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!
0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#420ad 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…
> 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.
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
BAR in general is such a great showcase in A) FOSS games can be good, work great, scale nice and be fun and B) BAR is a game built by gamers who play and enjoy their own game, for other gamers, which seems more and more rare these days.
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#44I 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
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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..
I had problems with lag years ago but not lately, though I don't do big multiplayer matches with several players and the like.
I'll check BAR out.
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
What is BAR?
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#47It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 un…
Yes, but if you were that unit, would you get stuck in a corner, or would you persist in trying to find your destination? I suppose if you make it all the way to the target, you've accomplished pathfinding of some kind, by definition, sure. But an algorithm to avoid getting stuck doesn't have to be "pathfinding" as in an expensive algorithm to find a complete path right away.
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is BAR?
Beyond All Reason as mentioned in a sibling thread.
"Currently in development". It's got robots.
Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
#500ad 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…
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.