The Unknown Horizons project aims at creating a free and open source realtime economy simulation with strategy elements in an isometric 2D engine loosely oriented towards Sunflowers' Anno / A.D. series. It is written in Python.

We mentor ideas together with our engine FIFE.

FIFE stands for Flexible Isometric Free Engine and is a cross platform game creation framework written in C++. It provides you with the ability to create a game using Python interfaces. FIFE also comes as a DLL or static library so you can use C++ as well.

The first commits to a repository of Unknown Horizons were made in October 2007, but the actual development started as a C++ project OpenAnno mid-2005 already.

Since then we have achieved a lot in terms of development and gameplay:

• Building a core development group and attracting many patchers
• Releasing several highly playable releases of an open source real time strategy game
• Setting up an excellent infrastructure that helps to focus on actual development
• Using only high quality media under terms of a free, open license
• Translating the game into more than 20 languages, resulting in many non-native English speakers contributing

Over the past twelve months, 38 developers contributed new code to Unknown Horizons. 
This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams listed on ohloh.net.

If you are into game programming and love an active, IRC-based community, Unknown Horizons is the place to be. Be sure to stop by our IRC channel if you are interested in joining us in GSoC as student!