0AD is the most polished, beautiful open source game I have ever played. This campaign is not about building a new game: the game already exists as shown in the video and is even in an enjoyable-to-play state. Definitely check it out if you haven't already (and it's cross-platform!): http://play0ad.com/
It really is a fantastic effort already. IMHO, their major needs are:
(1) scripted events, which would allow a tutorial mode and various scenarios. Apparently this is a tough integration into the existing engine.
(2) to make combat formations really work, so there's some sort of tactics to combat. You can do some of that, but it generally turns into a mob fight.
Good news is it looks like they're intending both of these already.
Personally, I'd like to use their engine and assets to create a turn-based combat game; RTS is a bit hectic for me.
This depends on the civilization and their troops.
Your claim is true for most barbarian, irregulars, and fanatics, but false for regular troops, and some irregulars like Greek style hoplite.
The main things 0ad is missing to reflect ancient combat are:
- Morale, as most fights had been decided by one side fleeing.
- Training, as its a real difference if one side has trained regular legion, hoplites or immortals, and the other side just barbaric irregulars, when it comes to the question if they follow commands, stay in formation, or just fight their own. ( e.g. pursue into a trap )
- Formation, as some troops fight in close formations, others in lose formations.
- Role, some troops are to hold and block, others have a shock of impact (Roman legion) or a shock of momentum (Greek hoplites). Same with ranged combat, as there is a real difference between skirmishers, who charge, throw their javelins or fire their bows, and run away hoping the opponent will break formation and pursue, and archers who stand (behind shield bearers) and deliver.
There are also some weapons missing, e.g.:
- There are no horse archers with bows, witch makes Persian light cavalry feel wrong with their javelins.
- Its not possible to have melee troops with additional ranged weapons, so a typical Roman shock of impact is not possible, as are Persian immortals who are trained with spear and bow, on horse and on foot.
I've put a lot of hours into playing 0AD and it's a joy. Very polished, really good gameplay, addictive, and engaging.
The bots can be ruthless at times, others you can figure out and trump. If you need them, then there are cheats to help whilst you learn.
I just went and tried to give money, and it's going to take me a while, incredibly all my disposable cash is in PayPal and my debit card is linked to an empty account, so I have to do the PayPal > bank shuffle, but I'll be supporting this as soon as I can.
They should really state this more prominently in the campaign! Reading it, I was thinking something like: 'well, this is pretty, but what are the chances that they actually release it in the next 3 years or so?'
ya sounds like they should say - "you can play now, download here and play for the next 45 days, but just remember us before those days are up and donate so we can make it better"
I tried it, and it seems really neat (though I generally suck at RTS games)... the graphics are a huge leap beyond other free RTS games I've tried before, and it does seem very polished.
One thing though: what's the frame-rate supposed to be? I'm getting 2-3 FPS, which is I suppose playable, but pretty jerky when things get hairy. Is it just my system, or is this just the nature of the game? [I guess if it's recalculating the world with every frame...]
This is probably not the most constructive comment here, but it's more correct to say open source RTS game than RTS open source game because open source in this case is used as an attributive adjective(pre-nominal modifier) and RTS as a noun-string nominative adjective which modifies 'game'.
Also, your title tries a call to action, that is, the first Help is a intransitive verb rather than a noun. So to is unnecessary there. In which case, Help founding would be a better writing. Of course, if we're to use gerund then the word founding could be better replaced with.
In support of pedantry, when I first read the post I thought this was going to be an RTS about managing an open source project, which sounds like a slightly more masochistic version of desert bus.[0]
All this and you don't delve in "founding" which is what made me cringe more than the grammar (as a non-native speaker I tend to tollerate bad grammar but spot quickly bad syntax)
I did edit it in very shortly after. To me the wording irked me more than the word choice 'founding'.
Besides, I generally don't like pointing out grammar; I find it a bad taste, especially when you use all jargons and all.
you do have a good point, though. The reason I decided to write the bad-taste grammatical pointing-out was because I was irked out. I thought it was RTS open source but the 'founding' did more, now that I think about it.
I think what irks everyone in written text is probably hard-wired in our brain, much like the feeling when rasping chalkboard with a fork or the fight-or-flight response... In my case I don't care that much about grammar even in my mother tongue(s) probably because I grew up mostly bilingual (my parents only speak Spanish, but since I was 4 years old a good deal of the TV I watched and all my school time was in Catalan) but not completely, meaning that I'm likely to make (relatively minor) grammar mistakes in both languages. This makes me overlook this kind of mistakes (grammar) because the patterns are not that hard-wired in my brain, whereas syntax is stronger. I'm not sure but probably reading a lot (which I used to do, now I read mostly in English) made syntax stick stronger than grammar (a good question would be why: grammar is patterns, syntax is elements...)
Don't worry, I didn't want to call the syntax nazi police on you, neither the grammar police :) I just found slightly funny you overlooked the (for me) clear error but pointed things I wasn't really paying attention to: it was a good reminder that I should be more careful with my grammar ;)
PS: Oh crap, just read your user info... So bad a joke :D:D:D
The causality of why you "don't mind bad grammar" is not correct. I am raised bilingually (both non English) and after some yeas of school I went to an international school where half of my courses were in English.
Bad grammar bothers me a lot in any language, even if it is one I don't speak well. It shows a lack of time spent into the details of things. It is the sort of mentality that causes plane crashes; "I checked the engine last time". Only on a lower level. If you adopt the 'but you know what I meant' argument than we'd all say things like "ain't nobody got time for that". It is funny as a meme, but it makes you sound stupid. Of course you have to take into consideration whether someone is a native speaker or not.
You don't have to care; you are free to sound stupid if you want to.
I can't see where in my argument I said "everyone in the same situation should be like I am," nor where in your argument it is so clear that I should follow your (personal) standards. Also I'm getting a feeling that in your comment you imply I am happy with my (probable) bad grammar. I am not happy with it, but I hit diminishing returns a long time ago.
Oh, and I'm completely happy about sounding stupid when speaking a foreign language (so far no-one has complained about my spoken English or German, only in France I've had "complaints") as long as other people can understand what I try to say and what I say is meaningful to them.
I am a non-native speaker myself. That's why I didn't go this sentence is wrong and use < > and used more grammatical jargon, so that it may be looked up.(someone once did it for me, correcting my sentences part by part, with all grammatical terms, which I looked up later.)
Honestly I don't understand the upvotes. It's pedantry at its worst. I was satisfied with the changed title.
Not totally the worst - since this is constructive (the title changed to something clearer), if you correct the title to something easier to understand, it is likely that more eyes will see it.
I love RTSs. Total Annihilation (TA) was an early favourite.
SpringRTS is an open source game engine that improved beyond TA and actually had UI features that Supreme Commander has drawn inspiration from.
The multilayer is epic, its totally LUA scriptable. People have re-purposed that engine for all manor of weird RTS type games. I sincerely hope this project is going to use that battle hardened, cross platform, actively developed, open source RTS engine rather than roll their own.
They already have an engine. And art, and a game. You can go download it. This is money to make it better. (Don't let that fool you though, what they have now is very impressive. I'm pretty sure those are actual screenshots.)
SpringRTS has an engine, and art. There are multiple games on the SpringRTS engine that don't use poached Total Annihilation content - sadly, only one of them has a real playerbase (Zero-K).
The engine launched back in '06 and has changed developers a bunch of times, which means the code is heavily rotted and it needs a lot of love. It has legacy issues and tooling issues out the wazoo, so it really needs some love from a charity or a google-summer-of-code-style project. The problem is they suck at the organizational stuff so they've never managed to put together anything like that.
The big one I love on the Spring engine is Zero-K. It's the one that provides the most "complete" experience of the Spring games and the one that takes the TA-style gameplay in the most interesting directions.
The problem is that, even as the best-developed Spring game it still needs a lot of polish and it's never going to be more than a labour of love for a few hundred players and a handful of devs. Their donations just keep the server running and that's about it.
0 A.D. has been around a long time, it's been quite a few years since my last commit to springrts repo and 0. A.D. had already been open source back then (it was closed source for a while IIRC.)
Another fan here. Played them all a lot, from the original TA + expansions, TA Spring (loved how long-range bullets literally bounced back off the shields), and the Supreme Commander series.
So far I think the best in the series was Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (not Supreme Commander II).
I backed & am greatly looking forward to Planetary Annihilation (though not too excited about the cartoony art-work). Just made a donation to 0AD too.
I've been a long time fan of Age Of Empires II. 0AD looks like a clone of it, more or less.
I think I last checked in on 0AD 2 years ago, before there was AI. Back then AOE II had poor performance issues that I really wanted addressed, like wrong colors (fixable by a user patch), only low resolution support (also fixable by a user patch? I forget), and horrible network management on busy LAN games (6 teams with 150 population each? Players will get dropped once battles start).
Then AOE II got picked up by a contracted company for the pure purpose of bringing an old game into the modern world, and HD got released with lots of fixes. It wasn't perfect, but there was much rejoicing.
Anyone played both 0AD and AOE II HD? Any comparison points?
I played both, and I also really enjoyed both AOEII's.
I think you will love 0ad. It's more complex than AOE IMO - some upgrade paths exclude others, so you have to make tradeoffs, there are sophistiscated terrain bonuses (e.g. view distance of towers depends on their location), soldiers can gather resources so you have to tradeoff economy vs. military even more... I just find it deeper. You'll love it!
If you like Age of Empires, GameRanger is a service that lets you host old games online. There are probably about 10,000+ games of Age of Empires 2 going on there right now, not to mention FIFA and about 1000 other old PC games that only worked via LAN. http://www.gameranger.com
Plus, Gameranger is a 1-man operation. And he's a really cool man.
When I first heard of a crowd-funded game, I assumed it would be open source and was surprised to find it wasn't. Glad to see it's starting to happen and hope they meet their target. I'll definitely be throwing a few dollars their way!
This actually makes me less willing to contribute. The worst outcome here is that they hit 15% of their funding goal and get stuck there, which means that there's enough money to do some work and to raise expectations of results from the funders, but not enough to produce a commercial (or near-commercial) quality game at the end of it.
With a Kickstarter all-or-nothing approach I can be quite generous (I'd probably go for the $100+ option here), safe in the knowledge that if nobody else offers any funding then I won't be the only one chipping in.
Interestingly one of the most well known figures in the Starcraft scene, Sean 'Day[9]' Plott, yesterday announced that he was working with a browser based game company on a new RTS.
Ideal would be if an online multiplayer community evolves around this game. Does the game feature the ability to track multiplayer win/losses and keep some kind of ELO rating or similar on a server? Is it reasonably safe against cheating in multiplayer? Does it allow setting a handicap for less good players?
As of right now the multiplayer has very limited support and isn't even supported in the basic packaged build you can download. Running multiplayer currently involves building it yourself with a specific patch. As for what they get done if they get the funding, we can only hope.
To clarify, there has been support for multiplayer games for a long time. Currently you connect to other players by entering the host player's ip address.
What is currently being worked on is a lobby system so you can create an account and view listings of what games are being hosted. The work is probably going to be added to the game soon, then further improvements like a ranking system can be added in the future.
I've been waiting for a game similar to Age of Empires to come but this just completely destroys Age of Empires, Thanks for this awesome game I will support.
Really? where can I read about it. AOE has the in game advance empire thing going where you can upgrade your entire empire to the next level I thought it was pretty cool.
I'm not sure I would call the system more sophisticated than AoE, it is very similar. There are three phases; Village, Town and City which work similarly to the AoE series, unlocking units, buildings and technologies. The idea behind only having three is that the first age in AoE tended to be quite limited so in 0 A.D. the aim is to make the village phase more significant with it being more like the second age in AoE2/AoM in terms of available units.
I've been playing RTS games for ages and the one thing that concerns me is balance. With so many different factions I can imagine this is going to be rather hard to do without a large amount of overlap between them. Best of luck!
Out of curiosity, how do developers "stay in business"? Is Wildfire making enough off of donations and kickstarter-like campaigns to keep development going strong?
0 A.D. Has made enormous progress toward the 14th Alpha, it's already incredibly engaging. They have my buck, and hopefully they can get consistent gloss on this gem.
While working fulltime, I find it hard to make time for free software projects and I would love to see something like this succeed. I have contributed to this project and encourage anyone who loves games to do so. We want free software games of all kinds to be out there!
Yes it is. It looks exactly like it. But no complAint. I will gladly back up this project cause I feel like AoE decided to take another route, while this game takes you back :)
> I fear the price tag is much to high. A tag around $10k or $20k would be much better, as payout is only done for successful campaigns, iirc.
I think that's Kickstarter's rule, but this is Indiegogo; right under the funding progressbar it has this note "This campaign will receive all funds raised even if it does not reach its goal."
No, the game is set in the period from 500 B.C. to 1 B.C. and during that period firing while moving was not common. It could possibly be added for some types of high quality horse archers but isn't a high priority.
It was certainly common in the east. The Battle of Carrhae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae) was at 56 B.C. and is one of the most famous examples of an engagement with horse archers who could fire while moving from that era.
Even well before then the Scythians were known for their horse archer armies and were tricky to defeat.
I know it doesn't seem like a big thing, but if Romans can form testudos while moving, then it seems only fair to have true horse archers. Both so that players can accurately recreate the tactics (horse archers + heavy cavalry were the mainstay of several eastern factions which people might want to mod in) and just because they're more interesting that way. Otherwise the game's horse archers are little more than fast moving foot archers, which doesn't allow for much more creativity.
I was thinking of games like Starcraft where even flying units had to stop before firing, as opposed to Total Annihilation where most (all?) units could fire on the move. So I guess I'm concerned about the ability of units to do multiple things at once, which os something every game should have.
"Importantly, “0 A.D.” is a time period that never actually existed: In the usual calendar, one goes from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. and skips zero.
This reflects the historical fiction in the game: Who would have won if all the factions were pitted against each other when each of them was at its prime?"