
New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 “Ken Wood” - jonbaer
https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-23-ken-wood/
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jessaustin
A project history [0] on the site is an interesting study in open source
development.

[0] [https://play0ad.com/about/the-story-
of-0-a-d/](https://play0ad.com/about/the-story-of-0-a-d/)

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franzpeterstein
One of the best open source games I know. I had played this in a very early
version, but it was still very immature. Apparently I can take a look inside
now.

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OhSoHumble
Here is the source for the game, for whoever is interested:

[https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/source?order...](https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/source?order=name)

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jonbaer
Also, [https://github.com/0ad/0ad](https://github.com/0ad/0ad)

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jessaustin
They don't take PRs there...

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StanleySweet
Game dev here. Indeed we do not however it shouldn't be hard to generate a
diff from your branch :)

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Sylos
I really like what they're doing with maps and map generation. To highlight a
few from this post:

"Hellas" gives you random cutouts of actual Greece landscape.

"Egypt" is just Egypt rebuilt at small scale, including 6 pre-built cities.

"Jebel Barkal" has a pre-built city on it, which dominates the map and
occasionally launches attacks against the players.

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ddtaylor
Nomad is one of my favorite modes in AoE2 I wasn't even aware 0ad was capable
of doing it, so this is awesome.

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everdev
The dev team and community are incredible. It's a brilliant open source game
that rivals any commercial RTS. It is still alpha, so things are still
changing, but that can be part of the fun too as new elements are introduced
each release.

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rambojazz
I love playing historic based RTS games, so this game is my favorite one by
far.

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zem
now that's what i call a changelog!

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deanclatworthy
This is such a great game but the network multiplayer really needs some work.
After building a certain number of units into a game the frame rate drops to
almost 1FPS.

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Dunedan
The main problem with multiplayer is that 0ad is still just using a single
thread for everything, so all the path finding, rendering etc. competes with
network related requests. One effect of that is that the player with the
slowest hardware might introduce lag for all players in multiplayer games at
the moment.

Splitting the game logic into multiple threads to have at least network
related stuff happening in another thread is afaik on the roadmap for the next
development cycle.

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ddtaylor
A group of friends were playing and really enjoying this game but suffered
from these may problem. We all fired up Visual Studio and started debugging
while playing and found the problems your discussing, but the problem doesn't
have a simple "throw more threads at it" solution because of the deterministic
nature of the game simulation relying on the path finding.

What we were able to do was put a hack into the path finding code that bailed
on one of the loops after X amount of steps. It made complex paths less
accurate (clicking units across the map to attack far away) but actually made
the game playable. We could actually control our units whereas with the lag
it's completely unplayable late game with 3 players and 3 AI.

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Imarok
Maybe you want to help develop 0ad? Seems like you have some knowledge
there...

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ddtaylor
Unfortunately I'm not in a financial position to donate my time right now.

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StanleySweet
Could you at least submit a diff of whatever you changed ? There are quite
some changes planned for the Pathfinder see D13 on code.wildfiregames.com. But
it might help any way :) Making a patch (diff file) shouldn't take you more
than ten minutes :)

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FrozenVoid
Still, there are no custom maps: you can't build a tower defense game or
anything non-standard, unlike Age of Empires2.

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Dunedan
Yes you can build custom maps and yes you can do something like tower defense.

0ad comes with atlas, its integrated map editor. Maps also support scripting
with Javascript and there are already maps included where waves of enemies get
spawned (e.g. Danubis or Jebel Barkal), what you'd probably want for tower
defense as well.

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ddtaylor
I can't fire it up right now as I'm away from a system, but does Atlas compare
to the awesome famed Warcraft 3 editor (WorldEdit)

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Imarok
I don't know Warcrafts mapesitor, but just try Atlas out. (I think it's quite
good)

