I don’t know if it counts, but I think the source code of Freespace 2 was released eventually und a non-profit license. The community did some great things with it, especially the Blue Planet campaign.
Too many amazing moments and memories to even count, always more to learn. I love how the open source nature of the game means there’s many different servers branching off from each other, running their own custom versions of the game. Smaller servers “downstream” pick and choose which features they want to keep when the upstream servers implement something new.
It’s not open source, but I do want to mention Barotrauma here – it’s not totally unheard of, but I don’t think many people realize that it’s a spiritual successor to SS13. Supports a lot less players, but still up to 12 or something on the bigger ships, and it manages to turn the absolute insanity of SS13 into a compelling survival game that still has plenty of goofiness.
I entered SS13 with the ssethtide and I stuck around past the worst of it but I haven’t logged in since probably 2021. Is it a good time to come back and see what’s up? I enjoyed high population servers and a lot of people were leaving with the tide around and before when I did. What’s an average server pop these days?
The overcomplexity of the game is part of why I love it so much but it’s also what drove me off of it, because I couldn’t figure out how to run an offline server to practice roles and I wasn’t trying to do my first day of engineering or doctoring on a public lobby if I could help it. I had a lot of fun in Mining and Cargo and occasionally just faffing about as an assistant helping Botany grow weed or bringing monkeys to the chef - but I’d like to learn “a real job” one of these days (he says, knowing exactly how pissed off everyone gets if mining or cargo either die or are understaffed). And most folks didn’t usually seem inclined to adopt assistants, unfortunately. Remember folks, adopt wandering assistants and then spay and neuter them because unattended assistants will cook their hands off trying to break into the armory.
I mostly play on tgstation’s european server Terry, which often gets up to 100 players in the busy hours.
I know exactly the kind of anxiety you mention when it comes to having to learn a new role. That was partly why I also had the idea of installing a server locally to tinker with the mechanics in, which fortunately tgstation actually makes very easy. My problem then is that I only have like 10 minutes alone on the station before the power runs out, and I have to go set up the solar panels to continue my experiments. Turns out being solo crew on a space station isn’t all that easy.
I didn’t see anyone mention Warzone2100 yet. An excellent RTS, with a neat research system and unit customisation, and fun campaign. They’ve recently added a couple of new campaigns I haven’t played yet, and have enough ongoing dev work on skirmish/multiplayer that some AIs are listed as “X% win rate in AI matches”.
Super Tux Kart (I play it on Android) is NOT one of them. The physics system is bad at some moments, the items aren’t fun to use and some of them ruin the game. The overall game feels amateurish (in a bad way), but one thing that I like is the Windows Car and the drifting. Those are awesome.
I really wish someone would do an OpenRCT3. It was so much fun being able to ride your creations. I had a 3D projector back then too, which made the game even more awesome. Such an underrated sequel.
And yes I’m aware that Planet Coaster exists but has anyone actually tried playing that game? They made everything way too complicated and I just can’t get into it. I don’t want to engineer every single bend and design the perfect landscaping from scratch, I just want to slap some rides together, see the guests come pouring in, and occasionally ride one of my rides (in VR, ideally). No game since RCT 3 has satisfied that itch for me.