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0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

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Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#101

Post by Dunedan »

ddtaylor wrote: post #50
x1f604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

There is also some exciting work going on to improve the path finding of formations to make them behave more naturally: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8608

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#102

Post by tasuki »

Dunedan wrote: post #93
tasuki wrote: post #57

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).

Making a high quality campaign is quite some effort and the engine still lacks some features, which would be helpful for this. A dialogue system is one of them, which already has a PR available: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8614 There is also a thread in the forum, where people are brainstorming about an official campaign: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/123956-narrative-campa...

Yes of course. I wasn't talking about a high quality campaign: I'm surprised there isn't even a low quality one. Perhaps that would be contrary to the 0ad philosophy.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#104

Post by Dunedan »

ddtaylor wrote: post #88
evolve2k wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That was my experience as well. My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC. All of my friends had pretty powerful PCs, but someone among us had a slightly weaker one in terms of single core performance, which means we all have that CPU basically then. The huge battle toward the end of the game dropping or making the game unplayable was what killed it for us. We didn't want to spend…

> My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC.

That's correct. While 0ad is an RTS, behind the scenes it's still turn-based and in multiplayer games turns can only progress once every participants PC has responded. That's also why the game also feels slow when a player has a bad latency to the player hosting the game.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#105

Post by Dunedan »

tasuki wrote: post #60
a1371 wrote: post #36

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 resour…

Ya I don't really get elephants. They seem way too strong and always win. What is the effective elephant-counter?

When was the last time you played 0ad? Each release brings new changes to balancing and especially a27 contained a lot of them.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#106

Post by daymanstep »

sdwr wrote: post #79
card_zero wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You reckon the perfect information version is cheaper than an algorithm that works only on the tiles near to the unit? But this quickly gets too complicated to discuss; there's the confusing matter of precalculation versus live updating.

The perfect information version calculates the path once on click, the local version needs to recalculate every time the unit moves (and new tiles are "seen")

Recalculating the path every game tick is too expensive. What brood war did was to just have units wait for a second when they collide with something before recalculating the path. This resulted in horrendous "traffic jams".

It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking resulted in smoother movement.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#108

Post by izacus »

ddtaylor wrote: post #6

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 complicat…

How did games like Age of Empires and StarCraft deal with that tissue on single CPU systems? They were mostly single threaded too and with way less computational power.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#109

Post by bawolff »

card_zero wrote: post #23
ddtaylor wrote: post #6

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 complicat…

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 dire…

At some point its a game and needs to be fun to play. If you are directing a group of five units that might work but if you have 200 units on the field i think it breaks down and is less fun.

> But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar being a clone

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#110

Post by NortySpock »

Aardwolf wrote: post #85
idoubtit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0AD's web site is rather bad at describing the game, but Beyond All Reason is even worse. I rarely play, so I had never heard about it. Both focus on details, forgetting the main points. After reading BAR's homepage and the FAQ, I still have no idea what to expect. It could be a purely online game with ads and in-game buys, through a central proprietary server. It could also have a single player campaign.

Good points, the BAR FAQ's first question is "Best Twitch Stream Settings for BAR (OBS)", and the Gameplay page talks about physics, terrain, economy, units and weapons but answers nothing like: is there a single player campaign? Are there AI opponents? what's even the theme/setting of the game?

There are single player scenarios in Beyond All Reason, though not yet a campaign with a narrative.

There are AI opponents and you can configure friendly and hostile AI players. There are also two dedicated "beat waves of enemies then final boss" pve modes.

There's not a real theme other than "robot armies built by commanders with exponentially scaling economy".

There is a lore/backstory/setting planned to be released on March 8th.

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