Wildfire Games have given an update on the status of 0 A.D. Alpha 25, which they've now confirmed the Feature Freeze will begin on June 6 to focus on getting it release ready.
We now know that on June 6 it will enter a Feature Freeze, meaning no more features will be pulled into the code and instead they will switch to bug fixing and optimization. Then on June 13 a "Commit and String Freeze" will happen, as they focus on getting out Release Candidate builds to move onto 0 A.D. Alpha 25 releasing at the earliest June 20, but it can be pushed to June 30 depending on bugs found during the RC phase.
As a reminder here's just some of what's coming:
- Single Player Campaign Support:
The ability for 0 A.D modders to create their own single player campaigns will be added. Alpha 25 will only include the base functionality for this with full campaigns scheduled to be added in later iterations.- Improved Multiplayer Responsiveness
A technical improvement that players may ‘feel’ rather than see, this is another progressive improvement step to smoothing out multiplayer gameplay and enhancing unit pathfinding. Before commands in multiplayer were processed twice per second, now five times like in single player.- Ongoing Balancing Changes
Numerous changes to balance of the game by way of micro adjustments to various civilisations, buildings, and units.
Pictured - a preview build of 0 A.D. Alpha 25
It's incredibly exciting to see 0 A.D. become a lot more active now that the big tech upgrade has been finished in the previous release, with more gameplay features to arrive in upcoming releases. 0 A.D. has always been one of the most promising free and open source games around and it's already highly playable and a lot of fun.
They don't have a name for the release yet so you can go and help pick them one.
The main reasons we haven't yet is that the game still has some rough edges namingly the huge lag when many units are moving. It's still missing some core features too and it also warrants for more breaking changes.
I really hope some day they will get to the beta stage, it's such a great effort.
Not sure if joking or not. It has been what other projects call "stable" for years. It's just bad marketing :(
Last edited by Julius on 31 May 2021 at 7:09 pm UTC
I really hope some day they will get to the beta stage, it's such a great effort.
I really don't understand why it's still labelled as alpha when it's more polished than many released commercial games. It's really production ready and doesn't need the alpha label, nor even the beta label.
Not at all!I really hope some day they will get to the beta stage, it's such a great effort.
Not sure if joking or not. It has been what other projects call "stable" for years. It's just bad marketing :(
Yes it's "stable," but not really feature-complete yet, and I think that's why they label it as "alpha".
Last edited by omer666 on 31 May 2021 at 8:05 pm UTC
Not at all!I really hope some day they will get to the beta stage, it's such a great effort.
Not sure if joking or not. It has been what other projects call "stable" for years. It's just bad marketing :(
Yes it's "stable," but not really feature-complete yet, and I think that's why they label it as "alpha".
Agree. Serious bug testers who get out a fine tooth comb, analyze & compile a list and compare to similar style games like say Age of Empires II Definitive Edition are not going to come up empty handed.
Granted credit where credit is due, Alpha 24 ended up being a MASSIVE improvement (3 years work).
I do think it's very close to graduating to Beta 1 -- I imagine it's fairly feature complete, but I could understand going from the number #25 to #1 feels a little wrong. Maybe they could just skip and make it Beta #25/#26 I dunno.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 1 June 2021 at 5:37 am UTC
The main reasons we haven't yet is that the game still has some rough edges namingly the huge lag when many units are moving. It's still missing some core features too and it also warrants for more breaking changes.
Has the switch to Python 3 been made yet? I don't have Python 2 around anymore on my system...
Yeah since A24. It was a hard requirement on most Linux distributions.
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