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New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 3 Cerberus


Jeru
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Wildfire Games proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 3 Cerberus", the third alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. Now you can play on a round map, garrison units in buildings, watch units shuttle resources to a dropsite, set up games more easily, look at game statistics when they're over and more!

Plus: This holiday season, we're fundraising to get a one of our developers paid to do 1 month of work on 0 A.D. Look below for more details.

Easy Download and Install

Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. You can redistribute it and modify it as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC-BY-SA. No registration, no advertising, no catch.

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New features in this release:

  • Gameplay: Added garrisoning; Added resource shuttling; Added circular maps; Improved pathfinding; Improved LOS computation performance; Rebalanced units.
  • Multiplayer: Slightly improved multiplayer latency; Allow multiplayer matches to continue when a player leaves.
  • Art: Hellenic and Celtic ships; Greek buildings (gymnasion, house, resource mill, fortress and gate building, or propylaea, as eye candy); Desert plants and pine trees; Treasure eye candy.
  • GUI: Improved game setup screen; Redesigned loading screen; Added summary screen.
  • Other UI aspects: Added double-click/triple-click selection of all units of a certain kind; Fixed hotkey bugs.
  • Multiple new maps to play: Acropolis, Belgian Bog, Cycladic Archipelago, Death Canyon, Median Oasis, Miletus, Resource Demo, Saharan Oases, Savana Ravine, Ship Attacks Demo, Tower Attacks Demo, We are Legion Demo.

Room for improvement:

  • There is no computer opponent AI yet. In single-player games the enemy does nothing.
  • There is no random map generation yet.
  • Many unit stats are still unbalanced.
  • Many planned gameplay features are not added yet: There is no research, no auras, no rank upgrades, no settlements and territories, etc.
  • Many bugs and small missing features.
  • There is no multiplayer matchmaking service. You have to connect by IP address. (More convenient ways may be implemented in the future).

An overview of the gameplay feature status is on our wiki, and as you can see, there is still a lot of work to be done. If you want to be part of this effort too, you're welcome to get involved!

Why "Cerberus"?

We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...).

In Greek and Roman mythology, Cerberus (pronounced SUR-buh-ruhs) is the multi-headed hound that guarded the gates of Hades, the ancient Greek underworld. The deceased entered the underworld by crossing the river Styx ferried across by Charon, who charged an obolus, a small coin, as a fee. Cerberus was stationed on the far side of the river and prevented those who had crossed it from ever escaping. (Source: Wikipedia articles on Cerberus and the Greek underworld). According to our records, "Cerberus" was first suggested on our forums by 0 A.D. fan SMST. Thanks!

For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter D. We will prefer words related to the civilizations of ancient Iberia. Keep it original and within the 0 A.D. timeframe (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC).

The One-Month 0 A.D. Development Pledge

We've been making some significant and steady progress since 0 A.D. became an open-source effort in July 2009. We've had releases come out in almost regular installments, each with new features, bringing us, slowly but surely, closer to a finished game. All of this was accomplished by volunteers in their spare time, away from school, university and real life jobs. Just think what we could accomplish with one month's solid work of one of our developers!

To that end, we are raising $3,000 via Pledgie. That's like 150 people donating $20 each. The funds will go to compensating a developer of the team's choice for 160 hours of work. If we don’t achieve the amount we need for a full month, we’ll round it to the nearest week, and put the remainder aside to help with maintaining the website and the SVN servers we use for developers. Thanks in advance!

<a href='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14160'><img alt='Click here to lend your support to: Sponsor a Developer on 0 A.D. and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !' src='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/14160.png?skin_name=chrome' border='0' /></a>

Long Time, No Siege

Wildfire Games will continue releasing new versions of 0 A.D. periodically. Watch our news feed to keep updated, or follow us by e-mail, RSS, Facebook or Twitter. And you're always welcome to join the 0 A.D. community on our forums.

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Edited by Jeru
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Yay! I've been mentioned! :)

:P

And you are looking for a Iberian-related word for the next release? I think I can see whence the wind blows ...

It's definitely our intention at the very least :) But the wind is unpredictable so we can't promise anything :P (It should just be to delay the release in such a case though, so it shouldn't be a problem unless something unexpected happens).

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Cool, I didn't expect #3 so soon! And I see good omens for the contents of the next version... exciting!

But you got the pronunciation of Cerberus wrong. In Greek it is Kerberos, with a hard K: Care-Bear-os (or more like Care-ver-os in modern Greek).

Anyway instead of Wikipedia, a better source about him is at the Theoi Project (which unfortunately displays best in Internet Explorer).

Edited by Aldandil
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  • 2 weeks later...

That doesn't look like a circular map, it looks like a thin rectangular map displayed in a circular area :). It seems what's common is a desire to rotate the minimap so it always matches the camera orientation - AoM does it by rotating the whole square minimap, CoH does it by rotating the rectangular map within a circular area (which can waste a lot of screen space), AoE3 (and now 0 A.D.) does it by rotating a circular map in a circular area.

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  • 1 month later...

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