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0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

play0ad.com

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Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#91

Post by Dunedan »

decimalenough wrote: post #13
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…

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.

> […] the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't rejoin.

When a player looses the connection the game just continues. Usually one of the remaining player then pauses the game until the player who lost the connection returned.

The game state becoming out-of-sync is often a problem of players using buggy mods. That this happens without mods is pretty rare and of course clearly a bug.

> It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.

It seems you haven't played 0ad in a while, as that's possible since a27 (see https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/).

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#92

Post by Dunedan »

evolve2k wrote: post #58
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…

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…

> 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.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> 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.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#93

Post by Dunedan »

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...

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#94

Post by Dunedan »

t43562 wrote: post #62

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.....

It crashed for you? You must be running Arch Linux. ;-)

Arch Linux used system-provided SpiderMonkey which lacked a crucial bug fix. This issue should be solved by now, by Arch Linux switching back to vendored Spidermonkey.

Check out https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/0a... and https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8757 for details.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#95

Post by Dunedan »

tasuki wrote: post #63
rutierut wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've played perhaps tens of hours of 0AD. I boom early, try to create an unbeatable army, and then go win. When I saw competitive 0AD players on YouTube, they played completely differently: they train cavalry or cavalry archers and go hassle the booming opponents really early. Then retreat to go hunt some chickens for a bit, train some more cavalry, and go raiding again. They simultaneously attacked each other, all t…

The best players are incredible at microing (although horse rushs are just one of multiple strategies). It's also equally important to manage resources and units in a way that you use all of them all the time. That's especially important in early game.

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#96

Post by qup »

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.

A realistic version would have unit commanders pathfinding over long distance, and the plebs following them unless they got merc'ed

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#99

Post by Dunedan »

cjbdndjc wrote: post #2

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

Fun fact: 0ad still doesn't support kerning. While I would've loved to see proper kerning support in r28, there is only so much a team of volunteers can do.

If you're interested in progress in this area, I suggest you keep an eye on https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7945

Re: 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

#100

Post by ddtaylor »

qup wrote: post #96
ddtaylor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A realistic version would have unit commanders pathfinding over long distance, and the plebs following them unless they got merc'ed

I think this actually can be used to optimize the pathfinding. Basically create a fake unit that is used for the real/complex path, then have the other units follow it with basic collision or a very tuned down pathfinding algorithm similar to the hack I did where I just counted loop iterations and bailed after some threshold.
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