: https://agateau.itch.io/pixelwheels.


Veloren, a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. https://veloren.net While not finishes yet, already playable and lots of fun.


ET:Legacy [1], initially it (the original: Enemy Territory) wasn't open-source but it is now. Never gets old.

[1]: https://www.etlegacy.com/


There goes the rest of the week. I loved ET. Thanks for posting.



XGalaga :)

There are tons of clones and forks: https://github.com/JoergStrebel/xgalaga-sdl


Red Eclipse, Fast-paced arena shooter. Shame there's almost nobody on the servers usually. https://www.redeclipse.net/

Teeworlds, Fast-paced 2D shooter that has had an undying community for ages. https://teeworlds.com/

Stepmania, DDR-like rhythm game. You know the drill. Also consider the Etterna fork if you're a keyboard fanatic. https://www.stepmania.com/

Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Android), a very good roguelike to fill the void when you only have a phone nearby. http://shatteredpixel.com/

NXengine (or nxengine-evo), an open source engine that can be used to play cave story. Apart from some minor bugs a really good way to experience the game. https://nxengine.sourceforge.io/ https://github.com/nxengine/nxengine-evo

All of these are games I've put countless of hours into. There's a bunch of other good games, SuperTux, Pingus, Tux Racer, Neverball/neverputt, Armagetron Advanced, Minetest, 0ad, some of the KDE games, and more that I've played and liked but haven't lost nearly as much time with.


A Dark Room - https://github.com/doublespeakgames/adarkroom

I actually forked and added a JS audio engine to play sound effects, ambience, etc. and it made it back into the official browser version of the game at http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com


That's an excellent game and you made an excellent contribution. Community-made updates like that are a fantastic example of why open sourcing games can be great for their longevity and quality!



tux racer (now extreme tux racer) was a favourite for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_Racer


I can recommend SuperTux[0] and SuperTuxKart[1] as great OSS alternatives to Super Mario and MarioKart.

SuperTuxKart is truly cross-platform and even has an online mode.

[0] https://www.supertux.org/ [1] https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page


SuperTuxKart has come a long way and is very well done. I haven't tried the online multiplayer, but it looks pretty good. I was really impressed that my Driving Force Pro racing wheel worked out of the box. Now I just need to fix the pedals which were designed rather poorly. Fortunately they can be improved with a couple of new potentiometers and some spring steel.


Even better than online mode, it also has splitscreen and LAN mode! And some of the new tracks are really pretty.


Aquaria, a truly immersive world with great music and sound, innovative gameplay. Open source, not open content.

http://bit-blot.com/aquaria/

https://github.com/AquariaOSE/Aquaria


Online Go Server (OGS): http://online-go.com/



> A retro multiplayer shooter

> Teeworlds is a free online multiplayer game, available for all major operating systems. Battle with up to 16 players in a variety of game modes, including Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag. You can even design your own maps!

https://www.teeworlds.com


I developed Dominus 8 years ago and it's still being played. https://dominusgame.net/ https://github.com/dan335/dominus


Does a chess server count? Lichess is in my opinion one of the greatest success stories as a fully free (both libre and gratis) project that competes with a closed and paid for profit competitor, while being funded by donations.

https://lichess.org


Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™

[1]: https://builtwithdjango.com/projects/widelands


I enjoy 0ad and xonotic


+1 to 0ad, when I allow myself to play games then 0ad is usually my choice.


Globulation 2 https://globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page It's an RTS focused on macro instead of micro. It is cross platform and supports multiplayer! It's really simple in the sense that there are only three unit types, but the strategy is much more nuanced. One interesting dynamic I appreciate is that your unit limit is caused by the fact you have to be able to feed everyone, as opposed to some arbitrary max number the game picks for you or how many pylons you've built. (What do pylons do anyway?) The AI is challenging at harder levels and I still haven't mastered beating them regularly. I really enjoy this game



Similarily, Pioneer Space Sim: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer


OpenArena, Tremulous.

However I stopped playing openarena because the only well-cared server was still full of people that would cheat in various ways, and that would make me extremely angry and would ruin the whole game experience. Also kinda addictive of a game, it is.


CoreWar: https://corewar.co.uk/pmars/

I don't programming game where you do assembly-like coding these days. Perhaps the closest one is Zachtronic' TIS-100


I've been enjoying Unciv on my phone recently. It's a FOSS port of Sid Maier's Civilization V.

https://github.com/yairm210/UnCiv


Widelands - I've spent days in that game.


A link for people who might be interested: https://www.widelands.org


Remnants of the Precursors looks like a pretty amazing recreation of Master of Orion 1

https://www.remnantsoftheprecursors.com/


shapez.io [1] - It's is great game inspired by Factorio. I would describe it as a minimalist Factorio-light.

[1]: https://shapez.io/


https://www.graememcc.co.uk/micropolisJS/ MicropolisJS a open source Sim City clone


The Battle for Wesnoth: https://www.wesnoth.org/

It hits the sweet spot between simplicity and depth for me, like Advance Wars.


FortressOne (modern fork of QuakeWorld Team Fortress). Disclaimer I am a core contributor.

https://www.fortressone.org


WordWarVI:

https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/

Video demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdPfI5B9Cjc

Its just so silly - editor (vi/emacs) wars manifest in a Defender-like arcade game - but extremely fun, and the source code is fun to read also.

Plus, its been my go-to for a "quick code base to port", its really fun to port.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingus is a wonderful lemmings clone


Warsow - quake3 cpma clone. So good.


cpma clone is a stretch would be giving it quite a complement. the only thing that is cpma like is the movement speed and air control. dash and stun not so much - not to mention the low weapon damage. it's also been ill-fated to a single developer running it into the ground with superfluous code and antifeatures


My plot to find fellow cpma'ers worked! Wanna play some cpma? :) add me on discord keeb#1337 and we can set it up. Would be so fun.


its ok to admit you like warsow


I do like Warsow! It's really fun and there's 3 people in the world who play it.


http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/

This is not a 3D technical achievement nor is it highly replayable, but the first playthrough is marvelous for any fan of scifi or cyberpunk.

Hard AI, trying to grow and avoid discovery. It plays very well.

In fact, I say that, but I haven't played it in 10 years and I see there was a 1.0 release in 2020, so I'm going to go check that out right now.


It has a lot of potential, if only the UI and gameplay were a bit better...


I really liked BrowserQuest, a "massively multiplayer HTML5 (WebSocket + Canvas) game experiment": https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/browserquest/


OpenMW, even though content is not open-source (TES III - Morrowind). But community and developers are unbelievable passionate about this project.


I had lots of fun with Red Eclipse (https://www.redeclipse.net/). I haven't played it in a while though so I don't know if it stagnated or got better or worse.

I am mostly playing PokerTH (https://www.pokerth.net/) now.


Not mentioned yet:

Unknown Horizons https://unknown-horizons.org/


Back in the day: Vegastrike.


Vega Strike is back! https://www.vega-strike.org/


I played a lot of Nexuiz and Wesnoth back in the day. Looks like Wesnoth is still in active dev, might give it another go soon.


bzflag! It carries this nice 90s-feeling in a multiplayer online world.


BZFlag is an amazingly addictive game (if you can find an active server). It is tricky to get the hang of it (jumping a tank while doing a 180 turn to land and fire a shot at a pursuer!). https://www.bzflag.org/


Cheating was fun with bzflag. The collision is done client-side.


cocaine diesel. code originally based on qfusion but most of it removed and rewritten including a new renderer from scratch. its a FPS that highly stylized and it has a bomb defusal game mode and loose concept of classes and loadouts

https://cocainediesel.fun/


Open Rollercoaster tycoon


Infra Arcana is an open-source Lovecraft roguelike absolutely dripping with atmosphere and I love it https://sites.google.com/site/infraarcana/home



I sometimes play the BSD games (boggle, mille, and others).

There is also ZZT and Free Hero Mesh, but those are engines with different licenses for different game worlds. A few ZZT games which are free cultural works. But for both engines, games can be made with any licensing.


Xonotic, The Battle for Wesnoth, 0 AD


Recently, I found myself tired of most games, so I wrote one: https://github.com/siberianbot/asteroids It is full of issues, but I still working on it.




ryzom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom

i only played it briefly, but i believe it is the only FOSS MMORPG out there.

if there are others, i'd like to know


Ryzom leveldesign and sound assets are not open source.


thanks, i didn't remember that detail, but there are other FOSS games with similar, or even worse caveats (graphics not free for example), and i think they are still worth considering.

with the whole engine and other code accessible as FOSS we can fix bugs and improve the game. and we can run our own servers and create our own stories. only the lack of sounds is a pity. that would be some work to recreate. i don't know if there are efforts underway


There is an effort underway for sounds.


Space station 13. Not only the game itself (which is unique) but the decentralized community of many independent servers developing their own versions of the game in parallel and copying successful features from each other.


Return to the root (Rttr) a settlers 2 engine reimplementation. Also Widelands.


Frogatto and Friends is a good platformer not mentioned yet. Open source engine, not open source content. https://frogatto.com/


One game per comment, or voting doesn't bring up the most liked game.



I really enjoy Cave Story, It's a very cute metroidvania with a lot of soul.

https://github.com/EXL/NXEngine


These are great but whose idea was it to "reimplement" a game engine, lift the assets from the original game and call it open-source? Who did it first? Was ScummVM the first?


Why, IVAN of course!

Play it here: https://attnam.github.io/ivan-050-wasm/


Super simple but really fun:

https://github.com/awilliams/RTanque



Strategy OpenRA (Red Alert) https://www.openra.net/


Candy Box 2 is fun https://candybox2.github.io/


MegaGlest, Warzone 2100, OpenArena, Mineclone2, Xmoto, SuperTux, Supertuxkart, 0ad, Pingus, TuxRacer, Hedgewars, TeeWorlds



I’ve been playing nethack for almost 40 years now, when it was called “hack” and it ran on 2 floppy disks.


lichess :)

Opensource, active hosted solution and great.


Warzone 2100 - https://wz2100.net


Sorry I don't have an answer but is there an open source tetris implementation?

(It's a good game.)


chess!

I'll also take street craps as a backup.


OpenTDD Nethack Brogue CE OpenRA Battle for Wesnoth Dungeon Crawl Shattered Pixel Dungeon


I really enjoy Bitburner


PewPew Live.

It's similar to geometry wars. It has lots of game modes, great controls, and great music.

https://pewpew.live/


Not open source though, just support for community-created levels.


0ad

Minetest (years ago, haven't kept up with it in a long time)

Widelands

gmult


XBill, Xjewel, Staipan, wump.


marsshooter and bloodfrontier weren't mentioned yet


OpenRA and OpenTTD


Wesnoth Nexuiz


Brogue.


Nethack.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: