The FOSS strategy game 0 A.D. seems to be coming along very nicely

Things on the news front for the FOSS RTS game 0 A.D. have been quiet recently but they certainly haven't been sitting on their hands, a lot of work has been going on in the background.

A game that's a real pleasure to watch grow, easily one of the most professional looking FOSS games around that may one day rival much bigger RTS games.

Since releasing Alpha 23 last year, the team haven't really said much. That changed yesterday, with the release of a brand new progress report. The silence on a lot of FOSS project news at times is quite understandable though, pulling together information on everything going on can be quite time consuming when people just want to get things done.

I shall note below some highlights below of what's coming.

Lots of new art assets went in including multiple new types bushes, trees, grass, foot-paths, papyrus and a lot more. Some shots below:

Continuing on the art there's also going to be many new Macedonian, Persian and Roman unit textures. There's a red fox model and animations, pigs got animated, new horses and other animals. New maps are coming too including Farmland, Oceanside, Temperate Roadway duel maps.

Lots of code improvements too including an improved water shader, to make the reflection and refraction a little more realistic. The map editor also gained a new tool, to allow you to choose the water height. Optimisations to the pathfinder, attack effects became moddable with an example of enabling a unit to both capture and damage in a single attack. There's also UTF8 support for map name and description, a major update to the SpiderMonkey version used for the game's scripting functionality.

The list of additions goes on for a while like units having an XP bar, new snowflakes and clouds particles and so on. Sadly though, there's no date yet for when Alpha 24 will be available but it's shaping up to be a massive release overall.

Also, for a slightly easier list of user-facing features to read over that are coming to Alpha 24 they're keeping a list here.