It's an amazing roleplaying disaster simulator, where around 100 players are trying to keep a Space Station afloat. From doctors, through police, scientist, engineers, to cargo and barmans. Every role has a way how to blow up the station - Engineers generate energy through a contained singularity or a Tesla ball. If that escapes because you forgot to repair the cage, the station is fucked.
Scientists experiment with artifacts that give you research for doing stuff with it, and it's generate what does doing stuff with it do, i.e if you wrench it, it does something. Something can be "spawn a monkey", "print money" to "thermonuclear explosion".
And add to that tower of cards some people getting the roles of antagonists, which can be anything between "Syndycate agent that has to kill the captaion", "a blood cult needing to steahltily sacrifice people to ascend", "pantient zero that turns into a zombie", or a "syndicate deathsquad that has to fight to the station nuke and trigger selfdestruction".
It's massive fun, and I highly recommend it.
Oh, and that's basic SS14. There's also a very popular mod - Roundy Marine Crops, which si basically ~ 100vs100 Alien vs Predator, where you play every role imaginable from Marines that are deploying planetside to fight Aliens who are digging in.
If you need convincing, this is the best short story video that absolutly sold me the game. It's aboslute cinema, the way it's told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjz1MnlxzE
Then there's also the almost legendary video about Space Station 13 from Sseth (this is basically a reimplementation into C#) that can also give you the vibe of the game. But I'd recommend the previous video more.
Note: There's currently some drama with main maintainer, who had control of the launcher and server hub, starting to act extremely egoistically and hostile, holding the whole game and it's auth database hostage, hacking discord servers, banning random people, and in general being a dick. That is why I have linked the playss14 launcher, which is a fork from the rest of the community to sidestep the demands and general dickery the maintainer is doing. It's pretty ugly. The game is on Steam, just like it has other page, but that would lead you to the launcher that's currently being ransomed. You're better off just getting the alt launcher from playss14.com linked above.
Though I haven't played it recently, I have some very good memories. It teaches you gambling and probability (especially on small multiplayer maps), and you develop feeling for the difference between 40% chance to hit and 30%.
The single-player campaigns are nice too. The one that I have in especially good memory is "Under The Burning Suns", which made a few creative and artistic changes to the game. It shouldn't be the first campaign you play, but it can be the second.
Oh man, this brings back memories. Used to play it in multiplayer with a couple of friends a lot at some point.
Very well crafted, balanced game. The graphics are beautiful.
I still think about garak and under the burning suns from time to time. The plot is decent and while there's not much writing, what's there is generally good. I'd rate it better than the vast majority of games, but general consensus would probably place it below planescape torment and disco elysium. I really liked it.
Recently, battle for wesnoth has remade the delfador campaign and heir to the throne and tried to unify a bunch of the mainline campaigns together. Deceiver's gambit and the new httt are imo respectively second and third best wesnoth campaigns now.
I still think about garak and under the burning suns from time to time. The plot is decent and while there's not much writing, what's there is generally good. I'd rate it better than the vast majority of games, but general consensus would probably place it below planescape torment and disco elysium. I really liked it.
Recently, battle for wesnoth has remade the delfador campaign and heir to the throne and tried to unify a bunch of the mainline campaigns together. Deceiver's gambit and the new httt are imo respectively second and third best wesnoth campaigns now.
Oh now you make me want to play planescape torment again. Really good writing. It always felt like the dialogs were about you and the questions you have, and immediately relevant to what happens next in the game.
I'm maybe a third through disco elysium, but I found the writing went off-rails too often for my taste, sometimes disconnected with your quest or what happens next. It's still very well written, maybe just not my "book". But now I have just derailed this thread from the original topic completely, so who am I to judge.
Also, I'm not sure you can count OpenRCT2 as fully open source, as it still requires the closed-source game files to run -- they haven't replaced all the game assets yet.
(That said, it's still fantastic and by far the best way to play RollerCoaster Tycoon.)
Technically, it's still an open source mod of a closed source game.
And am I too lazy to finish the job? ... Yeah, I guess I am. I am too lazy to go out there and re-do all of the thousands of graphics sprites and all the sound effects and music all on my own. Feel free to do it yourself if you're not that lazy. I'm sure the devs would appreciate your effort.
From the Luanti/Minetest games, I also like Exile very much.
It is a bit hard and nerdy (you'll have to read the PDF guide/tutorial as you progress), but I found it oddly calming. I recommend single-player only.
In contrast to other Luanti/Minecraft-Like games, in Exile it feels very rewarding just to have found shelter from a storm and a cozy fire going, after you were on the edge of collapsing from exhaustion. Though you're almost certainly out of food and it would be dangerous to go out looking before the storm passes, you're not quite dying yet and you have time to make your mud hole a bit more cozy. (It's not a good game if you want to build huge creative castles, but you'll need to build and improve your home a bit.)
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is a little weird, in that it's really just meant to be the game engine, not the full game. Mineclonia is basically a mod that adds back in all the extra mobs and whatnot Minecraft has.
I don't see this one mentioned often, but Frogatto & Friends is a lot of fun if you like platformers with an old-school aesthetic. I keep it on my Steamdeck to play a few levels every now and then, it's a smooth game with a nice feeling to the controls.
Came here to say exactly this. Played it for years and it keeps getting better and better. It's based on a game called Pixel Dungeon, which the original developer open sourced when they got bored with it. There are several other forks of PD, and I've also played most of them too, and SPD is definitely the best, and possibly the only one still in development.
Came here to say this, although I would not categorize it as a "shooter mining grind" (FWIF I never mine grind).
There are tons of things to do and stories to play. The community is quite active especially on the Git and Discord. Lot's do to but you really need to explore to get the full experience.
Also
::: spoiler spoiler
Republic and Syndicate story lines when? Can we stop making a zillion different alien factions already?
:::
Or a trading grind, depending on your playstyle. I've barely ever mined in it.
How are they doing on the campaign/storyline, BTW? Last time I played it (a year or so ago) I managed to capture a jump drive and explored a bunch of really interesting areas outside human space, but it really felt like I wasn't intended to be there yet and the story wasn't really ready for it.
Endless sky follows the old and storied tradition where 90% of the game's content is locked behind speaking to a specific random NPC near the starting town, and not giving any hints at all that you're going the wrong way. You probably fell victim to that.
No, I was following the human space campaign just fine (although maybe I didn't go far enough along it for it to take me to alien space "naturally").
I've also picked up at least one non-randomly-generated quest from the
::: spoiler spoiler
Hai, namely, the one where you get the Anomalocaris.
:::
I've also made it
::: spoiler spoiler
through the Tangled Shroud to Avgi space, and maybe I'm legitimately on their main questline there (as I currently have a job marker for "Meet up with the Avgi Strike force at Navigeo Yards in the Symphony system" on my map)
:::
It's just that those last two things I mentioned, especially the latter one, don't feel all that fleshed out compared to the human campaign.
I've wandered through the territories of a couple of other species, but they're either hostile or I haven't figured out how to talk to them yet.
Oh you did! Indeed, you have to complete the human campaign all the way through (to the point that you get an epilogue) to even be able to start the 2nd largest storyline after the human things.
Haven't played Unciv, how does it compare to Freeciv? If I see correctly, Freeciv is much closer to the original game, while Unciv tries to add some more "fun" features?
I really can't say anything about this, because I never played Freeciv. The reason is, that Freeciv has no Android APK (AFAIK). I play Unciv exclusively on my phone during my work breaks.
People have already said a couple of my favorites ( Super Tux Kart and Mindustry ), but I'd like to bring up one almost nobody talks about: Me And My Shadow
It's a 2D puzzle platformer where you control one person normally but then press space to record movement for your shadow character. Last time I tried downloading and playing it on Linux using the appimage on Sourceforge, pretty sure it didn't work because it might need an old glibc that has features that might not exist in newer versions.
This post reminded me of the game, so I'll download and see if I can run it on my desktop. Really feel like playing it now.
Edit:
I am too dumb to figure out how to make it work. Best I get is nothing. Not even a pop-up saying I need something else to make it work. So, I guess plating the windows release through WINE is the best I'd be able to do.
I played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Tremulous back in the day, and at least a few of its successor Unvanquished -- before mostly falling out of playing online games.
Tremulous was THE game for me for a couple of years, I remember people praising Natural Selection 2 as the FPS/RTS combo and I was like "but that's just one player playing an RTS and the rest playing an FPS". I always preferred the natural way we built in first person, and anyone could build anything, from Tremulous.
Been a while since I played one, but Stunt Rally was/is really good. It kinda blew me away with how many tracks there were, and how fun they were, for a game I've never seen mentioned anywhere. Red Eclipse is cool too; like that they have an easy to use in-game level editor (with multiplayer!).
Didn't know they actually published some source code. I looked at their GitHub account, unfortunately almost all of their repositories have this in their readme:
This is proprietary software owned by Anego Studios. All rights reserved.
You may NOT sell this software in any way, shape or form. You may NOT distribute this software in its unmodified form.
I highly recommend Space Station 14.
It's an amazing roleplaying disaster simulator, where around 100 players are trying to keep a Space Station afloat. From doctors, through police, scientist, engineers, to cargo and barmans. Every role has a way how to blow up the station - Engineers generate energy through a contained singularity or a Tesla ball. If that escapes because you forgot to repair the cage, the station is fucked.
Scientists experiment with artifacts that give you research for doing stuff with it, and it's generate what does doing stuff with it do, i.e if you wrench it, it does something. Something can be "spawn a monkey", "print money" to "thermonuclear explosion".
And add to that tower of cards some people getting the roles of antagonists, which can be anything between "Syndycate agent that has to kill the captaion", "a blood cult needing to steahltily sacrifice people to ascend", "pantient zero that turns into a zombie", or a "syndicate deathsquad that has to fight to the station nuke and trigger selfdestruction".
It's massive fun, and I highly recommend it.
Oh, and that's basic SS14. There's also a very popular mod - Roundy Marine Crops, which si basically ~ 100vs100 Alien vs Predator, where you play every role imaginable from Marines that are deploying planetside to fight Aliens who are digging in.
If you need convincing, this is the best short story video that absolutly sold me the game. It's aboslute cinema, the way it's told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjz1MnlxzE
Then there's also the almost legendary video about Space Station 13 from Sseth (this is basically a reimplementation into C#) that can also give you the vibe of the game. But I'd recommend the previous video more.
Note: There's currently some drama with main maintainer, who had control of the launcher and server hub, starting to act extremely egoistically and hostile, holding the whole game and it's auth database hostage, hacking discord servers, banning random people, and in general being a dick. That is why I have linked the playss14 launcher, which is a fork from the rest of the community to sidestep the demands and general dickery the maintainer is doing. It's pretty ugly. The game is on Steam, just like it has other page, but that would lead you to the launcher that's currently being ransomed. You're better off just getting the alt launcher from playss14.com linked above.
Lots of great games. Gonna add Endless Sky. 2D top down space sim RPG. Think Escape Velocity series.
0ad @[email protected]
Sonic Robo Blast 2 anyone?
https://www.srb2.org/
https://github.com/stjr/srb2
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
One of the most realistic games you can play. When it comes to gameplay, 95% of the time, it follows real life logic.
Your link seems to be borked.
Battle for Wesnoth. It's a fantasy-themed turn-based strategy.
Though I haven't played it recently, I have some very good memories. It teaches you gambling and probability (especially on small multiplayer maps), and you develop feeling for the difference between 40% chance to hit and 30%.
The single-player campaigns are nice too. The one that I have in especially good memory is "Under The Burning Suns", which made a few creative and artistic changes to the game. It shouldn't be the first campaign you play, but it can be the second.
Oh man, this brings back memories. Used to play it in multiplayer with a couple of friends a lot at some point. Very well crafted, balanced game. The graphics are beautiful.
I still think about garak and under the burning suns from time to time. The plot is decent and while there's not much writing, what's there is generally good. I'd rate it better than the vast majority of games, but general consensus would probably place it below planescape torment and disco elysium. I really liked it.
Recently, battle for wesnoth has remade the delfador campaign and heir to the throne and tried to unify a bunch of the mainline campaigns together. Deceiver's gambit and the new httt are imo respectively second and third best wesnoth campaigns now.
I still think about garak and under the burning suns from time to time. The plot is decent and while there's not much writing, what's there is generally good. I'd rate it better than the vast majority of games, but general consensus would probably place it below planescape torment and disco elysium. I really liked it.
Recently, battle for wesnoth has remade the delfador campaign and heir to the throne and tried to unify a bunch of the mainline campaigns together. Deceiver's gambit and the new httt are imo respectively second and third best wesnoth campaigns now.
Oh now you make me want to play planescape torment again. Really good writing. It always felt like the dialogs were about you and the questions you have, and immediately relevant to what happens next in the game.
I'm maybe a third through disco elysium, but I found the writing went off-rails too often for my taste, sometimes disconnected with your quest or what happens next. It's still very well written, maybe just not my "book". But now I have just derailed this thread from the original topic completely, so who am I to judge.
Thank you for this! I played it long ago when I used Ubuntu but couldn't remember the name when I wanted to play it again!
I liked Endgame:Singularity by EvilMrHenry, which was ahead of its time.
Played that one. Think it's a bit silly that humans discovering you is instant game over even if you're already running moon bases.
I agree, or if they discover you the freaking reality bubble?? But it doesnt bother me too mich -- i can suspend disbelief.
OpenTTD
Adding OpenRCT2, but I think most anyone who knows of OpenTTD knows of that.
Also, I'm not sure you can count OpenRCT2 as fully open source, as it still requires the closed-source game files to run -- they haven't replaced all the game assets yet.
(That said, it's still fantastic and by far the best way to play RollerCoaster Tycoon.)
Its open source. You're just too lazy to finish the job.
Technically, it's still an open source mod of a closed source game.
And am I too lazy to finish the job? ... Yeah, I guess I am. I am too lazy to go out there and re-do all of the thousands of graphics sprites and all the sound effects and music all on my own. Feel free to do it yourself if you're not that lazy. I'm sure the devs would appreciate your effort.
Mineclonia has like 95% of the features of Minecraft but is way better because you don't need a Microsoft account, plus modding is easier.
Also awesome:
From the Luanti/Minetest games, I also like Exile very much.
It is a bit hard and nerdy (you'll have to read the PDF guide/tutorial as you progress), but I found it oddly calming. I recommend single-player only.
In contrast to other Luanti/Minecraft-Like games, in Exile it feels very rewarding just to have found shelter from a storm and a cozy fire going, after you were on the edge of collapsing from exhaustion. Though you're almost certainly out of food and it would be dangerous to go out looking before the storm passes, you're not quite dying yet and you have time to make your mud hole a bit more cozy. (It's not a good game if you want to build huge creative castles, but you'll need to build and improve your home a bit.)
What's different between Mineclonia and Voxelibre?
Mineclonia is a fork of VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) that adds various improvements:
I had only heard of minetest. How does it compare?
Luanti is what Minetest was renamed to so it basically is Minetest
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is a little weird, in that it's really just meant to be the game engine, not the full game. Mineclonia is basically a mod that adds back in all the extra mobs and whatnot Minecraft has.
Oh, now I understand. Thanks so much for the explanation.
Mindustry
Not sure if it's my favorite, but openttd was already mentioned.
It's such a fun game, especially after you beat a campaign level. I love that part purely for the freedom it provides after a hard fought battle.
I don't see this one mentioned often, but Frogatto & Friends is a lot of fun if you like platformers with an old-school aesthetic. I keep it on my Steamdeck to play a few levels every now and then, it's a smooth game with a nice feeling to the controls.
The source is here.
Holy shit, I played Frogatto YEARS ago and totally forgot about it. Thank you!
Beyond all reason and Friday Night Funkin
since no one's mentioned them:
I love DC:SS.
It is like a refined nethack
Shattered Pixel Dungeon. The dev is even active on Lemmy! ![email protected]
I love shattered PD!
Came here to say exactly this. Played it for years and it keeps getting better and better. It's based on a game called Pixel Dungeon, which the original developer open sourced when they got bored with it. There are several other forks of PD, and I've also played most of them too, and SPD is definitely the best, and possibly the only one still in development.
Veloren
Didn't know that one, seems cool.
beyond all reason
Beyond All Reason or Xonotic.
Xonotic is so fast and smooth.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=K2FoeKWm5a0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2FoeKWm5a0
BAR is the greatest RTS.
Endless Sky if you’re down for a top-down space shooter mining grind.
Came here to say this, although I would not categorize it as a "shooter mining grind" (FWIF I never mine grind).
There are tons of things to do and stories to play. The community is quite active especially on the Git and Discord. Lot's do to but you really need to explore to get the full experience.
Also ::: spoiler spoiler Republic and Syndicate story lines when? Can we stop making a zillion different alien factions already? :::
Forgot to add a key detail! This game is a direct homage to the old Escape Velocity games if you remember those.
Actually it was my search for Escape Velocity which led me to it!
Same! But long, long ago, like 2017 or so. I am overdue for another play through soon!
Or a trading grind, depending on your playstyle. I've barely ever mined in it.
How are they doing on the campaign/storyline, BTW? Last time I played it (a year or so ago) I managed to capture a jump drive and explored a bunch of really interesting areas outside human space, but it really felt like I wasn't intended to be there yet and the story wasn't really ready for it.
Endless sky follows the old and storied tradition where 90% of the game's content is locked behind speaking to a specific random NPC near the starting town, and not giving any hints at all that you're going the wrong way. You probably fell victim to that.
They have specifically gotten better about adding in other opportunities especially for starting the ::: spoiler spoiler Free Worlds ::: story line.
No, I was following the human space campaign just fine (although maybe I didn't go far enough along it for it to take me to alien space "naturally").
I've also picked up at least one non-randomly-generated quest from the
::: spoiler spoiler
Hai, namely, the one where you get the Anomalocaris. :::
I've also made it
::: spoiler spoiler
through the Tangled Shroud to Avgi space, and maybe I'm legitimately on their main questline there (as I currently have a job marker for "Meet up with the Avgi Strike force at Navigeo Yards in the Symphony system" on my map) :::
It's just that those last two things I mentioned, especially the latter one, don't feel all that fleshed out compared to the human campaign.
I've wandered through the territories of a couple of other species, but they're either hostile or I haven't figured out how to talk to them yet.
Oh you did! Indeed, you have to complete the human campaign all the way through (to the point that you get an epilogue) to even be able to start the 2nd largest storyline after the human things.
Isn't Doom open source now? Does that count?
It is and it does.
However it is unclear where Diablo stands. We have open source decompilations and remakes but as for the legality: grey area.
I'm not very good at it, but NetHack catches me every now and then.
Unciv
Tux Kart
Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered
These 3 games are my favourites at the moment.
Haven't played Unciv, how does it compare to Freeciv? If I see correctly, Freeciv is much closer to the original game, while Unciv tries to add some more "fun" features?
Unciv - civ5 g&k
Freeciv - idk, civ2 maybe?
I really can't say anything about this, because I never played Freeciv. The reason is, that Freeciv has no Android APK (AFAIK). I play Unciv exclusively on my phone during my work breaks.
Oh it's on Android? Nice.
People have already said a couple of my favorites ( Super Tux Kart and Mindustry ), but I'd like to bring up one almost nobody talks about: Me And My Shadow
It's a 2D puzzle platformer where you control one person normally but then press space to record movement for your shadow character. Last time I tried downloading and playing it on Linux using the appimage on Sourceforge, pretty sure it didn't work because it might need an old glibc that has features that might not exist in newer versions.
This post reminded me of the game, so I'll download and see if I can run it on my desktop. Really feel like playing it now.
Edit:
I am too dumb to figure out how to make it work. Best I get is nothing. Not even a pop-up saying I need something else to make it work. So, I guess plating the windows release through WINE is the best I'd be able to do.
If you like puzzles, there is also fillets! Oldie but goodie.
apt install fillets-ngSuperTux! 🐧
I played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Tremulous back in the day, and at least a few of its successor Unvanquished -- before mostly falling out of playing online games.
Tremulous was THE game for me for a couple of years, I remember people praising Natural Selection 2 as the FPS/RTS combo and I was like "but that's just one player playing an RTS and the rest playing an FPS". I always preferred the natural way we built in first person, and anyone could build anything, from Tremulous.
Space Station 14 for me.
Breakout 71
https://renanlecaro.itch.io/breakout71
ROTA
https://github.com/HarmonyHoney/ROTA
I still play 0AD every now and then
Can I do a shameless plug? Not necessarily all of these are my favourites, but most of these are pretty nice. Here's my list.
My top fav is Mindustry, which has already been mentioned. Another not very popular FOSS game which is pretty good imho is OpenClonk.
Super Tux Kart
Been a while since I played one, but Stunt Rally was/is really good. It kinda blew me away with how many tracks there were, and how fun they were, for a game I've never seen mentioned anywhere. Red Eclipse is cool too; like that they have an easy to use in-game level editor (with multiplayer!).
I really like We Become What We Behold
https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
Its a gem
Cubyz is also similar to minecraft
Dwarf Fortress
I also really like Nightmare Kart which is free on steam, but I don't think it is open souce...?
DF isn't open source tho. It's not even source available.
Ah, my apologies, the binaries are closed source and the raws are public domain.
A better answer would have been KeeperRL
Friday Night Funkin!
VintageStory is kinda open source, and far more polished than any other minecraft clone.
Which part of it is open source?
The core mods are source available, and the base game is open source iirc
Didn't know they actually published some source code. I looked at their GitHub account, unfortunately almost all of their repositories have this in their readme:
That's not gonna stop me mwahahahaha
Pixel dungeon.