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

https://play0ad.com/

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

What is the best option for playing LAN games over the internet these days?

Hamachi appears to still be a thing, but I would prefer something open source.

Tailscale sadly doesn't support multicast, which I'm assuming most games use for LAN discovery.

ZeroTier maybe?

I'm not sure I understand: does one still need a copy of the game to play or is it self-contained?

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

Excellent.

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

Please add AoM support as well.

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

Voulomai

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.

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. :-)

Experimental

    * AIX

I wonder how they got an AIX.

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