Sort of supports Mac... No one on the current team has any Mac hardware. Myself and a couple others occasionally make unofficial builds but that's been about it for the last year or two.
As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules.
The GPL in particular is fundamentally not compatible with the App Store re distribution clauses.
VLC for iOS being the precedent setting example from a few years back.
To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of cases where Apple will outright reject the initial submission of some OSS app - especially if you aren't totally up front about it. But clearly re VLC they will pull it once it is brought up (also leaving to distributing developer open to liability depending on how unhappy the contributors are)
OpenTTD is in fact amazing, especially considering the amount of custom content that's been created over the years. 10/10 total nerd-bait, lose weeks and months of free time.
The problem is that the development of these things has been very ad hoc and all the defaults are based on the old Transport Tycoon gameplay, which... has a rather primitive idea of passenger/mail service. But if you turn on the right advanced options and have the right set of trains, it's a fun challenge to design networks with a mix of service classes (super express passenger lines, high capacity metros, branching suburban commuter networks, or trams/buses/ferries where you can't fit tracks) while facing capital constraints and the consequences of your previous decisions (like when your mainline runs through a major urban city center, which puts it close to all the passengers and was a super great idea, but now it can't easily be expanded to have longer platforms because there are lots of tall buildings hemming it in.)
Oh, and you can balance the risk of live upgrades (potentially, crashes and death, if you do it wrong) against the revenue losses and operational complexity of shutting down the trains.
I'd recommend that people who like OpenTTD try out Simutrans[0] as well. It's far less polished, and many aspects of it are much worse, but it adds a few things that OpenTTD is missing (like flexible underground/elevated routes) and feels like a much better simulation, particularly of passenger transport.
After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me.
Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it.
Oh, wow. I've played Simutrans, but it was a long long time ago (think "early alphas, back when raising and lowering land under bridges raised and lowered the roadbed of that one tile") and mostly forgot about it since. Will give it another look.
> After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network.
The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)
It is pretty fun, played a lot in my college years but hardly ever any more.
It has a huge tech tree that is difficult to master and difficult to maintain in game.
A similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree would be super fun I imagine.
Multiplayer takes it to a whole new level, although it needs some kind of game master server so that people can join in rather than having to host themselves.
Since what release? They did have a fairly major graphics update at some point but in the last several years the entire project has been languishing at best.
If the game is working today, in what sense is it "languishing"? We don't say that commercial games made years ago are "languishing," we may even consider them quite successful if they haven't been touched since release, so why the double standard?
Primarily a reduced number of games available in the lobby on a regular basis; I would imagine that a commercial games that once had a large number of players and now has fewer would also be considered languishing.
Also a lack of a current build for the Mac OS (an issue since the network play compatibility is tied to the game version)
No double standard, I used to be quite active in the gameplay and also contributed a little to the code itself - the community around the game just isn't what it used to be.
Edit: If you're involved in the wz2100 project directly and have other information, obviously I'm wrong here, but otherwise I'm just passing on my perceptions from many years of involvement on the sidelines.
I played a little bit years ago. I didn't like how the map was zoomed in so far, I wanted to zoom out more. I messed with the source code to let me zoom out more and shared how to do it. They told me I was cheating so I never played again.
Well that's rude at best. If your patch gives you a better game play to the point of being considered "cheating", then maybe it should be made part of the game. Because now cheaters can use it silently and lough about other players stuck with their narrow view ports...
It used to be part of the game, not 100% sure why they ever changed it but iirc it had more to do with technical limitations than game dynamics... also not sure why anyone would call it cheating if they understand the game well. I would have never banned you from my servers. Lots of people call anything cheating when they aren't good enough to win. All the more reason for neutral game servers rather than biased player hosting.
Yeah, I was told the game had to be shitty because some players still had pentium 3s. This argument was ridiculous as I was playing on a eee-pc (single core intel atom) with an external 19" monitor. My hardware was too good it wasn't fair? I started playing because it was open source, I thought players would be encouraged instead of discouraged from patching the source.
Agree. IMO in general, putting limitations that can be easily, invisibly overcome by either a local patch invisible to other players or multiple instances running in VMs is counter-productive.
in 2017 you should be able to view the entire map imo ;)
The cheating part however is true, the limited view creates extra challenges. The best solution is allowing servers to set the desired allowance.
Not sure how this is designed in this game, but if you want to make the game only show a certain portion of the map to clients at a given time, you need to make sure that things that the player should not see are never sent to the client. Otherwise, you are always opening the system up for this sort of "cheating". With the game being open-source, it is easier to do but also with closed-source games, this is what things like "wallhacks" etc are based off: making information that is available to the client visible to the user.
I don't know how you're supposed to do that and maintain acceptable performance for scrolling the screen around the battlefield. It's one thing for a game like DotA 2 to only send position updates for units that aren't obscured by fog of war, it's quite another to constantly keep track of the scrolling screen of the player and only send them the objects in that rectangle.
What do the map hacks accomplish? Can you see full unit information across the map? I doubt this is the case, except for the game host. For clients, I'd be surprised/disappointed if this were true as it is not costly to filter the information from clients if FoW visibility has already been calculated.
> Can you see full unit information across the map?
Yes. The engine works by syncing the entire game state between all players (and observers, which in tournaments can become an annoying issue) and all clients have the same information.
My guess is that the main technical problem preventing this in SC2 is related to the game's replay-saving system. If you have only partial data, your client can't include the data from the opponent's perspective, which makes the replays suck. Theoretically you could generate the replay server-side but it would be resource-intensive without a costly technical overhaul.
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't design for this. Typically replays (in any game) are a log of initial state and then player input commands, rather than complicated state streams. Input commands are simply replayed in the simulation. It seems possible to keep the master log of input commands and then simply replay the simulation on a client during replay. With this design you could filter inappropriate information from each client during gameplay but have full replay information.
I'm sure there are good reasons why the design in SC2 is as it is, but this was surprising! Thanks for the info.
warzone has a fog of war, i think people are confusing zooming out with that?
If you zoom out you will still only be able to see map area you revealed and in that map area you would only see enemy units if your units could observer an area.
No. I'm talking about the unit position data which is sent from server to client. If the designers of the game intend for you to have a restricted view of the battlefield that you must scroll around actively and a mini map showing unit positions within the visible range of your army, they are consciously making a choice to restrict the way in which your game client views the data sent to it. By modifying the client to allow you to zoom out, you're bypassing this restriction and gaining a wider view of the same data.
This is unlikely to be based on a camera rectangle. Fog of war, sure, but in most rts games the camera can jump immediately from a minimap click. Players would complain about popping and its doubtful a developer would value cheat prevention over standard experience.
While modems may be dead and buried, Carmack's response regarding wallhacks to reading ESR's essay "The Case of the Quake Cheats" in '99 still applies:
>With a sub-100 msec ping and extremely steady latency, it would be possible to force a synchronous update with no extra information at all, but in the world of 200-400 msec latency [and] low bandwidth modems, it just plain wouldn't work.
Most RTS games are simulations, so the client has to have the enemy unit positions in order to conduct its local simulation. In this case the best defense against map hacks (assuming it's closed source) is frequently updating the game, and messing around with the underlying unit data structures or systems each time there's an update. A map hack isn't very effective if it breaks every week or two on a regular basis, requiring more reverse engineering effort each time.
One notable exception to the local simulation model is Planetary Annihilation, which uses a traditional client/sever model as far as I'm aware.
Changing the games doesn't really help unless you also change the network protocol as a lot of hacks just inspect the network data steams. This makes it harder to check for at runtime and it is harder to change the network protocols since changes break everybody on the old version.
I think quake cheats got to the point a cheat server would MITM the game and shoot automatically and or auto-aim shots for the user.
You can just as easily say, "the packets sent to the client determine the knowledge the player may have."
And if these two are in conflict, it makes much more sense to defer to the latter, which is a firm, organic, physical concept, then the former, which is plastic and can be changed trivially in a text editor.
I'm making a different point: this conduct isn't cheating.
The player has the ability to know all that it sent to the client. Choosing to know it is not cheating. If the player decides to take notes, say, on graph paper, about the map so that she is able to have a clearer picture of it, is that cheating?
If not, then how is doing it in software any different?
If "the rules" dictate that the player not know something, then the app needs to not send that player that thing.
> By your logic, wall-hacks (changing the wall texture to be transparent in FPSes) isn't cheating?
It seems that the philosophy here is constrained by the (real or perceived) connectivity issues surrounding the withholding of knowledge other than that which the player is allowed to know.
Obviously these need to be overcome.
I can imagine knowledge coming in encrypted "chunks," with keys issued only for those chunks within a player's proper domain. I can also imagine other solutions.
But transposing an unrelated theory of mind ("the code of the version I'm playing constitute the rules for you") seems untenable, inorganic, and in arguably insufficient defined in the first place.
So yes, I don't think that, in this strict sense of how knowledge translates to cheating, that wall hacks are cheating.
> Exploiting a glitch that causes your opponent to disconnect from the game isn't cheating?
It seems to me that the moral responsibility here is on the author(s) - they have slighted the player by instructing, via their code, their disconnection from the game at an improper time.
> Macros that allow you to perform actions that are physically impossible for a human to perform isn't cheating?
> Consulting a chess engine (unbeatable AI) on your phone when playing chess with someone isn't cheating?
At some level, there needs to be a dose of reality in this conversation.
If I'm playing chess against you, across the table, at a coffee shop somewhere, and you are surreptitiously glancing at your contact lens HUD, playing essentially on behalf of an AI, then I guess you are not being very nice or honest to me. This is an interpersonal affront, but it's hard for me to gauge what it means in terms of sport.
On the other hand, if I'm playing chess against an cloaked and anonymous adversary, it might as well be the smartest computer on the planet. And I will lose.
Computers beat humans at some games. That's the reality.
It makes more sense for those of us who wish to continue to evolve here at this moment at the end of time to play games that humans are good at. And there are plenty of games at which humans will continue to trounce computers for the foreseeable future.
> Also, moving pieces in a boardgame when your opponent isn't looking probably isn't cheating either?
This analogy is way off vis a vis the current topic.
It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
> I agree in theory, but it's not always possible - latency is a major limitation in keeping everything on the server-side.
Right, and so some concessions must be made. Here I agree. But once you acknowledge this, I think you also have to give up some of the moral high-horsery that comes with casting judgment about cheating on other players.
> If I'm playing chess against you, across the table, at a coffee shop somewhere, and you are surreptitiously glancing at your contact lens HUD, playing essentially on behalf of an AI, then I guess you are not being very nice or honest to me. This is an interpersonal affront, but it's hard for me to gauge what it means in terms of sport.
I would imagine the sport would dub that cheating. At the very least, the sport would fall apart if it were permitted (because the individuals playing would no longer matter).
I'll grab the first Google definition for "cheating"
> act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination.
I'm arguing that each of my examples are a circumvention of what's widely understood to be the spirit/rules of the game. Just because you can see game-state hidden away by modifying the client doesn't mean it's not "cheating". Every game depends on the players not acting unfairly when they are capable, to some extent.
> It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
I think it's more like putting a camera behind your opponents so you can see their cards - you've deliberately added a measure to the existing client/room in order to give you a capability that your opponents don't have.
When I was younger I was more receptive to this sort of argument. I agree what you are railing about is poor design, but many times that poor security design is done because syncing games is a Hard(tm) problem - especially latency sensitive games. Thus the clients are considered part of the whole "gaming system" - not to be altered - and I'm okay with that. Those are the rules of the game. Expecting game devs to be able to come up with a "fully secure" networking protocol simply means far less games are made. I'm alright with the low security tradeoff.
It comes down to the simple fact that just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should. You can justify all the hacks you want with "well you shouldn't let me do that!" but to everyone else it's the same thing as playing Monopoly and you punching everyone else to take their money. Yeah, you can do that - and I suppose you'll nominally "win" - but it's really not playing the game we all agreed on so wtf is your point?
You could also build a robot that uses a webcam and USB input for keyboard/mouse to play FPS better than most humans - an interesting project to be sure. But how is that even remotely interesting from a competition sense? Even though no modifications were made to anything, it's still cheating.
Your chess example is someone else playing your opponents moves. That's obviously cheating - I can't have a grandmaster sitting next to me telling me my moves can I? How is this even a question in your mind?
To be fair, these types of necessarily clientside restrictions as "rules" exist in many popular games: Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 for example had a limit on the number of units you could select / command at once: there is absolutely no technological way for the server to enforce such a restriction if clients can be modified, but its a deliberate game rules restriction.
It sounds like your understanding is "the game is the server sends and receives packets: the goal is for the server to say that you win" which would be a view mischaracterizes almost all player's expectations: if you just wrote a client that has AI playing that only uses the info a player has that would also be very clearly cheating even if it only acts on information that players could act on.
I didn't realize how much Supreme Commander had spoiled me until I went back to AOE2, with no zoom, rudimentary at best pathing, and not as much complexity.
I like both a lot, and I know one is older, but Supreme Commander 2 (with a couple mods) reigns supreme in my heart.
I don't play games too often, but have enjoyed this in the past. As far as I could find, this was the only once commercial game that opened sourced it's engine AND data files.
Majority of previously commercial games do not open source the data files, e.g. FreeSpace and Quake.
Reading this triggered my memories of playing Black Nova Traders as a teen. Just checked and seems like that project hasn't gotten much love in the years since I quit playing it.
It'd be fun to have a kickstarter campaign to fund raise for new versions of old open source games.
I owned a copy of this before it was open sourced and used to play some epic multiplayer games with a friend against the computer. The big difference this has to other RTS games is the heavy emphasis on artillery - by the late game you end up with artillery pieces which can rain down destruction across most of the map, and counter battery radar to destroy that.
The unit designer is also neat, allowing you to build custom units out of various bodies, propulsion methods, and weapon systems.
Well that takes all the fun out, my friend and I are both notorious turtlers and would end up playing six hour matches with a slow crawl of artillery moving back and forth across the map.
Honestly this being on the first page of HN I was expecting to see something comparable to 0AD (probably the best RTS open source game out there), but this game really does look like it belongs in the 90s.
I think they could- but the problem is, the more up to date your pipeline gets, the more the amount of work necessary grows. You cant have just one high-poly-well textured unit. You need to remodel and re-texture all the Units.
Same goes for all GFX- like for example adding CC like cloud-shaders for the map- you then need the shaders on the units.
Its one huge mountain of work avalanching into your project, once you breach the dam.
You can avoid part of this by using procedural units- but that easily gets out of hand, making the units non-distinctive or physical impossible.
The best option actually is player involvment, as the players build the units. But that is tough to balance.
Oh, almost forgot:
RTS Game made by some Zero-K Devs on the side
http://www.istrolid.com/
I played this game so much when it came out. Really great strategy game.
I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it felt like the pathfinding had taken several steps backwards since the original game. You really start to feel it in the later missions, where the pathfinding becomes the biggest hurdle - your units get stuck while retreating and so get destroyed before they manage to return to a repair station. Never did manage to finish it because of this.
Too bad, because in all other respects it's great. But the pathfinding makes it unplayable for me once a decent number of units are involved in fighting.
I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved.
This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.
The pathing seems pretty reasonable to me. But sure if you have 2 flows of units through the same narrow canyon it's going to block.
I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side.
The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.
Personally I'm looking forward to Deadhold[1] which doesn't involve resource management, focusing instead on unit formations and tactics (a revival of Bungie's Myth series).
I am still waiting for a strategy game which gets near to the Total Annihilation experience (the most satisfying strategy experience I had so far). I am waiting since 1997 (20 years)! What I would like to see is real use of terrain features, monumental maps and units which are well designed. Take a look at the Prophet from TA:Escalation: [0]. 2 naval cannons, 2 plasma batteries, 2 flak guns with built-in multitasking.
A few years ago SpringRTS, and in particular the BalancedAnnihilation mod [0] were active and playable. There is also Planetary Annihilation [1] (that I used to play competitively online, a few of the top players are ex-StarCraft II Grand Masters).
I own Planetary Annihilation. It is a horrible successor to TA. No use of terrain, boring units and terrible UX. I currenlty play Total Mayhem (TA mod) and TA:Escalation.
I've played Warzone, Zero-K and SC2. I think Zero-K is the better of the three. Warzone's huge tech tree is overwhelming and I believe it doesn't really add to the game, because it's likely that only a few tech paths are actually viable if one talks competitive play. SC2 is pretty and all, but suffers from hard-to-solve balance problems. Zero-K has solid gameplay elements (like terrain deformation and good unit control) a great variety of units available to all players to master, and it handles nicely a dozen of players without population caps. The only problem is the small player base.
I've found Forged Alliance (standalone Supreme Commander expansion) to be a worthy successor and it still has an active community in Forged Alliance Forever.
If you've played it, where did you feel it was lacking?
The main problem is the resource management. In TA there is a continuous transmission of resources so you will build (albeit slowly) even if there is an outage. SC:FA on the other hand works like Red Alert. You buy something (like if you were using money) and then it builds. Additionally the animations are supbar compared to TA. Just try out both games and you will see what I talk about.
TA really has had a lot of community mod work done to extend and improve it. Playing vanilla TA and then a modern mod like Escalation [0] really demonstrate that.
It's even more impressive to consider that the TA engine was never open-sourced, Cavedog, the original developer, never gave out any information on how to mod the game, and that the community has managed to do things using limited unit scripting engine and some hex-editing that even some of the original developers are amazed at.
Nope, CT wasn't involved in PA, but a bunch of other Cavedog vets, including Jon Mavor, one of the main developers on TA, were.
I'm of the opinion that another CT RTS would be a project of 50/50 potential for TA fans. I love SupCom only a little less than I do TA, but I'm not a big fan of SupCom 2. On the other hand, some other old TA vets weren't big fans of SupCom, only to find themselves really liking SupCom 2. I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.
>I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.
People like to trash Planetary Annihilation but it's not really deserved. Yes, it doesn't scratch the TA itch as well as one might wish but it's a decent game in its own right.
GPG went under right after that campaign (October 2014). Technically they got bought out, but who knows if the new owner wants to make the same kinds (or quality) of games.
Chris Taylor left Wargaming back in November, and while I'd expect Wargaming to be doing something with the TA franchise, based on their other games, I'm not sure that it is a game that TA fans are going to be too excited about.
I hadn't heard the news, that is terrible. It basically crushes any hope I had for TA2 being good.
Figured they'd have just given CT free reign and had TA2 use a traditional retail pricing model ala Master of Orion, a Wargaming Labs project. It's still possible that could happen, but doubtful.
Supreme Commander is the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. It is made by Chris Taylor and is very similar in style. If you don't like that you probably wouldn't really like a sequel to Total Annihilation.
I've already said the problems with SC. It was a very bland and plain successor. They recognized this and tried to bring it up to the level of TA with SC:FA but it is not as good as Total Mayhem or TA:Escalation. Try them out and you will see the difference.
Forged Alliance Forever is about as close to the TA experience as you will get - coming from another hardcore TA fan.
It's of course not quite the same, but the community work on SC:FA has really made the game quite polished.
I too am still waiting on another modern TA-like flow economy game, but supreme commander is still by far the closest and best there is. In some ways it's better.
Remember Supcom 2 is in no way affiliated with the TA franchise like supcom 1 (and expac) was. It's an entirely different (and bad) game imo.
While we talk about free and open source reimplementations - is there anything similar to Sim Tower? I quite enjoyed that game, and haven't seen anything like it since.
It's sad that RTS (Real Time Strategy) games are more or less dead for more than a decade.
I still play 10-20 year old RTS games like Age of Empire series, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, C&C Generals from time to time. Especially playing skirmish mode against hard AI on random maps is really great.
Several spun off genres like Tower Defence, MoBa sprung off as Mods from Age of Empires series and WarCraft 3. Since 2009 also the Facebook games like Farmville, et al and Free2Play casual games implemented kind of RTS mechanics.
On consoles various unsuccessful RTS games like C&C 4, Halo Wars 1 and some failed Free2Play efforts like C&C Generals 2 meant basically the end to Triple-A RTS games as we knew them. The RTS genre was the best selling Triple-A genre on PC, even stronger than shooter and RPG, back in the late 1990s after all.
Now that all old genres like adventures or RPG (except RTS) got a successful revival, it would be great to get new Triple-A RTS games for PC.
The UI is the problem. Controllers or touch screens are just not precise and/or fast enough. I could see VR bringing back RTS however, simply because top down view on a map is much easier to implement than first person. It's like the old graphics constraints (which also made RTS popular because it was far more believable than FPS for a while) applied to a new input dimension (movement).
Personally I hope for a return of the RTS Battlezone which combined both. My favorite game still.
RTS doesn't work with Controller (without simplifying the gameplay, which would sucks, aka no base building, not hundreds of things to manage, see Halo Wars 1 and C&C 4). But Mouse, Touch, voice and gestures works fine.
Rise and Fall (the spiritual successor of Empire Earth), was a good RTS that allowed one to zoom-in and play in 3rd person with one's hero character (similar to Dungeon Keeper).
Battlezone (1998) was interesting too - first person shooter combined with RTS incl base building, similar was C&C Renegade. And Operation Flashpoint 1 (2001, now called AMA) had such a mode too.
But playing complex games like Watch Dogs 2 on PS4 nowadays, which has similar mechanics with the hacking tool and the quadcopter (you can control cars and what not while steering an quad copter while playing a third person character) - I am the opinion that nowadays, a complete non-simplified RTS would work on consoles just fine, even with a controller.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadIt's definitely a fun RTS, one of my favorites, and opensource.
I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).
As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules.
Are there actual documented incidents of GPL or other FOSS software being rejected from the iOS App Store due to the source code license?
VLC for iOS being the precedent setting example from a few years back.
To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of cases where Apple will outright reject the initial submission of some OSS app - especially if you aren't totally up front about it. But clearly re VLC they will pull it once it is brought up (also leaving to distributing developer open to liability depending on how unhappy the contributors are)
If the tech tree could be spooled up like in Civ V that would eliminate a lot of the necessary menuing.
For a game that was originally made in 1995 (openTTD is much newer though), the UI and gameplay work remarkably well on a tablet.
The problem is that the development of these things has been very ad hoc and all the defaults are based on the old Transport Tycoon gameplay, which... has a rather primitive idea of passenger/mail service. But if you turn on the right advanced options and have the right set of trains, it's a fun challenge to design networks with a mix of service classes (super express passenger lines, high capacity metros, branching suburban commuter networks, or trams/buses/ferries where you can't fit tracks) while facing capital constraints and the consequences of your previous decisions (like when your mainline runs through a major urban city center, which puts it close to all the passengers and was a super great idea, but now it can't easily be expanded to have longer platforms because there are lots of tall buildings hemming it in.)
Oh, and you can balance the risk of live upgrades (potentially, crashes and death, if you do it wrong) against the revenue losses and operational complexity of shutting down the trains.
After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me.
Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it.
[0] https://www.simutrans.com/en/
> After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network.
The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)
[0]: https://springrts.com/
It has a huge tech tree that is difficult to master and difficult to maintain in game.
A similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree would be super fun I imagine.
Multiplayer takes it to a whole new level, although it needs some kind of game master server so that people can join in rather than having to host themselves.
Also a lack of a current build for the Mac OS (an issue since the network play compatibility is tied to the game version)
No double standard, I used to be quite active in the gameplay and also contributed a little to the code itself - the community around the game just isn't what it used to be.
Edit: If you're involved in the wz2100 project directly and have other information, obviously I'm wrong here, but otherwise I'm just passing on my perceptions from many years of involvement on the sidelines.
Yes. The engine works by syncing the entire game state between all players (and observers, which in tournaments can become an annoying issue) and all clients have the same information.
I'm sure there are good reasons why the design in SC2 is as it is, but this was surprising! Thanks for the info.
If you zoom out you will still only be able to see map area you revealed and in that map area you would only see enemy units if your units could observer an area.
>With a sub-100 msec ping and extremely steady latency, it would be possible to force a synchronous update with no extra information at all, but in the world of 200-400 msec latency [and] low bandwidth modems, it just plain wouldn't work.
One notable exception to the local simulation model is Planetary Annihilation, which uses a traditional client/sever model as far as I'm aware.
I think quake cheats got to the point a cheat server would MITM the game and shoot automatically and or auto-aim shots for the user.
You can just as easily say, "the packets sent to the client determine the knowledge the player may have."
And if these two are in conflict, it makes much more sense to defer to the latter, which is a firm, organic, physical concept, then the former, which is plastic and can be changed trivially in a text editor.
The player has the ability to know all that it sent to the client. Choosing to know it is not cheating. If the player decides to take notes, say, on graph paper, about the map so that she is able to have a clearer picture of it, is that cheating?
If not, then how is doing it in software any different?
If "the rules" dictate that the player not know something, then the app needs to not send that player that thing.
Macros that allow you to perform actions that are physically impossible for a human to perform isn't cheating?
Exploiting a glitch that causes your opponent to disconnect from the game isn't cheating?
Consulting a chess engine (unbeatable AI) on your phone when playing chess with someone isn't cheating?
Also, moving pieces in a boardgame when your opponent isn't looking probably isn't cheating either?
> If "the rules" dictate that the player not know something, then the app needs to not send that player that thing.
I agree in theory, but it's not always possible - latency is a major limitation in keeping everything on the server-side.
It seems that the philosophy here is constrained by the (real or perceived) connectivity issues surrounding the withholding of knowledge other than that which the player is allowed to know.
Obviously these need to be overcome.
I can imagine knowledge coming in encrypted "chunks," with keys issued only for those chunks within a player's proper domain. I can also imagine other solutions.
But transposing an unrelated theory of mind ("the code of the version I'm playing constitute the rules for you") seems untenable, inorganic, and in arguably insufficient defined in the first place.
So yes, I don't think that, in this strict sense of how knowledge translates to cheating, that wall hacks are cheating.
> Exploiting a glitch that causes your opponent to disconnect from the game isn't cheating?
It seems to me that the moral responsibility here is on the author(s) - they have slighted the player by instructing, via their code, their disconnection from the game at an improper time.
> Macros that allow you to perform actions that are physically impossible for a human to perform isn't cheating?
> Consulting a chess engine (unbeatable AI) on your phone when playing chess with someone isn't cheating?
At some level, there needs to be a dose of reality in this conversation.
If I'm playing chess against you, across the table, at a coffee shop somewhere, and you are surreptitiously glancing at your contact lens HUD, playing essentially on behalf of an AI, then I guess you are not being very nice or honest to me. This is an interpersonal affront, but it's hard for me to gauge what it means in terms of sport.
On the other hand, if I'm playing chess against an cloaked and anonymous adversary, it might as well be the smartest computer on the planet. And I will lose.
Computers beat humans at some games. That's the reality.
It makes more sense for those of us who wish to continue to evolve here at this moment at the end of time to play games that humans are good at. And there are plenty of games at which humans will continue to trounce computers for the foreseeable future.
> Also, moving pieces in a boardgame when your opponent isn't looking probably isn't cheating either?
This analogy is way off vis a vis the current topic.
It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
> I agree in theory, but it's not always possible - latency is a major limitation in keeping everything on the server-side.
Right, and so some concessions must be made. Here I agree. But once you acknowledge this, I think you also have to give up some of the moral high-horsery that comes with casting judgment about cheating on other players.
I would imagine the sport would dub that cheating. At the very least, the sport would fall apart if it were permitted (because the individuals playing would no longer matter).
I'll grab the first Google definition for "cheating" > act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination.
I'm arguing that each of my examples are a circumvention of what's widely understood to be the spirit/rules of the game. Just because you can see game-state hidden away by modifying the client doesn't mean it's not "cheating". Every game depends on the players not acting unfairly when they are capable, to some extent.
> It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
I think it's more like putting a camera behind your opponents so you can see their cards - you've deliberately added a measure to the existing client/room in order to give you a capability that your opponents don't have.
It comes down to the simple fact that just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should. You can justify all the hacks you want with "well you shouldn't let me do that!" but to everyone else it's the same thing as playing Monopoly and you punching everyone else to take their money. Yeah, you can do that - and I suppose you'll nominally "win" - but it's really not playing the game we all agreed on so wtf is your point?
You could also build a robot that uses a webcam and USB input for keyboard/mouse to play FPS better than most humans - an interesting project to be sure. But how is that even remotely interesting from a competition sense? Even though no modifications were made to anything, it's still cheating.
Your chess example is someone else playing your opponents moves. That's obviously cheating - I can't have a grandmaster sitting next to me telling me my moves can I? How is this even a question in your mind?
It sounds like your understanding is "the game is the server sends and receives packets: the goal is for the server to say that you win" which would be a view mischaracterizes almost all player's expectations: if you just wrote a client that has AI playing that only uses the info a player has that would also be very clearly cheating even if it only acts on information that players could act on.
I like both a lot, and I know one is older, but Supreme Commander 2 (with a couple mods) reigns supreme in my heart.
Majority of previously commercial games do not open source the data files, e.g. FreeSpace and Quake.
apt-get install warzone2100
Done.
Tho on second thoughts I think the server side quests and world map may not have been released, so it probably does not count.
It'd be fun to have a kickstarter campaign to fund raise for new versions of old open source games.
The unit designer is also neat, allowing you to build custom units out of various bodies, propulsion methods, and weapon systems.
You can avoid part of this by using procedural units- but that easily gets out of hand, making the units non-distinctive or physical impossible.
The best option actually is player involvment, as the players build the units. But that is tough to balance. Oh, almost forgot: RTS Game made by some Zero-K Devs on the side http://www.istrolid.com/
I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it felt like the pathfinding had taken several steps backwards since the original game. You really start to feel it in the later missions, where the pathfinding becomes the biggest hurdle - your units get stuck while retreating and so get destroyed before they manage to return to a repair station. Never did manage to finish it because of this.
Too bad, because in all other respects it's great. But the pathfinding makes it unplayable for me once a decent number of units are involved in fighting.
Luckily, for TA, it's a really simple patch to increase the number of pathfinding cycles.
http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529
What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone?
I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved.
This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.
I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side.
The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.
Popular-ish examples:
* https://freeablo.org/
* https://openmw.org/en/
My favorite ones (apart from OpenTTD) are:
- https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH (Theme Hospital)
- https://openrct2.website/ (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
- https://github.com/angered-ghandi/OpenAOE (AoE I)
- https://github.com/SFTtech/openage (AoE II)
HN posts about openage:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830652
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511084 (with some links to other interesting games in the comments)
Very difficult and high quality fantasy turn based game. With tons of fun mods.
Not a re-write of Settlers II but inspired by it. Great game and a friendly community.
* http://sc2.sourceforge.net
[1]http://www.deadhold.com
The coolest thing about this game is that you could directly play as any unit like it was a third-person action game
[0][https://images.discordapp.net/.eJwNxkEOgyAQAMC_cC-7wGYFP0MIE...]
[0] https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation [1] http://www.uberent.com/pa/
Zero-K (www.zero-k.info) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcqY4GfRpI
TheCursed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed
BalancedAnnhilationReloaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0u2OYLubo
Evolution RTS: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/
Spring:1944 http://spring1944.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jFZvpvwoA
KernelPanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doF7owZ0blk&fmt=18
And various Original TA Derivatives. Try some, have fun.
https://github.com/spring/spring
If you've played it, where did you feel it was lacking?
Forged Alliance is great if you like TA!
Also, it has things like the Fatboy, http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/18/17842/Upgrade4.jpg
It's even more impressive to consider that the TA engine was never open-sourced, Cavedog, the original developer, never gave out any information on how to mod the game, and that the community has managed to do things using limited unit scripting engine and some hex-editing that even some of the original developers are amazed at.
The Hyper Viper
[0]http://taesc.tauniverse.com/
TA2 should be coming soon:
http://www.pcgamer.com/chris-taylor-you-can-use-your-imagina...
That was 2013, so perhaps E3 this year we may see an announcement. Four years is usually standard for big projects.
In the mean time, SC:FA on FAForever is your best bet.
I'm of the opinion that another CT RTS would be a project of 50/50 potential for TA fans. I love SupCom only a little less than I do TA, but I'm not a big fan of SupCom 2. On the other hand, some other old TA vets weren't big fans of SupCom, only to find themselves really liking SupCom 2. I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.
People like to trash Planetary Annihilation but it's not really deserved. Yes, it doesn't scratch the TA itch as well as one might wish but it's a decent game in its own right.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resourc...
GPG went under right after that campaign (October 2014). Technically they got bought out, but who knows if the new owner wants to make the same kinds (or quality) of games.
I hadn't heard the news, that is terrible. It basically crushes any hope I had for TA2 being good.
Figured they'd have just given CT free reign and had TA2 use a traditional retail pricing model ala Master of Orion, a Wargaming Labs project. It's still possible that could happen, but doubtful.
It's of course not quite the same, but the community work on SC:FA has really made the game quite polished.
I too am still waiting on another modern TA-like flow economy game, but supreme commander is still by far the closest and best there is. In some ways it's better.
Remember Supcom 2 is in no way affiliated with the TA franchise like supcom 1 (and expac) was. It's an entirely different (and bad) game imo.
https://www.faforever.com/
I still play 10-20 year old RTS games like Age of Empire series, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, C&C Generals from time to time. Especially playing skirmish mode against hard AI on random maps is really great.
Several spun off genres like Tower Defence, MoBa sprung off as Mods from Age of Empires series and WarCraft 3. Since 2009 also the Facebook games like Farmville, et al and Free2Play casual games implemented kind of RTS mechanics.
On consoles various unsuccessful RTS games like C&C 4, Halo Wars 1 and some failed Free2Play efforts like C&C Generals 2 meant basically the end to Triple-A RTS games as we knew them. The RTS genre was the best selling Triple-A genre on PC, even stronger than shooter and RPG, back in the late 1990s after all.
Now that all old genres like adventures or RPG (except RTS) got a successful revival, it would be great to get new Triple-A RTS games for PC.
Personally I hope for a return of the RTS Battlezone which combined both. My favorite game still.
Rise and Fall (the spiritual successor of Empire Earth), was a good RTS that allowed one to zoom-in and play in 3rd person with one's hero character (similar to Dungeon Keeper).
Battlezone (1998) was interesting too - first person shooter combined with RTS incl base building, similar was C&C Renegade. And Operation Flashpoint 1 (2001, now called AMA) had such a mode too.
But playing complex games like Watch Dogs 2 on PS4 nowadays, which has similar mechanics with the hacking tool and the quadcopter (you can control cars and what not while steering an quad copter while playing a third person character) - I am the opinion that nowadays, a complete non-simplified RTS would work on consoles just fine, even with a controller.