The twenty-fifth alpha release of the free game 0 AD has been published, which is a real-time strategy game with high-quality 3D graphics and a gameplay similar to the Age of Empires games in many ways. The source code of the game was opened 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 in the range 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.
Main innovations:
- The initial implementation of a single-player game is proposed.
- Improved GUI and added advanced graphics settings.
- Improved synchronization between server and client when playing online, reduced lag. Improved code performance for pathfinding.
- Added the ability to restructure quests - players can now move quests to the front of the execution queue.
- Improved AI implementation for units.
- Reworked the implementation of biomes used to simulate visual environments by combining textures and natural objects such as trees and animals. The new version adds new terrains based on 2k textures.
- Improved support for mods and filtering in the list of online games.
- The balancing of the capabilities of civilizations has continued.
Source: opennet.ru