It might be hard to believe nowadays, but Boson was a 2D game until the release of version 0.7 in January of 2003.

But the Sourceforce page has survived, and the Subversion repository contains screenshots from version 0.7 on and some older ones from unknown version numbers. Sadly the old websites at and are no longer online, and YouTube was not a thing back then, so most of the old artwork, videos and roadmaps are lost. More maps and sound effects tightened the atmosphere, but there was no computer opponent with artificial intelligence, so you absolutely had to play over a local network or online. The game came with its own soundtrack (you had the choice between “Jungle” and “Progressive), although the tracks did sound a bit… similar to each other, and Techno hadn’t been a thing in game soundtracks since Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. fog of war, path-finding, units defending themselves automatically, the destruction of a radar/satellite station leading to the disappearance of the minimap, and so on. Before OpenGL support was added, Boson used pre-rendered 2D tiles and sprites.īy version 0.6 (released in June of 2002) the project was on a very good path again, having been extended with all the features players were used to from similar RTS titles, e.g. A new set of developers revived Boson one year later, in 2001, and decided to port the game to Qt 3, the KDE 3 libraries and the recently introduced libkdegames library. Then the project suddenly went into hiatus, as it happens so often with ambitious open source game projects. Four releases later, on October 30, 2000, the release of version 0.5 was celebrated as a major milestone, also because Boson had been ported to Qt 2.2.1 & KDE 2.0 to match the development of the projects it was based on. A map editor was already part of the package. The core engine gained much-needed features. collecting oil and minerals) started working. 3D artists and sound designers were invited to contribute, and basic game play (e.g. Boson 0.1, as the attempt was called, was based on Qt 1.4, the KDE 1.x libraries, and described as being “Warcraft-like”.ĭevelopment continued at a fast pace over the following year. Back in September of 1999, just about a year after the KDE project had shipped its first release ever, Thomas Capricelli announced “our attempt to make a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) for the KDE project” on the kde-announce mailing list.

Boson x soundtrack