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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now
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!
Ya I don't really get elephants. They seem way too strong and always win. What is the effective elephant-counter?
Those who like this game may also want to try open-source The Battle for Wesnoth, which is a turn-based hexgrid war game.
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 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'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.
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 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-...
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
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’?
They have a Gitea instance - https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad
I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.
I first encountered it when I was looking at the biggest packages in the official repositories, in order to stress-test my own APT distribution implementation. Gave it a try, had fun too, and now part of the E2E tests of the mirror :D
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).
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...
Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything other than Easy.
Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!
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.....
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.
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
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.
I had been confusing this game with Unknown Horizons, another RTS but based on the game 1602 AD. Just realized they're totally unrelated.
> 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
It runs on my potato.
The game's creators need to focus on fixing core gameplay issues instead of new visual stuff.
Curiously, some people insist that the year zero AD was a thing.
It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system
Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.
gift from the gods
Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad
I used to like some of its music
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.
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