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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It did save in a27 for me - I had the same forking problem but was able to go back to a previous save and the other player was able to rejoin at that point. This was in a local network game.
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.
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
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.
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.
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..
I really love the iterative progress with 0 A.D. And every time the game shows up in news, it's always amazing to go through the changelog. I just wish I was a but younger with more time to play :) For an OSS project it's quite an achievement!
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.
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
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.
I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!
Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.
That makes it way better. For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game... (freeciv for example).
Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.
This game is in development for so long because it is driven by volunteers who don't work on this game full time. It doesn't have near the resources that the studio behind fallout has.
> For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game..
But why does not make 0ad bad? You want to play it on an pentium 1?
I'm seeing you don't like the rolling release, but I can't see the "why".
I have no idea what you're ranting about. 0ad is fantastic. I've never played Fallout, but it seems you want it to release versions like that? Why? It's not a version/story game but an iterative design on the same game.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
Sacrifice is a brilliant RTS where the commander (a summoner mage of sorts) participates at the ground level.
Isn't this Mount and Blade?
It was the dream but any game that tried was always disappointing.
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.
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.
It did save in a27 for me - I had the same forking problem but was able to go back to a previous save and the other player was able to rejoin at that point. This was in a local network game.
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.
[delayed]
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
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.
BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now
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.
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..
BAR runs fine on low end CPUs...until you have like 2,000 units on speed metal
I really love the iterative progress with 0 A.D. And every time the game shows up in news, it's always amazing to go through the changelog. I just wish I was a but younger with more time to play :) For an OSS project it's quite an achievement!
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!
I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.
I used to like some of its music
Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!
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
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.
Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.
Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad
> 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 ?
> Processor: 2 GHz Intel or x86 compatible, PowerPC64, Arm
https://play0ad.com/download
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
It’s what everyone used back in the Quake 3 days.
Rant:
I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!
Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.
That makes it way better. For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game... (freeciv for example).
Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.
This game is in development for so long because it is driven by volunteers who don't work on this game full time. It doesn't have near the resources that the studio behind fallout has.
Tell me how many versions, extensions, remaster and patches World of Warcraft actually have today?
> For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game..
But why does not make 0ad bad? You want to play it on an pentium 1?
I'm seeing you don't like the rolling release, but I can't see the "why".
Good thing for them they're at it to have fun, not to please you. And good thing for you they're not charging you for it if you do wanna try.
I have no idea what you're ranting about. 0ad is fantastic. I've never played Fallout, but it seems you want it to release versions like that? Why? It's not a version/story game but an iterative design on the same game.
The first two Fallout games are quite worthwhile, if you should find the time and can appreciate RPG:s with caustic jokes and satire.
...so? It's a hobby project, not a product. It's about the journey, not the result.