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0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

347 points| jonbaer | 10 days ago |play0ad.com

117 comments

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ddtaylor|7 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.

card_zero|7 days ago

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.

decimalenough|7 days ago

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.

x1f604|7 days ago

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

evolve2k|6 days ago

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.

izacus|6 days ago

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.

rand846633|7 days ago

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.

cess11|7 days ago

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.

ransom1538|6 days ago

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.

idoubtit|6 days ago

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.

nylonstrung|7 days ago

BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now

a1371|7 days ago

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!

tasuki|6 days ago

Ya I don't really get elephants. They seem way too strong and always win. What is the effective elephant-counter?

dyingkneepad|6 days ago

Those who like this game may also want to try open-source The Battle for Wesnoth, which is a turn-based hexgrid war game.

napsy|7 days ago

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!

MattTheRealOne|6 days ago

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.

seabass-labrax|6 days ago

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.

cdaringe|6 days ago

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

dvntsemicolon|7 days ago

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

rutierut|7 days ago

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.

mhher|7 days ago

I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.

embedding-shape|7 days ago

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

tasuki|6 days ago

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).

NoboruWataya|6 days ago

Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything other than Easy.

jnmandal|7 days ago

Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!

t43562|6 days ago

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.....

jiffygist|6 days ago

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

silveira|6 days ago

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.

chadrs|6 days ago

I had been confusing this game with Unknown Horizons, another RTS but based on the game 1602 AD. Just realized they're totally unrelated.

hulitu|7 days ago

> 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 ?

tasuki|6 days ago

It runs on my potato.

hungryhobbit|6 days ago

The game's creators need to focus on fixing core gameplay issues instead of new visual stuff.

Koshkin|5 days ago

Curiously, some people insist that the year zero AD was a thing.

dwighttk|7 days ago

It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system

Morromist|7 days ago

Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.

cheat101|6 days ago

gift from the gods

bandrami|7 days ago

Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad

avodonosov|7 days ago

I used to like some of its music

iberator|7 days ago

[deleted]

jaapz|7 days ago

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.

account42|6 days ago

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.

edhelas|7 days ago

Tell me how many versions, extensions, remaster and patches World of Warcraft actually have today?

piltdownman|6 days ago

Counterpoint: Minecraft

I could go on, but the argument doesn't really merit it.

Mashimo|7 days ago

> 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".

gspr|7 days ago

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.

Valodim|7 days ago

...so? It's a hobby project, not a product. It's about the journey, not the result.

silisili|7 days ago

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.

cjbdndjc|7 days ago

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

fxtentacle|7 days ago

It’s what everyone used back in the Quake 3 days.

Dunedan|6 days ago

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

account42|6 days ago

This is an odd comment on a website where most users are happy working with mono-spaced text most days. Not everyone has kemingphobia.