Open source SimCity in the works for OLPC's XO

This is great news! I am also working on porting a software project to the OLPC so its good to know that one of my favorite game designers has the same idea .

Loved SimCity and never played any other version. How much tax break do you think EA gets out of this?

@mattva01,

Very curious to know whether your port will be available for free or not. I hope it's not (or at least dirt-cheap), given the nature of the product. If that's the case, I applaud you and everyone's efforts on the OLPC. The world needs more projects like this one to bridge the technological divide.

Um... there already is an open source Sim City. It's called LinCity; it's been around for quite some time and has pretty much all the features of the original Sim City so this seems pretty pointless. It even comes in Win32 and Linux flavors.

"Very curious to know whether your port will be available for free or not."

All OLPC software is going to be Free software. So, if it's not free as in freedom (which in this case also means "free as in beer"), it's not going to be in the OLPC.

As for LinCity - that's nice, but it could be Mr. Wright plans on porting a newer version of it, like SimCity 2000.

Well I am only porting a 2D graphics API for beginning python students.
I do hope Sim City is an option and not a default, we don't have much space to work with. :)

mattva01:

What game are you working on? I'd like to write about it on the OLPC News "Games for the OLPC" section:
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/games/

Well I'm working on gasp(Graphics API for Students of Python)
Ever heard of the livewires python module ? We are porting and extending it for tk,sdl(pygame), and gtk-cairo.
Check out the launchpad page: http://launchpad.net/gasp
So not a game, but can be used to create games. :)

I’ve been working on SimCity for 15 years, ported it to the OLPC, and worked with John Gilmore and Will Wright to make it free.

The OLPC is an educational project, based on Seymour Papert’s ideas about “constructionist education”: kids learn by playing and building things. Seymour Papert teaches elementary school children to program computers with the Logo language. SimCity is a classic example of a constructionist educational game, and on the OLPC it will be totally open and programmable.

The point of porting SimCity to the OLPC is not just so they can play a game, but so they can learn to program their own games, by reading the SimCity source code, learning how it works, reprogramming it by making changes and plugging in their own modifications, and re-using SimCity’s components to create their own games.

I hope other game companies like EA will be inspired and follow Will Wright’s example, by making more of their games and programming tools open source, and contributing their code, content and resources to the OLPC project, so kids all over the world can learn from them.