Warzone 2100: A Free and Open Source Real-Time Strategy Game
wz2100.net
wz2100.net
[0][https://images.discordapp.net/.eJwNxkEOgyAQAMC_cC-7wGYFP0MIE...]
[0] https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation [1] http://www.uberent.com/pa/
Zero-K (www.zero-k.info) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcqY4GfRpI
TheCursed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed
BalancedAnnhilationReloaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0u2OYLubo
Evolution RTS: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/
Spring:1944 http://spring1944.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jFZvpvwoA
KernelPanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doF7owZ0blk&fmt=18
And various Original TA Derivatives. Try some, have fun.
If you've played it, where did you feel it was lacking?
Forged Alliance is great if you like TA!
Also, it has things like the Fatboy, http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/18/17842/Upgrade4.jpg
It's even more impressive to consider that the TA engine was never open-sourced, Cavedog, the original developer, never gave out any information on how to mod the game, and that the community has managed to do things using limited unit scripting engine and some hex-editing that even some of the original developers are amazed at.
The Hyper Viper
TA2 should be coming soon:
http://www.pcgamer.com/chris-taylor-you-can-use-your-imagina...
That was 2013, so perhaps E3 this year we may see an announcement. Four years is usually standard for big projects.
In the mean time, SC:FA on FAForever is your best bet.
I'm of the opinion that another CT RTS would be a project of 50/50 potential for TA fans. I love SupCom only a little less than I do TA, but I'm not a big fan of SupCom 2. On the other hand, some other old TA vets weren't big fans of SupCom, only to find themselves really liking SupCom 2. I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.
People like to trash Planetary Annihilation but it's not really deserved. Yes, it doesn't scratch the TA itch as well as one might wish but it's a decent game in its own right.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resourc...
GPG went under right after that campaign (October 2014). Technically they got bought out, but who knows if the new owner wants to make the same kinds (or quality) of games.
I hadn't heard the news, that is terrible. It basically crushes any hope I had for TA2 being good.
Figured they'd have just given CT free reign and had TA2 use a traditional retail pricing model ala Master of Orion, a Wargaming Labs project. It's still possible that could happen, but doubtful.
It's of course not quite the same, but the community work on SC:FA has really made the game quite polished.
I too am still waiting on another modern TA-like flow economy game, but supreme commander is still by far the closest and best there is. In some ways it's better.
Remember Supcom 2 is in no way affiliated with the TA franchise like supcom 1 (and expac) was. It's an entirely different (and bad) game imo.
Yes. The engine works by syncing the entire game state between all players (and observers, which in tournaments can become an annoying issue) and all clients have the same information.
I'm sure there are good reasons why the design in SC2 is as it is, but this was surprising! Thanks for the info.
If you zoom out you will still only be able to see map area you revealed and in that map area you would only see enemy units if your units could observer an area.
>With a sub-100 msec ping and extremely steady latency, it would be possible to force a synchronous update with no extra information at all, but in the world of 200-400 msec latency [and] low bandwidth modems, it just plain wouldn't work.
One notable exception to the local simulation model is Planetary Annihilation, which uses a traditional client/sever model as far as I'm aware.
I think quake cheats got to the point a cheat server would MITM the game and shoot automatically and or auto-aim shots for the user.
You can just as easily say, "the packets sent to the client determine the knowledge the player may have."
And if these two are in conflict, it makes much more sense to defer to the latter, which is a firm, organic, physical concept, then the former, which is plastic and can be changed trivially in a text editor.
The player has the ability to know all that it sent to the client. Choosing to know it is not cheating. If the player decides to take notes, say, on graph paper, about the map so that she is able to have a clearer picture of it, is that cheating?
If not, then how is doing it in software any different?
If "the rules" dictate that the player not know something, then the app needs to not send that player that thing.
Macros that allow you to perform actions that are physically impossible for a human to perform isn't cheating?
Exploiting a glitch that causes your opponent to disconnect from the game isn't cheating?
Consulting a chess engine (unbeatable AI) on your phone when playing chess with someone isn't cheating?
Also, moving pieces in a boardgame when your opponent isn't looking probably isn't cheating either?
> If "the rules" dictate that the player not know something, then the app needs to not send that player that thing.
I agree in theory, but it's not always possible - latency is a major limitation in keeping everything on the server-side.
It seems that the philosophy here is constrained by the (real or perceived) connectivity issues surrounding the withholding of knowledge other than that which the player is allowed to know.
Obviously these need to be overcome.
I can imagine knowledge coming in encrypted "chunks," with keys issued only for those chunks within a player's proper domain. I can also imagine other solutions.
But transposing an unrelated theory of mind ("the code of the version I'm playing constitute the rules for you") seems untenable, inorganic, and in arguably insufficient defined in the first place.
So yes, I don't think that, in this strict sense of how knowledge translates to cheating, that wall hacks are cheating.
> Exploiting a glitch that causes your opponent to disconnect from the game isn't cheating?
It seems to me that the moral responsibility here is on the author(s) - they have slighted the player by instructing, via their code, their disconnection from the game at an improper time.
> Macros that allow you to perform actions that are physically impossible for a human to perform isn't cheating?
> Consulting a chess engine (unbeatable AI) on your phone when playing chess with someone isn't cheating?
At some level, there needs to be a dose of reality in this conversation.
If I'm playing chess against you, across the table, at a coffee shop somewhere, and you are surreptitiously glancing at your contact lens HUD, playing essentially on behalf of an AI, then I guess you are not being very nice or honest to me. This is an interpersonal affront, but it's hard for me to gauge what it means in terms of sport.
On the other hand, if I'm playing chess against an cloaked and anonymous adversary, it might as well be the smartest computer on the planet. And I will lose.
Computers beat humans at some games. That's the reality.
It makes more sense for those of us who wish to continue to evolve here at this moment at the end of time to play games that humans are good at. And there are plenty of games at which humans will continue to trounce computers for the foreseeable future.
> Also, moving pieces in a boardgame when your opponent isn't looking probably isn't cheating either?
This analogy is way off vis a vis the current topic.
It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
> I agree in theory, but it's not always possible - latency is a major limitation in keeping everything on the server-side.
Right, and so some concessions must be made. Here I agree. But once you acknowledge this, I think you also have to give up some of the moral high-horsery that comes with casting judgment about cheating on other players.
I would imagine the sport would dub that cheating. At the very least, the sport would fall apart if it were permitted (because the individuals playing would no longer matter).
I'll grab the first Google definition for "cheating" > act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination.
I'm arguing that each of my examples are a circumvention of what's widely understood to be the spirit/rules of the game. Just because you can see game-state hidden away by modifying the client doesn't mean it's not "cheating". Every game depends on the players not acting unfairly when they are capable, to some extent.
> It's more like a card game in which I show you my cards and then ask you to forget that you saw them - this is what you are saying my client must do in order to provide a fair experience for you.
I think it's more like putting a camera behind your opponents so you can see their cards - you've deliberately added a measure to the existing client/room in order to give you a capability that your opponents don't have.
It comes down to the simple fact that just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should. You can justify all the hacks you want with "well you shouldn't let me do that!" but to everyone else it's the same thing as playing Monopoly and you punching everyone else to take their money. Yeah, you can do that - and I suppose you'll nominally "win" - but it's really not playing the game we all agreed on so wtf is your point?
You could also build a robot that uses a webcam and USB input for keyboard/mouse to play FPS better than most humans - an interesting project to be sure. But how is that even remotely interesting from a competition sense? Even though no modifications were made to anything, it's still cheating.
Your chess example is someone else playing your opponents moves. That's obviously cheating - I can't have a grandmaster sitting next to me telling me my moves can I? How is this even a question in your mind?
It sounds like your understanding is "the game is the server sends and receives packets: the goal is for the server to say that you win" which would be a view mischaracterizes almost all player's expectations: if you just wrote a client that has AI playing that only uses the info a player has that would also be very clearly cheating even if it only acts on information that players could act on.
I like both a lot, and I know one is older, but Supreme Commander 2 (with a couple mods) reigns supreme in my heart.
I tried playing through a campaign using the open-sourced engine a while ago but it felt like the pathfinding had taken several steps backwards since the original game. You really start to feel it in the later missions, where the pathfinding becomes the biggest hurdle - your units get stuck while retreating and so get destroyed before they manage to return to a repair station. Never did manage to finish it because of this.
Too bad, because in all other respects it's great. But the pathfinding makes it unplayable for me once a decent number of units are involved in fighting.
Luckily, for TA, it's a really simple patch to increase the number of pathfinding cycles.
http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42529
What's the problem with pathfinding in Warzone?
I haven't looked at the algorithm so can't explain what's going wrong from that side. But essentially, a lot of warzone maps have tight corridors that only barely fit 2-3 units side by side. A big part of the game is the tactical squadrons where you have a commander and assign armies to them, and then you can configure the army so units automatically retreat to repair at a certain damage threshold. So it's normal to have a huge army advancing and at the same time have a smaller number of units automatically retreating through the same corridor. When a unit's calculated path is blocked by another unit, they'll both sort of wiggle around turning a bit in any direction and advancing, doing this dance until they break free. This takes a long enough time that your damaged retreating units are dead by the time the gridlock is resolved.
This was also a problem in the original codebase, but it feels like it's a lot worse with the current wz2100 code.
I've played the game through several times, with a little forethought it's pretty straight forward to just setup things so you only have one flow from a canyon. Sure sometimes you have to build a new repair station to change the direction the units go to repair, or attack from a different side.
The occasional particularly narrow bottleneck is, er, a bottleneck. So either attack with enough force to avoid needing an immediate retreat, or soften up the enemy with artillery or air attacks before hand. Once accomplished just build a repair station and avoid the bottleneck except for the occasional reinforcement.
Popular-ish examples:
My favorite ones (apart from OpenTTD) are:
- https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH (Theme Hospital)
- https://openrct2.website/ (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
- https://github.com/angered-ghandi/OpenAOE (AoE I)
- https://github.com/SFTtech/openage (AoE II)
HN posts about openage:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830652
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511084 (with some links to other interesting games in the comments)
Very difficult and high quality fantasy turn based game. With tons of fun mods.
Not a re-write of Settlers II but inspired by it. Great game and a friendly community.
Majority of previously commercial games do not open source the data files, e.g. FreeSpace and Quake.
apt-get install warzone2100
Done.
Tho on second thoughts I think the server side quests and world map may not have been released, so it probably does not count.
It's definitely a fun RTS, one of my favorites, and opensource.
I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).
As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules.
Are there actual documented incidents of GPL or other FOSS software being rejected from the iOS App Store due to the source code license?
VLC for iOS being the precedent setting example from a few years back.
To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of cases where Apple will outright reject the initial submission of some OSS app - especially if you aren't totally up front about it. But clearly re VLC they will pull it once it is brought up (also leaving to distributing developer open to liability depending on how unhappy the contributors are)
If the tech tree could be spooled up like in Civ V that would eliminate a lot of the necessary menuing.
For a game that was originally made in 1995 (openTTD is much newer though), the UI and gameplay work remarkably well on a tablet.
The problem is that the development of these things has been very ad hoc and all the defaults are based on the old Transport Tycoon gameplay, which... has a rather primitive idea of passenger/mail service. But if you turn on the right advanced options and have the right set of trains, it's a fun challenge to design networks with a mix of service classes (super express passenger lines, high capacity metros, branching suburban commuter networks, or trams/buses/ferries where you can't fit tracks) while facing capital constraints and the consequences of your previous decisions (like when your mainline runs through a major urban city center, which puts it close to all the passengers and was a super great idea, but now it can't easily be expanded to have longer platforms because there are lots of tall buildings hemming it in.)
Oh, and you can balance the risk of live upgrades (potentially, crashes and death, if you do it wrong) against the revenue losses and operational complexity of shutting down the trains.
After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me.
Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it.
> After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network.
The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)
It has a huge tech tree that is difficult to master and difficult to maintain in game.
A similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree would be super fun I imagine.
Multiplayer takes it to a whole new level, although it needs some kind of game master server so that people can join in rather than having to host themselves.
> similar game that is less dependent on mastering the tech tree
The unit designer is also neat, allowing you to build custom units out of various bodies, propulsion methods, and weapon systems.
The coolest thing about this game is that you could directly play as any unit like it was a third-person action game
It'd be fun to have a kickstarter campaign to fund raise for new versions of old open source games.
Also a lack of a current build for the Mac OS (an issue since the network play compatibility is tied to the game version)
No double standard, I used to be quite active in the gameplay and also contributed a little to the code itself - the community around the game just isn't what it used to be.
Edit: If you're involved in the wz2100 project directly and have other information, obviously I'm wrong here, but otherwise I'm just passing on my perceptions from many years of involvement on the sidelines.
I still play 10-20 year old RTS games like Age of Empire series, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, C&C Generals from time to time. Especially playing skirmish mode against hard AI on random maps is really great.
Several spun off genres like Tower Defence, MoBa sprung off as Mods from Age of Empires series and WarCraft 3. Since 2009 also the Facebook games like Farmville, et al and Free2Play casual games implemented kind of RTS mechanics.
On consoles various unsuccessful RTS games like C&C 4, Halo Wars 1 and some failed Free2Play efforts like C&C Generals 2 meant basically the end to Triple-A RTS games as we knew them. The RTS genre was the best selling Triple-A genre on PC, even stronger than shooter and RPG, back in the late 1990s after all.
Now that all old genres like adventures or RPG (except RTS) got a successful revival, it would be great to get new Triple-A RTS games for PC.
Personally I hope for a return of the RTS Battlezone which combined both. My favorite game still.
Rise and Fall (the spiritual successor of Empire Earth), was a good RTS that allowed one to zoom-in and play in 3rd person with one's hero character (similar to Dungeon Keeper).
Battlezone (1998) was interesting too - first person shooter combined with RTS incl base building, similar was C&C Renegade. And Operation Flashpoint 1 (2001, now called AMA) had such a mode too.
But playing complex games like Watch Dogs 2 on PS4 nowadays, which has similar mechanics with the hacking tool and the quadcopter (you can control cars and what not while steering an quad copter while playing a third person character) - I am the opinion that nowadays, a complete non-simplified RTS would work on consoles just fine, even with a controller.
You can avoid part of this by using procedural units- but that easily gets out of hand, making the units non-distinctive or physical impossible.
The best option actually is player involvment, as the players build the units. But that is tough to balance. Oh, almost forgot: RTS Game made by some Zero-K Devs on the side http://www.istrolid.com/