Crossfire RPG game

Combine hack & slash gaming with a realtime RPG and you've got Crossfire. You've got the D&D stats, its common races and classes, spells/prayers and all your usual magical items. Gods can be worshipped and they grant powers, even if you are not a priest. There is also a skills system to gain levels in. You can play solo or team up with people you meet to form a party, taking on harder and harder monsters, discovering more and more about the world. I first played crossfire around 1994 on a Sun workstation at the university. It was an awesome game at the time. About as good as the arcade game, Gauntlet, it was inspired from, but multiplayer! With lots of extras. I've come back to the game now and then over the years and still like it. Over the years since then it has had its ups and downs in the development pace. Much of it is still the same, just improved and refined, but of course many entirely new features have been added as well. From a graphics point of view the game can't compare with modern games. The graphics is simple, top view 2D and it does not aim to be photorealistic in any way. Like many games of its time, you move from tile to tile, there is no per pixel movement at all. The lighting is per tile (even though clients smooth between them). However once you start playing you realize that doesn't matter at all.Its loads of fun walking through hoards of goblins like mowing a lawn. There are now thousands of maps to explore, hundreds of different monsters to learn about. Lots of races, classes and gods to combine together with loads of different armour and magical items making you into a powerful, but unique character. You can even create your own weapons and armour. There is a quest system and the system supports building advanced puzzles, but neither is yet used to its full potential. Puzzles tend to be of the hack & slash or exploration/discovery kind more than having to think hard. Find the switch, avoid the trap, kill the boss. Sometimes talking with the right NPC to get the password or finding the right item some other NPC needs. The reason I don't give crossfire a five is that it is developed as a truly free software project. Free software is great for building game engines and tools, but not so great for art like games. Like most free software projects, people work on what scratches their itch. Adding cool features, designing their map etc. The technology is solid (given the tile based design), with lots and lots of features, but there is not a singular artistic vision. Its more consensus and lots of choices you can make when compiling the server, which even though crossfire is unique also makes it a bit bland. The crossfire distribution of maps, sounds and arches (the tile building blocks) can be played as it is, but it is really meant to be used as a basis for your own game. There are a few long running servers around where they have done that.

this looks cool but comes with many .jar (specifically the all important editor) without .java (they are all .class and like deeply nested apache google and gnome stuffs - these are impossible to chase down license and get righ versions of .java for). i can't give stars as for Open Source if it's not Open. (cannot be modified fully redistrbuted dont have all code to do it, licenses on all those .class very unclear. oracle "almost all should run without modification and recompilation". "class initialization differences between 8 and 7 can cause unspecified `behavioral changes' (errors)" "Oracle suggest developers include .java source, and loader includes an integrity checked when it does." the .class of gradel apache et al are stripped. idk how you find docs on how to use them if need be. On CF web it shows were "5 compatible truly open source clients" but the server has been hacked so that none work anymore: they have blocked downloads of them on dl page. GTK Client now requires cmake + Vava (2 more entire megaware build extras, and vala requires Valac ... neither of which have makefiles (docs say use configure but that's missing also). btw if you manage to find valac it requires bootstrapping and docs to do it if that fails - something tells me it will)

Was once probably 4-5 stars. Sound gone after 1.11.0 for a long time, the user has to figure out everything self. The Wiki became abandoned after the year 2007. Compression support gone without adjusting define.h . The picture archives are always included in the source of the server, but not in the client package. The source code repo is too large because of the server's png archives and the maps.

So good!

As much fun to play as to work on.