
0 A.D. Alpha 15 - Osiris - intull
http://play0ad.com/alpha-15-osiris/
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frik
It's a open source RTS (real time strategy) game similar to the Age of Empires
game series. It's great that 0 A.D. is coming along fine :)

Microsoft closed Ensemble Studios (the maker of Age of Empires). And EA
canceled "Command & Conquer: Generals 2" as of October 29, 2013.

Sadly, beside Star Craft 2 (its SciFi theme is not for everyone) no triple-A
RTS games are in active development :( Back in 2000 there was the last RTS
hype and one had troubles to find a new roleplaying game.

As more and more players are moving back to PC/notebooks and tablets that all
have better navigation interfaces than the bad controllers, I hope RTS games
come back :)

~~~
mstrem
Not all is lost.

Let's not forget to mention the Spring RTS open source engine:
[http://springrts.com/](http://springrts.com/) which has some really good free
games (usually based on Total Annihilation).

Also new currently in beta (it has already been mentioned), Planetary
Annihilation: [http://www.uberent.com/pa/](http://www.uberent.com/pa/)

~~~
tobias2014
I can recommend Zero-K ([http://zero-k.info/](http://zero-k.info/)) and NOTA
([http://nota.machys.net/](http://nota.machys.net/)) as very polished AAA RTS
games based on SpringRTS.

As is always the case for games the available screenshots/media don't reflect
the actual gameplay. I suggest you give it a try :)

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sown
I like it. I went into it completely blind, not knowing what I would get.

The display felt like it was making the units, buildings and scenery seem too
small and I was often squinting. This caused tension to build up in my neck
and head, which caused some frustration.

Although it feels low-energy, it's fast paced. I had 1 wave that I could repel
but they almost wiped out all of my units. The 2nd wave sure did.

It wasn't totally obvious that I could upgrade units through buildings, but I
got that much eventually. The resources are up in the upper left hand. I guess
I need 3 resource types? Not quite sure what the elephants were for or how to
get them to offload.

Couldn't tell if there was advantage to one race over another.

Over all it was kind of fun. I think i'll play again.

~~~
ultimoo
I believe you can scroll up and down to zoom in and out so that the world and
the units appear bigger and smaller. I am not sure about this, but it had
worked when I had played the game a few months ago.

~~~
sown
True. It seems that when you're far out, scrolling is kind of slow. It's like
watching Robbie Robot play NES. :) Zooming in scales up the speed because
you're closer to the ground

But it's fun. It seems like it's kind of complicated but not in a way that is
overwhelming.

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gprasanth
This is written using an OOP language - C++

I was always fascinated at games like this one as to how perfectly they are a
use case to OOP paradigm. All objects are sharing a common object, and the
player can create, destroy objects, do stuff on the objects ( call their
methods ). Objects can upgrade to different versions. Objects exchange
information with themselves or even battle among themselves! Really cool
perspective, isn't it?

~~~
wereHamster
Many games use Entity-Component-System pattern, which doesn't necessarily
require an OOP language.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)

~~~
copx
That is a new trend though, primarily pushed by the fact that the popular
Unity game engine uses this model I think.

OOP is a perfectly serviceable model for developing games like this,
especially if you use modern OOP i.e. heavy on composition and interfaces as
opposed to the byzantine inheritance hierarchies of the 1990s.

The pro-ECS propaganda always contrasts ECS with said 1990s Java style OO,
correctly pointing out that inheritance (alone) does not allow clean modelling
of certain game world entities.

~~~
ijk
Entity based design goes back to at _least_ late-90's Looking Glass; for
example, Thief: The Dark Project (1998) used "a set of appropriately abstract
reusable game components designed for creating object-rich, data-driven games"
and "In _Thief_ there was no code-based game object hierarchy of any kind."[1]

It's used in Unity because it's a flexible approach to developing games.

[1]
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3355/postmortem_thief_...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3355/postmortem_thief_the_dark_project.php?print=1)

~~~
frik
One of the Thief game devs wrote the book _Game Coding Complete, 4th Ed._ it
mentions Thief game several times and it has some code and explanation about
component-entity system.

Also 3 articles about this topic:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1f83c5/3_articles_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1f83c5/3_articles_about_component_entity_systems/)

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mholt
Heard the hype about it so I thought I'd check it out. Pretty cool for open
source.

If you have trouble using this release on Macbook Pro with Retina display (OS
X 10.8+), the following worked for me:

1\. In Displays preferences, scale down the resolution (so text is bigger) by
one setting.

2\. Run the game. For me, it appeared, full-screen, in a small portion of the
screen on the bottom-left side. When I moved my mouse above that portion a few
inches, I figured out how to get the game to think my mouse was over the
buttons (fortunately they have hover effects). I had to move the mouse to a
Y-position a few inches up on the screen from where the button actually
appears (but the X-coordinate was correct).

3\. Adjust the settings so the game runs in Windowed mode. Save setting and
close the game entirely.

4\. Return resolution to normal.

5\. Re-run the game. Worked fine then.

~~~
alxndr
Retina MBP here, had to have my mouse cursor about an inch and a half below
the button I was aiming for. However even after doing the steps you laid out,
pointing is still off in full-screen mode (only).

~~~
mholt
Yep. I keep mine windowed. Oh well.

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clarry
It looks neat, but the performance was bad enough that I couldn't play it.

To mention another decent open source strategy game project, I'd say Widelands
is to Settlers what 0 A.D. is to Age of Empires.

[https://wl.widelands.org/](https://wl.widelands.org/)

~~~
ohmygeek
thanks for widelands. never knew about it :D

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cpeterso
btw, 0 A.D. embeds Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JS engine for scripting:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_A.D._(video_game)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_A.D._\(video_game\))

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the_french
I tried this alpha out with a friend, it seems like the multiplayer is
completely broken, each time we start a match we get out-of-sync errors and
can't play. I wonder if this has to do with trying to play using linux and OS
X

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pyrrhotech
Any time I start looking through the source code of one of these games, I
wonder how I get paid in the same realm (sometimes even more) as a meager UI
developer than these guys doing "real" engineering. Makes me feel dumb, but
also intrigued and intellectually stimulated. I'd like to become a better
programmer someday, so I could understand this code.

~~~
JoshuaJB
I'm one of the developers for 0AD, and I have to say it's really not that hard
to get started. I began checking out the source code and developing patches
only about eight months ago (I didn't know /any/ C++ when I started, only some
JS and Python), and in the mean time I'm gotten very familiar with the
codebase and joined the official team. In fact, the multiplayer lobby in this
release was primarily developed by myself.

Feel free to join us on #0ad or #0ad-dev on quakenet if you have any
questions.

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isaacdl
How does this compare to other (commercial) games in this genre?

~~~
oddshocks
Well, it's an alpha, so it's not really comparable yet. It's safe to say that
it lacks some "probably expected" featured.

I don't know about now, but when I tried it a month ago, it lacked an options
menu. Clicking "options" on the main menu opened a dialog with placeholder
text. Maybe they've added one now, but I didn't see one skimming the updates
list.

~~~
zaporozhets
There is now a neat options menu with all kinds of the obvious settings you
would want to change. even some graphics things, though most of them seem to
be for water haha.

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mml
Would be cool if they distributed via torrent (though their d/l speeds are
pretty impressive anyway).

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gorhill
That really look great on video, I definitely will have to check this.

I started playing the first Age of Empires such a long time ago. After Age of
Titans (my favorite of all -- the God powers added a lot of fun), I didn't
like as much the new ones.

Being an average player, I got the most fun watching recorded games from top
notch players, so I hope this will be a feature if not in there already.

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mladenkovacevic
Thank you for this game. I especially love the music and the 2 new tracks
definitely don't disappoint. Keep up the great work.

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alexnking
Wow, very impressive.

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lowglow
You should toss this up on [http://itch.io](http://itch.io)

