The project is still far from ready, but it's getting there

Nov 3, 2014 14:43 GMT  ·  By

Age of Empires II is considered one of the best real-time strategies ever made, and there are few gamers who haven't tried or at least heard of it. A group of developers is now working on a free engine clone that should greatly improve upon the original title.

It seems that many developers are doing this type of work and many games are being ported in the same manner. The title is not freeware and the rights are still owned by Microsoft, so you can't use any of the proprietary components, like the music, the sounds, or the textures, but you can make your own engine to take advantage of these components.

This procedure allows developers to improve upon the original game a great deal and to implement changes to the gameplay that would otherwise be impossible to make. Developing your own engine for a game allows for a lot of freedom, which is then translated into a better game, hopefully.

openage wants to make Age of Empires II better and available for Linux

This is not a free version of Age of Empires II and users will still need to own the original game and install it, in this case with Wine. For now, this is the compromise required by the developers. It's possible that it could change in the future, but this is an engine developed by people in their own spare time, so there's no pressure to take any actions in that direction.

"openage is a volunteer project to create a free engine clone of Age of Empires II, primarily aimed at POSIX platforms such as GNU/Linux, comparable in its goals to projects like OpenMW, OpenRA and OpenTTD."

"openage uses the original game assets (such as sounds and graphics), but (for obvious reasons) doesn't ship them. To play, you require an original AoE II installation or AoE II: HD (wine is your friend; in the near future, setup discs will be supported)," reads the entry on GitHub.

The developers’ aim is to provide a similar experience with the game on the Windows platform, offer multiplayer capabilities, have an approximate implementation of the AI, and bring improvements to the original gameplay.

You can download the source code for openage from GitHub and you will find the installation instructions in the same place. This is still work in progress and the devs have a long way until this becomes a proper clone, but users should test it and help them improve it.