git repos of semi abandoned but good open source games?

[Julius]

Since we now have our own Gitea instance for code hosting https://git.freegamedev.net (Edit: registrations currently closed until further notice, likely to be shut down until I find a different solution)

I thought it would be nice to mirror some interesting but more or less abandoned open-source game code bases there under a "adopt a project" kind of category.

Stuff like https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source

Or really anything that would losely fit into this category and would benefit from being part of such a collection.

So please suggest suitable projects below.

Easiest would be links to Github or Gitlab repositories as mirroring is very easy for those. But stuff from sourceforge etc can probably also be imported.

Looking forward to your suggestions

[fluffrabbit]

Awesome!

It looks like the first game on there is a roguelike. Kinda wish I had an open source game project. I have a few C++/SDL game prototypes from a few weeks ago. Will need to evaluate which of them should turn into projects.

As for old and abandoned games, the first thing that comes to mind is the well-known, incomplete and BUGGY RTS Bos Wars. I don't know whether the main repository is hosted in SVN or CVS, there seem to be a few repos, and they're all split into modules in a way I don't like. This thing is dated, laggy, and has timing issues that destroy resource gathering and make the game completely unplayable. But if you can overlook the nightmare codebase and unplayability it looks pretty neat aesthetically.

I know it would be easier to find an obscure SDL 1.2 game and update it (some on this list) but I decided to name the most difficult thing I could think of.

[fluffrabbit]

If you want something easier, I think fRaBs looks neat and I can't find any central place where people are working on it. The LGW page lists a couple repos, and I also found this one by searching GitHub, but nobody has done a good writeup on the current state of the project. Ideally one would want the SDL2 version with the Free Abuse assets in one repo with an updated readme.

[Julius]

No other suggestions?

Also what should we call this category (called organisation on Gitea)? "Games shelter" as in "dog shelter"?

[fluffrabbit]

I think "motel" is a more appealing term than "shelter".

[drummyfish]

There is a group taking over maintenance of such games:

https://gitlab.com/LibreGames

Not sure if good but I have a few old games that I kinda finished, but for various reasons haven't promoted them too much -- I always feel bad about my code in retrospect, and I don't maintain them -- if anyone feels like doing something like a refactor, improvement, maintenance or whatever, I'd be only glad. Here they are, just do whatever you like:

- Bombman
- Steamer Duck
- Mage Rage (very old, probably ugly code, was developed on Windows but I was later able to run under GNU/Linux)

[fluffrabbit]

I've stopped following GitLab antics. MS bought GitHub, there was the exodus, then the beginning of the GitLab squeeze.

It's unfortunately hard to give an old/abandoned game a strong recommendation as not only was it probably abandoned for a reason but also it will have an outdated codebase. Kinda wish I hadn't recommended any because none of them would I want to put any effort into as a developer/player/user. None of the old FLOSS games really wow me, and the new ones that do (like Lips of Suna) take a long time to work all those shiny features out.

[Julius]

There is a group taking over maintenance of such games:

https://gitlab.com/LibreGames

Oh, I wasn't actually aware of this group. Obviously their goal is actual maintenance, while I am more thinking about curating a place to easily find such projects, but in the end the idea is very similar.

[drummyfish]

If you want something easier, I think fRaBs looks neat and I can't find any central place where people are working on it. The LGW page lists a couple repos, and I also found this one by searching GitHub, but nobody has done a good writeup on the current state of the project. Ideally one would want the SDL2 version with the Free Abuse assets in one repo with an updated readme.

The LGW page is by me, I had a pretty hard time finding any sources about it, most stuff only lives in the IA now. It's a shame, it looks awesome, so I'd recommend hosting this as well. Could also maybe binary releases be provided in the repo? That would be very useful, but am not sure if gitea supports them.

outdated codebase

Most code is outdated and/or ugly, the games can still be played and enjoyed though. It's good to have them accessible and visible so that if the game is good, someone can update the code, reimplement it, use the engine, art or whatever. There are people who like to do it. Let's not lose to perfectionism.

[fluffrabbit]

I didn't say anything about perfection. I have played open source games (some of them available via the system package manager) that have become unresponsive and even locked up my system and forced me to drop to the terminal because they were so old and used software that has been unmaintained for over 10 years. It's kinda like trying to run DOS Elder Scrolls games on Windows XP-- it just doesn't compute, and nowadays these codebases would be considered just about as far from best practices as you can get. So no, I can't enjoy the games.

Maintenance isn't such a difficult thing, it's more about the psychological barrier of investing time in someone else's project that you may not get much out of. Most of us here are certainly capable, and I would be open to the idea, at least hypothetically.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Julius]

https://git.freegamedev.net/Games-Shelter

I added Abuse Free for now. If anyone wants to make a binary release I am happy to add it.

[fluffrabbit]

AFAIK there is no technical restriction forcing the first letter of fRaBs to be capitalized.

Requirements for compiling
--------------------------

- SDL 1.1.6 <http://www.libsdl.org>

Okay, but... That's wrong, though the supposed SDL2 port says the same thing in BUILDING.md. It's not a proper start if progress has been made elsewhere.

And that's why you rely on ISO C++ facilities and not 3rd party libraries.

No, the C++ standards people are wankers. Valve backs SDL and thus it's winrar.

[Julius]

Fixed the capital letter issue. Otherwise, I just mirrored the repo you pointed at, no idea about actual sdl2.0 support.

[fluffrabbit]

Well, at least we're starting with a completely libre repo (I think). The LGW page does warn about that. I'll try to compile it and see what happens...

It uses SDL 1.2, which will have to be upgraded to 2.0, probably with code from here.

It uses an Autoconf configure script. The repo linked above has been upgraded to CMake. I don't know what to do about that. I do know that with our current fRaBs codebase I have to make install as root. When I run the abuse command on Ubuntu, I get this:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

abuse 0.8
Abuse version 0.8
Sound: Disabled (couldn't find the sfx directory)
Specs : main file set to abuse.spe
Protocol Installed : UNIX generic TCPIP
Lisp: 527 symbols defined, 99 system functions, 319 pre-compiled functions
(load "abuse.lsp") [..                                      ]Segmentation fault (core dumped)

[fluffrabbit]

I tried compiling the supposedly better version.

I get this promising message when I run cmake:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

CMake Warning at data/CMakeLists.txt:343 (message):
  Non-free music not found, it will not be included.


CMake Warning at data/CMakeLists.txt:412 (message):
  Non-free sound effects not found, sound will not be enabled.

Dudes, that might mean it's not got the non-free stuff. Cool!

Here's something not-so-cool when I run make:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

Abuse_1996/src/sdlport/video.cpp:30:10: fatal error: Glee.h: No such file or directory
 #include "Glee.h"
          ^~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

The question is, what the hell is sdlport? I did some searching and found this. I have a hard time accepting that a competent programmer would use this, judging by the sdlport project description. What is the use case here?

Ignoring whatever sdlport is, this is Glee (or GLee). Gotta love the example code they provide:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

if (GLEE_VERSION_1_2)          //is GL1.2 available?
{
  glBlendColor(...);           // safe to use GL 1.2 core functions       
}

GL 1.2? What kind of mental asylum does this come from? This is what I'm talking about with keeping projects maintained.

[fluffrabbit]

I present to you the most highly functional version of Abuse on the GNU/Linux platform:

https://github.com/fluffrabbit/Abuse_Linux

It compiles and runs flawlessly, albeit this repo (like its parent) does not include sounds. All I did was update and patch everything in the SDL 2 version. The media is the same as the parent repo. Can someone confirm whether or not my repo contains non-free media?

EDIT: It's free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot can change...

- Technical notes for those who are curious -

The Abuse SDL2 fork was developed on Windows, which broke the Linux builds. I changed the following to get it to compile on Linux:

1. Some extremely common OpenGL commands like glEnable and glViewport were getting undefined references in video.cpp. The problem had something to do with the deprecated GLee dependency. AFAIK neither OpenGL nor GLee were being linked to the executable. It probably worked on Windows, but it didn't work for me. I replaced GLee with header-only Glad 2. (Configured for OpenGL 2.0 as a potential jumping-off point for a conversion to GLES 2.)
2. The custom Lisp interpreter, imlib, and compiled.cpp/.h used fixed-width integers, and lcache.cpp additionally used uintptr_t. It's stupid difficult trying to get CMake to use modern C++ (now I see why people hate CMake) so I replaced the special integer types with their older equivalents. For some reason, other parts of the codebase get away with using fixed-width integers. In any case, things are now consistent with what CMake expects.
3. I changed #include <SDL_config.h> to #include <SDL2/SDL_config.h> in a few places. Probably a holdover from SDL 1. This peculiar lack of a directory for the SDL headers is found in other files, but it only seemed to be a problem when the include file was SDL_config.h.
4. I updated abuse-tool from OpenCV 2 to OpenCV 3 and added CMake linker targets for opencv_core, opencv_highgui, and opencv_imgcodecs.
5. Changed ASSETDIR in the root CMakeLists to "." rather than a system path (which was probably breaking non-Unix platforms anyways)

[fluffrabbit]

Yes, it turns out it's completely FLOSS/PD assets in there. I just updated it with fRaBs assets including sound (yay!)

[Julius]

Awesome, will try it later today.

[Wuzzy]

Does Bazaar count?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cubosphere/

Latest version: Beta 0.3
Last update: 2017-06-29

It is already fully playable and has a TON of levels. A great game, I love it!

The list of bugs is here: https://sourceforge.net/p/cubosphere/bugs/
The bugs seem to be all rather minor, it's likely you won't encounter them.

I hope this game will be officially finalized one day.

[Julius]

I agree that would be a good one... but mirroring from SVN seems to be not quite so easy. I will not get around doing a manual import in the coming days, but why don't you create an account (as easy as clicking on the Github image in case you have an account there) and I will add you to the Games Shelter team so that you can add it yourself

[Wuzzy]

Heh. I just found this:

https://github.com/cubosphere/cubosphere-code

Looks like someone else already picked up Cubosphere! It looks alive, too.

[alexbl]

There is a Dwarf Fortress esque game made in C++ Boost with BJam build files. It's currently dead but is GPLv3+. The code is hosted on BitBucket and I'm honestly scared that it will be deleted, if not by Ilkka Halila, by BitBucket.

https://bitbucket.org/genericcontainer/goblin-camp


Apparently Trilarion converted the Mercurial repository to Git and put it on GitLab (still has a hgignore rather than gitignore file).

https://gitlab.com/osgames/goblin-camp


The game has a LibreGameWiki entry: https://libregamewiki.org/Goblin_Camp

[Julius]

Cool, added Goblin Camp from the git repository as a mirror.

Also added a link to the fRaBs repo pointing to fluffrabit's new version. I guess we could actually remove it sometimes as it isn't really abandoned anymore?

[fluffrabbit]

I guess that means the dog shelter is there to temporarily house games until somebody picks them up?