 Next up, we're going to have a talk from Nicolas, who's going to talk a bit about the game ZeroAD, which is a Libre real-time strategy game. And the slogan is, history is yours for the taking, right? Good luck, the stage is yours. Hello. Does this work? Yes, I hear it. So, welcome everybody to this presentation. Thank you so much for attending it. So I'm Nicolas Auvret and I am the project leader of ZeroAD, which is a free open source real-time strategy game that you may have heard of. If you don't, ZeroAD is a real-time strategy game, so you might compare it to old commercial titles like Age of Empires or Warcraft, Starcraft, this kind of game. Basically, you have a base, a military base that you have to build up, develop, make it flourish economically and then you can crush your opponents on the battlefield. But the important thing is that ZeroAD is not a clone of those commercial games you might know. It's really a completely original game which is made by us on our free time as a free and open source piece of software. More precisely, it's a historical strategy game set in ancient times, hence the name ZeroAD. In the Gregorian calendar, ZeroAD doesn't exist. You go straight from one BC to one AD. ZeroAD is like a time that never was in which you can play big civilizations from 500 BC to ZeroAD at the peak of their influence and prosperity in the Mediterranean world and beyond. So we have 13 factions that you can play in the game. From the ancient world, you have the Athenians in alphabetical order, the Britons, the Cartagenaeans, the Gauls, the Ibarians, the Kushits, the Macedonians, the Moeus, the Persians, the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Celesids and the Spartans. So you have a whole world of ancient civilizations that you can control, make them win, achieve supremacy on the battlefield and really history as you make it yours. As for ZeroAD itself in this presentation, apart from the world map, I just showed this is only in-game footage. The game really looks like this. I will try to show you a video a bit later in the presentation. So the game is beautiful and also actually fully playable. We advertise it as in-development because we still want to add features to it. But basically you can play alone or with friends and the game is almost complete. In terms of solo games, you can play against the computer, against the powerful AI, which is rather difficult to beat the first time. So maybe take a couple games before you increase the difficulty of the AI, but it's really working well. Here you see a game played by four different AIs playing against each other. And in the multiplayer aspect, the game is also feature-packed. We have a multiplayer mode which works locally if you want to organize a local area game. We have a multiplayer lobby with a very active community. So you can just come and have a game and be crushed if you're still starting with the game. Or you can play with a friend with a direct IP connection. We have some features that even commercial games don't have, especially in multiplayer we have a feature in case you have a bad network. You can join during a game or re-journ if you got disconnected because of your network. This is a feature that you can find easily even in games that are not made just for fun. We have a lot of other features from multiplayer like replays, observer modes, the chat in-game obviously. The ranking on the lobby is done with the same system as for chess. If some of you play this, you have a friend system and much, much more. Finally, of course, if I'm here at first, then to present the game is because 0AD is free open-source Libre, if you prefer, and cross-platform. You can play it on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac, anything you use, it works. It's in most package repositories. It's free and the code is written in the GPL and all the art is licensed under Creative Commons. This is really a game made by volunteers for the users in all meanings of the world. Another thing that is made possible by this openness of the development of 0AD is the modability of the game. We have a lot of mods. This one is a bit dark, sorry. We have a lot of mods and thriving modding environments. Here are some screenshots of Terra Magna, which is a mod that adds civilizations from the ancient world, from outside Mediterranean world. Here you have the Chinese from the Han Dynasty, the Zapotecs from Central America, and the Xiongnu Nomads from Central Asia. Those are added in the Terra Magna mod. We have Millenium AD, which is obviously a mod of the medieval civilizations in 0AD, a tribute to Age of Empires II. We also have this mod, which is entirely different, but has a lot of success, which recreates the world of the legend of Zelda in the engine of 0AD. Really, the modding capabilities of our engine are a big selling point for everything we do with it. Actually, in the latest version of 0AD, which was released mid-2019, we partnered with Mod.io, which is a new service provided by the creators of IndieDB and ModDB. I don't know if you know this website, but we partnered with them to bring a mod downloader inside 0AD. Basically, Mod.io provides us with a website where modders can upload their mods, and we use their API to download mods directly into the game. This has been a huge success. We have a lot of mods. Some of them are official, made by ourselves, and some of them are made by the community. In nine months of existence since May of 2018, when I created this slide, we were at 42,000 downloads, and we are slowly but steadily going to the 50,000 downloads. As you could see in the few slides I presented you, the art of 0AD is a very important thing for us. We are very lucky to have great artists who contribute voluntarily and create their art and their content and their assets under the Creative Commons license, and it allows us on top of the graphics capabilities of our engine to provide a game that is beautiful to see, beautiful to play, and I will also give you an idea of the beautiful music we have by presenting you some excerpts from the trailer of the latest version. So the entire soundtrack is composed for 0AD by another composer, played with real instruments, and if you want to come to our booth in the K building, we can give you CDs of the soundtrack of the game. So those are some major features from the latest version and actual in-game footage. This is the latest civilization that was added to the game, which is the kingdom of Kush from ancient Egypt. Each civilization of 0AD comes with a full set of models for buildings and units. There are not a lot of difference in the gameplay between the factions, but it's an entirely different experience visually. We have a map editor which comes with the game, in which you can create maps like placing elements on the map and you also have a powerful API for scripting random maps, random map generation. So I hope this gave you the idea to download the game and play it at home. So you probably wonder how we got here in the first place. So it all began in around 2000, where the original developers of 0AD actually created a mod for Age of Empires 2, which was a huge hit. So they decided to do something even bigger and even more successful and they created 0AD as an entirely different game. It was first, the aim was to create a game that was free as in free beer because they came from the modern environment, but in the end they decided in 2009 to go open source and Libre at the same time, which allowed the game to be developed way further than was anticipated, and we're still going strong and creating new content and new features for the game, which is actually almost finished. And so we're a global team of people from all over the world creating this game. So if by any chance you want to join us, you're warmly welcome because we always can use more contributors. We can welcome contribution in a big range of areas. Of course the first area where we will never have enough contributors is programming. So if you want to contribute code, you can go to our wiki pages and there will be a lot of information on how to start your first tasks. You can provide patches on a platform which is fabricator. We use SVN as a central repository, we host ourselves, but we have Git mirrors on GitHub, GitLab. The best way to get in touch with us is to use the IRC channel which is now bridged to metrics and discord. You can contribute art just by going to our forums and chatting with the community and proposing some new assets. You can contribute other kinds of content like mods and maps as well. On the forums we have guides on the wiki and I talked about Map Editor briefly earlier. And of course if you don't have all these skills but you want to further the cause of Zero AD you can just talk about the game, play it, make every friend know that you are playing Zero AD. And you can also come to the forums and join the community whenever you want. Thanks for your attention. You can see us at our booth, Building K Stage 2 and I'm giving you the website where you can download and have more information. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Nicolas. Perfectly on time. Yes, as he explained, if you would like to talk more since there was no time for questions you can go to the booth in Building K it was, right? Exactly. Very good.