Knights 2.4.1 Released

Today Knights has reached the stage where some exciting new features are completed and usable. The new release includes saving and loading PGN files, setting the difficulty, and supporting the UCI engine communication protocol. I also added a move history widget, which can display the moves so far in three different notations.

Playing against Stockfish, a strong chess engine using UCI

A handful of new themes appeared on kde-look which can be downloaded from the Knights configuration dialog.

St. George theme by Dave Kaye, with visible history and clock widgets.

Move history can be save quickly from the history widget, or from the dialog which appears after a game is over.

Knights can be downloaded from their usual site at kde-apps:

Related articles

• Upcoming features in Knights (noughmad.com)
• Knights 2.4 Released (noughmad.com)

Civilization 5

I just heard the news that the fifth game in the Sid Meier’s Civilization series has been announced and is going to be released this fall. I’ve been a fan for a long time, especially of Civ3, so I’m excited about the news.

The official page has some nice screenshots. The most visible significant change is the move from square tiles to hexagonal. While this brings it alongside games such as Panzer General and Settlers of Catan, I’m not completely in favor of this change. The main reason is that a square tile has eight neighbours (if you count ones that only share a point as neighbours, as Civilazation always has), whereas a hexagonal one has only six. This tips the scale of Strategy vs. Tactics more on the tactical side, so I hope there will be other combat changes to reverse the effect.

Another interesting, yet at least for me alarming information is that there will also be a (heavily modified) version for Facebook. I suppose they caught on FarmVille. I’m generally opposed to anything Facebook-related, so I won’t be playing that, and it also makes me kinda sad to ruin the name of my favourite game with Facebook.

Go look at the screenshots and follow the news at http://civilization5.com/

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

Free software strategy games

Even though it’s currently our exam period (or maybe because it is), I needed a way to have breaks from studying that were less mind-intensive and easier to save/restore than programming. So I looked into a couple of free open-source games that work on Linux. I’ve looked into other comments and blogs, and then decided to try some of them. Here’s the first batch of the more well-known strategies.

On strategy game design

As a person who enjoys various strategy games, I thought I could write something about them. The post is long and somewhat analytical, but I’m writing from my experience as a player.