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I noticed. (And commented on it, in a report; I sometimes add a sentence to reports...)

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

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

0 A.D. Development Report: May - August 2019 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present its latest development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, feel free to visit our forums and join our active community, or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Programmers, Animators and Artists. *names written in bold black are Wildfire Games staff and names written in bold grey are community members Programming wraitii has rewritten UnitMotion for better code and easier extensibility, with the goal in sight of introducing optimisations. He's optimised the Hierarchical Pathfinder, and is working on pathfinder threading. he has also worked on two patches, allowing triggers to give units modifiers, and making attack effects easily moddable so that, for example, a unit can both capture and damage in the same attack. Stan` Created a first version of the polycount guidelines and updated the art design document. He also added a glow material that also supports normal maps (basic_glow_norm). Stan` worked on many other fixes and improvements, such adding more animations to the atlas drop down list. vladislavbelov continues to work on the renderer among other things, improving the water's GLSL shader by increasing the reflection and refraction realism. He also added a tool to Atlas, which allows choosing water height by simply clicking on a part of the terrain with the desired height. Itms worked on our Continuous Integration system, and improved the developing environment for the programmers behind the scenes. He made the move from VS2013 to VS2015 as the default compiler on Windows, with help from Angen. He also upgraded SpiderMonkey to version 45. s0600204 increased the usage of pkg-config instead of hard-coding or library-specific programs, and added support for special characters (UTF8) in map names and descriptions. elexis rewrote source/gui/ to have a cleaner code structure and use C++11 features (most code still came from 2004), fixed a number of compiler warnings and some memory leaks. JoshuaJB fixed some memory leaks introduced by the implementation of STUN + XMPP ICE. historic_bruno has been working on MacOS build fixes. trompetin17 fixed an issue with atlasUI and added a "new" checkbox to the map settings tab. Imarok, FeXoR and bb_ have also been working on various smaller code fixes, improvements and reviews. Mate-86 has worked on a feature allowing entities to be affected by Status Effects, such as flaming projectiles igniting the target or poisoned arrows poisoning the target, which will cause the target to continue suffering damage for a while. Freagarach has replaced the gender-tag with phenotype, adding the ability to choose a random phenotype for a given template, allowing for different looks for the same template, as well as having male and female units from the same template with their correct respective voices. Freagarach, with assistance from wraitii, has also wrapped damage types in a Damage element in XML templates to make them generic. This places the damage types in a "Damage" container, just like the "Resources" are. Part of the effort towards having secondary attacks and a more easily moddable game. Angen made the AI aware of the existence of the new ranges and updated precompiled headers to improve build times. Krinkle fixed ESLint semicolon-related warnings and has been updating various wiki-pages on trac. minohaka helped testing and discovering regressions. Art Alexandermb‘s new fauna models and textures were committed by Stan`, including Marwari, Lusitano and Celtic horse breeds, new cattle textures, sanga variants, a new Maurya trader chariot with new animations and he animated the new Kushite hero chariot by Sundiata. He sorted his many new Celtic shields according to their specific civ, diffenrentiating the Gauls and Britons with the help of Genava55. Another big update were the many improvements to a variety of other shields, including the Greek aspis with new higher quality models and textures. And then there was the big Hellenic helmets update: Thracian, Phrygian, Boeotian, Chalcidean, Attic, Bryastovets, Corinthian and the Pilos helmet, with many variations. New meshes and textures for greaves were also committed. Many other smaller fixes and improvements were made, further enhancing the quality of his already Herculean art contributions, as wel as working on “the great animations re-export” together with Stan` (cleaning and committing) and assisted by fatherbushido and Enrique, in order to solve a flaw in many older meshes, while also taking the opportunity to improve on some of those animations and adding some new ones. Alexandermb has also been working on a number of formations like the testudo, phalanx and syntagma. wackyserious created many new Macedonian, Persian and Roman unit textures, a new Ptolemy IV hero texture and updated the Thracian Peltast, Naked Fanatic, Scythian Archer, Judean Slinger and Seleucid Pikeman and Cataphract. Stan` Made a new blacksmith for the Britons, improved the walls for the Gauls and added some detailing to their barracks. He unified foundation sizes and construction dust, added new scaffolds and updated structure templates accordingly. LordGood is continuing his prolific work in the flora department. Teak, dragon bamboo, strangler figs, bananas, areca palm, doum palm, Atlas cedar, holly oak, juniper tree and some new grasses are his latest additions. He has also been working on the Hellenization of the Ptolemies with a new tower and temple. Bigtiger has worked on some beautiful new flora as well, adding holm oaks, Euro birch, fir tree and a new fern to the collection. He also made new cliffs, new particle actors for snow and clouds and new temperate terrain textures. These new assets can be admired in three new excellent looking maps by Bigtiger himself: Farmland, Oceanside and Roadway. wowgetoffyourcellphone made new icons for the deer, boar, camel, horse, walrus and wildebeest. The Uffington White Horse he made back in 2016 will replace Stonehenge as the new wonder for the Britons. Other Gallaecio has been improving and correcting the English descriptions in-game. Stan` gave a presentation on 0 A.D. and it’s develoment process in Rennes for GrafikLabor 2019. user1 continues his work moderating smurf accounts in the multiplayer lobby. After discussions on the transliteration of Ancient Greek into English, the decission has been made to use the standards of the American Library Association and Library of Congress proposed by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates, who is, in discussion with Nescio, working to update all the Greek specific names, making them more accurate and consitent. Nescio has also been updating the English style guide, cleaned up the technology data files and applied some corrections to the new horse and cattle fauna templates (among others), added skirmishing templates to some structures and cleaned some obstruction and footprint sizes for others, improved a number of tool tips and improved and corrected some of the Roman and Persian specific names. Tom 0ad Has created five new informative videos, including “0AD Faction Overview 04 – Persians”, “0AD Faction Overview 05 – Kushites”, “The Ultimate Guide to Siege Weaopons”, “Top Three Tips to Improve. FAST” and “Essential Team Game Guide”. Likewise, ValihrAnt has made a number of enlightening videos, including “Unit Ranks & Promotions Explained”, “Top 5 Most Underrated Techs” and “Strategy Guide, Cavalry Rush Build Order”. HMS-Surprise, Unknown_Player, Feldfeld and psypherium organized the commentated Sunday Pro Games between April and June. This was a competetive community event, with Boudica ranking number 1! elexis, Stan` and wraitii have been updating an extensive list presenting all noticable changes to the end user in Alpha 24, since development started on December 26th, 2018. Changes include new 3D and 2D art, sound, maps, gameplay, user interface, renderer, pathfinder and more. Check it out at: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha24 Art Features A small selection of Alexandermb's new helmets with many variants: One of many new sets of shields. The Greek aspis for the Athenian faction. From top to bottom: basic, advanced, elite and champion. By Alexandermb: Macedonian, Carthaginian and Spartan units showing off their new equipment, by Alexandermb: New Macedonian unit textures by wackyserious: New unit textures for the Romans, Judean Slingers and Seleucid Cataphracts, by wackyserious: Some of the new temperate flora assets by Bigtiger: A lush display of some of LordGood's new tropical flora assets and cliffs: The new Oceanside map by Bigtiger. It's by the ocean... Mediterranean Islets, by LordGood: Hellenized Ptolemaic walls and temples on the banks of the Nile. Take note of the new palms and baobab trees. By LordGood:

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 :)

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.

@Stan` I pray you win a big lottery or something that makes you so happy and strong and come back to work for 0ad, You might think I am being childish but I was thinking a lot how to get money for 0AD development somehow, but my life is kicking me here and there my Computer that can run 0ad with out annoying other players is dead, I can't even play now. I can with my laptop but will be dead slow and others will ban me

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 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.

It was a great time to work with you! You've done uncountable amount of things to improve 0 A.D. in many areas. It was taking a lot of time and energy, it wasn't simple for you but you've made much further than many others in that situation. Thank you for all you've done! I wish you a nice journey and to only do things you really enjoy 0 A.D. development is keep going and I'll be always glad to hear your feedback if you came to say hello

In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on its finances as of 2020-01-01. In 2019, 0 A.D. had funds in two places: A legacy account on Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider. Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter “SPI”); Flattr Legacy Account In the beginning of 2019, we had 865.28 EUR as well as approximately 2 USD in our Flattr account. At our request, SPI helped us withdraw the portion of funds that were in EUR in 2019-02. This portion of the Flattr funds is now part of the SPI earmark for 0 A.D. (see below). Only the latter portion, that was in USD, remained on Flattr. Since sums under 10 USD cannot be withdrawn from Flattr, and the balance is not likely to reach that threshold anytime soon, the Treasury Committee decided to delete the account and let Flattr take the remaining funds. This completes the consolidation of 0 A.D.'s assets and prevents problems down the road. The Flattr legacy account is now closed. SPI Earmark for 0 A.D. As of 2020-01-01, the 0 A.D. earmark is USD 34,970.84 USD (Source: SPI Treasurer’s Report). This grand total includes the Flattr funds, which made up about a quarter of the income for 2019 (926.61 USD out of 4384.99 USD). Taken together, this represents a small increase in 0 A.D.'s assets from previous years, and shows that the project's finances have been stable over time. Concluding Remarks The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”) and Aviv (“Jeru”). We need you! We invite members of the 0 A.D. community to volunteer on the committee and help us put the funds to good use. We also welcome your questions, comments and suggestions.

0 A.D. Development Report: September 2019 – May 2020 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present its latest development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, feel free to visit our forums and join our active community, or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Programmers, Translators, Historians, MapMakers, Animators and Artistsa. *names written in bold black are Wildfire Games staff and names written in bold grey are community members Summary Programming We have been working on improvements on performance, both graphical and non-graphical, to make the next Alpha run more smoothly. The map editor will no longer be laggy (creation should not be hindered!) when changing the height. You can also now search the entities in a non-strict manner, e.g. “units ptol hlr” would show “units/ptol_support_healer_a” in the list. Art Greeks, Iberians, Celts, Romans, and Carthaginians have received visual updates, with better helmets, shields, and props. Flora has also been improved with better trees, and more variety in plants and props that can be placed over the maps in the scenario editor. The bear and the baby elephants now have animations, and hippopotamuses can now be placed using the scenario editor. Special artillery towers have been added to the game, as well as a new Gaul wonder and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. New sounds for weapons and for some animals have been committed. Balancing Work has been done towards improving gameplay to fix the current balancing issues with the help of some of the best ranked lobby players and some modders. Internationalization 17 languages have reached more than 90% of translation. Programming The whole team would like to welcome Angen as a new member. Angen has been an external contributor since the beginning of 2018 and has done a lot of work towards unit behaviour improvements. He is currently working on improvements on the formation system along with general unit behavior improvements. Angen added the ability to allow cancelling trade routes. He committed some fixes for formations. He implemented the ability to display tools instead of weapons when units are approaching resources. He made the trade gain by garrisoned entities configurable which will allow for a finer balancing a75397425a3774fd.mp4 bb has also been working on various smaller code fixes with the goal to improve consistency and to make unit templates cleaner and he fixed the lag that appears on windows when shift is pressed. elexis committed a patch allowing for map specific placement in the GUI game setup page, continued working on the GUI rewrite and fixed some bugs. He implemented game-setup options for landscape and daytime and added morepreviously uncredited people to the credits. FeXoR and nani have been working on the procedural generation of maps, to allow for more realistic maps. Freagarach made it possible for the same entity in multiple control groups (ctrl + number hotkeys). He allowed for status effects to affect unit speed (e.g. slowing down a unit when hit) this will be particularly useful for mods with magic. He also added a progress bar to show the upgrade status. Mods can now make projectiles deal friendly fire. This is currently unused in the game. He also allowed for some resources to not be barterable in the market, this will also be used in mods such as 0abc (link) and Delenda Est (link) upgrade-animations-and-progress-bar.mp4 Imarok fixed an error warning with AMD CPUs, fixed the display of actions cursors over the minimap and the usage of the patrol action, and did some cleanup in the minimap code. Itms worked on some improvements to the continuous integration system. He also did some library updates for NVTT (NVIDIA Texture Tools), the library we use for our textures, with the help of adrian and s0600204 on a library called FMT (This library is used to print warnings and errors). He also worked on build fixes for Mac OS. Krinkle worked on fixing JavaScript warnings, and submitted a few fixes for MacOS support, as well as some to improve the game’s CI. linkmauve did some cleanup of the rendering engine, by removing old platform specific code which was either deprecated or superseded by SDL2, and worked towards improving multithreaded debugging. Nescio has done a lot toward improving consistency in our files, renaming them to match the same conventions, and making them easier to deal with by simplifying some of them. For example all our map files had inconsistent naming conventions, and the presence of whitespaces in their name caused issues. Stan has created a feature for mods to allow buildings to construct themselves without the need of units. He made some optimizations to the engine, and did some cleaning up of the code. He also improved the scripts that help artists check for mistakes, and made a Blender importer for game objects, reducing the amount of work it requires. He also added the ability to play visual animations when a building is upgrading, and when a tech is being researched. He is currently working with the help of OptimusShepard to fix an issue with recent AMD CPUs. If you have Zen 2 CPU and want to help please head to this forum thread and tell us. Autobuildable video (3D Printing house) Researching animations user1 and Dunedan are working on upgrading the lobby backend to be able to provide new features for the next Alphas. vladislavbelov continued working on the rendering engine to bring improved performance and visuals. The next alpha will feature a FXAA filter, allowing models to look less jagged. He also worked on better tools to debug the renderer and easier access to those through the game. He added an option to use low quality shadows on more modest machines. He also worked on the map editor, allowing it to save the panel size between each session so one does not have to resize them every time, and a non-strict search to the Atlas entity list. He is currently working with Stan to add an option to resize the map with a specific offset. Snapping (1).mp4 Snapping to buildings (video) Screenshots with/without FXAA wraitii has worked on improving the engine, cleaning the code to make it easier to extend and to optimize. He has also been reviewing patches from Freagarach with aim to add gameplay features, such as status effects. Status effects will allow units to deal more realistic damage to others. For instance, it will allow flaming arrows to keep dealing burning damage after a unit has been hit. status-effect-test2.mp4 Art Alexandermb added a Transversal Crested gallic centurion helmet, sheaths, new idle relax animations for the hoplite, and scutum shields. He also made some citizen animations for the slave and siege engine operators. Likewise, there are some new Gaul idles for swordsman and new pikeman attacking animations, new Roman republican and imperial shields, gladiator helmets, Celtic Carnyx, while he finished the bear animations, hippopotamus animations, worked on improving camel animations and gave more options to modders, new animations for siege engines and improved existing ones. He worked on improving the shield textures, allowed elephant turrets to attack by giving them an attack animation, and animated the baby elephant. 5253d395bfdc8c4e.mp4 Bigtiger has worked on some gorgeous new elm trees, new poplar trees and improved the flora LordGood added new Ptolemaic houses, committed Enrique's pines, artillery towers, new unit sounds, Hungarian oaks, bolt tower and amphitheater, updated Ptolemaic sentry tower and added a new obelisk. He has worked on a few beautiful maps and provided screenshots for advertising on social media. Artillery Towers Hungarian oaks Pompeii amphitheatre for Romans in scenario editor New Ptolemaic houses Sahyadri Buttes, a new 5 player Skirmish map Atlas Valleys is a large 8 player skirmish map Samulis created new cattle sounds. Stan added an orange firefly particle and committed new improved berry bushes by BigTiger. He updated outdated icons and cavalry icons to use the new horse assets. There are now new lavender, new bluefin tuna textures and animations. Lately he has developed new icons for the unit actions and for status effects. He created three textures and icons for bears (polar, black, brown), made two hippopotamuses textures and created a model for the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. He also replaced the current Gaul wonder by a more historically accurate one: the sanctuary of Corent. Sanctuary of Corent Fireflies raw2.mp4 bear Mausoleum at Halicarnassus Hippopotamus wackyserious improved textures for Greeks, Iberians, Romans, and Carthaginians. Judean slinger Iberian Spearmen Roman Advanced Cavalry Cretan Archer Iphicrates Roman TRIARII wowgetoffyourcellphone made some Corinthian helmet portraits, worked on some animals portraits and has given feedback on gameplay and icons and has made some of the screenshots in this development report. Miscellaneous Balancing Nescio worked with Stockfish, Badosu, ValirAnt, FeldFeld, and borg- to get some gameplay balancing patches, which were committed by other members. Documentation Beau fixed some mistakes in the documentation.² Beise is currently translating the wiki from English to German. Nescio has also been updating the English style guide, corrected many templates for consistency, and standardized hero aura descriptions and generalised tooltips. Finances Jeru made a new financial report and submitted a development report to SPI our financial sponsor. Thank everyone for all the donations. You can see more information about supporting us financially here: https://play0ad.com/community/donate/. Lobby user1 and elexis continue their work moderating in the multiplayer lobby. user1 created a a special thread on the forums to report all issues regarding the lobby. Interviews Freagarach gave a presentation at Sogyo Stan gave an interview for the Waffling Taylors podcast (https://wafflingtaylors.rocks/). The podcast should be available in June. He gave an interview with Picasoft (in French - you can find an English transcript here). Picasoft is an association at the UTC (a French school) you can read more about it here. He also gave a presentation at Avanade He also held a stand at the Capitole Du Libre in November 2019. You can find a summary here vladislavbelov did a presentation in FOSDEM 2020 about graphics pipelines in 0AD. See this thread for more information. Translations 16 languages have reached more than 90% of translation. If you want to help with your native language head over to Transifex. Gallaecio has been improving and correcting the English descriptions in-game with the help of Nescio Tournaments There has been quite a lot of activity on the competitive side! Most of the replays are available on the forums, so you can see some of the best players in action. derekO organized “double elimination” a tournament fpre organized a “survival” tournament HMS-Surprise organized the Sunday pro games tournament 1v1 commentated between 17/01/2019 and 24/11/2019. This was a competitive community event with very nice graphic designs! marcusAureliu#s organized a tournament rain_ironwolf organized a Hyrule Conquest tournament Stockfish also organized a multiplayer 0 A.D. tournament called the Primus Pilus tournament from 30/03/2020 to 29/04/2020. HMS-Surprise eventually took over to finish it. This report was written by asterix with the help of Thorfinn the Shallow Minded, Stan and Sundiata. For more details, please check wiki:Alpha24 and the roadmap. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

shouldn't balancing rather go on with the community mod? A lot of development can be made trough that project.

Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present this monthly development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Head to our forums and join our active community! FOSDEM @ Brussels 3-4 February Those who'd like to meet members of the development team and are available this weekend, can join us on FOSDEM: "a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels". We'd love to see you there, and maybe grab a beer afterwards! The Team expands! We are proud to accept temple into the 0 A.D. programming team! May his commits be many and his whitespaces few (C++ joke)! Programming Itms, our project lead, has been working on a breakage in Jenkins, a tool that helps us ensure code quality by running tests in order to check the code for warnings, and has looked into goodies for FOSDEM (spoiler). mimo updated the AI to support the new combined victory conditions, among his ongoing improvements to the AI. He has improved the performance of GetEntityState by merging it with GetExtendedEntityState (performance improvement when selecting many units), reported some map errors and reviewed temple's formation patches. elexis "I like Vectors" has rewritten a lot of old random map generation code that will allow the player to select the biome on random maps. Other features: River maps are rotated arbitrarily, so that players get a truly unique map generation each time. The game now supports uncapturable Gaia fortifications. bb has committed the new game setup User Interface, providing sufficient space to add more game settings for the foreseeable future, and the combined victory patch. Vladislav reviewed a few patches and returned to working on post-game charts. Imarok committed a couple of minor GUI fixes. More importantly: he also worked on secure lobby authentication and a mod version test in the lobby (multiplayer). gallaecio has improved a couple of English strings. s0600204 worked on the template viewer patch. It is a new dialog that can be opened from the selection panel and structure tree and displays statistics and descriptions about the selected unit or building. temple worked on unit AI with dropsite distances (e.g. mill, storehouse) and visibility checks, fixed blinking territory and a couple of things with formations. He also fixed dock placement and updated some patches, which are waiting for a review by other programmers. Now he is turning his attention to the diplomacy color patch, together with Elexis, and balance changes for the next alpha release. Art & Sound LordGood has been working on the building sets. He committed a Ptolemies stable, archery range, workshop & elephant stable and a Roman stable & workshop. Stan has done some crash reporting and tried to reproduce call stacks, has worked on fixing the soundmanager bug that has been here since r9055 and has commmitted templates for new heroes. On the art side: he created many new helmets and caps. Alexandermb, a skillful new artist, has been very active. He has had his new models for horses and spears committed, aside other art improvements like giving siege weapons engineers. Omri Lahav, our composer, has not been idle in January. So much so that we'll dedicate a separate development blog to his work of late! Stay tuned! Community Contributions Dunedan and fpre's efforts to help with alpha 23 GUI and lobby patches, both coding and reviewing are greatly appreciated by the team! Lion.Kanzen recorded new sounds for the archery range. Hannibal_Barca has uploaded a beautiful winter river map. wowgetoffyourcellphone contributed new icons for dogs and for cavalry. Bigtiger created a beautiful skirmish map: Via Augusta. Leyto created a Muskox texture, that was committed to the game. Image: LordGood's Roman Workshop, front-side and back-side (centre). - by @plumo

0 A.D. Development Report - Autumn 2017 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present this monthly development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Head to our forums and join our active community! 2017 Indie of the Year Awards We made it to the final 100! Now we need your vote once more! Support the team and community by voting your-favourite-historical-real-time-strategy-game in-the-making to the top! The list of planned features is dwindling, and with the extra attention a prize brings, new contributors flock to our forums. Programming Itms, our project lead, worked on the build system with the update to premake5 and added VS 2015 support. Now he is showing SpiderMonkey some love... All on top of managing and directing the efforts of the team! mimo , our AI programmer, cleaned a lot of legacy code, as the first AI prototype was added many many alpha versions ago. He also removed the old tutorial AI and improved mod support. elexis has refactored the majority of the random map generator code, making it easier than ever before to create of new random map script, implemented tab controls for the options page and reviewed many patches by external contributors. The engine code become more fail-safe (by marking simulation states as read-only), simple (only one way to access JSON data globally) and versatile (implementing it in JavaScript instead of C++). bb has been busy coding the prerequisites for secondary attacks. Imagine your legionarii throwing their pila before drawing their gladii (just dropping some Latin like it's hot). He also worked on combining victory conditions (so one can play regicide + wonder victory for instance) and has been cleaning up templates for readability (among his work on the template viewer). He is also working on an updated user interface for the game setup, with more space for the options, so more can be added in the future. Vladislav has written some validation scripts and has had some experiments with Atlas and cinematics. fatherbushido has mostly worked on the attack component, both his own code and reviews of features like the destruction damage ( for instance fire ships exploding upon destruction) by others. wraitii has finished some of the pre-requirements of the unit motion rewrite (more fluid movements of units) and rebased the single player campaign patch, laying the groundwork for campaigns to be added in the future. Imarok has worked on the mouse wheel batch size (a feature that allows the player to specify the number of units to train by scrolling the mousewheel) and an anti-impersonation lobby patch, which further secures multiplayer lobby authentication. s0600204 and FeXoR have finished the patch that would make the random map generator wall-placer civ-agnostic. leper has been auditing patches by other programmers, which is a crucial yet tedious task. As usual, community members played a key role in our open source development process! Sandarac has implemented an attack range visualization that lets you preview the attack capabilities before placing the buildings. fpre contributed a number of enrichments to the multiplayer user interface. Last but not least, temple has helped tremendously with a lot of patches and reviews! His contributions on an issue with the pathfinder, which was the cause of additional lag, were crucial! Art & Sound LordGood and Stan have been working on new graphics for stables, workshops and archery ranges. Stan also committed a patch by Alexandermb which added animations for siege engines. Ever wondered how a zebu would fall lifeless to the ground? Programmers call this ZEBU DEATH ANIM, tells you something about them, right? Well, Stan has been struggling with his animation for quite some time. He has asked for a Field Study trip to South East Asia but our budget only stretches so far... after all: we're free-to-play. Stan also worked on the visual move order indicator. Omri Lahav, our ever talented composer-arranger-musician, has been working on another music track, and has acquired vocal recordings to enhance a current track! Head over to the 0 A.D. Bandcamp page and check out the 33 (so far!) original recordings for this project. Judge the zebu death animation for yourself!

How do I help out with the 0 A.D. project, I willing to help out with this great game.

Hi all, Now is the time to use the power of the 0 A.D. community to develop the next 1v1 event. This thread is the main place for you to share, and vote for, all of your valuable ideas for the style, duration, score system, rules, streaming, commentating, drawing of lots, level of players, awards, etc. anything. Let's all work together to make it better. Event Period: Late October 4 weeks + 1 week optional on Sundays at 17.00 UTC Here are the rules: -Single elimination, 8 Players, 3 rounds -The best players have priority to play. You need to be in the room early if you want to play. -Players are allowed to ban 2 civs before every round. -300 pop, small map, no dance -The best players have priority to play. You need to be in the room early if you want to play. -Players will be ordered by seed, best to worst. -If you win, you gain 3 points. If you lose, you gain 1 point. -At the end of the 4th week, If the best two players have the same point, there will be the 5th week. @psypherium @Feldfeld @ValihrAnt @camel @Boudica @ffffffff @JC (naval supremacist) @Unknown_Player @borg- @chrstgtr @Lefo @Pudim @Philip the Swaggerless @Stockfish @PhyZik @itrelles @nani @Hannibal_Barca @LeGenDz @phoenixdesk @LANDLORD @kizitom @mord @ffm @user1 @elexis @Stan` @SaidRdz @Emperior @Emacz @Dunedan @Ivaylo @yilmazgng @go2die @MorTak @Imarok @sarcoma @Lion.Kanzen @D_D_T_ @R4PT0R @Servo @Itms @coworotel @badosu @sphyrth @wowgetoffyourcellphone @faction02 @feneur @Issh @PrincessChristmas @RolandSC2 @Jofursloft @CAGD_lulofun @HirnWolf @Dakara @thankforpie @mgx *** If you want to be in the notification list, or not, send a PM so I can add/remove your nick.

Thanks for the report! It seems it doesn't like DDS for some reason. I fixed the mod and uploaded the new version. Could you try it?

In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on the finances of the project as of 2018-09-08. 0 A.D. has funds in two places: Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter "SPI"); An account on Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider. SPI Earmark for 0 A.D. As of 2018-01-01, the 0 A.D. earmark is USD 31,283.40 USD (Source: SPI Treasurer's Report). Unfortunately, more recent data are still unavailable. Other Accounts On Flattr, we have EUR 885.28 and USD 1.96 available, which are approximately USD 1,025. We have asked SPI to help us consolidate these funds with the SPI earmark. Total In total, we have approximately 32,308.40 USD. Concluding Remarks The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”) and Aviv (“Jeru”). Earlier this year, Adarash ("MishFTW") stepped down from the committee after almost four years of service. Thank you so much for your contribution, Adarash! It's been a pleasure and a privilege to have you on the committee. We welcome your comments and suggestions on the management of 0 A.D. finances.

0 A.D. Development Report #16 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., is happy to present this 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! !!! We are in need of programmers and animators! If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Clockwise: New unit meshes, Mastiff, shark and fox Programming & Art Enrique, our talented lead artist, has been busy last month. He decided it was time to rework 0 A.D. meshes and armature. The results are bringing them up to par with modern RTS games. Now the help of animators is required (if you are an animator, please post an application) to make use of the new possibilities. He also updated the complete Persian building set with better textures and ambient occlusion. If that was not enough, he also reworked the cypress trees and many other plants. Mimo has been hard at work improving his AI bot: Petra, which is the toughest AI opponent to date. Among cleaning up code and bug fixes, he also added AI support for saved games! A feature that has been high on the community's wishlist. On top of that the AI is now able to send tribute to its allies! Yves, has set the goal of upgrading our SpiderMonkey to ESR31 for next alpha release. Performance will increase with this upgrade and memory usage will be reduced a bit. Check out the following links for more information about performance measurements and detailed effects of gcPreserveCode setting. Itms fixed bugs related to the new Fog of War and bug fixes submitted by community members. He also accepted the task of improving the pathfinder, based on Philip's and Wraitii's work. We think we speak for all of you when we wish him good luck! historic_bruno updated Windows version strings for 8.1 and 10 (technical preview), fixed a couple of OS X bugs and many bug fixes submitted by community members. Leper updated 0 A.D. with the latest translation work of our community and fixed a good amount of bugs, many submitted by members of our community. He also replaced CParser, which is slow, with FSM to parse our config files. Micket modeled a shark, a wolfhound, a mastiff and tuna fish. Some of his models have been textured as well (as you can see in the screenshot above). Stanislas69 has also been modeling a lot of different objects, among his first steps in animating. Scythetwirler fixed a bug in the rating system of the lobby bot.

0 A.D. Development Report #15 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., is happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! !!! We are in need of (skilled) programmers. If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Team News Our 'family' keeps expanding! A warm welcome to Scythetwirler, who has been working on our multiplayer lobby among other things. Translations Work has begun on translating 0 A.D. into many, many languages. Using the Transifex translating system, everyone can help! Check out this link. Screenshot of the Month Enrique's new horses (WIP). Animated transparent manes and moving armor are also in the pipeline (thanks to Wraitii). Programming & Art Mythos_Ruler added a new map (Savanna River), rebalanced many units/technologies/... and laid the groundwork for our next civilization: the Seleucid Empire. Yves has been hard at work upgrading Spidermonkey from 1.8.5 (which is old and unsupported) to a more recent version (v24 or later). He committed one patch that solves the massive performance problems we got with the new SpiderMonkey versions in lategame by changing the way different AI players are separated from each other. The second big patch adapted our code with the old SpiderMonkey version to match the most important constraints required by newer versions without updating yet. The third patch removed the JS Debugger temporarily because it will require a partial rewrite but doesn't have priority for the update. After these changes the WIP patch for the new SpiderMonkey is now much smaller and easier to handle (test, update and review). Wraitii added a fishing boat for our latest civilization: the Ptolomaic Egyptians. He also implemented some new animals done by Micket: crocodiles, sharks and hawks. He optimized the water code making it faster (speed-up of foam generation code, ...) and more modern. Last but not least, he is overhauling the Aegis bot (AI), squashing AI bugs and improving their capabilities. Sanderd17 implemented countless functionality fixes; his energy/time went primarily to reworking formations and chasing (i.e. attacking fleeing units, animals). Enrique has been reworking our horses, as they were getting a bit outdated. Your cavalry charges will be even more heroic! Leper & Historic_Bruno fixed a number of crashes and other bugs. A full list of changes is available in the SVN log (any similarity with 99,9 % of all Google Chrome change logs is pure coincidence...) Bajter and Kabzerek are working on the summary screen. Their changes should provide more information to the player (after-battle statistics...). AnnieQ has been working on new unit cards for the Celtic factions. BoeseRaupe has been working on the hero icon and a way to delete a units group with a right mouse click. Lordgood: Artiste extraordinaire and My Little Pony-afficionado, has created a new Roman tower and a new wonder & homestead for the Carthaginians. Our "Brony" (Brother + Pony) also started working on the building set for the Seleucids. Dumbo has been working on improving unit behavior when choosing opponents. Itms added a town bell function. Enemy raid incoming? With one mouse-click your female citizens rush to the nearest building to find shelter. Scythetwirler & Josh have implemented various multiplayer lobby fixes to the alpha 15/16 server and alpha 16 client. They are hard at work fixing the post-game lobby disconnects and the problems with hosting to improve your multiplayer experience in alpha 16. Apart from the lobby, Josh has also been working towards a more intuitive lobby login UI in the new "modern" style (WIP by Pureon), has done various UI engine cleanup, and re-worked the selection back-end to yield ~2% overall performance increase. Mimo improved the way trade works. Now the trade management is centralised so there's no need to click every trader. Stanislas69 has been reworking the Iberian barracks and corral, and the Gallic mill and farmstead. Music & Sound Omri_Lahav has been working on new peace tracks for the different civilizations and freshening up the score. A professional tin whistle player will redo the Celts / Gauls, a trombone player will record the low brassy parts on Honor Bound / Elysian Fields, and the Qanun player will be brought in to add another unique color to the Ptolemaic Egyptians. I think it is fair to say Omri is setting new standards for music in freeware software. LAVS has been working on battle sounds that will make every melee more compelling.

0 A.D. Development Report #9 (21/10/2012 - 21/11/2012) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Screenshot of the Month! This strategic land bridge was named after the nearby Greek city. Need I say more? Click the image to see a larger version. Art & Programming & Sound Wraitii added enhanced water rendering, shore foam and waves for your viewing pleasure! He has also updated the water settings for most scenarios. leper added diplomacy to the game! Is your ally eating up your CPU's power? Declare war! He also added resource icons in the in-game tooltips (patch by regular contributor zoot). quantumstate added unit training hotkeys (patch from mammadori), some more mediterranean textures and a tutorial scenario: 'intruductory tutorial'. stwf kept working on the Sound Manager. Hurricane Sandy cut off his electricity for more than a week but now he's back in business. Shield_Bearer added the Roman bireme (= an ancient oared warship). He is also working on new human models together with Kopesh and Enrique! Omri_Lahav added yet another new track to our ever-expanding soundtrack: Calm Before the Storm. Enrique kept working on the Mauryan Indians, a new civilization which will be fully playable in two alpha releases' time. Lately he committed the Mauryan fortress among with some more textures. He has also added rubble (when you destroy a building) for most buildings! fcxSanya reimplented training limits for heroes! Only one hero per player so choose wisely! Spahbod added a new map: 'Corinthian Isthmus'. Zaggy1024 animated yet another animal! Please welcome in all its glory: the peacock! historic_bruno updated some lists with contributors, and fixed Atlas and Collada dylib loading on OS X, for non-bundled binaries and a build error on MSVC (for most people this reads as: two bugs were fixed). Mythos_Ruler added normal/parallax mapping for Iberian & Roman gates, an attack animation for females and some weapons and shields for the Mauryan Indians. Last but not least: Myconid. Last week we decided to drop the fixed function renderer (which is barely used nowadays and was holding our graphics back). A road map was published internally with a list of planned graphical improvements. If Myconid can implement all of these (which he is capable of), then 0 A.D. will set the new graphical standard for open-source games. One of our newest asquisitions, Ludo38, has been making box art and wallpapers. Strictly speaking not part of the team (yet!) is Lordgood who has modeled and textured a few buildings for the Mauryan Indians. See you in a couple of weeks with the latest development news!

Wildfire Games, the international group developing 0 A.D. - Empires Ascendant, is happy to present the 13th 0 A.D. development report covering everything (or nearly everything) that happened since the 12th report in June. Most of the items covered in the current report went into Alpha 14 Naukratis, so you should be able to see them in action right now! First and foremost, Wildfire Games has launched a crowdfunding campaign via IndieGoGo, with the aim of raising $160,000 in 45 days. If successful, the funds from this campaign will go toward paying 2 team members to work on the game full-time (40+ hours per week) for up to 2 years! For our fans, that means more features faster and better performance quicker. Our stretch goals include another year of paid development so we can create an exciting single player campaign for the game! Click the logo below to check out our campaign! Screenshots for this Report (New Features) Multiplayer Lobby (Work in Progress) Want a human sparring partner? The new multiplayer lobby will greatly facilitate the organization of multiplayer games. Badmadblacksad wrote the framework for the lobby based on XMPP and gloox while Josh, alpha123 and leper added a wide range of features including IRC commands, nick highlighting, anti-spam filtering, moderator support, timestamps, and much more. Currently, Josh and alpha123 are implementing a game monitoring and reporting system in conjunction with a leaderboard based on an implementation of an ELO rating system by scythetwirler. Players will have the option to play rated and unrated games as well as team games. Viewing other online game-seeking players will be located in a simple, intuitive part of the main program. Art and Random Maps Pureon fixed projectile errors on the Mauryan elephant archer, added new icons, modeled new blacksmith buildings and a new Persian Palace, created a mockup for a redesign of the GUI, and made smaller ships' movement sounds quieter than those of larger ships. Enrique modeled new blacksmith buildings, textured new animal models made by Micket, textured new Stonehenge model from Ludo38, and improved the quality of our graphics even further by adding ambient occlusion, specular, and parallax to all Greek buildings. He's also been working on differentiating the Gauls and Britons further (see the Gaul houses above). LordGood created new Carthaginian and Iberian unit portraits as well as a British tower (see screenshot above). Ludo38 created a new model of the Britons' wonder, Stonehenge (see screenshot above). Micket modeled a gorilla, auroch, partridge, hawk, cobra, white rhino, and wolf (see screenshot above). They aren't present in the game yet, but expect a much more diverse animal population soon! Spahbod polished the random maps and fixed a bug with technology caching. Performance, Gameplay and UI Programming contractor RedFox spent a lot of time optimizing and rewriting numerous parts of the engine and the resulting performance gains look promising, as shown in his development reports. He also spent some time to reduce the size of the patch review queue. Don implemented a quadtree to improve performance. Josh is working on a multiplayer lobby (pictured above) and has also added scrollbar improvements and fixed test issues on ARM CPUs. Project leader Mythos_Ruler rebalanced many stats, added new technologies, and made animals visible through Fog of War. alpha123 implemented diminishing returns for farms, added player perspectives to the developer overlay, rebalanced stats, added hotkeys to jump to places on a map, and reviewed and committed several patches. historicbruno added an option to change game speed, fixed building issues and memory leaks, added UI sounds, reviewed and committed many patches, and much more. mimo implemented shared trade gains for traders, fixed many bugs, implemented corralling and herder (which is under discussion), facilitated garrisoning of ships, implemented an escort order, and added an indicator for the number of workers tasked at gathering resources or building a foundation. Programming Infrastructure and Other Important Contributions Philip started reviewing RedFox's megapatch, optimized the entity-component system, a core part of the engine, experimented with , added a Gerrit server (which, in conjuction with git, will help streamline development), and helped others with their patches. sanderd17's work includes terrain anchoring (see screenshot above), animation interpolation, restriction of formations for non-military units, a new pike elevation tool in Atlas, an improved BuildingAI, health regeneration, WIP auras, shoreline walls, platform-consistent JavaScript math functions, elevation advantage for ranged units, and much more. Yves, with assistance from Mozilla developer h4writer, has continued his work on upgrading SpiderMonkey. Unfortunately, the upgrade does not seem like it will help as much with performance as we hoped. leper added hotloading support for skeletons, reviewed and committed many patches, and fixed miscellaneous bugs. AI wraitii adapted AegisBot for the new changes introduced in Alpha 14 and is currently rewriting AegisBot to be stronger and more efficient . He has also made impressive visual and performance improvements to water. quantumstate fixed unit attacking bugs in AegisBot. Bug Fixes and Other Improvements ldsh improved hotkey support for non-QWERTY keyboards. idanwin added and modified some cheat codes. mpmoreti added an alarm to signal the completion of a technology. kingadami facilitated the task of checking how many units are garrisoned inside a building. Jgwman added combined costs to the gate conversion tooltip. Never blindly convert your walls again! Mackeul wrote a patch to let the game report nice error messages to Windows users with missing hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers. Have you ever been annoyed by projectiles blocking your view? Enjoy a unobstructed view, now that Markus fixed the bouncing of projectiles. stwf has been working on improving the SoundManager by fixing bugs and adding functionality. Just for Fun scythetwirler has given flying objects, such as the P-51 Mustang, the (see video). We also want to thank all our contributors that are committing patches with new features and fixes. Not all of them make it into the report, but we are grateful. We would also like to thank scythetwirler for his crucial help with writing this report. If you want to be part of this project, you are invited to head to our forums and join our active community! Importantly, we are always looking for skilled programmers who want to contribute in fields such as gameplay, AI, sound, and graphics. We are also looking for Animators and 3D artists, a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager, and Scenario Designers. Feel free to introduce yourself on the forums using our recommended application format. Your contributions are crucial! Thanks in advance. See you next time with the latest development news!

0 A.D. Development Report #12 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this month's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! !!! We are in need of (skilled) programmers. If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! On Performance Performance has been a major bottleneck for quite some time. We know the problems, and we are committed to resolve them. Last two months we've seen an influx of new contributors who are keen to help us fix the lag. sbte committed some patches (sim interpolation optimization) and a couple of memory leaks have been fixed (Markus). Kuranes has also been working on optimization and his work seems very promising. He added VBO support to minimap entity rendering (1,5 ms/frame to 0,8 ms/frame, which may seem trivial but every millisecond counts!). But this is just the tip of the iceberg, his many other optimizations are WIP or being reviewed by us, but when they are committed to the game the increase in performance will be noticeable! Last but not least we have Redfox, a retired 0 A.D. programmer who became active again. Currently he is working on font rendering, but like Kuranes, he is dedicated to implement major code optimizations, and he has the know-how. Their work will make 0 A.D. the enjoyable and fluid experience, you always wanted it to be! Screenshot of the Month Team News: Peter a.k.a. alpha123 has joined the programming team. Peter has contributed quite a few patches to the game and has been a valuable contributor in design discussions. Programming & Art & Sound Our new project lead, Mythos_Ruler has been busy as well. So busy in fact that I'm reluctant to write down all the things he has been working on last two months. The major new feature is the blacksmith. Although the models are placeholders for now, in the near future you'll be able to upgrade your units in this new building. He also added new technologies, a new Spartan hero (Brasidas), rebalancing and tweaking the stats of almost every unit ingame, a new map, normal and specular map for desert terrain ... we could go on and on, but we insist you check out our next alpha release. historic_bruno committed a lot of patches and bug fixes. I'll mention just a couple of them: updating Valgrind headers and fixing some memory leaks (patches by Markus), updating Boost Library to 1.53.0 and improving SDL 2.0 support among many other. He also added a game speed option to the match setup. Leper also had a productive period. He cleaned up code, and reviewed and committed many functionality patches, that were written by contributors like Josh and KareemErgawy among others. stwf has kept working on the Soundmanager. Memory leaks have been removed, code has been cleaned up and multiple song playlists are now used by civs that have multiple tracks defined. Wraiitii committed a few fixes and improvements related to water. More importantly, he is completely reworking the water code: adding support for different water heights (e.g. lake vs. sea), optimizing foam and shore waves ... On top of that, ships received a sinking animation! Never has loosing your fleet been more pleasant to watch. Enrique has been working on shields, unit props and buildings for our next civilization: the Ptolemaic Egyptians! He is also designing, modeling and texturing the new blacksmith buildings. Omri Lahav has been working on some new material for the Mauryans. He has just invited two new guest musicians (didgeridoo and celtic harp) to capture their performance. How many freeware, open-source projects have a live recorded soundtrack? We are sure you will hear the difference. Yves is working hard on upgrading Spidermonkey. The first benchmarks are a bit disappointing, but Yves won't give up. This is not a simple task, but in the end performance and functionality will benefit greatly from the upgrade. alpha123 and quantumstate reworked the armor system. Damage = Attack - Armour was changed to: Damage = Attack * 0.9^Armour (in case your unit has a 10% armor bonus). This change was necessary as techs now have the same effect on each unit. So a 10% armour tech will decrease damage by 10% for every unit. We also want to thank all our contributors committing patches with new features and fixes. Not all of them make it into the report, but we are grateful. We can't do it without you guys and gals! This month special kudos to sanderd17 who is giving archers range bonuses based on map height and Micket who modeled a Hippo and an Oryx (and a WIP tiger). We'll get back to you next month with the latest development news!

Just to clarify, do you mean that after Alpha 26 there will be no further development put into the game, or do you mean there will be no more "Alpha" stage development as you wish not to double up on the 26 letters of the alphabet, and therefore will be shifting into Beta phase? Personally, I hope for the latter, as I find this game very enjoyable and am sorry that I do not have the technical skills, nor funds, to assist in making sure it continues in development and grows to meet its full potential.