0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xšayāršā
play0ad.com
play0ad.com
0 A.D. now has an API for reinforcement learning. You can train AI to control the units in game
https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
There should be no shame for innocent ignorance, but the remedy is correction and improvement (lifting all boats), not passing out participation trophies by watering down our vocabulary. "Massachusetts" is hard to spell (I just looked it up, myself, to be certain), but that doesn't make it a good idea to accept alternates.
> lede
> obs. variant of lead n. and v.
> lede
> variant of leed 1, Obs. language.
Earlier uses of "Lead":
> lead, n. 2
> f. Journalism. A summary or outline of a newspaper story; a guide to a story that needs further development or exploration; the first (often the most important) item in an issue, bulletin, etc. Cf. lead story, etc., under sense 11b below. Quot. 1947 refers to a radio news broadcast.
> 1927: Amer. Speech II. 241 “`Lead'..is used as a noun to refer to the initial summary of the story, or as a verb to instruct the printer what to put first.”
> 1947: Hansard, Commons 19 Dec. 2113 “There is what one calls the `lead', which is..the first item.”
Note that the Webster link says
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
> Our earliest examples of 'lede' come from the 1970s, around the time that Linotype machines began disappearing from newsrooms.
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Personal experience: A few-ish months ago, I tried to get into 0AD (more than an exploratory 1-2 matches vs an AI). I like to watch videos of folks playing Age Of Empires 2, and I looked for a similar experience on youtube, to better understand the game, the meta, and standard tactics.
But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when you actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch a video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
Having played to a lot of RTS when I was younger, the main difference between AOE2 and the rest[1] is 3D vs isometric-2D. 3D tends to make games a lot messier. The comparison between AOE2 and AOE3 is a pretty good example of this phenomenon for instance.
[1] : Stacraft 2 being the outlier here, it has really “clean” graphics, while being 3D.
Not a huge outlier. I find Starcraft 1 graphics more pleasing than Starcraft 2 for the isometric-2d reason.
This is presented a bit mysteriously. Does than mean 0 A.D. devs and contributors are going to have an emperor?
Also 0ad still has severe performance problems for various reasons. One of them is that nearly all code runs single-threaded. Also the multiplayer code is all but efficient, so in a multiplayer game all players are essentially limited to the FPS of the player with the least capable hardware.
Is there an issue tracker for these problems?
edit: play0ad, I cannot respond to your comment because it's dead. You might want to reach out to dang if you'd like other people to be able to read and respond to your comments.
One of the biggest but sadly not the only problem is pathfinder threading https://code.wildfiregames.com/D14
Other things like the messaging system could probably be threaded.
Rendering needs to run in another thread than simulation too.
Feel free to reach out to us on quakenet.org #0ad-dev. We're usually there on CET.
Compare Greek Dareios / Persian Darayavauš.
No matter how hard me and other non-anglophones work to pronounce and spell English words correctly, double checking and investing money in getting the right pronunciation.
I'm happy to see it's not the case!! ^^
I love this game and its music.
They also said they would only release the source once they made a release.
By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map generation.
So far they have not yet released any source code. Since the fork happened, the original project has released two new versions.
Fun fact: Map generation was significantly faster before alpha 23. With alpha 23 map generation got reworked to be more procedural, which decreased its generation time, but enabled features like choosing between different biomes per map or the nomad game mode on all random maps.
Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really out of the ordinary?
It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a fully private fork with 3 people?
However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my attention is being online multiplayer, the diversity and challenge other human players brings cannot be replaced with AI so far... Anyway, the last time I tried 0 A.D it didn't seem to have multiplayer capability yet, but it seems to now!
I had a long spell of BZflag. The humans are so much better to play against. Highly recommended game for casual play BTW.
I love bzflag though, I used to play locally with friends, sometimes all night when I was a teen. Good times :)
https://longbowgames.com/hegemony3/
It's also just a generally fun strategy game that went largely unnoticed and they're still plucking away on DLC years later.
Other Paradox games mostly just have generic "available manpower" number and unit attrition that eats into it, depending on terrain, weather, etc. They do not concern themselves much about how that manpower actually gets to the unit (which could be on the other side of the planet) to replenish it.
Hearts of Iron - HOI(4,3) is more of a modern warfare game: you manage supply, manpower, combat lines.
Crusader Kings - CK(3,2) is more of a roleplaying game: you manage your family, dynasty, vassals, religion, personal traits, and personal/family scheming.
Europa Universalis - EU(4,3) is a game that combines a bit of everything: you've got internal affairs, foreign affairs, bit of warfare, technology, colonization, discovery, market trading, ...
Stellaris is like EU but in space. With scifi tech, federation, diplomacy and mythical/intriguing events
Victoria is more of an economy management game along with a bit of warfare and political fun.
They're all good games that can take a few couple of hours to have fun with. People usually joke that it's like playing with a map and some coloured paintbrush ...
Paradox has some other nice titles too. I think "Tyranny" and "Pillars of Eternity" is Paradox too but might be wrong. Those are RPGs (think Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, ... kind of RPGs)
Very inspiring!
I guess maybe it works if you build from source? But last I checked it was a hairball with build scripts
I use this https://code.wildfiregames.com/P241 but basically you need only this after cloning and installing deps
cd build/workspaces && sh update-workspaces.sh -j4 cd gcc && make -j4
See also https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions
Btw am I reading it correctly - you guys are still on Subversion? and no CMake? but you're using C++17. What a weird combo of old and new :)
We use Premake5 instead of CMake, for historical reasons. an attempt was made at Meson but it was too messy on Windows.
We only switched to C++17 because Mozilla's SpiderMonkey headers required us to. Else we'd still be at C++11
Edit: Had to wait several minutes, but it started.
Anyone tried compiling it on any of these systems yet, will it still compile?
For macOS, you can actually build for > 10.12 BUT the build will only be compatible with this. See https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2827 for more info about why the SDL2 broke stuff.
Wow, that's helpful.
Seriously, IPA and a translation and/or explanation would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: 'IPA': not the beer, but 'International Phonetic Alphabet'
edit: The development PPA has v0.24 alphas that were compiled in November[1], though.
I don't see much of a business model.
> The free software philosophy allows game art to be proprietary.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The Free Software Definition does not allow this. If code is contributed to 0AD under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary graphics.
The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
> They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free.
This violates the spirit of free software.
> I'm not sure why they don't do this.
I think they want the game to be free.
> The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
The free software definition only really applies to software, not art. There is nothing that would be in conflict for having a free game engine paired with proprietary artwork. There even exists plenty of examples of such; most prominently, the Doom and Quake games.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
The spirit of free software is not "free stuff", but rather the freedom to run and modify programs. A free engine paired with proprietary art doesn't violate anything.
> I think they want the game to be free.
This is the main thing and the primary factor in all of the conversation. While the 0 AD authors _could_ make a proprietary-art game and maybe make a profit doing so, their intention is clearly to have free (as in freedom) artwork as well as to have the game spread as wide as possible. There is nothing wrong with this, just as there would be nothing wrong with making a commercial game. It is a choice and one that can be taken admirably.
The short of it, there probably isn't a business model to speak of. While it does appear there exists a corporation (Wildfire Games) to cover legal concerns, it's doubtful they're doing it for profit.
> > They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free. > This violates the spirit of free software.
Stallman sold copies of the GNU compiler. To be fair, he also says "but everyone's got to be free to non-commercially redistribute exact copies." However, charging a "distribution fee" is allowed and encouraged. 0 AD themselves state they cannot afford the bandwidth costs.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht...
"What about works of art and entertainment? Here it took me a while to decide what to think about modifications."
You could use the free 0AD engine to play a proprietary campaign, just as you can use the free Calibre to read a proprietary book.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
That's a matter of opinion. The roots of free software are about empowering users to fix bugs in functional code; computer gaming was barely a thing in those days, and while fixing outright bugs in games is an obvious extension of the same philosophy, changing artworks is much less so.
> By sending in a patch, you agree that it is your own work (or else make it clear where it came from) and agree to licensing any code as GPL 2+ (or in some cases MIT, especially for code in lib/ - check the existing copyright headers on the source files you edit) and data files as CC-BY-SA 3.0.