An update to our long-turn FreeCiv experience
So we have had quiet the journey here. So 70 days ago (aka 73 turns ago) I posted on HN sharing our FreeCiv deployment (https://github.com/ndroo/freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info). FreeCiv is a great game, the clients is very buggy however. I'm using the GTK4 version, but a few others have opted for the QT variant. At some point, we might turn our focus to contributing to improving the client based on our experiences playing the game. We've since added a lot of little fun features: - The editor: you can write to the newspaper Editor and they /might/ publish what you…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
So we have had quiet the journey here. So 70 days ago (aka 73 turns ago) I posted on HN sharing our FreeCiv deployment (https://github.com/ndroo/freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info). FreeCiv is a great game, the clients is very buggy however. I'm using the GTK4 version, but a few others have opted for the QT variant. At some point, we might turn our focus to contributing to improving the client based on our experiences playing the game. We've since added a lot of little fun features: - The editor: you can write to the newspaper Editor and they /might/ publish what you write, quote you, or decide you're full of it and write an opinion piece slamming your reputation. The editor will also reach out to a few players, each turn, and ask for their input on current game matters. - The Intelligence Dashboard. People were forgetting what they were up to, so we added a dashboard showing the timeline of what happens per turn for your player. - beta the online map viewer: I wanted a way to view the map without loading the client, so we started working on a beta map viewer that is HTML based. - The Chronicle (The newspaper) has also grown a bit. Maybe too much? We'll see. The crossword is fun. Some other 'fun' things that happened: my brother in law stopped speaking to me because of in game banter that was taken way too seriously. My friends invaded my wifes territory, and well, she didn't like that either. I'm currently in the lead, but theres still a long way to go from 475BC.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- AFA friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released2022 · ▲1,157
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
- ISI spent 6 years making a cool free game2015 · ▲151
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
- WLWayback Letter - Looking back at 5+ years of Hacker News2012 · ▲59
I just sent out my 100th issue of Hacker Newsletter and announced my newest newsletter: Wayback Letter - http://www.waybackletter.com/ In either a daily or weekly version, you'll get links to great HN articles from the past five years. A great way to see how HN has grown and changed, plus see what was going on at different times. Lastly, there are a ton of great reads to learn from that I never saw the first go around. Would love to get feedback and my goal is to expand this past HN in the future.
- PTPlay the front page of Hacker News as interactive text games2023 · infinityarcade.com · ▲109
Hey HN, I hacked together this fun project that lets you play any article on the front page of Hacker News as an interactive text game. You can create a game about anything by going to infinityarcade.com/ You can also use a URL, which is what this page uses. The whole thing is open source: https://github.com/themaximal1st/InfinityArcade
- CCCrash course in Qt for C++ developers – a blog post series2018 · ▲27
Hi guys, Two days ago I published the fourth post in the series and thought it would now be a good time to look for additional feedback here on Hacker News. The aim of the series (as mentioned in the first post) is to inspire more people to start using Qt. My ambition is to answer the following questions "what is the gist of Qt?"; "what is the 20% that you need to know to develop 80% of the application?"; "what are the perhaps unknown unknowns?". In other words, I'm just covering basics: enough to understand the concepts and where to find additional information should you need it. Do you…
- HNHacker News without leaving your terminal2011 · github.com · ▲25
I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.
More dev tools this month
the category →
The first open-source price index for GPU compute
Dev tools · 10d ago · getcomputable.com
OpenTrailPaper is open-source bike computer firmware for the LilyGO T5S3 4.7" E-Paper PRO. It supports offline maps, GPX routes, FIT recording and Bluetooth sensors.
Dev tools · 2d ago · opentrailpaper.com
Open-source GTM skills for technical founders
Dev tools · 29d ago · gtmcofounder.com
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
- NW
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
- FM
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com