That is sad. Maintaining something like this really takes almost all the skills also needed for enterprise, or a dozen places.

That it doesn't get him instant hired is the sad part, what are we coming to.

Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.

> Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates.

Furthermore, more and more companies are looking for "professional" devs using AI tools such as Claude Code. By "professional" I mean proficient in using those AI tools, not actual knowledge. And they don't even specify this in the job offer and you learn this during the interview.

I am very surprised if he can't find a job, as an American, in DC, with 12 years of C++ experience. Sure companies aren't great at assessing open source experience, but there is one area its easy to find a job as a dev: work that requires a clearance.

Same, i think It was on my first Linux OS. The good old days hehe

I know it's a very niche domain, but I feel this way about Lizard.

My lizard is the lizard of website: https://rainwarrior.ca/lizard/

My lizard is the lizard of source: https://github.com/bbbradsmith/lizard_src_demo/

0ad https://play0ad.com/

My first reaction was exactly that; I can't believe it's free!

The Free Civ and Free Colonization games are good. Brogue, Nethack, DCSS are good if you like roguelikes. OpenMW is a totally open source reimplementation of Morrowind, so that might fit the bill.

Same!

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: Like Dwarf Fortress but post-apocalyptic survival horror. Endless Sky: top-down space shooter inspired by Escape Velocity SuperTux: inspired by Super Mario SuperTuxKart: inspired by Mario Kart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

OpenRCT2 is a reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

Just like its cousing OpenTTD which is a reimplementation of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon.

Luanti aka minetest

Widelands as a settler clone

No. Warcraft 3 ist real time strategy, Wesnoth is turn based strategy.

It's turn based, the most similar game I've played is probably Fantasy General. Closer to Advance Wars or Fire Emblem than Warcraft.

Modern strategy games for leisure can be traced back to actual militaries or hardcore history buffs—systems that would try to model morale etc., often to a degree which, er, doesn't have mass-market appeal. :p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)

Not really. It's turn-based and hex-based.

More like Heroes of Might and Magic. It's a turn-based strategy game where battles take place on a hex grid map. It's got full campaigns, lots of factions and units, resources to gather... it's one of my favorite OSS projects. Wesnoth has been in active development forever and is a real labor of love, as well as a showcase of collaborative game development.

St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.

Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.

0 A.D. https://play0ad.com/ is more similar to Age of Empires.

Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit

Not at all. That would be a game called 0ad.

No. This is turn based, it doesn't play like any RTS game.

More like Final Fantasy Tactics

think more hexbased, turnbased, terrain and dice roll mechanics with unit upgrades being extremely important.

More like Fire Emblem

Not really. This game uses a turn-based combat system with a hex grid. It's more like Sid Meier's Civilization, but with a drastically simplified economy and a strong focus on battles. It also has a Tolkein-esque fantasy theme instead of a real-life history theme.

If that sounds at all interesting, I suggest giving it a shot.

I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.

> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP

In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.

Could you name a few places to find 3rd party content?

Also on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/599390/Battle_for_Wesnoth...

> Frequently Proposed Ideas (FPIs)

> 7. Healing/leadership should give experience

> It is felt that allowing units to gain experience without risk would make leveling-up of such units inevitable. Further, one of the motivating examples of this is so that units such as shaman can have a hope to level up in multiplayer. It is pointed out that if the experience gains were high enough to allow shaman to level up in a single multiplayer game, then it would be trivial to gain the best type of healing unit in a campaign very quickly.

https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=34904#w0fpi7 (2011)

It's OSS, no?

Same! Just downloaded the latest version for nostalgia’s sake.

It is a relatively simple formula that is very combat heavy with extremely simple economy. The campaigns are excellent though and as long as the true randomness of attacks/defense doesn't drive you crazy it is a lot of fun. Very challenging and has real strategic and tactical depth as well as pretty well balanced.

I personally never did multiplayer but last I checked the multiplayer community was pretty healthy.

i played it, its fine, its a solid game. Easily can lose several hours in a session and probably played over 40 in total. Its enjoyable to play through due to the upgrading mechanics and wanting to see all the potential evolutions. That said, I'm not always a huge fan of the level design as you're often encouraged to play into negative fights (e.g. the timing for meeting the enemy aligns with their daytime bonuses) which forces you to play a bit more defensively than I'd like.

Well:

- Supertux2, it got recently revamped, the quality skyrocketed. Much better controls and artwork.

- Supetux Advance, this is really great too.

- Retux (More Wariolike than Mario)

- Nethack/Slashem. A Roguelike more bound to interaction/exploration/mechanics than combat, but Slashem makes combat crazy with the Doppleganger Monk, which is basically a Shonen Manga, the role. (Dragon Ball/Naruto depending on your age).

- DCSS. Basically, not Nethack/Slashem, much more combat oriented than the Slashem combinatorics playing with the Monk a la Jackie Chan, this is more like an ARPG made a Rogue.

- Frotz/Lectrote/Winfrotz/whatver Z Machine interpreter and "All Things Devour". Spiritwrak, too. Great libre text adventures and still enganing because of weird mechanics.

- Frozen Bubble

- OpenArena.

- FreeDoom, better compiled with Deutex on daily builds.

- FreeCiv.

- OpenTTD today can be standalone enough.

- Frozen Bubble

- Minetest+tons of subgames such as Glitch, Nodecore...

- OOlite

- Speed Dreams. If the controls are hard, try the arcade mode. If the controls are still hard, get SupertuxKart, pick some real life car from the addons and get all the SD tracks from the inline downloader, they are several.

Last time I checked there was an option on the main menu to download user-made campaigns.

There's a "addons" browser in the game.

It's under the "add-ons" menu in game. I would recommend playing the top-ranked campaigns. Some amazing stuff in there. I adore Legend of the Invincibles. Fun story, tons of new gameplay mechanics.

Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.

Edit: Now that I think about it, most turn-based games have this mechanic. It's almost an idiomatic balance/design decision in gaming.

Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.

There's various ways around this (like capping amount of experience per level by source), but ain't game design fun?

Don't suppose you've played in the steamdeck? Curious how well it works there

It is, but making a change that doesn't mess up the balance of the game can be tricky.

Dota/League does this because each hero is controlled by a human, and humans don't like playing low-impact, low-wealth, low-exp supports.