TuxHistory

Real Time Strategy Game to learn History

Free software is an essential piece in the education for the world. TuxHistory aims to cover a major lack. Free Software doesn't have a history learning game! The idea is to make a strategy game that uses the real-time strategy mode like Age of Empire (all in 2d) but should be focused on an economic, cultural, military and science development of the different civilizations.

Background

Educational games in the free software world are vital. In many places, proprietary software isn't accessible for the significant part of the population. The high cost of the software is a problem, and free software must be an alternative in this area.

As far as I know, there is no history game alternative in the Free Software world. This is an issue that we need to solve.

The game

The idea is to make a strategy game that uses the real-time strategy mode like Age of Empire (all in 2D) but should be focused on an economic, cultural, military and science development of the different civilizations. Establish some civilizations and ages of development of each civilization. Each new age will provide to the culture new building, technology and units, advantages. The players must recreate the history of each civilization playing like the big ones: Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Maya or Aztec culture, etc. Of course, the idea here is that we provide some campaigns, but the community should write new ones, recreating the history of each country, culture, etc... Imagine: a Nepal teacher want to teach the history of his country, but no software is available for this so that he can create a camping special for his students. The best of this campaigns can be included in the default package.

Development

several limitations. It is not release ready, but developers are invited to At the moment, TuxHistory has basic functionalities and can be played with several limitations. It is not ready for release, but developers are invited to compile and try out our software.

So, what can TuxHistory do at this stage of development?

  • TuxHistory uses the building system, the main menu functions, internationalization, and sound / graphics loading, of TuxMath.
  • TuxHistory can read XML maps, render the world and the agents living there.
  • Town center can create pawns.
  • Pawns can move around the map, build and recollect resources.
TuxHistory uses game rules, an object collection, and a map grid. The map, with the different elements and of course a map representation system XML file.

The (still huge) TODO list

  • The campaign file should be a tar file with a basic description XML file of the campaign, the map files, and the game logic, extensible with LUA scripting.
  • Implement a extensible IA engine with LUA
  • Make a technology tree with specific art for different Civilizations.
  • Import maps from binary files, created with 3rd party software.
  • Users should have accounts, to store games.
  • Animate objects with sprites
  • Implement network modus.
  • We need a campaign editor!
  • Complete our UI

Get ready to code and contribute.

First, you will need all tools installed in your system. This can be done with: 
sudo apt-get build-dep tuxmath
sudo apt-get install libt4k-common0-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libmxml-dev \
        liblua5.1-0-dev
Then you need get to the source code 
git clone https://github.com/pywirrarika/tuxhistory.git
cd tuxhistory
To configure and compile TuxHistory: 
autoreconf --install
./configure
make
sudo make install
And you will be ready to run our game: 
tuxhistory
If you want to read the code, an online version is available on github: https://github.com/pywirrarika/tuxhistory

Contact

If you want to contribute to this project, I encourage you to send me (Manuel Mager) a email to pywirrarika [-at-] gmail dot com. All files are GPL 3v+, so this game is free software.

Finally, as you can see in the Git repo, this game was inactive for the last seven years. Some friends and I started an educational project in Mexico, and as TuxHistory fitted in our idea, I decided to restart hacking on it. If you want to know more about this, please visit PAREWI's Page . We refurbish old computers, we install Free Educational Software, and then we bring those to poor indigenous communities in Mexico.

TuxHistory if part of: Tux4Kids