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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
No system requirements. Does it run on Pentium II wirh 128 MB RAM ? Or does it need an 128 Cores Epyc with 64 GB RAM ?
Unless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have been unbearable even for latin scripts
I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!
Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.
That makes it way better. For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game... (freeciv for example).
Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.
But why does not make 0ad bad? You want to play it on an pentium 1?
I'm seeing you don't like the rolling release, but I can't see the "why".