Pioneers (FOSS clone of Settlers of Catan)

[Kichigai Mentat]

Settlers of Catan is a fun board game in which people attempt to build up a certain score by building roads, settlements, and cities. Now, there's not really a computerized version, and copying one directly would be illegal, so, thankfully, we have Pioneers, an open source clone. The source code can be found at Here, at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pio/). The game is simple, and shouldn't suck too many resources out of the machine. Hopefully, multiplayer functions will be intact, perhaps Ad-Hoc too.

[ihatesitesthatdothis]

there's a great network version of this game that has a large community

http://www.s3dconnector.net/

[HardHat]

Not an easy port. Probably closer to a rewrite. But I'd play it, anyway :-)

[Kichigai Mentat]

there's a great network version of this game that has a large community

http://www.s3dconnector.net/

Yeah, but that's Windows only. One of the things that I, personally, believe has hurt the PSP is that whenever something could have been cross-platform (PSP-DS, PSP-PC, PSP-PS2/XBox/GCN/Etc) it wasn't. Pioneers is GPL'd cross-platform source that runs on anything with a CPU, X11, video-out, and some sort of input. X11 isn't even a full requirement, so this means it'll run on Win32, Win64, PowerPC OS X, x86 OS X, IRIX, HP-UX, BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, oh, and Linux. It should also function on SPARC, Alpha, MIPS (I think, and if I'm right, that's a big plus since this is the PSP's processor architecture) and ARM (architecture used by the DS) processors.

So, this means that Pioneers has a gigantic potential audience, which is important, and a huge potential online community, which the PSP sorely lacks. Furthermore, the fun could expand further if DS programmers got into the fray.

Besides, it's bad enough that Sony is so maddeningly Windows-centric, the homebrew community doesn't need to follow in its steps.

[HardHat]

Well, most homebrewers are happy with Linux and Windows. That's enough for them. Maybe add in PS3 Linux and now we're really having fun. :-)