Open source strategy game Unknown Horizons is in need of developers

It's not the only one. If you see all the issues that affect the performance of 0a.d. (don't get me wrong: I love that game!) you see they could need some support as well. Not exactly my branche.

Ohh, i hope he finds some skilled people. this game is amazing, but the multiplayer has been broken for ages with going out of sync when moving ships around.

really like the game, but i have zero coding skills

I wish I had the chops to help them out.

This really would be ideal for me to further develop my Python and maybe C++ but I'm afraid my admittedly newbish contributions would be rejected.

I might have a look and see if there's anything in my skill area I can work on.

This really would be ideal for me to further develop my Python and maybe C++ but I'm afraid my admittedly newbish contributions would be rejected.

Even if you feel like you're crap the worst you can get is criticism and rejection. I am admittedly not that great at C++, but I've contributed to Falltergeist and my contributions were usually accepted and well received.

if only i could, i would...

Why not; if I have time to, but that will be a bit later this year in any case.
Sooo many projects to work on... :/

My opinion is that people are not contributing because it's not straightforward to implement stuff.

The fundamental problem is that each open source game has it's own engine.
WHY ??
There are TONS of open source engines out there, why reinvent the wheel each time?

I've tried to contribute to 3 open source games: Unknown horizons, VCMI and 0Ad. I have abandoned each one of them because of the difficulty to learn each underlying engine.
Engine optimisation problems actually stop 0AD from becoming well-known and actually playable RTS.

I think something has to change in the open source landscape for projects to be successful.
We're spreading too thin..

I challage you to name 3 open source games that use the same engine (excluding forks).


Last edited by Andrei B. on 21 June 2016 at 10:36 am UTC

@Andrei B. what do you think would be an good engine for UH?

UH is an really old project. We started with an lot of people on UH als of them was students and that is now the problem.
They dont are students anymore they have now jobs and not the time to code for UH or the Engine. Because they maybe must code at work.

When some people would come an say hey lets port UH to an other engine we would say okay lets do it.

@AnxiousInfusion we dont reject patches. When the patch is not good we say you what is wrong with that.
Than you can fix the patch and it will find his way into our code :)

Sorry guys for my english ist not really the best.


@liamdawe thank you very much for your post here :)

@LinuxDonald Personally, I think Godot looks very good and it's well supported. I don't know how you would manage the problem of Python. Either by an interface or by reimplementing it in C++.
If not, there's Panda3D, which supports python and seems to have a small footprint.

I don't see the project getting too far in its current state. Even if you manage to reach a 1.0 version, it still has to be maintained. You will always need developers. Removing the need to maintain and learn an engine would prove beneficial.

UH has unfortunately been stagnating since 2013. I personally thought it was dead.

I know that most of the open source games start with one guy that wants to learn how to code a game engine. It's also hard to hear that you have to replace half of your code or reimplement it, but in order for the project to live on, you will have to make sacrifices.

@Andrei B. There is always the possibility of implementing a python interface to an existing engine. Python has some quite good C bindings, it is a plus for the engine; and the game can still enjoy its customizability.

I would like to know what are the missing pieces of the engine. What exactly needs improvement? Where are you heading to?
Is it "just" a matter of fixing every issue on the GitHub tracker?

Edit : until now, in the comments, we focused on the engine itself. While this is the most interesting area for me personally, there might be a good chunk of work that needs to be done on the game itself, according to liam. This is probably an easier starting point, with python's entry barrier a bit lower than C.


Last edited by MayeulC on 21 June 2016 at 4:47 pm UTC

@M@yeulC: I think I was misunderstood. I'm not saying that the engine is not good.

It's just that it takes so much energy to learn a new engine each time you want to contribute to a new game.

I think my message is better suited for new games. Oh well..