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23 May 2011, 11:29

New alpha of real-time strategy game 0 A.D. features new civilisation

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0AD Logo After more than two months of development, Wildfire Games has announced the arrival of a fifth alpha version of its free cross-platform, real-time strategy game 0 A.D..

Code-named "Edetania", 0 A.D. Alpha 5 features improved formations, including support for unit formations, and the addition of a new faction: The Iberians. Other changes include a new lighting system with more vivid colours, new sound effects and music tracks, random maps scripting functionality, and a new map, "Acropolis II".

A new shader-based renderer mode has been added to support new effects and to improve performance, and the graphical user interface (GUI) has received several updates. Thanks to a new contributor, artificial intelligence (AI) in the game, named "JuBot", has also been "tremendously" improved.


Zoom The "Acropolis II" map that comes bundled with the latest alpha version of the game.
Source: CC-BY-SA Wildfire Games
Open sourced in mid-July of 2009, the game is similar to Microsoft's Age of Empires in that users create and build civilisations and must defend them against their enemies. The game focuses on the years 500BC to AD500 and includes six unique civilisations and several multi-player modes.

The developers say that 0 A.D. is, and always will be, free of charge. No registration is required and advertising is not included in the game. Feedback is welcomed in the Wildfire Games Forums and on their IRC channel (#wfg on QuakeNet IRC - irc://irc.quakenet.org/wfg).

Details about the fifth alpha, including a full list of new features, can be found in the official release announcement and on the Gameplay Feature Status page. 0 A.D. Alpha 5 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; installation instructions are provided.

The game's source code is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence (GPLv2) and the art, music and sound content in the game is made available under the CC-BY-SA Creative Commons Licence.

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(crve)

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