Like you can see, all you civ fans now have an opportunity to take part in designing a great new computer game. I'm talking about Openciv3.

Like the name tells, our game is inspired by the coming Civilization 3. It will be an open source game, meaning that everyone will have access to the source code. The name of the game is not decided yet, Openciv3 is only the project name.

Eventhough our game owes a lot to civ2 and SMAC, and to the discussion held over civ3, it will not be a clone of any existing game. It will be a completely new game, and everything is possible. All design stuff is public. Anyone can send ideas for the game.

You can visit our webpage for more info: civ3.sourceforge.net. To take part to programming (all help is much welcomed!) join our mailing list. It can be found from our sourceforge project site, here.

To join the design discussion, all you need to do is to read our threads in the Alternate Civs forum of Apolyton. Here is a link to it. Then send your comments and ideas. Our policy is, that all good ideas will be implemented (with some reason, it has to remain playable & civ-game-like).

There are already many ideas in the threads, but nothing is final. We have hardly started the design work, so there is much to do for everybody. Best way to start with is the general discussion thread, and the basic concepts thread.

(I'm not trying to be critical - I think it's a great idea!)

No, it is not a freeciv clone - or a clone of anything else either. It is an empire building game, that will take the best parts of the existing games in the genre, and add many things of its own.

Similarities to existing games cannot be avoided, but the game system will be different from all other games. And hopefully better. What made you think it is similar to freeciv?

Yes, DirectX allows fairly good hardware independency in windows environment. It is also fairly efficient. One of the best APIs of Microsoft in my opinion.

We will create the system so, that it is easy to make an opengl version, or a linux port etc. It has only minimum windows code.

Phunny pharmer:

We are 3 or 4 core programmers, and 6 core designers. Besides this there have been many people that has just made a few posts.

We are aware that this amount is not nearly enough to make a game. Therefor everybody is welcome!

I think that they propably do, but that it might very well be too late for them to implement any ideas at this moment.

I also fear that Firaxis will be really conservative regarding Civ3, and that they wont implement many revolutionary features.

This was our main reason for starting OpenCiv3: A dream, that we could make a Civ game the way Civ3 should be, if we were in charge.