[HN Gopher] 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
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0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
Author : jonbaer
Score : 328 points
Date : 2026-02-19 19:37 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (play0ad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play0ad.com)
| cjbdndjc wrote:
| I mean, good news, but even going down the route of using pre
| rendered fonts in the first place seems misguided O_o
|
| Unless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have
| been unbearable even for latin scripts
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's what everyone used back in the Quake 3 days.
| account42 wrote:
| This is an odd comment on a website where most users are happy
| working with mono-spaced text most days. Not everyone has
| kemingphobia.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Fun fact: 0ad still doesn't support kerning. While I would've
| loved to see proper kerning support in r28, there is only so
| much a team of volunteers can do.
|
| If you're interested in progress in this area, I suggest you
| keep an eye on
| https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7945
| ddtaylor wrote:
| 0ad is a fun game but the last few times I have tried to play it
| with my friends it lagged very bad once a few units were moving
| around. I actually was able to get it to play kind of normal by
| hacking the pathfinding code to give up after a fixed iteration
| count that was low. It worked kind of, but broke path finding a
| lot, obviously.
|
| The crux of the issue is that their simulation is single
| threaded. It's a complicated problem to do both deterministic and
| multi-threaded, but I feel some of us could help them.
| decimalenough wrote:
| For me the main problem with 0AD multiplayer is that if any
| player loses their connection even for a moment for any reason,
| the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't
| rejoin. Quite frustrating, especially for longer campaigns.
| It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.
| x1f604 wrote:
| This is one of the problems that BAR solves beautifully - a
| player could leave and rejoin later and the game would
| continue running just fine. An existing player can choose to
| take their stuff or not, or take it and give it back when the
| player rejoins. Truly elegant.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| BAR in general is such a great showcase in A) FOSS games
| can be good, work great, scale nice and be fun and B) BAR
| is a game built by gamers who play and enjoy their own
| game, for other gamers, which seems more and more rare
| these days.
| GvS wrote:
| What is BAR?
| card_zero wrote:
| _Beyond All Reason_ as mentioned in a sibling thread.
|
| "Currently in development". It's got robots.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > It's got robots.
|
| "Shut up and take my money, I'm making a donation" :)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| You might also like Iron Harvest. It takes place in an
| alternate history WWI setting with dieselpunk mechs.
| somat wrote:
| The history behind BAR is also fascinating.
|
| There was the Total Annihilation RTS and while it had the
| normal 2d overhead view, all the data was in 3d.
|
| A Swedish gaming clan put together an accelerated full 3d
| engine to replay Total Annihilation recorded demos. As it
| got more and more features it was realized that most of
| what was needed to play TA was being recreated so they
| closed the loop and made it into a full game engine which
| they called SpringRTS. There was the default accurate TA
| game code but there was also a very popular mod that was
| not afraid to change things a bit, basically "we like Total
| Annihilation but also think it could be better" and they
| called it Balanced Annihilation. We are almost there. BA
| lived under the Spring project for a few years, but really
| when you think about it there are ip problems with it using
| the TA assets, also, I suspect someone wanted to do engine
| work but was having a hard time with upstreaming it, so it
| forked off the Spring project, they rebuilt all the
| units(same unit different skin) are doing a ton of great
| engine work and called it BAR (retronymed into Beyond All
| Reason but I suspect it originally stood for Balanced
| Annihilation Reborn or something like that). So BAR is
| basically a highly modified legally distinct Total
| Annihilation.
|
| Zero-K is another great RTS based on this engine. It drifts
| further off the TA formula than BAR does.
| pino83 wrote:
| Are there any BAR forks or alternatives that don't force me
| into proprietary walled gardens for exchange with the
| community? I would even donate! Even regularly!
| Dunedan wrote:
| > [...] the game either halts completely or forks so that
| they can't rejoin.
|
| When a player looses the connection the game just continues.
| Usually one of the remaining player then pauses the game
| until the player who lost the connection returned.
|
| The game state becoming out-of-sync is often a problem of
| players using buggy mods. That this happens without mods is
| pretty rare and of course clearly a bug.
|
| > It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.
|
| It seems you haven't played 0ad in a while, as that's
| possible since a27 (see https://play0ad.com/new-
| release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/).
| card_zero wrote:
| Two thousand years ago they'd barely have maps, I don't see why
| units need pathfinding anyway. In the Age of Empires series it
| had bizarre effects, like you could steer an enemy army around
| by building a wall across a forest path, forcing them to take a
| different path to their target (your base), since they
| apparently saw the wall with their psychic powers.
|
| Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass
| direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player)
| shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.
| zxexz wrote:
| An RTS where you could only swap between FPV views of each of
| your units would be fun. Or at least different. Savage II but
| there is only 1 player per team, and no overhead view. And
| you can wrench control from a bot at any time.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| Isn't this Mount and Blade?
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| With the RTS mod you can get pretty close, yeah.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| It's simultaneously an RTS and a third person action
| game, during combat in singleplayer campaigns. You
| command your troops in real-time, but you have a limited
| POV.
|
| Realtime Strategy doesn't necessarily require that you
| have a top-down perspective or a specific set of
| controls, right? Pretty sure Brutal Legend is also
| technically considered an RTS
| GreyZephyr wrote:
| Battlezone and battlezone 2 [0] were great for this. Many
| hours lost, even if bz2 was a buggy mess on release. It was
| also one of the first faves to really have a missing
| community.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)
| totetsu wrote:
| It was the dream but any game that tried was always
| disappointing.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Sacrifice is a brilliant RTS where the commander (a
| summoner mage of sorts) participates at the ground level.
| nvlled wrote:
| So that's name of that game, I've been trying to remember
| that game I played briefly as a kid, which in my hazy
| memory seemed quite fun. Thanks, will give it a try when
| it goes on sale.
| tmtvl wrote:
| And there's of course the spiritual sequel, Bruetal
| Legend. The main campaign can be played more as an action
| game, but if you get into multiplayer the RTS elements
| really come through.
| cheschire wrote:
| It's just written Brutal Legend if you can't type the u.
| The dots you see in the name are not equivalent to an
| umlauted u, but instead it's just rock dots.
|
| Since rock dots don't affect the pronunciation of the
| name, you wouldn't expand to add a letter (which would
| affect the pronunciation) if you can't type the
| decorative dots.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
| Amezarak wrote:
| Typical armies usually had, if not maps, reliable
| intelligence and guides. "we've heard this chokepoint is
| heavily defended" would indeed be a common reason for routing
| around.
|
| It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into
| account the position of your mobile units as well - for
| example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable
| conditions.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway.
|
| I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units
| around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and
| this game?
|
| > Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass
| direction and hope for the best
|
| If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll
| get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless
| you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the
| game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yes, but if you were that unit, would you get stuck in a
| corner, or would you persist in trying to find your
| destination? I suppose if you make it all the way to the
| target, you've accomplished pathfinding of some kind, by
| definition, sure. But an algorithm to avoid getting stuck
| doesn't have to be "pathfinding" as in an expensive
| algorithm to find a complete path right away.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| This is naive pathfinding that adopts the shortcut of perfect
| information. Good looking pathfinding simulates realistic
| terrain ignorance (no "psychic powers"), but it is likely to
| be expensive enough to require other compromises (e.g.
| updating paths less often).
| card_zero wrote:
| You reckon the perfect information version is cheaper than
| an algorithm that works only on the tiles near to the unit?
| But this quickly gets too complicated to discuss; there's
| the confusing matter of precalculation versus live
| updating.
| sdwr wrote:
| The perfect information version calculates the path once
| on click, the local version needs to recalculate every
| time the unit moves (and new tiles are "seen")
| daymanstep wrote:
| Recalculating the path every game tick is too expensive.
| What brood war did was to just have units wait for a
| second when they collide with something before
| recalculating the path. This resulted in horrendous
| "traffic jams".
|
| It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of
| spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths
| every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking
| resulted in smoother movement.
| bawolff wrote:
| At some point its a game and needs to be fun to play. If you
| are directing a group of five units that might work but if
| you have 200 units on the field i think it breaks down and is
| less fun.
|
| > But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of
| your own, either.
|
| In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar
| being a clone
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| Pathfinding at scale is pretty much a solved problem. Spring.
| Recoil. SupCom. Starcraft. You can do that, for 10.000 units
| before you run into problems.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY
| Onavo wrote:
| Why is it so bad on sandboxes like Minecraft? Modded
| Minecraft has struggled with pathfinding for years.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass
| direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player)
| shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.
|
| It would depend where and when. An army on their own
| territory might know the terrain. An army on enemy's
| territory would try to send scouts ahead as opposed to
| wondering randomly, too.
|
| So at the army level it would almost work out like the they
| have "psychic" powers because they have scouts. At the
| individual units it would depend. But it would also be kind
| of annoying to play if the realism is increased too much.
| Like they wander into the woods and get stuck in a bog and
| die of hypothermia.
| x1f604 wrote:
| I feel like the issue is more that their pathing algorithm is
| very inefficient. Not sure why using multiple cores would solve
| the problem if the cause of the lag is that their pathing
| algorithm is cubic time or something
| ddtaylor wrote:
| The pathfinding algorithm has been decently optimized. The
| reality is that 600 units finding paths and keeping them up
| to date is a lot of work.
|
| Some of the pathfinding is precomputed, some cannot be as it
| involves other units and formations.
|
| Most other RTS games work around this by either relaxing the
| constraints or implement some amount of parallelism.
| qup wrote:
| A realistic version would have unit commanders pathfinding
| over long distance, and the plebs following them unless
| they got merc'ed
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I think this actually can be used to optimize the
| pathfinding. Basically create a fake unit that is used
| for the real/complex path, then have the other units
| follow it with basic collision or a very tuned down
| pathfinding algorithm similar to the hack I did where I
| just counted loop iterations and bailed after some
| threshold.
| Dunedan wrote:
| There is also some exciting work going on to improve the
| path finding of formations to make them behave more
| naturally:
| https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8608
| evolve2k wrote:
| AFAIK one of the reasons they held onto 'alpha' for so long was
| that this network lag issue for internet based play was a big
| known and hard to address issue. I'd def be trying again since
| they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a
| game that is so many years in development.
|
| Also, we've always played the game as in-person LAN, and for
| the most part the lag has been just fine. Only for really huge
| end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops
| did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often
| gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we
| waited for it to clear up.
|
| Good times.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| That was my experience as well. My understanding is that the
| simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC. All of my
| friends had pretty powerful PCs, but someone among us had a
| slightly weaker one in terms of single core performance,
| which means we all have that CPU basically then.
|
| The huge battle toward the end of the game dropping or making
| the game unplayable was what killed it for us. We didn't want
| to spend all that time making our army and strategy only to
| be disappointed. At the time we went back to playing Age of
| Empires 2 DE.
| Dunedan wrote:
| > My understanding is that the simulation will be
| bottlenecked by the slowest PC.
|
| That's correct. While 0ad is an RTS, behind the scenes it's
| still turn-based and in multiplayer games turns can only
| progress once every participants PC has responded. That's
| also why the game also feels slow when a player has a bad
| latency to the player hosting the game.
| Dunedan wrote:
| > I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha
| with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many
| years in development.
|
| We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't
| consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the
| last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation
| for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-
| alpha-27-agni/
|
| > Only for really huge end of game final battles with the
| screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being
| free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk
| crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.
|
| I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably
| improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28
| did as well.
| izacus wrote:
| How did games like Age of Empires and StarCraft deal with that
| tissue on single CPU systems? They were mostly single threaded
| too and with way less computational power.
| dvntsemicolon wrote:
| I tried to play this game once and sucked at it. There are people
| out there who are legitimately good at this, and that's awesome
| to see for an open source game
| rutierut wrote:
| I know what you mean, biggest gripe I have with this game is
| how important it is to play the meta and boom early if you want
| to win at anything other than easy mode.
| tasuki wrote:
| I've played perhaps tens of hours of 0AD. I boom early, try
| to create an unbeatable army, and then go win. When I saw
| competitive 0AD players on YouTube, they played completely
| differently: they train cavalry or cavalry archers and go
| hassle the booming opponents really early. Then retreat to go
| hunt some chickens for a bit, train some more cavalry, and go
| raiding again. They simultaneously attacked each other, all
| the while trying to continually improve their economy
| meanwhile. It seemed much more fun than the way I played tbh.
| Dunedan wrote:
| The best players are incredible at microing (although horse
| rushs are just one of multiple strategies). It's also
| equally important to manage resources and units in a way
| that you use all of them all the time. That's especially
| important in early game.
| jiffygist wrote:
| I started playing not so long ago. Here's some good lists of
| tips that helped me. Although I had some headstart with SC2
| experience :)
|
| https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/22257-a21-multiplayer-...
|
| https://gitlab.com/mentula0ad/0ad-tips-and-tricks
| hulitu wrote:
| > 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
|
| No system requirements. Does it run on Pentium II wirh 128 MB RAM
| ? Or does it need an 128 Cores Epyc with 64 GB RAM ?
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Processor: 2 GHz Intel or x86 compatible, PowerPC64, Arm
|
| https://play0ad.com/download
| tasuki wrote:
| It runs on my potato.
| rand846633 wrote:
| I love 0 A.D., and I'm endlessly grateful to all the developers
| and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill
| deserve a monument -- my genuine admiration.
|
| I install it every few years, and it's always a blast, somehow,
| and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..
|
| Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-
| source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and
| mature. I don't think there's any commercially available RTS that
| can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and
| performance.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now
| cess11 wrote:
| I haven't played Beyond All Reason but looking at the system
| requirements I'm not surprised it is more fulfilling. 0 A.D.
| runs on a potato if you look at it threateningly, which makes
| it a good option to have on a throwaway machine for kids or
| somesuch.
| rand846633 wrote:
| My experience is the opposite: 0ad will lag on my laptop once
| thing become big. BAR will warn that it's not compatible with
| my low end intel integrated potato gpu, but it works just
| fine..
| x1f604 wrote:
| BAR runs fine on low end CPUs...until you have like 2,000
| units on speed metal
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Thank you 0 A.D. team. My son and I play, it is one of the few
| things we can do together. Nothing has brought me so much joy
| as fighting my son: king of the Persian army.
| idoubtit wrote:
| 0AD's web site is rather bad at describing the game, but Beyond
| All Reason is even worse. I rarely play, so I had never heard
| about it. Both focus on details, forgetting the main points.
|
| After reading BAR's homepage and the FAQ, I still have no idea
| what to expect. It could be a purely online game with ads and
| in-game buys, through a central proprietary server. It could
| also have a single player campaign.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Good points, the BAR FAQ's first question is "Best Twitch
| Stream Settings for BAR (OBS)", and the Gameplay page talks
| about physics, terrain, economy, units and weapons but
| answers nothing like: is there a single player campaign? Are
| there AI opponents? what's even the theme/setting of the
| game?
| NortySpock wrote:
| There are single player scenarios in Beyond All Reason,
| though not yet a campaign with a narrative.
|
| There are AI opponents and you can configure friendly and
| hostile AI players. There are also two dedicated "beat
| waves of enemies then final boss" pve modes.
|
| There's not a real theme other than "robot armies built by
| commanders with exponentially scaling economy".
|
| There is a lore/backstory/setting planned to be released on
| March 8th.
| Morromist wrote:
| Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.
| a1371 wrote:
| This game started slow for me many years ago but I now absolutely
| love this game. Not just because of all the open source effort
| that has gone into it, because of the strategy. You have to make
| yourself vulnerable to get stronger.
|
| Wanna grow fast? Train workers who can't fight, but are resource
| efficient to make. Risk being badly weakened if getting attacked,
| for the benefit of the workers giving you much more resources to
| then raise an army.
|
| Also watch out for the elephants!
| tasuki wrote:
| Ya I don't really get elephants. They seem way too strong and
| always win. What is the effective elephant-counter?
| Dunedan wrote:
| When was the last time you played 0ad? Each release brings
| new changes to balancing and especially a27 contained a lot
| of them.
| tasuki wrote:
| I played whatever is in the Debian 13 repos.
|
| As far as I remember, elephants have always felt
| overpowered to me. Could be lack of skill on my part.
| avodonosov wrote:
| I used to like some of its music
| dwighttk wrote:
| It's macOS not OS X unless you're supporting a decade old system
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything
| other than Easy.
| tasuki wrote:
| The devs clearly put in a lot of effort. I'm a little surprised
| no one's created a campaign yet. I love the game anyway, just
| seems less effort and more fun to create a campaign (of course a
| different thing to keep the campaign balanced and up-to-date with
| new releases).
| Dunedan wrote:
| Making a high quality campaign is quite some effort and the
| engine still lacks some features, which would be helpful for
| this. A dialogue system is one of them, which already has a PR
| available: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8614
|
| There is also a thread in the forum, where people are
| brainstorming about an official campaign:
| https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/123956-narrative-campa...
| tasuki wrote:
| Yes of course. I wasn't talking about a high quality
| campaign: I'm surprised there isn't even a low quality one.
| Perhaps that would be contrary to the 0ad philosophy.
| t43562 wrote:
| I love 0ad - it has atmosphere. I was chuffed when a28 came out
| and the gutted when It crashed for me but it just got fixed and
| now I'm trying not to think about it until 5pm.....
| Dunedan wrote:
| It crashed for you? You must be running Arch Linux. ;-)
|
| Arch Linux used system-provided SpiderMonkey which lacked a
| crucial bug fix. This issue should be solved by now, by Arch
| Linux switching back to vendored Spidermonkey.
|
| Check out
| https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/0a...
| and https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8757 for
| details.
| cheat101 wrote:
| gift from the gods
| evolve2k wrote:
| Looking through earlier news, a July 2024 release note proudly
| proclaims "The git migration is on its way!". But I've had a look
| around and can't easily find any active git repo. Anyone know the
| current status around 'moving to git'?
|
| Ref: https://play0ad.com/the-git-migration-is-on-its-way/
| 13hunteo wrote:
| They have a Gitea instance -
| https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad
| MattTheRealOne wrote:
| This is such a high quality game that it is almost unbelievable
| that it is free and open source. The fact that it is also still
| seeing active development after more than 15 years shows just how
| passionate the developers are.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| Those who like this game may also want to try open-source The
| Battle for Wesnoth, which is a turn-based hexgrid war game.
| chadrs wrote:
| I had been confusing this game with Unknown Horizons, another RTS
| but based on the game 1602 AD. Just realized they're totally
| unrelated.
| cdaringe wrote:
| I played online once with a friend. He immediately rushed to make
| one soldier and that sole solider obliterated my tiny base
| immediately.
|
| Lesson learned. Sheep can wait
| silveira wrote:
| I have been playing 0ad, single player, medium/hard difficulty,
| round-robing all maps, for years now. Great game. I have to try
| mods one of these days.
| jiffygist wrote:
| Germans are too op in my opinion. Appimage is much appreciated as
| the game is pain to compile. And it crashes less than previous
| version that's also good
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I'm really looking forward to playing this! The new logic in
| Alpha 27, where units don't try to capture enemy structures by
| default, caught me out, but it was fun getting familiar with
| siege engines until I worked that out.
|
| As for the new capture attack for citizens, I imagine this could
| lead to some really risky endgame strategies where a player moves
| citizens from their base to attack the enemy's supporting
| buildings while the enemy is distracted.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| The game's creators need to focus on fixing core gameplay issues
| instead of new visual stuff.
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