Classic AoE-playing Hacker News-types might also enjoy 0 A.D.
It's free and fun, but definitely humbling if you consider yourself a master strategist:
Awesome to see AoE, and games in general being future proofed. Sad when functionality is lost because someone turned off a server.
As someone who spent an immeasurable amount of time on AOE 2 online multiplayer, it has been a steadily refreshing experiencing the rise of AOE2 DE over the recent years. The game not only received updates that brought in the total civilization count to 50+, but also a ton of visual enhancements and improvements in the overall gameplay and performance.
This is nothing short of stunning to see new developments happening for these games, especially in the open-source community.
How do you put a Terms of Use with an AGPL license? Isn't this a "further restriction" which the license says you can remove?
Seems more like a CYA thing to prevent takedowns
What's CYA?
It stands for "Cover Your Ass".
Wikipedia explains it as "an activity done by individuals to protect themselves from possible subsequent criticism, legal penalties, or other repercussions, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context."[1]
It's CYA if it's meaningless.
Thank you for sharing this, it is truly amazing.
While I like Steam for the convenience and also appreciate their efforts in developing SteamOS I am concerned about the lock-in. Projects like this really help to own more of what you paid for again, luskaner is a hero for me.
I feel like it is important to point out that Steam does not require games to have any DRM. Not even Steam's DRM. It's entirely up to the game developer and/or publisher. Many games on Steam are already DRM-free where you can just back up the files and play without Steam.
This is excellent.
I wonder if there any public documentation for AoE3’s API that was used to make this or if this was all newly reverse engineered. I’ve seen people ask about this kind of documentation before, but I’ve never seen it.
I'm sure the answer could be found in this repo somewhere but its above my head- does aoe2 DE rely mostly on p2p for multiplayer? I assume it does and the regional servers are just used for matchmaking, and all the actual game logic is running on the clients. I base that on the fact that map hacks are possible and that one player lagging lags the game for everyone, but there are often conflicting claims when it's brought up on aoe forums
If you haven't read it, there's a great paper on the netcode of the originals: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terran...
I'd be surprised if the definitive editions changed the design significantly enough to move the netcode away from P2P, but I don't know of any actual information on it.
Bit confused on the webserver aspect of this. Is it just the match making / game broadcast component of AoE multiplayer?
I was curious about this too and enjoyed reading the routes file https://github.com/luskaner/ageLANServer/blob/main/server/in...
Does anything like this exist for the original Age of Empires games?
Battle.Net has "PVPGN" that covers Diablo 2 up through Warcraft 3, and the Westwood Online games (ish) but searching for an AoE equivalent turned up nothing
I believe the originals just supported offline LAN play. I remember getting my friend to have his modem dial my modem so we could play together, no Internet connection required.
I hope AoE2 lives as long as Chess does. It really is one of the "perfect" games.
It really is and they keep iterating on it. definitive edition has more investment than some of the new AOE3 and 4 versions
Excellent.
This seems to work with the Remasters as well. Even better :)
Please add AoM support as well.
Voulomai
So how can I play AoE 3 the war chiefs online ?
If you're okay buying it then the definitive edition is on sale with active servers and includes War Chiefs among other things.
There were some questionable changes to the names of things to make them more politically correct but the game play is better than ever.
13
i love 0ad so much but it runs AWFULLY as soon as you get a fun number of units on the map.
I haven't had an issue with that personally (played on and off for almost 10 years), though I imagine it could be an issue on some older hardware. Massed units will cause lag in big team games where there's 4 armies clashing, though that might be more of a network thing.
I am curious as a non game developer, are these types of games deterministic? If so if I send to the server that I moved huge units to attack another huge units, can the server determine what the end will be? Why do we face a network issue?
Many (not all) RTS games use a networking method called lockstep synchronization that requires the gameplay to be deterministic, but has its own downsides. One of those being that if one player lags, everyone lags. I know AOE 1 and 2 use it, and I assume 3 as well