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Position: Application as Gameplay Developer. Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free? - Yes Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license? - Yes Are you sure you are not wanting to work on something programming related? - Yes Name: DarcReaver - Hendrik. Email: I don't publicly post my e-mail, but in case it's needed I'll send it over via pm, np Location: Kassel, Germany. Availability: around 10-15 hours/week. Age: 28 Occupation: currently employed as leading Estate Engineer for a town community. Planning and coordinating the construction of elevators, power supply systems, heating and ventilation systems among other stuff Skills and Experience: I've been playing various RTS games in the past and been heavily employed in game design department of various modding communities, most notably Company of Heroes franchise, C&C generals, Battle for Middle Earth series and Warcraft III. My experience in modding lies somewhere around 10 years, and I've been playing RTS games since around 15 years. I know many different types of strategy games and played quite a few of them on a competitive base, meaning tournaments, ladder matches etc. I worked with different types of editors that allow modification of existing game engines, most notably corsix mod studio and Warcraft editor. Also I'm doing .xml editing for some simulator games, modifying properties, sounds, physics etc. to create authentic driving experiences. Motivation: I know that there is no officially available position as a "gameplay developer" on 0ad, so I'm doing this application as some sort of iniative. However, I do think that there should be more discussion and progress towards creating interesting, unique and outstanding gameplay patterns that will make 0 ad stand out from other RTS games on the market apart from "it looks nice" and "it has a lot of content". Creating a game flow for the game is very important and from my experience in the game making area this is what has to come before betatesting. The current design, while having interesting aspects, lacks original patterns aswell as missing long term motivation for keeping a player base. After the conversations in the gameplay testing forum I decided that I'm officially applying to help out. (link to topic below) Don't be scared of my harsh tone, I am usually nice and helpful towards others, but depending on the situation sometimes more drastic words are needed to underline and emphasize a certain position in a discussion. Being nice doesn't always do its job. Personality: My personality tends to switch between the "terror that flaps at night" and "Launchpad McQuack" combined with enthuiasm, depending on my mood and the matter I'm dealing with. Short Essay: I searched for an alternative RTS game that combines an ancient Age of Empires 1 setting with polished graphics and modern gameplay patterns, that's how I noticed 0ad. Staff: Noone in person, but I had a series of conversations with community members like wowgetoffyourcellphone, niektb and Karamel. Favorite Game: All time favorite is company of heroes. Apart from that I'm into the Dead Space universe and the new Tomb Raider series. Also The witcher is pretty nice. Work Examples: http://www.easternfront.org/, http://www.moddb.com/mods/coheastern-front, http://www.moddb.com/mods/menace-from-outland/

I agree on this, it's an interesting concept. I'm trying to work in a system that works in a similar way but better for the game flow. I can't tell specific details, but I think it's a satisfying compromise between concept and playability. Edit: 4.800 words. I'll prepare a couple of pictures, polish it a bit more after I got some sleep and present it tomorrow on the forum. After that I'm expecting to be granted a WFG Badge

Good. I would say one thing about your assessment of 0 A.D., while I do not like the current state of citizen-soldiers, I do not find the concept itself bad. It simply needs to be better implemented. What could really make this game great is if there could be distinct changes apparent in the units with utility from the beginning stage to the later parts. It will be hard to make work, but it could be done.

I'm already working on a gameplay analysis and improvement concept actually. 2.500 words so far.

I recently used this spying feature ingame and it was one of the most unprofitable thing I did 900 metal itself is already too much in my opinion, but also you need to research the technology which adds an extra 500food,wood and 300stone,metal!! Much more profitable to send a suicide cavalry which will even see more than a trader. The only imaginable case in which Spying would be useful would be if you are interested in seeing the defences of a person with 3 layers of walls and bristling defences (aka TURTLE).

Thanks for the application. Big fan of Company of Heroes myself, including the Eastern Front mod.

Forgot to update here about the flag cart, it's being worked on. Just in case somebody was thinking to jump to the task to avoid duplicate work. WIP ( *Note: It's PBR shading, not GLSL)

I have been playing 0AD as single player for a few years. The change such that troops now try to capture buildings by default rather than destroy them, is annoying me. It was interesting at first, but it needs some tweaks. When the attacking force contains some military that cannot capture, such as elephants, you end up with some troops trying to capture a building while others are destroying it. Either you end up with the capture failing because it gets destroyed, or capturing a badly damaged building. The opposite of the Patrol order would be useful sometimes, especially for elephants and generals that have strong building-related effects and can take a lot of damage. That is "Go and capture / destroy the buildings but ignore the people". Sometimes I do not want the enemy buildings. I would rather the site was destroyed quickly. So I would like to be able to set a group of military units to "Never capture". Troops capture whatever is nearest. Is is annoying watching troops standing around trying to capture and hold a bunch of houses while a nearby tower is whittling them down. Just as there is a Violent stance for concentrating on attackers, being able to choose between "Capture nearest" and "Capture nearby strategic sites (towers, barracks, city centres) first" would be good. At the moment I am finding I have to micromanage the behaviour of my armies when they go to attack enemy towns, from building to building, which I did not have to do before capturing was implemented. (PS Excellent game though. I waste so much time playing it!)

Lol You can tell the man is on a mission.

Looks like a hack n slash where no one will actually use any real formations or cooperate like they should.

Is very like to Mount & Blade style.

Thanks for making me discover this game It looks really cool

The artwork is very nice, I love these portraits.

Especially in team games on "normal" maps where there isn't too much metal - maximum 3 metal mines for a player if you are VERY lucky but more likely 1/2. For the total metal cost of the tech and 1 espionage(1200) you can currently get 16 spear champs or 12 sword ones. In a game where military is important everyone sane will choose of course the champions.

Yes was very unpractical, when I started to use them, my army was stomping enemy base. You need infiltrate to do that. cavalry or nearby outpost.( both will be destroyed/captured)

If it was something like that, i would be able to reproduce it. So either it is a problem concerning your setup (Window/Linux maybe, did you use the latest window build?) or i made something wrong when trying to reproduce. Could anybody else reproduce it?

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I definitely agree on this one! Thanks for offering your effort and experience to 0 A.D. @DarcReaver!

Nice! Thank you for working on this.

Hi DarcReaver! http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers Hope to see patches! Checkout the simple tickets and feel free to come to IRC to ask questions!

I appreciate your application @DarcReaver and hope that the team does as well! This is a huge chance for 0 A.D., take it

I think a thought. What if this is something to do with entity classes. I've had weird behavior in past when I didn't have the right entity classes in the templates -- in that case, it was that I split "Worker" into "Builder" and "Gatherer", so units stopped working right. I fixed that by putting "Worker" back into the classes -- Builder and Gatherer I put in visible classes. Could the problem be class related then?

Looking forward to see both of them =)

For Rome, this militia spearman is the Rorarius -- see DE (I'm sure you guys are sick of reading this).

The point of this thread, and forum, and testing at this point, is to experiment so we have a system in place to properly test the game once it is ready for proper testing. Not to say that "we think everything is ready, please come test it so we can fine-tune things". Maybe we could have been clearer about that.

I feel like CCs should only be able to make a basic spearman or swordsman, and everything else should be in the barracks, with the barracks possibly producing a level-2 version of the basic unit by default (or treat the CC version as a level 0 weaker unit or something).

What about if we skew the gathering rates significantly in favor of the women, and make the citizen-sodiers suck at gathering? You keep the ability for the soliders to gather, since sometimes it can be beneficial, but in reality they're better to be used as a defense or offensive force in most instances. Just spitballing here. In DE I've increase the train times of units. It fees a lot better. I admit I like the Wives' Festival tech, but I think it can be balance better if the train time of house women is increased from 30s to 60s. I will try this in DE. It's one of the reasons I push for battalions. You have fewer entities to control and each one feels more important and unique, especially if you add some customization possibilities like I propose. They take longer to train and you invest more resources and time into them by customizing them, etc. Not to mention now the battles look way more epic and you can implement thing like muster time and charging and etc. a lot easier for the player.

I agree that the diplomacy screen seems to be the wrong place, since the bribing a spy is not directly related to diplomatic relations. The diplo screen is only used everytime when we need to pass a playerID argument, as in this case. The spy request could become a button in a special building, like the techs, production queue and upgrades, but that needs some rewriting as we can currently have only one of these button types per row. Also it would require some kind of popup box where you select the target player in a dropdown. Interesting concept for sure to link features to heroes, they shouldn't just be the strongest military unit with some strong auras but enable new qualities.

Hehe, I already modded it. Made the cost 500 metal and 500 glory, instead of 900 metal as in vanilla. Here is my suggestion: Make the first bribe very cheap. 50 metal. Each new bribe is more expensive, but increases the duration and adds more classes to the randomization. by the tenth bribe, hero class is added and you're looking at 60 seconds of duration, but now each bribe is like 500 metal or more, and you can't bribe another unit until the duration of the previous bribe is completed. Also, guys should think about the UI more. Do you want this feature to be a relatively useful and widely used feature or just a throway feature hidden in the diplomacy screen with a teeny tiny button? Think hard about my "commands" idea, where when you train a hero you get some macro/meta commands that you can execute. Next to the hero button on the top left you get a series of round command buttons --like toggling all your soldiers between capture/attack priorities, the bribery button, etc. Need a live hero. Promotes training heroes and also promotes some meta commands, like this new bribery feature.

My Spy Sheep concept didn't make it through the approvals process. Too "unrealistic" apparently I kid, I kid!

You took instructions bit too directly -- '/PATH/TO/pyrogenesis' should be ACTUAL path to 'pyrogenesis' binary on your system. Like '/usr/games/0ad/pyrogenesis' -- or wherever it's located.

The issue quantumstate encountered isn't actually one (more like a feature) as the server prevents creating a lot of accounts from one IP in a short timespan. My issue is probably due to some packaging error of the gloox package I'm using (I currently switched to a build of the 1.0 SVN branch of gloox, but there is still problem and I need to find some time to investigate that further).