0AD, an open source historical RTS in development for 22 years

https://play0ad.com/

by wsgeorge • 3 years ago

619 178 3 years ago

play0ad.com

robinhoodexe• 3 years ago

I’m quite excited for a future macOS ARM build.

postalrat• 3 years ago

Can't you run it now or does that build include some arm only units?

pohl2• 3 years ago

Rosetta should run it, but a native build would still be desirable.

psychphysic• 3 years ago

I played 0ad nearly every day about 5 or so years ago. What a blast from the past.

peter_retief• 3 years ago

Really enjoy OAD, good to know it is being developed.

Phlogi2• 3 years ago

It'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• 3 years ago

Because it's an OSS project ran by volunteers, each of whom work on the features they are interested in.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

Even 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.

wsgeorge4• 3 years ago

It works very well. I used to run the Alpha 23 on my old Windows 10 device, but I got Alpha 26 a few weeks ago for my Intel Mac.

No noticeable bugs affecting my single player gameplay, except a few quirks with ship movements (they tend to overlap, which makes it look unnatural)

I have also noticed that clusters of units tend to look smaller than their actual number, so it might be a similar issue as I've noticed above. From someone who still enjoys the AoE 1 Ex, 0 AD is a really amazing game.

Phlogi2• 3 years ago

Thanks, how is the learning curve in comparison to AoE2 DE?

CameronNemo• 3 years ago

I can only comment on Linux and to a much lesser extent macOS, but IME it is quite stable.

I think never going 1.0 is an open source game dev meme or something. Xonotic is still pre-1.0 even after over a decade in development. Stable as heck.

imiric2• 3 years ago

Not just in game dev: https://0ver.org/

bandrami• 3 years ago

Remember that the "unstable" aspect of alpha isn't that "it's going to crash randomly" but that "you can't rely on a given feature being there in the future".

yjftsjthsd-h2• 3 years ago

It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ?

It is 100% playable and has been for years. As sibling comments note, I think the only reason they label it as anything but stable is because there are still significant changes between releases. Although I personally think they could fix even that by just chopping the first parts of the version number off - if they stopped calling it "alpha" and just called it 0ad version 26, and then released version 27, everyone would still have the right expectations.

baobabKoodaa3• 3 years ago

I tried to play it at a LAN party. It started off great, but as the number of units increased, the connection slowly deteriorated until eventually it was literally unplayable. You say that it is "100% playable and has been for years"?

lagniappe• 3 years ago

Age of Empires ignited my passion for these games, but 0AD captured it just by sheer ubiquity and accessibility. That says something, to me.

doctorpangloss5• 3 years ago

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 there earlier.

Other previous discussions (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• 3 years 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.

doctorpangloss5• 3 years 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.

sesm• 3 years ago

But if pathfinding is too smart, then it becomes hard to micro-control the units, see StarCraft 2 vs StarCraft Brood War.

bee_rider5• 3 years 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.

billfruit• 3 years 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-guimaraes3• 3 years 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.

doctorpangloss5• 3 years ago

It’s not about “untainted pokemon”

It's not about original ideas in Pokemon either.

feldrim2• 3 years 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.

seventhtiger2• 3 years 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.

nephanth• 3 years ago

0ad is always the first listed package of linux distro repos (in alphabetical order). That might have helped with discoverability

scrapcode• 3 years ago

Ye ole Yellowpages marketing trick!

doesthiswork23• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

You are 100% correct. I remember over the years always seeing it when viewing alphabetical listings of packages in various distros.

silisili• 3 years 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).

npunt• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

en3r0• 3 years ago

Remember playing that demo over and over as a kid! Really cool that you worked on it.

Aeolun• 3 years 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.

NSMutableSet• 3 years ago

Dark Reign 1 was the first online game that I ever played, back in 1997. I still have the manual somewhere...

somethoughts• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I’d love to configure a PXE boot server so you could have a LAN party in a box.

smcleod• 3 years ago

I remember discovering 0AD from it being installable from package managers in various distros maybe 12-13 years ago.

COAGULOPATH• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Habadakus.

calvinmorrison• 3 years ago

Much improved. AoM has some buggy pathfinder edge cases still but its enough that its an annoyance not a mainstay.

rollcat5• 3 years 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 - 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• 3 years 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.

BlueTemplar13• 3 years 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• 3 years 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!

OOPMan2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

otikik2• 3 years ago

I recently started playing StarCraft 2. Amazing game, can’t believe it is free.

BlueTemplar13• 3 years 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 ?)

atum472• 3 years ago

Got 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.

johnisgood2• 3 years ago

compression

Yup, we are on Hacker News!

atum472• 3 years ago

I usually swipe to type (which works 80% of the time) and honestly some times my eyes to catch spelling mistakes like these. Sorry, haha.

princevegeta89• 3 years ago

played 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• 3 years ago

They 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/

heavyset_go4• 3 years ago

I actually prefer 0 A.D. to any AOE game, now.

taopai• 3 years ago

Me 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!

pelasaco3• 3 years ago

for 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_go4• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

28,827 commits. GitHub mirror of the code:

https://github.com/0ad/0ad

trollied• 3 years ago

I'd give this a go if I wasn't so terribly addicted to Factorio...

hydroid7• 3 years ago

Try Mindustry instead

gwnywg• 3 years ago

Yep, I was addicted to that... and to 0ad at some point too...

martinald• 3 years ago

Captain of Industry too. Lost so many hours to that. Though there's a new big update coming on the 30th May that isn't compatible with old saves, so you're probably better off waiting for that!

ransom1538• 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years ago

Same! Weekend 0AD LAN parties with my family is a real treat!

philipswood• 3 years ago

There 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_go4• 3 years ago

The deathmatch mode also literally gives each player 50k in all resources to start out with.

chickenimprint• 3 years ago

The 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!

winrid• 3 years ago

NetPanzer is also an open source RTS in development for over 20 years!

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• 3 years ago

For those interested in RL portion, https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem... and 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).

pelasaco3• 3 years ago

Best 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• 3 years ago

Are 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• 3 years 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.

stodor892• 3 years ago

You can play Tzar in the browser: https://tza.red

Not open source tho.

npteljes• 3 years ago

There are a few on itch.io: 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• 3 years ago

https://littlewargame.com/

BlueTemplar13• 3 years ago

Source available :

http://www.istrolid.com/

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.

lagolinguini4• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Are you talking about custom maps? The size of the online community? Those are better in AoE2. What else is?

lagolinguini4• 3 years ago

Matchmaking and the gameplay experience in general. I spend a lot of time playing AOE4 and I also like the direction that game is taking.

nylonstrung• 3 years ago

A 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/

laputan_machine• 3 years ago

Oh wow, thanks for this. I bought TA (& TA:Kingdoms) a while back but it wouldn't run on my machine

aragilar2• 3 years ago

The 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/).

lagolinguini4• 3 years ago

Age of Empires 4 is not the same as Age of Empires Online and is a a full fledged game in the Age of Empires Series incredibly similar to AOE2 with some learnings from AOE3 added in.[1] It very much plays like it’s predecessors. It is highly enjoyable and has a very active community as responsive developers. There are many content creators and tournaments for this game now. It has a large enough userbase for you to be able to find a game quickly and they are constantly releasing new content and patches. The latest patch was released quite recently.[2]

AOE2, 3 and 4 have lots of tournaments, some of them with quite decent prize pools.[3]

I personally don’t play AOM so I can’t comment on that but as far as I have seen, Microsoft has done a good job at reviving the other games and with the new game so while I don’t doubt AOM is buggy I do have faith they are actively attempting to fix issues.

As for the Windows only thing, as I said, I use windows at times myself and I don’t mind paying for proprietary software. But I understand if others have qualms about that.

But to say that the Age of Empires series died with AOE3 is untrue, and while 0AD is a great achievement, to say it is a replacement for the actual Age games is also not true.

Also note that MS did reimplement the engine for the AOEI definitive edition, unsure about the others.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_IV 2 https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-iv-season-f... 3 https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Main_Page

kasztelan_• 3 years ago

As 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• 3 years ago

https://play0ad.com/game-info/project-overview/

jgalt212• 3 years ago

0AD is implanted in my as the first package listed in Synaptic.

math-ias• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

OK, that has fellow open-source project The Battle for Wesnoth beat by 4 years.

est• 3 years ago

It's a cool game and all, but does it still burns the cpu0 only?

mikae1• 3 years ago

When it comes to open source RTS games, https://www.beyondallreason.info really deserves an honorable mention.

yread• 3 years ago

looks like a Spring TA successor, nice!

rand846633• 3 years ago

Looks 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?

concordDance2• 3 years ago

It'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.

egeozcan2• 3 years ago

How is it possible that as an RTS fan, I've never heard about this? They even had a pro tournament: 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• 3 years ago

As 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.

BlueTemplar13• 3 years ago

BA/Spring still has tournaments too, and predates SupCom1 (though Spring was of course following the promotional materials released for it, the Supreme Strait map was already in it before the name of Seton's Clutch that it's based on was even known), and BAR(/Recoil) used to stand for Balanced Annihilation Reloaded.

https://challonge.com/CROWN_CUP_7

wurzeltrick2• 3 years ago

Beyond all reason is not open source though, since a lot of its artwork is licensed CC-by-NC-ND. https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/blob/...

Another Total Anhilation clone is ZeroK which is unfortunately also not completely open source because of its artwork license (Wikipedia mentions CC by NC ND but I could only fjnd this summary https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Artwork/issues/16).

Unfortunately it is near impossible to setup a local LAN game with ZeroK, since there are no current instructions to setup the required spring-engine lobby server.

Edited, because I recognized to late, that Wikipedia mentions that zeroK-Artwork might also be under CC-by-NC-ND.

Edited again to clarify, that its not open source because of the artwork.

concordDance2• 3 years ago

Difficult without Steam? A friend of mine plays Zero-K on Linux without Steam.

Maybe drop by the Discord to see if anyone can help you debug the issues you've run into.

Also, just because it might be hard to use on non-closed systems doesn't make something not open source.

grozzle2• 3 years ago

Hmm. I read the licence.md. Does this mean if I fork the game to try my own patches, I'm forbidden from using the game's artwork in my forked version?

If so, that is a serious impediment, tbf.

BlueTemplar13• 3 years ago

It's still somewhat easy for Zero-K : just copy the game and maps into the respective folders inside the engine folder and run the engine binary (bypassing the lobby).

It's somewhat easier for BAR despite in theory being harder due to the lack of these standalone files due to the rapid file system, but in practice easier because you can just use the unofficial Skylobby (BAR still uses Springlobby protocol, at least for now).

xela79• 3 years ago

played Zero-K at local LAN party without any issues, it was a breeze to get to work.

mishftw• 3 years ago

I 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!

wsgeorge4• 3 years ago

Thank you for your contribution to this amazing game!

pelasaco3• 3 years ago

The openage is as well a fantastic project https://github.com/SFTtech/openage

badnogooderevil• 3 years ago

I've read about this.

gatane• 3 years ago

This appears just when I'm getting into OpenRA... Might check it someday.

silveira• 3 years ago

0ad is a great game on its own merits. I have played countless hours on matches against the PC.

0AD, an open source historical RTS in development for 22 years

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