Leaderboard

Alpha 17 and 18 took 5 months, Alpha 19 took 6 months. But comparing early to late releases is like comparing apples with potatoes: On the one hand: The more features there are, the more code has to be maintained, fixed, rewritten, improved. For example it took me 6 months to rewrite 65+ random maps during alpha 23 development. So many maps and bugs didn't exist back then. Secondly the capable motivated and available developers went down. Thirdly we put more emphasis on quality now than was done before from what I can tell (for example we try to balance the game so that it can be played competitively on the lobby, which wasn't the case until alpha 14-16 when the lobby was introduced and scythetwirler started trying to fix the balance. But the quality in other areas was neglected too. I recall alpha 18 was about to be released with an OOS, nowadays we would fix it). Another example are the trailers, which consumed up to 2-3 weeks. Very early releases often were only a new snapshot of the most recent state with sometimes only few and small addtions. In the last years we try to add at least 3-4 new impressive features that have distinct, memorable character to call it a release, so that people actually get excited about the release (rather than just installing something that doesn't differ from the predecessor). The 4th reason is also the reason why this should not be called alpha 24 but alpha 23b. There is literally not a single new feature unless you call privacy policies or connection encryption one. It's a classic maintenance release. An update to an existing product as the existing product had some serious defects. So if one wants to target 3-4 month release cycles, that will come with a serious quality or feature reduction unless there are some supermen coming. I think we should continue to keep the quality, use our time more economically / productively. People have kept piling hacks and workarounds. It seems we currently add more contributions the way they should end up in the final version of 0 A.D. and pyrogenesis. So the end of having to rewrite historic spaghetti code might come eventually. After that, we can provide the same quality and same new impressive features in a shorter timespan. I don't see how we can change the rest of the restrictions (in particular if we want to use the time most productively). Alpha 23 rerelease in particular had some weeks of timewaste unrelated to above argument as everyone fled the dirty GDPR work. That is more a problem of negligence.

@stanislas69 I don't think any apologies are necessary, at all... We should all rather be grateful for all the headaches you guys (and gals?) put yourself through so we can all play one of the world's greatest historical RTS-games!

Sorry if I explained myself wrong, but I didn't say slingers wins games alone. Whenever I loose, it's either my fault or the opponent is better than me, period. I am just saying there's a dominant choice: civs with slingers. Either to thrive stronger economies or directly smash the opponent. How many non-casual players have you ever seen in lobby playing Spartans, Macedonians or Persians? Hell, Kushites looks awesome and on paper they should be THE counter to slingers/rams civs (swordsmans and sword cav), but I hardly see someone playing them. My point is pretty simple, Rome conquered almost the entire known world with gladius, not throwing rocks to their opponents. Same probably applies to any other civilization. I never heard of an ancient castle siege with only ranged units (you can include bolts shooters here too) supporting their siege engines and I doubt I will ever will. Actually on 0 A.D., that's the current meta of 95% of the games also because its much easier and safer - most of the time - to destroy structures than conquer them, which is completely illogical from my point of view. If we consider this is an issue, there are many but I am trying to update myself on 0 A.D. development before saying something which is already planned.

I don't have any strong opinion on how to call it and I will stick to the team decisions for that one. We really want to reduce release time between releases but the very nature of this project makes it complicated because of the team member different schedules. A lot of bad things (And some good too) happened behind the scenes these past months and we've been trying to keep the ship afloat and most of us are sorry you had to pay the price. In the current state of affairs a Mac développer came back and is helping us to bring back Mac Os 10.9 Compatibility so we can finally put this behind us and start adding stuff (At least on the art side) The current issue with Mac is that without the fix no one below 10.12 will be able to join the lobby without disabling SSL on both sides which is a GDPR requirement. We brought back the feedback server which was also a security / GDPR concern so that by knowing more about our users we can better help them (Like if nobody is using XP anymore drop that (The lobby won't work with it anymore in the next version) Me and Itms will be in Toulouse giving a talk this weekend about the game and hopefully meeting new people and potential contributors. So stay tuned. And still sorry for the inconvenience.

You can write quite long comments in this forum. (Ask @Sundiata ;))

They sure are pretty, those Zapotecs...

I cannot find in which section on transfix is public-gui-other its frustrating Ok, found and fixed ( just sk files )

That's something I'd like to have as well. Unfortunately while Imarok is right and it takes Dev time the main issue we have is internal communication. We have members going AWOL, people working like madmen on their own but not advertising what they do and people that simply don't talk We are working on our AFK skills but it's a long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll

First of all, there is no need to apologize. We all know you're volunteers who devote your free time to 0 A.D. and we're grateful for that. Also, it's human that things tend to take more time than one expects beforehand. Although more frequent, smaller releases with fewer changes would be nice to remind everyone development is continuing, it is not really important whether the time between alphas is three months, six, or twelve. What discourages me more is that there has been a feature freeze in place for about seven months now. Something I really appreciated was the “0 A.D. Development Report – January 2018” posted on the play0ad.com homepage on February 2. However, that appears to be a one-time update. Only two more official posts have appeared since: “New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 Ken Wood” on May 17 and “0 A.D. Financial Report, September 2018” on September 8. A bit more official communication would be nice. I was under the impression the reason for the re-release and its delay were difficulties with the GDPR. Only on November 3, thanks to elexis' posts in this thread, I learned that the current issue is the lack of Apple Mac OS users in the team. Ideally there would be one official announcement on the official homepage each month, to inform the general public what's currently going on. It doesn't have to be long nor complete. E.g. “October 2018: still working on making 0AD GDPR compliant.” or “November 2018: currently we're experiencing difficulty with checking the Apple Mac OS release because none of the active team members has one.” This is what worries me most. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.

Have not used Codeblocks to compile 0AD on Windows but on Linux , after you run update-workspaces.bat you will find a Codeblocks folder ready to use so you don't have to get that pile of manure from Redmond so no grass under your feet Enjoy the Choice

That's me. A nice one day task with regards to the first implementation: D1674. Using this script I found there are three further strings that throw errors upon use that noone found yet: The nice thing is we know that we can find all of them by running a short script, i.e. there are certainly not more than these three. Now who wants to update transifex?

I've been playing this days after a long break and I think I understand what OP is talking about. Basically, there's a dominant choice with civs as far I have played this week: civs with slingers. After that, there's no real strategy other than spam the most slingers you can, put something in front of them (will depend on the selected civ) and smash at least the first line of defense of your opponent. Ever heard on history class about a slinger only army ripping apart soldiers, civilians, siege engines and structures themselves? Well, that's the trend actually of almost every single multiplayer game. I've watched some of the 0 A.D. Champions Cup games (sorry but I could not find the original videos in english) and you can see it on your own. The other variant is skirmisher cav (yes, more ranged xD) to harass/rush the enemy. Anything else is residual. Don't get me wrong, A23 is great and I really enjoyed coming back to play, but saying ranged is balanced at least optimistic. On the other hand, while it's true that ranked system can be a bit "primitive", a ranking system like LoL isn't the point actually (tiny playerbase). Also consider @thankforpie there are usually changes every release that modify the gameplay.

Hi everyone ! Thanks to @FeXoR for his feedback. He is right to say: ... of course. Point 2 is not difficult to fix most probably. I use here an old version of rmgen routines which works not well every time (don't say I should use a newer version. I know but it creates problems in my design too). Point 1 is more tricky. For now, the road creation procedure draws one cell wide paths, which is not optimal when the path runs diagonally. It's probably why they look broken when running across forests. In mountains it would be even worse, but here, I have already made some adjustments to make roads (rather) walkable. But this is clearly not enough. Il have to rework the thing to create larger paths (and by a side effect, maybe solve the issue @elexis quoted here: Now, how wide ? It's not an easy choice: I often noticed the pathfinder has a problem with bottlenecks: even when the path is more than five tiles wide, if units use it in both directions, they deadlock each other and this results in a absurd mob (and a lag). All these are created by the main landscape procedure. Mountain and water ratios can be modified easily (it's a parameter). It's always possible to modify the map in some way (make the water deeper for instance), but IMHO, the problem is to know if we create (rather) realistic maps players have to deal with (and this is part of the game challenge), or artificial playgrounds where all landscape difficulties are smoothed or eliminated. This is open to discussion but maybe we should make a clear choice (at least for this or a random map category). Agreed... OK... Yes, it's not, but in real world, geomorphism don't cares about paths too... I suppose here the civilization level is rather low here, so paths follow the easiest way. It's possible to make them avoid completely water, but this would eventually result in absurd things: for instance a road climbing rather high to cross a mountain falling into water when it is shorter and easier to follow the bank, wetting slightly one's feet. In some way, I follow the pathfinder policy to connect parts of the map: it avoids not crossing the lakes and rivers even when it's not absolutely necessary. Ideas ? Textures can be changed easily of course, but I'm not that good at it. Feel free to suggest other sets. Don't worry, they make sense...

There is no concept of momentum in 0 A:D.. And IMO there shouldn't be. Instead arrows should be acting like missiles IMO so not the way things act (momentum for units, pure parabolic arrow path's) but the outcome is what's about realistic (units are hit with a specific probability, maybe dependent on distance - though "always hit" wouldn't be as bad as "can always be dodged" IMO). And, yes @Sundiata , part of the problem is the simplistic unitAI's targeting but the above approach would "solve" this (yea, also not very realistic but it's the outcome what matters most IMO and it's doable even if the arrow path's might not perfectly correspond to the hit unit's position). Also I agree with @wowgetoffyourcellphone (just there have been several attempts to implement this and none of them where really pleasing IMO).

Ah... Feedback enabled. Thanks. Everything seems to be displaying fine.

It's the falling star P.S. It's the known problem, but we need the replay to check it after fix. Does it reproduce the bug for you and could you attach the replay?

I like the new rainbow effect 0 A.D. has implemented 2018-11-04_0011__territory_border_line_haywire__min_20.zip

Gohma empire. Hyrule conquest mod. I think I will have to buy a lot of insecticide

But why you send your units into battle with rolling pins and frying pans? Asking the important questions here...