0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xšayāršā(play0ad.com)
play0ad.com
0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xšayāršā
https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-24-xsayarsa/
27 comments
Thanks for sharing this. THAT IS SO COOL.
Brian Broll will be taking about 0 A.D. today between 11:10 and AM–12:25 PM PCT for Microsoft
's AI and Gaming Research Summit. They seem to still accept attendance registrations.
https://lnkd.in/d5y5Y37
That’s honestly what I’ve been waiting for from this game. Game is decent enough, but the AI needed work. I was looking to build my own for years, just never had a decent interface for it.
Someone needs to start a Kaggle competition for training AI agents on 0 A.D.
It’s “buried the lede”
Yes, but "lead" is not completely wrong either:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
While I acknowledge the authority of the domain for your link, I must say that I have come to truly despise this class of slimy homophone equivocations (I'm attacking the concept, not you). There is something valuable, I claim, when specialist jargon leaks into general use and begins to become adopted by the masses. We (the public) get to feel as if we are in on the process of a specialized craft.
There should be no shame for innocent ignorance, but the remedy is correction and improvement (lifting all boats), not passing out participation trophies by watering down our vocabulary. "Massachusetts" is hard to spell (I just looked it up, myself, to be certain), but that doesn't make it a good idea to accept alternates.
There should be no shame for innocent ignorance, but the remedy is correction and improvement (lifting all boats), not passing out participation trophies by watering down our vocabulary. "Massachusetts" is hard to spell (I just looked it up, myself, to be certain), but that doesn't make it a good idea to accept alternates.
It's not homophone equivocation. "Lede" is obsolete, and for some reason people started using lede instead of lead. Lead has been in use for this for longer than lead.
> lede
> obs. variant of lead n. and v.
> lede
> variant of leed 1, Obs. language.
Earlier uses of "Lead":
> lead, n. 2
> f. Journalism. A summary or outline of a newspaper story; a guide to a story that needs further development or exploration; the first (often the most important) item in an issue, bulletin, etc. Cf. lead story, etc., under sense 11b below. Quot. 1947 refers to a radio news broadcast.
> 1927: Amer. Speech II. 241 “`Lead'..is used as a noun to refer to the initial summary of the story, or as a verb to instruct the printer what to put first.”
> 1947: Hansard, Commons 19 Dec. 2113 “There is what one calls the `lead', which is..the first item.”
Note that the Webster link says
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
> Our earliest examples of 'lede' come from the 1970s, around the time that Linotype machines began disappearing from newsrooms.
> lede
> obs. variant of lead n. and v.
> lede
> variant of leed 1, Obs. language.
Earlier uses of "Lead":
> lead, n. 2
> f. Journalism. A summary or outline of a newspaper story; a guide to a story that needs further development or exploration; the first (often the most important) item in an issue, bulletin, etc. Cf. lead story, etc., under sense 11b below. Quot. 1947 refers to a radio news broadcast.
> 1927: Amer. Speech II. 241 “`Lead'..is used as a noun to refer to the initial summary of the story, or as a verb to instruct the printer what to put first.”
> 1947: Hansard, Commons 19 Dec. 2113 “There is what one calls the `lead', which is..the first item.”
Note that the Webster link says
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
> Our earliest examples of 'lede' come from the 1970s, around the time that Linotype machines began disappearing from newsrooms.
Hopefully we'll be selected for GSOC see: https://twitter.com/play0ad/status/1363607317653180419
Congrats on a new release! I think it's a good project, and I too thought it was dead.
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Personal experience: A few-ish months ago, I tried to get into 0AD (more than an exploratory 1-2 matches vs an AI). I like to watch videos of folks playing Age Of Empires 2, and I looked for a similar experience on youtube, to better understand the game, the meta, and standard tactics.
But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when you actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch a video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
=====
Personal experience: A few-ish months ago, I tried to get into 0AD (more than an exploratory 1-2 matches vs an AI). I like to watch videos of folks playing Age Of Empires 2, and I looked for a similar experience on youtube, to better understand the game, the meta, and standard tactics.
But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when you actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch a video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
> But the videos just don't look nice. The units are hard to distinguish. The graphics are serviceable. It looks nice when you actually play, but personally it is not enjoyable to watch a video of it in the same way that AOE2 is.
Having played to a lot of RTS when I was younger, the main difference between AOE2 and the rest[1] is 3D vs isometric-2D. 3D tends to make games a lot messier. The comparison between AOE2 and AOE3 is a pretty good example of this phenomenon for instance.
[1] : Stacraft 2 being the outlier here, it has really “clean” graphics, while being 3D.
Having played to a lot of RTS when I was younger, the main difference between AOE2 and the rest[1] is 3D vs isometric-2D. 3D tends to make games a lot messier. The comparison between AOE2 and AOE3 is a pretty good example of this phenomenon for instance.
[1] : Stacraft 2 being the outlier here, it has really “clean” graphics, while being 3D.
> Stacraft 2 being the outlier here
Not a huge outlier. I find Starcraft 1 graphics more pleasing than Starcraft 2 for the isometric-2d reason.
Not a huge outlier. I find Starcraft 1 graphics more pleasing than Starcraft 2 for the isometric-2d reason.
This game looks so much better than it did a few years ago! I wish people used open source games like this for AI competitions. So much more open and also what a great community effort.
"We decided to name Alpha 24 after this inspiring ancient ruler to celebrate the ancient Persian civilisation, and to reflect upcoming changes in the internal governance structure of 0 A.D."
This is presented a bit mysteriously. Does than mean 0 A.D. devs and contributors are going to have an emperor?
This is presented a bit mysteriously. Does than mean 0 A.D. devs and contributors are going to have an emperor?
Every year over my summer break me and my teens have a tradition of locking ourselves in for a few days of Playing Zero AD which loosely aligns with at least one update for the year. We truly love this game and invite a few friends around also for a epic LAN party. We’ve waiting a long time for this release. Lots of great improvements in there, can’t wait to play.
I’m not sure about others but the game is in quite a playable state and has been playable for many years. Anyone have context on why it’s still labelled Alpha. What’s the key criteria for it to jump to Beta and 1.0?
What's still completely missing is a single player campaign, which at least some people consider a requirement for an non-alpha release.
Also 0ad still has severe performance problems for various reasons. One of them is that nearly all code runs single-threaded. Also the multiplayer code is all but efficient, so in a multiplayer game all players are essentially limited to the FPS of the player with the least capable hardware.
Also 0ad still has severe performance problems for various reasons. One of them is that nearly all code runs single-threaded. Also the multiplayer code is all but efficient, so in a multiplayer game all players are essentially limited to the FPS of the player with the least capable hardware.
> Also 0ad still has severe performance problems for various reasons. One of them is that nearly all code runs single-threaded. Also the multiplayer code is all but efficient, so in a multiplayer game all players are essentially limited to the FPS of the player with the least capable hardware.
Is there an issue tracker for these problems?
edit: play0ad, I cannot respond to your comment because it's dead. You might want to reach out to dang if you'd like other people to be able to read and respond to your comments.
Is there an issue tracker for these problems?
edit: play0ad, I cannot respond to your comment because it's dead. You might want to reach out to dang if you'd like other people to be able to read and respond to your comments.
There is on trac.wildfiregames.com
One of the biggest but sadly not the only problem is pathfinder threading https://code.wildfiregames.com/D14
Other things like the messaging system could probably be threaded.
Rendering needs to run in another thread than simulation too.
Feel free to reach out to us on quakenet.org #0ad-dev. We're usually there on CET.
One of the biggest but sadly not the only problem is pathfinder threading https://code.wildfiregames.com/D14
Other things like the messaging system could probably be threaded.
Rendering needs to run in another thread than simulation too.
Feel free to reach out to us on quakenet.org #0ad-dev. We're usually there on CET.
I'm explicitly and admittedly just not a PC gamer, but this is the one exception to the rule. Probably because I'm a longtime Linux on the desktop user, and there just wasn't much in the past. If you enjoyed AoE2, or just want to kill some time messing around, I highly suggest giving it a spin. Careful, time can disappear quickly.
Just to save somebody some searching, here's what the release name refers to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_II
The first paragraph on the page specifies that the release is named in honor of Xerxes I, not Xerxes II.
Kind of sad how awfully mangled the Greek version of the name is...
It's not that far off; the Greeks have Xerxes where you might expect Xiarsa from the cuneiform. Greek has no "sh" sound, so you can't blame them for not using it.
Compare Greek Dareios / Persian Darayavauš.
Compare Greek Dareios / Persian Darayavauš.
If it consoles you I feel the same, daily, with how anglophones refuse to write even basic Italian, Spanish, French, or Portuguese sentences.
No matter how hard me and other non-anglophones work to pronounce and spell English words correctly, double checking and investing money in getting the right pronunciation.
No matter how hard me and other non-anglophones work to pronounce and spell English words correctly, double checking and investing money in getting the right pronunciation.
Still better than Ahasuerus, descended from the same Old Persian name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahasuerus
Wow!! I thought it was pretty much dead after their fork.
I'm happy to see it's not the case!! ^^
I love this game and its music.
I'm happy to see it's not the case!! ^^
I love this game and its music.
Sorry, what fork? What happened?
Here, they said that the development was slowed down because of disagreements, and a sizable part of the development team announced their fork:
https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/25134-fork-ad/
https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/25134-fork-ad/
With the benefit of hindsight, this sounds more like personal drama than a real fork. I'm not super familiar with 0AD beyond playing sometimes, dunno what their org structure is like or anything, but this doesn't look like there was ever really a threat to 0AD.
Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really out of the ordinary?
It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a fully private fork with 3 people?
Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really out of the ordinary?
It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a fully private fork with 3 people?
Well, I mean, "personal drama" is likely the chief cause of most forks. So it's not as if this didn't create a real fork (I'm pretty sure the other guys have their own repo).
They do, they even have their own website. Their repo is closed source so we can't take any patch from them though.
https://fork-ad.gitlab.io/
Three guys left to create a fork back in 2018. They argued that they would be able to iterate faster because they trusted each other.
They also said they would only release the source once they made a release.
By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map generation.
So far they have not yet released any source code. Since the fork happened, the original project has released two new versions.
They also said they would only release the source once they made a release.
By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map generation.
So far they have not yet released any source code. Since the fork happened, the original project has released two new versions.
> By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map generation.
Fun fact: Map generation was significantly faster before alpha 23. With alpha 23 map generation got reworked to be more procedural, which decreased its generation time, but enabled features like choosing between different biomes per map or the nomad game mode on all random maps.
Fun fact: Map generation was significantly faster before alpha 23. With alpha 23 map generation got reworked to be more procedural, which decreased its generation time, but enabled features like choosing between different biomes per map or the nomad game mode on all random maps.
Similarly I've been playing OpenRA recently, which is basically an open source recreation of the old C&C games Dune, Tiberian Sun and Red Alert (the later being the most popular). It's a very honest recreation that feels close to the originals, both in terms of graphics and game play.
However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my attention is being online multiplayer, the diversity and challenge other human players brings cannot be replaced with AI so far... Anyway, the last time I tried 0 A.D it didn't seem to have multiplayer capability yet, but it seems to now!
However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my attention is being online multiplayer, the diversity and challenge other human players brings cannot be replaced with AI so far... Anyway, the last time I tried 0 A.D it didn't seem to have multiplayer capability yet, but it seems to now!
>> However the key thing that keeps it fun for me and holds my attention is being online multiplayer
I had a long spell of BZflag. The humans are so much better to play against. Highly recommended game for casual play BTW.
I had a long spell of BZflag. The humans are so much better to play against. Highly recommended game for casual play BTW.
The last time I tried bzflag online I got beaten non-stop. It was honestly a little disheartening, the skill level of the human opponents seemed comically good. Lots of practice I guess
I love bzflag though, I used to play locally with friends, sometimes all night when I was a teen. Good times :)
I love bzflag though, I used to play locally with friends, sometimes all night when I was a teen. Good times :)
I had the same issue with openRA at first, some games take a lot more skill investment at the start but this pays off later in genuinely rewarding gameplay, much like mastering a sport.
Off topic, can anyone recommend a good strategy game with a logistics system? I mean in realistic terms a battle unit can not just sit in a remote place for ages and survive without food and gears support.
This might sound ridiculous but some of the most advanced civilization builders I’ve played have been mods (custom games) of old Warcraft 3.
Those include Genesis of Empires 1 and 2. Although they don’t have quite the logistic mechanics you ask for, they do scratch an itch. However, some of them are rendered broken by recent updates.
Heroes and Empires also comes close, but the city building mechanics of Genesis are unparalleled in my experiences. Essentially a sim city like game with war mechanics that are rooted into how your society responds to your control.
Unfortunately it wasn’t very popular since it required a lot of knowledge about how to build your city and manage your army.
The Hegemony series features supply range heavily, in how you build/connect your cities and with armies:
https://longbowgames.com/hegemony3/
It's also just a generally fun strategy game that went largely unnoticed and they're still plucking away on DLC years later.
https://longbowgames.com/hegemony3/
It's also just a generally fun strategy game that went largely unnoticed and they're still plucking away on DLC years later.
Spellforce 3 (and likely others from the series) has carts that move resources between outposts. These can be attacked. It's not exactly what you're after, but more than most other RTS games where resources can be deposited anywhere and picked up anywhere.
Hearts of Iron 4 and 3
Indeed, Hearts of Iron series are in great part about managing your country's war production and supplies (including getting enough raw materials), setting up what hardware your military units are made up of and making sure they are well supplied. Actually moving them around and achieving your tactical and strategic goals is just a cherry on top.
Other Paradox games mostly just have generic "available manpower" number and unit attrition that eats into it, depending on terrain, weather, etc. They do not concern themselves much about how that manpower actually gets to the unit (which could be on the other side of the planet) to replenish it.
Other Paradox games mostly just have generic "available manpower" number and unit attrition that eats into it, depending on terrain, weather, etc. They do not concern themselves much about how that manpower actually gets to the unit (which could be on the other side of the planet) to replenish it.
I liked Crusader Kings. Same studio (right?). It's more RPG focused. Having an army mustered is expensive. There's also Europa Universalis, same studio again. Some people swear by it, but I've not played it.
Great :-) Yes, those are Paradox games.
Hearts of Iron - HOI(4,3) is more of a modern warfare game: you manage supply, manpower, combat lines.
Crusader Kings - CK(3,2) is more of a roleplaying game: you manage your family, dynasty, vassals, religion, personal traits, and personal/family scheming.
Europa Universalis - EU(4,3) is a game that combines a bit of everything: you've got internal affairs, foreign affairs, bit of warfare, technology, colonization, discovery, market trading, ...
Stellaris is like EU but in space. With scifi tech, federation, diplomacy and mythical/intriguing events
Victoria is more of an economy management game along with a bit of warfare and political fun.
They're all good games that can take a few couple of hours to have fun with. People usually joke that it's like playing with a map and some coloured paintbrush ...
Paradox has some other nice titles too. I think "Tyranny" and "Pillars of Eternity" is Paradox too but might be wrong. Those are RPGs (think Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, ... kind of RPGs)
Hearts of Iron - HOI(4,3) is more of a modern warfare game: you manage supply, manpower, combat lines.
Crusader Kings - CK(3,2) is more of a roleplaying game: you manage your family, dynasty, vassals, religion, personal traits, and personal/family scheming.
Europa Universalis - EU(4,3) is a game that combines a bit of everything: you've got internal affairs, foreign affairs, bit of warfare, technology, colonization, discovery, market trading, ...
Stellaris is like EU but in space. With scifi tech, federation, diplomacy and mythical/intriguing events
Victoria is more of an economy management game along with a bit of warfare and political fun.
They're all good games that can take a few couple of hours to have fun with. People usually joke that it's like playing with a map and some coloured paintbrush ...
Paradox has some other nice titles too. I think "Tyranny" and "Pillars of Eternity" is Paradox too but might be wrong. Those are RPGs (think Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, ... kind of RPGs)
I like Total War Three Kingdoms, it has one of the best AI and campaign dynamics I've ever seen.
I have been following this game for many years. What you all have made is amazing. Thank you for continuing to work on and improve 0 A.D.
Very inspiring!
Very inspiring!
A small piece of esoteric knowledge: There is no year 0 A.D. The year before 1 A.D. was 1 B.C.
Fun fact that's the point, so we can "justify" artistic license for some things :D
So... Year 2021 A.D. is actually year 2020. You could say that this year indexing scheme is 1-based. Btw, I'm sure you meant to say 0 C.E. \s
Yes but actually no. Calendars are horribly complicated. IIRC Christ's birth year is about 6 years off. This because the year as we know it was fixated around 300 years Christ's death and by then nobody had (or really cared about) the exact offset.
Historic knowledge: There was none of the tree. People only started counting years relative to Christ's birth at about 300 A.D.
Neither Ubuntu packages haven't been updated nor the official PPA. The latest version of Ubuntu mentioned is .. 19.04 .. so I think the page hasn't been updated in ages.
I guess maybe it works if you build from source? But last I checked it was a hairball with build scripts
I guess maybe it works if you build from source? But last I checked it was a hairball with build scripts
It will totally work if you build from source ^^
I use this https://code.wildfiregames.com/P241 but basically you need only this after cloning and installing deps
cd build/workspaces && sh update-workspaces.sh -j4 cd gcc && make -j4
See also https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions
I use this https://code.wildfiregames.com/P241 but basically you need only this after cloning and installing deps
cd build/workspaces && sh update-workspaces.sh -j4 cd gcc && make -j4
See also https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions
There is no rush. I will wait for the AppImage to get published. It's just the release links to Linux downloads are broken and I thought someone in charge will see it
Btw am I reading it correctly - you guys are still on Subversion? and no CMake? but you're using C++17. What a weird combo of old and new :)
Btw am I reading it correctly - you guys are still on Subversion? and no CMake? but you're using C++17. What a weird combo of old and new :)
We use Arcanist + Phabricator, but main repo is SVN yes. We also have two git mirrors.
We use Premake5 instead of CMake, for historical reasons. an attempt was made at Meson but it was too messy on Windows.
We only switched to C++17 because Mozilla's SpiderMonkey headers required us to. Else we'd still be at C++11
We use Premake5 instead of CMake, for historical reasons. an attempt was made at Meson but it was too messy on Windows.
We only switched to C++17 because Mozilla's SpiderMonkey headers required us to. Else we'd still be at C++11
The snap was updated on the 10th of December 2020, so expect the latwst version to show up there.
Something I've always loved about the ancient Greeks is how they'd hear a foreign name, go "yeah, I can't even pronounce that, never mind decline it" and come up with their own totally and shamelessly mangled variant. See also: their names for the Egyptian gods.
Sounds interesting. Do you have direct links?
One of my favorite games. I play it quite often since years now. Thank you for this new release. I normally see it being compared with AoE 2, but 0 A.D is much more dynamic, than AoE 2. I just wish there were more online games going on.
The GUI isn't starting on Mac for me.
Edit: Had to wait several minutes, but it started.
Edit: Had to wait several minutes, but it started.
works great on linux
I'm really happy to see that the project is still alive and kicking!
> New Requirements: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and anything below macOS 10.12 are no longer supported.
Anyone tried compiling it on any of these systems yet, will it still compile?
Anyone tried compiling it on any of these systems yet, will it still compile?
The problem is Spidermonkey for windows, as their build is pretty opaque, and they started calling some Windows APIs breaking compatibility. You get a nasty error if you try to run something there about a missing Kernel32 function
For macOS, you can actually build for > 10.12 BUT the build will only be compatible with this. See https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2827 for more info about why the SDL2 broke stuff.
For macOS, you can actually build for > 10.12 BUT the build will only be compatible with this. See https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2827 for more info about why the SDL2 broke stuff.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I guess that'd be pretty challenging now with all the new requirements noted in the "Under the hood" section of the release notes.
For anyone still playing Alpha 23 be sure to try my Aye Pirates mod. Further updates are still planned through the rest of this year.
Yeah, I used to play with my friends back in college the whole night. Old school lan party.
> “Xšayāršā” (pronounced: Khsha-ya-ṛsha)
Wow, that's helpful.
Seriously, IPA and a translation and/or explanation would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: 'IPA': not the beer, but 'International Phonetic Alphabet'
Wow, that's helpful.
Seriously, IPA and a translation and/or explanation would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: 'IPA': not the beer, but 'International Phonetic Alphabet'
Both kinds of IPA are greatly appreciated
Actually it's there Xšayāršā (pronounced Khsha-ya-ṛsha; IPA: /xʃajaːr̩ʃaː/) :)
Anyone have links to Linux binaries?
That links to distro and community repositories, and the ones that I checked out didn't have v0.24 binaries yet.
edit: The development PPA has v0.24 alphas that were compiled in November[1], though.
[1] https://launchpad.net/~wfg/+archive/ubuntu/0ad.dev
edit: The development PPA has v0.24 alphas that were compiled in November[1], though.
[1] https://launchpad.net/~wfg/+archive/ubuntu/0ad.dev
This is such a great project
age of empires 4 open source
I find the choice of business model very strange. The free software philosophy allows game art to be proprietary. They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free. I'm not sure why they don't do this.
> I find the choice of business model very strange.
I don't see much of a business model.
> The free software philosophy allows game art to be proprietary.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The Free Software Definition does not allow this. If code is contributed to 0AD under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary graphics.
The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
> They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free.
This violates the spirit of free software.
> I'm not sure why they don't do this.
I think they want the game to be free.
I don't see much of a business model.
> The free software philosophy allows game art to be proprietary.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The Free Software Definition does not allow this. If code is contributed to 0AD under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary graphics.
The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
> They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free.
This violates the spirit of free software.
> I'm not sure why they don't do this.
I think they want the game to be free.
> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The Free Software Definition does not allow this. If code is contributed to 0AD under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary graphics.
> The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
The free software definition only really applies to software, not art. There is nothing that would be in conflict for having a free game engine paired with proprietary artwork. There even exists plenty of examples of such; most prominently, the Doom and Quake games.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
The spirit of free software is not "free stuff", but rather the freedom to run and modify programs. A free engine paired with proprietary art doesn't violate anything.
> I think they want the game to be free.
This is the main thing and the primary factor in all of the conversation. While the 0 AD authors _could_ make a proprietary-art game and maybe make a profit doing so, their intention is clearly to have free (as in freedom) artwork as well as to have the game spread as wide as possible. There is nothing wrong with this, just as there would be nothing wrong with making a commercial game. It is a choice and one that can be taken admirably.
The short of it, there probably isn't a business model to speak of. While it does appear there exists a corporation (Wildfire Games) to cover legal concerns, it's doubtful they're doing it for profit.
> The GNU Free System Distribution guidelines allows for the inclusion of game art that is under a license that does not permit modification. However any such art must be redistributable for commercial and noncommercial purposes at no charge.
The free software definition only really applies to software, not art. There is nothing that would be in conflict for having a free game engine paired with proprietary artwork. There even exists plenty of examples of such; most prominently, the Doom and Quake games.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
The spirit of free software is not "free stuff", but rather the freedom to run and modify programs. A free engine paired with proprietary art doesn't violate anything.
> I think they want the game to be free.
This is the main thing and the primary factor in all of the conversation. While the 0 AD authors _could_ make a proprietary-art game and maybe make a profit doing so, their intention is clearly to have free (as in freedom) artwork as well as to have the game spread as wide as possible. There is nothing wrong with this, just as there would be nothing wrong with making a commercial game. It is a choice and one that can be taken admirably.
The short of it, there probably isn't a business model to speak of. While it does appear there exists a corporation (Wildfire Games) to cover legal concerns, it's doubtful they're doing it for profit.
Stallman has repeatedly stated that game art can be proprietary and still be free software.[0]
> > They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free. > This violates the spirit of free software.
Stallman sold copies of the GNU compiler. To be fair, he also says "but everyone's got to be free to non-commercially redistribute exact copies." However, charging a "distribution fee" is allowed and encouraged. 0 AD themselves state they cannot afford the bandwidth costs.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht...
"What about works of art and entertainment? Here it took me a while to decide what to think about modifications."
> > They could sell DRM-free copies on their site that license the game art but keep the code free. > This violates the spirit of free software.
Stallman sold copies of the GNU compiler. To be fair, he also says "but everyone's got to be free to non-commercially redistribute exact copies." However, charging a "distribution fee" is allowed and encouraged. 0 AD themselves state they cannot afford the bandwidth costs.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht...
"What about works of art and entertainment? Here it took me a while to decide what to think about modifications."
> If code is contributed to 0AD under the GPL, they could not combine it with proprietary graphics.
You could use the free 0AD engine to play a proprietary campaign, just as you can use the free Calibre to read a proprietary book.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
That's a matter of opinion. The roots of free software are about empowering users to fix bugs in functional code; computer gaming was barely a thing in those days, and while fixing outright bugs in games is an obvious extension of the same philosophy, changing artworks is much less so.
You could use the free 0AD engine to play a proprietary campaign, just as you can use the free Calibre to read a proprietary book.
> This violates the spirit of free software.
That's a matter of opinion. The roots of free software are about empowering users to fix bugs in functional code; computer gaming was barely a thing in those days, and while fixing outright bugs in games is an obvious extension of the same philosophy, changing artworks is much less so.
If you are the author (and every other contributor signed relevant CLAs) then you can distribute the code however you want. You do not have to include game assets in the code distribution.
I do realize that. However, in the case of 0ad, they do not require such a CLA. Rather their website has this to say:
> By sending in a patch, you agree that it is your own work (or else make it clear where it came from) and agree to licensing any code as GPL 2+ (or in some cases MIT, especially for code in lib/ - check the existing copyright headers on the source files you edit) and data files as CC-BY-SA 3.0.
> By sending in a patch, you agree that it is your own work (or else make it clear where it came from) and agree to licensing any code as GPL 2+ (or in some cases MIT, especially for code in lib/ - check the existing copyright headers on the source files you edit) and data files as CC-BY-SA 3.0.
0 A.D. now has an API for reinforcement learning. You can train AI to control the units in game
https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...