
Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine - doener
https://github.com/SFTtech/openage
======
SEJeff
As a longtime fan of Age of Empires, I have absolutely fallen in love with the
open source 0ad clone.

[http://play0ad.com/](http://play0ad.com/)

The AI is surprisingly good, and the character models are as good as Age of
Empires. Bonus points that it is in all major Linux distro repositories if
you're one of those kinds of people (like me!).

~~~
axaxs
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.

~~~
SEJeff
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/](https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-21-ulysses/)

[https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-
alpha-22-venustas/](https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-22-venustas/)

I find the AI to be challenging to beat on hard, but not impossible. I'll play
as the Ptolemies, because I know that they were the pinnacle of the Greek
Phalanx lead by none other than Alexander the Great. So I was trying to take a
large group of spearman up to take over an enemy town center filled with
archers but wasn't having a ton of luck. Every time my infantry would retreat,
the 20 archers would come out and chase them down. When I'd turn back, the
archers would head back to the town center and shred through them. My winning
strategy involved staging 10 companion cavalry to the east and have the
infantry attack the town center and then retreat south, drawing the archers
out to try to take out the infantry. The companion cavalry rode north of the
archers cutting off their retreat to the town center and let the infantry cut
them down.

The newer AI will also scout out your location and attack weak spots. They'll
purposefully avoid attacking through walls and lots of towers if you
mistakenly leave an unprotected rear or flank that they can use to march right
up and destroy your town. It is certainly more difficult now and the new
graphics make it a lot of fun to play.

~~~
mnicky
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](https://github.com/agentx-
cgn/Hannibal)

------
peterburkimsher
For other AoE fans, I like this real-world map creator tool:

[https://peterolson.github.io/AOE2-Real-Map-
Creator/](https://peterolson.github.io/AOE2-Real-Map-Creator/)

I've made my own custom map of Taiwan with the correct locations for gold,
stone, and types of fish in the area. I plan to screen-record some famous
historical events and make a video, but I'm still figuring out how to make
such a video interesting and short enough to actually watch.

~~~
alanning
For what its worth I would watch just based on your description alone. May be
better to just make one and get feedback than focus on making it interesting.
Also, please let me know once you do. :-)

------
everdev
0ad is another open source project. It's a full-fledged game which can be
modded with your own imagery/units, etc.

[http://play0ad.com/](http://play0ad.com/)

------
pwaai
In case this wasn't posted, here is an index of all open source clones.

[https://osgameclones.com/](https://osgameclones.com/)

It doesn't list OpenAge there yet but shows 0ad instead. I wonder if we'll
ever see Total War 1 clone as well as a Civ 5 clone.

~~~
Scriptor
Seems like OpenAge is just a clone of the engine, not a full standalone game
like 0ad.

~~~
dbrgn
Not yet, but a full game is the plan.

------
jstimpfle
AoE2 is the one game I play regularly. It's great that this project was
started, but is it still active? Did anyone manage to compile and run it, and
if so, how does it feel?

Not to belittle the nice work, but I feel there was a better reason for making
this clone a few years ago. There has been a "HD" version on Steam for a
couple of years, which finally has good network support and most of the bugs
seem ironed out, after almost 20 years! The only thing I still miss is to be
able to run it on Linux...

~~~
opsroller
Runs better on wine than it does on windows.

~~~
mikejmoffitt
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).

~~~
jsjolen
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.

------
rawnlq
There's also a new Age of Empires coming out soon. You can thank Bill Gates
for it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/d0s9j8s/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/div4w6h/?context=10000)

------
cjslep
Note that the AoE 2 community is still going strong with HAD and Voobly
communities, casters like T90 and ZeroEmpires, and streamers like Viper.

There have been some epic professional games as well as community games.

It will be interesting if a similar competitive community popped up for the
open source versions.

------
larrykwg
Most impressive feature:

> We have an integrated terminal emulator supporting ecma-48. You can run vim
> or anything else within openage. This is neat to interactively edit scripts.

it runs vim!

------
JepZ
Status Video on Youtube

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnLTS4tAJKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnLTS4tAJKs)

------
okanesen
There is also the open source implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2:

[https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2](https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2)

~~~
bri3d
The approaches are dramatically different, though - this implementation seeks
to discover and re-write the game logic from the outside in (black box), using
reverse-engineering to understand things like the assets file formats.
OpenRCT2 started as a direct translation of RCT from the original assembler
into C (via Hex-Rays) and builds on the original game engine verbatim.

------
daxaxelrod
Age of empires is the only game I play on steam

~~~
vineetch
Same here! Wololo.

------
andrew_wc_brown
I'm working on my own open-source game as a Tetris Attack clone.
[https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop/](https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-
pop/)

What I'm always surprised is the lack of tooling and test code and I'm of the
belief that in the war of the clones, the ones that chooses tooling and a
stack designed for larger teams, and a focus on BDD will get your project
where it needs to go.

Instead of building a game, focus on building a team.

Great work on this clone so far, I was just talking top of mind.

~~~
caio1982
I did not downvote you but I suspect you might have been downvoted because you
"stole" someone else's thunder so I would suggest you post your clone in a,
perhaps, Show HN post.

~~~
kbenson
Interestingly, it's pretty common to also mention your own project in a
comment, and how it's received seems to differ quite a bit based on how it was
presented. If they start out with relevant comments about the current
submission, a segue-way into a somewhat related project is usually taken well.
If you start off with what can be taken as self promotion and take a while to
get to relevant comments about the current submission (or never do), it's not
received well.

In this case, I'm actually surprised that it was downvoted. After the initial
line with a link, it's all fairly general and about clone projects in general,
which makes that line read as presenting bon fides and not self promotion when
the comment is interpreted as a whole.

------
nurettin
Why use SDL2 for input handling when you have Qt5?

~~~
cosarara97
Isn't sdl2 a lot smaller than qt5?

~~~
nurettin
They list both as a dependency, that's why I mentioned it.

------
itwy
I am curious how is this not a copyright infringement?

~~~
JetSetWilly
No code or artwork has been copied from the original game, so why would it be
copyright infringement?

------
nkkollaw
This is awesome if it means being able to play AOE2 or a clone on Linux.

I'm not sure I understand if engine means playable game..?

~~~
d33
Not really playable. See status here:

[https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/status.md](https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/status.md)

~~~
nkkollaw
Thanks.

------
JepZ
AoE II for Linux :D

Hope it will be in a playable state soon.

~~~
emidln
0ad is playable today. On Fedora try

    
    
        dnf install 0ad

------
mehrdadn
Interesting, what's made them choose to do this with AoE II rather than AoE
III? Is II more popular?

~~~
andrew_wc_brown
I think the best in the series on AOM, felt like a streamlined version, though
that game requires no cloning.

I only have faint memories of AoE II and at the time never had a powerful
enough computer for AoE III.

I can never get the iconic AoE theme out of my head.

------
saikiranmc
WTF

Contributing: Being typical computer science students, we hate people. Please
don't contact us. Nobody likes Age of Empires anyway. None of you is
interested in making openage more awesome anyway. We don't want a community.
Don't even think about trying to help.

Guidelines: No bug reports or feature requests, the game is perfect as is.
Don't try to fix any bugs, see above. Don't implement any features, your code
is crap. Don't even think about sending a pull request. Please ignore the easy
tasks that could just be done. Absolutely never ever participate in this
boring community. Don't note the irony, you idiot. To prevent accidental
violation of one of those guidelines, you should never

~~~
TN1ck
It's a joke. It's obvious that they want people to contribute, as this follows
with:

\---

To prevent accidental violation of one of those guidelines, you should never

* learn git

* fork the repo

* learn python

* learn c++14

* read the code and documentation

* contribute anything to the code

* contact us

cheers, happy hecking.

\---

The contribution guide in general is pretty well written and welcoming.

~~~
Sylos
Also, "Don't note the irony, you idiot." directly above that.

~~~
lsh
And for those Vulcans that are still confused, this is Morrisette-level irony.

~~~
tkoolen
Is it though? I think it's not the actually-just-a-coincidence type of 'irony'
from her song, but rather actual 'verbal irony',
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Verbal_irony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Verbal_irony).

------
cpeterso
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.

~~~
blattimwind
Rule of thumb suggests that implementing AoE with Python today probably means
PyAge2 runs about as well on a 4.5 GHz CPU as AoE2 did on a 266 MHz Pentium
II. (not that well)

~~~
cjalmeida
And with C++14 the stdlib provides out of the box alternatives for most
syscalls. No cross platform woes needed.

Also, they do use Python. One of it's advantage is that it's easy to integrate
with native code. So you should implement the hot parts in C++.

