Age of Empires Clone Released as Open Source
0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game. If you’ve played or seen Microsoft’s Age of Empire series, then you’ll have a good idea of this RTS game. The developers recently announced that the code available as GPL and the art content is available as CC-BY-SA.
here’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.
It’s recommended developers and artists read the Getting Started Guide, which explains building the game on various platforms. The developer, wildfire games, also has an active forum with posts on building for Mac OS X.
Lovers of RTS should also look into two more cross-platform projects Glest and Spring Engine. Glest is a free 3D real-time strategy game, where you control the armies of two different factions: Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield. Glest is not just a game, but also an engine to make strategy games, based on XML and a set of tools. A few mods already exist. A Mac OS X port is Glest available.
Spring is a project aiming to create a new and versatile RTS Engine. It features large battles, fully 3D deformable terrain, 3d combat in sea, air, and land with realistic weapon trajectories, complex 3rd party AIs and much more. As with Glest, Mac OS X users can also get in on the RTS fun.
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