Talk:Freeciv

Learning freeciv

I find learning freeciv somewhat difficult for a beginner. Should a section be there on how to start, and proceed with the game? --Phoe6 20:52, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

No. This isn't a manual - that should be done by interested parties at either Wikibooks, the Internet in general, or the Freeciv project. --Gwern (contribs) 21:14 17 November 2006 (GMT)

I agree. A manual and several beginners' guides are available at www.freeciv.org. Rp 17:49, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Freeciv vs. Civ: copyright issues?

If anyone knows the answer, I think it would be very valuable (and encyclopedic) if this page explained the copyright issues involved in Freeciv.

Currently this page simply says:

Freeciv is a multiplayer, turn-based strategy game for personal computers inspired by the commercial Sid Meier's Civilization series. Released under the GNU General Public License....

I think this sentence makes two claims that may be false, and certainly need some sort of justification to avoid being POV

The claims are absolutely correct; what makes you think otherwise? Copyright issues regarding Freeciv have often been discussed (primarily on the Freeciv mailing lists) but without a clear statement that is ready for inclusion into this article. Please see www.freeciv.org, forum.freeciv.org, or the freeciv-dev mailing list archives for further discussion. Rp (talk) 12:16, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Name

"Inspired by"??? No, Freeciv is Civ. In fact, I would argue that Freeciv is closer to Civ 1 than Civ 2 is to Civ 1, and nobody says that Civ 2 is merely "inspired by" Civ 1.

Edit: I have changed it to say Civ 2. This is as Civ 1 uses a top down view and Civ2 and freeciv use isometric

Freeciv's default tileset is indeed isometric, but it fully supports both top-down and hexagonal layouts as well. Fact is, before v2.0 the default and only view was the top-down one. I for one still prefer playing the game with this view. --Himasaram 01:09, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I understand that some of you may be Freeciv players with a vested interest in Sid Meier not suing for money from Freeciv. But if such a lawsuit happened, any court in the world would rule that Freeciv was not merely "inspired by" Civ, but copied almost all of its details, usually quite literally.

It's unclear to what extent making use of another game's rules and conceptual elements constitutes copying in the sense of copyright law. Freeciv is most certainly free of literal copying: all source code and data elements (e.g. artwork) was created specifically for Freeciv. Some additional material available on the website does reuse pre-existing material, but always with the explicit permission of the original creator. Rp 12:00, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Licence

"Released under the GNU GPL..." By what right? If Sid Meier owned the original copyright, then he would have had to relinquish these rights in order for Freeciv to be under copyleft.

What I am writing here is partially speculation (and that's why I haven't edited the main page). Can someone who knows the true story please clarify?

And one final nitpick. The opening sentence says that Freeciv is "for personal computers". As someone who spent three years in grad school playing Freeciv on the Unix machines in our math department, let me assure you that Freeciv is far more widely used than just on the PC market. This probably needs to be revised as well. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 07:58, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

The first question is very complex and has been discussed for over a decade with no definite answer so far (search the mailing lists or the web forums for old discussions). As for the second question: The source code and artwork that are released under the GPL are all original, created by the Freeciv developers. It is completely unrelated to Meier's work. --Himasaram 09:08, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

In general I think games are not covered by US copyright, except for the verbatim copying of text or pictures: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html Thue | talk 09:41, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Interesting. The government website you linked to says that a particlar part of a game "may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression." I'm now very curious what "sufficient amount" means. Freeciv copied all the names of things from Sid Meier's Civilization.

Those names are all real-life historical concepts. Hardly copyrightable. --Himasaram 00:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Of course, Meier's Civilization copied a number of basic concepts and names from the Avalon Hill Civilization board game, but the strategy details are all different. Freeciv has identical strategic details to Civ. I have seen players who are experts in Civ join a Freeciv game, having never played it before, and implement their usual Civ strategies with perfect results. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 21:48, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Meier's and Avalon Hill's Civilizations are two radically different games. What got Meier into trouble was IIRC only the use of the trademark Civilization. --Himasaram 00:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Notability

Someone has added a notability tag to this article but hasn't explained his reasons for doing so. I just found this article but I can't seem to figure out why that tag was put there, since there seems to be plenty of third-party documentation of this game (one source I just added). What do you all think? If he (or someone else) doesn't explain his reasoning within the next few days, the tag should be removed.71.231.87.53 (talk) 16:56, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

It's no longer there. I plan to pull the call for more citations as well; it's been there for ages and it's unclear why. Rp (talk) 16:07, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

The article currently still does not pass the the general notability guidelines, or suggest how else the game might be notable. As for the reference request, I have changed this to show that the article requires material sourced from reliable, independent sources. I can't really consider free-games-net to be a reliable source. Are there any reviews/articles/interviews from reliable magazines or website publications? Marasmusine (talk) 17:21, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

It's a well-known open source gaming project that's older than some of our editors. It gets 574,000 Google hits. Call me cynical, but I somewhat doubt there's no reliable sources among all those hits from the last 13 years. Rebecca (talk) 17:27, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

30,000 downloads per month don't add up to notability, I guess. What will? Rp (talk) 21:56, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Sources, which shouldn't be at all hard to find given the above facts. Rebecca (talk) 09:33, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I tried, and inserted what I found, but it's not so easy to determine what User:Marasmusine will consider good sources. Rp (talk) 07:23, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Significant coverage in reliable third party sources is what is needed. This is standard for almost all topics across wikipedia, but most specifically software. Has it been mentioned in game magazines in a non-trivial manner? How about something on wired? anything at all? "Well known" is subjective and doesn't pass notability at all.--Crossmr (talk) 03:49, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Coverage in game magazines is unlikely, because they are targeted at flashy commercial games. Freeciv is somewhere halfway such games and chess. Even if it were covered there, it wouldn't add to its notability to any significant extent, because the distribution of such magazines is much smaller than the distribution of Freeciv itself. The game has received decent coverage in Linux magazines over the years. Rp (talk) 18:57, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Is this APC magazine link any good? (I've never heard of the magazine.) Rp (talk) 19:02, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Not terribly, its covered under trivial coverage. Its just a small blurb listing the game and its features. Unless top x lists actually devote some coverage to the various items in their list beyond a quick quip, they're not generally considered significant coverage.--Crossmr (talk) 09:21, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I am sick of games being picked on by Wikipedia editors simply because they are free software. There are thousands of commercial game articles with no citations, or are stubs, but simply because they where once able to be bought in stores they are somehow considered "notable". These strict notability policies are going to be the death of Wikipedia. I don't mean to be rude, but this policies like this have caused a back-lash and have turned many strong Wikipedia supporters against it. Something which would help is if these people who tag these articles as not notable had to go through the same detailed justifications that people who have to defend articles do. That would at least be fair. Comrade Hamish Wilson (talk) 20:36, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

This is not a game magazine, but it is a fairly prominent publication: http://m.linuxjournal.com/article/4683. Comrade Hamish Wilson (talk) 20:39, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

If there are commercial games without citation, bring it up at those pages. Each article stands on its own. Its being picked apart because notability hasn't been established, not because its a "free game". Don't try to insert bias where none exists. It doesn't need to be from a game magazine, it just needs to be significant coverage in reliable third party sources. Was this article in the print version of Linux Journal or online only?--Crossmr (talk) 09:21, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I want to reiterate that Linux Journal (or any other magazine on Linux or computer games) has a much smaller circulation than Freeciv itself, so it's a bit ridiculous to consider its mentioning Freeciv as a validation of the relevance of this article. Of course the requirement for independent evidence of notability is important, but paper just doesn't work very well for this type of subject. Rp (talk) 16:31, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Depending on the online source, it can convey notability as well. If wired ran an online article, or gamespot/ign did a special on it, etc. Has it ever won any notable awards?--Crossmr (talk) 01:01, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think Freeciv ever won any awards. Rp (talk) 14:49, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Freeciv does occur in interviews, e.g. I have seen comments on it from Sid Meier. Rp (talk) 14:49, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

That falls under the whole trivial coverage again. I've got to wonder where some of you looked for sources? Did no one think to check google news? There are 238 results there. Some of them don't convey notability. Google sometimes indexes things like blogs, and minor sites which aren't terribly notable in their own right. But some of these sources might be usable: The Star, Mac Observer, Jerusalem Post those were all on the first page. You might want to go through, filter out the name drops, trivial mentions and forum/blog stuff and see what is left. Those three, if they all turn out to be reliable sources, should be sufficient to cover notability. But more sources are always better--Crossmr (talk) 01:58, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm ... no I didn't check Google News. Thanks! Rp (talk) 09:24, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

BTW Google Books has some useful references as well. Rp (talk) 09:26, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

PS: that list is more useful after [1] - can anyone tell me what in that list, if anything, would count as independent evidence of notability? To me, Freeciv is far more notable than any of these publications. Rp (talk) 17:22, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I can tell you that a case study in The Art of Unix Programming chapters 6 and 7 settles all "notability" questions forever. Thanks for the link. 89.204.138.103 (talk) 13:20, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

It has been in the article for quite a while; I just moved it to a separate Publications section and added a few more publications that use Freeciv in one way or another. Rp (talk) 16:23, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

JFTR, 89.204.x.y=82.113.x.y=dunnoob –Be..anyone (talk) 13:43, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Less advanced graphics?

"The graphics in Freeciv are in some respects less advanced than in Civilization II" I for one really doubt this, at least judging by screenshots. The source linked refers to some old version of freeciv(download-link is to 1.81 or something), and I dont believe that it is appliable to current versions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.167.107.251 (talk) 15:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree; rewrote it. Rp (talk) 13:10, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Player details

I greatly enjoy the paragraph listing many of Freeciv's best-known players, but I'm afraid the personal details must be removed as a violation of privacy, and I'm not sure it has much encyclopedic value without them. Rp (talk) 23:19, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Fun stuff

"and optionally hexagonal tiling (like in Civ V)"

This text is particularly funny considering Freeciv had hexagonal tiling years before Civilization V. It also had simultaneous play TCP/IP support years before Civilization. Does Civilization even have IPv6 support? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.240.13.100 (talk) 22:33, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Website in Infobox

I noticed that the website for the game does not show up in the Infobox, but when I went to put it in, there was already an entry for it in the description. I am thinking that the option is misnamed or something like that and I do not know this particular template well enough to fix it. Does somebody else want to fix it? Nutster (talk) 12:48, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. One maybe unrelated problem, www.freeciv redirects to wikia:freeciv after their old server died, I've used play.freeciv now. The {{Infobox video game}} template has no website parameter, and it was anyway unsuited for Freeciv: {{Infobox software}} works as it should. –82.113.106.36 (talk) 20:43, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

In the lead section's infobox, the website entry currently points to play.freeciv.org after the edits by Be..anyone. This isn't the reference website for Freeciv but, rather, just a subsection of the site containing the online spin-off of the game (named freeciv-web), which is one of the "forks" of the main Freeciv project.

The reference website linked in the infobox should rather be www.freeciv.org, which is intended to be the DNS's inbound address for the projects' homepage, which at the moment redirects to the introductory documentation and download page hosted at Wikia, at freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page. There are also wikis hosted by third parties, such as this, but the one at Wikia is the only one officially recognized by the project since it is referred to by the top-level web address for Freeciv: www.freeciv.org.

I don't think it makes any sense to consider play.freeciv.org the homepage of the project.

Medende (talk) 22:15, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

The www page redirects to the wiki hosted by wikia. The play page ends up on the domain freeciv.org. The play page has links to the wiki (wikia) and the forum (freeciv.org). With all those Civ, Longturn, Freeciv web, C-evo, FreeCol etc. projects something ending up on freeciv.org as first stop is more official or trustworthy as some wikia (there is also a civilzation wikia for everything not-Freeciv.) –Be..anyone (talk) 22:24, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

C-evo, FreeCol, or Civilization have nothing to do with Freeciv. I don't think we can pretend play.freeciv.org to be the homepage of the project just because it is the nicest webpage hosted under the domain freeciv.org, full of links to other related resources, and because it has an appealing look which appears as an homepage. What that webpage is is a subsection of the website specifically dedicated to the freeciv-web port. It doesn't show download links for Freeciv, which is the "parent" project of all the spin-offs; it has nothing to do with the desktop version of the game; it is just a webpage dedicated to freeciv-web. Some of my newcome users at civland.org have even wondered how they could play Greatturn with their client, since having learned of Freeciv via Wikipedia, they entered the "homepage" of Freeciv (play.freeciv.org) and they didn't even expect that Freeciv is a desktop application. Freeciv-web is a restricted sub-project of Freeciv with a different codebase and a restricted subset of features, by which you cannot play variants of Freeciv such as Greatturn or Longturn, which are spin-offs of Freeciv at the same level as freeciv-web is, and which are only available via the desktop client. The online structure of freeciv has always been disorganized. There is a talk forum at Wikia, another forum at forum.freeciv.org/f/ (notice the messy ending /f), then there is a website dedicated to longturn (longturn.org), and still the official forum has a subsection dedicated to Longturn itself. It is all a mess, but still, what the homepage really is, always used to be, and we should agree to be for the infobox, is the wiki hosted on Wikia, either thru the address www.freeciv.org or freeciv.wikia.com. Medende (talk) 23:04, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Freeciv does have a group of people who manage the code, control the domain, etc.; they moved the home page to Wikia, so the Wikia site is as 'official' as a Freeciv site can be. Rp (talk) 09:04, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Some years ago I was seriously confused what was and what was not "official", when http://freeciv.net was not an obviously unrelated site as it is today. And for Interwiki purposes it's nice to know that [[wikia:freeciv:longturn]] (example) wikilinks to "official" freeciv wikia pages without an "external link" warning arrow. –Be..anyone (talk) 14:19, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Proposal to merge the Freeciv.net article into the Freeciv article received. Your comments are invited below. GenQuest ^{"Talk to Me"} 07:39, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Somebody did this, thanks. For Freeciv Greatturn I suggest the same procedure. I'm often pissed by allgedly "unencyclopedic" deletions, but Freeciv Greatturn does not need its own page while Freeciv struggles to be better than a stub. –89.204.139.186 (talk) 14:08, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

How can this article be made 'better than a stub'? What sort of information would you like to see added? Third-party publications about the game are rare, so it would be difficult to add much without being accused of NPOV, original research, or triviality. Rp (talk) 09:08, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

An officially registered Internet Port number 5556 qualifies Freeciv as one of the 65,535 most important things in the Internet.(kidding) –82.113.98.76 (talk) 07:06, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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External links modified

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External Link

It doesn't appear the external link to the website is correct, when I clicked on it, my browser informed me the encryption ceritificate was wrong. Additionally, when I look up freeciv, the top result is a different website ending in the same .org suffix. JohnWarosa (talk) 05:49, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Came to report the same certificate warning, but I think the issue is that the URL on this page has https://freeciv.org when search engines just link to http://freeciv.org. I'd change it but wikipedia editors can often bite your head off for making changes so I'll just report it here. 2400:4050:AF64:600:CC9E:D37:93F1:33B6 (talk) 02:47, 17 August 2023 (UTC)