Open World Soccer

I guess most cultured people above the age of 25 or so have played some version of Sensible (World of) Soccer on the Amiga at some point – younger people may have tried the not-so-great retro edition released for the Microsoft Xbox a couple of years ago.

Senible Soccer was one of the premier time consumers for me in my early teens – only rivaled by Civilization, Championship Manager, the turn based AD&D games and school. I still play SWOS now and then to this day using UAE and my Competition Pro usb joystick. The experience comes pretty close to the real deal. I still have an Amiga 600, but, well.. it’s not GNU/Linux with KDE, so I end up using UAE more.

I also competed at the annual Danish Open held by Amiga Club Denmark in 2004, 2005 and 2006, with some success. So as you can see Sensible Soccer is very much still alive.

Enter Open World Soccer. It’s a project that not only aims to create a free clone of Sensible World of Soccer but also to develop it further.

There’s a simple howto for compiling svn snapshots on openSUSE 11.1 here, and the project releases binaries for a distribution called Ubuntu also.

EDIT: Turns out Toni has been building packages on Packman since February. Unless you really want latest svn, simply ‘zypper in ows’.

It still seems to need quite a bit of work to be much fun but they’re off to a great start, so if you’re a C++ developer looking for a project to work on…

PS: And please, don’t bring up Kick Off or Goal, they completely lacked the sophistication of SWOS >:-)