Human-Beings - The Real Civilization Simulator

Overall

The need to design such a game is at the confluent of several ideas:

• There is no cool free networked multiplayer strategy game. Freeciv, being turn-based, doesn't qualify because you spend your time waiting for other players.
• I want to mix what's interesting in Civilization (the intelligence of the game, the building of a civilization), in Dune2/StarCraft (the coolness of the non-turn-based fights), and in SimCity (organizing cities).
• I have a few other ideas concerning what could be a cool strategy game.
• Designing Frozen Bubble was a pleasure.

Status

I'm currently pre-thinking the concepts of the game. You can read the current status in the Mission Statements. Of course any contributor welcome (subscribe to the discussion mailing-list), designing the general rules of the game is probably the toughest part of the project.

For the implementation, I'd like to use a higher-level language so that the project is reasonably fast to implement (e.g. 6 months / 1 year) and the program doesn't segfault; since it will probably be quite large and an object conception would map well, I thought of using Ruby. But it's probable that we will need more performance than an interpreted scripting language can offer, so I think we need a compiled language. The problem is that there is very few "usable" higher-level programming languages, so currently my best bet is Objective Caml (with ocaml-SDL, for quick graphics access).

Who

Guillaume Cottenceau.