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0 A.D (Zero Anno Domini) is a real-time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games which has recently released the source code, thus allowing us to enjoy the game without having to pay anything. The game has excellent graphics which are unfortunately quite rare in the Linux world.

Here is a video to get a better idea of 0 A.D.:



Since this game has very good 3D graphics, the requirements are kind of high too. The developers say that having an Geforce 4 or Intel 945GM graphics card or worse will give you very bad gaming results and therefore you are advised not to play the game if you have such a graphics card. Furthermore, it is recommended you have at least 1GB of RAM, especially to prevent huge compilation times (yes, you need to compile this game to be able to play it). And finally, the processor should be a Pentium 4 or higher and at least 2 GB of free disk space.

Installing the needed packages for compiling 0 A.D. (Zero Anno Domini) in Ubuntu



1. Make sure you have svn installed. If not, install it:
sudo apt-get install svn

2. After you have SVN installed, you can then download the latest version of the game:
svn co http://svn.wildfiregames.com/public/ps/trunk/

Leave this terminal window open because the download will take a while and until the game finishes downloading, go to step 3.

3. Install needed packages for compiling:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg62-dev libgamin-dev nasm libwxgtk2.8-dev libboost-dev libboost-signals-dev libopenal-dev libalut-dev libvorbis-dev libogg-dev libcrypto++-dev binutils-dev libnspr4-dev libdevil-dev libenet-dev libxml2-dev


4. Before compiling the game, you should install SpiderMonkey for better memory management. To install it, follow the steps below:
a) Download it:
wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js-1.60.tar.gz

b) Extract the archive:
tar -xzf js-1.60.tar.gz && cd js/src

c) Compile it:
JS_THREADSAFE=1 INCLUDES=-I/usr/include/nspr OTHER_LIBS=-L/usr/lib make -f Makefile.ref && make -f Makefile.ref export

d) Move the files to their respective folders:
cd ../../dist/Linux_All_DBG.OBJ && sudo cp lib/* /usr/lib &&sudo mkdir /usr/include/js && sudo cp include/* /usr/include/js && sudo ldconfig


Compilling 0 A.D. (Zero Anno Domini)


Now everything is ready and we can proceed on compiling the game:

1. In the terminal that you used to download the game (or open another one and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the game), paste this:
cd trunk/libraries/fcollada/src && make

2. And then change the directory to where we need to run script that takes care of the files needed for compilation:
cd ../../../../trunk/build/workspaces

3. And run the script:
./update-workspaces.sh

4. Now we can proceed to compiling:
cd gcc && make -j3

5. After the process finishes:
cd ../../../binaries/system

6. If all goes well, there there should be a file named "pyrogenesis_dbg" in this folder, which is the game. So you should now be able to run the game like this:
./pyrogenesis_dbg


[credits: ubuntued.info]