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.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20011128105604/http://cns-web.bu...
[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ninjin/fdd615d6e32e1316014dece892128697...
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/
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.
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”).
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”.
[1] https://xonotic.org/ [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shattered...
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.
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.
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/
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.
Kittens: https://bitbucket.org/bloodrizer/kitten-game/src/master/
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.
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.
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 :)
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/
"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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Eventually someone reimplemented it faithfully! I love FOSS!
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OpenMW is my current vice, but obviously content is not open source.
All super basic, but always ready to go when you've got a few minutes to kill.
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/
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
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...
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.
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.
But I do not play it anymore. I fear it would become too addictive again.
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.
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.
[1]: https://veloren.net/
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?
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.
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.
Amongst them one my favorites: Alien vs. Predator (Sierra Game Studio). Proprietary game content though, unsure about the code licence.
Edit: typos fixed
[1]: https://te4.org/
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.
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.
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/
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.
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA
I wish the developer of ChronoDivide would open source their code. I read it was implemented in TypeScript.
The mana world- a 16 bit inspired MMO rpg http://www.themanaworld.org
And EDOPro, a YGOPro fork (You-Gi-Oh client) with improvements
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?
The hardest part about setting that up is likely the servers.
https://github.com/sim-museum/esports-for-engineers
the source code is here: https://github.com/gondur/BOB_Src
There are tons of clones and forks: https://github.com/JoergStrebel/xgalaga-sdl
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.
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
SuperTuxKart is truly cross-platform and even has an online mode.
[0] https://www.supertux.org/ [1] https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page
> 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!
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.
I don't programming game where you do assembly-like coding these days. Perhaps the closest one is Zachtronic' TIS-100
[1]: https://shapez.io/
It hits the sweet spot between simplicity and depth for me, like Advance Wars.
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.
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.
I am mostly playing PokerTH (https://www.pokerth.net/) now.
Unknown Horizons https://unknown-horizons.org/
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.
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
https://www.siedler25.org/index.php?com=dynamic&mod=1&lang=e...
Play it here: https://attnam.github.io/ivan-050-wasm/
Opensource, active hosted solution and great.
(It's a good game.)
I'll also take street craps as a backup.
It's similar to geometry wars. It has lots of game modes, great controls, and great music.
Minetest (years ago, haven't kept up with it in a long time)
Widelands
gmult