Micropolis (2008)

In January 2008, the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license. The release of the source code was related to the donation of SimCity software to theOne Laptop Per Child program, as one of the principles of the OLPC laptop is the use of free and open-source software. The open-source version is called Micropolis (the initial name forSimCity) since EA retains the trademark Simcity. The version shipped on OLPC laptops will still be called SimCity but will have to be tested by EA quality assurance before each release to be able to use that name. The Micropolis source code has been translated to C++, integrated with Python and interfaced with both GTK+ and OpenLaszlo.

Micropolis (also called OLPC SimCity) is a release of the city-building sim game SimCity, that was developed by Don Hopkins. It is based on the source code of the X11 version ofSimCity for the Unix operating system, which was donated to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project by Electronic Arts as free and open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License in 2008.

There are two versions: The original version uses the Tcl/Tk user interface and can be run on the OLPC, as a stand-alone game in any Linux or Mac OS X system with X11, or as a port for OpenBSD. The new version has a user interface implemented in Python code, which uses Cairo to draw graphics and Pango to draw text. The C core that is responsible for the simulation has been restructured and reworked into C++ code, which is cross-platform, and independent of the user interface and scripting language.