Wildfire Games proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 3 Cerberus", the third alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. Now you can play on a round map, garrison units in buildings, watch units shuttle resources to a dropsite, set up games more easily, look at game statistics when they're over and more!
Plus: This holiday season, we're fundraising to get a one of our developers paid to do 1 month of work on 0 A.D. Look below for more details.
Easy Download and Install
Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. You can redistribute it and modify it as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC-BY-SA. No registration, no advertising, no catch.
New features in this release:
- Gameplay: Added garrisoning; Added resource shuttling; Added circular maps; Improved pathfinding; Improved LOS computation performance; Rebalanced units.
- Multiplayer: Slightly improved multiplayer latency; Allow multiplayer matches to continue when a player leaves.
- Art: Hellenic and Celtic ships; Greek buildings (gymnasion, house, resource mill, fortress and gate building, or propylaea, as eye candy); Desert plants and pine trees; Treasure eye candy.
- GUI: Improved game setup screen; Redesigned loading screen; Added summary screen.
- Other UI aspects: Added double-click/triple-click selection of all units of a certain kind; Fixed hotkey bugs.
- Multiple new maps to play: Acropolis, Belgian Bog, Cycladic Archipelago, Death Canyon, Median Oasis, Miletus, Resource Demo, Saharan Oases, Savana Ravine, Ship Attacks Demo, Tower Attacks Demo, We are Legion Demo.
Room for improvement:
- There is no computer opponent AI yet. In single-player games the enemy does nothing.
- There is no random map generation yet.
- Many unit stats are still unbalanced.
- Many planned gameplay features are not added yet: There is no research, no auras, no rank upgrades, no settlements and territories, etc.
- Many bugs and small missing features.
- There is no multiplayer matchmaking service. You have to connect by IP address. (More convenient ways may be implemented in the future).
An overview of the gameplay feature status is on our wiki, and as you can see, there is still a lot of work to be done. If you want to be part of this effort too, you're welcome to get involved!
Why "Cerberus"?
We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...).
In Greek and Roman mythology, Cerberus (pronounced SUR-buh-ruhs) is the multi-headed hound that guarded the gates of Hades, the ancient Greek underworld. The deceased entered the underworld by crossing the river Styx ferried across by Charon, who charged an obolus, a small coin, as a fee. Cerberus was stationed on the far side of the river and prevented those who had crossed it from ever escaping. (Source: Wikipedia articles on Cerberus and the Greek underworld). According to our records, "Cerberus" was first suggested on our forums by 0 A.D. fan SMST. Thanks!
For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter D. We will prefer words related to the civilizations of ancient Iberia. Keep it original and within the 0 A.D. timeframe (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC).
The One-Month 0 A.D. Development Pledge
We've been making some significant and steady progress since 0 A.D. became an open-source effort in July 2009. We've had releases come out in almost regular installments, each with new features, bringing us, slowly but surely, closer to a finished game. All of this was accomplished by volunteers in their spare time, away from school, university and real life jobs. Just think what we could accomplish with one month's solid work of one of our developers!
To that end, we are raising $3,000 via Pledgie. That's like 150 people donating $20 each. The funds will go to compensating a developer of the team's choice for 160 hours of work. If we don’t achieve the amount we need for a full month, we’ll round it to the nearest week, and put the remainder aside to help with maintaining the website and the SVN servers we use for developers. Thanks in advance!
Long Time, No Siege
Wildfire Games will continue releasing new versions of 0 A.D. periodically. Watch our news feed to keep updated, or follow us by e-mail, RSS, Facebook or Twitter. And you're always welcome to join the 0 A.D. community on our forums.
DO these 1st priority:
1. Include only completed bug tested maps in Aplha release(this way you can keep adding the complete maps every alpha release)
2. Introduce BOTS, its the biggest aspect. Online multiplayer can come after that.
3. Implement all gameplay features first befoer releasing any more Aplha's.
Work on Graphics after these, remember AOE II ??? It's still played among people. But it's graphics was hardly what we cann eye candy, god it wasn't even candy alone.
Hey thunderrising, thanks for your feedback! Just to touch on a few of your points here:
1. Did you experience any problems with any of the maps we've released? The reason we don't always include new maps in alpha releases is because it's not a priority, and we'll eventually run out of ideas. Also, developing maps requires manpower that would be better suited elsewhere.
2. This also requires quite a bit of manpower. Though it is planned for Alpha 4, we can make no guarantees about this. We hope to have at least a basic form of AI by the next release. (see Trac.wildfiregames.com)
3. This is our goal for our Beta releases. The purpose of an Alpha release is not to be a fully-operational representation, but rather a very incomplete version of what is to come. By definition, an Alpha does not have functional iteration of all major features, but rather serves as a snapshot of the current state of development. Until we've announced our first beta, you can expect this to be the case with all our releases.
For future reference, you can see all of the features we intend to include with each release here: Trac.wildfiregames.com
Also, could you perhaps clarify what you mean by "work on graphics"?
Great answer! ;-)
My take on what thunderising meant in terms of graphics is, "OMG!!! Why is 0 A.D. an eye-candy fest?!"
Really? As an artist for the game I am not really all that pleased so far with the amount of visual content we have. Of course I am never pleased, but I think that's a good thing, wanting to continually improve and add content.
good to hear about the AI
>Online multiplayer can come after that.
The thing is, multiplayer is easier to implement than a singleplayer AI. True story. Multiplayer (over IP) is already implemented. :)
What I would like to so is ai players once that happens I will download this please work on that for the next release good job by the way this game looks good
This game is great, and I didnt really notice the AI did nothing((Fail))(I only played once, then again.. it didnt fight back when I sent catapults..). Just some ideas, best added much later preferably in beta.
* Procedural walls/bridges placing walls and towers in exactly the right postition right now is VERY annoying
* Siege units need some troops that spawn with them to "push" and "operate" them, they look stupid moving and fireing themselves..
Great game! Like I said, best implemented in Beta.
Yes, our AI has yet to be written. We have plans for basic implementation come Alpha 4 (see Trac.wildfiregames.com), but we can't promise that it'll be challenging just yet. By the time we're done with it though, we can certainly guarantee that it won't hold back!
We've also started a Pledgie, to help pay a developer to work on the game for a month.
Pledgie.com
Support from the community is much appreciated.
I really dont get how to compile it for MAC..i though that i could do it but..meh i dont get it xD
Compiling the game on OSX is admittedly not for the faint of heart. The process involves installing Xcode, ~12 developer libraries and a basic knowledge of Terminal commands. You can expect us to release a binary for OSX (i.e. 0 A.D.app) as soon as we find a developer who knows his way around Xcode.
In the mean time, see if you can't find a friend with a PC.