7 ms·

How 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 th

• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Tangent 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 ago
    This 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.
    • lukevp 3y ago
      Your phrasing and word choice is very peculiar. It’s a bit difficult to follow what you’re saying to me. For example, you say you’re an AoEII ultra. Is this an ultra fan? Or ultra what? > 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. If I had to rephrase this section based on my understanding, I would interpret it to say something like: Often, people are bothered by bugs and other issues that happen in commonly-used apps like Facebook or YouTube, but when these bugs manifest in video games, it’s viewed as part of the character of the game. For example, the micromanagement of villagers that’s required due to bad pathfinding in AoE II (to prevent them from running under turrets and such). Is that correct? Any ideas why your phrasing would seem so foreign to me? I’m very curious why.
      • doctorpangloss 3y ago
        > Is this an ultra fan? Yes > you say you’re an AoEII ultra No. I can't say how I really feel about the game. > it’s viewed as part of the character of the game Yes. > I’m very curious why. People feel very, very strongly about their nostalgic retro childhood fun cozy times like playing AoEII. They're ultras, right? It's like talking about football. It can be perilous.
        • jaredhallen 3y ago
          I see where you're coming from, but (in my opinion) you're over indexing on the issue. If someone gets bent because you said some video game has bad pathfinding, so what? Seems like their problem. It isn't a mean spirited or unreasonable thing to say.
  • sesm 3y ago
    But if pathfinding is too smart, then it becomes hard to micro-control the units, see StarCraft 2 vs StarCraft Brood War.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      N.B: Age of Darkness is an inherently player-vs-environment game (Survival RTS… it is sorta like They are Billions if you’ve played that). So, I think super high action-per-minute PVP style gameplay is not really the goal.
    • doctorpangloss 3y ago
      StarCraft is a great example because we can talk about it now without the threat of ultras. Like its audience has gone away, people only feel nostalgia for it but they don't really play it anymore. It's easier to talk about the objectively bad and clunky things about it. I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft, is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game harder in ways that were not fun. Which is too bad, because it was a phenomenally engineered RTS engine (starting with WC3) that brought us many other game formats in its custom scenarios. Compare to Supreme Commander, which had very sophisticated pathfinding and in my memory more interesting micro. Compare to all MOBA formats, where if you're going to have WC3/SC style micro, you might as well focus on micro of one unit. There were many ideas that came after StarCraft that are in an important way, objectively better. It has a lot of other clunk. The way you have to manage resource gathering. The unit building queues and how spending occurs. The spellcasting. The selections. It has so much legacy. StarCraft 2 had to cater to a very specific eSports skill base that probably led to it going into the same level of obscurity as EverQuest: Gen X people still have strong nostalgic feelings for it, but they don't play EVE Online, they're not 20 anymore with oodles of time and no responsibilities, they don't want hard permadeath single instance experiences. They want something much gentler but they still feel very positively about like, this one clunky thing they may have mastered a long time ago when their brain power was so much more plastic. Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a technical engineering point of view? In my opinion, no. So besides the existence of an ultra audience, I don't think there's a good reason to celebrate the crappy pathfinding anymore.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    This sort of RTS sub-genre (of which They Are Billions is the only other example I can think of) probably needs different unit AI than a typical RTS. In case anyone is not familiar with these games, you are building a base, the map begins unexplored and is populated by monsters which will attack you in waves, so it is a sort of inherently player-vs-environment, very asymmetrical game. Because the enemies are basically expendable and your units aren’t, your units should… try not to sacrifice themselves so much. They should avoid the fog-of-war areas unless explicitly instructed to go there. Melee units should flee when injured. Ranged units should stay out of melee range. Total War unit AI (where ranged units typically skirmish by default) might be a better starting point than Age of Empires style unit AI. Although, it is a niche within a niche, so I guess I’ll take what I can get, haha.
    • 3np 3y ago
      Sounds a lot like Factorio. Quite different and you generally don't do things involving pathfinding in the first place; so not sure if it scratches your itch.
      • bee_rider 3y ago
        I did enjoy Factorio (and also Mindustry) a bit. For Factorio a lot of the fun seems to be in really optimizing the heck out of your factory, which I didn’t really enjoy as much, so it was only good for like one or two playthroughs for me. One or two fun playthroughs though, no complaints. It is sort of funny, I do enjoy optimizing, but in a game I prefer setups where you have to kinda intuitively optimize by your gut rather than really tweak things. The 50-80% efficiency range, rather than hitting those 80-99% targets, so to speak.
        • Cogito 3y ago
          There are a few playstyles, both modded and unmodded, that will allow for more of the "we're under attack!" panic and less optimisation of your factory. Ramping up the number of biters in an unmodded world (deathworld) can be really fun. Modpacks like Warptorio 2 add a very different dynamic but has that same frantic feel.
  • billfruit 3y ago
    Some games have issue in moving groups of units, with some units moving slowly while others move faster, end up reaching the destination at different times, and get easily taken out by enemy units one by one, unless the player painstakingly babysits the entire movement to ensure same time of arrival.
• tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  People play showdown because of easy UX for netplay on both official, fan formats or old formats. It’s not about “untainted pokemon”, and more about “build a team without grinding and have an online matchmaking with different formats”. So, that one in particular is a bad example.
  • doctorpangloss 3y ago
    > It’s not about “untainted pokemon” It's not about original ideas in Pokemon either.
    • tm-guimaraes 3y ago
      How not so? I don’t get what you mean. Supports every new thing and has new formats. Only one gimmick was disabled in the devs/smogon formats on the previous gen as it did work very well for those (but was great in the official ones) So I would really like to know what you mean by it not about the new.
      • tsimionescu 3y ago
        I think they're trying to say that it's not trying to progress Pokémon, to make something new or better out of it. I don't have any opinions on this (I'm not really into Pokémon).
        • tm-guimaraes 3y ago
          > it's not trying to progress Pokémon, to make something new or better out of it. But it is addressing one of its "failings": No decent online PvP play. And it's only about that. While the 2 latest "main" games addressed this, showdown it's still important, because building a team ingame needs some time commitment (catching/breeding the mons and training them) while on a simulator its "instant". Also, there are more formats to play. Yes, showdown doesn't try to make something new/better out of pokemon, but that misses the point. Their examples were about picking something popular and making something like that, either by the community/opensource or commercially Showdown is not that, showdown is not alternative,a rehash or competitor to a main pokemon game, showdown is better seen as a tool rather than a game, it's where you go to validate/test your team, it's where you play some alternative format that the game itself doesn't care. So it obviously doesn't try to move game design forward, if it changed things it would no longer be where people would bring their pokemon teams online. "bringing pokemon forward" is gamefreak/nintendo job, showdown is just a tool for competitive players, and it's not a tool job to make something new or better than the original game. It's just a glorified "online matchmaker" why is it even being lumped together?
• feldrim 3y ago
  The pathfinding discuss was good. I remember that around 2008-2010, I read the Killzone AI related papers and presentations. Basically, all the planning, tactics were based on pathfinding algorithms. Because, if you find the shortest path by scoring the nodes, if you add multiple layers - like line of sight as a triangle- you can also update the scores, which eventually help the character move most optimal path: short but safe path. The idea made it possible to convert the graph into either way finding meshes or influence maps, a great abstraction layer to build complex scenarios on top. What makes me sad here is that, even though the paper written for 0 A.D. is newer than the paper I had read around 15 years ago, it is primitive. It is also a good thing as it is a low hanging fruit here for game devs. But I am not sure if there is enough interest for game devs here.
  • seventhtiger 3y ago
    In game design terms it's interesting how old games pathfinding is so much better than modern games. If pathfinding is too efficient, and the same for all units, then the micro aspect of the game is killed. Micro is the "real time" part of real time strategy. If you play something like Starcraft 1, Warcraft 2, or AoE 2 you'll see the pathfinding has immense peculiarities that as you get better at the game you learn to manage. Units get stuck on each other and so on. Starcraft 2 has a very good pathfinding algorithm but it still intentionally adds a lot of variety to how units move to recreate that cumbersome peculiar pathfinding that rewards micro. Yet if you look at Starcraft 1 you see the units still move in much more unique ways. I think it's too easy to fall into a technical rabbit hole and try to do the best pathfinding when it actively harms the game.
    • grozzle 3y ago
      Interesting. Could you give a bit more of a concrete, specific example of "good pathfinding hurting the experience"? It's an odd sounding idea, to me. Also, you seem to be deep in this world, I'll also ask you - are there RTS games out there where the specific terrain is crucially important for various unit types - like we've seen in the real world recently, with weather updates waiting for deep mud to dry out being the main factor in when tanks and other sorts of vehicles can be useful? My experience of RTS games is limited, but I remember maps being very flat overall, with very few types of steepness modelled.
• nephanth 3y ago
  0ad is always the first listed package of linux distro repos (in alphabetical order). That might have helped with discoverability
  • scrapcode 3y ago
    Ye ole Yellowpages marketing trick!
    • mattigames 3y ago
      The modern version of that trick is adding "near me" to the name of your business, there was a viral pic of a restaurant called "Thai food near me".
  • doesthiswork23 3y ago
    Also as a fan of the genre when I was younger, I recall just trying to find other RTS games that I could play, including free ones. This game came up pretty often.
  • Ruq 3y ago
    You are 100% correct. I remember over the years always seeing it when viewing alphabetical listings of packages in various distros.
    • BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Damn, Zero-K really missed on that one...
• silisili 3y ago
  I found it years back looking for games in the repo. The only two were tux racer, and 0ad. Been playing it off and on ever since(not so much tux racer).
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• npunt 3y ago
  Back in the day when I was working on another RTS of the era (Dark Reign 2), pathfinding was the bane of our existence. We weren't able to dial the pathfinding in because we'd pivoted late in the development cycle from the more innovative but complex 'walk anywhere on a 3d terrain' design to the ship-it-quickly traditional grid unit placement of 2d RTS'. This was the era of 2d RTS' transitioning to 3d, so everything was new and a bit harder than anticipated. Just that one thing of having sub-par pathfinding made the game far worse, I'd guess at least a full point off a 10-point game rating. I believe we had to slow the whole pace of the game down because the player had to babysit units as they moved, which made the game far different from its extremely fast-paced predecessor and which the players expected from a sequel. I played DR2 again recently and it doesn't hold up almost solely due to pathfinding and the pacing that results.
  • KptMarchewa 3y ago
    On the other hand, specific, suboptimal pathfinding is like 80% of a Brood War charm. The game without die decades ago if dragoons and zerglings would blob optimally.
    • nerdponx 3y ago
      Arguably, low tech pathfinding is what gave us the tower defense genre.
  • en3r0 3y ago
    Remember playing that demo over and over as a kid! Really cool that you worked on it.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    For what it’s worth, reading about one of the first true 3D RTS games (after Ground Control) at the time was really cool. Even if I never actually played the game.
    • formerly_proven 3y ago
      > Ground Control A surprisingly unknown title. Always wished it had a third campaign with base building or a level editor though.
• somethoughts 3y ago
  I'd say a key element for me was that it is multi-OS (even installs on Google supported ChromeOS Linux Developer Mode), does not require any store account, does not require crazy powerful external GPUs and still supports LAN only mode. This meant I could setup a LAN party by dusting off a collection of semi-retired Windows, MacOS and Chrome machines.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    I’d love to configure a PXE boot server so you could have a LAN party in a box.
• smcleod 3y ago
  I remember discovering 0AD from it being installable from package managers in various distros maybe 12-13 years ago.
• COAGULOPATH 3y ago
  AoEII has fantastic pathfinding. That and the formation system was the game's secret sauce. In early RTS games like Warcraft, half the game was micromanaging your units from place to place. You'd send your army to a location, and if there was an obstacle in the way (such as a forest), they'd awkwardly path around the edges of it, one tile at a time (causing massive congestion, because the units at the front would obstruct the ones behind). They'd arrive at their destination one by one, and if the enemy was waiting, they'd get slaughtered. In Age of Empires II, your army would arrive in a solid mass. It was a relief: you could actually play the game, instead of babysitting a bunch of units.
  • adastra22 3y ago
    Habadakus.
    • stodor89 3y ago
      prostagma
      • imiric 3y ago
        Vulome. Etimos. Pani. Wololooo <3
  • calvinmorrison 3y ago
    Much improved. AoM has some buggy pathfinder edge cases still but its enough that its an annoyance not a mainstay.
  • rollcat 3y ago
    > In early RTS games like Warcraft, half the game was micromanaging your units from place to place. This is probably the most annoying aspect of StarCraft 1 / BroodWar (1998), considering the game still has a very strong player base and is very enjoyable to watch (even if the clunky mechanics are too much to bear for me to play it). > You'd send your army to a location, and if there was an obstacle in the way (such as a forest), they'd awkwardly path around the edges of it, one tile at a time (causing massive congestion, because the units at the front would obstruct the ones behind). They'd arrive at their destination one by one, and if the enemy was waiting, they'd get slaughtered. In SC1, they wouldn't even arrive on location half the time, because the pathfinding is so stupid they'd get stuck trying to walk up a wall. It's so infamously bad it's still being mocked: https://youtu.be/mCEZ2hIcUW0?t=134 https://youtu.be/mCEZ2hIcUW0?t=134 - still, a great game! In SC2 (2010), the pathfinding has been massively improved. You can give orders to hundreds of units and they will all figure out how to navigate complex terrain. They will still clump up at chokepoints or occasionally get a bit stupid when trying to path around other units that are engaged in a fight but this is more easily fixable with even a tiny bit of micro. However SC2 makes no attempt to make units maintain formation. So if you're moving your army across the map, still best to keep an eye on it, and group up / pre-split / set up before attacking. It's a bit less of an APM game, and more of an SPM (screens per minute) game.
• toyg 3y ago
  > Old reigns supreme Advancement in computing capabilities over the last 15 years seem to have gone almost exclusively to graphics and duration. We get bigger and bigger games with better and better visuals, but fundamentally the same few gameplay modes. Maybe it's just perspective, compressing the "glorious past" of 80s/90s games (breaking all sorts of barriers and inventing new ways of gaming with every other title) over a shorter timeframe in my memory, while the last decades feel long and bare. I probably sound like a boomer talking about rock'n'roll.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    If you are looking at innovation, it's not the big budget games you should look at. Spring(-Recoil) engine and games like Zero-K have tried a LOT of things over the years, and I am going to take a guess and assume that so did 0AD ?
• arendtio 3y ago
  I think the path finding was one of the crucial elements that lead to porting AoE1 to the AoE2 engine (which was released just this month DLC Return of Rome). So there are some cases when it produces weird behavior, but in general I like it. Nevertheless, I admire 0AD especially for the consistent progress and commitment to the game. It has been a while since I played it the last time. Might be a good occasion to start it again!
• OOPMan 3y ago
  Pretty sure Genshin Impact was in development as early as 2016, before Breath of the Wild was released, although after it was announced. Contrary to popular belief, Nintendo are not the only people that make open world games...
• uoaei 3y ago
  > Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia? Nearly a million people a day do. I wonder how many of these are bots developed by three-letter agencies trying to build their own AI.
• n3storm 3y ago
  About players, some parents are Linux users and we loved help our children develop computer skills and also play games with them in their Linux computers. In my case Gcompris for learning and pre-10 years old and TuxCart, TotalAnhiliation and 0ad when older. In 0ad case, is both gaming and learning, about civilizations and history. We played together first and networking later, which helped learn some networking skills like looking his computer IP.
• otikik 3y ago
  I recently started playing StarCraft 2. Amazing game, can’t believe it is free.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I paid full price for it on release. Now they are making money with the 2nd and 3rd part of the campaign (sadly, both inferior), and also probably from the coop commanders DLCs. (Most players never touch competitive multiplayer, but quite a lot might try playing with friends vs the AI ?)
    • otikik 3y ago
      Thank you for clarifying, yes I should have mentioned that the multiplayer / vs AI is free, but there's paid content as well (single player campaigns, unit/building skins, etc). To me the writing of the Single Player campaigns was grating ("bout time we kick this revolution into overdrive", rawr!) but the gameplay was good, so no hard complains. I liked the unit variety on the Protoss and Zerg campaigns compared to the WoL "buy upgrades and mercenaries" approach.