Software-update: 0 A.D. alpha 12

0 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 500 jaar voor tot 500 na het begin van de christelijke jaartelling afspeelt en waarmee spelers het ontstaan van de westerse beschaving kunnen naspelen. De ontwikkeling is in 2003 begonnen als een total conversion mod voor het spel Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, maar al snel werd duidelijk dat het beter was om een geheel nieuw spel te ontwikkelen. Inmiddels is met codenaam Loucetios een nieuwe ontwikkelbuild verschenen en de belangrijkste veranderingen die hierin zijn aangebracht, kunnen hieronder worden gevonden.

Top New Gameplay Features in This Release:

• Diplomacy: Determine if you and another human player are allies, enemies or neutral to each other, and change this relationship in mid-game as you see fit. If you downgrade the relationship, the change is automatically mutual (i.e., by turning someone into your enemy, you automatically become their enemy); But if you try to upgrade relations, as in forging an alliance, you need the other side to explicitly agree. (As of Alpha 12, AI players will not react to diplomacy changes at all. We hope to add this in the future.)
• Packing Siege Engines: Certain siege engines need to be in a “packed” state to be moved from place to place, and in a stationary “unpacked” state to be able to fire. Moving a siege engine between these states is called “packing” and “unpacking”, and takes time, during which the siege engine can neither move nor fire. (This is important for both realism and balance, as siege engines can inflict lots of damage.)
• Formation Order Queueing: Allows giving units several tasks to carry out in order, e.g.: (1) Build a house here, then (2) move near to the other player’s territory, (3) build a army camp there and then (4) attack the fortress first and then (5) go straight for the civic center. All these orders can be given in one sequence by pressing “shift” and right-clicking the relevant parts of the map in order.
• Heroes are back, but now each player can have only up to one living hero at any time.
• Slaughter Attack: All domestic animals are killed with melee weapons, even by otherwise ranged units. This speeds up meat harvesting.
• Unit Training Hotkeys: If you select a building that can train units, and then hit “Z”, it is as if you clicked the first unit training button on the left on the GUI; “X” for the second button from the left, “C” for the third, etc., up to the letter “M”.
• New Match Setup Options: Choose the population cap and the amount of resources players will start out with.
• Five New Random Maps: Nomad, Syria, Corinthian Isthmus, Belgian Uplands, and English Channel.

Graphics and User Interface Improvements:

• Improved Water Rendering: The new, “super-fancy” water includes the white foam of waves crashing onto the shore, it can be much wavier, and it casts surface and underwater shadows.
• Post-Processing Manager: Recent changes enable features such as distance fog, bloom and more. No less importantly, the post-processing manager is extremely moddable, so from now on, developers can very easily add new visual effects to 0 A.D. using existing code from other projects. For an example, see the Bokeh Depth of Field effect shown below.
• Rubble appears when you destroy a building
• We have also added icons to the tooltips, instead of names of resources like “Food” and “Wood” and time units like “seconds”

Music and Sound:

• New song: “Calm Before the Storm”, meant to be played in menu screens.
• Recent changes to the audio improve the way music sounds, and ensure it is heard in stereo.

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