Got all my friends hooked on it back in my college days. We attended class in the night, but for some reason beyond my compression we did have classes at Saturday morning. Being a bunch of nocturnal beings, we usually bought some pizzas and stayed up all night from Friday to Saturday playing on lan and having pizza. Good times.

How did this find players? People want "more Age of Empires II" (and to some extent more Age of Mythology). In the most literal sense of those words. 0AD got there earlier.

Other previous discussions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684532) were about pathfinding in this game. The pathfinding in AoEII is something. It's neither naturalistic, immersive, nor intellectually stimulating, which would be goals of mine and probably the average game designer in 2023. I'm not going to say how I really feel because I don't want to be downvoted over something stupid. The important thing is people love this pathfinding. It's worthy of copying.

0AD: People love more of the same. Another free & open source example is Pokemon Showdown. People want original untainted Pokemon so badly that Pokemon Showdown still has concurrents in the tens of thousands. Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia? Nearly a million people a day do.

Commercially: There was an audience for "more Breath of the Wild" before TOTK: Genshin Impact. League of Legends is more than a decade old now. Counter-Strike is almost as old as 0AD. Old reigns supreme.

I played 0ad nearly every day about 5 or so years ago. What a blast from the past.

Age of Empires ignited my passion for these games, but 0AD captured it just by sheer ubiquity and accessibility. That says something, to me.

It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ? Why are they not focusing on a 1.0 release and seize adding features, new civs, and therefore complexity?

It'll run on the Hurd and ReactOS when those are finished and come bundled together with Duke Nukem Forev... no wait, they actually finished that.

I’m quite excited for a future macOS ARM build.

Really enjoy OAD, good to know it is being developed.

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28,827 commits. GitHub mirror of the code:

https://github.com/0ad/0ad

I actually prefer 0 A.D. to any AOE game, now.

I'd give this a go if I wasn't so terribly addicted to Factorio...

For those interested in RL portion, https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem... and https://github.com/0ad4ai

There has also been some work to establish a geospatial intelligence class using the game engine as well (map/market/resource analysis).

NetPanzer is also an open source RTS in development for over 20 years!

https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/tree/dev

I just setup a new masterservers and a couple game servers with bots.

Best game. My kids play it every weekend - when they are allowed to consume medias other than books. They love to play historical battles, go through the history of the civilizations. I still beat them, but it's such fun to have some "LAN-parties" with them.. said that, we noticed that quite often, the network game gets aborted. Is that something that just happen to me (Linux, Mac, Windows, doesnt matter) or the network part of the code is not so robust as the rest?

Are there opensource RTS games made with JS that run in the browser?

Not having to install would be awesome. And JS would make it accessible to most devs.

I don't mean to disparage other people's experiences but I find a massive disconnect between what other people are feeling and how I feel about this game.

Actual AOE is still alive and kicking through the Definitive Editions and now AOE4 with a very active online community and developers. While 0AD is great and fully opensource, I still don't find it comes close to the Experience of the actual AOE titles. Maybe I'm biased because I don't mind paying for proprietary software and I sometimes use Windows. I do however definitely agree how great of an achievement 0AD is and it is definitely a great game when considered in isolation.

As someone unfamiliar with that project I looked up About Us on the main site. There wasn't a section that would just explain what the project was about.

I know this is more 'if you know you know' kind of hobby but it would still be nice to get a quick overview :)

OK, that has fellow open-source project The Battle for Wesnoth beat by 4 years.

It's a cool game and all, but does it still burns the cpu0 only?

When it comes to open source RTS games, https://www.beyondallreason.info really deserves an honorable mention.

I started my coding journey by fining OAD. I was able to contribute to the project in my early days. Truly amazing to see how far it's come!

0ad is a great game on its own merits. I have played countless hours on matches against the PC.