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Comment by Rendello

2 days ago

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:

https://play0ad.com/

20 comments

Rendello

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bryancrisso  1 day ago

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

  • Dunedan  1 day ago

    Alpha 27 of 0 A.D. has a notable performance regression for a subset of users, compared to earlier versions. Users not affected by this regression should see improved performance, thanks to improvements like the added Vulkan support.

    The regression in performance seems to be caused by a change in Spidermonkey. For details check out https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7714

    That said, even without this performance regression, 0 A.D. is prone to run slow in late game when lots of units are on the map. There are several reasons for that, but maybe the most intuitive one is that 0 A.D. is still largely single-threaded and therefore doesn't make use of the multi-core capabilities of modern CPUs. As you can imagine changing that is no easy feat and takes a lot of effort. As the number of volunteers to 0 A.D. is limited, nobody has picked up that topic yet.

    If you enjoy 0 A.D. and want to improve it: it's Open Source and contributions are always welcome!

  • Rendello  1 day ago

    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.

    • yohannesk  1 day ago

      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?

      11 replies →

  • nophunphil  1 day ago

    Same here. I use a modern Windows 10 PC (Ryzen 5600x, RTX 3070Ti) when playing games. I wonder if the performance is better on Linux for some reason.