Lincity

Lincity is a free construction and management simulation game, which puts the player in control of managing every aspect of a city's socio-economy. Its name is a play on the title of the original city-building game, SimCity. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Lincity is considered free software by the Free Software Foundation.

Gameplay
Lincity is a city and country simulation game, similar in concept to SimCity. The player can develop a city by buying appropriate buildings, services and infrastructure.

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.

Various indicators are provided, with mini maps or statistics. The player has to take care of population growth and various socio-economical 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.

Critical reception
A CNN article on Linux games highlighted LinCity ' s sophistication.

History


The original version of the game was titled LinCity. This version can be played on older computers without a 3D graphics card, and possessing low memory and a slow processor. It features complex, 2D, top-down gameplay. It was last updated in August 2004, though any changes since 1999 have been minor.

Lincity was originally designed for Linux, but also runs on Microsoft Windows, BeOS, OS/2, and AmigaOS 4, as well as a huge variety of Unix-styled systems. Mac OS X, however, is only supported when compiled from source using GCC and run using X11.app. It uses SVGALib or X11 as its graphics interface API on Unix systems, with a variety of native versions on non-Unix platforms.

LinCity-NG
LinCity-NG is a fork of Lincity with improved graphics and new sounds. Up to release 1.1.2, gameplay is identical and can read classic Lincity save files.

Lincity-NG version 2 adds water management to the simulation, and very simplistic ecology. Version 2.0 was released on 25 January 2009.

It is released under the GNU General Public License with artwork dual licensed under that and the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license; the included DejaVu fonts are distributed under their own liberal licensing terms.

LinCity-NG uses SDL and OpenGL, and has an isometric view.