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Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

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Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#71

Post by mschwaig »

craftyguy wrote: post #33
mschwaig wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a look at some .NET code integrating steam once and the integration itself looked quite clean and lightweight. I'd be interested if people got banned or something like that for modifying games when they were clearly not hacking/cheating/cracking/impacting the experience of others. From DSfix for Dark Souls I know that it can be fine with them if you hook function calls to improve rendering for example. I imagin…

This project has nothing to do with Steam, other than perhaps (optionally) using the assets from the steam version of AOE2 HD, but it doesn't interface or interact with Steam at all AFAIK.

Sure, I know, but the parent poster complained about how Steam was a terrible thing about the HD version. I wanted to know if it creates practical problems if you want to mess with a game that has Steam integration.

Probably that was too far off topic by me.

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#72

Post by ouid »

rpedela wrote: post #50
ouid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like the idea of non-sprite graphics. Seems like it would detract from the game.

Sprites in a 3D game look horrible for most objects: buildings, characters, terrain. Sprites are typically used for particle effects, grass, or objects that are far away. The latter is often used a performance optimization.

Age of Empires is not a 3d game.

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#73

Post by jsjolen »

mikejmoffitt wrote: post #32
opsroller wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runs better on wine than it does on windows.

Citation needed. In my experience, running AoE2HD in Wine results in strange mouse errors at the start of a match which can ruin a game (where the screen is stuck scrolling to one side).

The mouse bug seems to be gone for me (it was mainly triggered by alt-tabbing out of the window). It still has an issue with text not being rendered properly while typing.

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#74

Post by rpedela »

ouid wrote: post #72
rpedela wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprites in a 3D game look horrible for most objects: buildings, characters, terrain. Sprites are typically used for particle effects, grass, or objects that are far away. The latter is often used a performance optimization.

Age of Empires is not a 3d game.

AoE 1 and 2, yes. AoE 3 is 3D. True 3D works fine for RTS games and generally looks better, and can apply dynamic shadows, physics, etc. If you are simply saying that you prefer the old-style graphics, then okay. But your initial statement wasn't worded well if that is what you meant.

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#75

Post by mnicky »

SEJeff wrote: post #44
axaxs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question... did it get better recently? I tried it years ago... and the AI was non existent...as in, I built up an army and went to explore, only to find my enemy had like 4 peasants.

If you watch their svn history, they consistently are chipping away at it. I simply wait (to upgrade to a new 0ad) with the latest version in each new Fedora release. It gets progressively better from an AI, music, and artwork standpoint. 0AD is definitely not the same game now as it was years ago, it is massively improved. These were both pretty big releases: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-21-ulysses/ h…

Speaking of AI, there's pretty interesting project which aims at creating 0AD bot that uses hierarchical planning, not just some random heuristics: https://github.com/agentx-cgn/Hannibal

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#76

Post by fooker »

cpeterso wrote: post #19

Why C++ instead of a higher level language like Python? The developers could focus more on game functionality than C++ bugs and cross platform issues. Performance should not be a big concern for running an old game on modern hardware.

Why is python 'higher level'?

Re: Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

#77

Post by Thorncorona »

eertami wrote: post #69
nerdponx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when we are going to start seeing game AIs trained by reinforcement learning with self-play. Building a simple 0AD AI would be a fun capstone project.

The Open AI guys made a very impressive Dota 2 AI that trained itself through self play (and against pros), there is a pretty interesting write-up about it: https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/

To shed some light on why they won, they chose a character (Shadow Fiend) that heavily relies on tight timings to execute moves. Naturally, AIs beat humans in events where timing is the key differentiator. Even so it’s quite impressive
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