0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

0ad is a fun game but the last few times I have tried to play it with my friends it lagged very bad once a few units were moving around. I actually was able to get it to play kind of normal by hacking the pathfinding code to give up after a fixed iteration count that was low. It worked kind of, but broke path finding a lot, obviously.

The crux of the issue is that their simulation is single threaded. It's a complicated problem to do both deterministic and multi-threaded, but I feel some of us could help them.

I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill deserve a monument — my genuine admiration.

I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..

Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and mature. I don’t think there’s any commercially available RTS that can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and performance.

Those who like this game may also want to try open-source The Battle for Wesnoth, which is a turn-based hexgrid war game.

I have been playing 0ad, single player, medium/hard difficulty, round-robing all maps, for years now. Great game. I have to try mods one of these days.

This game started slow for me many years ago but I now absolutely love this game. Not just because of all the open source effort that has gone into it, because of the strategy. You have to make yourself vulnerable to get stronger.

Wanna grow fast? Train workers who can't fight, but are resource efficient to make. Risk being badly weakened if getting attacked, for the benefit of the workers giving you much more resources to then raise an army.

Also watch out for the elephants!

This is such a high quality game that it is almost unbelievable that it is free and open source. The fact that it is also still seeing active development after more than 15 years shows just how passionate the developers are.

I played online once with a friend. He immediately rushed to make one soldier and that sole solider obliterated my tiny base immediately.

Lesson learned. Sheep can wait

I had been confusing this game with Unknown Horizons, another RTS but based on the game 1602 AD. Just realized they're totally unrelated.

Looking through earlier news, a July 2024 release note proudly proclaims “The git migration is on its way!”. But I’ve had a look around and can’t easily find any active git repo. Anyone know the current status around ‘moving to git’?

Ref: https://play0ad.com/the-git-migration-is-on-its-way/

I really love the iterative progress with 0 A.D. And every time the game shows up in news, it's always amazing to go through the changelog. I just wish I was a but younger with more time to play :) For an OSS project it's quite an achievement!

The devs clearly put in a lot of effort. I'm a little surprised no one's created a campaign yet. I love the game anyway, just seems less effort and more fun to create a campaign (of course a different thing to keep the campaign balanced and up-to-date with new releases).

I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.

Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything other than Easy.

I tried to play this game once and sucked at it. There are people out there who are legitimately good at this, and that's awesome to see for an open source game

I love 0ad - it has atmosphere. I was chuffed when a28 came out and the gutted when It crashed for me but it just got fixed and now I'm trying not to think about it until 5pm.....

Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!

It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system

Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.

I used to like some of its music

Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad

> 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

No system requirements. Does it run on Pentium II wirh 128 MB RAM ? Or does it need an 128 Cores Epyc with 64 GB RAM ?

Rant:

I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!

Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.

That makes it way better. For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game... (freeciv for example).

Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.

I mean, good news, but even going down the route of using pre rendered fonts in the first place seems misguided O_o

Unless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have been unbearable even for latin scripts

Also watch out for the elephants!

Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!

Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.

The crux of the issue is that their simulation is single threaded. It's a complicated problem to do both deterministic and multi-threaded, but I feel some of us could help them.

AFAIK one of the reasons they held onto 'alpha' for so long was that this network lag issue for internet based play was a big known and hard to address issue. I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

Also, we've always played the game as in-person LAN, and for the most part the lag has been just fine. Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

Good times.

Two thousand years ago they'd barely have maps, I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway. In the Age of Empires series it had bizarre effects, like you could steer an enemy army around by building a wall across a forest path, forcing them to take a different path to their target (your base), since they apparently saw the wall with their psychic powers.

Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

For me the main problem with 0AD multiplayer is that if any player loses their connection even for a moment for any reason, the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't rejoin. Quite frustrating, especially for longer campaigns. It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.

I feel like the issue is more that their pathing algorithm is very inefficient. Not sure why using multiple cores would solve the problem if the cause of the lag is that their pathing algorithm is cubic time or something

I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill deserve a monument — my genuine admiration.

I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..

BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now

I haven't played Beyond All Reason but looking at the system requirements I'm not surprised it is more fulfilling. 0 A.D. runs on a potato if you look at it threateningly, which makes it a good option to have on a throwaway machine for kids or somesuch.

I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.

I first encountered it when I was looking at the biggest packages in the official repositories, in order to stress-test my own APT distribution implementation. Gave it a try, had fun too, and now part of the E2E tests of the mirror :D

I tried to play this game once and sucked at it. There are people out there who are legitimately good at this, and that's awesome to see for an open source game

I know what you mean, biggest gripe I have with this game is how important it is to play the meta and boom early if you want to win at anything other than easy mode.

> 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

No system requirements. Does it run on Pentium II wirh 128 MB RAM ? Or does it need an 128 Cores Epyc with 64 GB RAM ?

I used to like some of its music

Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad

Good times.

BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now

I know what you mean, biggest gripe I have with this game is how important it is to play the meta and boom early if you want to win at anything other than easy mode.

> Processor: 2 GHz Intel or x86 compatible, PowerPC64, Arm

https://play0ad.com/download

I mean, good news, but even going down the route of using pre rendered fonts in the first place seems misguided O_o

Unless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have been unbearable even for latin scripts

It’s what everyone used back in the Quake 3 days.

Rant:

I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!

Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.

Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.

Tell me how many versions, extensions, remaster and patches World of Warcraft actually have today?

This game is in development for so long because it is driven by volunteers who don't work on this game full time. It doesn't have near the resources that the studio behind fallout has.

> For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game..

But why does not make 0ad bad? You want to play it on an pentium 1?

I'm seeing you don't like the rolling release, but I can't see the "why".

...so? It's a hobby project, not a product. It's about the journey, not the result.

Good thing for them they're at it to have fun, not to please you. And good thing for you they're not charging you for it if you do wanna try.

I have no idea what you're ranting about. 0ad is fantastic. I've never played Fallout, but it seems you want it to release versions like that? Why? It's not a version/story game but an iterative design on the same game.

Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

An RTS where you could only swap between FPV views of each of your units would be fun. Or at least different. Savage II but there is only 1 player per team, and no overhead view. And you can wrench control from a bot at any time.

> I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway.

I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and this game?

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best

If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.

Typical armies usually had, if not maps, reliable intelligence and guides. "we've heard this chokepoint is heavily defended" would indeed be a common reason for routing around.

It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into account the position of your mobile units as well - for example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable conditions.

It did save in a27 for me - I had the same forking problem but was able to go back to a previous save and the other player was able to rejoin at that point. This was in a local network game.

This is one of the problems that BAR solves beautifully - a player could leave and rejoin later and the game would continue running just fine. An existing player can choose to take their stuff or not, or take it and give it back when the player rejoins. Truly elegant.

The pathfinding algorithm has been decently optimized. The reality is that 600 units finding paths and keeping them up to date is a lot of work.

Some of the pathfinding is precomputed, some cannot be as it involves other units and formations.

Most other RTS games work around this by either relaxing the constraints or implement some amount of parallelism.

Those are lowball system requirements too.

You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.

Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.

That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.

For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.

I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.

My experience is the opposite: 0ad will lag on my laptop once thing become big. BAR will warn that it’s not compatible with my low end intel integrated potato gpu, but it works just fine..