0 A.D A free, open-source game of ancient warfare | Hacker News Reader

0 A.D A free, open-source game of ancient warfare

play0ad.com

321 pointskrisgenre71 comments

Some of my friends started a weekly gaming group when lockdown began. We initially played 0 AD as a joke. One year in, we've had stints of Starcraft 2, CS:GO, and Among Us. But at this point we've settled into something of a rotation of 0 AD and Overwatch.

It's a good game to play with friends and the jankiness is actually pretty charming. Just stay away from naval combat.

0 AD naval stuff can be pretty brutal. I read that some of the naval stuff was improves this last update. In any case, I don't think I've ever enjoyed naval combat in an RTS!

Puzzle Pirates has great naval combat, it's an MMO however and requires a bit of investment before you can sail a ship into battle.

I’ve been playing the new Civilization 6 Pirates multiplayer mode. It’s exactly as it sounds —- travel the seas building an armada, burying treasure, and pillaging costal cities.

It’s much faster paced than a traditional Civ game, and only takes a bit over an hour to finish. 10/10 would recommend

Civilizations isn’t an RTS, it is turn based

Naval combat is better (reworked) in Aye Pirates mod.

https://ayepirates.com

Disclaimer: I made this mod.

Great to see 0ad featured here!

I collaborated on some mods and reviews so I have some context on the high-level (scripting) part of the game, which comprises mostly everything that is not engine related. Feel free to ask any questions.

It's a passion project with a lot of attention given to historical acuity.

This release saw a lot of balance fixes (that didn't get much love in the trailer) and a process to release in faster (6-months) cycles - compared to 2 years taken from a23-a24.

It established a baseline for great improvements coming on the next version, in particular faction (civ) differentiation and faster gameplay.

I hope they start to charge something to support this game.

No reason not to offer a paid version of an open source project.

I know the donations are there but paying for a copy now that it’s so stable would open up support for paying customers and further help legitimize the open source RTS game development process IMHO.

I like the Mindustry way of doing this. Game can be downloaded freely but costs a few bucks if you want to buy it on Steam.

1000% agree! Mindustry's model is my favorite so far. I get all the benfits of open source software while still supporting the developers by happily paying for the convenience of Steam integration.

It seems this is actually pretty stable. I played a23 a couple of times and there was no major problem (I don't really remember even any minor problem).

Why not change the versioning scheme? Instead of calling it alpha 23, just call it version 23? Or maybe 1.23 and reserve major version changes for big/breaking changes. Or just adopt a yearly versioning scheme similar to Firefox/Chrome.

I think many people will just stay away from this when they read "alpha", but this is really not an alpha version anymore.

For me the biggest marketing factor for this game was shell autocompletion for package managers.

0ad is the first package in archlinux.

A modern version of the zzt trick!

And the AAA towing!

Note that the free software definition does not require game assets such as art[0], data[1], world maps, etc. to be free. Those are data, not software. They are for appreciation, not functional use. Stallman only asks the code to be under a free license.

Selling a license to the art and game files (how many hit points does the enemy have?) and keeping the software free is a potential business model for freedom-respecting videogames.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-softwa...

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...

Keeping the art which is necessary to actually play the game proprietary is not respecting freedom. Its the equivalent of releasing just the compiled binary and keeping the source closed. The GPL game code is useless without the art assets.

I think Stallman is talking about art as in paintings, not art assets which are integral to the working of a GPL program.

"For example, some game engines released under the GNU GPL have accompanying game information—a fictional world map, game graphics, and so on—released under such a verbatim-distribution license. This kind of data can be part of a free system distribution, even though its license does not qualify as free, because it is non-functional."

> The GPL game code is useless without the art assets.

You can make your own art. When software is free, you can modify it to be less addictive, to fast forward, to learn from it, and generally protect your rights. "Free as in beer" was never the point of free software.

> is not respecting freedom.

Sounds like an over-broad definition of freedom, the kind open-source supporters might use. I suppose you think museums shouldn't charge too?

If gnome desktop shipped without any icons or assets would we still consider it free software? I just don't understand how releasing only a subset of the code, or code not in its preferred editing format is "not free", but failing to release assets critical to the working of the program somehow maintains freedom. I mean you could also decompile the program which is a lot easier than recreating the art assets from scratch.

Since you've confirmed I share a different opinion, it seems Stallman has a bias toward console applications where art is not a critical component. That's the most charitable interpretation for this cognitive dissonance I can think of.

I get your point. There is a difference between what free software is in theory, and what we grew to expect from free software. I mean common expectations software are build instructions, packaged versions (binaries, installers), publicly viewable code - but the free software requirements say nothing about these, people just provide it because they want to make users' lives easier. And so, they became the norm over the years. But they are not strictly part of what makes a software "free software".

The “free software” requirement as defined by Stallman doesn’t require it sure. My argument is that it’s not a logically consistent position.

It would be wrong for EA to take a GPL game and modify the code without keeping it GPL. But somehow it’s OK for them to modify all the art assets to get the same effect of making the software as a whole effectively proprietary. Unlike console applications the art in a GUI program is critical to its function.

It makes little sense.

> But somehow it’s OK for them to modify all the art assets to get the same effect of making the software as a whole effectively proprietary

Stallman believes it should be legal to redistribute all art non-commercially. That is his political belief, outside the scope of free software, however. https://stallman.org/articles/guardian-correction.html

I just don't feel like it's practical to ask game companies to distribute ALL assets semi-freely, and somehow still make a profit. Let me know if you come up with a good business model.

There's no reason you couldn't release the game art as CC BY SA alongside the GPL source code.

I will wager that since development began in 2001, and this is still in alpha stage, that this game will still not be ready by the year 2041. See also: Lindy Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

I worked on this game when I was in High School and at the time we were just entering the first alpha release (amazing to see it grace HN!). Most of the team then and still today is comprised of part-time volunteers, students - people who are simply passionate about game development, art, history or some combination thereof. Many of the contributors actually were sourced from Age of Empires/Age of Mythology fans that wanted to build something that paid proper homage to the things they liked and overcame the things they didn't. Though my contributions are quite distant at this point, I can say that as this is our collective passion project they likely never intend to "release" the game because they're simply having too much fun making it. That would imply a finality that we can instead avoid by passing the project to the next generation of ambitious developers and artists as I once did to my successors. The game is actually quite stable now, supported on all three major OS's, and has a small but devoted modding community. Even though it's free, I've felt that the limited budget (exclusively donations) has always made marketing the game its biggest challenge to finding a broader audience. Hopefully landing at the top of HN will help! We just want people to enjoy the game - if you're an RTS fan, give it a shot!

Big shout out to any of the current or past contributors reading this post - you all deserve immense credit for your work over the decades: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/dat...

Fair points all, and I thank you for your illuminating comments.

I really enjoy 0 A.D., so thanks!

> I can say that as this is our collective passion project they likely never intend to "release" the game because they're simply having too much fun making it

Word for that, autotelic

Myself and other have argued it should stop labeling itself as Alpha for years, it's a completely awesome (if not totally balanced) RTS

Yeah some people overly strictly version their product, PuTTY was first released in 1999 but somehow the latest stable is 0.74.

Hah, I'm only familiar with this because it always shows up alphabetically at the start of a lot of Debian package lists e.g. https://salsa.debian.org. Cool project though.

The front page makes it sound like the development is moving along at a moderately slow pace and it's still a work in progress.

The screenshots are pretty impressive for an open source game though. At least all of the buildings. They don't have many shots of troops in there.

> Currently, 0 A.D. is still in alpha phase, which means an early experimental phase. It is playable, and you can already download and test the game, but some features are still missing. When will 0 A.D. be released? It is very hard to predict. Even after we are done implementing all the features, we will want to conduct extensive beta testing, which can take a while. Information about release dates will be released at the appropriate time.

> They don't have many shots of troops in there.

Here's their most recent video trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6scM-nwfhE

> They don't have many shots of troops in there

You can see some gameplay in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6SBLu3TYfg

Keep in mind most competitive players play with graphical settings turned down

So I gave this a whirl tonight and it was better than I expected. I'm actually impressed at how well it plays.

I started on Easy since people were saying that the AI is brutal, but on the next game I went Normal. It seems like the AI prefers to build up and launch a big attack roughly around the time you upgrade your town to level 2. If you survive that you're pretty much golden. I lost a couple of times and won three times against the AI on Normal. The deciding factor is if I managed to build a Defense Tower in time. Those are basically impossible for regular troops to hurt at that point and the AI will fixate on it and let itself get cut down. Actually, garrisoned buildings are really deadly. I don't see a way to zerg rush your way to victory except possibly as an economic victory where you kill all of the workers and then keep them from spawning new ones until you've built your siege engines. Your troops just can't hurt the town square, even when they have it fully surrounded.

I found controlling the troops to be difficult at times. The healers love to run away at the first sign of danger and other troops will rush at towers and fortresses no matter how many times you tell them to stay away. You can also bait the AI into sending a steady stream of lone troops into a meatgrinder (massed archers are murder) while you casually build up your army.

I only ran into one bug. On one map I wiped out the enemy base but it didn't declare me a winner. I searched high and low for a lone troop or something but there was none to be found. I even filled the map with blue just to make sure it wasn't some building thing.

Performance was not an issue for me, even when I was moving maximum size armies around. There were a handful of pathfinding quirks but nothing too major. Mostly units getting stuck on other units and being left behind. It was pretty rare, but when it happened it tended to happen to big expensive units which makes it a little more annoying. I'd have to carefully separate them to get them moving again. I couldn't get the AI to build any boats so naval combat went untested.

One UI thing I couldn't find that I'd like is a way to select all combat troops currently harvesting and tell them to switch to combat mode and rally somewhere. It can be kind of hard to pick them out, especially when you're under attack. Even better if after combat I could tell them to go back to their previous job.

If curious, past threads:

0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xšayāršā - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26207191 - Feb 2021 (89 comments)

New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 “Ken Wood” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108843 - May 2018 (24 comments)

0 A.D.: A free, open-source game of ancient warfare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638238 - Nov 2015 (48 comments)

0 A.D. Alpha 15 - Osiris - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961782 - Dec 2013 (47 comments)

0 A.D., an Open-Source Strategy Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339917 - Sept 2013 (101 comments)

0 A.D. Open Source Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704415 - July 2009 (6 comments)

While it's not as polished as AoE2 or other games for playing or competition, the reinforcement learning interface is great fun in and of itself. It's nice to practice on a "real" game that isn't OpenAI Gym or similar teaching tool.

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...

Fun game! Actually very well made for something that's open and free. Pretty great to play with some friends online during this pandemic.

many previous discussions for various releases over the years

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=play0ad.com

Back in college we had lan parties aS much as we could. Some fried chicken, some pizza, a lot of energy drinks and 0ad. Great game.

Anyone know how 'Alpha' this game is? I'm looking at their news archive and their first post is from 2003, then jumps to semi-regular posts starting 2011. Is this a reasonably stable game? Is this like Dwarf Fortress and will just forever be in some alpha state?

The biggest problem in this game is the networking. It seems to have the same sort of networking issues Age of Empires did before the HD revamp, except worse. Once you hit a 100+ units for each player, the gameplay slows down dramatically. If the multiplayer desyncs, the game is over and there's no way to continue. The unit pathfinding is pretty janky as well.

I've played it, we liked it, but the multiplayer issues made it a non-starter for us. And while other changes have been made, it doesn't seem like any real networking optimizations have been made in years. The only recent change that might help is them adding a global population max in addition to a per player one, so you can keep the lag from getting too bad but add more units per player as other people get eliminated. But it's not enough.

Not sure that's networking.

I play single player here and there to kill time. When a lot of units are moving, the game will literally freeze for seconds at a time.

You can consider it indefinitely alpha at this point, unless dev adoption gets traction, especially engine/graphics specialists.

That said, as a huge RTS and ancient history fan I can definitely say its mechanics/art/units make it stand out from other games - and have had lots of fun playing it continually for years.

It's enjoyably playable. I haven't noticed any bugs or warts that have bothered me for years. It was a different story several years ago.

It’s highly playable for in-person LAN.

I’ve said before; each year over summer my kids and I have a tradition of finding the game downloading the latest and locking in for a day or two of play.

LAN Parties!

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cant see more than 1 picture

I still feel like Empire Earth 2 is the best RTS I've played, and it's hard to determine why I always went back it it instead of continuing with all the Age of Empires.

whats the real difference? I can not say really. Maybe the mechanic of have priests that can convert people? I think that was in populace on the Amiga..

Anyhow I look forward to trying out this open source similar thing and wonder what it takes to get graphics made for the various parts - maybe I could make some or get some others to make some for it and make it more similar to EE.

The requirements page is interesting. For Linux they require a 1Ghz processor and 512MB of memory. For video it requires a Geforce 3 or better. So basically anything that still works.

For Windows the requirements are a 3Ghz machine and 2GB of memory. Is the Windows port running on an emulation layer? The disparity in the specs borders on the absurd. Or is it including Windows 10 vs. a Linux version running on TWM?

Anyone know how the gameplay compares to Age of Empires 2?

It's pretty similar, but 0 A.D. lacks polish.

I played previous release with friends, it was quite enjoyable. AI is super strong for newbies.

I always loose in a couple of minutes in 0 A.D. :-(

Then again, I am more interested in exploration and building than fighting to the dead. I loved playing Age of Empires on the easy setting and then go overboard with the civilization building.

Me too. Same story on Factorio. Fortunately both games allow you to control the difficulty of your adversaries.

We started 3v3 on normal difficulty, as some of us had AoE experience, but quickly had to go down to 3v2 very easy until we learned to win relatively consistently (this took quite a bit of time).

Hopefully it isn't like Supreme Commander or Total Annihilation where the AI is more than happy to micromanage you to death.

"Ah, I see you can handle attacks, but can you handle little groups of 3 attackers going after every resource simultaneously and running away when you look at them; all the time?"

That crap is no fun to play against. Not unless your own units can be programmed with some basic AI to counter it.

0 A.D. AI does not micromanage. It wins by strategy.

> That crap is no fun to play against.

Hannibal of Carthage agrees.

Because I'm life-long Age of Empires fan and want to hype people about Age of Empires IV - the next month is a huge Fan Preview event -> https://www.ageofempires.com/news/announcing-age-fan-preview...

Did you catch hidden cup 4? It was an amazing tournament.

Yeah I did; Hidden Cups are always peak for AoE2 e-sports scene. Unbelievable matches! I think they hit 100k viewers on Twitch, which is amazing for RTS game.

It was indeed!

I'd love to see an alphastar variant try to learn how to play and compete against the best

It would be really amazing if one built an alphazero for AOE2, trained it on the ladder, and then entered it into hidden cup V without letting anyone in on the joke until the end.

I fell into the game again because of DE and a new friend whose into it too. With Youtube videos (explanations and competitive games, like Hidden Cup right now) and regular updates it got another dimension to it.

The DE of Age of I sucks though, the sprites generates from 3D models being less good than in II DE. I would has preferred they made a remaster like the C&C for this one.

I think of it as Age of Empires 3 but actually good. It feels like a nice compromise between AoE 2 and 3.

Wow never thought I’d see this on hacker news! It’s an open source age of empires and it’s got a kickass soundtrack!

I'd love to see a modern commercially successful open source game with non-free art.

as I read this comment I thought immediately that fortnight is that exactly and they are making millions that way.

Of course if you interpret your "with non-free art" to mean zero art - then it's different I know, but still..

Is fortnight open source?

I don;t think fortnight is open source, but it's been a while since I ran it - and I wonder if parts of it are using open source models and such.

I commented on the parent comment because I read it as sarcasm / inferring that a free game without free at is not free - and that something like that could never be modern or successful.. so I was trying to offer a counter point to consider which is similar - although certainly not exact apples to apples.

No sarcasm. I really mean what I wrote. The reason: this would open up a new market and encourage studios to develop open source games. Also, I really do not oppose proprietary art. Not even Stallman is against it[0].

We've had a bit of it a some years ago when some indie devs sold through "humble indie bundle" pay-what-you-want and made the code available if they money passed a threshold amount.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html

This reminds me of all the fun I had with Empire Earth. Will have to check 0 A.D out.

How does this compare to Age of Empires? It looks like AOE3.

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