alt.hn

2/13/2026 at 6:56:38 PM

Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBQveBCtKY

by CharlesW

2/13/2026 at 7:42:05 PM

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

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

by tsycho

2/13/2026 at 9:20:37 PM

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/

by ARandomerDude

2/13/2026 at 9:50:54 PM

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

by heavyset_go

2/13/2026 at 9:04:00 PM

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.

by maxverse

2/13/2026 at 9:49:30 PM

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.

by tomwojcik

2/13/2026 at 9:23:04 PM

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.

by its_magic

2/13/2026 at 9:51:39 PM

quake series has way more players than xonotic, interesting framing

by sitzkrieg

2/13/2026 at 9:48:08 PM

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! :)

by jorl17

2/13/2026 at 7:58:24 PM

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.

by jstrebel

2/13/2026 at 7:57:07 PM

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)

by LPisGood

2/13/2026 at 8:24:02 PM

Wait, is the AoE source code public?

by joe_mamba

2/13/2026 at 7:35:39 PM

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.

by superkuh

2/13/2026 at 10:22:56 PM

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)

by khrbrt