After a year of development, the twenty-eighth release of the free game 0 A.D. has been presented, implementing real-time strategy reminiscent of the "Age of Empires" series. This is the first release that is labeled without the "Alpha" tag and is marked as "0 A.D. Release 28." The alpha label was previously applied because not all originally planned features were implemented. However, the existing functionality is now refined and stable, and in terms of quality, 0 A.D. has long surpassed the alpha stage.
The game's source code was opened by Wildfire Games in 2009 under the GPL license. Prior to this, the project had been developed as a proprietary product for nine years. The game is available for Linux (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, and Arch Linux), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Windows. The proposed version supports both multiplayer and single-player modes against bots on pre-modeled or dynamically generated maps. The game encompasses over ten civilizations that existed between 500 BC and 500 AD.
Non-code components of the game, such as graphics and audio elements, are released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, allowing for modification and use in commercial products provided attribution is given and derivative works are shared under a similar license. The 0 A.D. game engine comprises approximately 200,000 lines of C++ code, uses OpenGL for rendering 3D graphics, OpenAL for sound, and ENet for online gameplay. Other open projects that create real-time strategy games include Glest, ORTS, Warzone 2100, and Spring.
Key Changes:
- A new faction, the "Germans," has been added, uniting ancient Germanic tribes such as the Cimbri, Teutons, and Ambrones. The gameplay covers the period of the Cimbri's migration from Jutland at the end of the 2nd century BC and their conflict with the Roman Republic.
- New male and female models for civilians have been added, previously referred to as "female citizens" (all men were depicted as soldiers, and most women as servants). Since in the civilizations represented in the game, the status of citizenship typically did not extend to women, the term "citizen" now denotes a citizen-soldier, while "civilian" refers to individuals supporting the army away from the battlefield.
- Instead of loading pre-rendered font representations into memory, dynamic font rendering has been implemented using the Freetype font engine, which has reduced memory consumption, resolved issues with separate localization for East Asian languages in mod form, and improved text display during interface scaling and on high pixel density screens.
- New options for personalization have been added to the game settings, such as population limits for each team and the ability to completely remove a player in Skirmish and Scenario modes.
- In multiplayer mode, TLS certificate verification is enabled by default during the connection.
- The SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine has been updated to version 128, which has dropped support for Windows 7 and 8.1. Running the game on Windows is now possible only with Windows 10 or 11. 64-bit builds for Windows have been added. For Linux, AppImage builds have been included in addition to Snap and Flatpak.
Source: opennet.ru
