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Hello everyone, This year and for the past three years 0 A.D. was holding a stand at the FOSDEM. Like every time, it was a very great experience for me, and I was happy to be able to join @Itms, @plumo, @implodedok, @FeXoR, @bb_, @Imarok, @vladislavbelov and @fabio in this adventure. This year was a bit special because I got to co-host a game dev room with the guys at Godot thanks to Akien and Straton and of course to all the people I convinced to give talks and the people that attended said talks. I think the dev room was an overall positive experience so it's great! You can find the videos here. Our room was K.3.201. Some videos might not have been uploaded yet. There were a lot of interesting talks, especially the one about the Spring engine going to Steam. I got to talk a bit with the guys at the GSOC stand and they apparently knew us, so maybe we'll be more lucky this year. I got to meet a lot of people for the first time, some of the above team members, but also @Krinkle, @balduin. I also met @oSoMoN with who we discussed a potential better usage of the Snap Packages for 0 A.D. The idea would be to offer special features to be tested as snap packages on something like Kiwit CMS. By using this specific platform we would be able to set up test scenarios for things not covered by CI and unit tests. I also had the great honor to meet with Ton Roosendal (the CEO of Blender) and Dalai Felinto. We had an informal chat at our stand about our usage of Blender. Bernard Tyers asked me to give a talk at the design dev room next year and I think I'm gonna deliver. The Raspberry Pi 4 I brought had quite a nice success as it caught the eye and people were amazed that it could run on such a low end device. A few people were interested in helping out. We are looking forward to hearing from them. Thanks for all the people who gave us donations! For those who paid for music CDs I hope you'll enjoy them. For those that could not get one you can grab it here. See you all next year, or at the next FLOSS event that we will attend which will likely be JDLL in Lyon, France.

Hi all, yesterday I gave an ~1 hour presentation about 0 A.D. at the IT company I do my traineeship. It was very nice since there were many positive reactions from the attendees I attached the presentation for those who are interested. Presentation0ad-Sogyo2020-ForForum.pdf

Hello everyone, I have been interested in making it possible to explore applications of machine learning in 0 AD (as some of you may have gathered from https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5548 ). I realized that I haven't really explained very thoroughly my interest and motivation so I figured I would do so here and see what everyone thinks! tl;dr - At a high level, I think that adding an OpenAI gym-like interface* could be a cool addition to 0 AD that would benefit both 0 AD (technically and in terms of publicity) as well as the research community in machine learning and AI. I go into the specifics below as well as discuss other potential avenues for integrating/leveraging machine learning: Potential Machine Learning Problems/Applications Intelligent unit control (micromanagement) I have an example where an AI learns to kite with cavalry archers when fighting infantry at https://github.com/brollb/simple-0ad-example. This is probably one of the easiest problems to explore as it can be done progressively starting with small, clearly defined scenarios using the functionality added in the beforementioned ticket. That said, there are still some of the standard challenges present with machine learning around ensuring that the AI has been trained on sufficiently diverse scenarios so that it doesn't ever encounter something new and behave incorrectly. As far as potential impact on the game, automatic micromanagement could be interesting for either a component in an otherwise scripted AI such as Petra or as a way to make the units more intelligent as they gain experience. That is, I could imagine that as the units gain more experience, they could also start having improved tactical behavior, such as kiting, automatically. Enemy AI Trained Entirely with Reinforcement Learning This is actually very difficult although it has been recently done in StarCraft 2 (https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii). Although I think this could be fun for people to try to do, I wouldn't have high expectations on this front for awhile because it is a very hard problem for ML to solve - especially given the large number of different civilizations, maps, resource types, etc. Enemy AI with Scripting and Learned Components This is referring to a generic version of what I mentioned under "intelligent unit control". Essentially, there are a lot of opportunities to incorporate learned components into an otherwise scripted AI. From a technical perspective, this makes the machine learning problem much easier/tractable while still enabling more intelligent behavior from the built in AI. There are many different examples of intelligent components that could be incorporated. For example, it could try to predict the outcome of a battle (to determine if we should retreat) or try to imitate various high-level human strategies (such as predicting what a human might target for an attack). Quantitative Game Balancing This is a very interesting problem and I find 0 AD to be a particularly unique opportunity for exploring it. Essentially, the idea is that there are many different parameters in a game (such as attack damage for each unit, etc) which are quite difficult to tune without making the game imbalanced and one of the civilizations/strategies OP. (I don't think I need an example for this community but I enjoyed watching https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012211/Design-in-Detail-Changing-the.) This problem is nontrivial since detecting overpowered strategies really requires an understanding of the way various aspects of the game can be exploited. Although this is a nontrivial problem, I find it to be an exciting opportunity for 0 AD to gain publicity and for researchers to have a sandbox in which they can explore this research question in an actual game (rather than a trivial, toy environment). That is, many of the other environments used in reinforcement learning research are either open source toy environments (eg, CartPole) or proprietary games which cannot be modified (eg, StarCraft 2). There has been a bit of related research in detecting imbalance in complex games like StarCraft 2 as well as balancing simpler games but as proprietary games will not be exposing the parameters used for the units (and other aspects of the game), automatic game balancing approaches are limited. Being an open source game that people actually play, 0 AD provides a really exciting opportunity for research in this direction as the parameters of the game are not proprietary and could be modified programmatically enabling researchers to explore this rather complex problem. For the 0 AD community, enabling researchers to conduct this type of research in the game itself should make it much easier to be able to incorporate any results of such research into the game making 0 AD more fun and an even better game! Imitation Learning Training the AI to imitate humans is worth mentioning although the impact on the game is likely to be in one of the beforementioned ways. Imitation learning, unlike reinforcement learning, is training the AI using expert demonstrations of gameplay. It is often used as a method for essentially initializing the AI to something reasonable before training it further with reinforcement learning (ie, training the AI using a reward rather than example). Imitation learning can arguably be more valuable for game development given that it can more directly instill various human-like behaviors (hopefully making the gameplay more engaging and interesting) rather than simply trying to maximize some reward or score in the game. Techniques to Train and Understand AI Agents This is more of a general research direction that I find interesting (and is similar to research that I have done in the past). Essentially, this is exploring the means by which the game developer can use the various methods of instilling behavior into an AI (programming, reinforcement learning, imitation learning) to create the desired behavior (and game experience). This is a bit of both a human-computer interaction (HCI) and machine learning question (also related to machine teaching). To give a more concrete example, this would include exploring the behavior of a trained RL agent in the game, correcting these behaviors, and perhaps trying to detect potentially incorrect behaviors to raise to the user automatically. 0 AD is well suited for this type of research for the same reasons that it is well suited for exploring game balance - most games used in research are either proprietary or not something people would actually play. Optimizing Existing Game Parameters (Relatively Easy) There are some existing machine learning tricks that could be used to make other sorts of improvements to the game rather than explore research questions. A while back, I was playing around with CMAES (a machine learning technique to optimize a set of parameters given a "fitness function") to improve some of the sort of magic numbers used within Petra such as "popPhase2" and "armyMergeSize". Essentially, this made it possible to find values for these parameters which would improve the AI's ability to win when playing against the standard Petra agent (on the hardest difficulty). Although I don't find this as interesting as the other areas, it is a useful tool that could be nice to apply to other aspects of the game. Overall, I think it would be really exciting to be able to explore some of the research questions in 0 AD as I think it could be beneficial both to researchers but also would make it easier to incorporate the results of this research into 0 AD (making it an even better game!). Of course, this is only true if the functionality required to be added to 0 AD is easy to maintain and doesn't add overhead taking away from the development of the core game features and functionality. I am also hopeful that incorporating some of these machine learning capabilities could also be beneficial to the community and raise awareness of 0 AD! As far as technical requirements, I made an RPC interface for controlling the AI from Python (because the majority of machine learning tools are in Python). This makes it possible to explore 1, 2, and 3 as well as provides necessary functionality for 4, 5, and 6. As mentioned above, I have an example of #1 on GitHub and I think this could make for really interesting undergraduate projects (as well as potentially interesting integrations into the game). However, I think 0 AD is a particularly unique opportunity for exploration of 4 and 6. Game balancing (#4) still requires the ability to programmatically edit the unit parameters which I have explored a little bit but haven't added to the game. If this is something that others find interesting (and wouldn't mind me asking a few questions ), I would be open to adding this as well. Anyway, I find these machine learning problems and applications quite exciting both for 0 AD and for AI/ML research but I want to know what the rest of the community thinks! Let me know what you think or if you have any questions/comments! * I say *OpenAI gym-like* because a gym environment requires an observation space (numerical representation of the world for the AI), action space (numerical representation of the actions the AI can perform), and reward function to be defined. It isn't clear what the most appropriate choices for these would be (and they could vary based on the specific scenario) so I would prefer making more of a "meta-gym" where it is basically an OpenAI gym that needs the user to specify these values.

Hello! I've been searching for all kinds of tutorials on how to mod this game and haven't been able to really find everything I need so I figured I'd use this opportunity to introduce my mod to the world and see what people think. I started this project some months ago in Warcraft III for my friends and it was near completion, but then reforged came out and I pulled the plug on the project because I didn't want Blizzard to swoop in and steal my baby from me if I ever decided to publish it. So I had to find something that I could remake my project in since I don't really have the skill to make a whole game. So I remembered that 0 A.D. existed and here I am now! This isn't based off of anything, its entirely my own creation. Its a low to mid fantasy world where gods exist and magic is sparse. There are centaurs, beastmen (satyrs, minotaurs, etc.), gnolls, humans, elves, and orcs. I created my own map for the world and have all kinds of factions thought out. (Fun fact: Amindale is one of the continents in the world, not the name of the world itself!). I I don't have a whole lot to show of it, I only started a few days ago but I hope I can deliver something that people will enjoy! Currently its just my friend and I who are working on it and I'm a beginner so progress is slow but there is progress. Though I guess the progress isn't really the mod itself just conceptual progress... So far I've figured that I want to release the mod in parts, with each part introducing the various factions. Part 1 (Project Amindale) would showcase the 5 factions that inhabit Amindale. I've also gotten all their tech trees sorted out as well as units and stuff like that so I have a clear idea of what I want. I made a Trello laying out this stuff which only my friend and I really have access to. I apologize if any formatting is wrong here, this is my first time posting in a forum and showing this project to the world so I'm very nervous! Also sorry if this post is a mess and doesn't make sense, I am just trying to get my thoughts out! I would like to ask some questions though. 1. What are some tips you would have for a project like this? 2. I'm not a great artist and I don't really know any, is it possible to stitch game assets together into what I need them to be? (I.e. Centaur, Satyr, Minotaur, etc.) 3. For the unit creation tutorial it seems like its outdated, I've followed it to the letter multiple times but it doesn't seem to work, I get this crazy error in game that is pretty long. Is there some kind of updated one or can someone provide a new one or a good example I could follow? If you have any questions about anything please feel free to ask! Thank you for reading I am excited to share more about what I am doing in the future! ^.^

I made this poll because I’ve always thought that the current market for the Iberian faction lacks a certain recognisability, and even after all these years, I still sometimes struggle to quickly find my allies’ Iberian market in a competitive match. In my opinion it’s a little too small, and looks more like a single market stall, than an actual market. A few years ago Stan` made a new Iberian market, but was not committed. I rather like that market, and decided to ask the community their opinion on the matter. The current Ibrian Market ("Old"): The "New" Iberian market by Stan`: https://skfb.ly/6Qvv9

This is a tropical naval map consisting of mainland Vietnam, Laos, Malaisia, Camboja together with Indonisia. All players start in large jungle islands with only wood as a primitive resource. To get metal and stone, the players need to go out in the sea and find these resources elsewhere. But beware of the animal beasts scattered all over these rich areas... If I remember well,. this is a giant map that can take up to 6 players. Despite the abundant vegetation, it runs smoothly on an old desktop from 2011. Also, If I remember, i adapted it from the Blue Marble NASA map series and its based on the ALPHA 24 version of 0ad (that is currently under development). Let me know what you think!

Hello there, I recently gave an interview to the French association Picasoft for a podcast called "La voix est libre". Since the interview was also in French I translated so I can share it with you guys too. If people want to translate it in another language, I added the markdown transcript as an attachment below. Check out the podcast in the section “La Voix Est Libre”: https://radio.picasoft.net/co/2020-01-24.html FLOSS Video Games Guest: Stanislas Dolcini (0.A.D) Summary What one is allowed or not to do with a video game is a complex matter. Someone that just wants to make a game available to an audience which is either not financially bankable, or to give it a second life can get into trouble fast. The video game industry, as soon as it came to existence, entered a system that was not prepared to deal with the new products it had to offer, mix of unused technologies and artistic creativity. Video games do not have a well-defined position between intellectual property and patents. In such a continuously expanding and changing environment, they did not wait for the law to solve their issues and rather took the matter in their own hands. Free Software licenses are a way to address all those issues. The Interview Introduction Hello everyone, welcome on Graphit 94.9 you are listening to "La Voix est Libre" a Picasoft podcast. Picasoft is an association from the UTC of Compiègne whose goal is to make people aware of the stakes of the digital world and which is also hosting web services respectful of your privacy. Today's podcast was important to us because it talks about video games, and obviously libre videogames. We have the pleasure to welcome of the 0 A.D. developers, Stanislas Dolcini. Who are you, and on which project do you work on? Hello, I'm Stan, and I work on 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant a project of the volunteer group Wildfire Games. It has been about 9 years since I started working on the project, but it's only been three as an official member of Wildfire Games. I have a somewhat transverse role. Officially, I'm a 3D artist, but I also write code whether it's bug fixes, scripts or utilities, and I also manage the forums, answering questions and welcoming people. In a way, I'm 0 A.D's butler. How does your project benefit from Free Software We use Free Software under all its forms, not just "actual" software. Our homegrown game engine (Pyrogenesis) is free software since 2009, but it also incorporates a variety of other free software projects, such as the GLSL pre-processor of the open source engine Ogre 3D. All the artistic contributions are under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license. We are also present on Mastodon which is free software, and we use the Phabricator platform for our code contributions. How big is your team? What kinds of skill set are represented, and which are you missing? The team is made of about 30 members, and their activity and productivity evolve over time. 16 Nationalities are represented. However, some of our members have roles not directly linked to the game itself. Some do videos, take care of the finances, the hosting, translate the game, or social media... 0 A.D. was partially funded through a crowdfunding campaign, and more and more projects rely on this kind of funding to kick off. Do you think this medium is sustainable for the next open source games? As some of the Wildfire Games team member pointed out, most, if not all of the open source projects have a donation system. This funding system are in a way "crowd funding". How big the funding campaign is makes it (or not) a real crowdfunding campaign. Whether the funding is random or not makes it a crowd funding as most people think of it. So yes, I think it is a sustainable mean, saying otherwise would be ridiculous considering the number of examples there are, however I believe there are a few things that are really important to prepare those campaigns. Crowd funding campaigns are a bit of a double-edged sword, however. People usually have great expectations of such campaigns, which is what happened in 2015 for 0 A.D. we asked for about 160 000 euros on the Indiegogo platform, we raised "only" 40 000 euros. This created a great deception among the team members at the time, because they expected to be able to fund the game entirely but they ended up with enough money to make the project live, without being able to do what they had in mind. It is important to have well defined objectives, even if you must lower your goals, by saying, "if you give us that specific sum of money, it will be invested in that project". You can for example say "We need to improve our engine, so we need to support X or Y technology, so if you give us Z money, we will be able to pay W person to work on it for V time. It is also important to have a strong communication. This usually one of the issues with free software. There are a lot of programmers, people who are not always great communicators, or used to work in the spotlight. That's also one of the goals of this interview, to be able to talk about 0 A.D. and share it with a maximum of people because it brings us visibility and allows people that might have wanted to contribute to at least know this kind of project exists. Picasoft: We talked about 0 A.D. for the people that might not know 0 A.D. can you talk a little about the game, and tells us what it is ? 0 A.D. is a real time strategy game, the goal is to build your civilization. You start with a single building and then you make your city grow by recruiting new units and the goal is to have supremacy on the map you are playing on, either made with the map editor, or procedurally generated through code. If I had to give a proprietary example, you can look at Age of Empires by Microsoft, of which 0 A.D. is an open source alternative. 0 A.D. is built upon the Pyrogenesis engine and it is totally possible to create a wide variety of video games using that engine. Picasoft: Okay. A lot of interesting things have been said during this interview, we might get back at them later on, especially on the crowd funding aspect, what you said has been seen on a few other Open Source projects, like Framasoft which in its last crowd funding campaigns, for Peertube or Mobilisons had a few goals with clear results, saying for instance that if one of the goal was reached they could hire a designer for a few hours of a work. The exchange What's a video game? What is it made of? (Romain) When thinking about video games, one usually thinks about a software with a graphical interface offering content to the user. But there used to be other types of video games before, that's why Wikipedia defines video games as: "A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a two- or three-dimensional video display device such as a touchscreen, virtual reality headset or monitor/TV set." The player interacts with the game through external peripherals (keyboard, mouse, joysticks...) in a virtual world, and nowadays even with the real world with augmented reality. We can mention one of the first video games called "Tennis for two" in 1958 which was played using small gamepads on an oscilloscope. A modern video game is indeed composed of a computation part that manages characters, environment and displays images on the screen (engine and code designed for video games) and of multimedia part (textures, music, 3D models, UI). It is an entertainment software able to run on multiple platforms (either open source or not such as the Xbox, the PlayStation, the RecalBox, Steam OS, arcades) What is the juridic status of video games? (Rémi) In France, the definition of what a video game was has not always been simple. Despite the (1886) Berne convention, there is what one might call a grey area for video games. It is difficult to differentiate the between the game and the platform and between the source code and the graphical assets. In the nineties it was considered both as a software work and as an audiovisual artwork. It is only with the jurisprudence judgment of 2009 (judgment Cryo) that the videogame became considered as a complex work, which implies that each part of it (software, music, video, images, text...) keep its protection regime. It's an important distinction because it allows one to separate video games in various categories: Fully open source games (like 0 A.D.), Games with a free software engine but proprietary content (using 0 A.D. but making better art and keeping it proprietary), Games with a proprietary engine but free and open source content, Fully proprietary games, A small example where the engine is open source but not the content is Jedi Knight, when Lucas Arts' was bought by Disney, the studio "Raven Software" which made the game was not okay, and released the code (though they later had to un-release it because of legal reasons) so the code was free, but we couldn't use the visuals. Nevertheless, it allowed the engine to be compiled on Linux (the game was only available on windows). If one has paid the game on Windows, he can get the art assets and play the game on Linux. Why are FLOSS video-games important? (Quentin) The first reason is that Libre software is fantastic (laughs). Various reasons can encourage to use free software to create video games. There are the obvious reasons mentioned in the podcast, decentralization, (there is little variety in big studios), privacy protection (data usually stored on one big server of the studio). It also helps innovation (everyone can give advice, contribute, give ideas). There is also a less known advantage, it's the sharing of art, video games are more and more recognized as art nowadays and making it open source allows for a broader sharing. One can only think of other reasons that are more specific of video games. A rather famous example is that of the Phoenix Wright games, which weren't translated from Japanese nor shared on the European and American because it was not considered financially sustainable. A huge community came to existence to reverse engineer the games "ROM" understand how it was built, and to create software allowing contributors to translate the game. This was a huge undertaking, which is unfortunately not common for games, thereby preventing a lot of people from playing them. We can also think of old games for example (Dungeon Keeper) where people gather to fix bugs, improve textures, extend the scenario. As soon as a game is not bringing any more money, editors put it in corner, with the game's community. The game having be been bought by players, one can see a certain injustice. One can see a certain analogy with the fan fictions for books or movies. Releasing the source code allows the community to create a great variety of derivative works and to extend considerably the initial work. Game studios understood that and start to provide systems to mod their games, adding characters, objects, textures, changing interactions. It is nevertheless a rather asymmetrical situation. The editor chooses what can be modified and what cannot It gets all the benefits of the volunteer work and the increased visibility generated by those mods It keeps the game's code secret. "Mods extend the game's lifespan by adding additional content and improving the graphical quality by proposing new interfaces and sometimes even fix bugs faster than the developer. It is customary for the game editors to rush the release of their games to occupy the market, usually around the end of year and the Christmas holidays to anticipate the end of the fiscal years. This usually leads to unfinished games, riddled with all kind of bugs, and stripped from parts of their initial content. That's were modders come into play and offer at the release of the game unofficial bug fixes and an improved game experience." ( https://larevuedesmedias.ina.fr/contenus-crees-par-les-joueurs-le-probleme-de-la-monetisation-des-mods ) Stan`: A lot of editors have in their End User License Agreements (EULA) special clauses for users to prevent them from doing such modifications. One can think of GTA, which is one of the most heavily modded game and were developers do everything they can to prevent them. There are other games like 0 A.D. which are by nature moddable because it's open source, but also like a game called Mount & Blade where it got to the point where the mods became DLC for the game. Usually though editors try to prevent modding as much as they can. I think that Nintendo or Disney usually shut down quickly every mod that touch their Intellectual property, because they consider only them can use it (Which is backed by the law). Picasoft: You told us about turning mods into DLC. Where does the money go to? Does it go the developers or the editor? It depends. In general, it's a mix of both. In this specific case though a big part of the modders have been recruited to work on the next game (Mount & Blade: Bannerlord). In general, I think the game makes money of it, though it might pay a little fee to the modders (for the rights). It's almost never only for the modders, as they usually are illegally (because of the EULA) modding the game. Picasoft: It is an absurd situation not unlike those where a big security breach is found, and either the person that found it is hired to fix it, or they get sued for discovering it. It is very common for buggy games to be fixed by the community. Talking about games that were translated, I remember hearing about a case where the editor totally shut down all the translated ROMS. Stan`: One of the most absurd cases I know, is that some games are under DRM (Software that prevents the game from being copied) where the editor patched the game with a NOCD because they didn't have the source anymore and they had to edit the executable directly. Doing so they forgot to remove the cracker's signature Picasoft: Two of the biggest examples of how mods extended the game are DOTA, a mod of Warcraft III and Counter Strike, a mod of half-life. Editors might let modders what they want if it benefits them. Stan`: The only case where I can see it legitimate to shut down mods is when the content is modified in a way that can be provocative. Other than that, I don't see any reason why not. The recent games usually have a very little lifespan, unless they are massively multiplayer, and the ability to have mods can had a few hundred to a few thousand hours of additional gameplay. Of course, for single player games it is against the benefit of the editor because it means that people keep playing the old game instead of buying the next five that came out. We could put stickers saying the "Proprietary software kills" because the Open Source extend the lifespan of everything from the programmed obsolescence because of the Linux giving new life to the old computers, to the open source games that are nearly never ending. It's not in a growth and the capitalistic state of things though. What are some of the FLOSS videogames ? (Romain) There are multiple examples of FLOSS video games, content, engines, platforms, emulators, extensions (mods...) For Video Games : 0.A.D Spring (1944, Total Annihilation, Balanced Annihilation... BAR, Zero K) Minetest Battle for Wesnoth Sauerbraten (prononcer Za-ouère-bra-teuhn) Wyrmsum Super Tux Super Tux Kart Widelands ... For Game engines : Godot Pyrogenesis (0 A.D.) Ogre Irrlicht Spring Blender (Removed in 2.8) Stan`: Speaking of which, I am co-hosting a dev room at the FOSDEM in February, and we have been reaching out to a lot of projects to know whether they would be interested to give talks about their struggles and their successes with those engines. Ton Roosendaal is coming so if you are near Brussels do not hesitate to come say hi. For open source content : Open source (usually under creative commons) music A large variety of textures, 3D models, sprites are provided under open source licenses on the internet (e.g. : https://opengameart.org/) Tools : Blender Tiled Krita Gimp All those tools usually have a wide variety of extensions, from brushes to complete overhauls. Platforms : Retroarch Recalbox Lutris (bibliothèque, aide à l'installation WINE, ...) PlayIt https://www.dotslashplay.it/ Emulators : MAME Dolphin Picasoft: Have you heard about Khaganat Stan`? Yes, I have, they are very nice people (laughs). Picasoft: We recently met squeeek that came to do a presentation about the Libre Ğ1 currency. The goal of the Khaganat is to create FLOSS MMORPG, "Libre in the possibilities it offers the players, Libre in its code, libre in its graphical resources, it's universe, it's history, libre in the tools to modify it and expand it. It is also a social and economic experiment exploring concepts rarely explored in videogames. The contributors of Khaganat bet that an easily accessible game may also generate a positive economy, and of more than usual productive human exchanges. Not based on constraint and secret but on sharing and free will." What is the most interesting in this project is Khanat, the universe? They are creating everything, from the mythology to the language while producing a lot of music and visuals. It allows people to create literally anything they want. Or as they say, to "dream". Stan`: Yeah, it is also a good example of offering non-technical people the resource and ability to do productive things. Everyone can take part of the universe creation, and the association often organizes "Khanateliers" to give that opportunity on events such as the Capitole du Libre and JDLL. They are going at slow pace, but if people want to help them, they are looking for people, so do not hesitate to come say hi on their XMPP channel. https://khaganat.net/ What are the FLOSS video game's obstacles (Rémi) The first obstacle is the platform. It might have exclusivity for the video game, its publishing, edition, or execution. Even if today a lot of games are multi-platform, they usually are not on Free Software ones (GNU/Linux, BSD, ...) or are poorly optimized for those platforms or their free software drivers. Copyright and intellectual properties are an obstacle for the saving of abandoned old games. It can also prevent the extension, the modding, and porting games on more modern platforms. Budget and advertisement are also huge obstacles, inasmuch studios working on video games generally allocate a big sum of money, allowing for a large team of professionals proficient in a variety of domains (history, linguistics, psychology, art, programming...) to be hired. Studios can also put great emphasis on communication (sponsoring, advertisement...). Libre Software, while free also need those. It can therefore be complex to gather such professionals, and to have such a big reach with regards to communication. Stan`: In the same way there are a lot of resources one can buy, on stores such as Unity's, however very few materials under Creative Commons, such as CC0 or CC-BY-SA. There are lot of license issues with regard of what you can do with the assets you buy. For instance, are you able to use an asset you bought without adding a few hundred clauses in the license file to say what you can and cannot do with that file? It's sometimes very hard to find quality assets one can reuse. The reason for which allegedly "Open source games look bad" is that most of the time one has to do everything from scratch to be sure not to break laws. Those laws are also complex. In France for instance, when releasing an asset on the Creative Commons licenses does not bereave you from the rights over the original work. In theory, one could release something under creative commons, and a few months later go back on that decision, and sue everyone that has used the material. Picasoft: For those interested, you can listen to the podcast we made on Open Source license, where for the CC0, even though that license is compatible with French law, there are rights you cannot forsake. How to support the FLOSS video game industry (Romain) There are a lot of options to help your favorite games. The first and the simplest is the financial donation. Every project has running costs and sheer volunteer work is not always enough. Secondly, if you are fluent in other languages, it can be useful to translate the game, software not in one's native language prevent one from using it (just like any software). Thirdly, if you have artistic abilities (2D, 3D, Music) free software projects might need your help. And finally, if you know how to code, you can contribute to the game engine, or create extensions, for a game is only alive if the community behind it is. Additionally, like for every free software, sharing is caring. The Quiz When I own a copyrighted edition of a video game in France, I have the right to: Port this game to another console on which it is not available (From XBOX to PS4 for instance) ? Fix bugs or security flaws ? Translate the game ? Create a game extension, or a mod ? Music Heaven in Your Mouth de Intouchwithrobots (CC-BY-NC-SA), found on freemusicarchive The Answer It's incredibly complicated and there have not been enough cases with the justice to bring light to this topic. For the first three propositions, The article L122-6-1 of the Intellectual Property French Code allows the reverse engineering (e.g. to analyze the source code of a game) only if this allows one to improve the interoperability with another software, and if there is no other choice. In this way, one could consider it legal to "port" a video game on another platform, if it done through the creation of an emulator able to run the game but modifying the game itself is not permitted. This article also mentions it is possible to modify a video game (for instance by fixing bugs)to meet its original usage. The article does not mention translation, but one can only wonder as translating is case of improving the interoperability. Finally, the ability to create extensions depends on whether you consider mods a derivative work, in which case it would be strictly prohibited, or whether it's original content, in which case no claims can be put on the modification. Once again, the law does not protect the modders in this case, because there is no contract binding them to the video game's editor. External Links https://cpi.openum.ca/files/sites/66/CPI_28-3_671_savoie.pdf https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle=LEGIARTI000028345224&cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006069414&dateTexte=20131220 play0ad.com khaganat.net mintetest.net opengameart.org https://www.dotslashplay.it/ picasoft_interview.md

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Hello everyone, I have found this game and I love the whole concept behind this project. I'm a computer engineer and I have worked before on projects with C++ or javascript. I already programmed in unity but this seems very different to me and I'd like to get the experience of working in this project. First of all, I downloaded the source code from the svn repository and compiled it, then I continued looking for tasks required to complete but when I read it I don't know where to start and how your code works. It's really hard for me find a beggining. I started by taking a look at the simple tasks but I don't know which to choose because they look like they are resolved or have people working on it or I don't know if that bug actually exists. I've read Finding_Your_Way_Around, Mod_Layout and GettingStartedProgrammers. Do you have a tip for me? How can I understand better your code and it's operation? Which simple task do you recommend me? How did you personally started on this project? I'd like to be a very valuable programmer in this project and contribute as much as possible. I have been translating the game to spanish as Antonio_vazquez while I try to find out how to start. Thank you for your help, I am looking forward to your response.

Also I primarily use Gimp

My little try with blender and texture kush_nuba_camp.

Nice job dude! That's looking super cool! I was brought here by the 0AD twitter account. I'm a mesoamerican archaeologist and a historical ilustrator, and I'm open for discussion and advising if needed regarding any faction of the cultural region (as well as texturing if I can find the time). Here's my portfolio, hope you are still working on the subject: https://www.artstation.com/rafael-mena

no meat this time

New Hero Portrait: King Nastasen By Sundiata (Malcolm Quartey) King Nastasen, a late Napatan Period ruler of the Kingdom of Kush, Sudan (4th Century B.C.). King Nastasen Ankhkhare was a Napatan Period ruler of the Kingdom of Kush (Sudan), ruled c. 335 B.C. - 315/310 B.C. His mother was Queen Pelkha and his father may have been King Harsiotef. Married to Queen Sekhmakh, and succeeded by King Aryamani. Nastasen is noted for defeating an Upper Egyptian invasion of Kush by Khabbash "taking many fine boats" and putting down many rebellions, thereby consolidating Harsiotef's earlier conquests. Most of what we know about Nastasen comes from the rather lengthy, and well preserved Stela of Nastasen. The submerged tomb underneath his pyramid at Nuri (Nuri 15) is currently under excavation by the Nuri Archaeological Expedition. Early results (remnants of gold) are indicating the real possibility that his tomb has not been looted, and his sarcophagus may still be intact! Because of high water levels the tomb is currently under water and archaeologists have to resort to underwater excavations with scuba gear, a first in Sudan. @OptimusShepard, I started this portrait exactly one day before you shared that documentary in the above post, half of which is about those very excavations! So that was really an incredible coincidence! Watching that docu was a bit surreal for me. And also a great source of inspiration! Nastasen's Pyramid Nuri 15 The Nastasen Stela: Some translated excerpts from the Nastasen Stela: Clearly, humility was not a thing Kushite kings were concerned with... Funnily, Nastasen is mounted on a horse in-game. From the stela we actually find this excerpt: "I went off on a great horse and I reached the Great House. They made obeisance' to me, all the notables and priests of Amun". Got to love 0 A.D.... The rest of the Stela is about Nastasen slaughtering rebels, taking loot, defeating an invasion from Egypt, bigging up his mom, listing his donations to the temples etc, etc... @Stan`, here is a perfectly square PNG version for you: Also, I just registered a personal ArtStation account. Please feel free to head on over there to check out some of my other art and give me some views https://www.artstation.com/malcolmquartey

Pew pew pew

I'm sorry Labrynna is taking a long time to finish:

1) Lobby changes: I think that is not a secret that lobby style is too old. Maybe should be changed for something more ''atractive'' What i propose is to make a big lobby where all players are there chatting or just being, and then 3 sublobbys (maybe more or less depending of the wellness of your ideas) - Team Games Lobby: As the name shows, a lobby to play multiplayer games - Rated 1v1 Lobby: As the name shows a lobby to play 1v1 rated - Casual Games Lobby: As the name shows a lobby to play non rated 1v1s Ok, let's do here another way, a way where there is a rating in TGs. (We'll talk about this in some time) In case that there is a possible TGs rating, the Casual Games Lobby would be to play TGs and 1v1s unrated. I'll let design stuff to you, think about some ideas and coment them!! 2) Ratting System Changes Well, probably we all can accord that nowadays there is nothing that makes people play rated games, excepting the own points. Maybe it's not enough, maybe not, is not. I propose (as i accorded to @user1) to make a new Ratting System to make people play rated games, and to make this game more atractive. What you think about this: 1) Making seasons . Yes, making for example 3 mounths seasons and when season ends, restart the points in new season to the initial ones. I propose to start with 1600 points. 2) Making a League Mode. This is handed with the first point, and in my opinion is the most atractive point. Why not making Rated Games Lobby a league mode, having a league depending of your rating. I give you an example: Wood League: (-1400) - Stone League: (1400-1600) - Bronze League: (1600-1800) - Silver League: (1800-1950) - Golden League: (1950-2100) - Platinun League (2100-2250) Diamond League: (2250-2350) /// Here, we would be at 1730 ratting more or less, which is a strong rating. Top 23 now. So, we could make a Pre Master league. Candidate Master: (2350-2450) - Master League: (2450-2600) - Grand Master League: (2600+) Obviously, designers should make an animation showed after each rated game with an experience bar with rating, that is filled or emtied acording if you win or lose. At the left with the current league, and at the right with the upper league. I don't know if you understand what i mean. 3) Giving some insignias: Before the nickname of each player, you could have some insignia depending of your rank, i thought in having your League's shield until you're Master or Grand Master, that you would have a yellow RM (Rating Master) or a GM (Grand Master). For example: GM elexis (2741) Sorry @elexis haha Maybe titles like GM or RM should stay forever, becouse it's suposed that only 12 players as much would get them in all seasons. Or maybe it should last just the current season and the next. Brainstorm guys =D 3) Player Names: @user1 told me that he doesn't want to overcharge names, so we got the conclusion that maybe removing the rating of the players, just showing the insignia and the nickname would be a good idea and if you click one player, in his profile you can find its own rating. In my opinion i would let the rating too in names. 4) Player's Profiles: What you think about this: When you click in a player, you can see, Name, Rank, League, W/L and the flag of the country. You like the idea? I have more ideas that will be posted with time. Mates! share your ideas and let's make 0 A.D. bigger!! Let's make a brainstorming. Greetings. Stockfish

How do you like this? Is this too crowded? Should pikemen be allowed on the walls?

people didnt see me for ages now in lobby. I receive many request off my 0ad followers on Instagram (about 12000 people ) when i'll be back on 0AD. My forum inbox is full. This has to come to an end. I cant keep notify them my return but be banned from the lobby each time i relog after 2 months. They will lose patience. Also, i've heard that Stockfish is getting too far in the ranking. This is insane. How much should i pay to Wildfire games to have a premium pass and get rid of random bans ? monero, bitcoin or just paypal. Choose and communicate me how much you want. kd,

I believe that after the last barbarian invasion, the last developers were defeated and died on the battlefield. So, I think 0 A.D. game may now go through a long period of darkness, a kind of "Dark Age", and perhaps be a thousand years without a new release. Maybe in 3020 we will have a new Alpha ...

I think the game should have a Deathmatch mode. I'm just not sure if it should be reminiscent of the Age series Deathmatch or something "unique." I honestly think it should be mostly based on the Age series model with a couple unique flairs. So, I think once you choose Deathmatch you should then be able to choose which Phase everyone starts at. The most popular would probably be "Post-City Phase" with everything auto-researched already. The only difference would be that any paired techs would not be auto-researched yet, the player having to choose which one they want. Since it's Deathmatch, they cost no resources or research time, the player just has to choose. And then resources-wise every player starts out with 40000 of every resource. The name of the game is building up and expanding as fast as possible while pumping out tons of troops for massive battles early on.

I realize I am pretty late to comment on this but if anyone is still interested in this, this revision adds support for using 0 AD like an OpenAI gym environment. There are a couple simple examples using this API at https://github.com/brollb/simple-0ad-example where the agent learns how to kite cavalry archers when fighting infantry!

Yes, it very much is. The last commit for the current stable (A23) was 21946; work on the next (A24) started on 26 December 2018. Right now we're at 23493, which means there have been 1547 commits in the past 14 months.

Interesting oppening with brits.metadata.jsoncommands.txt

It's really fascinating to see all these efforts. Thanks for the good work.

Good questions! I assume you're asking because you're translating strings on transifex? If you're having trouble with something, it helps if you inform us about file it is, which you can find under Context (yellow) / More Info (cyan) / Occurrences (magenta). For specific names, if you're translating to a language that uses the Latin alphabet, you can usually just click on Copy the source string (green) or press Ctrl+G. If you make a mistake, click on Revert the translation (red). Under Add special character (blue) you can find e.g. the ellipsis (…), itemization bullet (•), en-dash (–), or non-breaking space (NBSP). Alt+Enter will save your changes. If you're translating to a language that uses a different script (e.g. Cyrillic), then you probably want to transcribe the specific names. You can find some information on the relevant wiki page (work in progress). Consistency matters. Are you familiar with IPA? I don't know how Briton and Gaulish specific names are pronounced. @Genava55? Iberians use Basque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language#Phonology Mauryas use Sanskrit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Phonology Persians use Old Persian. The X was probably pronounced /kʰ/ (as Ancient Greek χ) or /x/ (as Modern Greek χ). The š is indeed /ʃ/ (as in English ship). The ç is uncertain; it may have been a palatal fricative /ç/ (as in German nicht, not German auch, which is velar /x/) or perhaps affricative /t͡ʃ/ (as in English church). The ā is a long a /aː/, which is the same sound as short a /a/, but twice as long. Yes and no: the apostrophe (actually a keraia) indicates the Greek letter should not be read as a letter but as a number; B' means 2; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals#Table @Stan` or @feneur, could you split off @Zeldt's question and my answer into a separate translation thread?

Welcome back! I can confidently assure you that you are not old in this community... Our fanbase on facebook counts nearly 12.000 people, and out of this group, exactly 50% of the people are between 25 and 34 years old... 16% is between 35 and 44 years old. 6% between 45 and 54 years old. 2% between 55 and 64 years old and 2% is 65+. Only 19% are between 18 and 25. Less than 1% are minors less than 18 years old! We literally have more than 3 times as many seniors as we do minors in this community

one more in this duel my enemy disconnected to see that I could not do anything newenmapu rome s0loooy0 iber interesting duel, in which Rome has a great economy, and much production of troops, which prevents me from starting the attack and advancing in any way, and if we add the damage that the catapults do, I could lose fast, when I was able to do the cav ibera and the chaos began, this game is quite interesting and you can see that the tactic influences a lot and that not everything is decided by pop and echo 2020-02-04_0005 iber.zip

A friendly reminder, 0 A.D. will be present at FOSDEM’20 in Brussels on February 1st and 2nd. That's tomorrow, and the day after (Saturday and Sunday)! FOSDEM is a free event for software developers from around the world to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Some of our devs will be manning a stand Saturday and Sunday (Building K level 1 (group C): stand 6), and on Saturday, Vladislav Belov will be giving a talk about 0 A.D.’s graphics pipeline at 11:15 – 12:00 in the Game Development devroom K.3.201. Stan`, one of our devs, will co-host the Game Development devroom. 0 A.D. at FOSDEM’20 1st & 2nd of February 2020, Building K level 1 (group C): stand 6, ULB (Université libre de Bruxelles) Solbosch Campus, Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Brussels, Belgium https://fosdem.org/2020/

fun.mp4 @Sundiata by @Angen and @Alexandermb

With rP23448 committed today, you can create proper slowing towers (And poison, for that matter.) (Status effects being able to apply modifiers.)

Nonetheless, I doubt women growing grain twice as fast as men is historically accurate.

I prefer MS-Paint

I tried something new, @LordGood what do you think? mace_demetrius.xcf

Gimp is garbage, if you can learn a better program I would recommend you do so. Krita is decent and I've heard good things of firealpaca if you want free.

check those icons (in he GUI) this isnt what @Nescio means? archer.. cavalry cavalry archer catapults (artillery) infantry check the impresive minimap. I didnt like the gameplay. now to the point. ____________________________________ Why Aoe have a more large fanbase and new RTs dont have that. Ancestor legacy example.

Hi, As i'm nearly finishing the map of the Acropolis of Athens, i would like to receive any feedback or suggestions regarding historical facts. So please if you are willing to help me, pointing me where i did a mistake by including or not, an historical building, let me know. The depicting period is the classical. Some references: Starting with the @wowgetoffyourcellphone suggestion, but waiting to know which building i have to remove, as it confused me. lol Of course, the official presentation of the map will have its proper introduction with some historical background, i will do my best at it. Here it goes

too big took too long holy crap never again

A fully mirrored map will mean that a player will be capable of knowing exactly what resources, and where, the enemy has. So for an early rush I'll know exactly where all the berry spots are, where the woodlines are and such. It severely reduces importance of scouting. Other than that not too many downsides I can think of right now.

https://www.facebook.com/samara.parcarcheologique/ Photos:

Yes it's a general issue of the game. The speed of the game is conditionned in multiplayer by the slowest computer in the bunch. The game is a CPU intensive task which is mostly mono threaded ( As in not able to use more than one CPU core) Since in MP all the clients compute the game the AIs and whatnot on their own they have to sync regularly so the slowest computer defines the pace. Also in MP "turns" are slower than in SP (200ms per turn vs 500ms) I believe I answred most of it in the above post. There is some work being done to improve things for A24 mainly threading the pathfinder and the networking and @vladislavbelov is working on making the renderer a bit faster. (The renderer is also a bottleneck) Welcome to the forums @2fftr

Hello @Antonio_vazquez, we appreciate your interest and we look forward to see your contribution. As asterix said, it is better if you start in part you are interested in. Anything (or most part) about game simulation and whole ai is written in javascript, which communicates with engine written in c++ using global/direct messages or functions defined for it. Engine takes care about anything else, like drawing graphics, computing turns, broadcasting messages to entities, checking obstructions, unit movement, it stores all components and entities and so on. every entity in the game has its components, which are separate and every component takes care for specific logic and stores variables if needed (health, attack, unitai, ...) entity itself is defined in template file using xml syntax and components. then there is code in javascript related to session, grouped in gui folder ,it gets data to be displayed, decides if some icon should be red, grayedout, what will happen after some clicking on it (and other codes, for example what will happen when someone clicks to unit, ...) anything visual is located in art folder, where are actor files, they define how given entity will look, which animations will be played, of course given actor file needs to be bound with game entity in its template. If you find any ticket here is list with keyword simple (https://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&keywords=~simple&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&order=priority) you think you are interested in and you have doubts if it is still valid or free, feel free to leave comment there or visit (what is recommended for faster communication) https://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad-dev there should be almost anytime (well, timezones) someone able to help you. Wish you good times with coding. Regards Angen

Hey nani, you know me. I can't go without your mod now.

“Translating specific names” or something like that? Language is fascinating.

ἐστί means ‘is’: first person singular indicativus praesens active of εἰμί ‘to be’; ἥσομαι means ‘I will go’: first person singular indicativus futurum medium of ἵημι ‘to let go’; that beta shouldn't be there; you're right βήσσω/βήττω means ‘to cough’.

Then I got it. Less you see - less object the game should draw. @nani and @OptimusShepard are mostly right, we're CPU bound in most cases. I'm working on the bottleneck. I could recommend to use closer views to prevent drawing of most objects on a scene.

gaul_britomartus.xcf

interesting