10 /10 1 Votes
Developer(s) I. J. Peters | 5/5 SourceForge Initial release date 1999 Mode Single-player video game | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar City-building games, Other games | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lincity is a free and open-source software construction and management simulation game, which puts the player in control of managing a city's socio-economy, similar in concept to SimCity. The player can develop a city by buying appropriate buildings, services and infrastructure. Its name is both a Linux reference and a play on the title of the original city-building game, SimCity, and it was released under the GNU General Public License v2.
Contents
Gameplay
Lincity features a complex, 2D and top-down gameplay.
The simulation considers population, employment, basic water management and ecology, goods (availability and production), raw materials (ore, steel, coal), services (education, health, fire protection, leisures), energy (electricity and charcoal, coal with finite reserves, solar and wind power) and other constraints such as finance, pollution and transports. The player has to take care of population growth and various socio-economic balances.
Lincity can be won in two ways: reaching sustainable development, or evacuating the entire population with spacecraft. The Lincity homepage has a Hall of Fame, listing players who have succeeded in one of these two goals.
History
Lincity was around 1995 created as Simcity clone for Linux by I. J. Peters and hosted on Sourceforge in 2001. Lincity was originally designed for Linux, but was ported later to Microsoft Windows, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS 4, and other Unix-styled systems. Mac OS X is supported when compiled from source code using GCC and run using X11.app. It uses SVGALib or X11 as its graphics interface API on Unix systems. As Lincity does software rendering it requires no 3D graphics card and also demands not much other computing resources, e.g. much memory or a fast processor. Since 1999 there have been only minor changes on Lincity, the last updated was in August 2004.
In 2005 significant development continued with the fork Lincity-NG , which was later transferred to google code and then to GitHub. Lincity-NG uses SDL and OpenGL, and features an isometric view.
Critical reception
In 2000 a CNN article on Linux games highlighted Lincity's sophistication. It was The Linux Game Tome Game of The Month for January 2005. Lincity was 2008 a featured freeware title on 1up.com. The Washington Post featured Lincity in 2009. Since the release, Lincity was downloaded alone over Sourceforge 140,000 times until July 2016.