Looking for FOSS Games

theshatterstone54@feddit.uk to Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 122 points –

Hey there,

I enjoy Linux gaming via WINE/Proton, but I often wonder about Linux-native FOSS games. You often see brilliant titles like 0AD and Mindustry mentioned, but there are also some unspoken gems in the "genre" like Minetest and it makes me wonder what other FOSS games are out there, that people just don't talk about much? I'm looking to discover and play more of these titles.

54

Unciv - this one's especially good on mobile

FreeDoom

Sonic Robo Blast 2 if fangames are acceptable

Edit: Since I mentioned FreeDoom -- Gzdoom acts as a sort of platform for Libre FPSes. Ashes 2063 and Wolfenstein Blade of Agony for instance.

To name a few: AssaultCube, Battle for Wesnoth, Cube2: Sauerbraten, FligthGear, Freeciv, Freeciv21, Nexuiz Classic, OpenArena, OpenHV, OpenRA, OpenTTD, Remnants of the Precursors, SpeeDreams, Stone Kingdom, SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, Unciv, Urban Terror, Veloren, Warozone 2100, Widelands, Xonotic

P.S. It may be that not all of them are FOSS, but they run natively on linux.

I have thousands of hours in Urban Terror. I wish the jump mechanics could be enabled in other games. I have so many neurons dedicated to it.

BAR - Beyond All Reason, for Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander style RTS, learned about this one in another thread here on lemmy

Zero-K - similar premise, plays different from BAR, also the graphics seem less demanding

OpenSoldat - 2D arena shooter. For anyone that never played or saw something similar, think of multiplayer maps of halo, quake or unreal, but if it was a 2D platformer

Not quite open source, but Daggerfall Unity is a FOSS update to the engine for Daggerfall, a game which Bethesda has made free for years now. You can get the game off GOG, too.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

https://cataclysmdda.org/

Hell yeah CDDA.

I'm currently installing solar panels and wind turbines on the roof of a firestation to act as my garage and home base while I'm fixing up a luxury RV that I drove out of a mall. Surprisingly, it was in great condition except for all of the glass, boards, and quarterpanels; the chassis itself and all of the internals are practically untouched.

Ones I've played (mostly when I was younger) and enjoyed a lot:

Teeworlds

Warmux

SuperTux

Cube 2: Sauerbraten

Unfortunately Warmux is now a dead project, with official site taken over by unrelated company and only unofficial Flathub distribution exist.

Even Windows built and other OS is gone.

I'm a fan of Freedroid Classic, a FOSS remake of a commodore 64 game called "Paradroid". You're a robot on a deserted space ship full of other malfunctioning robots, and you have to hack / shoot all of them. You start out as the worst robot, but if you encounter a better one, you can hack it to take over its body -- if it doesn't kill you first.

Takes a few runs to get the hang of it, but it's a lot of fun.

Open transport Tycoon deluxe. Been going for years and it's still great.

Simutrans, surely.

Simultrans is good but it's a bit barebones for my liking.

Really! I got started on Simutrans and had a lot of difficulty moving to oTTD. The straw that broke the camels back was having to lay down rail tile by tile instead of routing between two point.

Endless Sky is an amazing one. I've put tons of hours into it. It's a top down 2d space trading/fighting game, very similar to Escape Velocity if you've ever played that game.

Would reccomend osu!. A cool rhythm game with support for different gamemodes. The lazer version is open source and is on development to ensure it can match all expectations.

Here is also a website where you can see if there is an open source port to non-open source games or an alternative that e.g. tries something of its own / based on the gameplay. As an example, the following "clones" are listed for Minecraft: Minetest, Mineclone2 (now VoxeLibre), ManicDigger and more.

Edit: fixed some grammatic fails.

Didn't see any mention of dungeon crawl stone soup so I'm adding it here

Nikki and the Robots, it's written in Haskell

For those unaware, what is the significance of it being written in Haskell?

It's a functional programming language, so you have to think quite differently when using it if you're used to imperative programming languages (e.g. C++, Java, Python, Basic). I learned it at uni and it was quite fun, but I wouldn't know how to write a larger project in it.

Language on the broad scope doesn’t matter, but something with a niche—especially not another object-oriented framework as dominates video games but less so elsewhere in the last decade where encapsulation & state have been seen more as anti-patterns in most cases—can make it either a better tool for the job or at least a curiousity on how to construct a full application of the type in said language—which helps fans of this or adjacent languages have a repository of ideas to draw upon.

Does Katawa Shoujo count? It’s not quite FOSS, but it’s a renpy game under CC BY-NC-ND.

Selaco is a quite recent FOSS game, pased on DOOM.

Selaco looks awesome, and GZDoom it's running on is indeed FOSS, but the game itself appears to be a commercial endeavor and not FOSS itself, from what I could find. :)

Absolutely a cool looking game though. Super impressive.

FOSS doesn't require that it's not sold commercially.

The "Free" is as in speech.

I think it's great that FOSS developers can get paid.

You're correct, although I didn't necessarily dispute that.

I also think it's awesome to see FOSS software people are buying voluntarily to support the project! Stuff like Cataclysm: DDA being on Steam for instance.

But is Selaco's source code available and does it have a permissive license to distribute, like the GPL? That's what I had trouble substantiating. Happy to be shown otherwise! But I think this might be a case of "The engine / platform is FOSS, but the IP is not."

Looks like a really cool game though. I love the artwork.

Here are some less mentioned FLOSS games, that are excellent quality:

Fillets-ng (2D fish sokoban)

The Dark Mod (3D stealth game, bow and sword)

Crrcsim (3D model glider flightsim, slope soaring)

its pretty complex and can be hard to learn, but flightgear is super fun once you get the hang of piloting.

I can also recommend Rota, it's a relatively new puzzle platformer. https://snapcraft.io/rota

Snap is closed-source backend and is hardcoded to use Canonical's repo (therefore centralized). Kinda ironic I think. I can't find it through flathub sadly.

I haven't played it yet, but a game called Veloren looks really good, and I've heard great things about it.

I spent several years on OpenBSD playing mostly foss games (no WINE support) before I got my steam deck, so I feel fairly qualified with recommending Cataclysm DDA, Xmoto, and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Say goodbye to the next several months of your life. Other cool FOSS games that grabbed me, but not to the same level: Ur Quan Masters (Star Control 2), and endless-sky.

@theshatterstone54@feddit.uk Sonic RoboBlast 2 and Sonic RoboBlast 2 Kart.
The former is a fork of the original Doom that turns it into a 3D platformer. The latter is a fork of the former that turns it into an online kart racing game