In The Beginning

We were a bunch of CS students who used to hang out in the labs playing a
number of multiplayer X11 games - some SGI racing game, Doom 1 and XPilot. 
Now as most CS students, we were all Civ fans, so one day we found and
installed the Python based Openciv project. However Openciv was rather
broken - I think it used 100% CPU power. We then decided to write our own
version. 
In the end only Allan, Claus and I were willing to devote some time to the
project and we split the work between us. 
Allan did the graphics. Whatever people think about the original graphics
I think it was quite an accomplishment, as Allan had absolutely no
training. We partly praised and laughed at his work. He really produced a
number of both ugly and nice looking tiles. 
Claus wrote the Civ part of the backend. Implementing the logic, rules and
game-engine is his work. He got some help with the formulas from a Civ
book. He was clearly the one of us who knew most about Civilization. 
As for myself I did the client/server architecture and wrote the X11
client. Learning to program X11 was a big motivation - not that I ever
used that skill later on. 
Funny thing is, that as the game became playable we started losing
interest as we were increasingly drawn back to XPilot playing. 
I remember later on when we were playing XPilot in the lab, we could hear
the younger students were playing Freeciv. I always thought that was nice. 
Allan, Claus and I still meet once in a while and occasionally track the
progress of Freeciv. 
Best of luck with the further development. 
:- Peter 
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Category:Documentation