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0 A.D. is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It's a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of twelve ancient civilizations, from Iberia to Mauryan India, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess. Developed using Pyrogenesis, a ground-breaking new game engine custom-built to suit this project, 0 A.D. will give players a rich and entertaining real-time gaming experience.

Report RSS 0 A.D. Goes Open Source

0 A.D. is moving to an Open Source development model!

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What is 0 A.D.?

0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game.

Swamp Defense screenshot


What are you doing?

Switching from a closed development process to open source: making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions. We've been working on 0 A.D.in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we've achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved.0 A.D. is a very complex and ambitious project. A lot of work has been put into it, but a lot remains to be done. We're not releasing a playable game – you'll have to wait until much later if that's what you're interested in. There are plenty of major missing features and bugs and rough edges. We're releasing this as a work-in-progress, pre-alpha project, aimed at developers who might be interested in this kind of thing, in the hope of sharing resources with a community that would otherwise be excluded from our development process.This is an experimental step and we don't quite know what's going to work best, so we're going to move carefully and try to adapt based on experience. This document describes our current plans; feedback will be appreciated! Contact us on our forums, or #0ad on QuakeNet IRC.

Discovery screenshot

Why should I care?

We think there's a good chance we can produce a pretty decent game with some unique features. Maybe you want to help that game come into existence. Maybe you want to learn from the experience of working on a complex software project, or particularly on a game. There's a wide range of areas involved: graphics and audio, AI and UI, file handling and gameplay scripting and networking and so on. The basic framework is all in place, and some of it is already very solid, but there's a lot of scope for diving into the details and working on various components.Maybe you want to make the game work better on your favourite platform. Maybe you want to show us how stupid we are and how you can write code that's much better. (We're far from perfect!)Maybe you want to use parts of our code or art in your own project. Maybe you want to use our game for teaching a practical game development class. And maybe you have other reasons.

Gaugamela screenshot

Why are you doing this?

We've been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We've come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can't devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.Also, we have some ideas and tools and code that we think are quite nice and would like to share. We ought to clean them up and document them properly so they're more useful to other people, but making the code available is the first step. And, particularly on Linux, open source simplifies a number of issues with distribution and debugging, so it makes things easier for us and for users.Up until now, access to the project has been limited to 'official' members of our group, though the intent has always been to produce a non-commercial game and membership has always been quite open. The concept of open source simply wasn't considered interesting a couple of years ago, but times have changed and it now seems the natural way to develop our project.

Magna Graecia screenshot

How is the development going to be organised?

In opening this project, we need to respect the community by providing as much information and communication and support as possible, so you can benefit from participating in the project (hopefully contributing back and benefiting us, of course!), balanced with our desire to get the game completed to a high standard and with some constraints from our past organisation.In the past, all developers have been part of the official 'team': anyone can apply to join, we'll have a short interview over IRC to get to know them, and if it seems they have the time and energy and skill to contribute usefully then they're made a member. We're going to keep the core group of developers and the private communication methods – we don't want to risk destroying the team we've already got. We're going to keep aiming towards a particular design vision, and we don't want to diverge much from that – we'd rather not add (and have to maintain) features that aren't part of that goal. We're releasing the art and gameplay data for two of the game's six civilisations, but holding back the work-in-progress civs until they are more complete and usable.Apart from those restrictions, we're opening access to the source control server (Subversion), and the documentation and issue-tracking system (Trac), and moving our technical discussions to an open forum. Anyone can download, build and run the latest version of the game. Our initial process for contributions will be very basic: If you make some changes, you should create a patch and submit it to us, and we should then review it and maybe suggest some changes or commit it to SVN.Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we're not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we'd like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we'd be interested in discussion of this issue.

Savanna Biome screenshot

What is the code like?

There's roughly 150K lines of C++ for the game engine, and another 25K for editing tools. Gameplay scripting uses JavaScript. We build on top of low-level libraries (OpenGL, OpenAL, ENet, ...), not an existing game engine (like OGRE).The code isn't all extremely clean or extremely modular or extremely well-written. It's been written by a wide variety of programmers, and it's far from a "completed" codebase. We want to continue cleaning things up as part of the normal development process. We're not averse to rewriting entire subsystems if that's the most effective way to make them satisfy our requirements. But in many areas it's quite solid.

What reusable code is there?

Most of our code is specific to the game and not very useful outside it, but some parts could perhaps be interesting for developers working on other projects. Some examples:

  • Low-level library providing cross-platform support for resource management (archive file loading, GL textures and shaders, ...), debugging tools (error reporting, memory tracking, stack dumps), timers, asynchronous IO, allocators, ...
  • Converter from COLLADA models with skeletal animation into a simple game-friendly format.
  • Binary XML caching system, for faster resource loading.
  • Automated build tools using Amazon EC2.
  • Boring maths code for matrices, vectors, quaternions, etc.

How does this compare to other games?

We are aware of several other open-source RTS games. Glest has reached 'stable' status and is set in a medieval/fantasy world, with less complex gameplay and graphics but with AI opponents (which are not yet implemented in 0 A.D.). ORTS is a framework emphasizing AI research more than a playable game. Spring is another RTS engine that appears designed for gameplay similar to Total Annihilation. 0 A.D. is striving to differentiate itself by providing new gameplay ideas, detailed graphics and an an accurate historical setting.

How can I get started?

See the Getting Started guide to find more information about the game, forums for discussion, instructions for downloading the code using SVN, building and running the game, and links to further details.

Post comment Comments
JustDaveIsFine
JustDaveIsFine

I'm already interested.

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Dremth
Dremth

awesome

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Kyogreex
Kyogreex

It's nice to see a game of this quality going open source this early in development.

Although I cannot participate, I do wish your team the best of luck on this project.

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Mythos_Ruler
Mythos_Ruler

Thanks for the kind words, gents!

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L0K
L0K

Awesome :)

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awesomepossum
awesomepossum

Interesting development strategy, I hope it works well. The game looks great so far.

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dissonance
dissonance

Holy ****, this is awesome.

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vus
vus

This is good news for the open source world.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+4 votes
noyart
noyart

WOW! This RTS look so epic! Cool that you realse it for opensource! but where can I download the source code, I must be blind cant find the link :P

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Mythos_Ruler
Mythos_Ruler

Everyone please keep in mind that (at first at least) we are only releasing about 20% of the game art along with the source code of the game. :) About 80% of the game's art assets are held back internally. This release is not to release a workable game for gamers, but rather for those who are interested in game development to try their hands at helping develop a video game. :) But I know personally a few enterprising modders and fans that have taken it upon themselves to learn new skills (compiling executables, etc.) in order to turn the source code into a playable state (even if it is missing most of the assets). We are hoping this release will garner new interest and bring more talent to the team. If you don't want to join the official Wildfire Games team, but still want to help by taking a crack at the code, you can still submit patches to us, we'll evaluate them, and then commit them to the game. We are doing it this way in order to maintain some sanity to the development and to maintain the spirit and letter of the game design. All contributions are welcomed and appreciated. When everything is said and done, those who have made contributions will be recognized alongside the developers. :) We want this to be a huge community of developers and avid modders developing a great game under a structured and well-documented umbrella. :)

Thanks guys!

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Betelgeuze
Betelgeuze

good luck to you guys, this is a big step!

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Bird_of_Prey
Bird_of_Prey

This could be huge. Looking forward to what this might bring about. Best of luck!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+4 votes
vus
vus

+ in O
earth symbol :D

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matti3
matti3

+111111111

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