A.D. is een strategy-spel en is opensource, crossplatform en realtime. Wildfire Games werkt er nu samen met zo'n honderd vrijwilligers aan. Het is een historisch oorlogs- en economiespel, dat zich van vijfhonderd jaar voor tot vijfhonderd jaar na het begin van de christelijke jaartelling afspeelt en waarmee spelers het ontstaan van de westerse beschaving kunnen naspelen. De ontwikkeling is in 2001 begonnen als een total conversion mod voor het spel Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings en sinds 2003 wordt van een eigen game-engine gebruikgemaakt. Inmiddels is met codenaam Rhododactylos een nieuwe ontwikkelbuild verschenen en de belangrijkste veranderingen die hierin zijn aangebracht, kunnen hieronder worden gevonden.
Top New Gameplay Features in This ReleasePerformance Improvements and Other Changes Under the Hood
- Nomad Game Mode: Players start with only some citizen soldiers and female citizens, and no civil center, and must build a base from scratch.
- In-Game Technology Tree: Allows players to see which faction can research what technologies, when and for how many resources.
- The default AI, Petra, now supports saved games.
- Toggle groups of units between marching in formation and breaking formation.
- New Seleucid buildings: The new buildings are the house, storehouse, farmstead, towers and temple. The Civic Center is a placeholder for now and will be updated before the Seleucids are finished.
Improvements to the Atlas Editor
- SpiderMonkey upgraded to v31: The Javascript engine SpiderMonkey has been upgraded to version 31. This greatly improves performance and reduces memory usage a bit. We have also adapted our code to support new and advanced memory management techniques and features of SpiderMonkey such as Exact Stack Rooting, Moving GC and Generational GC. In addition, this version of SpiderMonkey includes a new and improved version of the performance profiling tool called “Tracelogger”, which has helped us identifying and fixing different problems and further improving performance.
- C++11 upgrade: C++ is the main programming language used for our Engine and we now support the C++11 standard, which was finalized by the ISO committee in 2011. It took a while until the standard was supported well enough by the third party tools we are using, mainly C++ compilers. Last but not least, we dropped support for older C++ compilers in order to move to the new version. As a consequence, we have also been able to remove some workarounds for bugs and missing features in these old compilers. C++11 brings many new and useful features our programmers can use and it was a requirement for the SpiderMonkey 31 upgrade.
- More Efficient Fogging and Visibility Calculations: These calculations keep track of what each player knows about all objects in the world. For example, you might see a tree with half of its resources remaining in the Fog of War. Another player might have more recent information because of scouting and knows that this tree has already been collected completely. This kind of information is now stored and processed more efficiently, which improves performance a lot.
- New Wildfire Games Server: The new Wildfire Games server hosts different services such as the multiplayer lobby, our IRC bot, the website and also the newly implemented autobuilder. The autobuilder builds 0 A.D. from source code for artists, players and other people who should not have to build it manually, and can now check itself with automated tests. (The payments for the hosting plan and server license are made possible thanks to our donors!)
- Selected other improvements: Several AI optimizations, reduced lag when selecting units, and more.
- Right-Click Rotations of Multiple Objects: Normal behavior: Rotate objects in circle, Ctrl+Right-click: Rotate each of the objects individually in place, Shift+Right-click: Keep rotation but move in circle.
- Atlas now checks for unsaved changes when closing a map.
- Atlas now shows when objects are placed in invalid locations by highlighting them in red.
- Show template names of selected objects.
- Copy and paste added to Edit menu.
- Numerous bug fixes.