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 Channel Futures

Open Source


0 A.D. Promises Real Gaming for Ubuntu

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • October 13, 2009

And now a brief break from business-oriented coverage on WorksWithU. As a history Ph.D. student by day and free-software geek by night, I find that my poles of interest rarely converge.  That’s why I was so excited when the real-time historical strategy game 0 A.D. was switched to an open-source license in July.  I’ve been meaning since then to give it a try, and finally found the time and hardware necessary to do that.  Here are the results.

Set in antiquity and designed with historical accuracy as a priority, 0 A.D. is a real-time strategy game that supports Linux, Windows and OS X. The developers, Wildfire Games, originally intended to distribute it as freeware, but decided to open-source the code last summer in hopes that it would speed the development process.

The game is not yet really playable, but it runs.  Here are some screenshots:

0 A.D. screenshot

0 A.D. screenshot

And here are some more interesting shots courtesy of the game’s Wikipedia article (it was not playable enough on my computer to get any very exciting scenes):

0 A.D. screenshot

Why it’s great

0 A.D. is probably the only open-source RTS game besides Glest that attempts to bring to Linux users a gaming experience otherwise available only on Windows (or through wine, sometimes).  Other strategy games for Linux exist, some of them decent enough to provide a few hours’ entertainment, but they’re mostly half-baked and lack the professional quality of their commercially developed betters, especially when it comes to art and gameplay.

That’s no surprise, since the free-software community is short on the kind of talent required to create good games.  Coders are available in abundance, but finding experienced artists, designers and writers willing to contribute to open-source projects can be difficult, especially when cash is tight.

Despite these odds, 0 A.D. has clearly managed to assemble some impressive non-coding talent, as the artwork above attests to.  If the game receives the necessary support from the community to put out a successful product, it will set an important precedent demonstrating that quality games can be developed on the open-source model.  It will also send a message to vendors that Linux users care about games, which may help expand the dismal range of offerings currently available for Ubuntu.

Appendix: installing 0 A.D. on Ubuntu

The game is still highly unstable, but packages are available from getdeb.  To install the game from that repository, just type:

echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu jaunty-getdeb-testing apps games" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb-testing.list
wget -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 0ad

Note that the getdeb packages were built in July, and are missing all of the improvements implemented since then.

The truly adventurous can try compiling from source using the latest subversion code.  The instructions in this Ubuntu Forums post worked for me on 64-bit Jaunty.  Unfortunately, although the code compiled without a problem and the application launched, it crashed when I tried to start a new single-player game.  But I may simply have checked out a bad svn snapshot.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Open Source

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25 comments

  1. Avatar László Torma (toros) 's status on Tuesday, 13-Oct-09 14:46:0 October 13, 2009 @ 11:46 am
    Reply

    […] http://www.workswithu.com/2009/10/13/0-ad-promises-real-gaming-for-ubuntu/ a few seconds ago from web […]

  2. Avatar Vadim P. October 13, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
    Reply

    I respectfully disagree.

    http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/ promises real gaming. Native Linux client, the game has had zero marketing yet through word of mouth has ~30k people playing at any time 🙂

    Facebook page is huge too: http://www.facebook.com/heroesofnewerth

  3. Avatar lol October 13, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
    Reply

    “The game is not yet really playable, but it runs.”

    Hahahaha

    Welcome to the world of Linux gaming.

  4. Avatar aikiwolfie October 13, 2009 @ 1:12 pm
    Reply

    Nice. It’s always good to see Linux moving forward.

  5. Avatar L4Linux October 13, 2009 @ 3:13 pm
    Reply

    After adding the repository, it needs a
    sudo apt-get update

  6. Avatar Christopher Tozzi October 13, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
    Reply

    L4Linux: thanks for catching the error; post updated.

  7. Avatar Victor October 13, 2009 @ 4:30 pm
    Reply

    Being a Ph.D graduate and a Linux fan myself, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone!

  8. Avatar Alfredo October 13, 2009 @ 6:24 pm
    Reply

    Being a project manager student during the day, worker 2; gamer and geek at nite.. good news.. but when will I get onscreen take off? or autocad =(

  9. Avatar GamniX raquo; Blog Archive raquo; 0 A.D. Promises Real Gamin October 13, 2009 @ 11:46 pm
    Reply

    […] The game is not yet really playable, but it runs. Read more at Works With U […]

  10. Avatar Links 13/10/2009: Ubuntu 9.10 for Servers, ASUS Back to GNU/ October 14, 2009 @ 12:35 am
    Reply

    […] 0 A.D. Promises Real Gaming for Ubuntu And now a brief break from business-oriented coverage on WorksWithU. As a history Ph.D. student by day and free-software geek by night, I find that my poles of interest rarely converge. That’s why I was so excited when the real-time historical strategy game 0 A.D. was switched to an open-source license in July. I’ve been meaning since then to give it a try, and finally found the time and hardware necessary to do that. Here are the results. […]

  11. Avatar Artemis3 October 14, 2009 @ 3:11 am
    Reply

    “0 A.D. is probably the only open-source RTS game besides Glest that attempts to bring to Linux users a gaming experience otherwise available only on Windows”

    My friend, i think you need to check out Warzone 2100, thats also a complete open sourced commercial RTS game.

    If you add playdeb repositories, installing is a breeze. But don’t forget to download the ingame videos from the main site, and put the file ~/.warzone2100-2.2/sequences.wz

    http://www.playdeb.net/
    http://wz2100.net/

  12. Avatar Roy (linuxcanuck) 's status on Wednesday, 14-Oct-09 12:23:12 October 14, 2009 @ 9:23 am
    Reply

    […] http://www.workswithu.com/2009/10/13/0-ad-promises-real-gaming-for-ubuntu/ a few seconds ago from web […]

  13. Avatar Razor7 October 14, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
    Reply

    Hahahaha…..did you imagine this news article for Windows?

    “…ValVe has released a new version of HalfLife, the game is not yet playable, but it runs…”

    Please Linux…grow up!

    Cheers

  14. Avatar Richard Venneman October 14, 2009 @ 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Looks great! Can’t wait to play it. Hope they’ll get some contributors since now it’s open.

  15. Avatar Christopher Tozzi October 14, 2009 @ 5:08 pm
    Reply

    lol and Razor7: to be clear and to be fair to the developers, the game has not come close to being released. It’s still in development. The fact that it’s open-source means anyone can compile and play the development version, which I did in this post to preview the game, but to expect the pre-release versions of the game to be playable is not fair. If you had access to the source code of HalfLife when it was in the middle of being written and compiled it yourself, you’d have the same problem.

  16. Avatar Jeff October 14, 2009 @ 9:40 pm
    Reply

    For those making fun of it because it is not playable…hello, ever hear of a alpha release or beta which all games go through? Only difference is with open source anyone can get the code anytime and play with. Don’t see that happening with other games.

  17. Avatar Ước Nguyễn October 15, 2009 @ 10:20 am
    Reply

    ha ha, great, very impressive. Waiting for stable release version. Hope it will be soon…

  18. Avatar SwiftNet October 15, 2009 @ 10:22 am
    Reply

    I love this comment by Razor7

    Quote
    “Please Linux…grow up!”
    Unquote

    We are talking about games here, not supercomputing. Windows is grown up because it can play games? Windows runs 1% of the world top 500 supercomputers. Linux runs well over 77%. Razors comment should have been: Please Linux… lighten up and play.

    A

  19. Avatar ubuntu user October 15, 2009 @ 12:38 pm
    Reply

    well, its great news! its what linux need. artwork its awessome, but check that isn’t just the artwork that makes a good game. i wish you good luck and i will bookmark your website to time to time see the news. keep it up the good work!

  20. Avatar lol loonix October 15, 2009 @ 1:33 pm
    Reply

    So the “real gaming” for Ubuntu is another game clone? The graphics look worse than Age of Empires 2 that came out 10 years ago.

  21. Avatar Toby Haynes October 15, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
    Reply

    For those of you who want a more futuristic RTS on Linux, check out Spring RTS

    http://springrts.com/

    Originally an attempt to reproduce Total Annihilation, it has far outgrown those original roots and can now provide World War II themed games (Spring:1944), CPU warfare (Kernel Panic) and others, free to download and modify.

    There are others mods which are proprietary or which use parts of the original Total Annihilation models/textures.

  22. Avatar Jose_X October 15, 2009 @ 10:52 pm
    Reply

    gt;gt; Coders are available in abundance, but finding experienced artists, designers and writers willing to contribute to open-source projects can be difficult, especially when cash is tight.

    Writers and others will come on board, but, unlike for software coders, FOSS is new to them.

    How many experts get to work on the next EA game? Very few. Experts and hobbyists of all sorts will love FOSS as well and will eventually help FOSS games be the best games.

    FOSS credits will improve the odds of grabbing a paying gig (eg, customizing the game to a business, eg, as a marketing gimmick or to make gamer/customers more easily do business with that given shop).

  23. Avatar Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #164 | Ubuntu-News - Your one stop October 19, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
    Reply

    […] Needed2009 Community Council vote complete WorksWithUThe Importance of Free Software in the Cloud0 A.D. Promises Real Gaming for UbuntuInstaller Slideshow in Ubuntu 9.10 Helps New Users Unknown Feed Ubuntu UnleashedPost for […]

  24. Avatar Destillat KW43-2009 | duetsch.info - GNU/Linux, Open Source, October 23, 2009 @ 6:05 am
    Reply

    […] 0 A.D. Promises Real Gaming for Ubuntu […]

  25. Avatar dido January 10, 2010 @ 6:53 pm
    Reply

    Very good post, thanks a lot.
    Very good post, thanks a lot.
    dido

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