0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
play0ad.com213 points by jonbaer 4 days ago
213 points by jonbaer 4 days ago
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.
This is naive pathfinding that adopts the shortcut of perfect information. Good looking pathfinding simulates realistic terrain ignorance (no "psychic powers"), but it is likely to be expensive enough to require other compromises (e.g. updating paths less often).
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.
So that's name of that game, I've been trying to remember that game I played briefly as a kid, which in my hazy memory seemed quite fun. Thanks, will give it a try when it goes on sale.
> 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.
Yes, but if you were that unit, would you get stuck in a corner, or would you persist in trying to find your destination? I suppose if you make it all the way to the target, you've accomplished pathfinding of some kind, by definition, sure. But an algorithm to avoid getting stuck doesn't have to be "pathfinding" as in an expensive algorithm to find a complete path right away.
Well, depending on how you implement it, there might not be any way of getting unstuck, imagine a wall that is 3/4 circle for example, with a small opening, could it escape with that sort of naive algorithm? Players tend to be kind of sensitive to "stupid unit movements", and not having pathfinding is a great way of triggering that feeling in every play session.
There certainly are naive ways, although whatever I suggest here will be poorly thought out and will lead to the next problem. But OK, I suggest a scent trail. Each unit paints where it's been and prefers not to go that way again. Then of course it could paint itself into a corner, so it needs a local-maximum-busting strategy too, which probably means marching off in an arbitrary direction to see if it gets unstuck.
This would be behaving like a caged animal, and in a game, that's good, and better than a smarter algorithm. You don't want them to be idiots, but you don't want them to be magic, either.
The old "follow the left-hand wall" maze-solving strategy is another naive way to get out of a trap. It's not fun gameplay, but it's naive and it exists, so better naive strategies do too.
When you get stuck, try random directions. That's what my robot vacuum does.
Not sure if you've played any RTS lately, but I'm fairly confident people would drop the game relatively fast if they started seeing their units taking off in random directions because they cannot find their way around a wall. But we could also be playing very different games :)
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.
The history behind BAR is also fascinating.
There was the Total Annihilation RTS and while it had the normal 2d overhead view, all the data was in 3d.
A Swedish gaming clan put together an accelerated full 3d engine to replay Total Annihilation recorded demos. As it got more and more features it was realized that most of what was needed to play TA was being recreated so they closed the loop and made it into a full game engine which they called SpringRTS. There was the default accurate TA game code but there was also a very popular mod that was not afraid to change things a bit, basically "we like Total Annihilation but also think it could be better" and they called it Balanced Annihilation. We are almost there. BA lived under the Spring project for a few years, but really when you think about it there are ip problems with it using the TA assets, also, I suspect someone wanted to do engine work but was having a hard time with upstreaming it, so it forked off the Spring project, they rebuilt all the units(same unit different skin) are doing a ton of great engine work and called it BAR (retronymed into Beyond All Reason but I suspect it originally stood for Balanced Annihilation Reborn or something like that). So BAR is basically a highly modified legally distinct Total Annihilation.
Zero-K is another great RTS based on this engine. It drifts further off the TA formula than BAR does.
BAR in general is such a great showcase in A) FOSS games can be good, work great, scale nice and be fun and B) BAR is a game built by gamers who play and enjoy their own game, for other gamers, which seems more and more rare these days.
What is BAR?
Beyond All Reason as mentioned in a sibling thread.
"Currently in development". It's got robots.
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.
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
The pathfinding algorithm has been decently optimized. The reality is that 600 units finding paths and keeping them up to date is a lot of work.
Some of the pathfinding is precomputed, some cannot be as it involves other units and formations.
Most other RTS games work around this by either relaxing the constraints or implement some amount of parallelism.
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.
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.
Those are lowball system requirements too.
You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.
Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.
That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.
For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.
I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.
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 had problems with lag years ago but not lately, though I don't do big multiplayer matches with several players and the like.
I'll check BAR out.
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?
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.....
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
Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything other than Easy.
It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system
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.
I've played perhaps tens of hours of 0AD. I boom early, try to create an unbeatable army, and then go win. When I saw competitive 0AD players on YouTube, they played completely differently: they train cavalry or cavalry archers and go hassle the booming opponents really early. Then retreat to go hunt some chickens for a bit, train some more cavalry, and go raiding again. They simultaneously attacked each other, all the while trying to continually improve their economy meanwhile. It seemed much more fun than the way I played tbh.
I used to like some of its music
Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.
Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad
gift from the gods
> 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 ?
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
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.
Tell me how many versions, extensions, remaster and patches World of Warcraft actually have today?
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".
...so? It's a hobby project, not a product. It's about the journey, not the result.
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.