I used to play this game so much back in the mid 2010s. I had a potato computer and this was pretty much the only game it could run. I remember playing it and thinking how terrible it was. Didn't stop me spending way too much time on it though.
@@ayushabraham9789 lol I just played it for the first time a few days after recording the video. My 8 year old and I took a while to figure out the UI but overall it was pretty good fun. Terrible as in buggy or bad compared to real Civ?
@@ants_are_everywhere Terrible as a combination of two things. One was the game mechanics, which I never fully grasped how I was supposed to make use of. Things like combat ending in one turn and always ending in one unit's death, stack-wiping all other units in the tile. I also always felt that the AI was blatantly cheating. Fights which I felt should have been equal, or where I had a slight advantage more often than not ended in the AI's victory. They also somehow produced units much faster than I thought possible. Of course, more likely it was merely a skill issue on my part😅. The other was that I was an avid watcher of CIV5 and CIV6 content, and I'd always be making comparisons with the freeware I had.
@@ayushabraham9789 oh yeah that all makes sense, thanks! I bet the AI isn't actually cheating. But one hard thing about AI in strategy games like chess is that it's really hard to make a convincing "easy" AI. The AI basically always knows the best move, so you have to add heuristics to make it blunder. So an AI that seems to be cheating is possibly a result of them not having more resources to invest in a more convincing AI with multiple difficulty levels.
@@ants_are_everywhere Yeah, I bet you're right. Figuring out how to beat the AI is something I struggle with even now that I play CIV6, unless I play in the lower difficulties.
Hi im a junior/middle webdev finally getting curious about more low level code and FOSS software, I kinda understand C and C++ but i dont really get hardware stuff, is there some video of yours where you dive in a "easier" software to start understanding other people large software or do you have any general tip/ resource to read ? Thanks
This is a great question. I'm not sure what to recommend, but maybe the MAME video th-cam.com/video/CvUsb6nlC3g/w-d-xo.html ? I've done a few videos for "small" apps like the tiny C compiler or the lightweight IP implementation. But honestly I found those repos harder to understand on average because the desire to write a performant lightweight implementation makes the code less straightforward. We've also done large parts of the C toolchain including compilers, parts of the kernel, glibc etc. But the focus in those videos is more assuming you have some background in C and know what the tools do, and we are exploring focusing on how the code is laid out as if you were looking to contribute to it. For learning about lower level stuff, I think maybe the best way to go is to focus on an application domain you enjoy (which is perhaps games) and just going along for the ride. Your brain will pick up a lot of extra stuff if you're intrinsically interested in the domain. MAME has the other advantage that it's implementing emulators for very simple hardware systems (namely arcade games) which might make it easier to start thinking about hardware.
@@ants_are_everywhere it isn't but there is a complete reverse engineered source code called devilution. It is based on the debug symbols from the original source code.
I used to play this game so much back in the mid 2010s. I had a potato computer and this was pretty much the only game it could run.
I remember playing it and thinking how terrible it was. Didn't stop me spending way too much time on it though.
@@ayushabraham9789 lol I just played it for the first time a few days after recording the video. My 8 year old and I took a while to figure out the UI but overall it was pretty good fun.
Terrible as in buggy or bad compared to real Civ?
@@ants_are_everywhere Terrible as a combination of two things.
One was the game mechanics, which I never fully grasped how I was supposed to make use of. Things like combat ending in one turn and always ending in one unit's death, stack-wiping all other units in the tile.
I also always felt that the AI was blatantly cheating. Fights which I felt should have been equal, or where I had a slight advantage more often than not ended in the AI's victory. They also somehow produced units much faster than I thought possible. Of course, more likely it was merely a skill issue on my part😅.
The other was that I was an avid watcher of CIV5 and CIV6 content, and I'd always be making comparisons with the freeware I had.
@@ayushabraham9789 oh yeah that all makes sense, thanks!
I bet the AI isn't actually cheating. But one hard thing about AI in strategy games like chess is that it's really hard to make a convincing "easy" AI. The AI basically always knows the best move, so you have to add heuristics to make it blunder.
So an AI that seems to be cheating is possibly a result of them not having more resources to invest in a more convincing AI with multiple difficulty levels.
@@ants_are_everywhere Yeah, I bet you're right. Figuring out how to beat the AI is something I struggle with even now that I play CIV6, unless I play in the lower difficulties.
Battle for Wesnoth code would be pretty nice to read. Its a very fleshed out open source game.
that's a great idea thanks! I added it to the spreadsheet
Hi im a junior/middle webdev finally getting curious about more low level code and FOSS software, I kinda understand C and C++ but i dont really get hardware stuff, is there some video of yours where you dive in a "easier" software to start understanding other people large software or do you have any general tip/ resource to read ? Thanks
This is a great question. I'm not sure what to recommend, but maybe the MAME video th-cam.com/video/CvUsb6nlC3g/w-d-xo.html ?
I've done a few videos for "small" apps like the tiny C compiler or the lightweight IP implementation. But honestly I found those repos harder to understand on average because the desire to write a performant lightweight implementation makes the code less straightforward.
We've also done large parts of the C toolchain including compilers, parts of the kernel, glibc etc. But the focus in those videos is more assuming you have some background in C and know what the tools do, and we are exploring focusing on how the code is laid out as if you were looking to contribute to it.
For learning about lower level stuff, I think maybe the best way to go is to focus on an application domain you enjoy (which is perhaps games) and just going along for the ride. Your brain will pick up a lot of extra stuff if you're intrinsically interested in the domain.
MAME has the other advantage that it's implementing emulators for very simple hardware systems (namely arcade games) which might make it easier to start thinking about hardware.
¿can you read code of diablo from blizzard?
I don't think Diablo is open source is it?
@@ants_are_everywhere there is OpenDiablo2 if you would like to do it in the future and devilutionX for open Diablo 1 I guess
@@ants_are_everywherethere is a version of the code somewhere. I'd answer "yes", but I am not sure if it is legally open source
@@ants_are_everywhere it isn't but there is a complete reverse engineered source code called devilution. It is based on the debug symbols from the original source code.
@@ants_are_everywhereI do believe there's a decompilation or open source clone out there