After almost three years, the Developers of the popular game 0 AD unveiled the twenty-fourth alpha release and in this new release various improvements are presented Of which the ones received by the rendering engine stand out, as well as for the mods and more.
For those who are unaware of 0 AD should know that This is a real-time strategy game with high-quality 3D graphics and gameplay very similar to the games in the Age of Empires series. The game's source code was released by Wildfire Games under the GPL after 9 years of development as a proprietary product. The current version supports network play and bot single player play on pre-modeled or dynamically generated maps. The game covers more than ten civilizations ranging from 500 BC. C. until 500 d. C.
Non-code components of the game, such as graphics and sound, are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, which may be modified and used in commercial products, provided derivative works are credited and redistributed under a similar license.
The 0 AD game engine has around 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 source projects to create strategies in real time are: Glest, ORTS, Warzone 2100 and Spring.
Main new features of 0 AD Alpha 24
Considering the experience of some famous players, Adjusted the parameters of all units and structures for a more balanced and fluid gameplay. For example, heroes can now only be trained once, and stables have been added to train cavalry and chariots, and an arsenal to build siege engines for all civilizations.
Additionally, new tools have been provided for placing units in a military formation for patrolling and marching, and support has also been added for automatically dissolving a formation when attacking.
For mod creators, the ability to link status effects to units to change characteristics has been implemented.
On the other hand, models of many elements of the game have been added and reworked, new models of helmets, horses, weapons and shields have been added, new textures have been implemented, new attack and defense animations have been introduced, the characters of the Romans, Gauls, British and Greeks have been improved.
Updated UnitMotion and rendering code, which removed support for OpenGL 1.0 and peer-to-peer processing in favor of OpenGL 2.0 and the use of shaders, the JavaScript engine for plugins has been updated from Spidermonkey 38 to Spidermonkey 78.
Support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and macOS prior to version 10.12 has been removed. A processor with SSE2 instruction support is now required to function.
The rendering engine has anti-aliasing support. Depending on the capabilities of the GPU, there is a choice between FXAA and different levels of MSAA and the CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) filter has also been added to the rendering engine.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Includes 7 new maps.
- Rewrote the game settings interface.
- Added population settings to limit the maximum number of units for a player and to distribute the loser's units among the remaining players.
The ability to play password-protected network games has been added to the Lobby. - Added Map Browser to select and navigate available maps.
- Added interface for configuring hotkeys.
- Added the ability to break buildings, allowing you to anchor buildings next to each other.
- The "Hearse Overview" screen has been added to the "Game Tutorials" menu to study the characteristics of the relics of dead heroes.
- A hardened learning interface has been added to the AI engine.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it or obtaining this new version, you can check the following link.