The twenty-sixth alpha release of the free game 0 AD has been published, which is a real-time strategy game with high-quality 3D graphics and gameplay similar to the games in the Age of Empires series. 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:
- Added a new civilization - The Han Empire, which existed from 206 BC. before 220 AD in China.
- New maps added: Tarim Basin and Yangtze.
- The rendering engine provides the ability to adjust texture quality (low, medium to high) and anisotropic filtering (from 1x to 16x).
- Added support for FreeType fonts.
- Added settings for fullscreen and windowed modes.
- Implemented performance optimizations. On the Windows platform, GPU acceleration is enabled by default.
- Improved object navigation. Improved the movement of military formations. A military formation can now be selected as a single entity with a single click.
- The ability to adjust the size of interface elements has been added to the GUI.
- Installed mods in drag & drop mode.
- Improved Atlas Editor interface.
- The GUI has a field for searching players, a summary page has been added, and new tooltips have been implemented.
- Work has been done to improve textures, 3D models, landscapes and animations. Added 26 new music tracks.
- An option has been added that allows allies to share information about each part of the map opened.
- Added the ability to assign extraordinary tasks to units that require immediate execution, regardless of the presence of other tasks.
- Support for acceleration has been implemented for units.
Source: opennet.ru