what a great talk with many little highlights: code archaeology of a codebase passed between many teams & companies with the full revision history being lost somewhere along the way, detective work figuring out there had been an accidental regression in floating point precision when SIMD was enabled, obtaining higher performance by specialising/simplifying the 2d geometry algorithm to axis-aligned rectangular obstacles instead of the prior convex hull code, automatically fuzz-testing the proposed "obviously valid" algorithm by AI vs AI matches & using logging/invariants to identify and harvest nasty counterexamples, growing a unit test suite of 100 harvested nasty counterexamples while fixing the identified defects in the new algorithm, finally shipping it and receiving player feedback
danbolt 22 hours ago [-]
My first job out of school was on one of the HD expansions at SkyBox Labs. It was mostly grunt feature work and desync fixes, but I remember that some of the handcoded ASM from the legacy pathfinding had been one-to-one translated to C++.
I always wondered if that contributed to the pathfinding regressions that were talked about online. Or, you learn about compiler-induced accidental UB in school, and part of me wondered if something was happening there.
jstrebel 1 days ago [-]
A very nice video. It shows that computer games are glamorous on the outside, but once you look behind the scenes, they just look like normal software. I was also surprised to hear that the team did not only rely on computer graphics textbook algorithms, but built their own pathfinding algorithm in a pragmatic manner.
Heh funny you post this. My example of poor pathfinding is OpenRA but I quit following that project when it was clear they were heavily biased towards their gameplay and focused on odd features over making the basics (pathfinding) work.
LPisGood 1 days ago [-]
The Age of Empires 3 path finding was so impressive, but also with cavalry it got clumpy and could be used tactically (which is sort of realistic)
tsycho 1 days ago [-]
Rediscovered this game a year ago, and am absolutely loving it.
The r/aoe2 community is also generally welcoming and helpful.
ARandomerDude 1 days ago [-]
I also really like to play 0 A.D. Similar game but open source, looks great, frequently updated, runs on Win, Mac, Linux.
Came here to praise 0 AD, it feels like a love letter to the AoE franchise from creators who really appreciate AoE II & III
maxverse 1 days ago [-]
It's kind of crazy how nice people in multiplayer are. Nobody says anything about my mother or what kind of content I'm downloading to cause lag. Everyone's got the personality of, like, a chill dad now. People are more interested in a good game than just winning. It's really nice.
The other day, I was playing a noob game where one opponent on the other team was way better than the rest of us and rushed. His own team came down on him after.
I am a chill dad and I rediscovered aoe2 a few months ago, after being addicted to Age of Mythology. Previously it was Songs of Syx, Foundation, Farthest Frontier... I think we're just a different type of gamers.
DavidPiper 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not in the scene, but I used to love Age of Mythology - is the AoM scene as big, or as AoE2 become the sort of de facto classic Age of Empires game now?
tomwojcik 16 hours ago [-]
AoM is not as popular, but I can't give you the numbers. All I know is I'm very good in AoM, and very bad in AoE2. AoE is easy to learn and hard to master, imo. I assume it's the biggest old school strategy franchise with a PvP scene that refuses to die, and it's not driven by hype or marketing.
smw 15 hours ago [-]
I think it's possible that starcraft might have a claim here?
_JoRo 23 hours ago [-]
Haha, I think the experience is a bit different at the higher levels (between ranks 50-1000), but overall people are quite a bit nicer than those playing League of Legends or Dota.
its_magic 1 days ago [-]
I don't play a lot of games but one thing I've noticed over the years is that the best games with the best communities are more niche. Like Xonotic for instance. It has a fair number of players; there's always at least one or two servers going in the evening. Everyone is friendly to each other. I've never seen any kind of trash talking in there. Same with other games like Quake etc which are long past their heyday. Wherever the masses are, that's where the toxic assholes are. When they move on, things just get a lot better.
sitzkrieg 1 days ago [-]
quake series has way more players than xonotic, interesting framing
jorl17 1 days ago [-]
Excellent talk!
I don't really play AoE2 anymore (though I have bought it!), but I can feel the excitement and dedication the author seems to put into his work. I'm sure modern AoE2 players have benefited immensely from it! :)
joe_mamba 1 days ago [-]
Wait, is the AoE source code public?
DarkNova6 23 hours ago [-]
Sadly not. He is part of the current set of developers.
ece 19 hours ago [-]
I guess Rise of Nations was a different code base altogether since he didn't mention it. Floats are something every programmer learns about.
superkuh 1 days ago [-]
It's good to get understanding and confirmation that, yes, the community userpatch version on the online matchmaking service voobly before Microsoft came back in an recapitalized on the popularity by releasing Definitive Edition was and remains the best version in some very important ways. Also great to hear DE has now reached near parity with lower resource use.
khrbrt 1 days ago [-]
Has it? I recently tried to organize a little AoE2 LAN party but we got stuck because the DE was too heavy for our old computers and the HD Edition was no longer for sale on Steam.
(Apologies if this was answered in the video, I'll watch it later tonight)
simscitizen 20 hours ago [-]
DE is definitely not meant for older computers, it contains gigabytes of 2D sprites
486sx33 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:46:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I always wondered if that contributed to the pathfinding regressions that were talked about online. Or, you learn about compiler-induced accidental UB in school, and part of me wondered if something was happening there.
The r/aoe2 community is also generally welcoming and helpful.
https://play0ad.com/
The other day, I was playing a noob game where one opponent on the other team was way better than the rest of us and rushed. His own team came down on him after.
I am a chill dad and I rediscovered aoe2 a few months ago, after being addicted to Age of Mythology. Previously it was Songs of Syx, Foundation, Farthest Frontier... I think we're just a different type of gamers.
I don't really play AoE2 anymore (though I have bought it!), but I can feel the excitement and dedication the author seems to put into his work. I'm sure modern AoE2 players have benefited immensely from it! :)
(Apologies if this was answered in the video, I'll watch it later tonight)