I'll note that I've restored AI being deterministic in my project

I remember using some kind of resource explorer, looking into the scripts powering the AIs. If I remember correctly, it didn't get "smarter" at higher levels, it just cheated and gave itself more resources every minute, lol.

Absolute left field question. Have you touched the other RTS contemporary of the time, Red Alert 2 in any detail? I've been told the source code for it leaked some long time ago and has floated around for the past two decades or so. While most people contend that EA had lost the source code to the Command & Conquer series games many years ago when the studio was closed down and assets were shipped to "DICE" in Stockholm

Sending state updates every 200ms made my spidey sense tingle. Most industrial control systems of the 90s would work on continuous 200ms polling through the network. Mostly RS485 links at 9600 baud. The thing is that this is perfectly reasonable if your network infrastructure is known. If you have fixed bandwidth and deterministic packet sizes, then you can do math and know what the behavior will be. Determinism is good! Also this assumes the network is single purpose. Which it was! For games in the 90s it was! This isn’t bad design, it was good design for the network infrastructure people would have had at the time!

> There's some "interesting" naming conventions, one being prefixing member variables names with "value" -- there's even a "valueValue". Very little consistency in general in this regard, a reflection of independence between teams working on different components. Actually suffixing! i.e. objectsValue.

How are you able to work on the game? Are you employed to do so? Do you reverse engineer? Or has the source leaked?

> I'll note that I've restored AI being deterministic in my project. Are you the OpenAge author, or maybe Voobly? I've never read such detailed info on AoE's internals online. Thanks for the post. > In practice, contemporary Intel/AMD chip families produce bitwise the same result, however those around the time of AoE are known to diverge on results to some small margin That little bit of validation I needed for why I avoid AMD CPUs. (not entirely serious)