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For one reason or another, 2025 has started off as the year where I get back into that most nostalgic of genres - good o' real-time strategy. First came the replaying of classics like Age of Empires, then trying out some new promising indie titles (Eyes of War being my most interesting find - just classic skirmish with a gimmick that lets you play in 3rd person and fight with your army, very cool during sieges), and then it just continued... Age of Darkness was another find, but the latest is 0 AD. Since most of my game consumption is a direct funnel from Steam (or GOG for all my DRM-free purchases), I guess gems like this are even harder to discover unless you hear from it by word of mouth - same as we did back in the day. That's what makes it even more endearing and kind of bitter-sweet because of how nostalgic this whole gaming period feels for me. Where do I start and end with 0 AD? It's absolutely astounding that someone released a free game of this scale and caliber. It's perhaps the closest to being a spiritual successor to the original Age of Empires while also having its own personality. And this was being developed all the way back from 2010? Needless to say, I've dipped just a bit into it and already have to shout praise in its direction. Just so glad whenever I see love being shown (and in such quantities too!) to this overshadowed genre. Consider this my love letter if nothing else <3

Hah: I just finished making my own script for fetching it from latest SVN, which I can confirm works as needed. # Get the latest version of Spirv from the nightly build SVN # https://svn.wildfiregames.com/nightly-build/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/shaders/spirv path="/home/mircea/Games/0ad/0ad_GIT/" cd "${path}/binaries/data/mods/mod/shaders" rm -rf "./spirv" svn export "https://svn.wildfiregames.com/nightly-build/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/shaders/spirv" echo -e '\E[32m* Updated, press any key to continue\E[37m' read Looking at source/tools/spirv/get-nightly-shaders.sh it seems to do roughly the same thing written in different words, so I'll probably use that

Please, @WiseKind, do yourself a favor and start playing against HUMAN players. Experience will give you much more than these countless words full of assumptions. See you in the lobby

I love the lobby name feature though, I think it is a very nice addition that tells us who is who. Maybe we can remove AIM MSN ICQ Yahoo Skype from the profile since they are no longer relevant?

The density of substantive content per paragraph is exceptionally low here. It is therefore unsurprising that such threads invariably conclude in the same manner.

Right always forget about it ^^"

There is already a dedicated script for Unix, source/tools/spirv/get-nightly-shaders.sh

(Don't get it - is there an automatic swearword correction? I meant to write da_mn_ed but it corrects me to "darned".)

... and he is darned right!

No one cares which mod you run in single player*. It's what you run in multi-player which may or may not cause a problem. In a competitive environment, we should endeavor to make the experience and challenge as consistent as possible for all participants. *Though, bragging rights are reduced the more automation-focused your mods are, even in single player. It's not as impressive to beat "the campaign" on hardest if you're running all kinds of mods compared to someone who beat it with stock 0ad.

Because it requires extra tools you might not have such as GLSLC and the Vulkan SDK. And the shaders are made available in the release tarballs. See source/tools/spirv for the python script to build shaders. See this for the nightly build https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/NightlyBuild To build you'll need the rules.json in the nightly build source/tools/spirv The commands look a bit like https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/build/jenkins/pipelines/nightly-build.Jenkinsfile#L139 You can also svn export the shaders to your folder like this script does https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/binaries/system/get-nightly-binaries.bat

A27 UPDATE

My bad. Should be good now.

SPIR-V files are binary files. As such they are not present in the git repository. You can either build them, or download them from the nightly build. Windows provides a script for this. You can adapt it for linux as well.

Should be optional imho.

he should do commentary of game replay, it can reduce lag, also showcase other players

No, i'm not saying that. I'm making my point against automations and smarttrain feature. Here you are defining typical characteristics of a real-time strategy game. Are you really explaining how to use control groups? I invite you to play a competitive multiplayer game and see if you still believe that 2 or 3 seconds isn't a long time. Also, in the fast-paced nature of a competitive game (not exactly Medium Petra Bot, not even Very Hard Petra Bot) you may forget to check your barracks for several seconds due to the number of things you have to pay attention to. Additionally, it may be necessary at some point to check which barracks are IDLE and which are overcrowded. This has to be done manually in the vanilla version of the game, and this takes valuable seconds of time. Talking about something you don't know it's not wise at all. Indeed, generally, the definition of what is cheating and what isn't is ultimately determined by the general opinion of the game's community. In this case, for you, there's no such thing as a mod that cheats (unless it breaks a core mechanic), even if you haven't tried it and don't have the slightest idea how it works. Here we return to subjectivity and irrelevant arguments such as "I can still beat you even if you use ProGUI" and this same sentence is enough: "I can still beat you even if you use revealed map". Ok done whit this. Good luck!

I would say the same thing, and probably you would too, if someone made lame assumptions on historical right? One will never try it if he is imprinted into thinking he'll not like it (he'll convince himself he doesn't if ever he tried it anyways), and he'll have the freedom to do so. I also have the freedom to say that speculations are stupid and explain that it's dumb to refer to something you don't have knowledge about. And it is. @TheCJ @WiseKind please don't take my comments for personal attacks. They just explain why it's not working to argue in those threads.

I believe that it is impossible to enforce such a rule without making 0 A.D. at least partially nonfree, something I gather we are not going to do any time soon Well, what does "enforcing" mean, here? If I host a multiplayer game, and I do not want my players to use any GUI mods, I will ask them when they join my game "Do you use any GUI mods?". If they say "yes, I use xy", I'll (politely) tell them that I do not want to play with them and they should turn the mods off if they want to play with me. If they say "no" and dont lie, we play together. If they say "no" and lie, we still play together, but if I realize during the game that they lied to me, I ban them. Also, if I realize they lied to me, I wont play with them again. If they say "I do not want to disclose this information", then thats their right, but I will still tell them "then you cant play with me" By doing this, I am "enforcing" that players I my game do not use GUI mods (that can be detected through gameplay). But I did not need to change anything about 0ad code for that "enforcement". I understand your sentiment. But you see, I do not have the time to take a proper look at proGUI, as all the time I do have for 0ad goes to the few games I play with my friends and helping Leif with the historical patch (which is getting better by the day, you should check it out). I'd wager others are in a similar position, they do not wish to invest their time into checking out proGUI, as they already believe it is not a mod they would enjoy/endorse. The different opinions based on whether the auto-trainer is a strategic decision by you or the mod comes from different perspectives, as I understood it; If you believe the choice, in which barracks to produce units in which size is a direct strategic decision, then proGUI is taking that decision for you (or is it not?). If you believe that the choice where to produce how many units is just a means to a higher strategic decision, and the actual decision is still taken by the player, as he defines the ratio (ranged-melee) which proGUI should try to match, then proGUI is not taking any decision fot you.

Wow, I'm sorry. I created my own thread about a similar topic before I realized that this thread existed. But to be fair, both threads have been meaningful, and their purposes aren't exactly the same... I must say that anyone who is actually suggesting that an anticheat program be included with 0 A.D. is arguing that 0 A.D. should cease to be a free software project. You can say what you want about what kinds of mod checks should be implemented, but that's the facts. You can't stop people from writing code on their own computers, due to the nature of free software. Anticheat solutions inherently require obscurity to work, so there cannot be a free-as-in-freedom anticheat. And I find the idea of using Machine Learning to help cringeworthy, but I digress... After reading this thread in full, I am starting to think that we could use a compromise. I strongly believe that the use of ProGUI, AutoCiv, and similar mods is NOT cheating, and I have my own reasons that I won't dive into here (it's mostly free-software absolutism), but I understand that some people disagree with me, so I would be open to allowing game hosts to decide for themselves what mods to allow, and perhaps a way to see what mods are active on each client, just for the sake of convenience. Nothing super invasive, since it's truly impossible to stop the secret use of mods, but it would mainly serve as a convenience option to make sure people are on the same page, and so those who don't understand the dilemma will have their clients figure it out from them, assuming they haven't modified it for themselves. I, for one, would never discriminate based on mod usage in my games, but I am finally coming to terms with the realization that I can't convince those who take the opposite extreme. However, I do think that there is a separate problem that the full game state is necessarily stored on every client, which makes fog-of-war cheating much easier than it should be. I do believe that it is possible to fully eliminate the risk of this kind of cheating, by redesigning the network protocol so that the game state is stored away from untrusted players, and only partially synced with the clients (again, won't go into too much detail since I have my own thread for this). I think this should be discussed separately from the argument as to the long argument of whether changing the input/output system of the game constitutes changing the game itself (I believe it doesn't). That may allow us to actually accomplish something here.

I played a 2v2 and it was a fun game

OBS Studio bug: the recording will flicker if you record at 4K 60fps

@SneakEP is becoming op at commentary! The stutter and camera shakes are kinda EXTREME thoughts.... RIP.. Could also be used to illustrate an issue/motivate the a27 relaunch.

Looks like I just added an asset import mission to my to-do list

Stan lets celebrate the coming out of alpha lable with an official discord server xD

Indeed, and they likely have very different limitations because they use very different engines. They also probably are developed by very different individuals. Of course this is does not mean there is nothing that can be done. But this is not something which has a huge priority. In fact it was even attempted in the past by @nani see: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1662