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Warzone 2100: A Free and Open Source Real-Time Strategy Game
- jon-wood 10y agoI owned a copy of this before it was open sourced and used to play some epic multiplayer games with a friend against the computer. The big difference this has to other RTS games is the heavy emphasis on artillery - by the late game you end up with artillery pieces which can rain down destruction across most of the map, and counter battery radar to destroy that. The unit designer is also neat, allowing you to build custom units out of various bodies, propulsion methods, and weapon systems.
- matheweis 10y agoNowadays many players disable artillery (or the major end game versions of it) for a very different game dynamic.
- sliken 10y agoNot sure why this is posted. It's an old game, no particularly note worth releases in the last month. It's definitely a fun RTS, one of my favorites, and opensource.
- wonko1 10y agoI think it's nice to see order stuff that people might not be aware of on HN from time to time. I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).
- matheweis 10y agoSort of supports Mac... No one on the current team has any Mac hardware. Myself and a couple others occasionally make unofficial builds but that's been about it for the last year or two. As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules.
- Zarel 10y agoI used to be the Mac guy for Warzone. Nice to see it's still going strong. dak180 used to be the other Mac guy, is he still around?
- ssalazar 10y ago> As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules. Are there actual documented incidents of GPL or other FOSS software being rejected from the iOS App Store due to the source code license?
- matheweis 10y agoThe GPL in particular is fundamentally not compatible with the App Store re distribution clauses. VLC for iOS being the precedent setting example from a few years back. To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of cases where Apple will outright reject the initial submission of some OSS app - especially if you aren't totally up front about it. But clearly re VLC they will pull it once it is brought up (also leaving to distributing developer open to liability depending on how unhappy the contributors are)
- sliken 10y agoIt's pretty complex, I can imagine it being decent on an iPad. An iPhone seems like it would be difficult.
- poisonarena 10y agowas always more of a total annihilation guy
- alcari 10y agoAre you aware of Spring[0]? It's another open source RTS that's effectively data file compatible with TA. [0]: https://springrts.com/ https://springrts.com/
- matheweis 10y agoIt is pretty fun, played a lot in my college years but hardly ever any more. It has a huge tech tree that is difficult to master and difficult to maintain in game. A similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree would be super fun I imagine. Multiplayer takes it to a whole new level, although it needs some kind of game master server so that people can join in rather than having to host themselves.
- nbaksalyar 10y ago> similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree Supreme Commander comes pretty close to this and yes, it's super fun. :)
- webmaven 10y agoYeah, maybe this needs a (2004) in the title.
- moester 10y agoThanks. Was looking for this
- hkt 10y agoNew to me, even as someone with a long standing interest in open source games.
- flukus 10y agoHas there been any significant graphical updates since release?
- matheweis 10y agoSince what release? They did have a fairly major graphics update at some point but in the last several years the entire project has been languishing at best.
- pekk 10y agoIf the game is working today, in what sense is it "languishing"? We don't say that commercial games made years ago are "languishing," we may even consider them quite successful if they haven't been touched since release, so why the double standard?
- matheweis 10y agoPrimarily a reduced number of games available in the lobby on a regular basis; I would imagine that a commercial games that once had a large number of players and now has fewer would also be considered languishing. Also a lack of a current build for the Mac OS (an issue since the network play compatibility is tied to the game version) No double standard, I used to be quite active in the gameplay and also contributed a little to the code itself - the community around the game just isn't what it used to be. Edit: If you're involved in the wz2100 project directly and have other information, obviously I'm wrong here, but otherwise I'm just passing on my perceptions from many years of involvement on the sidelines.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- robotjosh 10y agoI played a little bit years ago. I didn't like how the map was zoomed in so far, I wanted to zoom out more. I messed with the source code to let me zoom out more and shared how to do it. They told me I was cheating so I never played again.
- ifdefdebug 10y agoWell that's rude at best. If your patch gives you a better game play to the point of being considered "cheating", then maybe it should be made part of the game. Because now cheaters can use it silently and lough about other players stuck with their narrow view ports...
- matheweis 10y agoIt used to be part of the game, not 100% sure why they ever changed it but iirc it had more to do with technical limitations than game dynamics... also not sure why anyone would call it cheating if they understand the game well. I would have never banned you from my servers. Lots of people call anything cheating when they aren't good enough to win. All the more reason for neutral game servers rather than biased player hosting.
- nol13 10y agobut now im disadvantaged because i don't have huge 5k monitor
- robotjosh 10y agoYeah, I was told the game had to be shitty because some players still had pentium 3s. This argument was ridiculous as I was playing on a eee-pc (single core intel atom) with an external 19" monitor. My hardware was too good it wasn't fair? I started playing because it was open source, I thought players would be encouraged instead of discouraged from patching the source.
- ptero 10y agoAgree. IMO in general, putting limitations that can be easily, invisibly overcome by either a local patch invisible to other players or multiple instances running in VMs is counter-productive.
- simonmales 10y agoI don't play games too often, but have enjoyed this in the past. As far as I could find, this was the only once commercial game that opened sourced it's engine AND data files. Majority of previously commercial games do not open source the data files, e.g. FreeSpace and Quake. apt-get install warzone2100 Done.
- CliffyA 10y agoSaga of Ryzom went open source with creative commons assets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom#Source_code_and_assets_freely_released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom#Source_code_and_assets_f... Tho on second thoughts I think the server side quests and world map may not have been released, so it probably does not count.
- godzillabrennus 10y agoReading this triggered my memories of playing Black Nova Traders as a teen. Just checked and seems like that project hasn't gotten much love in the years since I quit playing it. It'd be fun to have a kickstarter campaign to fund raise for new versions of old open source games.
- kriro 10y agoSeems like a cool testbed for game AI. There's even a NullBot included from my quick research :)
- neverminder 10y agoHonestly this being on the first page of HN I was expecting to see something comparable to 0AD (probably the best RTS open source game out there), but this game really does look like it belongs in the 90s.
- izacus 10y agoThat's because it IS from the 90ties. It was initially (commercially) released in 1999.
- lawless123 10y agobe nice if they could add shader support etc to it.
- Pica_soO 10y agoI think they could- but the problem is, the more up to date your pipeline gets, the more the amount of work necessary grows. You cant have just one high-poly-well textured unit. You need to remodel and re-texture all the Units. Same goes for all GFX- like for example adding CC like cloud-shaders for the map- you then need the shaders on the units. Its one huge mountain of work avalanching into your project, once you breach the dam. You can avoid part of this by using procedural units- but that easily gets out of hand, making the units non-distinctive or physical impossible. The best option actually is player involvment, as the players build the units. But that is tough to balance. Oh, almost forgot: RTS Game made by some Zero-K Devs on the side http://www.istrolid.com/ http://www.istrolid.com/
- throwaway7767 10y agoI played this game so much when it came out. Really great strategy game. I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it felt like the pathfinding had taken several steps backwards since the original game. You really start to feel it in the later missions, where the pathfinding becomes the biggest hurdle - your units get stuck while retreating and so get destroyed before they manage to return to a repair station. Never did manage to finish it because of this. Too bad, because in all other respects it's great. But the pathfinding makes it unplayable for me once a decent number of units are involved in fighting.
- DanBC 10y agoTotal Annihilation also suffers from really bad path finding when you get above a certain number of units. Luckily, for TA, it's a really simple patch to increase the number of pathfinding cycles. http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529 What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone?
- throwaway7767 10y ago> What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone? I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved. This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.
- sliken 10y agoThe pathing seems pretty reasonable to me. But sure if you have 2 flows of units through the same narrow canyon it's going to block. I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side. The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.
- smnscu 10y agoDoes anyone have a list of open source games such as this one? i.e. that are rewrites of older games Popular-ish examples: * https://freeablo.org/ https://freeablo.org/ * https://openmw.org/en/ https://openmw.org/en/
- helb 10y agoI've found this – http://osgameclones.com/ http://osgameclones.com/ My favorite ones (apart from OpenTTD) are: - https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH (Theme Hospital) - https://openrct2.website/ https://openrct2.website/ (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
- evolve2k 10y ago0AD (Age of Empires) https://play0ad.com https://play0ad.com
- helb 10y agoYeah, i love 0 A.D., but i don't consider it a "rewrite". There are at least two ongoing attepts to create open source AoE: - https://github.com/angered-ghandi/OpenAOE https://github.com/angered-ghandi/OpenAOE (AoE I) - https://github.com/SFTtech/openage https://github.com/SFTtech/openage (AoE II) HN posts about openage: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830652 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511084 (with some links to other interesting games in the comments)
- LordKano 10y agoThank you for this. I hadn't thought to look but many of these look promising.
- zaggynl 10y agohttp://www.openomf.org/ http://www.openomf.org/
- throwaway1892 10y ago
- flashman 10y agoPersonally I'm looking forward to Deadhold[1] which doesn't involve resource management, focusing instead on unit formations and tactics (a revival of Bungie's Myth series). [1]http://www.deadhold.com http://www.deadhold.com
- coldpizza 10y agoI remember playing this on the PS1 The coolest thing about this game is that you could directly play as any unit like it was a third-person action game
- NKCSS 10y agoSounds like C&C: Renegade
- lawless123 10y agoI don't think that was a PC feature, or at least i never found it.
- lawless123 10y agoI don't think that was a PC feature, or at least i never found it.
- edem 10y agoI am still waiting for a strategy game which gets near to the Total Annihilation experience (the most satisfying strategy experience I had so far). I am waiting since 1997 (20 years)! What I would like to see is real use of terrain features, monumental maps and units which are well designed. Take a look at the Prophet from TA:Escalation: [0]. 2 naval cannons, 2 plasma batteries, 2 flak guns with built-in multitasking. [0][https://images.discordapp.net/.eJwNxkEOgyAQAMC_cC-7wGYFP0MIErTRQmA9Nf17zVzmq-5xqlXtIn2uANsxcxubntJGqkXX1upZUj-mzu2CJJLyfpWPTDBhCZ4QmZ3xFJ6DZRNwYfJESI44WDA2WhcNx9cDEYN-96p-f1VVJAw.GAe1ysUqLULZdL03aFIy-ihPduU https://images.discordapp.net/.eJwNxkEOgyAQAMC_cC-7wGYFP0MIE...]
- snippyhollow 10y agoA few years ago SpringRTS, and in particular the BalancedAnnihilation mod [0] were active and playable. There is also Planetary Annihilation [1] (that I used to play competitively online, a few of the top players are ex-StarCraft II Grand Masters). [0] https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation [1] http://www.uberent.com/pa/ http://www.uberent.com/pa/
- edem 10y agoI own Planetary Annihilation. It is a horrible successor to TA. No use of terrain, boring units and terrible UX. I currenlty play Total Mayhem (TA mod) and TA:Escalation.
- Pica_soO 10y agoEh, there is also, with the same Engine(https://springrts.com/ https://springrts.com/) , and improved gfx and ux: Zero-K (www.zero-k.info) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcqY4GfRpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcqY4GfRpI TheCursed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed BalancedAnnhilationReloaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0u2OYLubo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0u2OYLubo Evolution RTS: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/ Spring:1944 http://spring1944.org/ http://spring1944.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jFZvpvwoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jFZvpvwoA KernelPanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doF7owZ0blk&fmt=18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doF7owZ0blk&fmt=18 And various Original TA Derivatives. Try some, have fun.
- tlo 10y agoHave also a look at http://osgameclones.com/ http://osgameclones.com/
- georgeecollins 10y agoWarzone 2100 was a really good game.
- mamurphy 10y agoWhile we talk about free and open source reimplementations - is there anything similar to Sim Tower? I quite enjoyed that game, and haven't seen anything like it since.
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoIs there a .dmg version? I couldn't find one.
- frik 10y agoIt's sad that RTS (Real Time Strategy) games are more or less dead for more than a decade. I still play 10-20 year old RTS games like Age of Empire series, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, C&C Generals from time to time. Especially playing skirmish mode against hard AI on random maps is really great. Several spun off genres like Tower Defence, MoBa sprung off as Mods from Age of Empires series and WarCraft 3. Since 2009 also the Facebook games like Farmville, et al and Free2Play casual games implemented kind of RTS mechanics. On consoles various unsuccessful RTS games like C&C 4, Halo Wars 1 and some failed Free2Play efforts like C&C Generals 2 meant basically the end to Triple-A RTS games as we knew them. The RTS genre was the best selling Triple-A genre on PC, even stronger than shooter and RPG, back in the late 1990s after all. Now that all old genres like adventures or RPG (except RTS) got a successful revival, it would be great to get new Triple-A RTS games for PC.
- m_mueller 10y agoThe UI is the problem. Controllers or touch screens are just not precise and/or fast enough. I could see VR bringing back RTS however, simply because top down view on a map is much easier to implement than first person. It's like the old graphics constraints (which also made RTS popular because it was far more believable than FPS for a while) applied to a new input dimension (movement). Personally I hope for a return of the RTS Battlezone which combined both. My favorite game still.
- frik 10y agoRTS doesn't work with Controller (without simplifying the gameplay, which would sucks, aka no base building, not hundreds of things to manage, see Halo Wars 1 and C&C 4). But Mouse, Touch, voice and gestures works fine. Rise and Fall (the spiritual successor of Empire Earth), was a good RTS that allowed one to zoom-in and play in 3rd person with one's hero character (similar to Dungeon Keeper). Battlezone (1998) was interesting too - first person shooter combined with RTS incl base building, similar was C&C Renegade. And Operation Flashpoint 1 (2001, now called AMA) had such a mode too. But playing complex games like Watch Dogs 2 on PS4 nowadays, which has similar mechanics with the hacking tool and the quadcopter (you can control cars and what not while steering an quad copter while playing a third person character) - I am the opinion that nowadays, a complete non-simplified RTS would work on consoles just fine, even with a controller.