My Pioneers theme: ccFlickr

Friday, April 11th, 2008

The Settlers of Catan is a sweet, nerdy, hex-based strategy game. Pioneers is a free software implementation of ‘Settlers’ — some co-workers and I have taken to playing it in the SFLC conference room (and over the tubes) after hours, typically with scotch and pizza. It’s great, you should do it.

They say that every contribution to a free software project begins with one developer’s itch (to see a new feature implemented, a bug fixed, etc.), and the graphical themes (e.g.) that shipped with v.0.11.3 of Pioneers made my brain itch something fierce. So I made a new one. ccFlickr, as the name suggests, is cobbled together from Creative Commons-licensed images harvested from Flickr. Here is a screenshot:

The ccFlickr theme

Download ccFlickr

To install, just place the ccFlickr directory in the directory with all of your other themes. In Ubuntu Linux, this is: /usr/share/games/pioneers/themes/

It’s a first effort, but I’m happy with the result. The one problem I’ve noticed is that, because I made tiles with the exact dimensions of a hex (rather than making smaller images to tile), space sometimes shows up between tiles upon resizing the window. Not sure whether this is an issue with the scaling algorithm, could be fixed by making the tiles rectangles (the space is usually on the diagonal), or if it’s unavoidable.

All of the images I used to make the theme are licensed CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike), so that they can be distributed with the GPL-licensed program. Some images were originally (or still are) licensed CC BY-NC-SA on Flickr. In each of these cases I requested a BY-SA license to the images, and the authors were kind enough to grant one, either by changing the public license on Flickr or by simply giving me a one-off grant of permissions. Here are the images:

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