Lincity

Lincity

Company type	Open-source software
Industry	Video games
Founded	1995 (1995)
Founder	I. J. Peters
Headquarters	United Kingdom
Products	City-building simulation game
Website	sourceforge.net/projects/lincity/

Lincity is a free and open-source construction and management simulation game centered on overseeing a city's socio-economic dynamics, bearing resemblance to SimCity. Players expand their urban environment by acquiring various buildings, utilities, and infrastructure components. The title combines references to both Linux and SimCity, and it is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Gameplay

Featuring detailed 2D graphics with a top-down perspective, Lincity simulates numerous aspects of urban management.

The game models elements such as population demographics, employment sectors, water supply systems, environmental factors, production of goods, extraction of raw materials (including ore, steel, and coal), public services (education, healthcare, fire safety, recreation), energy generation (electricity, charcoal, coal with limited availability, solar power, wind energy), alongside financial management, pollution control, and transportation networks. Success depends on balancing these socio-economic variables to foster sustainable population growth.

Players can achieve victory either by guiding their city toward long-term sustainability or by evacuating inhabitants through space travel. The official website maintains a Hall of Fame recognizing those who reach these milestones.

History

Originally created circa 1995 by I. J. Peters as a Linux-based SimCity imitation, Lincity was made available on SourceForge in 2001. Although initially developed for Linux platforms, it was subsequently adapted for Microsoft Windows, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS 4, among others. Support for Mac OS X exists through source code compilation using GCC and execution via X11.app. On Unix-like systems, graphics rendering relies on SVGALib or X11.

Because it employs software rendering without the need for 3D graphics hardware acceleration, Lincity runs smoothly on machines with modest CPU and memory resources. Development activity has been limited since 1999; the most recent official version was released in August 2004.

Critical reception

In 2000, a CNN feature acknowledged the game's complexity within the Linux gaming community. It earned the title of The Linux Game Tome Game of the Month in January 2005 and was highlighted as a noteworthy freeware option on 1up.com in 2008. Furthermore, The Washington Post covered Lincity in 2009, underlining its significance in the city-building genre.

Successor

Significant progress occurred in 2005 with the creation of a fork named LinCity-NG, initially hosted on Google Code and now maintained on GitHub. Utilizing SDL2 and OpenGL, Lincity-NG provides an isometric viewpoint inspired by SimCity 3000, featuring graphics closely aligned with that title’s aesthetic.

See also

• List of open source games
• Simutrans
• OpenTTD
• OpenCity
• Micropolis

External links

• Lincity, hosted at SourceForge
• Lincity-NG Source Code, available on GitHub (mirror)
• Lincity-NG downloads (alternate)