[HN Gopher] New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xsayarsa
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New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xsayarsa
Author : shakow
Score : 164 points
Date : 2021-02-20 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (play0ad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play0ad.com)
| planb wrote:
| For a moment I thought Elon Musk had another child...
| d33 wrote:
| Just to save somebody some searching, here's what the release
| name refers to:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_II
| kowlo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The first paragraph on the page specifies that the release is
| named in honor of Xerxes I, not Xerxes II.
| zibbity-rw wrote:
| This game looks so much better than it did a few years ago! I
| wish people used open source games like this for AI competitions.
| So much more open and also what a great community effort.
| BariumBlue wrote:
| Congrats on a new release! I think it's a good project, and I too
| thought it was dead.
|
| =====
|
| Personal experience: A few-ish months ago, I tried to get into
| 0AD (more than an exploratory 1-2 matches vs an AI). I like to
| watch videos of folks playing Age Of Empires 2, and I looked for
| a similar experience on youtube, to better understand the game,
| the meta, and standard tactics.
|
| But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to
| distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when you
| actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch a
| video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to
| distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when
| you actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch
| a video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
|
| Having played to a lot of RTS when I was younger, the main
| difference between AOE2 and the rest[1] is 3D vs isometric-2D.
| 3D tends to make games a lot messier. The comparison between
| AOE2 and AOE3 is a pretty good example of this phenomenon for
| instance.
|
| [1] : Stacraft 2 being the outlier here, it has really "clean"
| graphics, while being 3D.
| crazypython wrote:
| I find the choice of business model very strange. The free
| software philosophy allows game art to be proprietary. They could
| sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but
| keep the code free. I'm not sure why they don't do this.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > I find the choice of business model very strange.
|
| I don't see much of a business model.
|
| > The free software philosophy allows game art to be
| proprietary.
|
| I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The Free Software
| Definition does not allow this. If code is contributed to 0AD
| under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary
| graphics.
|
| The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the
| inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not
| permit modification. However any such art must be
| redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no
| charge.
|
| > They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license
| the game art but keep the code free.
|
| This violates the spirit of free software.
|
| > I'm not sure why they don't do this.
|
| I think they want the game to be free.
| crazypython wrote:
| The GUI isn't starting on Mac for me.
|
| Edit: Had to wait several minutes, but it started.
| reddotX wrote:
| works great on linux
| henearkr wrote:
| Wow!! I thought it was pretty much dead after their fork.
|
| I'm happy to see it's not the case!! ^^
|
| I love this game and its music.
| rambojazz wrote:
| Sorry, what fork? What happened?
| henearkr wrote:
| Here, they said that the development was slowed down because
| of disagreements, and a sizable part of the development team
| announced their fork:
|
| https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/25134-fork-ad/
| spijdar wrote:
| With the benefit of hindsight, this sounds more like
| personal drama than a real fork. I'm not super familiar
| with 0AD beyond playing sometimes, dunno what their org
| structure is like or anything, but this doesn't look like
| there was ever really a threat to 0AD.
|
| Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always
| been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really
| out of the ordinary?
|
| It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers
| when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron
| fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a
| fully private fork with 3 people?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Three guys left to create a fork back in 2018. They argued
| that they would be able to iterate faster because they
| trusted each other.
|
| They also said they would only release the source once they
| made a release.
|
| By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs
| showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map
| generation.
|
| So far they have not yet released any source code. Since the
| fork happened, the original project has released two new
| versions.
| axaxs wrote:
| I'm explicitly and admittedly just not a PC gamer, but this is
| the one exception to the rule. Probably because I'm a longtime
| Linux on the desktop user, and there just wasn't much in the
| past. If you enjoyed AoE2, or just want to kill some time messing
| around, I highly suggest giving it a spin. Careful, time can
| disappear quickly.
| programd wrote:
| The buried the more interesting lead:
|
| 0 A.D. now has an API for reinforcement learning. You can train
| AI to control the units in game
|
| https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...
| cl42 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. THAT IS SO COOL.
| shakow wrote:
| I'm really happy to see that the project is still alive and
| kicking!
| max0563 wrote:
| I have been following this game for many years. What you all have
| made is amazing. Thank you for continuing to work on and improve
| 0 A.D.
|
| Very inspiring!
| tomxor wrote:
| Similarly I've been playing OpenRA recently, which is basically
| an open source recreation of the old C&C games Dune, Tiberian Sun
| and Red Alert (the later being the most popular). It's a very
| honest recreation that feels close to the originals, both in
| terms of graphics and game play.
|
| However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my
| attention is being online multiplayer, the diversity and
| challenge other human players brings cannot be replaced with AI
| so far... Anyway, the last time I tried 0 A.D it didn't seem to
| have multiplayer capability yet, but it seems to now!
| phkahler wrote:
| >> However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my
| attention is being online multiplayer
|
| I had a long spell of BZflag. The humans are so much better to
| play against. Highly recommended game for casual play BTW.
| sebyx07 wrote:
| age of empires 4 open source
| Bakary wrote:
| This is such a great project
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(page generated 2021-02-20 23:00 UTC)