Hacker News

i love 0ad so much but it runs AWFULLY as soon as you get a fun number of units on the map.

Wow, this is still being developed? I still recall the Heavengames forum thread that spawned it...

8 player multiplayer is unplayable.

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.

This happened with supreme commander.

The company shut down and turned the servers off, but luckily someone created an implementation of the match making server.

And even to this day the community is fully alive and growing, they even continue to develop the game, and have taken it far beyond the original.

It’s called Forged Alliance Forever.

Imo this should be legislated. Do you provide a service necessary to use your product ? Great. But if you decide to deprecate said service, rendering said product inoperable or partially operable, you should be obligated to release an implementation & documentation.

And since everyone was "turtling" the games would almost never end anyways.

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.

Seems more like a CYA thing to prevent takedowns

AFAIK, it's server-based rather than p2p for DE, but the way it works is all clients/servers simulate the world in lockstep and hold a full copy of the state. That's what makes map hacks possible.

You don't need anything paxos-like for this, the game desyncs and stops if any machine messes up but you can usually restore from a save point in that case.

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.

In professional tournament games a server is chosen that lies between the two players. For example, a Brazil-China match might be played in an EU server.

Given this, I suspect the server is used as a central source of truth between the clients where all game data goes through the server, with all the calculations still being done client-side.

That was the old one , the DE version lags only for the player with poor network ( cpu performance stutter of one player affect all players though )

I thought about almost this exact thing recently. I hope we're able to keep the best games running forever.

For games that are fun I think you can leave in balance issues and even features-not-bugs. It's trickier for things like netcode bugs that are purely a negative.

Really grateful Id release their source eventually. Really hoping the same will happen for AoE2 someday.

In chess if you don't play 2 years and then come back to it, you don't find out that all the rules have changed in the meanwhile. Which is what currently happens with age of empires 2.

It really is and they keep iterating on it. definitive edition has more investment than some of the new AOE3 and 4 versions

It's a brilliant game for sure. The randomness, the fact that it's not turned-based and the multiplayer also make it interesting compared to chess. However Chess has 1000x simpler rules that never change, and you don't need high APM to play competitively.

AoE2 is coming out on PS5 this year.

I was curious about this too and enjoyed reading the routes file https://github.com/luskaner/ageLANServer/blob/main/server/in...

While the game itself runs over LAN, my understanding is LAN play requires internet for 2 reasons:

1. the game connecting to multiplayer services

2. coordination server for the LAN setup itself.

I think this covers #2. #1 appears to be more complicated unfortunately, and involves tricking Steam into thinking you're connected.

Curious what your use case is as opposed to using the official LAN support? For me, I'm trying to get it working completely without internet, ie on a plane. It's so sad to me that built-in LAN requires an internet connection.

Check out Voobly. That seems to be a pretty big hub for people playing the original games, I think mostly patched versions of the originals with some nice features.

I've LANed them "online" many moons ago by using software that made a virtual lan that we all installed and managed to find each other ingame. "Hamachi" I think?

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.

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.

Emulator maybe? It's a weird and intersting platform to target, but I suspect that it's because Go supports it, so it might not be to much hassle. On the other hand reading the article from yesterday regarding porting Tailscale, it might be more involved that I imagine.