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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! :)

Rediscovered this game a year ago, and am absolutely loving it.

The r/aoe2 community is also generally welcoming and helpful.

I also really like to play 0 A.D. Similar game but open source, looks great, frequently updated, runs on Win, Mac, Linux.

https://play0ad.com/

Came here to praise 0 AD, it feels like a love letter to the AoE franchise from creators who really appreciate AoE II & III

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.

Maybe because most of them actually are chill dads! See this one of the top posts by score on r/aoe2 https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/s/X7TgxJetMp

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 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.

quake series has way more players than xonotic, interesting framing

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.

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)

Wait, is the AoE source code public?

see also: "How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding" (2019, non-technical, for a general audience) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-VAL7Epn3o

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.