Freebooters 0.2.2 review

Freebooters project is a "Pirates!" clone based on SDL. Freebooters is a strategy/action game set in the Caribbean Sea during the

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 7306K Developer: Moritz Mhlenhoff

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Freebooters project is a "Pirates!" clone based on SDL.

Freebooters is a strategy/action game set in the Caribbean Sea during the golden age of piracy.

It is based on the game mechanics of Sid Meier's "Pirates!", but is not an exact clone and uses neither code nor copyrighted material from the original.

The Caribbean Sea in the late 16th century: The Dutch, French, English and Spanish crown aim to expand their areas of influence.

You as an suspicious young captain are trying to make the best of it, as you may either become a brave merchant soul, a freebooting hero of your crown or a bloodlusty dreaded pirate leader.

Freebooters will hopefully become a free clone of the Sid Meier classic Pirates!. It's written in C++ using SDL and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Here are some key features of "Freebooters":
Gameplay:
Some of the crucial game mechanisms already work, but they need to be improved a lot, both with regard to features (refine the mechanisms, simulate more realistically) and to playability (how hard is a game, do certain features make sense at all?)
Several core elements are missing (e.g. fencing duels with other captains, attacking a harbour from the seaside)
There'll be a lot more harbours all over the Caribbean Sea
Most game data is bogus (such as features of the ships, harbours, history etc.) and has to be replaced with realistic ones
There'll be a career mode and a mission mode

Tech:
The current menus are mostly prototypes, they'll be replaced with clickable images maps, which are yet to be raytraced. However, the game will always be comfortably playable with the keyboard only.
The current selection of targets on the map is a prototype as well. It will be replaced with a navigatable sea map as in the original game. There is already a demo world as a separate binary called seapassagedemo. For the 0.3 release this will be integrated along with the full map data.
Lots of tuning and other improvements are needed
Multiplayer capabilities over IP will be tackled once the game is properly in shape for single player games and the game mechanisms are fully established
This is an item for the very far future, for a foreseeable timeframe Freebooters will be singleplayer only like the original.

Requirements:
libsdl (version 1.2)
libsdl_mixer (version 1.2)
libsdl_image (version 1.2)
libsdl_ttf (version 2.0)
Ogre 3D engine (version 0.15.1) (seapassagedemo only)

What's New in This Release:
Implemented internal time representation during inter-island sail
Implemented a simple model for changes in the wind direction
Reenabled loading of harbours