The link shows that the last commit was a week ago... so, yes, it's still active. It compiles and runs, provided you have access to the media assets. It still needs work though.

Having a FLOSS engine for this game is more desirable than having to rely on a proprietary mess like Steam to play AOE2. So I hope this project is eventually successful.

I had a look at some .NET code integrating steam once and the integration itself looked quite clean and lightweight.

I'd be interested if people got banned or something like that for modifying games when they were clearly not hacking/cheating/cracking/impacting the experience of others.

From DSfix for Dark Souls I know that it can be fine with them if you hook function calls to improve rendering for example.

I imagine you also have to distinguish between Steam and VAC (anti-cheat) integration.

This project has nothing to do with Steam, other than perhaps (optionally) using the assets from the steam version of AOE2 HD, but it doesn't interface or interact with Steam at all AFAIK.

Sure, I know, but the parent poster complained about how Steam was a terrible thing about the HD version. I wanted to know if it creates practical problems if you want to mess with a game that has Steam integration.

Probably that was too far off topic by me.

It even has dev diaries: https://www.reddit.com/r/openage/

There are only three games I play regularly: AoE2, Doom, and SimCity 2000.

Why? That's like saying I only read Of Mice and Men, Dune, and Wealth of Nations.

There's so many other options to explore!

Runs better on wine than it does on windows.

Citation needed. In my experience, running AoE2HD in Wine results in strange mouse errors at the start of a match which can ruin a game (where the screen is stuck scrolling to one side).

The mouse bug seems to be gone for me (it was mainly triggered by alt-tabbing out of the window). It still has an issue with text not being rendered properly while typing.

Pretty sure that was one of several bugs I hit after release back in 2013, on Windows.

Doesn't it compile natively on Linux?

Fairly sure that AoE2HD was only released on Windows.