Not that I've used this extensively, but months would likely increase to quarters.
And if you're estimating something to the lengths of months, you're already into project management territory size, rather than broken down to development/delivery sizes... The amount of unknown unknowns and other uncertainty certainly warrant happily estimating years length, surely.
It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ? Why are they not focusing on a 1.0 release and seize adding features, new civs, and therefore complexity?
> It's alpha for so long, how stable is it to play ?
It is 100% playable and has been for years. As sibling comments note, I think the only reason they label it as anything but stable is because there are still significant changes between releases. Although I personally think they could fix even that by just chopping the first parts of the version number off - if they stopped calling it "alpha" and just called it 0ad version 26, and then released version 27, everyone would still have the right expectations.
I tried to play it at a LAN party. It started off great, but as the number of units increased, the connection slowly deteriorated until eventually it was literally unplayable. You say that it is "100% playable and has been for years"?
Honestly I've only ever played it single player or with 2 players. So yes, it's 100% playable under all conditions that I've been able to test. There are plenty of games with unacceptable performance on my machines; do I get to call all of them alpha-quality?
My objection was not related to 0AD versioning their releases as "alpha". That's absolutely fine by me! My objection was related to you describing 0AD with words "It is 100% playable and has been for years". Clearly it has not been 100% playable for years!
I can only comment on Linux and to a much lesser extent macOS, but IME it is quite stable.
I think never going 1.0 is an open source game dev meme or something. Xonotic is still pre-1.0 even after over a decade in development. Stable as heck.
Remember that the "unstable" aspect of alpha isn't that "it's going to crash randomly" but that "you can't rely on a given feature being there in the future".
Even in OSS it's wise to have some people steer the direction. I tried the game about eight years ago but it didn't run well on my laptop. I've tried to keep up somewhat but lost interest when it felt like they just added new features instead of polishing and improving core functionality.
I had a similar feeling with Black Mesa. At a certain point, it feels like they've worked so long on the project that they lost the original selling point. At what stage does it make more sense to just remake the game in the latest UE than offering a 20 year old game that still isn't close to being released.
I don't want to talk down on the project but it's a question I think about every time I see these types of products.
Not sure what exactly you meant, but Black mesa was mighty playable and 100% stable when it was released as full. Maybe stay away from half-working early builds of these kind of games, IMHO its not worth the frustration just because of some nostalgia.
Now if somebody would port first Deux ex into Unreal 5.2 engine that would get me interested (but still, keep your emotions in check and play when its ready, otherwise just a recipe for regrets)
Fair point. On my part, I like to think of them as "ever-green" projects. So they're never "done", they just keep evolving at whatever rate the community can manage, and people check out and check in once in a while to see where it's at.
> I tried the game about eight years ago but it didn't run well on my laptop
Care to try it now? I've been playing Alpha 26 for a few weeks, and I actually love it.
Unreal Engine isn't an option if open sourcing it again was a goal and/or a means to attract new developers after the death of half of the previous core team.
Old engine foundations doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing : for instance the Spring engine was started in the late 90s, released in 2005, and not only is still used today, the fork of it that is even more successful (and with the fanciest looking games, and the best performance) today, Recoil, is the one that decided to stick with legacy OpenGL3 features rather than radically change to better fit with how OpenGL4 does things(?), in order to not break games !
It works very well. I used to run the Alpha 23 on my old Windows 10 device, but I got Alpha 26 a few weeks ago for my Intel Mac.
No noticeable bugs affecting my single player gameplay, except a few quirks with ship movements (they tend to overlap, which makes it look unnatural)
I have also noticed that clusters of units tend to look smaller than their actual number, so it might be a similar issue as I've noticed above. From someone who still enjoys the AoE 1 Ex, 0 AD is a really amazing game.
I figured out the basics before bothering to read the docs, so anyone who played classic RTSs will get off to a good start.
Some specifics about this game that make it unique:
1. You cannot build anything any where. There's the concept of a "region of control" that surrounds your Civic Center (Town Center equivalent) that marks the borders of your settlement. Building right on the borders expands it. Exceptions to this rule are made for docks, outposts Roman army camps (if you play as a Roman)
2. Besides mounted and siege units, your soldiers are also your builders/resource gatherers. Citizen soldiers. Non-combatant builders/gatherers are female citizens. As soldiers gather experience from fighting, they become more capable soldiers and less capable citizens.
3. The default UI uses traditional, civ-specific names for units and buildings (with English equivalents as secondary), which can be jarring at first. I swap them to make deciding on what to build easier.
> 2. Besides mounted and siege units, your soldiers are also your builders/resource gatherers. Citizen soldiers. Non-combatant builders/gatherers are female citizens. As soldiers gather experience from fighting, they become more capable soldiers and less capable citizens.
You can also train mercenaries who can only fight and not work.
Eventually they will come up with this. You have to consider Framework being a startup and, hence, not being HP or Lenovo in their production and shipping capacities.
In the mean time, go for a US keyboard and swap it for Scandinavian one when available.
Scandinavian layout (often called "ISO-nordic") is the exact same ISO/IEC 9995 standard as all other ISO keyboards. Same physical layout. Just a few keys/legends mapped differently.
Quite duly noted! I'd love to provide other formats and will investigate this very soon. I can't guarantee that I'll come up with a solution given how vast and variegated the space is, but it's worth trying.
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