Leaderboard

The first Release Candidates are available for Alpha 27 You will find them at https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/ Please report any issues in this thread! We are preparing the announcements, hoping to deliver this new release soon if no breaking bugs are found. Thank you to everyone who has already tested and provided feedback on the mock bundles.

They're at the tip of the branch, 173100c5c3. The RCs are based on the nightly build.

The Unix bundles are used by package maintainers, they still need to be compiled following the Build Instructions. You'll need unix-build to build the game and then unix-data to play it.

The diff https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1905

Making things block vision could be a significant slowdown and would at a minimum require a large rethinking of the LOS algorithm. Walls blocking projectiles is more doable, but hasn't really been a priority or a target.

IIRC Silier had a patch that allowed hiding the vision depending on terrain. Not sure it worked with walls though.

Boats: Request: Boats should be made more intuitive to use with visual or sound indicators. Problem 1: Sometimes you think you should be able to go somewhere in a boat but you can't because: The passage is too narrow The water is too shallow (I think). It should be clear to the player where they can go. Ideas for solutions: Make the water incrementally lighter the shallower it is. Play a sound effect if you click to travel on an area a boat can't actually go on. Play a sound effect if the boat takes a path significantly longer than the straight-line distance to the destination. (So you know right away if its gonna take the long way.) Problem 2: Sometimes you think you should be able to garrison/ungarrison or repair a boat but you can't. Ideas for solution: Have a docking mechanism with a visual or sound indicating that the boat is now docked, so it can be repaired, garrisoned, or ungarrisoned. The dock-able positions should be defined and intuitive. Players should be able to recognize them. For example, beaches. (I think that is already how it is basically.) If you attempt to dock but cannot, there should be a sound indicating the location is un-dockable. Attempts to garrison a docked boat should never fail if the unit is coming from an appropriate level. (For example, if the boat is docked on a beach, units on an adjacent cliff cannot board. This also means that when you click to have a unit garrison a boat, the boat should not automatically start moving towards the person. So that would have to be changed from the current boat behavior.

I've thought about it before. Its an idea with a lot of grey area. Should they block vision too? How would the implementation work to try to shoot over the walls? I'm sure it could work, but it would take a lot of figuring out, and I'm not sure if it fits with the abstraction level of the game. @Grapjas this could be something interesting to try out with your mod.

Strategos

As we approach the New Year, I want to thank all the developers, designers and everyone else who made this great game and continue to improve it.

I'm not an artist but I'm amazed by what they can create and very proud of participating to a project that is so visually appealing. I would be very sad to see this work from humans replaced by generated contents copied over from someone else's work (because "generative" AI creates from plagiarized content, for now). Jason, the content you sent is beautiful, but knowing that no one spent time on it, demonstrating their skills through it, removes all the value in my eyes. I'm on 0 A.D. to do something selfless, spend much time on something for the love of it. The end result is not by far my main metric of satisfaction. Similarly, genAI could generate documentation and increase our metrics on this front... but without real added value. If an AI can deduce what the code does, maybe documentation was not absolutely necessary at this place. Worse, it can generate low-quality comments which mask the need for detailed information written by competent developers. And, my main concern, regardless of the very personal input I'm giving above, is the carbon footprint of these tools, which is ridiculous. If we're accelerating the catastrophe just to splash shiny images on a hobbyist game, we're being very careless. That also includes using genAI for inspiration.