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Position: Video Editor Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free? Yes Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license? Yes Name: Peter Cacciatore Email: petercacciatore6@gmail.com Location: East Coast US Availability: 7-8 Hours Average Age: (Optional) How old are you? Not because it matters, but rather we ask this to anticipate your availability and other factors based on where you are in life. Occupation: I am currently a film major in college who is specializing in editing. Skills and Experience: I have done considerable work making trailers and gameplay videos for various Total War games and mods. I have a lot of experience with several different editing applications including Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I have a fine ear for timing of music in my work and have a firm grasp of editing technique. Motivation: I have always loved video editing and film making from a young age. In particular I love making videos with my PC games such as the Total War series. It's personal for me since it was making those Total War videos that got me into pursuing this kind of work in the first place. I was bed ridden from a couple of operations on my legs several years ago, because I had little else to do so I tried making these battle scenes with Medieval 2 Total War's cinematic editor. Everything kind of snowballed from there. Personality: I see myself as someone who can make a powerful dynamic image with a lot of heart as well. Short Essay: I've known about Wildfire Games for a while now since I've played the 0 AD on several occasions. It's an enjoyable game for sure. I want to help this project to see it continue to grow more and more. For me personally I would love to help to expand my professional portfolio and get more experience in a professional setting. Interests and Hobbies: The other stuff I like to do is make live action films for my College work and make mods for the various games in the Total War series. Much of my work that you will see is promotional work for my own mod: Medieval Kingdoms Total War. Staff: (Optional) Do you know, or know of anyone on the team? Community: Total War Center Favorite Game: Total War Rome 2, although I hate playing favorites. Work Examples: Here is just some of my work I've done over the past year. I have more if you wish plus live action work as well. Thank you for your time.

I imagine pathfinding will be the topic of the next developer report. Hopefully.

Hi everyone! We decided it would be a good idea to do some pioneering work on trigger-based scenarios. Hence we are going to create a trigger-based scenario called Athens Triumphant. The main purpose of this project is logically to do pioneering work on triggers, to provide a base for other maps and to get our Scenario Designers accustomed with the Trigger functionality in 0 A.D. This scenario deals with the Greco-Persian Wars. We divided it roughly into three parts: Battle of Marathon, Defense of Athens and the Battle of Salamis. We created a story diagram to give an easily readable overview of the story line. Note that this could be changed in the future. We have used the Athens Sandbox as a base to build our map upon. Here is the current status (with some triggerpoints and names placed): We'll keep you up-to-date with weekly updates! Keep in touch!

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.

It seems that the games continuously tries to find impossible paths (i.e. foot soldiers trying to attack a naval vessel that is out-of-range). As you can imagine, this creates massive lag even with small amount of units. In my scenario a ship was just outside a range of my ranged units, the units got as close as possible to the ship but couldn't walk any closer since there was water creating massive lag because the pathfinder tried to find an impossible path to the ship. I think it would be nice to cancel the path finding if one cannot be found in an alloted time; or give an audio/visual warning on which units are stuck.

Well, there are different types of reachability: Unit wants to go from land cell to another land cell, both not connected: No pathfinder needed, that's terrain analysis. The path can be blocked by water, mountains or other non-walkable cells. It helps to have a list of regions which are connected and the mean of transport (ship, feet). Unit wants to go from island beyond shore into water: pathfinder should stop at first or nearest dee water cell and no repeat. Unit wants to go from land cell to another land cell, obstructions can be non-movable (houses, etc), completely blocking the path or just some cells. If full blocking there is no need to run the pathfinder again as long as the house is still on the map. This can be solved by temporarily splitting a region into two and make the pathfinder listen to destroy events. Or there are other units blocking cells or the path. Here a time limit makes sense. I think the challenge is to tell the module asking the pathfinder, why the pathfinder failed and that module should be clever enough to not hammer the pathfinder with unsolvable requests. Basically a pathfinder response is success w/ path, partial success w/ partial path, permanently blocked by terrain, temporarily blocked by immobile obstruction or temporarily blocked by mobile obstacles with partial path if available. On top the size of a unit matters, elephants and sieges should not get lost in a forest. I'm not sure if temporarily blocked by wall should get a partial path or not. The player might want to destroy the blocker with his units or not. In case of an AI having it self locked out, I'm not sure too. But an AI should be clever enough to not build houses on the only way out of the village. Unfortunately that sounds more easy than it is. What should not happen are AIs randomly building structures on the map and destroying them because the pathfinder said so. What I have in mind for Hannibal is taking the CC, creating a circle around and from 10-16 points on that circle let the pathfinder compute a path to the cc. Then you have a list of cells from multiple paths. I think building houses on cells which appear multiple times in that list is not a good idea. The idea is to make "streets" an obstruction for buildings.

If it doesn't change the game fundamentally, then all it really does is give coders extra work doesn't it? Indeed, 0 AD has a lot of concepts in it that differentiate it from other, solid RTS games. That doesn't mean that 0 AD should do everything differently for the sake of being different. If you want to introduce a new game mechanic then it should be relevant to the way the game plays: how the units interact, how the economy works, what strategies you might use, how everything comes together. Changing farms slightly just for the sake being new and unique doesn't mean much when it doesn't change the way the economy works. I'd rather see a larger focus on caravans, corrals (which is being worked on), perhaps even a fertile terrain mechanic so that map control matters even more. Perhaps you could introduce of draft animals, mobile drop-sites for every civilization (no reason for Mauryans to be the only ones to have the fun), etc. Realism is always interesting but I don't believe that realism should be more important than an actual fun game. Realism should definitely influence how mechanics work in the game

there is nothing so different It is just a really really slight difference: a little bit more realistic, and not copy-paste variant from other RTS I think set of this mini changes can make difference between <another-in-row good but seen RTS> and Great one. Another one i mentioned several times: U just cant have farms around Town centre, because you did a copy-paste thing from previous RTSgames. It is not natural. No village in history had farms around its centre, not to mention towns and Cities and Capitals. Drop sites should be drop sites and town centre mustn't be one. And i see <another-in-row good but seen RTS> trap as most dangerous for this excellent project.

Its great to see that this RTS in development. Even better that its Open Source. Its really good to play and I know it will get even better with time. I think this project has a lot of potential. Especially with mods and custom games. I look forward to seeing some of the awesome custom maps with triggers etc that Warcraft 3 and Starcraft had in a few years from now. I think this game has massive potential in the future and its really fun already. Really missing the left hand only hot keys for buildings. It feels really differen't for me using the mouse to make buildings. Also I think as well as using Ctrl as the only key that can be used to assign groups. For example Ctrl + 1 etc it would be great to use the ` key as well. Then it would be super fast for hand movements on the keyboard. "`" + "1". Also ungarrissioning ships near hills often gets units stuck in unmovable positions. Its so excellent to find this game in development. Thanks to the Development team. Keep it up . Also had a few games using the lobby. Lots of fun. Thanks for creating an opensource RTS. I'll have some 0 AD LAN partys later on maybe after Alpha 18 or 19 comes out.

> If any of my ideas is to enter game, i would be proud. That's called programming and it is only for people not fearing complexity

I support Qwerty s idea on farm replenishing as ORIGINAL and AUTOMATIC

I'm leaning towards more simplicity and more sandbox. "pop/eco/military/building/tech formula" sounds like a ton of forum posts about "balancing" this formula. I would just make phases a costly tech. Then it is up to player to decide how he accumulates this wealth of resources. If someone spends an hour to advance to phase town with 5 units, well, then he earned it and it is not even unrealistic. Also, I think, if players start optimizing their game play towards a formula it restricts the game and many features remain unrecognized or unused. Not to mention the frustrating hours a newcomer must spend to grasp a rather complex formula. 1000 food and 1000 wood is hard enough to gather.

Appreciate the scenario inputs, Thorfinn! We might as well put those ideas in a similar scenario in the future. However, we have used the sandbox Athens map to make map-making easier and less time-consuming, so we can only put ideas and scenario objectives within the constraints of the map itself. Having said that, I have started the painting of the map, and lo, my inadequate painting :