161–170 of 174 posts
Would be nice if they finished Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 support. I only complain because I put in over $1,000 USD as part of a crowd funding campaign to do just that ...13 years ago :(
Wait, Tiberian Sun is not working? In what sense? I'm sure I played with walkers, visceroids, giant ants, mole tanks, and hovercraft.
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It should work but you'll need .net 10 and powershell. works on macos, win64 and winarm64 so far I just haven't uploaded binaries since it's just work between a friend and I on weekends to fine tune or fix things
Binaries would suck. Buildable source enables inclusion in distro repositories.
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Weird. I find the balance for player vs AI to be actually pretty horrible. AI can outrange artillery sight so you have no choice but to push forward always or micro manage units. I have a fork of OpenRA on my GitHub where I try to address this, along with pathfinding bugs, enabling Tiberian Sun and fixing bugs with that. I also updated it to cross platform .NET 10 and bumped the performance up about 6-10x fixing mino…
> AI can outrange artillery sight so you have no choice but to push forward always or micro manage units. Since when is having to micro your units viewed as an issue in an RTS?!
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The load/save is what kills me. It's a great project, but having to wait 2 hours for a game to load, fans blaring on my laptop, makes it less playable. For context, I love huge, massive maps with loads of players. OpenRA replays the entire game to restore, it doesn't have a save-current-state routine. So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save. Heartbreaking.
Why is saving the state hard for them? So many games and other software save their state .... Imagine Excel 'replaying' the spreadsheet to return to the latest state.
(It's not impossible to do both: while it's not strictly an RTS, Factorio has the same difficulty of synchronising the whole game state in multiplayer, but also has the disadvantage of quite long-lived and simulation-intensive games. So it uses a hybrid approach: it has a deterministic engine and a game state save, and when someone joins a multiplayer server, the server snapshots and sends the game state, which may take a few minutes, then it sends a replay to catch that player up to the current state of the game. But this is something that took them a lot of work to get into a reliable state and was kind of forced onto them by the constraints they had to work with)
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Why is saving the state hard for them? So many games and other software save their state .... Imagine Excel 'replaying' the spreadsheet to return to the latest state.
it sounds so stupid u know i am curious Why on earth people would do this. How it is not possible to dump some memory as save/load. is the game state not known?? :/
Would never have thought I would see OpenRA here on HN. Great project, great game.
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it sounds so stupid u know i am curious Why on earth people would do this. How it is not possible to dump some memory as save/load. is the game state not known?? :/
Save files are not just memory dumps, you need to have a serialisation/deserialisation mechanism for the game state. But this is not generally a viable way to do RTS multiplayer, so you either need to build both a save game system and a deterministic replay system (which might each make the other more complicated), or go for the latter which you need to do anyway and then reuse it for saving the game as well.
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Save files are not just memory dumps, you need to have a serialisation/deserialisation mechanism for the game state. But this is not generally a viable way to do RTS multiplayer, so you either need to build both a save game system and a deterministic replay system (which might each make the other more complicated), or go for the latter which you need to do anyway and then reuse it for saving the game as well.
Factorio manages to pull it off and I'd argue they are tracking far more individual entities.
(note that factorio does a hybrid: multiplayer works like an RTS but starting from a save game instead of from scratch. If your PC can barely keep up with a server that you're joining, it can take a long time to actually get into the game or actually just not be possible)
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Why is saving the state hard for them? So many games and other software save their state .... Imagine Excel 'replaying' the spreadsheet to return to the latest state.
The main thing is that synchronizing the state is hard: with hundreds of units and low latency being important, there's big advantages to having a deterministic simulation and relaying the player's commands instead of the whole game state, in fact unless you know everyone playing the game has a very good internet connection it's the only viable option. As an added bonus, it also allows you to hide small amounts of la…
> there's big advantages to having a deterministic simulation and relaying the player's commands instead of the whole game state, in fact unless you know everyone playing the game has a very good internet connection it's the only viable option.
If I understand, running it all on a server and just updating player UIs doesn't work for an RTS because some user Internet connections bottleneck the updates, putting those users at a disadvantage. You need to keep as much on the client as possible.