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0AD is the most polished, beautiful open source game I have ever played. This campaign is not about building a new game: the game already exists as shown in the video and is even in an enjoyable-to-play state. Definitely check it out if you haven't already (and it's cross-platform!): http://play0ad.com/
It really is a fantastic effort already. IMHO, their major needs are:
(1) scripted events, which would allow a tutorial mode and various scenarios. Apparently this is a tough integration into the existing engine.
(2) to make combat formations really work, so there's some sort of tactics to combat. You can do some of that, but it generally turns into a mob fight.
Good news is it looks like they're intending both of these already.
Personally, I'd like to use their engine and assets to create a turn-based combat game; RTS is a bit hectic for me.
Totally this.
I've put a lot of hours into playing 0AD and it's a joy. Very polished, really good gameplay, addictive, and engaging.
The bots can be ruthless at times, others you can figure out and trump. If you need them, then there are cheats to help whilst you learn.
I just went and tried to give money, and it's going to take me a while, incredibly all my disposable cash is in PayPal and my debit card is linked to an empty account, so I have to do the PayPal > bank shuffle, but I'll be supporting this as soon as I can.
They should really state this more prominently in the campaign! Reading it, I was thinking something like: 'well, this is pretty, but what are the chances that they actually release it in the next 3 years or so?'
I tried it, and it seems really neat (though I generally suck at RTS games)... the graphics are a huge leap beyond other free RTS games I've tried before, and it does seem very polished.
One thing though: what's the frame-rate supposed to be? I'm getting 2-3 FPS, which is I suppose playable, but pretty jerky when things get hairy. Is it just my system, or is this just the nature of the game? [I guess if it's recalculating the world with every frame...]
This is probably not the most constructive comment here, but it's more correct to say open source RTS game than RTS open source game because open source in this case is used as an attributive adjective(pre-nominal modifier) and RTS as a noun-string nominative adjective which modifies 'game'.
Also, your title tries a call to action, that is, the first Help is a intransitive verb rather than a noun. So to is unnecessary there. In which case, Help founding would be a better writing. Of course, if we're to use gerund then the word founding could be better replaced with.
Ah, the pedantry!
In support of pedantry, when I first read the post I thought this was going to be an RTS about managing an open source project, which sounds like a slightly more masochistic version of desert bus.[0]
[0]: (http://desertbus-game.org/)
All this and you don't delve in "founding" which is what made me cringe more than the grammar (as a non-native speaker I tend to tollerate bad grammar but spot quickly bad syntax)
Seems like a typical misplacement for a non-native speaker.
I love RTSs. Total Annihilation (TA) was an early favourite.
SpringRTS is an open source game engine that improved beyond TA and actually had UI features that Supreme Commander has drawn inspiration from.
The multilayer is epic, its totally LUA scriptable. People have re-purposed that engine for all manor of weird RTS type games. I sincerely hope this project is going to use that battle hardened, cross platform, actively developed, open source RTS engine rather than roll their own.
They already have an engine. And art, and a game. You can go download it. This is money to make it better. (Don't let that fool you though, what they have now is very impressive. I'm pretty sure those are actual screenshots.)
Heard of Planetary Annihilation http://www.uberent.com/pa/ ?
Apparently some of their guys worked on TA back in the day..looks very promising to me!
The big one I love on the Spring engine is Zero-K. It's the one that provides the most "complete" experience of the Spring games and the one that takes the TA-style gameplay in the most interesting directions.
The problem is that, even as the best-developed Spring game it still needs a lot of polish and it's never going to be more than a labour of love for a few hundred players and a handful of devs. Their donations just keep the server running and that's about it.
0 A.D. has been around a long time, it's been quite a few years since my last commit to springrts repo and 0. A.D. had already been open source back then (it was closed source for a while IIRC.)
TA is a brilliant game.
There appears to be a renewed interest, with people playing the original TA on and offline.
Here's a site with information about many of the various mods, remakes, etc: (http://www.tauniverse.com/)
And here's a sub-site with lots of information about online play (http://tazone.tauniverse.com/)
Another fan here. Played them all a lot, from the original TA + expansions, TA Spring (loved how long-range bullets literally bounced back off the shields), and the Supreme Commander series.
So far I think the best in the series was Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (not Supreme Commander II).
I backed & am greatly looking forward to Planetary Annihilation (though not too excited about the cartoony art-work). Just made a donation to 0AD too.
0ad and Megaglest are two great RTS games!
I particularly recall the good stuff re path-finding that came out of sponsored hacking on 0ad last time:
Jump Point Search (A*JPS) goodness e.g. http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15270...
I've been a long time fan of Age Of Empires II. 0AD looks like a clone of it, more or less.
I think I last checked in on 0AD 2 years ago, before there was AI. Back then AOE II had poor performance issues that I really wanted addressed, like wrong colors (fixable by a user patch), only low resolution support (also fixable by a user patch? I forget), and horrible network management on busy LAN games (6 teams with 150 population each? Players will get dropped once battles start).
Then AOE II got picked up by a contracted company for the pure purpose of bringing an old game into the modern world, and HD got released with lots of fixes. It wasn't perfect, but there was much rejoicing.
Anyone played both 0AD and AOE II HD? Any comparison points?
I played both, and I also really enjoyed both AOEII's.
I think you will love 0ad. It's more complex than AOE IMO - some upgrade paths exclude others, so you have to make tradeoffs, there are sophistiscated terrain bonuses (e.g. view distance of towers depends on their location), soldiers can gather resources so you have to tradeoff economy vs. military even more... I just find it deeper. You'll love it!
Big fan of AOE also this looks much better been waiting for something like this for years.
When I first heard of a crowd-funded game, I assumed it would be open source and was surprised to find it wasn't. Glad to see it's starting to happen and hope they meet their target. I'll definitely be throwing a few dollars their way!
Now only if Dwarf Fortress would be open sourced and combined with the amazing effort presented here -- that would make for an epic game.
Hmm, i wonder if its possible to port this to asm.js + WebGL. That would make it very easy to start playing...
This looks super cool!
Ideal would be if an online multiplayer community evolves around this game. Does the game feature the ability to track multiplayer win/losses and keep some kind of ELO rating or similar on a server? Is it reasonably safe against cheating in multiplayer? Does it allow setting a handicap for less good players?
Thanks :)
I've been waiting for a game similar to Age of Empires to come but this just completely destroys Age of Empires, Thanks for this awesome game I will support.
I was absolutely shocked when I saw this, this is so awesome in so many ways. It resembles Age of Empires but much better graphics.
Age of Empires has this thing where you can upgrade your empire to the Castle age or Imperial Age I wonder if this game has that?
I've been playing RTS games for ages and the one thing that concerns me is balance. With so many different factions I can imagine this is going to be rather hard to do without a large amount of overlap between them. Best of luck!
This really looks like Age of Empires 2. It's not a bad thing I was a fan.
Beautiful soundtracks too, http://play0ad.bandcamp.com/
Awesome. $20 to them. (And finally got around to renewing my FSFE support too!)
This is excellent!
Out of curiosity, how do developers "stay in business"? Is Wildfire making enough off of donations and kickstarter-like campaigns to keep development going strong?
0 A.D. Has made enormous progress toward the 14th Alpha, it's already incredibly engaging. They have my buck, and hopefully they can get consistent gloss on this gem.
While working fulltime, I find it hard to make time for free software projects and I would love to see something like this succeed. I have contributed to this project and encourage anyone who loves games to do so. We want free software games of all kinds to be out there!
> This isn’t your daddy’s Age of Empires.
Yes it is. It looks exactly like it. But no complAint. I will gladly back up this project cause I feel like AoE decided to take another route, while this game takes you back :)
Crowdfund all the things!
I fear the price tag is much to high. A tag around $10k or $20k would be much better, as payout is only done for successful campaigns, iirc.
Looks like fun, I am excited to try it out tonight
Looks cool, commenting to come check it out again later. HN doesn't have a "save" feature right?
So when 0 A.D will be released is unpredictable? I was looking forward to the campaign.
0 A.D. is in development, if memory serves well, since at least 10 years ago. Maybe more. I doubt it will ever be completed.
Bitcoin donation address please!
Do units fire while moving?
Supported. Go wildfire!
Played this game and it really sucked. :(
Every fan of RTS games needs to play Metal Fatigue. One of the greatest/unique game ever.
Has anyone pointed out that there was no year 0 A.D. 1 BC was followed by 1 AD.