Openage: Making Age of Empires II Open-Source

Like Xoreos, GemRB, and OpenMW that seek to remake popular proprietary games/engines as open-source, Openage is another such project and it's seeking to free the once popular Age of Empires II game.

Age of Empires II is now a decade and a half old but there's a community forming to develop Openage to enable it as open-source. Age of Empires II was powered by the Genie Engine that was designed to power the AoE series along with Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

Openage aims to have POSIX platform support for the Microsoft-published game. Like the other open game engine projects out there, Openage will still require the title's original game assets from a valid copy of the game as they aren't seeking to remake all of the in-game assets, sounds, etc. Openage is an open-source re-implementation of the engine.

The original AoE2 trailer.

Openage is being written in C++11, will feature Python scripting support, is aiming for OpenGL 2.1 compliance, will use SDL2, and aims to use the Opus audio codec. Developers working on Openage hope their take on it will provide a fully authentic look and feel, multiplayer support, AI, an easily-moddable content format, etc. They may also try to land some improvements over the original game.

Age of Empires fans wishing to learn more can visit Openage on GitHub.