Monday, July 13, 2009

0 A.D. Now Open Source



Some breaking, amazing news related to one of the most exciting freeware Free game projects on the indie scene:



What is 0 A.D.?



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



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.



How can I get started?



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



For the full announcement, see the dedicated page for explaining why they moved to open source from the closed development model. For more media and information on the game, go to the official 0 A.D. website.





This is, of course, an exciting development. This game has been in production of some form for nearly 8 years, has 150k lines of code in the engine, and hundreds of dedicated (and now shared) models. It will be very interesting to gauge the impact this has on the open source game community. The game itself is not yet complete but it's definitely more than a tech demo, so it will also be interesting to see if the move to open source galvanises the project and gives it the push that it needs to get to a more complete/playable state.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is exciting news!

Unknown said...

Sweet, that looks amazing!

Wikipedia says: Windows, Linux, Macintosh

Anonymous said...

Looks very nice. But I can't play it on my Ubuntu PC, ever time i try to run it I get a Segfault :-(

Andrew said...

The SVN download for 0AD is really busy and keeps breaking so I made a torrent available which includes the source code tar.gz. (Don't let the pirate bay link fool you, it's legit)

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5002770

Just download, extract and you can use "svn update" to update to the latest revision

Anonymous said...

Andrew: The build instructions page already has a .tar.gz, which shouldn't break when downloading (I hope!) - are there problems with that that make the torrent a better option?

Anonymous said...

Andrew: The build instructions page already has a .tar.gz, which should download without breaking (I hope!) - are there problems with that that make the torrent worthwhile?

samrick said...

Looking Nice..How can I get it,Is it compatible with windows XP & I want to know the system requirements for running this game.

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samrick

sapience

Unknown said...

Great news, the opensource game world will make wonders on the next years

The first decade of the century was for the fps, now is the turn of the rts :D

ps: for the ppl asking details or how to run it... its a project that after 8 years cant be called alpha, even the engine isnt finished. wait 2 or 3 years more if you want to look for an alpha like version

Anonymous said...

Are there pre-compiled builds? I can't seem to find them.

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