Open-source clone of the Age of Empires II engine

Yes much better. I have trouble beating the default AI on its highest setting now. I am not a great player, but I don't suck either.

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-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.

Another stupid question: did performance improve in the last ~two or three years? Even on the kinda small maps back then it quickly ran into CPU limits.

What do you mean in specific? The current models are mostly made with Blender 3D and they're quite good.

Sprites in a 3D game look horrible for most objects: buildings, characters, terrain. Sprites are typically used for particle effects, grass, or objects that are far away. The latter is often used a performance optimization.

The Open AI guys made a very impressive Dota 2 AI that trained itself through self play (and against pros), there is a pretty interesting write-up about it:

https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/

Not yet, but a full game is the plan.

I had a look at some .NET code integrating steam once and the integration itself looked quite clean and lightweight.

I'd be interested if people got banned or something like that for modifying games when they were clearly not hacking/cheating/cracking/impacting the experience of others.

From DSfix for Dark Souls I know that it can be fine with them if you hook function calls to improve rendering for example.

I imagine you also have to distinguish between Steam and VAC (anti-cheat) integration.

Why? That's like saying I only read Of Mice and Men, Dune, and Wealth of Nations.

There's so many other options to explore!

Doesn't it compile natively on Linux?

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).

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.

To be honest I can't even tell that I've been down voted. I never thought to bother posting my clone to hackernews and likely wont unless I do a postmortem when the game has been released and if I have something worth reading.

My market isn't really here on Hacker News, there's already a built in community on Discord which is where its worth link baiting so I don't even have to promote. https://discord.gg/bpk6ue

There are sum of 100 hard code people or less and thats all I'm likely to reach. My only motivation for my clone is so the community I already participate in has something for competitive play.

I could certainly say I could have written something with more breath to it and that might merit a downvote.

I remember I once wanted to hack on the open-source CIV4 game to give it a friendly UI game but found the codebase to be as unfriendly as the one linked above.

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

Thanks.

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

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++.