OSGL static website new and improved

 The web output of the OSGL (open source game list) that I maintain is now improved and public since a couple of days. You can see it at trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames as well as mirrored at osgl.twelvepm.de. It's made with Jinja2, a template engine in Python and Bulma, a CSS framework and displays the content of the OSGL database nicely (with some glitches still). It looks quite nice:

The dynamic table is gone for now and there are still some glitches. I hope to be able to improved both and tell the public about it a bit more soon. All in all there is information ~1500 open source games contained, linked to ~600 inspiration games and ~10,000 developer names. Let's see where the journey will lead the project. So far, there are quite a large number of issues still open including many things that could still be done with and to these games.

FreeRails: Integrated CVS, SVN and Git history from 2000-2017

Typically, there are lots of warnings of changing the history of Git repositories after they were already pushed to the public, but I think that this is one of the typical exceptions from this rule.

After starting with FreeRails I learned a lot about converting CVS and SVN repositories to Git and about using advanced Git history editing commands like git replace or git filter-branch. Therefore I could really include the history of the FreeRails 1&2&3 and Railz 1&2 projects in a single Git repository.

On the other hand, although there are three forks on Github, there has not been done any work on them yet. The chances that somebody did do something and gets into trouble now is rather very slim. However, in this case, I'd be happy to assist. Nothing is lost. It's just a matter of chaining sufficiently many git commands.

Civil: Integrated CVS history from 2000-2004

The project has not progressed much lately but at least I managed to convert the original CVS code repository containing all the development work of 2000-2004 into the Git format and then I could persuade the existing Git repository to prepend these old code changes. Like everything related to Git it wasn't straightforward (conflicts where none should be) but worked in the end.

That brings the project to a whopping 1600 commits since the year 2000. A read-only copy of the CVS converted to Git has also been put on Gitlab.

Civil is worth to be rescued

While collecting information about open source games and storing these in a Github repository, I stumbled on the Civil project. It was thought as a cross-platform, turn-based, networked strategy game where players take part in scenarios set in historical battle theatres. The U.S. Civil war was the primary focus. It was written in Python and main development took place between the years 2000 and 2004 with this Sourceforge project. The game was in an intermediate stage, far from completed but already much more than just a tech demo.

One major drawback was that the original FreeRails project used CVS as versioning system, which is now very much outdated. I decided to import the project (and some of its history) to Github and Git. Since 21th of December 2017 there is a Github page for Civil. I preserved a bit of the history (all of the releases I could find on Sourceforge and the final CVS state).

I hope that this will facilitate further development. It would be nice if development of Civil could continue with the help of new tools and library usable from Python.

FreeRails is worth to be rescued

While collecting information about open source games and storing these in a Github repository, I stumbled on the FreeRails project. It was thought as a railroad simulation/strategy game based on the RailRoad Tycoon and RailRoad Tycoon II games. It was written in Java and main development took place between the years 2000 and 2005 with this Sourceforge project and some side and continuation projects. The game was in an intermediate stage, far from completed but already much more than just a tech demo. I wrote a small article about the history of FreeRails so far.

One major drawback was that the original FreeRails project used CVS as versioning system, which is now very much outdated. I decided to import the project (and some of its history) to Github and Git. Since 15th of December 2017 there is a Github page for FreeRails. There was already another import by lukeyj13, one of the original developers, but I preserved more of the history (all of the releases I could find on Sourceforge and the final CVS state and the Railz sister project).

I hope that this will facilitate further development. It would be nice if development of FreeRails could continue with the help of modern development systems like Git, Gradle, IntelliJ code inspections and others.

What this is all about

This blog will be all about different open source projects, I'm interested in. In particular it will focus on open source games for PC as well as open source apps for Android.