After a year of development, the twenty-eighth edition of the free game 0 A.D. was presented with the implementation of a real-time strategy in the style of the games of the “Age of Empires” series. This release, known as “0 A.D. Release 28”, marks the first version without the “Alpha” tag, indicating that the game has reached a more stable state with polished functionality. The quality of implementation has advanced to a point where 0 A.D. has transitioned out of the alpha version state.
The source code of the game was made open by Wildfire Games in 2009 under the GPL license, after 9 years of development as a proprietary product. The game build is available for various operating systems including Linux (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, and Arch Linux), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Windows. Players can enjoy online play and single-player mode with bots on pre-designed or dynamically generated maps, covering more than ten civilizations that existed between 500 BC to 500 AD.
Non-code elements of the game such as graphics and sound are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, allowing for modification and usage in commercial products with attribution and distribution of derivative works under a similar license. The game engine of 0 A.D. consists of approximately 200 thousand lines of code in C++, using OpenGL for 3D graphics, OpenAL for sound, and ENet for networking. Other open real-time strategy projects include Glest, ORTS, Warzone 2100, and Spring.
Main changes in this release include the addition of the faction “Germans“,