Wildfire's 0 A.D. Game Progresses With New Alpha

After being in development as a closed-source game for more than eight years, this past summer the 0 A.D. game was open-sourced by Wildfire Games. A month later, the first alpha release of this real-time strategy came emerged. Now three months after being one of the newest open-source games for Linux / Windows / Mac OS X, a second alpha release is available for testing with many advancements.

While Wildfire's 0 A.D. game is far from being on the same level as say Unigine's OilRush game in terms of the artwork and engine, this ancient warfare game has now picked up a "fog of war" game-play mode, victory conditions, hunting and fishing activities, multiple new maps, a brand new in-game GUI, and new artwork.

On the technical end, 0 A.D. (which is codenamed "Bellerophon") now has automatic texture compression, streaming music decompression, data files are now stored in ZIP archives, and the pathfinder performance has improved significantly.

Still left to be tackled by the developers with Wildfire Games or the open-source community is artificial intelligence for the computer opponent, even out the unit stats balance, adding more game-play features, and creating a multi-player match-making service.

Additional details concerning Wildfire Games 0 A.D. Alpha 2 along with the free download links can be found on the project's web-site.