freeciv21-client

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Freeciv21 is a free open source turn-based empire-building 4x strategy game, in which each player becomes the leader of a civilization. You compete against several opponents to build cities and use them to support a military and an economy. Players strive to complete an empire that survives all encounters with its neighbors to emerge victorious. Play begins at the dawn of history in 4,000 BCE.

Freeciv21 takes its roots in the well-known FOSS game Freeciv and extends it for more fun, with a revived focus on competitive multiplayer environments. Players can choose from over 500 nations and can play against the computer or other people in an active online community.

The code is maintained by the team over at Longturn.net and is based on the QT framework. The game supports both hex and square tiles and is easily modified to create custom rules.

This is the client interface program used to connect to a Freeciv21 server. For more information on the server, refer to freeciv21-server(6). The program can be launched without any command line parameters. A player can use the main menu to connect to a running game, open an existing savegame, start a new game, or start a new scenario game. However, if you wish to automate the connection to a running server or start a new game with a server settings file, command line options are available.

OPTIONS

The following options are accepted on the command line of the client. They may not be combined as with other tools. For example: freeciv21-client -sp localhost 5556 will not work. Instead you will need to enter each option separately, such as, freeciv21-client -s localhost -p 5556.

-A, --Announce <PROTO>: Announce game in LAN using protocol PROTO (IPv4/IPv6/none), Default is IPv4. Options include: IPv4, IPv6, or none.
-a, --autoconnect: Skip connection dialog (usually with url or -n, -s, and -p).
-d, --debug <LEVEL>: Set debug log level (fatal/critical/warning/info/debug). Default log level is info.
-F, --Fatal: Raise a signal on failed assertion. An assertion is a code calculation error. With this set, the client process will SEGFAULT instead of issuing a warning message to the terminal console.
-f, --file <FILE>: Load saved game FILE. Useful when wanting to restart a game.
-H, --Hackless: Do not request hack access to local, but not spawned, server.
-l, --log <FILE>: Use FILE as logfile.
-M, --Meta <HOST>: Connect to the metaserver at HOST.

Note

With regard to the command line arguments concerning the metaserver, Freeciv21 does not have its own metaserver at this time and the legacy Freeciv metaserver does not support Freeciv21. This means, right now, that all commands related to the metaserver are held over from the fork from legacy Freeciv until the Longturn community creates a custom metaserver.

-n, --name <NAME>: Use NAME as username on server.
-p, --port <PORT>: Connect to server port PORT (usually with -a).
-P, --Plugin <PLUGIN>: Use PLUGIN for sound output []. The default is SDL.
-r, --read <FILE>: Read startup script FILE. Options are passed to the spawned server.
-s, --server <HOST>: Connect to the server at HOST (usually with -a).
-S, --Sound <FILE>: Read sound tags from FILE. Default is stdsounds.soundspec.
-m, --music <FILE>: Read music tags from FILE. Default is stdmusic.musicspec.
-t, --tiles <FILE>: Use data file FILE.tilespec for tiles.
-w, --warnings: Warn about deprecated modpack constructs.
-h, --help: Display help on command line options.
--help-all: Display help including Qt specific options.
-v, --version: Display version information.
url: Server information in URL format. See examples below.

EXAMPLES

Here are some examples:

freeciv21-client -n mycoolusernname -s localhost -p 2004: Connect to an already running server with a username of mycoolusername, server host name of localhost, and port of 2004.
freeciv21-client “””fc21://[username]:[password]@[server]:[port]””” -a -t amplio2: Connect to an already running server using URL format. The parameters [username], [password], [server], and [port] are replaced with valid values. This command also passes the autoconnect option (-a) as well as loads the Amplio2 Tileset.

Note

The communication between the client and the server is plain text, so make sure the password you use is unique. This is especially true for Longturn games on the open Internet.

ENVIRONMENT

The Freeciv21 client accepts these environment variables:

FREECIV_DATA_PATH: A colon separated list of directories pointing to the Freeciv21 data directories. By default Freeciv21 looks in the following directories, in order, for any data files: the current directory; the “data” subdirectory of the current directory; the subdirectory “.local/share/freeciv21” in the user’s home directory; and the directory where the files are placed by running “cmake –target install”.
HOME: Specifies the user’s home directory.
http_proxy: Set this variable accordingly when using a proxy. For example, “””http://my_proxy_address/”””.
LANG or LANGUAGE: Sets the language and locale on some platforms.
LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE: Similar to LANG (see documentation for your system).
USER: Specifies the username of the current user.