http://play0ad.com, 0 A.D, a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game. GPL 2+ license for the game engine and the CC-BY-SA for the game art.
Tower? heck take a group of villagers with your army. Build castles in enemy territory as you capture it! (or maybe bombard towers) That doesn't mean the game is broken though.
Picked up Age of Mythology: Extended Edition during the Steam Summer Sale. My friends and I used to play a ton against each other over LAN when we were kids. Now we're all in different states, but multiplayer works really well so that's not a problem!
Waaaaaah! It
* segfaults
* prints error messages I don't want to read
* ate my dog
All of those are features, not bugs. To turn them off, use ./openage --dont-segfault --no-errors --dont-eat-dog.
I chuckled when I read that. If that were so easy...
You should post this on aoczone[0] - probably the largest aoe2 enthusiast forum. Voobly[1] is the primary aoc client at the moment with fan made compatibility patches, such as userpatch[2]. They are also hosting a $120,000 tournament in a weeks time with some of the strongest teams around. I'm sure some of the developers from voobly/userpatch could have a look at it.
As someone mentioned 0ad[3] is an aoe2 inspired game, unfortunately I think their kickstarter failed but they did add multiplayer support which looks promising.
Sorry I meant for online matches, although some people would draw a distinction between age of empires: the conquerors and age of empires: hd edition.
You can check the player history for steam here[0], it's almost at an all time low, although this number includes people logged in playing single player too, while voobly's numbers (just over 1500 at the time of writing) include people spectating matches and waiting in lobbies or idling.
Unfortunately there were performance problems on the release of aoehd, pretty much up until 1-2 months ago, leaving the community fragmented. Typically steam is where you'll find casual gamers and voobly is where slightly more experienced players go (although they do have a new player lobby with casual gamers too). During steam sales however the hd edition does get an influx of new players every time (you can usually pick it up for $5).
Since I'm talking about platforms it wouldn't be fair not to mention game ranger[1]. I don't know a lot about it but the rumours are they largely play standard (non-userpatch) aoc or the forgotten empires[2]. I have got no idea about the userbase size though.
Are the performance problems you refer to the horrible slow-down in multiplayer? I've never had any client-side performance problems with AoC (Steam edition or prior), but the network slow-down has always been there, and makes substantial games with more than about 4 players essentially unplayable. I haven't checked on the Steam edition since a couple months after its release, but if they managed to fix that I would be elated.
Both client and network but most of the fps issues and scrolling issues have been fixed. I think patch 3.8 fixed some of the memory leaks and "out of syncs" also. It's definitely worth another go. They also changed the default hot keys to a grid layout late last year too, just in case! :)
I've been playing it since 2002 and keep an XP box specifically to play it on. After all these years I still haven't gotten bored of the game and probably play it 2-3 hours a week or more on average.
I don't know if this means it's a really good game or I'm just a boring person. But it beats AoE all over in my opinion. I've tried a lot of other games, played them for a bit and forgotten about them. But not Cossacks. I just wish they had kept the series going.
You, me, and 3 of my cousins would all agree. We had a blast playing over LAN and watching our millions of pikemen get mowed down by grapeshot, large fleets of battleships tear through each other, and do silly things like build farms near our seiging armies so the wheat fields would hide mortars.
The sheer scale of that game at the time is what made it stick.
They should release an HTML5 port of Cossacks. With WebGL, websockets and modern JS performances there's no reason it wouldn't work just as well as the original game. Plus it'd be cross-platform and no install needed.
The internals of AoE II are quite interesting, especially when it comes to how the terrain is rendered. There is an epic thread here [1] where it's discussed a bit and one of the original developers (Matt Prichard alias MattP) chimes in and talks a bit about AoE II's development.
Trying to clone AoE II seems like a pretty cool and challenging project, and actually if I was going to write a game with 2D isometric graphics, I might steal some tricks from AoE.
Cool! How do you draw heights? I always wondered whether the ground texture was really texture-mapped, or whether it was just drawn flat and then shades were drawn over it.
I'm going to out myself as oversensitive and lacking a sense of humor in many of your eyes (or so I imagine) but I can't stand the kind of sarcastic humor in the contributing section.
Sarcasm is only funny to me when it's not mean spirited.
The joke about segfaults: "--dont-segfault --no-errors --dont-eat-dog." was quite funny, on the other hand. I'd like to see more playful expression in this way rather than playing with negativity; because even though it's obviously a joke, there's enough negativity in the world already that it doesn't make me laugh thinking about it.
Scripting AoEII maps with a decent scripting language has long been a dream of mine. Current trigger editor is "hard to use and lacking" to put it politely. Python support in the map editor would be amazing.
It's an expert system. You can create if-then condtions. "If under attack, attack nearest enemy." It looks like lisp because every statement needs to be surrounded by parentheses, but it's not anything like lisp.
It's extremely limited, at least if you expect it to be a complete programming language. On the other hand, it's very easy to learn and use, which is what it's designed for.
The random map scripting is a programming language I believe. You can create scripts that generate maps.
It's something that kind of looks like lisp, but the only thing it has in common is the parentheses. You basically set condition→action rules, one level deep, with a limited amount of global-only "variables" (goals). I think the amount of conditions and actions per "rule" is limited, too.
Has anyone else seen a big difference between the original AoE2 and the Steam re-release? I swear that the AI is barely aggressive anymore, even on the most difficult setting.
The Forgotten expansion ships with a much improved AI. Expansion-less uses the old Petersen AI from the original game, and that isn't particularly intimidating anymore!
Original AOE2 and AOE2HD both started with the same AI.
AOE2 received a 'userpatch' that updated the AI allowing it to do more complicated things
The userpatch wasn't made my Microsoft so AOE2HD was unable too take advantage of it but 2 months ago there was a patch that made the AI very difficult and aggressive.
Still, the AI is unable to do certain things that the userpatch AI could do (using walls, moving deer, playing on forest maps etc).
You can add your own AI scripts. There is an entire community around AI scripting, if you want good AIs to play against. I believe there are also a few in the steam workshop.
1) free as in "gratis" (freeware software) - you can download it for free, install it and use it. And that's all. Usually it's already compiled so you don't have an access to the source code. Sometimes you are forbidden to copy it and give it to a friend (because you both should e.g. download it from author's web page).
2) free as in "freedom" (free software) - you can do literally anything with this kind of software because it's licensed in a way that doesn't restrict the user in any manner (i.e. license preserves user freedom). Run it, fork it, modify it, sell it, give it away to your friends (or to anyone), you can do anything. There are several free licenses which handle these cases in a different way (e.g. GPL, LGPL, Apache License, MIT License, Boost License, Vim License and so on). They're sometimes called copyleft licenses (as opposite to copyright term). If you're interested, here's the wiki page comparing most of free licenses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-sou...
Please note that it doesn't mean that the software is being given away "for free (gratis)" (but usually it is) - it only means that once you obtain it, you can do anything you want with it.
Something like this needs work. In an open source project if you want something you can and should do it. So how about taking a free weekend to read how to make a .deb package?
No different from eg. OpenTTD. If they don't distribute any of the original assets or code, copyright is not relevant. That's most likely why they require an original installation to get the game assets from.
They don't present themselves as AoE2 either - saying that it's like AoE2 is not infringing - so no trademark issue either.
Copyright affects more than just assets, it also includes e.g. creative physics. The idea of an RTS in a medieval time period is not copyrightable, but copying all the specific choices AoE2 made even when those choices weren't made because the setting required them can very well be infringement. Calling yourself a clone will also not help you in a court.
Actually, it's quite different from OpenTTD. OpenTTD's source is based on a disassembly of TTD. So far as I can tell, OpenAge is being coded from scratch.
Starcraft is a product of Blizzard. If you wanted to draw a parallel it would be with a product of Ferrari, so a Testarossa say. And it's only the suffix that's duplicated.
So to get close to a car analogy [it's still poor] it should rather be "try giving away plans for a car called a 'Triangolorossa'".
The real chance of confusion is pretty close to zero but no doubt a motivated lawyer and a legal system corrupted to favour mega-corps would still be able to decide it was a genuine trademark confusion.
If it's a clone then there are copyright issues. If it's not a clone then having a similar but clearly distinct name is not a genuine point of confusion for the public.
It would be more like coming out with a sports car with a name ending in "ri", which is meaningless.
Also from the comments on that page:
>I am not a lawyer, but on the surface this case looks similar to one the Supreme Court just decided recently in which Victoria's Secret sued a sex-toy company called Victor's Secret for trademark infringement because of the soundalike name. Victoria lost---the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name.
I doubt there was any evidence of "serious harm", or that any of the players thought it was actually a Blizzard product. A big disclaimer saying "not associated with starcraft, bizzard, etc" should be more than enough to stop any confusion if it existed. But they didn't ask for that, they asked for them to take down the whole thing.
