0 A.D. The Age of Empires II Open-Source and Free.

[_Neptunno_]

There is an open-source 'Age of Empires'. Against all odds, it has been in "alpha" version for more than twenty years.

Strategy game lovers have a wide catalog of titles at their disposal, but alongside 'Civilization', 'StarCraft' or the mythical 'Age of Empires', there is an alternative that is somewhat unknown but very special. It is about 0 A.D, a very special video game that has just been renewed.

What is '0 A.D.'. It is a strategy game that began its journey in 2001 in a curious way: what the original developers wanted to do was a mod of 'Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings'. Finally, the developers decided that the mod limited their creative capacity, so they embarked on the adventure of creating an independent game. Thus was born Wilfire Games, the company responsible for its development.

Open Source heart. Although for some years the development had a more closed philosophy, in July 2009 Wildfire Games published the code of '0 A.D.' as Open Source under the GPLv2 license. Not only that: all graphic resources were also released under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license (share and adapt with attribution and preserving this license). Even the soundtrack is free under that license, and can be downloaded in its entirety in MP3 format.

Long live collaboration. Throughout the history of the project, the collaboration of professional programmers and volunteers has been notable, and more than 100 people have contributed to the different versions of a video game that has not stopped improving and gaining more and more features.

A game with tradition. The people responsible for Wildfire Games announced these days the availability of '0 A.D. Alpha 26: Zhuangzi'. The previous version was 'Alpha 25: Yauna', and it was published in August 2021. This Open Source project is one of the most long-lived —more than 20 years in the spotlight—, but it is also unique in another aspect.

An eternal 'Alpha' version. It seems surprising, but the developers do not seem to consider that the game deserves to leave the alpha version in which it has been since it was created. At this point, the game is really very polished and is comparable to any final product that is simply being updated. That qualification seems almost anecdotal, but they do not seem to be in a hurry to abandon that nickname.

The Han dynasty arrives. The big novelty of this latest version is the inclusion of a new civilization, the Han, which has been in development for some time and which has its own technologies, art, buildings and strategies. There are also two new maps and improvements in the interface, the AI, the graphic interface or the graphic resources.

Back to the 'A'. Each of the 26 versions of this game has had a name related to some historical name, always following the sequence of the English alphabet, hence why this last version corresponds to a word with the letter Z.

In this case, they have paid homage to the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, better known as Zhuangzi, who wrote one of the most important texts of Taoism. The 26 letters of the English alphabet have ended, so the next version will return to the 'A', and the developers are already asking for suggestions that, of course, "must be original and related to the range of dates contemplated in 0 A.D. (from 500 BC to 1 AD)". If you like the effort, you can make a donation or even contribute with your ideas and work.

Source: Xataka (2022).

Source: VidaExtra (2016).

I discovered it yesterday, while looking at news on my mobile. The truth is that I had not filed this game, which seems to have been in development for years. I am curious to try it, I hope you like the news

Greetings!!

Requirements:

Version: 7, 8, 8.1, 10
Processor: 3 GHz Intel or x86 compatible
Memory: At least 2 GB
Graphics Card: Any supporting OpenGL 2.1 with 3D hardware accelerated drivers and at least 128 MB memory, e.g., Radeon 9000, GeForce 3, or similar
Screen resolution: 1024x768 or above
Disk Space : 3.31 GB

[cobito]

I tried it back in 2008 and it was still worthy of the label "alpha version". I'm sure it has evolved a lot in these 14 years.

We actually have a video of a network game in the videos section and it really looks great: