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Web Server for AoE 1, 2 and 3 DE supporting LAN multiplayer 100% offline
- hh2424 2y ago[dead]
- recycledmatt 2y agoAwesome to see AoE, and games in general being future proofed. Sad when functionality is lost because someone turned off a server.
- princevegeta89 2y agoAs someone who spent an immeasurable amount of time on AOE 2 online multiplayer, it has been a steadily refreshing experiencing the rise of AOE2 DE over the recent years. The game not only received updates that brought in the total civilization count to 50+, but also a ton of visual enhancements and improvements in the overall gameplay and performance. This is nothing short of stunning to see new developments happening for these games, especially in the open-source community.
- _the_inflator 2y agoImagine AoE being owned by Nintendo. :D A no small wonder. I never thought that MS, as the IP owner, would allow such an open community to grow and thrive. MS is notoriously bad at game community growth development. I remember that right after the acquisition of ES through MS in 2001, Microsoft went on a rigid IP enforcement role and, for example, targeted people at MFO. The story of DBD_Jinx losing his account to MS Legendary DBD_Jinx lost his account and had to start anew under _IamJinx because MS suspended his ZONE account due to copyright infringement for using MS trademarks without a license. What did he do? He advertised at MFO to help people increase their early game through his academy training, which offered advice on micro-management, game planning, strategy, and scouting. Together with a couple of other 2000+ Zone Rating dudes from the US, they started to make a few bucks on the side using AoE as a vehicle. What a knee-jerk reaction from MS back then. And today? Red Bull Wololo - I hardly can hold my pants compared to 2001. I hope this keeps going, even though I am a purist "old-schooler" who prefers the AoE 2 classics game. Cheers + gl + hf! _CN
- moduspol 2y agoIt probably won't matter. When I play a "random civ" game with my friends, I always get Vikings. On maps with no oceans. For real, though, it's really great to see this game continue to live on.
- reactormonk 2y agoVikings are a very good archer civ, full tree and the free handcart is a top-tier eco-boost.
- moduspol 2y agoI just distinctly remember getting slaughtered by Paladins, and having very few good options to counter.
- princevegeta89 2y agoNote that the Viking Pikemen have a lot of extra HP though.
- pertymcpert 2y agoWith non-unique units paladins can only be countered by upgraded halberdier, heavy camels or a huge mass of arbalesters. Monks counter them in small numbers but in late game when they're massed they're almost unstoppable unless you have halb/camel in equal numbers.
- princevegeta89 2y agoWell even arbalesters get slaughtered by Paladins, unless we are able to push them behind a wall or a corner with only a very tiny attack area for the Paladins.
- pertymcpert 2y agoI think even in open ground if you have a big enough group you can still trade well. Ethiopian arbs fire 25% faster. If you micro the arbs to focus on individual paladinsthey can one shot paladins and their attack surface area increases with the sqrt() of their numbers. For sure it's a lot more work than spamming halb.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoImo this should be legislated. Do you provide a service necessary to use your product ? Great. But if you decide to deprecate said service, rendering said product inoperable or partially operable, you should be obligated to release an implementation & documentation.
- slightlygrilled 2y agoThis happened with supreme commander. The company shut down and turned the servers off, but luckily someone created an implementation of the match making server. And even to this day the community is fully alive and growing, they even continue to develop the game, and have taken it far beyond the original. It’s called Forged Alliance Forever.
- apitman 2y agoThat's awesome. What sort of changes have they made? I feel like that's got to be a tricky line to walk for a classic game.
- TsiCClawOfLight 2y agoMostly balance and quality of life, the UI especially improved a lot. Better AI opponents as well, and a few new units that fit well within the rest (and improve balance between races)
- abigail95 2y agoHow do you put a Terms of Use with an AGPL license? Isn't this a "further restriction" which the license says you can remove?
- anamexis 2y agoSeems more like a CYA thing to prevent takedowns
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoIt's CYA if it's meaningless.
- shash7 2y agoWhat's CYA?
- pacificmint 2y agoIt stands for "Cover Your Ass". Wikipedia explains it as "an activity done by individuals to protect themselves from possible subsequent criticism, legal penalties, or other repercussions, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass
- Rendello 2y agoClassic AoE-playing Hacker News-types might also enjoy 0 A.D. It's free and fun, but definitely humbling if you consider yourself a master strategist: https://play0ad.com/ https://play0ad.com/
- bryancrisso 2y agoi love 0ad so much but it runs AWFULLY as soon as you get a fun number of units on the map.
- Rendello 2y agoI haven't had an issue with that personally (played on and off for almost 10 years), though I imagine it could be an issue on some older hardware. Massed units will cause lag in big team games where there's 4 armies clashing, though that might be more of a network thing.
- yohannesk 2y agoI am curious as a non game developer, are these types of games deterministic? If so if I send to the server that I moved huge units to attack another huge units, can the server determine what the end will be? Why do we face a network issue?
- HideousKojima 2y agoMany (not all) RTS games use a networking method called lockstep synchronization that requires the gameplay to be deterministic, but has its own downsides. One of those being that if one player lags, everyone lags. I know AOE 1 and 2 use it, and I assume 3 as well
- littlestymaar 2y agoThe good thing being that you get replay for free.
- 486sx33 2y agoSo how can I play AoE 3 the war chiefs online ?
- CSMastermind 2y agoIf you're okay buying it then the definitive edition is on sale with active servers and includes War Chiefs among other things. There were some questionable changes to the names of things to make them more politically correct but the game play is better than ever.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoThe censorship really annoys me. I would've happily paid for the definitive edition (even though I already own the game), but I'm not willing to support a rerelease which changes stuff about the original game like that. If the devs want to make sure their new content is politically correct then fine, but changing the original content isn't cool.
- hoten 2y agoBit confused on the webserver aspect of this. Is it just the match making / game broadcast component of AoE multiplayer?
- pininja 2y agoI was curious about this too and enjoyed reading the routes file https://github.com/luskaner/ageLANServer/blob/main/server/internal/routes/routes.go https://github.com/luskaner/ageLANServer/blob/main/server/in...
- apitman 2y agoWhile the game itself runs over LAN, my understanding is LAN play requires internet for 2 reasons: 1. the game connecting to multiplayer services 2. coordination server for the LAN setup itself. I think this covers #2. #1 appears to be more complicated unfortunately, and involves tricking Steam into thinking you're connected.
- LPisGood 2y agoThis is excellent. I wonder if there any public documentation for AoE3’s API that was used to make this or if this was all newly reverse engineered. I’ve seen people ask about this kind of documentation before, but I’ve never seen it.
- the__alchemist 2y ago13
- brink 2y agoI hope AoE2 lives as long as Chess does. It really is one of the "perfect" games.
- hackernewds 2y agoIt really is and they keep iterating on it. definitive edition has more investment than some of the new AOE3 and 4 versions
- guappa 2y agoIn chess if you don't play 2 years and then come back to it, you don't find out that all the rules have changed in the meanwhile. Which is what currently happens with age of empires 2.
- sqrt_1 2y agoAoE2 is coming out on PS5 this year.
- dominicrose 2y agoIt's a brilliant game for sure. The randomness, the fact that it's not turned-based and the multiplayer also make it interesting compared to chess. However Chess has 1000x simpler rules that never change, and you don't need high APM to play competitively.
- apitman 2y agoI thought about almost this exact thing recently. I hope we're able to keep the best games running forever. For games that are fun I think you can leave in balance issues and even features-not-bugs. It's trickier for things like netcode bugs that are purely a negative. Really grateful Id release their source eventually. Really hoping the same will happen for AoE2 someday.
- cheeseomlit 2y agoI'm sure the answer could be found in this repo somewhere but its above my head- does aoe2 DE rely mostly on p2p for multiplayer? I assume it does and the regional servers are just used for matchmaking, and all the actual game logic is running on the clients. I base that on the fact that map hacks are possible and that one player lagging lags the game for everyone, but there are often conflicting claims when it's brought up on aoe forums
- lightingthedark 2y agoIf you haven't read it, there's a great paper on the netcode of the originals: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terrano_1500arch.pdf https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terran... I'd be surprised if the definitive editions changed the design significantly enough to move the netcode away from P2P, but I don't know of any actual information on it.
- arbitrandomuser 2y agoThat was the old one , the DE version lags only for the player with poor network ( cpu performance stutter of one player affect all players though )
- Raudius 2y agoIn professional tournament games a server is chosen that lies between the two players. For example, a Brazil-China match might be played in an EU server. Given this, I suspect the server is used as a central source of truth between the clients where all game data goes through the server, with all the calculations still being done client-side.
- red_admiral 2y agoAFAIK, it's server-based rather than p2p for DE, but the way it works is all clients/servers simulate the world in lockstep and hold a full copy of the state. That's what makes map hacks possible. You don't need anything paxos-like for this, the game desyncs and stops if any machine messes up but you can usually restore from a save point in that case.
- CursedSilicon 2y agoDoes anything like this exist for the original Age of Empires games? Battle.Net has "PVPGN" that covers Diablo 2 up through Warcraft 3, and the Westwood Online games (ish) but searching for an AoE equivalent turned up nothing
- lightingthedark 2y agoI believe the originals just supported offline LAN play. I remember getting my friend to have his modem dial my modem so we could play together, no Internet connection required.
- red_admiral 2y agoFrom memory, there was a patch that added a new-fangled option "internet" as well as LAN play. I remember the days of fiddling with port forwarding and then calling a friend over the telephone to read out my IP address for them to type in.
- matsemann 2y agoI've LANed them "online" many moons ago by using software that made a virtual lan that we all installed and managed to find each other ingame. "Hamachi" I think?
- apitman 2y agoCheck out Voobly. That seems to be a pretty big hub for people playing the original games, I think mostly patched versions of the originals with some nice features.
- o1o1o1 2y agoThank you for sharing this, it is truly amazing. While I like Steam for the convenience and also appreciate their efforts in developing SteamOS I am concerned about the lock-in. Projects like this really help to own more of what you paid for again, luskaner is a hero for me.
- Rohansi 2y agoI feel like it is important to point out that Steam does not require games to have any DRM. Not even Steam's DRM. It's entirely up to the game developer and/or publisher. Many games on Steam are already DRM-free where you can just back up the files and play without Steam.
- herewulf 2y agoDoes this apply to AoE? I never played it much in its hey-day but it would be interesting to get into properly. I have no interest in buying an old game with DRM given the obvious potential for maintenance issues though.
- lionkor 2y agoYou could buy it and then download a cracked one
- o1o1o1 2y agoI basically did that, bought AoE several times, back then on CD and again on Steam. First I used virtual drives with ISO images and later a cracked version. Today I am only using the Steam version though because I can easily join multiplayer games with friends all over the world. Also, I really like all the additional features in the remakes of AoE that you can get on Steam.
- Rohansi 2y agoI haven't checked AoE myself. If you're concerned about DRM, games using Steam DRM are usually the easiest to crack on your own by just by replacing the Steam DLL that ships with the game with one that emulates its functionality.
- vkaku 2y agoExcellent. This seems to work with the Remasters as well. Even better :) Please add AoM support as well.
- whatever1 2y agoVoulomai
- pjmlp 2y agoI guess a few brownie points for making the case for compiled managed languages in games, nice work.
- nurettin 2y agoExperimental * AIX I wonder how they got an AIX.
- mrweasel 2y agoEmulator maybe? It's a weird and intersting platform to target, but I suspect that it's because Go supports it, so it might not be to much hassle. On the other hand reading the article from yesterday regarding porting Tailscale, it might be more involved that I imagine.
- nurettin 2y agoYeah go supports AIX. In fact I remember it having bash, and a package manager so it felt like home. AS400 was an interesting platform. I was fascinated with their almost assembly like programs, alien UIs and decades old hardware. Almost got nerd sniped. Unfortunately, I was told to use java. The jar I tested on linux worked perfectly the first time, so I couldn't even learn anything.
- Seanambers 2y agoRemember we used to have Aoe2 sessions on LANS when we were kids back in the 00s and like 1 in 3 games just crashed after everyone had played for like 2-3 hours. In a way it was even better because then nobody had to loose, and everyone believed they were winning.
- matsemann 2y agoAnd since everyone was "turtling" the games would almost never end anyways.
- rightbyte 2y agoThat is how kids play Monopoly too. It is part of the fun :)
- matsemann 2y agoYeah, I know of turtling because we used to do it ourselves! Have a pact that you can't attack in the start, then build an impenetrable city until there are basically no more resources left and then fight it off with having 10 castles and barracks and stables mass-producing units right to the front.
- red_admiral 2y agoAoE2 was released 1999 based on a 1997 game engine, and a new major DLC is about to drop this spring in 2025 (for the definitive edition). Sandy Petersen should be proud.
- typh00n 2y agoWe tried this at a LAN-Party in December and couldn't get it to run. I am happily trying it again for the next LAN-Party. Nice to see development on this project. :-)
- apitman 2y agoCurious what your use case is as opposed to using the official LAN support? For me, I'm trying to get it working completely without internet, ie on a plane. It's so sad to me that built-in LAN requires an internet connection.
- typh00n 2y agonot all participants had an official copy of the game. while i think that it is well worth it, i am not the person who pressures other people to buy things for a single-digit-attendence one-time get-to-gether LAN-party.
- ziofill 2y agoI'm not sure I understand: does one still need a copy of the game to play or is it self-contained?
- apitman 2y agoWhat is the best option for playing LAN games over the internet these days? Hamachi appears to still be a thing, but I would prefer something open source. Tailscale sadly doesn't support multicast, which I'm assuming most games use for LAN discovery. ZeroTier maybe?
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