Quoting: ChiKinIt looks so cool but every time I play it, the performance is too much of a problem. I don't get it? Is it running smoothly for some folks?

Well it seems so for some people. Maybe you didn't adjust the graphics settings, or maybe something else is at play. What you might be confusing as lag could be the command delay in multiplayer games.

Performance has also improved over the years with the threading of the pathfinder and the various Spidermonkey improvements.

Quoting: ssj17vegetaThe very first open-source game I told my self it had nice graphics. Back in, like, 2005 ? Geez, I'm old :

Imagine what the game looked like inside (the code). It probably has nothing to do with its current code.

You'd be suprised. Some 2009 code is still there, untouched.

Quoting: ShabbyXDoes it have a campaign yet?

Also, nice, I might look at what they are doing in RenderDoc and give them some pointers (if GPU is their bottleneck)

It has campaign support but only one person made a campaign so far. We hope to integrate it in the mod downloader at some point, but updating the maps from three alphas has been a bit difficult. They have a github: https://github.com/SciGuy42/Macedonia_0ad/tree/a25 [External Link]

With regards to Render doc, you have to change some options in the config (to enable 3.3 GL by default it's set to 2.1) You'll probably see that we have some heavily unoptimized art assets. Also, the lack of instancing, the number of materials, and the great variety in assets.

Quoting: Mountain ManThis thing has been in development for, like, 50 years, and they still haven't nailed down performance?

20! Well it's not a simple issue, and good C++ programmers with time and patience don't roam the streets. We're a very small team these days and we have 500k LOC.

Quoting: Lanz0 AD is the best Age of Empires 2-like game, hands down.

Thanks!

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So I went around and asked STK, Super Tux, Warzone 2100 Zero-K and Wesnoth.

Zero-K:

Quoting: NRHD

Quoting: play0adDoes anyone know if Zero-K had to relicense before going on Steam?

ZK did not relicense before going to Steam and afaict this kind of threat was never evaluated

Quoting: play0adMy question is more along the line of can a gpl2/ccbysa project go on steam without CLA

Plenty others did i think. Wesnoth is gplv2 and is on Steam

Ah:

Another case is when you have an optional feature to interface with a proprietary application on the system, for example a FOSS communication program that has the functionality to access the address books of third-party applications, including proprietary ones like Outlook. In this case the library isn't required at all for the main functionality.
If steam is optional this interpretation lets you off the hook

Note that you'd probably be violating the GPL if you use any third-party GPL code or libraries unless the proprietary library is part of the operating system. So don't use third-party GPL code and third-party proprietary code together. (Of course, if you're not distributing the third party library OR you're using only your own code, it would probably be legal, but you'd be building a software combination that's illegal to distribute in a working form.)

SuperTuxKart:

Quoting: BenauStan most contributed stk agreeded on that, the rest will be cleared after 🇦🇶 is taken out Actually stan supertux project is a better asker

SuperTux:

Quoting: Semphris(Lesuperchef) SuperTux does not use Steam's library, which is proprietary
Some people said the author of PhysFS also did a library that would allow GPL apps to use Steam's library, but I haven't looked into it

It seems he did https://github.com/icculus/steamshim [External Link] so at worst we could use that.

Wesnoth:

Quoting: Pentarctagonmy understanding is that it's not an issue since we don't use the steamworks sdk for anything.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading/distributing_opensource [External Link] says

But I saw a GPL-licensed application on Steam!
This can happen if the author of the code that is GPL-licensed has given the permission to do so. The author can of course always (a) decide to grant Valve a different license than the author grants everyone else or (b) decide that what the Steamworks SDK does is just a communication with a service that does not invoke the copyleft requirement of the GPL.

but we just plain don't use the sdk in the first place

Quoting: play0adAsking cause 0 A.D. has no CLA
So we can't get the consent of all past and dead contributors to do it
It seems to me like it's possible but I have yet to find a source that actually does it ^^

yeah, wesnoth has no CLA either, so we couldn't relicense even if we wanted to.
well, technically contributors agree to "GPL 2 or later", so if needed at some point we can say it's GPL 3 rather than GPL 2
but that'd be it

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIf you're curious how that relicensing exercise panned out for VLC (they did get it relicensed in the end), here's their press release on the matter: https://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html [External Link]

Yeah I remember reading about this. It was when I looked for the apple store. Most of the links I consulted then are in that question.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple-allowed-to-distribute-gplv3-licensed-software-through-its-ios-app-store [External Link]

Asked BAR as well and they said they were waiting for that roadmap to finish:

Quoting: ⛏ PtaQ ⛏We have a checklist of stuff we wanna do before Steam
You only have one shot at it and we wanna makes sure it is in the best shape possible (and infra is ready for the influx)
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release [External Link]

Asked Warzone 2100 as well seems like they have a copy cat that do not bother to update it.

Quoting: pastdueNothing done through or with the Steam build supports the project, unfortunately.
A brief summary of the history of the Steam build, and the individual who uploaded it:
- We reached out prior to his release with an offer to collaborate, and raising potential concerns and issues. He was fairly unreceptive and is now largely unresponsive.
- He packaged the 3.3.0 public release, but incorrectly, so we can’t really even help debug issues with it. He continues to leave the package with outdated releases.
- Legitimate questions / concerns on the Steam forums continue to go missing (i.e. are deleted), instead of being addressed, as relayed to us by numerous community members.
- At the moment we're far more focused on working on improving the game and the infrastructure around it to support all of our new contributors.
- So we encourage folks to avoid the Steam release and just download directly from wz2100.net, GitHub, or SourceForge.

TLDR; Seems it's possible, with or without hacks depending on that SDK linking issue.

But in our case that doesn't solve the infrastructure problem and the fact that a huge number people on the lobby could kill the lobby VM and all the other services we have running on our server, and that the lag in late game could be a major turn off for players, ruining the reputation of the game on steam and elsewhere.

A question we get often is how many developers are there working on 0 A.D. to which the answer is it's complicated. There is a big contribution bar to match the level of quality we want to achieve, and there are few resources to review and ensure that the contributions match the criteria.

We have two senior C++ senior devs, and one of them is mostly AFK, the rest is junior to mid level and cannot review the contributions we actually need, such as threading and other performance improvements that could make it so we can go on platforms to get more players.

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Quoting: CatKillerIt's mostly $100 and agreeing to the Distribution and SDK Access agreements. The rest is mostly best practices stuff: localisation, branding requirements, controller support, stuff like that. The best bet would probably be to talk to other folks that have already done it: Supertux, Blender, RetroArch, are ones that come to mind. For rustling up the $100 you could take donations, potentially with a specific call to action. You might also consider Early Access as an option if you feel the game isn't quite ready yet, although you wouldn't want to stay like that forever.

Question is whether we are legally allowed to accept "Distribution and SDK Access agreements." Yeah I'll see if I can talk to my contacts there when the time comes.

The game isn't quite ready yet, the lag in late game might put off a lot of people. And most importantly, I don't know if the team is ready for the influx of people. As you can see for Spring it wasn't a smooth ride https://video.fosdem.org/2020/K.3.201/gamedev_spring_steam.mp4 [External Link]

We don't have that many active developers these days.

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Quoting: Liam DaweThanks for coming here to give your thoughts directly. A quick idea: could you not set up a page and company on Steam, and leave it as Coming Soon? Plenty of other developers have done that. Gives you a way to ensure you're ready for an eventual release and protect the game too.

We could. Question is whether we are legally allowed to have a GPL2+ (Technically some our libs are GPL3 so we'd have to be careful) game on steam "as is" (re-licensing is impossible). If we are then we can try setting it up if Steam allows coming soon forever. If we aren't then we should never go there.

I imagine Steam might be more careful now so we'd have to get in touch with them somehow.

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We totally agree that the person had the right to upload it to steam due to the license. The concern here is Wildfire Games' identity theft, the lack of certainty about the source code (Verified, not verified), the mistakes in the title, and especially the potential load on our servers if the person didn't change the multiplayer lobby, and bonus, the positive or negative reputation of the game's presence on Steam in an alpha version for Wildfire Games and 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant since the person is pretending to be us. As an additional cost, moderation might have been problematic.

Regarding the legal part, there is no CLA on 0 A.D., so if it had to be re-licensed to link to the Steam SDK, I have potentially 500 contributors who disagree with taking this into account. Some of them are part of a fork, and some of them are dead.

You have to be the copyright owner to post on Steam, but I'm not sure.
In fact, if the person had contacted us beforehand, we could have considered something, but the fact they totally ignored us and or our messages made it a matter of urgency.

We're actually really interested in what it would take to go on Steam properly, and whether we can at all so please get in touch if you know what's required.

We'd like to thank all the people that reported the game on Steam, and we're sorry it had to go to such extents.

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Has the switch to Python 3 been made yet? I don't have Python 2 around anymore on my system...

Yeah since A24. It was a hard requirement on most Linux distributions.

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Well there are some discussions inside the remaining team as whether to drop the alpha label.

The main reasons we haven't yet is that the game still has some rough edges namingly the huge lag when many units are moving. It's still missing some core features too and it also warrants for more breaking changes.

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Quoting: Mountain ManMany, many years ago before Steam for Linux, I started keeping track of open source game projects because they were pretty much the only games available for Linux at the time. 0AD was one of them. As I look through my few dozen archived internet bookmarks now, most of the sites are either gone or haven't been updated in years. And yet here's 0AD still going strong and looking better than ever. Given its professional quality, I'm surprised it hasn't been given a price tag and sold as an "early access" project on Steam.

It's been considered however there are some licensing issues, and also, the problem that the game is 20 years old, nearly 100% volunteer work, and there are still some major issues we have to fix to avoid a huge spam of Negative reviews if we decide to change something between two releases. So we will go eventually, for a price or not, but not until some features like campaign support and pathfinder threading are implemented.

Quoting: DerpFoxI really love that gale. It's a pleasure to see it constantly evolve.
The only thing important to me it lacks for me is a voiced tutorial/campaign with a clear objective system.

Hopefully the work will resume on https://code.wildfiregames.com/D11 [External Link] soon allowing the interface to support campaigns. However it's already somewhat possible to create scenarios. Voice campaigns are much more complicated, for we'd need to have a special sound team for that. And that doesn't usually come open source :D

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: TcheyAlso, i find the perf mid-game to drop quite a lot, and with 50+ units on screen, it’s not great. Could be my computer, but for similar situation, i have better perf with SupCom or Zero-K.

Unfortunately, the game's rather bad performance is well known.
IMO it is mostly due to them using JavaScript (Spidermonkey afaik) for scripting. JS simply wasn't made with high performance in mind, that's just not where it shines.
But now that the script engine is that deeply integrated since years, you can't just rip it out like a bad tooth to replace it with a shiny C# or Lua tooth. At best, I could imagine more scripting logic being rewritten in C++, only called from script.

Actually, the latter makes most sense IMO, as that is how scripting should be used anyway (as in, if it is performance critical, don't do it in script, do it in C++).

Intel did actually some profiling recently https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/identifying-the-frame-rate-bottleneck-in-0-ad.html [External Link]

There are however a lot of things that can be done, though most of them are very complex. There is pathfinder threading
https://code.wildfiregames.com/D14 [External Link] UnitPushing https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1490 [External Link] those could offer a significant boost in the endgame.

There is also using a more recent version of OpenGL we use 2.0 and 1.1 but that means a lot of existing players won't be able to play anymore.

In the future we'll have to find a way to keep supporting MacOS when they finally remove OpenGL support.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: TheRiddickWhy not SMAA? its superior!

Because it is a lot harder to implement.
FXAA is a relatively simple post-effect, just blurring together neighboring pixels more or less. One of the reasons it makes stuff quite blurry and some prefer having no AA at all over FXAA.

SMAA is more involved, effectively "intelligently" smoothing edges instead of just blurring. But it also requires a lot more GPU power (and afaik CPU as well for the preparation?).

It is possible their graphics pipeline is not set up for that. Who knows.

Hey there,

The code has been made so we can add more filters later on :) It just takes time to add such filters because we need to make sure they are gonna work for everyone. For instance the FXAA filter we used had to be modified because it only worked on NVIDIA hardware and would crash on AMD and Intel.

I can't say for sure we will provide SMAA in the next release, but some work as been started. However we are only volunteers so free time is defined by the amount of time we spend AFK;

Stay tuned for more updates, and thanks a lot to GamingOnLinux for this article :)

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