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Wildfire Games, a international community of free software game developers, has released the new 0.0.23 version of popular open-source RTS game O A.D. Empires Ascendant. It's very similar to Age of Empires franchise, and fans of AoE likely already know how great it is, even in it's current alpha state.
Check it out:
https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-a ... -ken-wood/
You can download and compile it for Stretch easily, just follow the guide on the build instructions page:
https://play0ad.com/download/source/

Those with more patience can just wait for it to land in Sid, and compile it the Debian way:
https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial
Or just download it from fluthub, flatpak package is available.

Have fun playing! I know I will

Trying to package it right now...just a note that the release is actually 0.0.23.

Edit: seems it now needs libsodium-dev (>= 1.0.14) as a build-depend. Backported that from Buster and trying to build packages again, using the 0.0.22-4 upstream folder as a template, with the arm and the hardening-relro patches disabled, as they have been fixed upstream.

Edit 2: Seems the internal mozjs(spidermonkey) build method used upstream fails on Stretch, which is probably why we don't have 0.0.22 in stretch-backports, either. Now trying the libmozjs-38-dev system library build instead, which works for 0.0.22 and for 0.0.23 in the PPA (with an additional patch). That library had to be ported over, since it's not in Debian at all, but we already had that done for MX LInux.

Edit 3: Got Stretch-based packages built and installed, but Jessie based builds fail with a boost related problem:
So far it doesn't look feasible to backport Stretch's boost libs to Jessie, but I'll explore options.

stevepusser wrote:just a note that the release is actually 0.0.23.

I've fixed the title.

stevepusser wrote:Got Stretch-based packages built and installed, but Jessie based builds fail with a boost related problem:

Super I hope you find a way to build it for Jessie, but it's soon out of it's official 3 year support anyway.

Wheelerof4te wrote: but it's soon out of it's official 3 year support anyway.

Yes you are right. Regular security support for Debian GNU/Linux 8 (code name "jessie") will be terminated on the 17th of June. As with previous releases additional LTS support will be provided for a reduced set of architectures and packages.

Conclusion: I don't think we'll see any official backport for 0.0.23 for Stretch, just like 0.0.22, since AFAIK it requires a build-depend that Debian seems to have concerns about putting in the repo: libmozjs-38-dev. I wonder if the manual build per their instructions succeeds on Stretch.

I could probably set up an OBS repo for the new 0ad with the build-depends, if anyone requests it and has some aversion to using the MX LInux builds, but that would take a while. The MX Linux builds were done in vanilla Stretch pbuilds with only the extra build-deps added.

stevepusser wrote: I wonder if the manual build per their instructions succeeds on Stretch.

I managed to compile 0.0.22 locally when I was on Stretch. It used up 6GB of drive space, and about 2+GB when I left only needed binaries. You can copy the provided .desktop and icon files for the easy launching without typing all the time.
I'm on Sid now, so I can't check if this new version can be built that way for Stretch.

At the very least on Stretch you also need to backport libsodium-dev first, and I still think the internal spidermonkey build will fail.

I could not backport (yet) Boost 1.62 from Stretch to get it to build on Jessie, but Boost 1.57 is the minimum required, and I was able to backport that from the sources at snapshot.debian.org with only one minor tweak. That then allows 0ad to build, install, and run successfully on Jessie.

The latest version has been uploaded to Sid:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/0ad
That was fast

Love 0AD....Highly recommend downloading and installing the mods (just download and extract into /home/[user]/.local/.0ad/mods/), then when you load the game go to either tools or options (can't remember) then click mods, then click your mod from list, click enable, click load/play game.....

There is a mod with Norse/Viking and Anglo/Saxon....also one for Han China but I haven't gotten that to work yet.

Ref: https://www.moddb.com/games/0-ad/mods
https://github.com/0ADMods

The latest version is now available from stretch-backports repo.
https://packages.debian.org/stretch-backports/0ad
Good, now I can get rid of flatpak.

Just had my first multiplayer match using the new server lobby. In the short time it existed, I can say the competition is fierce

Really excited with this, and to think the game is still in alpha.