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.
So keep the old version you liked? The nice thing about open source is that you even get to share that version with others - much better than commercial games where almost everything multiplayer is also a live service these days.
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.
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.
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.
Starcraft 1 is well known for having an absurdly hacked together pathfinding algorithm that almost stopped the game from shipping and the bugs it created are now expected mechanics of that game, such as "worker drilling", where players can pop through specific arrangements of buildings and units.
They also make heavy use of pre-computed pathing maps (Dijkstra) and place restrictions on how that pathing map can be changed.
It's also worth mentioning it's not just the pathing that is single threaded, it's ALL of the game logic, since it all has to be deterministic. All players must agree on the input, then run ALL of the game logic with the same inputs and same deterministic functions so that they agree on the game state without having to synchronize it.
I don't really know 0ad well enough to know if the game logic is more complex than Starcraft or Age of Empires.
Also, both Starcraft and Age of Empires have struggled with lag once above the unit counts. AoE in specific has always had a lot of lag once players start to get full armies. There are well known patches for Age of Empires 2 before the Definitive Edition (DE) where people just hand optimized the binary and figured it out.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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).
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.....
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’?
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.
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.
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
40 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadUnless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have been unbearable even for latin scripts
If you're interested in progress in this area, I suggest you keep an eye on https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7945
I could go on, but the argument doesn't really merit it.
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.
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.
They also make heavy use of pre-computed pathing maps (Dijkstra) and place restrictions on how that pathing map can be changed.
It's also worth mentioning it's not just the pathing that is single threaded, it's ALL of the game logic, since it all has to be deterministic. All players must agree on the input, then run ALL of the game logic with the same inputs and same deterministic functions so that they agree on the game state without having to synchronize it.
I don't really know 0ad well enough to know if the game logic is more complex than Starcraft or Age of Empires.
Also, both Starcraft and Age of Empires have struggled with lag once above the unit counts. AoE in specific has always had a lot of lag once players start to get full armies. There are well known patches for Age of Empires 2 before the Definitive Edition (DE) where people just hand optimized the binary and figured it out.
https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/22257-a21-multiplayer-...
https://gitlab.com/mentula0ad/0ad-tips-and-tricks
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 ?
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.
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.
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!
Ref: https://play0ad.com/the-git-migration-is-on-its-way/
Lesson learned. Sheep can wait