This is a continuation of the effort of making Freeciv in 3D playable in the browser.
I will focus on:
- improving 3D
- implementing hex map tiles
- using protobuf as the network protocol https://protobuf.dev/
- AI LLM models in the Freeciv server and client using web-llm https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm
- various Freeciv-web related improvements.
- WebGPU support and using new features in Three.js.
Last edited by AndreasR on Fri Oct 18, 2024 5:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
I played the small earth and had a very frustrating experience. Suddenly, the map was totally ruined because of pollution that had not been cleaned up. I found out that pollution had been hidden under "city buildings". I had to go back over 8 hours and play again from there, meticulously reading the game log each turn to check for pollution and sending 2 engineers to remove it in one turn. I also had to turn off the "city buildings" again each time the game had been loaded (because it was automatically turned on). A much much smaller annoyance was that the special resource Coal and pollution look very similar.
After that, I was able to complete the game. The hard AI was not hard though. During the loading, the players were added as easy AI. Then when the game was started, they were set to hard. But they were totally incapable of transporting units across water. I was randomly assigned the Central Americans and used my second settler to build a city that blocked the entrance from South America. I competed with the Venezuelans for South America, using my explorer to block the tile that they wanted to settle next, which slowed them down a lot, while I had North America for myself. The AI tried to just wait for me to move my explorer from the spot, instead of trying to go somewhere else. Soon I defeated them with some archers and legions, so I had all of America for myself. After building up, colonizing the closest islands (Caribbean, Greenland, Iceland, Great Britain, Spetsbergen, Madeira and Arctic Canada) and researching most technologies, I started to invade Europe and Asia, which were quite densely colonized with small weak cities of different players. I also sent a battleship and a transport with a tank and a couple of howitzers from South America to Africa, but the AIs had only managed to build 3 cities there. Australia and every island was totally untouched by the AIs.
The web interface was quite hard to use with the mouse. Sometimes red tetragons appeared and stayed on the screen. It also happened very often that the map was rotated in weird ways when just trying to do something else. Moving the view across the map was also difficult. The only way I found was by right-clicking on a tile to center on it. But that was hard, because whenever a city happened to be where I wanted to center the map, the city interface opened. That is totally unnecessary, because it is also opened by left-clicking, which would be sufficient.
It was also difficult to use airports because I saw no easy way to locate them on the map. Maybe it works automatically when using the goto command to go to another landmass through a pair of airports, but I did not try that.
Only after i played the game, I tried to move a unit across the edge of the map in Alaska and found that it appeared on the other side. But the interface did not show it in a good way. I am sure that other interfaces shows the map as a seamless cylinder without any edges to the east and west.
Also, the overview tab of the city interface was broken for one of the cities, but that seems to be fixed now. Unfortunately, when loading some of the savegames, that city is not shown on the map. Clicking on the tile opens the city interface though.
Pollution as a game concept for Freeciv seems mostly annoying and micromanagement tasks. I have therefore based on your feedback here disabled pollution in the civ2civ3, classic and webperimental rulesets. I will work through the other ideas and bugs in your feedback. Please submit bugreports here: https://github.com/freecivx/freecivx/issues
