The crux of the issue is that their simulation is single threaded. It's a complicated problem to do both deterministic and multi-threaded, but I feel some of us could help them.
Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.
It would depend where and when. An army on their own territory might know the terrain. An army on enemy's territory would try to send scouts ahead as opposed to wondering randomly, too.
So at the army level it would almost work out like the they have "psychic" powers because they have scouts. At the individual units it would depend. But it would also be kind of annoying to play if the realism is increased too much. Like they wander into the woods and get stuck in a bog and die of hypothermia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)
Since rock dots don't affect the pronunciation of the name, you wouldn't expand to add a letter (which would affect the pronunciation) if you can't type the decorative dots.
Realtime Strategy doesn't necessarily require that you have a top-down perspective or a specific set of controls, right? Pretty sure Brutal Legend is also technically considered an RTS
> But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.
In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar being a clone
It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking resulted in smoother movement.
I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and this game?
> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best
If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.
This would be behaving like a caged animal, and in a game, that's good, and better than a smarter algorithm. You don't want them to be idiots, but you don't want them to be magic, either.
The old "follow the left-hand wall" maze-solving strategy is another naive way to get out of a trap. It's not fun gameplay, but it's naive and it exists, so better naive strategies do too.
It also doesn’t at all address inter-unit collisions, which is a big topic in RTS pathfinding.
It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into account the position of your mobile units as well - for example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable conditions.
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/).
There was the Total Annihilation RTS and while it had the normal 2d overhead view, all the data was in 3d.
A Swedish gaming clan put together an accelerated full 3d engine to replay Total Annihilation recorded demos. As it got more and more features it was realized that most of what was needed to play TA was being recreated so they closed the loop and made it into a full game engine which they called SpringRTS. There was the default accurate TA game code but there was also a very popular mod that was not afraid to change things a bit, basically "we like Total Annihilation but also think it could be better" and they called it Balanced Annihilation. We are almost there. BA lived under the Spring project for a few years, but really when you think about it there are ip problems with it using the TA assets, also, I suspect someone wanted to do engine work but was having a hard time with upstreaming it, so it forked off the Spring project, they rebuilt all the units(same unit different skin) are doing a ton of great engine work and called it BAR (retronymed into Beyond All Reason but I suspect it originally stood for Balanced Annihilation Reborn or something like that). So BAR is basically a highly modified legally distinct Total Annihilation.
Zero-K is another great RTS based on this engine. It drifts further off the TA formula than BAR does.
"Currently in development". It's got robots.
"Shut up and take my money, I'm making a donation" :)
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.
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 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.
Good times.
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.
The huge battle toward the end of the game dropping or making the game unplayable was what killed it for us. We didn't want to spend all that time making our army and strategy only to be disappointed. At the time we went back to playing Age of Empires 2 DE.
That's correct. While 0ad is an RTS, behind the scenes it's still turn-based and in multiplayer games turns can only progress once every participants PC has responded. That's also why the game also feels slow when a player has a bad latency to the player hosting the game.
I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..
Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and mature. I don’t think there’s any commercially available RTS that can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and performance.
After reading BAR's homepage and the FAQ, I still have no idea what to expect. It could be a purely online game with ads and in-game buys, through a central proprietary server. It could also have a single player campaign.
There are AI opponents and you can configure friendly and hostile AI players. There are also two dedicated "beat waves of enemies then final boss" pve modes.
There's not a real theme other than "robot armies built by commanders with exponentially scaling economy".
There is a lore/backstory/setting planned to be released on March 8th.
You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.
Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.
That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.
For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.
I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.
I'll check BAR out.
As for the new capture attack for citizens, I imagine this could lead to some really risky endgame strategies where a player moves citizens from their base to attack the enemy's supporting buildings while the enemy is distracted.
Wanna grow fast? Train workers who can't fight, but are resource efficient to make. Risk being badly weakened if getting attacked, for the benefit of the workers giving you much more resources to then raise an army.
Also watch out for the elephants!
As far as I remember, elephants have always felt overpowered to me. Could be lack of skill on my part.
Lesson learned. Sheep can wait