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0 A.D. Weekly Report #1 by plumo, 0 A.D. Community Liaison The wait between consequent alpha releases can be hard, we realize that. To ease the pain we -- the international bunch of volunteers that is Wildfire Games -- will start showing what’s being worked on behind the scenes by our dozens of contributors. Starting this week, we commence with publishing a weekly 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 is a must-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. No wizard when it comes to 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! Feature spotlight! Badmadblacksad, historicbruno, and Pureon have been working on implementing gates to work with the existing click-drag wall system. Expect this feature in the next alpha release! Pureon also uploaded a teaser video. Art & Programming After his work on the gates, Badmadblacksad, departed on a well-deserved holiday. When he gets back, we’ll urge him to continue working on the new multiplayer lobby. One of our more reclusive contributors, Eggbird, has been modeling buildings for the Mauryan Indians, the recently-announced new civilization that will make a partial debut in alpha XI (for the complete implementation of this civilization you will have to wait until the release of alpha XII). Last week Eggbird has been putting the final touches on the civilization centre. Gen.Kenobi has been busy revising the Hellenic buildings. Last week he remodeled and retextured the market building. This week he has been working on the Greek fortress. Historicbruno has mainly been reviewing and implementing patches, submitted by other contributors like F00/Deiz, who personally whips programmers to greater productivity! This week saw the implementation of 'always visible hero selection rings'. This screenshot will explain. Myconid has been working ‘round the clock to add modern post-processing effects like Bloom, HDR and SSAO to 0 A.D. Making everything work on various systems and video cards is a long and tedious process but the results are well worth the trouble. Art department veteran (12,390 forum posts and counting!) Mythos_Ruler has been working on modeling and texturing units for the Mauryan Indians. He has also been editing the massive design document in our wiki. Pureon has been working mainly on gate animations (last week he finished all gate animations!) and on new icons for opened gate/closed gate. Spahbod has created autumn textures for the temperate biome. He has also been working on a new GUI for the match setup. On top of being considerably more user-friendly the match setup now features map previews! Thanks also to luziferius for these. Wijitmaker, an old timer who has been around far longer than any current team member can remember, is currently reworking some of the building and clothing textures to make good use of the new possibilities introduced by myconid (Parallax) and Philip (Specular Lighting). Wraitii has been working on a new and improved water shader. He is currently implementing more realistic shore waves. Zaggy1024 is facing the massive task to have all animals in 0 A.D. fully animated. Lately there have been rumors of walking (not gliding!) elephants. Audio Our talented composer Omri Lahav has been recording new tracks for both the Athenian and the Macedonian civilizations. He insists on recording the performance of a real flutist instead of just using a flute sample… once again we realize how fortunate we are to have him. Misc. You find 0 A.D.’s website slightly (we stay polite) outdated? We too! That’s why bstempi, Geek377 and gerbilOFdoom are working hard on a brand new web portal for your favorite open-source game. Project leader Feneur and PR guy Jeru are responsible for the promotion of the game among many other things. They keep the information on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and on portals like moddb up to date, whilst spreading the word (and the love). Last but not least is K776, our open source development manager who sets the deadlines and targets for every alpha. His catchphrase ‘Will this make it into next alpha?’ is becoming legendary. Next Monday: our second Weekly Report!

This time Jeroen, aka vts is our featured contributor. He has been working on both minor fixes and big things like the wall system. Read on for a description on what "Featured contributor" means or jump down to read the quick interview with Jeroen. As you may remember we had a thing a while back called Member/Contributor of the Month, as you may also remember we have not any such posts for quite a while. It's definitely not because of a lack of skilled contributors as anyone following the forums/IRC (or for that matter the release announcements) knows. It was hard to keep to the monthly schedule, but since we still think it's important to highlight the skilled people who work on 0 A.D. in various ways we've decided to bring it back in a slightly different way. Both to honor the hard-working contributors, and to give everyone a chance to get to know them a bit. To give you some insight into who the people working on 0 A.D. are Now we will post on a slightly less rigid schedule, but that doesn't mean that the people featured are any less worthy And here comes the interview with Jeroen: Tell us a bit about yourself? I'm Jeroen, a 23-year old guy from the city of Ghent, Belgium. I finished my Computer Science studies last year, and am now employed at a financial company in Brussels as a security analysist. I've been a programmer on 0 A.D. for about a year now. My programming background is mainly one of personal interest. I believe it started as a teenager, when I became interested in building websites in Flash. To make them do more interesting things I started learning ActionScript, which in turn lead to PHP to be able to do things on the server side, more generally exposing me to the LAMP stack. I moved on from Flash websites to more traditional ones, and picked up some Java, C/C++ and Python along the way. Today, I still occasionally do web development, although I find my interests have moved more towards non-web development. I enjoy programming and general problem-solving recreationally. I tend to write programs just for fun, for personal use or because I have my mind set on learning how to write a program that does a particular thing. I enjoy a challenge in that regard. Game development was a challenge for me when I first heard about 0 A.D. (and it still is), and that was a big part of the reason why I decided to join the project. It's a subject I've always been interested in, but that I never had a chance to get serious with. Many aspects about 3D programming seemed very complex and hard to grasp for me, so I figured just diving in would be a good idea. There are some communities that I used to be a part of when I was younger. I used to be very active on Kirupa Forums, a board about web development (and anything related). I also used to be part of the Crossfire community, which revolves around the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory that I used to play quite enthousiastically and competitively. I still play it occasionally, but just for fun. Other than that: I'm a big fan of movie soundtracks, and am somewhat privileged in that regard as the annual World Soundtrack Awards are held right where I live. I also like to go for a run every so many days around my local track. On my nightstand are books about reverse engineering, windows internals, (popular) cosmology and religion, and our local variant of Scientific American. What have you found most interesting about contributing to 0 A.D.? I think the most interesting part has to be the way in which a loosely grouped set of people from around the world manages to coordinate an effort like this, and have been keeping it going for so long. I've said this before, but one of the things I really like about 0 A.D. development is that the people involved are active in such a way as to create a positive feedback loop: because people keep the project moving forward, everyone stays encouraged to keep working on it, in turn contributing to the feedback loop for others. Anything you want to add? Nothing especially important, although I would like to point out that I think it's great to be able to work with and learn from people who are vastly more talented and knowledgeable than me, and not only in the field of programming. Oh, and I also enjoy the occasional back-and-forth with people on IRC who appear to share my tastes in music (you know who you are)

To lock and unlock the gate A locked gate will never open, while an open one always will(for allies only iirc).