Leaderboard

Hello everyone, It is with great sadness and a little relief that I am announcing my retirement as project leader of both 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant and Wildfire Games. It has been an awesome 12 years and 8 months, with its ups and downs. Making it to the team will remain one of my greatest achievements ever. After 6 years of 3D art struggles, getting the chance to join the team was unexpected (and, to this day one of my proudest moments), and two years later to be offered the leader job came even more as a surprise. It has been an incredible opportunity to be the leader of such a project. I would not have met half of the awesome people I met if it were not for it, and I would certainly have not have had the opportunities to go to the places I went if it were not for it. I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Being able to spread the word about the game around the world has been an honor, and I hope the game will continue to shine at events. Recently, I had less and less energy and motivation to give to 0 A.D. The delay followed by the cancelling of A27 was no exception; I simply could not give the same energy I gave for the previous ones. The lobby became a source of permanent mental load and anxiety, first because of it is lack of moderation, then because of it started becoming moderated, and now because mods splat the community even more and the cheating is rampant. And it went downhill from there, as I started the longest break I ever took from 0 A.D. Those of you that know me know I was not really far, but I was simply not there. On the development side, I cannot seem to find any fun anymore. Everything feels more like duty than an actual desire, which can only work for so long until it breaks. The learning curve is just simply not worth the burnouts anymore. There are so many things I wanted to add to 0 A.D to showcase the true potential of the engine, as it is just immense, look at all the mods have done, look at all the thing people learnt about history, programming, art, bugs.. But I don't feel I can carry that vision anymore. I believe it is time for a change. I am therefore, effective immediately, quitting my functions as programmer, artist, video editor, documentation manager, translator, human resources, moderator, social media manager, public relations, system administrator, mod signer and modder, (all my mods can be considered archived until further notice). It is the only way for me to ever move on. I cannot just keep doing one thing for 0 A.D., unless I get a clean break I will continue feeling everything not covered by someone is on my shoulders, and it is a weight too big for a single person. I would like to thank everyone that made some or the whole journey with me, I will miss you all very much. I hope we shall meet again. I would also like to thank all the players that took action in the balancing department it has not been an easy task. I do not have ideas for the person who can or will replace me, nor do I know whether I should be replaced by a single person. I will leave it for the remaining people to decide what kind of leadership model they want to go for from now on. As for what I'll do next I do not know yet, but I've been working on Godot tools to import 0 A.D. assets and it's been fun, so I might continue that. I'm still working with Activ' Design this year as well. tldr; So long and thank you for the fish. May Wildfire Games and 0 A.D: Empires Ascendant live a long and healthy life after I am gone. Best regards, Stan

Hello everyone, This is an update on the progress of the Alpha 27 release. After extensive deliberation, the team has decided to abort the release process for the foreseeable future. As some of you know, we've been in a "feature freeze" for the past 3 months. This period, during which we halt all new code merging except for crucial bug fixes, is typically a final step before a release. Unfortunately, progress on the release has been slower than anticipated, and Alpha 27 is still several weeks away. Some of the outstanding issues include: Acquiring the necessary macOS certificates for signing the packages Completing the trailer for the announcement, and finishing the announcement itself More testing is potentially needed, and some important bug fixes are not yet merged. The balance of A27 has not been extensively tested and refined. The time it takes to actually release (uploading packages, informing maintainers, etc.) is potentially more than any of the team can commit to right now. Our current pace on these matters is unsustainable. Following a vote, we have chosen to abort the release and refocus. This decision wasn't made lightly, but we believe it's in the best interest of 0 A.D.'s long-term health. We will use this time to: Merge improvements that have been developed during the feature freeze, such as optimizations and further fixes. Identify and address the issues that have hindered the current release process, as we cannot hope to release in the future without fixing them. We will likely come back to the community with more information on this last point and potentially requests for help. We realize that this news may be disappointing. We thank you for your patience, understanding, and ongoing support. On behalf of everyone at Wildfire Games, Wraitii

Here is the first 'Release Candidate' of Alpha 27 - Agni Downloads - Current bundles are for SVN revision r27645/bbae4080acaf09e2716cde8027c7a3c2cd3eaff4 Linux data and build Windows MacOS Builds currently unavailable due to signing issues. You can only test the installer but the game will not run. macOS (x64) macOS (ARM) Things to note: Mind your mods -> they might introduce issues or Out Of Sync. Save your A26 config file somewhere, ideally. or use -writableRoot. What changed: Alpha27 – Wildfire Games How to port my mod PortA26ToA27 – Wildfire Games What to do if I have an error or notice something weird? Post your commands.txt (replay) and the interestinglog.html file from your folder. You can also reply to this thread. What to do if the game crashes? Upload your crashlog.dmp and crashlog.txt see https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths What to do if I have an Out Of Sync? You should go in your logs folder, find the replay (commands.txt at least), the mainlog/interestinglog and find the OOS dump folder. Zip all these files and upload them here. We need the reports from two players to compare them: One OOS and one non-OOS players at least should upload their oos_dump files. Things you may want to test (non-exhaustive) Test Vulkan performance. Enable feedback and see if it works (Main menu) See this video Launch a random game Launch a skirmish. Connect to the lobby Play on the lobby with someone Play in LAN Launch Atlas and try things out there Open Unit tests demo (To see if there any breakage in displaying entities) (It's in scenarios) Connect to and use mod.io Test replaying new games Test multiple game modes (e.g. Regicide) Test Atlas terrain previews. Test Screenshots (F2) Test deleting all saved games Test Big Screenshots (Maj+F2) Test hotkeys Test Saving and loading a game. Test Quickload/Quicksave And of course playing games.

Wildfire Games would like to send you its best wishes for 2024! May you have a prosperous New Year! On behalf of the Wildfire Games team, Vladislav

I am certainly one of the 10 oldest accounts in the lobby. When I first started playing, I only had 2 players to play, scythewirley and wesono, maybe on a good day, 5-6 players simultaneously in the lobby, with a lot of luck we managed to create a 2x2 game, and either way I still had fun. I saw all the good, average and bad players go through 0 a.d. I made many friends, really many hours of fun, in my case thousands. Most are gone, new ones have come, it's a cycle of life that also applies to our beloved game. As long as there are people as passionate about this game as I am, 0a.d will live on.

I personally think pro players should behave better and set an example of good conduct. Arrogant pro players drive out people who just want to have fun with their attitude. I prefer mediocre players in a nice environment than playing with very good uneducated players. I think this is also seen in the rise of password games. A toxic pro of >1500 attracts toxic players and kicks normal players. It's not nice to play like that. Pro players should also feel a bit more responsible for the community and not just focus on playing with each other. Regarding mods, I think their contribution is contradictory. On the one hand, they enrich the game, but since they don't have a massive fan base, they also fragment it excessively. It's kind of annoying to be turning the community mod on and off to find a game. Lastly, being a player for more than 5 years, I think I miss seeing the game reach a more stable level of balance between factions and units. With each alpha it seems that you have to relearn how to play. Sorry for my bad English. I only speak Spanish and use an automatic translator. Greetings to all. See you in the game.

Hi everyone, For a few years now we have pondered whether git would be the right VCS for the development of 0 A.D. One of the main selling points of git is the ability to create numerous branches for parallel development of features and bugfixes. Several popular platforms (Github, Gitlab.com, ...) leverage this to provide a feature-packed development environment, where people can contribute, discuss, review, and test patches. Historically, the development of 0 A.D. has been performed using SVN, which is a bit old... but suits our needs in a number of ways, already discussed elsewhere. We are using Phabricator to supercharge SVN with a review and CI/CD platform, but alas, Phabricator has been abandoned by its developers. In any case, a lot of contributors in the past couple of years have expressed disappointment with the peculiarities of Phabricator. Thus, we have discussed finally moving to git, without any strong urgency or hard opinions on the matter. I have proposed myself to set up a migration path and a new development environment for 0 A.D., and I am proud to present it to you folks today. I have started working on this "for real" more than a year ago, and started dedicating all my "0 A.D. time" (which has been very scarce) on this project at the end of Spring 2023. It is still, unfortunately, very much a work-in-progress, but now is the time to reveal it and receive feedback. Ideally, I would like to collect feedback from the community, finish the CI/CD system, and fix bugs, over the course of the spring, with the aim of performing the actual migration, if the community wishes to perform it, during the summer. As always, delays should be expected. It is worth noting that personal changes in my life/work balance will give me more free time after the summer. Thanks in advance for the feedback you will provide Presentation of the Proof of Concept I am self-hosting the services for the duration of the tests, so that I have full control and do not divert resources from WFG. All URLs are under itms.ovh, which should eventually become wildfiregames.com Email does not work on this Proof of Concept! I have no will to setup email and I certainly don't want to spam anyone with tests. The services are not updated automatically: the full migration takes around 48h and necessitates some human input. The PoC I am presenting was generated from scratch the past two days. I will update stuff from time to time, when I fix bugs or when I'm bored, but don't expect the PoC to follow the actual development of the WFG services. Please test as many things as you want and don't hesitate to try to break things! Now is the time to make sure I didn't forget anything. All the data sent to the PoC will be wiped out whenever I re-migrate the services, and of course whenever the actual migration happens. Please feel free to play around all this. The services (this will be regularly updated) - gitea.itms.ovh The development platform. This is an instance of Gitea, a self-hosted lightweight alternative to Gitlab/Github. If, in the far future, we want to stop self-hosting stuff, Gitea is compatible with Github features to allow for easy migration. The git repository is at wfg/0ad. Commit messages were reformatted, contain the original SVN revision, links to other commits are preserved as much as possible. The HEAD revision is the HEAD of the SVN repo. A currently WIP of the "future" branch of the git repository, adding commits needed for development with git, is at my fork Itms/0ad. All Gitea users were imported from Trac. Since email does not work, if you want to login, shoot me a DM and I'll send you a password. All Trac tickets are imported at wfg/0ad/issues. The Trac wiki is imported at wfg/0ad/wiki. I tried to self-document the PoC as much as possible, so please read the updated pages, especially BuildInstructionsGettingTheCode and BuildAndDeploymentEnvironment. The FAQ is defaced beyond readability because of its formatting peculiarities, work is needed, my apologies to everyone who worked hard on the visuals of the Trac page... - trac.itms.ovh A read-only copy of Trac, upgraded to the latest release. This serves as a reference, and can stay online as long as needed. See below for the redirect tool. - code.itms.ovh A registration-disabled copy of Phabricator, upgraded to the latest version (RIP). All the inactive accounts were deleted, especially the dormant spam accounts. This should stay up as much as possible. We need to keep all the discussions on patches and commits. TODO: I need to find a (possibly ugly) way to disable the upload of new diffs. - svn.itms.ovh The old and new SVN repositories. This holds the current ps repo (which will stop receiving commits after the migration), the audio and art sources (which will keep working as-is), the new libraries repos for precompiled Windows and for bundled libs, and most importantly the new nightly-build repo WIP: This is currently the biggest missing piece, as I am now going to start working on CI/CD, and the generation of the nightly build. Please read NightlyBuild if you want to know how this will work in the (hopefully close) future. - ariadne.itms.ovh Ariadne is a small redirect tool I wrote as a drop-in replacement for Trac or Phabricator when/if we decide to drop them. A lot of links to Trac exist on the Internet. You can follow Trac-like paths on Ariadne to find the relevant content. Each Trac page displays a link to the associated Ariadne path. For instance : A ticket https://ariadne.itms.ovh/ticket/666 A wiki page https://ariadne.itms.ovh/wiki/Manual_Settings A SVN changeset https://ariadne.itms.ovh/changeset/28056 A Phabricator commit page https://ariadne.itms.ovh/rP28056 A file in the Trac browser https://ariadne.itms.ovh/browser/ps/trunk/source/test_setup.cpp Ariadne also provides a nice page for knowing commit correspondence, just use `rXXXX` as path: https://ariadne.itms.ovh/r28056 https://ariadne.itms.ovh/r28000 Enjoy! And see you soon for regular updates

Hey Stan, Please don't feel bad for quitting your 0 A.D. posts. Health and a fulfilling life go first, and I'm sure that everyone here knows that you have thoroughly thought about it before making your decision. Your work, care, and constructive attitude have had without doubt a huge impact on the development of the game and its community, and have made 0. A.D what it is today: Objectively one of the greatest open source games in the world. It can even compete with the best commercial games in the market which is - given the fact that this is all made by volunteers - not a matter of course at all. Thinking about the huge part that you had in it, what you did is outstanding and you can be more than proud of it! It is only natural that the colossal effort you put into 0 A.D. would at some point wear you down. So don't think about your retirement as a weakness but instead be amazed at how long you kept up. It's also a wise decision to make a clean cut as it's easy to get sucked back into old habits and wrongfully getting the feeling that one was supposed to deliver. Once you have established a healthy mental distance, feel free to drop in for some games or good company without any pressure! I wish you all the best and am sure that you'll find your energy again to have an amazing future :)

Good morning. We develop for fun the game 0 A.D., which is a strategy game in which multiplayer is an essential component. However, the childish and toxic behavior of a minority of lobby players has always been an issue and a cause of distress for developers. I see with disgust that this continues to be the case. I suppose it cannot be avoided, since professional game developers also face a lot of verbal abuse from their players, but unlike them, we do not receive compensation for our work. Thus, it should be expected that most WFG developers, especially me, are not aware of the daily developments in the MP community, and are not interested in knowing more about them. Since a few days, I have been receiving complaints from several accounts, who harassed me and other devs in order to get Norse_Harold removed from his position. I have also been added to a conversation about one specific offender, in which Norse_Harold has provided convincing data backing his decision. There are probably other discussions I am not aware of, I am merely giving the context in which I write this post. The only complaint I agree with is the need for transparency around the rules (currently materialized as a draft Code of Conduct, which is not yet published). This is the team's fault for not publishing this CoC in a timely manner. For the record, Norse_Harold has been the one pushing the team for a publication, he does not withhold the CoC on purpose, quite the contrary. Sadly, we in the development team are notoriously inefficient at publishing rules, terms, or legal stuff. It is our fault that rules applied to the community are not clearly communicated and make moderation appear arbitrary. However, this does not justify the current situation. The method used by players to denounce the alleged abuse (spamming devs with copies of the same message, childish comparisons between totalitarian regimes and a silly video game) are jerk methods (not to say extremely cringe-worthy) which are just pushing me into backing the moderators. By the way, there are several moderators with identical powers. I heard no complaints of Norse_Harold alleged power trip from his fellow moderators. I just see the current wave of copy-pasted criticism as a concerted attack towards the most active and efficient moderator. I must say I am concerned about the variety of back channels used to harass people (including me during a weekend I wanted to take for myself...) If you are temporarily blocked on the lobby or the forums, just close your computer and go touch some grass. Or fire up a different game if you have no outside life, which is OK. Opening Insta or Discord to harass, complain, and start a concerted attack is gross misbehavior. In my opinion, this extends to what I read about the use of Element: while I find the idea of restorative justice extremely interesting in principle, I find it unhealthy to actively reach out to offenders, using different platforms, to burden them with injunctions. I would prefer to push people into disengaging from the community for a while and, I insist, going to touch some grass. This is the last input I deign to give in this thread, as I have more important work to do on 0 A.D., including helping to publish the CoC.

Hey everyone, Thank you for taking the time to vote! I have decided to go with Agni, as Vulcan really felt bland and I think 0 A.D. deserves better. It also starts with an A, which is a lucky coincidence, but I don't want it to be binding, so we'll see what will happen for the next alpha.

Hello everyone, Today I would like to share a project that's been in the back of my mind for a while. Sharing replays has always been a mess and annoying and I wanted to address that a bit by providing a centralized address so that all replays you want to share can be uploaded there. I made a proof of concept Using Svelte &, Fastify and I'd like to hear your feedbacks about what you'd want the UI to look like, what filters would you like to see etc, details about the match (we don't have the possibility to get all the info) Here are some screenshots (Keep in mind the layout isn't set in stone, just wanted to have a convenient way to test things out) For security reasons there will be no direct upload button there if it gets online, but rather you'll be able to upload replays to single thread and it will be scrapped periodically. One can upload a zip containing a replays or containing multiple folders with replays, or just the commands.txt or the commands.txt and the metadata.json. LIVE AT: https://replay-pallas.wildfiregames.ovh/ Sources at:

It's time to present a blender project I've been working on lately, which is a set of buildings that make up a roman castrum. Contubernium (Barracks) The contubernium consisted of 10 units of 8 soldiers and one centurio, I had to cut it down to 6 stalls, so that it wouldn't be way too long. Horreum (warehouse/storehouse) Horrea were special warehouse to hold mostly grain. The floor was elevated to keep it dry. The walls needed to be strong to withstand the pressure from the filling. Principia (Main Building) The Principia was the main building, were the administration was situated and the standards (Aedes) and valuables (Aerarium) were kept. The big basilica was used for gatherings of the troops. Gate (Porta) Walls (short with stairs, medium, long, curved) It's a work in progress, so still some things are missing, especially (normal, spec) texture improvements and more props. Climbing plants like ivy would look good on it. Some parts still look a bit empty, especially the roof parts. The Gate animation is still missing. Possible buildings to add could be: Praetorium Porta praetoria (Bigger and fancier gate) Wall towers Calvary barracks I'm gonna add references later. I know that for now there might not be much use for it, maybe for some mod or scenario. To make it constructable ingame a js wallplacer helper would be helpful. Anyway, it was fun and I learned some more blender and gimp stuff I guess. Let me know what you think:) castrum-0.27.0.zip

It would be really helpful if Wall snapping was extended to include shorelines and cliffs, and Gaia objects such as mines and trees. Snapping new walls/hubs to the ends of a segment so that you can repair the end of a wall would be helpful too. Also, walls snappable to Fortresses and also the ability to upgrade wall hubs to ballista towers, etc. to make them more interesting and defensive.

games are not open source and only maintained by volunteers. it's an impossible comparison.

Stan, thank you for the outstanding job you did. Besides the remarkable commitment and contribution to the project development, I have admired your patience, tolerance, responsiveness and involvement demonstrated to every member of this community, from the newest forum user, to the ones claiming they know better. Even more so, considering the responsibility and high pressure that the role demands. 2023 has been a tough year for 0AD and the project is more fragile today than it was one year ago. My wish for the future is that the new leadership will successfully tackle the "few can ruin the experience of many" problem, that so deeply harmed the game and the community. Fair winds Stan. Whatever you'll do from now on, it'll be a success.

Two weeks ago I played a game as Reza's pocket. I played badly and we lost the side. He started attacking me and telling me not to play "Pro Games" if I didn't want to receive that kind of aggression. All the following matches he asked the host to get me out of the lobby or not put me on his team. If it were a super popular game, perhaps this would be one more anecdote. But with such a small community I would start by improving personal behavior towards other players. It's the least we can do.

Thanks for clarifying. It's better to postpone than a bad release.

Well IMHO the whole (Spamming, Cheating, DDOSing) lobby debacle, and the lagging kinda proves the point. If 5 people can tank the multiplayer game are we really allowed to be called a beta? Or should we just target single player folks, in which case not having a campaign is kind of a no no ?

I am trying to make a sense out of this. The whole point of LocalRatings being local is that the mod user is the only one who can see ratings and that ratings are calculated based on the user data. Why would one tweak a rating being the only one seeing it... self-motivation? PS: the fact that a user can edit a free-and-open-source project and its files (including replays) should not come as a surprise. Welcome to foss!

I am happy to present the start of a new single player campaign called "Carthage: New Beginnings". The campaign will cover Dido's departure from Tyre up to the founding of Carthage. This campaign will be fairly short, about 6 or so scenarios. They are mostly done and I will be porting each one to the current version of 0ad and provide an update every few days. Chapter 1: In the beginning You are Elissa -- the sister of the tyrant of Tyre, King Pumayyaton. All your life, you have dreamed of glory but lately, your brother has been increasingly pushing you out of power and out of influence. You sense that is the time to make a move. And what better way to show your abilities to the citizens of Tyre than to raid a band of Celts who have recently moved in and established a small fishing town on the mainland. But first, you must figure out how to get your elephants across the sea as to take down the settlement's fortifications. Your husband, Acerbas, the High Priest of Melqart, has an idea. A band of pirates holding out on an island to the north-west, has stolen an ancient relic. Should you be able to return it, he will secure enough money to purchase you a ship that will be able to carry the elephants across the water. But you must be careful - our current ships are weak and can only be used to ferry our soldiers but not for battle. AI Settings: Player 5 should be on Petra with a difficulty of your choice (the hardest for best experience). All others should be set to Sandbox. Note: you may need to know a tiny bit about the geography of Tyre to know which was is North Where to get the scenarios: https://github.com/SciGuy42/Carthage_BeginningsGloryAndDemise/archive/refs/heads/main.zip You should extract the files in your /mods/user/ folder. On Linux, that is typically located in /home/.local/share/0ad/mods/user/. Note that the repository contains additional scenarios but I haven't tested them yet and they most certainly need fixes and a play test. But coming soon! I play tested on the following build: Mar 22, 2022 (25860-release), which is the default version on Liniux when installing from the "universe". There are probably issues with newer versions if the javascript API is not backwards compatible or if template names changed. A few screen shots from the game play: Some questions for developers: 1. Can some point me to the function I need to call to display text in the same place where we see notifications, like when a players enters a new phase? Since the objectives change throughout the game based on events, I would like to periodically print the current objectives to remind the player. 2. Similarly, is there an example of a dialog box but no so much a dialogue with 2 options but just 1 option? I found the example with two buttons and am currently using that but I don't actually need two buttons and which button is pressed is irrelevant. Observed issues: 1. One of the docks that the AI build rotated the wrong way by 90 degrees, instead of the dock facing the sea, it was oriented parallel to the shore. 2. The first time I used catapults, I gave them the command to attack a fortress while the catapults were packed. The moved closer to the fortress, unpacked but were still outside of range. I had to pack them, move them closer, then unpack and then they worked fine. Want to help? While I am quite proud of my Tyre, it can use a round of, let's say, "beautification". If you like that sort of thing, let me know, I can give you permissions in the repository. The only constraint is that I'd rather not move the docks and also the passages to the harbors should probably not get smaller. Eventually I may need an "early" Carthage but probably not for the first few missions. If you want to help there, I am already thinking of one possible scenario that would take place in Carthage, let's say, 10-15 years after it was founded. I also need a mod file but I don't know how to do that. The other way to help, of course, is to play it and write back with how it went. Enjoy!

Not the first map I've made using Atlas editor, but it's the first I'm feeling rather satisfied about I had the Nile river delta in mind but I wasn't looking to create an accurate representation this time. This map is basically a river system deep enough to hold the largest class warships, with every bit of land connected by shallows and therefore not requiring ships at all. Thought it might provide a fun and interesting scenario with a lot of possibilities. Any thoughts/suggestions?

My first attempt at a map. I play a lot of 1 vs 2 AI. Most of the islands have 2 access points by ground. Ships can also pass through. Any feedback is welcome. Thanks for the awesome game! . coastal_islands_3p.tar.gz

So, progress has sadly been going a bit slow lately. I haven't done the UI design of the page itself. But I have restructured the entire page. Now it has every text we've ever written that I'm aware of. This includes all templates, mixins, animals, trees, and more. Here is a short showcase, clicking through what I have done so far: 1300745683_0A.D.2024-02-1618-46-25.mp4 There are seven categories chosen by the buttons on the right, every category has its own overview text, displayed where later the article will be shown. We never wrote such texts which is why I use placeholders right now ("Here is..." at the top). The categories also have subcategories that are chosen by the buttons appearing on the right. My idea was to have the overview text and then something like "Learn more about ..." below it. After selecting a subcategory, there is the list of articles in the specific subcategory, and here one can open the individual articles. In addition to all that, the civilisations tab also has a dropdown for choosing civ. The civs' overview texts are of course the ones in the game. The categories 'historical background' 'maps' and 'gameplay' are currently empty. If you're curious, here is the file with the folder structure in it that I use for my external setup script: folders.json I also added a related articles section on the right. The related articles need to be manually added to the files (which is why in the showcase only one article actually has related articles showing up). And there are back buttons to more easily navigate all the menus. I am aware that that some name choices aren't very good or fitting, I am definelty open for any sugggestions, especially regarding adding, removing, or renaming categories. What do you think of the 'category-subcategory-selection' system in general? Does anyone have ideas on how to arrange all the buttons in the middle panel? P.S.: I will upload a mod with the current version soon for people to try out. I have to clean up my messy code first.

Hi all, I recently updated my old "South_East_Asia" to be able to run on new 0ad releases. I tested it on the 26 Jan build (revision 28018), and it works for me! Here how it looks like: Download the map and see more screenshots at https://github.com/crazyBaboon/0ad_geo_maps Let me know what you think!

hello fellow 0 A.D players. today I started the open beta testings stage for realism mod (Alpha 27). if anyone is interested in participating in testing the new features and reporting bugs feel free to download the mod from github repo and giving us feedbacks. main intentions of this mod is: increasing realism. reducing micromanagement by increasing units' autonomy. giving more advantages for players that can do good tactics. for now, I need more tests for the separate horse and rider entities. try it through ordering any unit to turret any horse (even if owned by gaia or enemies) and report any unwanted behavior. it also has hunger and thirst mechanisms which needs few tweaks but usable with no problem for human entities. the resources mechanism now changed. instead of being able to put the resources in a very far storehouse and immediately use them to build some building, the builders will need to carry the needed resources to build (which requires the resources or storehouse be closer for faster building). todo: adding workshops for delayed converting of a resource to another (like using forgery to convert metal to swords).

I can't even... Happy solstice or whatever.

Imo ideally every department should have it's own leader to spread the load, intaked and assigned by someone who knows a bit of everything. But we don't have that luxury. I think you can count all active devs on one hand. Putting everything on 1 person again will just lead to burnouts. Btw the original post is top tier trash, at least catch yourself up to the history before saying all that. Or get your own feet wet in development instead of making demands. Like alre said, you don't even seem to grasp the concept of an open source project.

Thanks Stan for everything (is it already 12 years? My god). Your contribution to 0 AD cannot be measured nor understated. On a personal level, I have fond memories of after-FOSDEM dinners and beers. Take good care and all the best.

Since the sole role of leadership seems very taxing, I wonder if a leadership 'committee' would be better suited for a project like this. There could be 3 (or more) positions: Engine development lead, Multiplayer and lobby lead, Volunteer organization lead, and/or maybe outreach and public relations lead.

I came across 0 A.D. several years ago and, as an Age of Empires fan, figured it would be neat to try. I saw that it was an "Alpha" though and so I didn't download it, figuring it would be buggy and incomplete. I decided that I would wait until it was at least a Beta version when I tried it. A few years later I came back to it, only to discover it was still Alpha. I was confused about there being so much progress though. I decided to download it and it looked playable. There were still rough edges, but about what I would expect for a Beta version. I talked to another person who said they too had heard about the game, but never tried it because they too were "waiting for the game to not be buggy". When I asked when they would know that would be, they said "1.0, or at least a beta". So the "Alpha" label scared me off from trying 0 A.D. for years and scared off another person I know from trying it at all. Now that there have been Alphas for all 26 letters of the English alphabet, maybe it's time to start releasing Betas? That would prevent new users like me from thinking that the game is still a buggy mess not ready for prime time.

Hello! So I wanted to recreate Ancient Rome through Map Editor and wanted to get some feedback from you guys (: It is still a work in progress and it is not 100% historical accurate and tried to scale the city center 1:1

I'm not sure anyone knows what @Langbart is planing about BoonGUI. This project brought a very refreshing UI to 0ad. I decided to introduce in ProGUI the original BoonGUI panel. You can easily choose to switch between ProGUI and BoonGUI, and have one of them preset for Spectating and when Playing. You could already switch between mods automatically using @seeh's autocivP, but I also wanted to add the option here. BoonGUI overlay: ProGUI overlay: I disabled by default the panel to control the features such as the Trainer and Auto-Tribute. Some players were just using the overlay but the features were still draining some performance. Option page, you can define when to use BoonGUI or ProGUI, and you can enable the additional panel with ProFeatures: If you used previous ProGUI versions, and the advanced features, you may enjoy being able to customize the panels even more: I would probably also help maintaining a BoonGUI representation. I'm not as op dev as @Langbart but I'll still do it. I'll try to get this new version published on the mod downloader so that the classical BoonGUI overlay is also downloadable from it. Shame it wasn't already but I know it was a @Langbart choice not to. Since he didn't say anything, I'll assume I can/should do this. Git Repo: https://gitlab.com/4trik/proGUI/ Mod.io: https://mod.io/g/0ad/m/progui (not always updated)

live version at https://replay-pallas.wildfiregames.ovh

Coming in Alpha 27: Marian Legions. I took some Principe chainmail textures and added cingula and a little extra mail on the shoulders. You'll notice some Ptolemaic and Seleucid-inspired helmets mixed in a little, too. This is to show perhaps some war booty collected from these foes and does show up in a few references.

Happy New Year! If we are friendly and act like mentors to new volunteers then we can gradually grow the development team.

Hello Stan. I know all too well the feeling of not being able to carry on anymore, despite wanting to. You have been an extraordinary leader and the best successor I could have had when I decided to step down. You should indeed have absolutely no regrets, including in this decision of stopping and focusing on yourself and your health. Others have worded it perfectly during these ten past days: thank you for making 0 A.D. the best game that exists. I am certain that, thanks to your work, the project will endure.

Thank you Stan for your hard work. The game in even its current form is simply a stunning achievement and really a tremendous amount of fun to play.

I have no recollection of this, but apparently it made a big impact on you, so I apologize. If I were to be made leader I would merge DE instantly and make everyone angry.

Using Vulcan should drastically increase the performance and reduce the lag. The list is there: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&type=defect&milestone=Backlog&group=type&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=time&order=priority People making balancing changes and small features are not the same people than those working on the engine and on the core of the game.

After years of Torrent-seeding 0AD, I've checked the 0AD site again and noticed the news. I've registered here to thank you @Stan` for all your time and heart spent working on 0AD and give you remote support and a hug! Thank you! If the project/community will need a new system administrator, please PM me. I and my ~9 years of SysOp/Linux experience will do my best to help the project!

@Stan` I want to express my sincere gratitude for all the support and encouragement you have given to the project and to each of us here. I'm sure you'll be successful in whatever direction you decide to take from now on. I hope to continue seeing your presence here on the forum.

Thanks to Stan for his leadership. For his gentle style to moderate and his way to give motivation even for small contributions.

Stan, thanks for the monumental effort that you put into helping WFG. If I had to sum up your attitude about WFG, it would be "I care." Period. You did the tasks others weren't willing to do. You never said "that's below my pay grade," when I brought an issue to you that I couldn't solve myself. You intervened when other staff were being petty. You were nearly always "on duty" and available. I agree that no one person can replace you. In fact, it's not fair for one person to do as much as you took responsibility for. Other staff were ignoring certain responsibilities and allowing you to take care of too much. That only works for so long, and now they see the consequences. Anyone in Stan's position would get burnt out. The work that Stan did should be done by a team of people, unless Stan would be paid for it of course. I mostly agree with this idea. I would instead structure it like this: there is a team leader who has authority to delegate. He has three subordinates who do tasks assigned by the team leader. The team leader is a supervisor who verifies that all necessary tasks have been assigned and are making progress. He also does work on these tasks, but he's not the only one doing that work. Maybe that's what was originally intended, but the subordinates just didn't do the tasks because they didn't feel like it or something along these lines. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the impression that I got. Anyway, maybe a new structure and agreement can be reached. Meanwhile, we have even more of a need for volunteers. It's not only programmers that we need. There are documentation, bug reporting, testing, artwork, scenario and map making tasks available for volunteers here. Contact your nearest dev or WFG staff to discuss how you can help.

I think I speak for everyone when I say--you will be missed. You oversaw a great development period for the game. Thanks for all that you've given and I wish the best.

Thanks for all your work over the years, Stan!

I wonder if there are members of the community who have an urban garden. A year ago I was lucky enough to move into a house with a few meters of garden and I wanted to start exploring the path of agriculture as a way to escape from my daily life as a worker who lives in a huge city, full of asphalt, loud horns and people angry and in a hurry to reach their destinations. It has been a way of connecting a little more with nature and with the essential aspects of life. If any of you have an urban garden (or maybe you live in the country and have a little more than a few meters of land) I would like to invite you to share your progress with everyone! Here it is. We have some winter and summer Lettuce, Chard, Rosemery at the back and Broccoli. Also I've just planted a Lavanda this season (left side) More Broccoli at the front And finally this is the last harvest we made of Chard and Lettuce

0 A.D. currently updates the simulation state every 200ms. This update usually takes 20-40ms, depending on the number of units doing things. This means even if you're running at 60 FPS graphically, when the sim is running, you'll get worse FPS, and worst you might get a lot of 'micro-freezes'. Furthermore, the 200 ms turn length gives high input lag which would be nice to shorten. I ran some quick experiments on Combat Demo Huge to see what changing the turn length would do to performance, and the results are somewhat more promising than I expected. First, what to expect: We should run fewer JS timers each simulation turn, as they will tend to hit on different frames. This should 'smooth' the framerate. Movement might be a little easier and smoother since we're going less far away (in practice, I'd need to update Pushing, it's too smooth) Things like 'range queries' shouldn't change too much, as we still run all of them every turn. Overall the FPS should be lower, as we compute more things, but also smoother, as we don't stop as long. Frames would go "16-16-30-16-16-30ms..." instead of "16-16-16-16-80-16-16-16-16-80ms..." The results are quite interesting. The 'smoothing' effect is rather convincing. I think if we adapted to not run all Range queries on all turns, and perhaps tweaked movement appropriately, it might be worth looking into running turns every 100ms for example. In the profiling runs below, Red is 350ms turns, green is 200ms (normal), dark-blue is 100ms and cyan is 50ms turns. Remember that the red curve is farther ahead in time at any given time.

Good news and bad news about the future. As of Firefox 115, which will be the latest ESR soon, I can finally properly profile the game including JIT code. The only thing to do is compile spidermonkey with `enable-perf` and `--enable-jitspew` (I think), then run it form within https://github.com/mstange/samply like so: `IONPERF=func PERF_SPEW_DIR=. samply record -n --rate 10000 binaries/system/pyrogenesis -mod=public -autostart="random/continent" --autostart-ai="1:petra" -autostart-ai="2:petra" -autostart-nonvisual -autostart-seed=150` This gives you a full profile that you can then access on the firefox profiler, like so: https://share.firefox.dev/3IHH7ho (AI 1v1) There are some interesting overall insights: In this AI 1v1 75-80% of the time is spent in C++ code. But a lot of that time is calls from JS. As I have reported in the staff forums in the past, the main cost in the SimUpdate is `Timer Update` (about 15% of total time), split between ResourceGatherer, ProductionQueue, Builder, Attack, DelayedDamage. Most of the code appears to end up properly jitted. But the GCs 'dump' the JIT code regularly, which means we spend more time in baseline than we probably should. I have reported a bug about this, we'll see what happens: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1834848 There is a fair amount of Spidermonkey overhead, though there are things we could improve. To take the Example of calling `Engine.QueryInterface`, the costs breakdown as follow: ToJSVal<IComponent*> is about 40-45%. This is largely because of D5004. The actual C++ QueryInterface is only 20%, which is slow because of std::map. But it's not the most major cost. Getting the ComponentManager pointer is 7% ScriptRequest enters the realm (for no reason), which accounts for about 10% total So as you can see there are a lot of things we could do to skip some time, but it's also going to be kinda hard. Some obvious things that show up and could probably be improved: Having a `Engine.QueryInterfaces()` function is probably interesting. Identity:Init() is slow because of splitting the identity classes. We can cache that in ParamNode directly I think. There are some regex constructions in loop which are slow, such as in MatchesClassList AI Interface and AI Proxy are fairly slow. The AI in general also seems poorly jitted, and that might have to do with how the objects are structured, hard to say. Modifiers are kinda costly, but we knew that. Now, right now we are still on ESR92, so this is some ways off, but I have compiled it on a local branch, and I think the results are rather interesting, and encouraging for the future.