These are the FLOSS games that stand out, list your own favourites or most-play games.
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I would rate all of these, as worth a try:
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
Cube2:Sauerbraten
SGT-Puzzles
Andor’s Trail
AssaultCube
Minetest
Neverball/Neverputt
PowderToy
0ad
Fillets-ng
Anuto TD
Xmoto/Bloboats
Flightgear
Kobo Deluxe
Enigma (oxyd)
LiquidWar5
H-Craft Championship
Numpty Physics
Wesnoth
The Dark mod
Have completed SuperTuxKart, BlobWars 1&2, Flare, Frozen Bubble, Hex-a-Hop, Holotz’s Castle, SearchAndRescue II, Alex the Alligator, Project:Starfighter, Stormbaan Coureur, Trigger, all are fun.
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Can find details about most of the above games here:
https://libregamewiki.org/List_of_games
FLOSS gaming is excellent, thanks to all these devs and asset creators.
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BONUS TOMT:
I’m looking for the name of a FLOSS Quake1-mod, puzzle game, that was about placing gravity points, to curve a stream of particles around the level, and eventually into the goal target. (May have used irrlicht) If anyone knows the name of this one, please let me know, it is my white-whale of games.
Mindustry
God I love Mindustry, but I feel it was a better game before it added unit factories and became a full-fledged RTS. I enjoyed it more back when it was pure tower defense with supply line logistics.
Now that you mention it, I feel the same way.
I’ve played a bunch of Mindustry. I feel like I’m not very good at it , after completing about 10 levels.
May need to watch more beginner vids.
OpenTTD - One of the few games I can pick up and put down, and it’s never boring. Also on all the distribution platforms for free I believe.
OpenTTD, or Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, is a very clean city management game.
Try it out if top down cities are your thing.
no nethack? weird move omitting the OG in floss gaming
I remember thinking the original Hack was the greatest thing in the world, when seeing it on PC in '85 or '86.
I’ve got respect for Nethack, and recommend everyone take a look at Nethack to see where all roguelikes came from.
intersting! where/how did this opportunity arise? was it widely spread already or were you kinda lucky?
Lucky, we visited a friend’s dad’s workplace. The dad was a coder and showed us around, and also showed us Hack (a quick Basalisk battle).
Thrive: the cell-stage in Spore but more in-depth.
You float around looking for various compounds for energy and to grow. After growing you can add parts to the cell or modify it’s membrane type or the behavior of AI-controlled copies (you lose if there are no others of your species when you die). You can also migrate to a new environment with different resources (including sunlight). The game ends when you live long enough or complete evolutionary objectives for which the next stage is a work in progress. It can often be easy or difficult to survive, depending on your choices.
Protip: you can modify the cell to be faster at the expense of less HP - would recommend.
Thrive looks like an excellent evolution game.
I haven’t tried it yet, but did watch the retrospective video from one of the core developers who joined the Dev team as a teen. Can’t find the link for that video, can anyone post it?
Good gameplay tips.
-= Addition =-
Here is the link for the Thrive overview video, mentioned above(warning 46min long): link
Both naev and endless sky will scratch the top down space trader itch.
I killed a lot of hours on the official release of endless sky, it was nice to see it unexpectedly in the arch repo.
I tried Naev before and it looks very polished.
A little too involved for me, the whole star-trading style. I never got into Elite during the Amiga/ST years, but I get how polished and layered Naev and Endless Sky are.
Get into it people, if those are your type of games!
Formerly known as Star Control 2, and now officially known as “Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters” (available for free on Steam).
The game was released open source in the early 2000s when the code from the 3DO port was found.
Since then, there have been plenty of mods, including a demo of a fan sequel, and two full graphics overhauls giving the game HD graphics. Plus optional remixed music.
My favourite mod is UQM Mega Mod, which is probably the most feature-rich mod, and super customizable. You can go for full fan-made HD graphics and music, or switch things over to the vanilla PC experience from 1992. Or you can toggle QoL features or bonuses for added lore if you so choose.
Yes!
I played Ur-Quan way back, and it is a great space battler.
Haven’t tried any of the mods yet. Those are some handy recommendations, thanks!
It’s kind of like Minetest, but an RTS. (And it predates Minetest by a significant margin.) Originally conceived to be better client for Total Annihilation, but is now a completely extensible engine for real time strategy games and several FOSS games you can plug into it are also available – Kernel Panic being a perennial (and perhaps appropriate) favorite.
Beyond All Reason is a great Spring engine game as well.
I’ve heard of Zero-K previously, and the Kernel Panic mod looks unique and fun.
I’ve played and modded
- Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead (currently)
- Endless Sky (in the past)
Both can be run on both android and Linux. I still haven’t setup CDDA as a server and made a script to compile for Andy/x86. I played Endless Sky like that for awhile in the past where I could play mobile or on the comp. I kinda stopped because the gameplay features on mobile are different than PC and so the game can get grindy on mobile more than x86.
- Hedgehogs is another favorite
Where is our Counterstrike for the Millenni"boomer" naughties café crew? I miss that experience but am not willing to buy into a monetizing platform like steam or anything I cannot own outright/requires trusting some proprietary kernel module or m$ garbage.
For anyone who likes the idea of CDDA but bounced off its vertical difficulty and complexity curves, there’s also Cataclysm: Bright Nights. While Dark Days Ahead chases realism, BN is a fork that prioritizes fun.
It adds a ton of quality of life tweaks to make basic tasks less annoying, and removes most of the artificial restrictions DDA added to make the game more difficult. It also lacks the pockets system that DDA implemented that splits your inventory into a dozen smaller ones, so managing your inventory is a hundred times easier in Bright Nights.
It’s kind of unbalanced, is missing a bunch of content that DDA has, and is much easier than the base game, but IMO it’s way more fun. And once you’re comfortable with things, you can move on to the base game for a real challenge.
I tried CDDA, need to try it a bunch more to figure out what is going on.
Endless Sky really did seem endless in terms of time needed to play. I didn’t get into the real depth of exploring different systems.
Did autocomplete change Hedgewars -> Hedgehogs ? Or do you have a link for Hedgehogs?
The closest to CS2 is Urban Terror (UrT), but it has proprietary bits in it, and feels dirty after a while.
Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory is pretty good for round-based team play. Not sure how active these days.
I think Assault Cube Reloaded tried to hit the COD style of play.
IMO CDDA reinvents what complexity means. I found it both interesting and frustrating at first. Modding is actually quite approachable and pretty much entirely in JSON files. Once you get an idea of the basic layout, just get used to going in and changing what you really don’t like about the game.
I really like the Sky Island mod right now, and have been playing with it for weeks. I don’t go in to mod items in the game like some kind of cheat code or when I find it frustrating to find or do X/Y/Z. The game (experimental build) is full of little odds and ends. Like I’ll occasionally find things where I can disassemble a thing but can’t assemble it using the same tools or someone made a complex version of an item that is needlessly advanced for the purpose so I go in and make a simple version. At first I was concerned about making pull requests or sharing my stuff, but I think that is quite premature for me. Maybe if I make some stuff that is super useful or interesting I will share that item. It has really been an eye opening experience to take open source responsibility for my own frustrations in the game. My frustrations have become my own challenges. Maybe it is my age but I spend about half my time modding and half playing. There are warnings in the game and documentation about how what I am doing can ruin the game experience. However, I have found the actual gameplay documentation is too terse for me, especially given the game’s complexity. Between the better dev documentation, and reading the JSON and CPP, I find it fun to play around. For me on Linux, they haven’t been adding the nightly builds for Linux to the precompliled binaries, so that got me into using the make file already. I’m still figuring out git branches and merging with minimal success, and making my own mod file that can replace items defined elsewhere eludes me, but I’m working through it. I only have a little more than a dozen items I’ve actually made and about that many alterations.
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Yeah, hedgewars is what I meant.
Thanks for the references. I’ll check them out sometime soon.
My favorite is [email protected]. 🙃
Gameplay is similar to Shattered Pixel Dungeon, i.e. traditional roguelike, almost like a puzzle game. It is a bit harder to get into, though.
Just gave Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup another try just then, it is one that I will need a lot of beginner videos too.
Yeah, I had to start out with videos, too. It’s certainly not a small amount of information to take in…
This is a lengthy list! Thanks.
Also, xracer is another clone of wipEout.
