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0AD, an open source historical RTS in development for 22 years
- robinhoodexe 3y agoI’m quite excited for a future macOS ARM build.
- postalrat 3y agoCan't you run it now or does that build include some arm only units?
- pohl 3y agoRosetta should run it, but a native build would still be desirable.
- adsche 3y agoIs the "M1" build not native? It shows up as "Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64" for me and is fast. https://play0ad.com/download/mac/ https://play0ad.com/download/mac/
- pohl 3y agoThanks for pointing that out! The system requirements for Apple, on the front page, still say… Processor: 2006 or later Intel-based Mac, ARM based with Rosetta …so there are mixed signals.
- psychphysic 3y agoI played 0ad nearly every day about 5 or so years ago. What a blast from the past.
- mike_hock 3y ago[flagged]
- bee_rider 3y agoEhh… it is an open source game, not a kernel, a playable alpha is fine as long as it is fun.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago0ad is completely playable right now. (Although, if HURD had drivers it would be usable right now, too.)
- peter_retief 3y agoReally enjoy OAD, good to know it is being developed.
- Phlogi 3y agoIt's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ? Why are they not focusing on a 1.0 release and seize adding features, new civs, and therefore complexity?
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoBecause it's an OSS project ran by volunteers, each of whom work on the features they are interested in.
- suddenclarity 3y agoEven in OSS it's wise to have some people steer the direction. I tried the game about eight years ago but it didn't run well on my laptop. I've tried to keep up somewhat but lost interest when it felt like they just added new features instead of polishing and improving core functionality. I had a similar feeling with Black Mesa. At a certain point, it feels like they've worked so long on the project that they lost the original selling point. At what stage does it make more sense to just remake the game in the latest UE than offering a 20 year old game that still isn't close to being released. I don't want to talk down on the project but it's a question I think about every time I see these types of products.
- wsgeorge 3y agoFair point. On my part, I like to think of them as "ever-green" projects. So they're never "done", they just keep evolving at whatever rate the community can manage, and people check out and check in once in a while to see where it's at. > I tried the game about eight years ago but it didn't run well on my laptop Care to try it now? I've been playing Alpha 26 for a few weeks, and I actually love it.
- saiya-jin 3y agoNot sure what exactly you meant, but Black mesa was mighty playable and 100% stable when it was released as full. Maybe stay away from half-working early builds of these kind of games, IMHO its not worth the frustration just because of some nostalgia. Now if somebody would port first Deux ex into Unreal 5.2 engine that would get me interested (but still, keep your emotions in check and play when its ready, otherwise just a recipe for regrets)
- lagniappe 3y agoAge of Empires ignited my passion for these games, but 0AD captured it just by sheer ubiquity and accessibility. That says something, to me.
- m00x 3y ago[flagged]
- doctorpangloss 3y agoHow did this find players? People want "more Age of Empires II" (and to some extent more Age of Mythology). In the most literal sense of those words. 0AD got there earlier. Other previous discussions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684532) were about pathfinding in this game. The pathfinding in AoEII is something. It's neither naturalistic, immersive, nor intellectually stimulating, which would be goals of mine and probably the average game designer in 2023. I'm not going to say how I really feel because I don't want to be downvoted over something stupid. The important thing is people love this pathfinding. It's worthy of copying. 0AD: People love more of the same. Another free & open source example is Pokemon Showdown. People want original untainted Pokemon so badly that Pokemon Showdown still has concurrents in the tens of thousands. Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia? Nearly a million people a day do. Commercially: There was an audience for "more Breath of the Wild" before TOTK: Genshin Impact. League of Legends is more than a decade old now. Counter-Strike is almost as old as 0AD. Old reigns supreme.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoTangent about bad pathfinding: Another game with really frustrating is (still pre-release) Age of Darkness. Units typically get slaughtered if they traverse uncleared regions of the map. But you can't tell them not to, and you can't even see ahead of time what pathfinding will choose for them. It's amazing how much cognitive load is added by having to prevent units from doing super-stupid stuff.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoThis stuff has been solved by middlewares like Unity for ages. > bad What I really wanna get into: the cognitive dissonance of being a programmer and an AoEII ultra at the same time. Game mechanics do have a certain objective truth to them. They are also pieces of software, they follow a lot of the same rules as Gmail and Instagram and whatever. As a matter of objective reality: when your game does not aspire to specifically be clunky - this distinction is sometimes called "QWOP" - it seems valid to say, okay, this pathfinding is the word you used. I have the wisdom to not use that word you used in this forum to describe something people feel ultra about. But it is true. People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of gameplay. I wonder how to harness the resources poured into something like 0AD to make "Better AoEII" or "Better AoM." I'm not sure how often that question is asked and how it is answered. That's why this cognitive dissonance matters.
- atum47 3y agoGot all my friends hooked on it back in my college days. We attended class at night, but for some reason beyond my comprehension we did have classes at Saturday morning. Being a bunch of nocturnal beings, we usually bought some pizzas and stayed up all night from Friday to Saturday playing on lan and having pizza. Good times.
- johnisgood 3y ago> compression Yup, we are on Hacker News!
- atum47 3y agoI usually swipe to type (which works 80% of the time) and honestly some times my eyes to catch spelling mistakes like these. Sorry, haha.
- johnisgood 3y agoOh no worries really. Your typo was on topic as well! :P
- princevegeta89 3y agoplayed AOE 2 when it was just released, more than 20 years ago. And then 10 years later in 2011, online with real people which was a lot of fun and competitive touch. Then again, I played the AOE 2 DE 10 years later in 2021, at 4k which was a great refreshment. I would say I got even better at it and had so many incredible achievements and games during that time. I now see that more DLCs and patches were released after they did Poles and Bohemians, which were the last ones I played. The Poles as a civ were incredibly powerful btw. I felt really thankful for the team to keep supporting and developing the game in these recent years.
- rootlocus 3y agoThey recently released Return of Rome, where they added Romans to AoE2 and also implemented AoE1 inside of AoE2, using the same engine and QoL improvements from AoE2. You can now play the full AoE1 game (except ranked multiplayer) within AoE2. https://www.ageofempires.com/games/aoeiide/return-of-rome/ https://www.ageofempires.com/games/aoeiide/return-of-rome/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- heavyset_go 3y agoI actually prefer 0 A.D. to any AOE game, now.
- taopai 3y agoMe too. When I found it during the pandemic, it was like "Wow this game has everything I dreamt about when I was a little kid playing AOE". Capturing buildings and other awesome features!
- pelasaco 3y agofor sure. AOE2 is ok, but the game controls are much better on 0 A.D.. i think 0.A.D is more dynamic and the civilizations much more interesting.. there is a middle ages mod to 0.A.D which is pretty cool too.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThe mods are really amazing, it's great that they're supported by the platform, as well. They can make for an almost different game, but in really well-integrated ways.
- hedgehog 3y ago28,827 commits. GitHub mirror of the code: https://github.com/0ad/0ad https://github.com/0ad/0ad
- trollied 3y agoI'd give this a go if I wasn't so terribly addicted to Factorio...
- hydroid7 3y agoTry Mindustry instead
- ransom1538 3y agoThis game is awesome. This is the only game me and my son(7) play together. It amazing for little kids. They learn history, building resources, building alliances, and destroying the dad empire. I wish it was possible to play online multiplayer :(. Unfortunately, the people that play online are pretty elitist. Just reject your offers to play, setup the game for you to lose on join, etc etc. The multiplayer "collect resources" is not very fun - it would be awesome to start with 50k each and just create an awesome battle. I don't want to spend 2 hours collecting fake trees - only to have the opponent destroy me in 2 seconds. You can't do any strategy since you will never get to the stages where that matters.
- ARandomerDude 3y agoSame! Weekend 0AD LAN parties with my family is a real treat!
- philipswood 3y agoThere is a "deathmatch" mode you can setup during map selection where all players start with ample resources and you can enforce a starting timed ceasefire to allow some building before the battle starts.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThe deathmatch mode also literally gives each player 50k in all resources to start out with.
- chickenimprint 3y agoThe strategy is to start out with a couple of horse javelineers, send them to hunt game until you have at least 5 and then get raid other players' women. Remember to always queue women in groups of 2-4 and get the first berry upgrade asap. Play against people of a similar ELO, and you will have a lot of fun online!
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- winrid 3y agoNetPanzer is also an open source RTS in development for over 20 years! https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/tree/dev https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/tree/dev I just setup a new masterservers and a couple game servers with bots (but you need v0.9x+ to play with bots). I'm working with the maintainer to do one more release to the distros and then probably convert it to Godot. You can download the latest 0.9 release from sourceforge. 0.8, in the distros, is pretty old.
- jonbaer 3y agoFor those interested in RL portion, https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcementLearning https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem... and https://github.com/0ad4ai https://github.com/0ad4ai There has also been some work to establish a geospatial intelligence class using the game engine as well (map/market/resource analysis).
- pelasaco 3y agoBest game. My kids play it every weekend - when they are allowed to consume medias other than books. They love to play historical battles, go through the history of the civilizations. I still beat them, but it's such fun to have some "LAN-parties" with them.. said that, we noticed that quite often, the network game gets aborted. Is that something that just happen to me (Linux, Mac, Windows, doesnt matter) or the network part of the code is not so robust as the rest?
- hu3 3y agoAre there opensource RTS games made with JS that run in the browser? Not having to install would be awesome. And JS would make it accessible to most devs.
- anonzzzies 3y ago> And JS would make it accessible to most devs. Don’t think it would be more than it is now; game dev is not the same as web dev and the sourcecode of this game is very readable and easy to work with. The language is not going to be the issue for getting collaborators.
- stodor89 3y agoYou can play Tzar in the browser: https://tza.red https://tza.red Not open source tho.
- npteljes 3y agoThere are a few on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/platform-web/tag-open-source/tag-real-time-strategy https://itch.io/games/platform-web/tag-open-source/tag-real-... Open source games are not really constrained by devs, I think. I'd say that dev work is the one that's best covered in the open source game development. Project management, marketing, asset production, user experience, quality assurance, product management seem to be much more underserved.
- hohg 3y agohttps://littlewargame.com/ https://littlewargame.com/
- BlueTemplar 3y agoSource available : http://www.istrolid.com/ http://www.istrolid.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/istrolid/comments/ksu5n9/any_chance_of_the_source_code_being_released/ https://www.reddit.com/r/istrolid/comments/ksu5n9/any_chance... > The web version is literally just a .js file, all the code is there. Fun fact: the user run servers (my own server Myxori and Magic) run a modified version of that file. I literally download the file via inspect element, add some wrapper code for networking, and get a fully functioning server.
- lagolinguini 3y agoI don't mean to disparage other people's experiences but I find a massive disconnect between what other people are feeling and how I feel about this game. Actual AOE is still alive and kicking through the Definitive Editions and now AOE4 with a very active online community and developers. While 0AD is great and fully opensource, I still don't find it comes close to the Experience of the actual AOE titles. Maybe I'm biased because I don't mind paying for proprietary software and I sometimes use Windows. I do however definitely agree how great of an achievement 0AD is and it is definitely a great game when considered in isolation.
- wendyshu 3y agoAre you talking about custom maps? The size of the online community? Those are better in AoE2. What else is?
- lagolinguini 3y agoMatchmaking and the gameplay experience in general. I spend a lot of time playing AOE4 and I also like the direction that game is taking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nylonstrung 3y agoA more interesting peer to this game is Beyond All Reason, an open source clone of Total Annihilation that has essentially revived a community for the franchise https://www.beyondallreason.info/ https://www.beyondallreason.info/
- laputan_machine 3y agoOh wow, thanks for this. I bought TA (& TA:Kingdoms) a while back but it wouldn't run on my machine
- aragilar 3y agoThe new AOM is really buggy (c.f. the original), so "alive" probably only applies to AOE2. I'm not sure I'd call AOE4 "AOE" (yeah, it's branded as it, but so was "Age of Empires Online"), so the series basically died at AOE3. The other thing is the new DEs (which are relatively recent) and AOE4 are Windows-only (there were Mac releases for the originals, and the originals were much easier to get running under wine), so there is more incentive to look at other games (or reimplement the engine like https://openage.sft.mx/ https://openage.sft.mx/).
- kasztelan_ 3y agoAs someone unfamiliar with that project I looked up About Us on the main site. There wasn't a section that would just explain what the project was about. I know this is more 'if you know you know' kind of hobby but it would still be nice to get a quick overview :)
- MagicMoonlight 3y agohttps://play0ad.com/game-info/project-overview/ https://play0ad.com/game-info/project-overview/
- jgalt212 3y ago0AD is implanted in my as the first package listed in Synaptic.
- math-ias 3y agoI would guess that this drives a non-negligible number of people to playing the game for the first time. My personal anecdote is tab completing `apt-get install` by mistake and figuring I should research this 0ad package more to make sure I didn’t screw up configurations.
- mproud 3y agoOK, that has fellow open-source project The Battle for Wesnoth beat by 4 years.
- est 3y agoIt's a cool game and all, but does it still burns the cpu0 only?
- mikae1 3y agoWhen it comes to open source RTS games, https://www.beyondallreason.info https://www.beyondallreason.info really deserves an honorable mention.
- yread 3y agolooks like a Spring TA successor, nice!
- rand846633 3y agoLooks compelling! Could you offer a 3 sentence summary of what I would lean, were I to sped 10 minutes understand what exactly this game is? Also is it fully playable already?
- concordDance 3y agoIt's a sci-fi RTS game. Focused on multiplayer (co-op, 1v1 and teams). It has cool explosions and giant robot armies. Yes, it's fully playable (and indeed being played by thousands of people) right now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- egeozcan 3y agoHow is it possible that as an RTS fan, I've never heard about this? They even had a pro tournament: https://youtu.be/_dq9Xwfh4h4 https://youtu.be/_dq9Xwfh4h4 Some aspects vaguely look like C&C Generals, and some like Starcraft, if I'm understanding stuff from the video correctly. Thanks for sharing!
- Kiro 3y agoAs an RTS fan, I'm surprised you compare it to Generals and Starcraft instead of the obvious inspiration: SupCom. BAR is basically Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander reincarnated. I think even the devs call it a clone or derivative.
- pelasaco 3y agoThe openage is as well a fantastic project https://github.com/SFTtech/openage https://github.com/SFTtech/openage
- mishftw 3y agoI started my coding journey by fining OAD. I was able to contribute to the project in my early days. Truly amazing to see how far it's come!
- wsgeorge 3y agoThank you for your contribution to this amazing game!
- badnogooderevil 3y agoI've read about this.
- gatane 3y agoThis appears just when I'm getting into OpenRA... Might check it someday.
- silveira 3y ago0ad is a great game on its own merits. I have played countless hours on matches against the PC.