[HN Gopher] 0AD, an open source historical RTS in development fo...
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0AD, an open source historical RTS in development for 22 years
Author : wsgeorge
Score : 259 points
Date : 2023-05-26 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (play0ad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play0ad.com)
| trollied wrote:
| I'd give this a go if I wasn't so terribly addicted to
| Factorio...
| winrid wrote:
| NetPanzer is also an open source RTS in development for over 20
| years!
|
| https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/tree/dev
|
| I just setup a new masterservers and a couple game servers with
| bots.
|
| I'm working with the maintainer to do one more release to the
| distros and then probably convert it to Godot.
| robinhoodexe wrote:
| I'm quite excited for a future macOS ARM build.
| postalrat wrote:
| Can't you run it now or does that build include some arm only
| units?
| pohl wrote:
| Rosetta should run it, but a native build would still be
| desirable.
| atum47 wrote:
| Got all my friends hooked on it back in my college days. We
| attended class at night, but for some reason beyond my
| comprehension we did have classes at Saturday morning. Being a
| bunch of nocturnal beings, we usually bought some pizzas and
| stayed up all night from Friday to Saturday playing on lan and
| having pizza. Good times.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > compression
|
| Yup, we are on Hacker News!
| atum47 wrote:
| I usually swipe to type (which works 80% of the time) and
| honestly some times my eyes to catch spelling mistakes like
| these. Sorry, haha.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oh no worries really. Your typo was on topic as well! :P
| [deleted]
| psychphysic wrote:
| I played 0ad nearly every day about 5 or so years ago. What a
| blast from the past.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Best game. My kids play it every weekend - when they are allowed
| to consume medias other than books. They love to play historical
| battles, go through the history of the civilizations. I still
| beat them, but it's such fun to have some "LAN-parties" with
| them.. said that, we noticed that quite often, the network game
| gets aborted. Is that something that just happen to me (Linux,
| Mac, Windows, doesnt matter) or the network part of the code is
| not so robust as the rest?
| mike_hock wrote:
| It'll run on the Hurd and ReactOS when _those_ are finished and
| come bundled together with Duke Nukem Forev... no wait, they
| actually finished that.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ehh... it is an open source game, not a kernel, a playable
| alpha is fine as long as it is fun.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 0ad is completely playable right now.
|
| (Although, if HURD had drivers _it_ would be usable right now,
| too.)
| peter_retief wrote:
| Really enjoy OAD, good to know it is being developed.
| Phlogi wrote:
| It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ? Why are they
| not focusing on a 1.0 release and seize adding features, new
| civs, and therefore complexity?
| bandrami wrote:
| Remember that the "unstable" aspect of alpha isn't that "it's
| going to crash randomly" but that "you can't rely on a given
| feature being there in the future".
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I can only comment on Linux and to a much lesser extent macOS,
| but IME it is quite stable.
|
| I think never going 1.0 is an open source game dev meme or
| something. Xonotic is still pre-1.0 even after over a decade in
| development. Stable as heck.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ?
|
| It is 100% playable and has been for years. As sibling comments
| note, I think the only reason they label it as anything but
| stable is because there are still significant changes between
| releases. Although I personally think they could fix even that
| by just chopping the first parts of the version number off - if
| they stopped calling it "alpha" and just called it 0ad version
| 26, and then released version 27, everyone would still have the
| right expectations.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I tried to play it at a LAN party. It started off great, but
| as the number of units increased, the connection slowly
| deteriorated until eventually it was literally unplayable.
| You say that it is "100% playable and has been for years"?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Because it's an OSS project ran by volunteers, each of whom
| work on the features they are interested in.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Even in OSS it's wise to have some people steer the
| direction. I tried the game about eight years ago but it
| didn't run well on my laptop. I've tried to keep up somewhat
| but lost interest when it felt like they just added new
| features instead of polishing and improving core
| functionality.
|
| I had a similar feeling with Black Mesa. At a certain point,
| it feels like they've worked so long on the project that they
| lost the original selling point. At what stage does it make
| more sense to just remake the game in the latest UE than
| offering a 20 year old game that still isn't close to being
| released.
|
| I don't want to talk down on the project but it's a question
| I think about every time I see these types of products.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Not sure what exactly you meant, but Black mesa was mighty
| playable and 100% stable when it was released as full.
| Maybe stay away from half-working early builds of these
| kind of games, IMHO its not worth the frustration just
| because of some nostalgia.
|
| Now if somebody would port first Deux ex into Unreal 5.2
| engine that would get me interested (but still, keep your
| emotions in check and play when its ready, otherwise just a
| recipe for regrets)
| wsgeorge wrote:
| Fair point. On my part, I like to think of them as "ever-
| green" projects. So they're never "done", they just keep
| evolving at whatever rate the community can manage, and
| people check out and check in once in a while to see where
| it's at.
|
| > I tried the game about eight years ago but it didn't run
| well on my laptop
|
| Care to try it now? I've been playing Alpha 26 for a few
| weeks, and I _actually_ love it.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| It works very well. I used to run the Alpha 23 on my old
| Windows 10 device, but I got Alpha 26 a few weeks ago for my
| Intel Mac.
|
| No noticeable bugs affecting my single player gameplay, except
| a few quirks with ship movements (they tend to overlap, which
| makes it look unnatural)
|
| I have also noticed that clusters of units tend to look smaller
| than their actual number, so it might be a similar issue as
| I've noticed above. From someone who still enjoys the AoE 1 Ex,
| 0 AD is a really amazing game.
| Phlogi wrote:
| Thanks, how is the learning curve in comparison to AoE2 DE?
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I figured out the basics before bothering to read the docs,
| so anyone who played classic RTSs will get off to a good
| start.
|
| Some specifics about this game that make it unique:
|
| 1. You cannot build anything any where. There's the concept
| of a "region of control" that surrounds your Civic Center
| (Town Center equivalent) that marks the borders of your
| settlement. Building right on the borders expands it.
| Exceptions to this rule are made for docks, outposts Roman
| army camps (if you play as a Roman)
|
| 2. Besides mounted and siege units, your soldiers are also
| your builders/resource gatherers. Citizen soldiers. Non-
| combatant builders/gatherers are female citizens. As
| soldiers gather experience from fighting, they become more
| capable soldiers and less capable citizens.
|
| 3. The default UI uses traditional, civ-specific names for
| units and buildings (with English equivalents as
| secondary), which can be jarring at first. I swap them to
| make deciding on what to build easier.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _2. Besides mounted and siege units, your soldiers are
| also your builders /resource gatherers. Citizen soldiers.
| Non-combatant builders/gatherers are female citizens. As
| soldiers gather experience from fighting, they become
| more capable soldiers and less capable citizens._
|
| You can also train mercenaries who can only fight and not
| work.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Age of Empires ignited my passion for these games, but 0AD
| captured it just by sheer ubiquity and accessibility. That says
| something, to me.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I actually prefer 0 A.D. to any AOE game, now.
| taopai wrote:
| Me too. When I found it during the pandemic, it was like "Wow
| this game has everything I dreamt about when I was a little kid
| playing AOE". Capturing buildings and other awesome features!
| m00x wrote:
| [flagged]
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| How did this find players? People want "more Age of Empires II"
| (and to some extent more Age of Mythology). In the most literal
| sense of those words. 0AD got there earlier.
|
| Other previous discussions
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684532) were about
| pathfinding in this game. The pathfinding in AoEII is something.
| It's neither naturalistic, immersive, nor intellectually
| stimulating, which would be goals of mine and probably the
| average game designer in 2023. I'm not going to say how I really
| feel because I don't want to be downvoted over something stupid.
| The important thing is people love this pathfinding. It's worthy
| of copying.
|
| 0AD: People love more of the same. Another free & open source
| example is Pokemon Showdown. People want original untainted
| Pokemon so badly that Pokemon Showdown still has concurrents in
| the tens of thousands. Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia?
| Nearly a million people a day do.
|
| Commercially: There was an audience for "more Breath of the Wild"
| before TOTK: Genshin Impact. League of Legends is more than a
| decade old now. Counter-Strike is almost as old as 0AD. Old
| reigns supreme.
| feldrim wrote:
| The pathfinding discuss was good. I remember that around
| 2008-2010, I read the Killzone AI related papers and
| presentations. Basically, all the planning, tactics were based
| on pathfinding algorithms. Because, if you find the shortest
| path by scoring the nodes, if you add multiple layers - like
| line of sight as a triangle- you can also update the scores,
| which eventually help the character move most optimal path:
| short but safe path.
|
| The idea made it possible to convert the graph into either way
| finding meshes or influence maps, a great abstraction layer to
| build complex scenarios on top.
|
| What makes me sad here is that, even though the paper written
| for 0 A.D. is newer than the paper I had read around 15 years
| ago, it is primitive. It is also a good thing as it is a low
| hanging fruit here for game devs. But I am not sure if there is
| enough interest for game devs here.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Tangent about bad pathfinding:
|
| Another game with really frustrating is (still pre-release) Age
| of Darkness.
|
| Units typically get slaughtered if they traverse uncleared
| regions of the map. But you can't tell them not to, and you
| can't even see ahead of time what pathfinding will choose for
| them.
|
| It's amazing how much cognitive load is added by having to
| prevent units from doing super-stupid stuff.
| sesm wrote:
| But if pathfinding is too smart, then it becomes hard to
| micro-control the units, see StarCraft 2 vs StarCraft Brood
| War.
| bee_rider wrote:
| N.B: Age of Darkness is an inherently player-vs-environment
| game (Survival RTS... it is sorta like They are Billions if
| you've played that). So, I think super high action-per-
| minute PVP style gameplay is not really the goal.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| StarCraft is a great example because we can talk about it
| now without the threat of ultras. Like its audience has
| gone away, people only feel nostalgia for it but they don't
| really play it anymore. It's easier to talk about the
| objectively bad and clunky things about it.
|
| I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft,
| is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game
| harder in ways that were not fun. Which is too bad, because
| it was a phenomenally engineered RTS engine (starting with
| WC3) that brought us many other game formats in its custom
| scenarios.
|
| Compare to Supreme Commander, which had very sophisticated
| pathfinding and in my memory more interesting micro.
| Compare to all MOBA formats, where if you're going to have
| WC3/SC style micro, you might as well focus on micro of one
| unit. There were many ideas that came after StarCraft that
| are in an important way, objectively better.
|
| It has a lot of other clunk. The way you have to manage
| resource gathering. The unit building queues and how
| spending occurs. The spellcasting. The selections. It has
| so much legacy.
|
| StarCraft 2 had to cater to a very specific eSports skill
| base that probably led to it going into the same level of
| obscurity as EverQuest: Gen X people still have strong
| nostalgic feelings for it, but they don't play EVE Online,
| they're not 20 anymore with oodles of time and no
| responsibilities, they don't want hard permadeath single
| instance experiences. They want something much gentler but
| they still feel very positively about like, this one clunky
| thing they may have mastered a long time ago when their
| brain power was so much more plastic.
|
| Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a
| technical engineering point of view? In my opinion, no. So
| besides the existence of an ultra audience, I don't think
| there's a good reason to celebrate the crappy pathfinding
| anymore.
| qu4z-2 wrote:
| StarCraft is a lot more fun to watch than SupCom though.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| bee_rider wrote:
| This sort of RTS sub-genre (of which They Are Billions is the
| only other example I can think of) probably needs different
| unit AI than a typical RTS.
|
| In case anyone is not familiar with these games, you are
| building a base, the map begins unexplored and is populated
| by monsters which will attack you in waves, so it is a sort
| of inherently player-vs-environment, very asymmetrical game.
|
| Because the enemies are basically expendable and your units
| aren't, your units should... try not to sacrifice themselves
| so much. They should avoid the fog-of-war areas unless
| explicitly instructed to go there. Melee units should flee
| when injured. Ranged units should stay out of melee range.
| Total War unit AI (where ranged units typically skirmish by
| default) might be a better starting point than Age of Empires
| style unit AI.
|
| Although, it is a niche within a niche, so I guess I'll take
| what I can get, haha.
| 3np wrote:
| * * *
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| This stuff has been solved by middlewares like Unity for
| ages.
|
| > bad
|
| What I really wanna get into: the cognitive dissonance of
| being a programmer and an AoEII ultra at the same time.
|
| Game mechanics do have a certain objective truth to them.
| They are also pieces of software, they follow a lot of the
| same rules as Gmail and Instagram and whatever. As a matter
| of objective reality: when your game does not aspire to
| specifically be clunky - this distinction is sometimes called
| "QWOP" - it seems valid to say, okay, this pathfinding is the
| word you used. I have the wisdom to not use that word you
| used in this forum to describe something people feel ultra
| about. But it is true.
|
| People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social
| media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking
| around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of
| gameplay.
|
| I wonder how to harness the resources poured into something
| like 0AD to make "Better AoEII" or "Better AoM." I'm not sure
| how often that question is asked and how it is answered.
| That's why this cognitive dissonance matters.
| lukevp wrote:
| Your phrasing and word choice is very peculiar. It's a bit
| difficult to follow what you're saying to me. For example,
| you say you're an AoEII ultra. Is this an ultra fan? Or
| ultra what?
|
| > People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their
| social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love
| clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece
| of gameplay.
|
| If I had to rephrase this section based on my
| understanding, I would interpret it to say something like:
| Often, people are bothered by bugs and other issues that
| happen in commonly-used apps like Facebook or YouTube, but
| when these bugs manifest in video games, it's viewed as
| part of the character of the game. For example, the
| micromanagement of villagers that's required due to bad
| pathfinding in AoE II (to prevent them from running under
| turrets and such).
|
| Is that correct? Any ideas why your phrasing would seem so
| foreign to me? I'm very curious why.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Is this an ultra fan?
|
| Yes
|
| > you say you're an AoEII ultra
|
| No. I can't say how I really feel about the game.
|
| > it's viewed as part of the character of the game
|
| Yes.
|
| > I'm very curious why.
|
| People feel very, very strongly about their nostalgic
| retro childhood fun cozy times like playing AoEII.
| They're ultras, right? It's like talking about football.
| It can be perilous.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but (in my opinion)
| you're over indexing on the issue. If someone gets bent
| because you said some video game has bad pathfinding, so
| what? Seems like their problem. It isn't a mean spirited
| or unreasonable thing to say.
| nephanth wrote:
| 0ad is always the first listed package of linux distro repos
| (in alphabetical order). That might have helped with
| discoverability
| scrapcode wrote:
| Ye ole Yellowpages marketing trick!
| doesthiswork23 wrote:
| [dead]
| silisili wrote:
| I found it years back looking for games in the repo. The only
| two were tux racer, and 0ad. Been playing it off and on ever
| since(not so much tux racer).
| smcleod wrote:
| I remember discovering 0AD from it being installable from
| package managers in various distros maybe 12-13 years ago.
| [deleted]
| npunt wrote:
| Back in the day when I was working on another RTS of the era
| (Dark Reign 2), pathfinding was the bane of our existence. We
| weren't able to dial the pathfinding in because we'd pivoted
| late in the development cycle from the more innovative but
| complex 'walk anywhere on a 3d terrain' design to the ship-it-
| quickly traditional grid unit placement of 2d RTS'. This was
| the era of 2d RTS' transitioning to 3d, so everything was new
| and a bit harder than anticipated.
|
| Just that one thing of having sub-par pathfinding made the game
| far worse, I'd guess at least a full point off a 10-point game
| rating. I believe we had to slow the whole pace of the game
| down because the player had to babysit units as they moved,
| which made the game far different from its extremely fast-paced
| predecessor and which the players expected from a sequel. I
| played DR2 again recently and it doesn't hold up almost solely
| due to pathfinding and the pacing that results.
| en3r0 wrote:
| Remember playing that demo over and over as a kid! Really
| cool that you worked on it.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| On the other hand, specific, suboptimal pathfinding is like
| 80% of a Brood War charm. The game without die decades ago if
| dragoons and zerglings would blob optimally.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I'd say a key element for me was that it is multi-OS (even
| installs on Google supported ChromeOS Linux Developer Mode),
| does not require any store account, does not require crazy
| powerful external GPUs and still supports LAN only mode.
|
| This meant I could setup a LAN party by dusting off a
| collection of semi-retired Windows, MacOS and Chrome machines.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'd love to configure a PXE boot server so you could have a
| LAN party in a box.
| tm-guimaraes wrote:
| People play showdown because of easy UX for netplay on both
| official, fan formats or old formats. It's not about "untainted
| pokemon", and more about "build a team without grinding and
| have an online matchmaking with different formats". So, that
| one in particular is a bad example.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > It's not about "untainted pokemon"
|
| It's not about original ideas in Pokemon either.
| tm-guimaraes wrote:
| How not so? I don't get what you mean. Supports every new
| thing and has new formats. Only one gimmick was disabled in
| the devs/smogon formats on the previous gen as it did work
| very well for those (but was great in the official ones) So
| I would really like to know what you mean by it not about
| the new.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| This game is awesome.
|
| This is the only game me and my son(7) play together. It amazing
| for little kids. They learn history, building resources, building
| alliances, and destroying the dad empire.
|
| I wish it was possible to play online multiplayer :(.
| Unfortunately, the people that play online are pretty elitist.
| Just reject your offers to play, setup the game for you to lose
| on join, etc etc. The multiplayer "collect resources" is not very
| fun - it would be awesome to start with 50k each and just create
| an awesome battle. I don't want to spend 2 hours collecting fake
| trees - only to have the opponent destroy me in 2 seconds. You
| can't do any strategy since you will never get to the stages
| where that matters.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 28,827 commits. GitHub mirror of the code:
|
| https://github.com/0ad/0ad
| jonbaer wrote:
| For those interested in RL portion,
| https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...
| and https://github.com/0ad4ai
|
| There has also been some work to establish a geospatial
| intelligence class using the game engine as well
| (map/market/resource analysis).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-05-26 23:00 UTC)