Web Server for AoE 1, 2 and 3 DE supporting LAN multiplayer 100% offline

apitman 372 points github.com

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Rendello

Classic AoE-playing Hacker News-types might also enjoy 0 A.D.

It's free and fun, but definitely humbling if you consider yourself a master strategist:

https://play0ad.com/

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bryancrisso

i love 0ad so much but it runs AWFULLY as soon as you get a fun number of units on the map.

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Rendello

I haven't had an issue with that personally (played on and off for almost 10 years), though I imagine it could be an issue on some older hardware. Massed units will cause lag in big team games where there's 4 armies clashing, though that might be more of a network thing.

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yohannesk

I am curious as a non game developer, are these types of games deterministic? If so if I send to the server that I moved huge units to attack another huge units, can the server determine what the end will be? Why do we face a network issue?

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HideousKojima

Many (not all) RTS games use a networking method called lockstep synchronization that requires the gameplay to be deterministic, but has its own downsides. One of those being that if one player lags, everyone lags. I know AOE 1 and 2 use it, and I assume 3 as well

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littlestymaar

The good thing being that you get replay for free.

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Panzer04

It's got downsides. There's often no way to recover game state without actually running the simulation, and often no way to go backwards either. If you miss a moment in the replay you gotta watch the whole damn thing all over gain.

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gsich

You get that with any type of networking.

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NortySpock

For Beyond All Reason, it seems the Spring/Recoil engine will eventually decide to "close the action window", so that if one player is lagging hard, they simply submitted no actions for that "round" and the rest of the players keep going.

I know because I've gotten to the point in the late game where my computer can't simulate at realtime, and I can no longer control my units, but everyone else keeps playing.

Conveniently you can even still sort of chat in this state, and ask a teammate to assume control of your army on your behalf.

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matsemann

This article is a classic, 1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-...

Edit: original where the pictures work https://web.archive.org/web/20180719170411/https://www.gamas...

Rather than passing the status of each unit in the game, the expectation was to run the exact same simulation on each machine, passing each an identical set of commands that were issued by the users at the same time. The PCs would basically synchronize their game watches in best war-movie tradition, allow players to issue commands, and then execute in exactly the same way at the same time and have identical games.

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IshKebab

Which was great until there's a bug and it just says "sync error" and your 3 hour game is gone.

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immibis

When this happens in Factorio, the game pauses, one player (the server?) saves the game and sends it to all other players who load the savefile and the game resumes when that's done. It's not a nice experience, but it's a lot better than "you can't play today, goodbye!"

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doublerabbit

Same with RA2/YR.

All it took was for some salty player to activate a trainer or prez IFS and kill the game.

I like that the lobbies were ran over IRCd.

Dreamforge IRCd with the server password being "supersecret".

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arlort

They can be deterministic but I think you might be confused about the kind of game

In RTS games like 0AD or AoE you don't just send a single huge unit to attack and wait for the result, you send many tens of individual units near enemy units, then the "battle" goes on in real time and you can micromanage units to influence the outcome. You can't just simulate it on the server because the server can't simulate the thought process of the players

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vasco

AoE2 battles are all about the micromanagement. Last minute splitting the onslaught of trash units against your opponents treb micro shot can change everything.

Kind of old but lots of micro tactics per unit here: https://youtu.be/hjUgisPD_C4?si=F-UvzDOTsWRZhZSq

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Dunedan

Alpha 27 of 0 A.D. has a notable performance regression for a subset of users, compared to earlier versions. Users not affected by this regression should see improved performance, thanks to improvements like the added Vulkan support.

The regression in performance seems to be caused by a change in Spidermonkey. For details check out https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7714

That said, even without this performance regression, 0 A.D. is prone to run slow in late game when lots of units are on the map. There are several reasons for that, but maybe the most intuitive one is that 0 A.D. is still largely single-threaded and therefore doesn't make use of the multi-core capabilities of modern CPUs. As you can imagine changing that is no easy feat and takes a lot of effort. As the number of volunteers to 0 A.D. is limited, nobody has picked up that topic yet.

If you enjoy 0 A.D. and want to improve it: it's Open Source and contributions are always welcome!

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nophunphil

Same here. I use a modern Windows 10 PC (Ryzen 5600x, RTX 3070Ti) when playing games. I wonder if the performance is better on Linux for some reason.

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RUnconcerned

Wow, this is still being developed? I still recall the Heavengames forum thread that spawned it...

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gsich

8 player multiplayer is unplayable.

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o1o1o1

Thank you for sharing this, it is truly amazing.

While I like Steam for the convenience and also appreciate their efforts in developing SteamOS I am concerned about the lock-in. Projects like this really help to own more of what you paid for again, luskaner is a hero for me.

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Rohansi

I feel like it is important to point out that Steam does not require games to have any DRM. Not even Steam's DRM. It's entirely up to the game developer and/or publisher. Many games on Steam are already DRM-free where you can just back up the files and play without Steam.

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herewulf

Does this apply to AoE? I never played it much in its hey-day but it would be interesting to get into properly. I have no interest in buying an old game with DRM given the obvious potential for maintenance issues though.

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lionkor

You could buy it and then download a cracked one

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cheeseomlit

I'm sure the answer could be found in this repo somewhere but its above my head- does aoe2 DE rely mostly on p2p for multiplayer? I assume it does and the regional servers are just used for matchmaking, and all the actual game logic is running on the clients. I base that on the fact that map hacks are possible and that one player lagging lags the game for everyone, but there are often conflicting claims when it's brought up on aoe forums

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red_admiral

AFAIK, it's server-based rather than p2p for DE, but the way it works is all clients/servers simulate the world in lockstep and hold a full copy of the state. That's what makes map hacks possible.

You don't need anything paxos-like for this, the game desyncs and stops if any machine messes up but you can usually restore from a save point in that case.

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Raudius

In professional tournament games a server is chosen that lies between the two players. For example, a Brazil-China match might be played in an EU server.

Given this, I suspect the server is used as a central source of truth between the clients where all game data goes through the server, with all the calculations still being done client-side.

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lightingthedark

If you haven't read it, there's a great paper on the netcode of the originals: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terran...

I'd be surprised if the definitive editions changed the design significantly enough to move the netcode away from P2P, but I don't know of any actual information on it.

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arbitrandomuser

That was the old one , the DE version lags only for the player with poor network ( cpu performance stutter of one player affect all players though )

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CursedSilicon

Does anything like this exist for the original Age of Empires games?

Battle.Net has "PVPGN" that covers Diablo 2 up through Warcraft 3, and the Westwood Online games (ish) but searching for an AoE equivalent turned up nothing

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lightingthedark

I believe the originals just supported offline LAN play. I remember getting my friend to have his modem dial my modem so we could play together, no Internet connection required.

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red_admiral

From memory, there was a patch that added a new-fangled option "internet" as well as LAN play. I remember the days of fiddling with port forwarding and then calling a friend over the telephone to read out my IP address for them to type in.

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matsemann

I've LANed them "online" many moons ago by using software that made a virtual lan that we all installed and managed to find each other ingame. "Hamachi" I think?

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abigail95

How do you put a Terms of Use with an AGPL license? Isn't this a "further restriction" which the license says you can remove?

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anamexis

Seems more like a CYA thing to prevent takedowns

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shash7

What's CYA?

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pacificmint

It stands for "Cover Your Ass".

Wikipedia explains it as "an activity done by individuals to protect themselves from possible subsequent criticism, legal penalties, or other repercussions, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context."^[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass

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HeatrayEnjoyer

It's CYA if it's meaningless.

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recycledmatt

Awesome to see AoE, and games in general being future proofed. Sad when functionality is lost because someone turned off a server.

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princevegeta89

As someone who spent an immeasurable amount of time on AOE 2 online multiplayer, it has been a steadily refreshing experiencing the rise of AOE2 DE over the recent years. The game not only received updates that brought in the total civilization count to 50+, but also a ton of visual enhancements and improvements in the overall gameplay and performance.

This is nothing short of stunning to see new developments happening for these games, especially in the open-source community.

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_the_inflator

Imagine AoE being owned by Nintendo. :D

A no small wonder. I never thought that MS, as the IP owner, would allow such an open community to grow and thrive. MS is notoriously bad at game community growth development.

I remember that right after the acquisition of ES through MS in 2001, Microsoft went on a rigid IP enforcement role and, for example, targeted people at MFO.

The story of DBD_Jinx losing his account to MS

Legendary DBD_Jinx lost his account and had to start anew under _IamJinx because MS suspended his ZONE account due to copyright infringement for using MS trademarks without a license.

What did he do?

He advertised at MFO to help people increase their early game through his academy training, which offered advice on micro-management, game planning, strategy, and scouting.

Together with a couple of other 2000+ Zone Rating dudes from the US, they started to make a few bucks on the side using AoE as a vehicle.

What a knee-jerk reaction from MS back then.

And today? Red Bull Wololo - I hardly can hold my pants compared to 2001.

I hope this keeps going, even though I am a purist "old-schooler" who prefers the AoE 2 classics game.

Cheers + gl + hf!

_CN

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4gotunameagain

Imo this should be legislated. Do you provide a service necessary to use your product ? Great. But if you decide to deprecate said service, rendering said product inoperable or partially operable, you should be obligated to release an implementation & documentation.

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nurettin

Experimental

    * AIX

I wonder how they got an AIX.

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mrweasel

Emulator maybe? It's a weird and intersting platform to target, but I suspect that it's because Go supports it, so it might not be to much hassle. On the other hand reading the article from yesterday regarding porting Tailscale, it might be more involved that I imagine.

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nurettin

Yeah go supports AIX. In fact I remember it having bash, and a package manager so it felt like home. AS400 was an interesting platform. I was fascinated with their almost assembly like programs, alien UIs and decades old hardware. Almost got nerd sniped. Unfortunately, I was told to use java. The jar I tested on linux worked perfectly the first time, so I couldn't even learn anything.

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brink

I hope AoE2 lives as long as Chess does. It really is one of the "perfect" games.

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dominicrose

It's a brilliant game for sure. The randomness, the fact that it's not turned-based and the multiplayer also make it interesting compared to chess. However Chess has 1000x simpler rules that never change, and you don't need high APM to play competitively.

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guappa

In chess if you don't play 2 years and then come back to it, you don't find out that all the rules have changed in the meanwhile. Which is what currently happens with age of empires 2.

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hackernewds

It really is and they keep iterating on it. definitive edition has more investment than some of the new AOE3 and 4 versions

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sqrt_1

AoE2 is coming out on PS5 this year.

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hoten

Bit confused on the webserver aspect of this. Is it just the match making / game broadcast component of AoE multiplayer?

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pininja

I was curious about this too and enjoyed reading the routes file https://github.com/luskaner/ageLANServer/blob/main/server/in...

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typh00n

We tried this at a LAN-Party in December and couldn't get it to run. I am happily trying it again for the next LAN-Party. Nice to see development on this project. :-)

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LPisGood

This is excellent.

I wonder if there any public documentation for AoE3’s API that was used to make this or if this was all newly reverse engineered. I’ve seen people ask about this kind of documentation before, but I’ve never seen it.

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vkaku

Excellent.

This seems to work with the Remasters as well. Even better :)

Please add AoM support as well.

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red_admiral

AoE2 was released 1999 based on a 1997 game engine, and a new major DLC is about to drop this spring in 2025 (for the definitive edition). Sandy Petersen should be proud.

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pjmlp

I guess a few brownie points for making the case for compiled managed languages in games, nice work.

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Seanambers

Remember we used to have Aoe2 sessions on LANS when we were kids back in the 00s and like 1 in 3 games just crashed after everyone had played for like 2-3 hours.

In a way it was even better because then nobody had to loose, and everyone believed they were winning.

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matsemann

And since everyone was "turtling" the games would almost never end anyways.

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rightbyte

That is how kids play Monopoly too. It is part of the fun :)

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matsemann

Yeah, I know of turtling because we used to do it ourselves! Have a pact that you can't attack in the start, then build an impenetrable city until there are basically no more resources left and then fight it off with having 10 castles and barracks and stables mass-producing units right to the front.

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486sx33

So how can I play AoE 3 the war chiefs online ?

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CSMastermind

If you're okay buying it then the definitive edition is on sale with active servers and includes War Chiefs among other things.

There were some questionable changes to the names of things to make them more politically correct but the game play is better than ever.

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the__alchemist

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whatever1

Voulomai