Open source video games

Scarecrow59@lemmy.one to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 64 points –

Ive been playing zero-k recently, and wondering what other great open source video games are out there?

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Great suggestions in this discussion! Rather than adding my favourites, I will add some resources that list more games.

  • Libregamewiki: it is really comprehensive (sometimes too much, including even not-so-good-games). They care about licencing and is is very easy to browse, top-notch for me.
  • Open source games: a more relaxed repository, with lots of material.
  • bobeff open source list: this is curated, which means that there are not so many games but each and every one is stable, good, maintained.
  • Arcane Cache: a fantastic blog with reviews of libre games — or more precisely, underground games, there is a lot of discussion on how gamedevving philosophy too. The reviews are always in-depth and allow you to experience the games on another level, and each game is a small jewel in its category. Strongly recommended!

Battle for Wesnoth is the one that comes to mind first. Turn based strategy game.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup classical roguelike, as in actually like Rogue/nethack. Can be played with ASCII or graphical tiles, and you can play in a browser window with scoreboards and a spectator mode.

Some of the most polished open source games are: 0 A. D., Xonotic, Beyond All Reason, Battle for Wesnoth, Mindustry, Minetest, Thrive. These are all great games open source or not. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but these stand out to me for their completeness and polish.

I wasn't expecting to find a new "polished" open source game I've never heard of from this thread, but somehow I've never heard of Thrive before. It's even got a steam release!

Mindustry is a favorite of mine

I love the game, but absolutely hate the inability to freely save and load in a game where maps can last for hours.

inability to freely save and load in a game

Oof. That's a really major downside. Bummer.

Edit: just downloaded to see for myself. You seem to be able to save and load, at least in singleplayer on pc.

I suspect I didn't explain myself well.
If I remember correctly, you can enter and exit the campaign, and doing so saves the game. There is also a single autosave, which you can't manually select and is there for better or worse.

So in practice, one mistake or ruthless surprise can turn into a lot of wasted time. For the sake of my alopecia, I used to make regular backups to the whole folder, convenient enough using btrfs.

+1 for mindustry. Great game and works across all platforms.

Been using the android version, hadnt updated in a while, excited to see they added another world and a lot more content it seems!

  • Xonotic is a great old school, Quake style FPS with an active community
  • 0 A.D. is a pretty polished historical RTS
  • The Battle for Wesnoth is a classic turn based strategy
  • OpenRA is an open implementation of the Red Alert engine that's got an active community

I spent so many hours on wesnoth...

That one is perhaps the most polished open source game out there.

Veloren is based on Cube World and it's an RPG with server builds and everything

  • osu! (The new lazer client, the old one isn't open source)
  • Veloren

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, has a really strong community behind it. Be warned, it is an intensely deep simulation (as in dwarf fortress), that is often criticized for it's tediousness. But that gameplay element critique aside, it's a fantastic example of a community developped game.

Highly recommend. Easier to grasp than dwarf fortress, although finding community can be a bit hard since reddit shutdown

They also took the trouble and respect to make the game multi-language, unlike dwarf fortress.

OpenTTD is more a strategic game,but it's great. OpenRCT sadly requires the graphics of the original RCT2, so it's not really open source. But also a favorite.

OpenRCT is an incredible achievement. The mods people make add so much more content.

0AD is great. And whilst not a game really, FlightGear is the best you'll get for a FOSS flightsim. And really, for the prices that some X-Plane/MSFS planes and other addons go for, it's actually proper good.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, or if you like something a little less complex, Cataclysm: Bright Nights, are fantastic roguelike games. Proper traditional, turn based, tileset ones.

Imagine a mix of Fallout and The Walking Dead, that's what it's like. It's superb. The possibilities are endless

Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs got open sourced if that counts.

Holy f— really? I used to love Amnesia back in the day. This is such a strange and unexpected, but really cool news!

Ive been playing a lot of MineClone2 which is a modpack for Minetest!

haven't used mineclone2, but i do want to echo minetest

Havent seen endless sky mentioned here, it is an old school space trader sim (think scape velocity or a 2d freelancer)

Warzone 2100 is an excellent RTS that is open source. I've never played a game with a bigger and more complex skill tree. Has an interesting development history in that it was originally a Playstation game, but was completely open sourced once the company went under. It has been kept alive by fans ever since.

Colobot was made open source a while ago and is still great! The game assets (and original binaries) can also be downloaded for free from the dev's site.

For mobile games there is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, great time sink

I like re3, reVC and reLCS. These are reverse engineered versions of GTA 3, Vice City and Liberty City Stories with improvements. Take Two has thrown a strike on the main repository, but you can still find mirrors or builds in the internet.

Is there any mirrors with newer builds? I could only find the earlier releases when I looked.

I don't know, I compiled from source. If you use ArchLinux you can get re3-git, revc-git and relcs-git from AUR.

If you like Zero-K you're going to love Beyond All Reason

Battle for westnoth !

And I can't remember right now the stealth game I used to play, it was the dark something, gonna search it later.

I can recommend osu!lazer if you like rythm games, be careful not to get addicted though :P