After almost three years of silence, the twenty-fourth alpha release of the free game 0 AD took place, which is a real-time strategy with high-quality 3D graphics and gameplay in many ways similar to the games in the Age of Empires series. The game's source code was open sourced by Wildfire Games under the GPL license after 9 years of development as a proprietary product. The game build is available for Linux (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora and Arch Linux), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS and Windows. The current version supports online play and single-player play with bots on pre-modeled or dynamically generated maps. The game covers more than ten civilizations that existed from 500 BC to 500 AD.
Non-coded components of the game, such as graphics and sound elements, are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license that allows modification and use in commercial products, provided attribution is given and derivative works distributed under a similar license. The 0 AD game engine has about 150 thousand lines of C++ code, OpenGL is used to display 3D graphics, OpenAL is used to work with sound, and ENet is used to organize a network game. Other open real-time strategy projects include Glest, ORTS, Warzone 2100, and Spring.
- Taking into account the experience of some famous players, the parameters of all units and structures have been adjusted to achieve a more balanced and smooth gameplay. For example, heroes can now be trained only once, and stables for training cavalry and chariots, and an arsenal for building siege engines have been added to all civilizations. Women and militias are allowed to mortgage buildings.
- Added the ability to snap buildings, allowing you to pin buildings next to each other.
- The rendering engine now supports anti-aliasing. Depending on the capabilities of the GPU, you can choose between FXAA anti-aliasing and different levels of MSAA. The CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) filter has also been added to the rendering engine. To use the new features, OpenGL 3.3 support is required on the system.
- Added interface for setting up hotkeys.
- New tools have been provided for placing units into military formations for patrols and forced marches, and support has been added for automatically disbanding formations when attacked.
- For mod creators, the ability to bind status effects to units to change characteristics has been implemented.
- Added population settings that allow you to limit the maximum number of units for a player and implement the distribution of the loser's units among the remaining players.
- The Lobby has added the ability to host password-protected online games.
- The user interface has been modernized. Tooltips have been improved and a display of the amount of collected resources has been added.
- Added Map Browser for selecting and navigating existing maps.
- A βFuneral Chariot Overviewβ screen has been added to the Game Training menu for learning the characteristics of relics of dead heroes.
- An interface for reinforcement learning has been added to the AI ββengine.
- Models of many game elements have been added and redesigned, new models of helmets, horses, weapons and shields have been added, new textures have been implemented, new animations of attacks and defenses have been introduced, and the characters of the Romans, Gauls, Britons and Greeks have been improved.
- The composition includes 7 new cards.
- The game settings interface has been rewritten.
- UnitMotion and rendering code have been modernized, removing support for OpenGL 1.0 and point-by-point processing in favor of OpenGL 2.0 and the use of shaders.
- The JavaScript engine for add-ons has been updated from Spidermonkey 38 to Spidermonkey 78.
- Support for Windows XP, Windows Vista and macOS older than 10.12 has been discontinued. A processor that supports SSE2 instructions is now required to run.
Source: opennet.ru