freeaoe

About

freeaoe is a from-scratch, single-person engine reimplementation capable of running Age of Empires II (and eventually other 'Genie engine' games, with early WIP support for Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds). It's still in early development — scenarios can be loaded and played, with movement, building, attacking, and a history screen — and works with the free Age of Empires II trial data files, though the author recommends the full original CD for higher-resolution UI graphics. The author states no reverse engineering was used; the implementation is based on publicly available knowledge and observation of the running game.

Getting started

If Age of Empires II is already installed, freeaoe automatically detects it (via the Windows registry, or the Wine registry on Linux) and loads its data files; otherwise it prompts for the files manually, with a shortcut to download the free trial version's data. Prebuilt Windows binaries are published via AppVeyor; Linux and Mac require building from source with SFML and a C++ compiler.

History

The project began as a fork of an earlier freeaoe repository by another author, then continued as an independent repo because forked repos tend to get less visibility on GitHub.

Known issues & limitations

• features: Random map RMS script parsing and campaign cinematics not yet implemented.
• platform: Does not build on macOS; only Windows and Linux are supported.
• macOS builds are currently not working; the author attributes it to Apple's outdated bundled Clang.

Media

Additional notes

Related project

The readme points to 'openage' as a more actively developed alternative for anyone wanting a more serious project.