Dunedan

You probably disabled TLS encrypted connections to the multiplayer lobby in the past. See:

And for completeness sake here is the announcement post the banner links to (for everybody who stumbles over this thread after the banner is gone):

The overall Terms of Use forbid harmful and threatening behavior. This of course applies to game names as well. We've taken care about that specific case in the meantime.

Unencrypted connections to the multiplayer lobby are now not possible anymore.

When you connect to the multiplayer lobby, 0ad uses a secure, TLS-encrypted connection by default. However, up to now we also offered the ability for players to disable that encryption. This won't be possible from some time tomorrow (2026-03-06) on anymore, as we want to improve the security and privacy of our players. For the past two weeks, every player who disabled TLS-encryption in the past, and therefore connected to the multiplayer lobby with an unencrypted connection, received a notification to change their configuration to enable it. If you haven't followed these instructions or just haven't connected to the multiplayer lobby since then, here is what you have to do to continue to be able to connect to the multiplayer lobby: From the main screen of the game, navigate to "Settings" → "Options" → "Networking / Lobby" and enable "TLS encryption" there. As an alternative you can also locate your 0ad configuration file and change lobby.tls = "false" to lobby.tls = "true" there.

Don't keep your hope up too much.

Would make sense if they would though, wouldn't it?

I have to admit that the Terms of Use aren't very clear regarding this, but I would argue point 8 and maybe point 10 as well apply. Such bots might also introduce additional security and privacy risks for our users and that's why we generally don't allow them. To be clear: Those are not artificial rules we made up for your bot, but something we have applied in the past as well, whenever somebody added a third-party bot to the multiplayer lobby. One difference of your bot, compared to other bots I have seen in the past, is that it implements functionality I can very well see to be integrated into 0ad itself (albeit I'd prefer a different interface between players and the dedicated server). The correct process is to go through the regular PR review process for that though and get it accepted into 0ad.

Please mind that we consider any player operated bots in the multiplayer lobby to be a violation of the Terms of Use.

In r28 the font engine got replaced, so you could use any FreeType or OpenType font. All you have to do is add it in the right location (it's binaries/data/mods/mod/fonts/ by default, but should work with any mod too) and change you config to use them. Here is how that'd need to look in your config: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/commit/6ca52a0b23a311910e259cddf4ddab747374f22d/binaries/data/config/default.cfg#L659-L710 If you are stuck with Hyrule Conquest on a27, check out source/tools/fontbuilder2/fontbuilder.py for how to build the font files.

The problem is that without retrieving reports from all players, we don't know if the game is still in progress. As there is no artificial limit to the duration of games, we'd have to wait a few hours to be reasonably sure it's over.

To rate games we currently rely on both players "agreeing" about the outcome of the game. That means whenever a rated game ends, 0ad sends a report about its outcome to a bot which is responsible for handling the ratings. Only if the reports of both players match, the game will get rated. This is necessary to prevent players from sending fake reports to manipulate their ratings. In case one of the players disconnects and doesn't come back later, we won't get a report from that player and therefore can't rate the game automatically. The best solution I've come up with so far is to inform the bot already when a rated game starts and about which players participate. Then if only a single report gets received later on, we can wait a few hours and award that player the points. I've described that in more detail in https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/3951#issuecomment-62016 The non-host player loosing the connection and not being able to reconnect afterwards (no matter for what reason) is an interesting edge case I haven't thought about yet.

As soon as a release candidate gets published, mod authors should take care to update their mods. From this point on breaking changes are unlikely and a release candidate is a clear sign that a release is about to come out soon.

The lobby isn't resource heavy and right now we should be able to handle a few thousand concurrent players. There is also work in progress to make it even more scalable (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8679). However, as @Stan` already mentioned, with a sudden significant increase of players we'd definitely get trouble moderating the lobby with the capabilities we have at hand for that right now.

Good catch @yeager! I created a PR to fix that, however we'll have to see if it'll make it into r28: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8668