> The game is still very popular and easy to play. But the obsoletness of DOS
Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Thanks to DOSBox and other emulators (FreeDOS is also not bad though) it is a fantastic OS (or virtual machine). DOS as a platform for (2D) games has never been better than it is today, on modern hardware running DOSBox.
> Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games.
Until you want better graphics, network, touch support, etc, etc.
Some people may not want that; and there are workarounds, even in dosbox itself; still, they are just that.
The page lists similar plans in FAQ: “To add additional functionalities (features) to the game (like online gaming, scalable HQ Grahics, HQ Audio, plugins, etc.).”
What I like about DOSbox are its constraints and limitations.
Of course there plenty of good features missing but on the other hand that’s the point.
Why start in 2d when in reality you want a 3d game?
DOSbox is delivering constraints.
The demo scene died when the constraints were gone and all that was left was showing a movie. On a C64 for example there are no animations per se but maxing out technical prowess combined with design. If it matches optimally it will make you marvel otherwise not so much.
So there is no right or wrong only what do you want?
> The demo scene died when the constraints were gone
The problem was in my opinion not that the constraints were gone, but the fact that the PC did not provide a very stable platform anymore, on which you could do some crazy low-level optimizations.
There are also patch sets available for modern PCs to support legacy MSDOS, and Windows 3.1/95/98/ME. Attempting to install/run on modern hardware will usually blue-screen without the workarounds. =3
This is a cool project, but the author should note that they _are_ likely creating a derivative version of Civ1 here. It might look somewhat different, but that's clearly just 16-bit (?) intel opcodes in a slightly spicier form.
It's very unlikely this sort of approach will end up with a copyright-free codebase, though it might be useful as a source for a cleanroom approach. The author shouldn't be discouraged -- lots of other recompilation efforts work this was as well, but it's a muddy place to be.
I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)
This is a great idea. I do play Civ1 on my XT class machine (NEC V20 @ 10MHz, 1MB RAM, 64MB IDE, 256K Trident VGA, NE2000, Adlib) but the turn times are horrendous as this is a 1991 game being run on a 1982 CPU. Realistically, most people would have been playing on either a 286 or 386. Having the game available on modern hardware, I imagine it’d be far more enjoyable. I’ll give it a go.
I'm commenting this blindly so apologies if I'm wrong, but if it's possible I'd try and compile this against .NET Framework 3.5 instead of .NET 8.
A lot of people (myself included) have XP/7 machines for retro games like Civ1 and I'd personally love to use that machine instead of my modern one to play the game.
Without looking at the codebase, I can already say this is a big ask because it uses the Avalonia framework for cross-platform deployment. .NET Framework 3.5 is Windows-only, and there was a heap of massive breaking changes when the .NET Framework was replaced by the superior .NET Core (now just .NET), so it would be a pretty big maintenance burden to try to maintain a separate build target for that.
You go on eBay or similar site and you pay for a used copy on floppy or CD-ROM. Then using the appropriate tool you back those files up and use them for OpenCiv 1. Cheap, no. Convenient, no. But legal.
If you're lucky you stumble across it in a thrift store that wasn't paying particular attention and assumed it was a puzzle or a board game.
I still have the floppies and manual in a box in the attic. Bit of a hoarder in that way I’m afraid.
Question then is do I need to find a floppy drive to obtain the files or can I get them elsewhere.
Of course who knows if the floppy’s still work. I remember having problems with my Star Trek 25th anniversary floppies around 1996ish, and today it’s 30 years later.
I mean from a legal perspective, original media is the only recourse. But if we expand the options we're willing to avail ourselves of, there's a lot of high quality backups online.
So far as I know, Take-Two Interactive is extremely lenient, especially since they don't offer any way to purchase Civ1 or 2
I love how obsessed HN is with civilization. I put over 1000 hours into Civ 5 alone and was proud to beat diety (and then consistently beat diety). It's funny how many founders are big on civ. Zuck and Elon both apparently spent a lot of time during college on the series.
In my opinion, Civ1 was fundamentally simpler than any other Civ game. It is like the difference between playing DOOM and Halo. Civ 1 has very few units, very few civ types, very few anything really. That means that it is easy to keep the whole game in your head at once. For me, its a totally different experience.
It's simple (both in terms of gameplay and graphics) and it's the fastest Civ game to complete a full playthrough. Later releases made the game slower and more complex.
Honestly it feels to me that Civ1 - Civ2 is the most direct upgrade in the series. Civ 2 was mostly just a better civ 1. From civ4 onwards, the series was a lot more willing to shake things up in its gameplay.
Civ 2 was without doubt a much uglier civ 1, though. Isometric graphics in win 3.11 wasn't a good bet.
Civ 1 had good pixel art (look at those mountains! Not to mention the intro), good colors (and more of them!) and clean iconography. For me the look was part of the magic, so I never got into Civ 2.
> The game is still very popular and easy to play. But the obsoletness of DOS
Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games. Thanks to DOSBox and other emulators (FreeDOS is also not bad though) it is a fantastic OS (or virtual machine). DOS as a platform for (2D) games has never been better than it is today, on modern hardware running DOSBox.
> Nothing obsolete about DOS when it comes to playing 2D games.
Until you want better graphics, network, touch support, etc, etc.
Some people may not want that; and there are workarounds, even in dosbox itself; still, they are just that.
The page lists similar plans in FAQ: “To add additional functionalities (features) to the game (like online gaming, scalable HQ Grahics, HQ Audio, plugins, etc.).”
What I like about DOSbox are its constraints and limitations.
Of course there plenty of good features missing but on the other hand that’s the point.
Why start in 2d when in reality you want a 3d game?
DOSbox is delivering constraints.
The demo scene died when the constraints were gone and all that was left was showing a movie. On a C64 for example there are no animations per se but maxing out technical prowess combined with design. If it matches optimally it will make you marvel otherwise not so much.
So there is no right or wrong only what do you want?
> The demo scene died when the constraints were gone
The problem was in my opinion not that the constraints were gone, but the fact that the PC did not provide a very stable platform anymore, on which you could do some crazy low-level optimizations.
86Box runs on modern MacOS, but is not very performant for games on ARM.
https://github.com/86Box/86Box
There are also patch sets available for modern PCs to support legacy MSDOS, and Windows 3.1/95/98/ME. Attempting to install/run on modern hardware will usually blue-screen without the workarounds. =3
https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x
There is a win 3.1 port for wider screens that do box will run
This is a cool project, but the author should note that they _are_ likely creating a derivative version of Civ1 here. It might look somewhat different, but that's clearly just 16-bit (?) intel opcodes in a slightly spicier form.
It's very unlikely this sort of approach will end up with a copyright-free codebase, though it might be useful as a source for a cleanroom approach. The author shouldn't be discouraged -- lots of other recompilation efforts work this was as well, but it's a muddy place to be.
It is very likely that no one cares if anyone cares about copyright.
If someone do in fact care, I'm sure someone else can organize an online donation for them tissues those who care can cry into.
Otherwise please accept that Civ I is effectively public domain.
Nobody cares until the original company wants to release a remaster in 10 years.
There are also some folks working on a similar project for Civilization 2. https://github.com/axx0/Civ2-clone
While not exactly the same, there is also https://www.freeciv.org/
- civ 1 --> OpenCiv1
- civ 2 --> FreeCiv
- civ 3 --> OpenCiv3
- civ 4 --> ???
- civ 5 --> UnCiv
Also worth mentioning is C-evo, even if it's not being developed further afaik
http://c-evo.org/
C-evo development shifted to forks, New Horizons and Distant Horizon.
https://app.zdechov.net/c-evo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/
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Nice one! Wish someone would make a browser based version a la Chronodivide's RA2
https://github.com/Solen1985/CivOne
Worth mentioning this one also
I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)
This is a great idea. I do play Civ1 on my XT class machine (NEC V20 @ 10MHz, 1MB RAM, 64MB IDE, 256K Trident VGA, NE2000, Adlib) but the turn times are horrendous as this is a 1991 game being run on a 1982 CPU. Realistically, most people would have been playing on either a 286 or 386. Having the game available on modern hardware, I imagine it’d be far more enjoyable. I’ll give it a go.
Emulators are ok
> The game logic is Based on original DOS Civilization 1 game version 475.05 disassembly.
Love more details on how this was done and the translation to human-readable code.
I'm commenting this blindly so apologies if I'm wrong, but if it's possible I'd try and compile this against .NET Framework 3.5 instead of .NET 8.
A lot of people (myself included) have XP/7 machines for retro games like Civ1 and I'd personally love to use that machine instead of my modern one to play the game.
Without looking at the codebase, I can already say this is a big ask because it uses the Avalonia framework for cross-platform deployment. .NET Framework 3.5 is Windows-only, and there was a heap of massive breaking changes when the .NET Framework was replaced by the superior .NET Core (now just .NET), so it would be a pretty big maintenance burden to try to maintain a separate build target for that.
Since this requires some files from the original Civilization how do people obtain legal copies of the game? It's not available on Steam or GOG
(Or am I being hopelessly naïve by asking such a question?)
You go on eBay or similar site and you pay for a used copy on floppy or CD-ROM. Then using the appropriate tool you back those files up and use them for OpenCiv 1. Cheap, no. Convenient, no. But legal.
If you're lucky you stumble across it in a thrift store that wasn't paying particular attention and assumed it was a puzzle or a board game.
So: Yes, hopelessly naive.
I still have the floppies and manual in a box in the attic. Bit of a hoarder in that way I’m afraid.
Question then is do I need to find a floppy drive to obtain the files or can I get them elsewhere.
Of course who knows if the floppy’s still work. I remember having problems with my Star Trek 25th anniversary floppies around 1996ish, and today it’s 30 years later.
I mean from a legal perspective, original media is the only recourse. But if we expand the options we're willing to avail ourselves of, there's a lot of high quality backups online.
So far as I know, Take-Two Interactive is extremely lenient, especially since they don't offer any way to purchase Civ1 or 2
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Is there anything similar for Civ IV? So many top tier mods break after a while due to the same memory issues.
I love how obsessed HN is with civilization. I put over 1000 hours into Civ 5 alone and was proud to beat diety (and then consistently beat diety). It's funny how many founders are big on civ. Zuck and Elon both apparently spent a lot of time during college on the series.
True, found this study fascinating, basically coming to the same conclusion: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11846-020-00378-0
Can anyone give some hints on what made Civ 1 special compared to other classic entries in the franchise? Despite the nostalgia factor, of course.
In my opinion, Civ1 was fundamentally simpler than any other Civ game. It is like the difference between playing DOOM and Halo. Civ 1 has very few units, very few civ types, very few anything really. That means that it is easy to keep the whole game in your head at once. For me, its a totally different experience.
It's simple (both in terms of gameplay and graphics) and it's the fastest Civ game to complete a full playthrough. Later releases made the game slower and more complex.
Honestly it feels to me that Civ1 - Civ2 is the most direct upgrade in the series. Civ 2 was mostly just a better civ 1. From civ4 onwards, the series was a lot more willing to shake things up in its gameplay.
Civ 2 was without doubt a much uglier civ 1, though. Isometric graphics in win 3.11 wasn't a good bet.
Civ 1 had good pixel art (look at those mountains! Not to mention the intro), good colors (and more of them!) and clean iconography. For me the look was part of the magic, so I never got into Civ 2.
I considered Alpha Centauri as the sequel, both in the continuation of Civ 1s final goal and the expanded gameplay.
Civ 3 already started to shake things up.
Is there a similar project for Masters of Orion?
https://github.com/1oom-fork/1oom is the one I recommend
There's another recommendation that I haven't tried, but I've played a bunch of https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors and can recommend it.
I wish there were one for MOO2, though. With some modern rebalancing...
"OpenCiv1 uses .NET 8 and Avalonia UI framework" So.... way bigger filesize than the original game + dosbox running on a html server?
Nice exercise though, but I'll stick to the original.
By the way CivNet (civ1 + networking for Win 3.11) runs perfectly in Wine
We got civ 2, civ 3, and civ 1.
But when will we get the greatest civ ever, civ 4?
Looks like C# completely taken over gamedev.
It's in the first party libraries now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics...
No, but it has always been huge.
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Time to pimp up my throne room
In Civ 1 you bring ameliorations to your palace, not throne room. Please hand in your geek card.
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