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Hi, I am trying to promote opensource game in Ars Technica forum. Ars is a publication devoted to technology that would cater to the "alpha geek". I made a list of opensource game in one of their forum, and mentioned 0 A.D. would you mind checking to see if my description of 0 A.D. is correct? here's the link: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1240969 you are welcome to try other games on the list and participate in the discussion.

Thank you for your attention. For my part, I think I'll sent you some work in progress as you proposed, to have your thoughts. My exams are practically over and I started to start making music again, so, I hope I'll have news very soon. (I'm also looking for people to play a few things, as you said, to compensate the midi as you said, but that can take more time...) Anyway, until I'll have musicians, I'll record what I can record on my own, and make the rest midi. So, I'll come back as soon as I'll have something. Thanks for your answers.

I do agree that we do something, but I'd like a more fixed suggestion to vote on. This exact option seems more like a general suggestion to me than an exact suggestion to use that specific service. I really think we need to sort out Trac/SVN as well, for which we really need to get Philip on board

Looks good to me, though you might want to mention something about the game being Alpha/WIP/laggy in some situations so people don't get too high expectations/compare it to a finished game unnecessarily

If you've got a really good track ready but not recorded, I could record a few of the solo lines myself - but that'll be on a free time basis. In other words, no need to wait until you have musicians ready, send me your tracks whenever you're ready Thanks again,

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.

How about snapping buildings in general together like AOE3? it makes compact base building more convenient.

The 'Little Query Language' now has a web interface at http://noiv.pythonanywhere.com/agentx/0ad/explorer/hannibal.html To start click HCQ in the menu, choose an interesting node from the list and click 'analyse'. From there you can browse the triple store via the blue links. Also the planner makes progress: I've ported the python sources to JavaScript. Two tests are ready to try out. It seems a blocks world is the Hello World in terms of planning, so the examples define 3 blocks (a,b,c) and a table. The planner tries to find a list of actions moving the blocks from state to goal, see test2. The new JS module system has the advantage sources run in the web AND in 0 A.D. Very useful, this way I can use the browser to debug!!!! However, above site is only tested with FF30, don't tell me it doesn't run with IE , even Chrome doesn't support all ES6 features. I've started to document more of Hannibal in the wiki: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/HannibalBot check it out! Comments are welcome. Hannibal is making first baby steps, it can launch groups maintaining a field. Groups are coded with a high level bot language: I hope the semantics are self explaining. It really took some effort to make things that simple, well, now I understand why it takes a village to raise a child In case you're wondering, the idea is all other features are much faster and easier implemented using this (sigh) language. I have plenty of time this WE and hope I can finalize it with a video showing above code in action. Edit: this is a very interesting Google search: https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Ajsperf.com+%27use+asm%27 lots of asm.js code to checkout, some are very clever and fast.Edit2: links

*Stan says no, and thinks yes* Too bad he isn't more active, we would have all the animals in game

Interesting idea; perhaps in the future certain factions could have the ability to use tunnelers/sappers in some way. One of the United Monarchy champion units should be a slinger of the Benjamite tribe (Benjamite slingers are mentioned at least twice in the Old Testament as being very skilled.) Normal Judahite slingers will be available as basic civ centre and barracks units. I believe that Jehovah did indeed, at times, aid his people the Israelites against their enemies in battle, but I do not believe divine aid should play a factor in the game. This type of supernatural phenomenon occurred relatively infrequently in Israel's history, and I am very uncomfortable with the idea of “summoning” divine aid, even in a game, as though God were at our beck and call. Yes, the Tabernacle (and Temple) should be able to train healers: Priests of Jehovah. In the Old Testament, one of the many offices of a Levitical priest was to serve as the “health inspector/physician”, if you will, of people's various ailments and diseases, giving prescriptions and remedies for them. So, in other words, building this wonder would be a condition for victory in some game modes? On the contrary, I think that the worst one could say about the Bible as a historical sourcebook is that many parts of it have not (yet!) been corroborrated by extra-Biblical sources such as contemporary accounts from other nations and peoples. However, up through the present day, the Bible continues to be confirmed by science and history, in a multitude of fields. Therefore, I believe it is an authentic primary source for a historical game researcher to use. The synagogue is actually a mostly New Testament-era structure, with its use becoming rather widespread by the first century B.C. It was basically the center of Jewish town or village's religious and cultural life (a civic centre!), but it is rather late for a Late Bronze Age timeframe. The civ centre I had in mind would basically be a “house of meeting”, but not called a “synagogue,” per se. As far as the wonder goes, I had already planned to use Solomon's temple for that purpose (but it should probably be rather difficult to destroy). I personally do not think that the destruction of a religious temple (or church, or mosque, or monastery, or any other place of meditation/worship/veneration) should be overly offensive to most people in the game-playing community. 0 A.D., by its very nature, involves massive amounts of simulated death and destruction. People out there who are offended about temple destruction also are probably squeamish about the “total war” concepts of annihilation and devastation (although, as a player, I would prefer to negotiate a peace settlement with my would-be foes before we come to blows). In that case, I think they would probably be happier not playing this type of historical conquest game to begin with. Regarding the implementation of miracles: It is true that Israel, as God's chosen nation, at times experienced deliverance and/or victory via supernatural occurrences such as the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the collapse of the Jericho walls, the hailstones striking the Canaanites, the thunder against the Philistines, etc.. But most of the time, deliverance occurred through the “mundane” or “everday” actions of a few individuals used by God to lead their people to victory using often unorthodox, but almost always very human methods of warfare: ambushes, stealth, trickery, negotiation, etc.. I am definitely against having miracles readily available in one's game arsenal; the Lord God is not a man that we should “use” him to perform acts of deliverance for us, and I don't think that these types of super-advantages should be available in a game, as they would be an incorrect portrayal of the nature of supernatural assistance. If God intervenes divinely on our behalf, it is to get glory unto himself, not because we randomly decided to avail ourselves of a “Jehovah cheat code”. So, for example, as Israelites, we shouldn't be able to call down hailstones on an attacking army in 0 A.D. I intend to treat the Israelite faction, and all others for that matter, from an almost purely human standpoint.

Ok, i agree with that but you know, for my in this topic Jews is priority to have a last word in this matter. I don't want offense any religion or religious group.

Actually this view is indefensible. To say that all post enlightenment historians wrote without bias or purpose is simply not true (the implication of only being able to trust post enlightenment history). Actually if we were to take this view we would know almost nothing about the ancient world. For example, by that argument we would have to say Julius Caesar didn't exist, we would have to disregard the writings of historians like Seutonius, Tacitus, Josephus, Plini because they are for the most part not "scientifically verifiable". No the historian is dependent on histories like the Old Testament to make sense of the Archaeological record. HOWEVER generally the Old Testament is frowned upon as a historical source because of it's religious context, again though this is poor scholarship for the simple reason that most of our sources from the ancient world have religious elements and without these texts we would know almost nothing about the civilisations they were written by. Hear me correctly here, I'm not saying these sources should be trusted without question however what I am saying is that it is poor scholarship to disregard them on the basis of their ideology. Another very large concern relevant to this discussion is that near eastern chronology is in no way a perfect science. Talking for example about Solomon's empire not existing is a bit of a leap, it takes only a little trip into archaeological scholarship and chronology to see this. Tools like radio carbon dating or dendrochronology are only now making an impact in chronology, for a long time and perhaps even now they were rejected in favour of the old methods of dating. There are many many very poor or circular arguments that are accepted as truth in the Archaeological world and espoused as fact to the public. One instructive example is the dating of Lachish (an Israelite city) level III. The dating of the destruction of this level of Lachish was originally based on the dating of a number of ostraca found in its ruins (a type of letter generally written on pottery). The date initially given for this level of Lachish was derived from analysis of these letters by a Hebrew specialist named Torczyner. However, these dates were revised by about 150 years by Hebrew specialists over a number of years of dissecting his arguments. The archaeological world seemed completely oblivious to this though and still continued to use the incorrect dates to peg the dating of Lachish III. Given that Lachish was used a reference date this had pretty big consequences. A very interesting book on this topic (near eastern chronology), though sadly out of print now, is "Centuries of Darkness" by Peter James et al. My point is this: what we know about the ancient near east is a very large moving target and it is certainly not the perfect post enlightenment science it is made out to be. In my opinion basing the Hebrews off the O.T. would be reasonable.

There actually are archaeological traces of the First Temple. Not a whole lot, but various artifacts that would have been used in it have been dated to that time. Solomon was actually quite rich, I think he would have been able to afford the temple. According to National Geographic it seems likely that he would have had access to enough copper and other metals to build it. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume a large temple stood there. The Old Testament is historically reliable (Egyptian and Babylonian carvings confirm some Old Testament events, the Tel Dan stele proves King David existed). Certainly other sources should be used as well though. So yeah, I think there's nothing wrong with using the Bible as a historical account simply because it's also a religious text. There's not a lot of reason to doubt most of the stuff in the Old Testament. Besides, it would just look cool in the game to have this huge temple.... In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Christian and so that almost certainly biases my opinion of the Bible a bit. However, I would probably not be Christian if the Bible was obviously historically inaccurate.

Bronze Age Hebrews would probably have a tabernacle. If we are closer to Iron Age, then maybe the temple. Synagogues would be more in 0 A.D.'s time period.