Acumen
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Job Title(s): OpenGL Programmer.
Joined: 24th September 2005.
Department: Graphics Programming.
Location: Paderborn, Germany.
Birth Year: 1984.
Home Town: Polling, Bavaria, Germany.
Interests/Hobbies: Reading books, discussing politics, philosophy or mathematical problems, playing the guitar or the bassoon. Existential questions of philosophy, new scientific developments, beautiful works of (science) fiction, and the fascinating connections that can be found throughout mathematics.
Favourite Musician/Band: The Beatles, Queen, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Favourite Computer Games: Age of Kings: Simply one of the most polished RTS games ever. FreeCiv: It's got (almost) everything I've wished for while playing CivII. Half-Life 2: Brilliant world design, wide range of gameplay experiences in a single game; the list goes on ...
Bio: Nicolai was introduced to the computer even before he went to school, and quickly learned that he could make it do (almost) anything he wanted. A programmer was born. Without the wonders of the Internet or access to many books, he taught himself assembler using debug.com on his parents' first PC.
He wasted weeks of his youth playing games like Settlers 2, Civilization 2 or Red Alert, and quite naturally he wanted to create games himself. This led him to further hone his programming skills and seek out knowledge about stuff like DirectX and OpenGL.
At some point he figured out that physics could really help understand the world on a fundamental level, but being scared by the prospect of having to actually work in a lab with mechanical or optical devices and stuff, he decided to stick with sciences that can be performed with just a brain, a pen, paper, and a computer: mathematics and computer science, which led him to study these majors at university.
He has 6 years' experience in C++ - more than 10 years' programming experience in total, deep understanding of OpenGL and 3D hardware in general, formal training in maths and CS, and experience working with teams over the internet, including "Return to the Shadows", a vertical scroller (http://www.rtts.org/) (virtually all programming), and "Widelands", a Settlers-like game, simulation and strategy (http://www.sf.net/projects/widelands) (most of the game logic, as well as some (software) rendering work). His background also includes writing an open-soruce driver for the ATI R3xx family of graphics chips and a number of high profile tutorials for the Half-Life 1 modding community (http://hlpp.thewavelength.net/tutorial.htm).
Motto: "Those who trade freedom for security will lose both."
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I'm ambidextrous, so I alternate between hands to avoid RSI (but keep a right-handed button config regardless of which hand I'm using).
Though I usually use the mouse left-handed, especially when gaming, and map most keys (particularly for FPSes) to the numeric keypad, which provides good keyboard posture and keys aligned in straight rows.
(Being able to swap mouse hands has also come in handy when I'm tutoring; I can stand on a student's right and run his right-handed mouse left-handed without ramming my elbow in his face.)
Left-hand orientation depends on the number of buttons in use.
All three: index right, middle middle, ring left
Left & Right: index right, middle left
Middle & Left: index middle, middle left
Middle & Right: index right, middle middle
I have an IntelliMouse, so also add thumb on right secondary button, and ring/pinky on left secondary button.
Right-handed orientation follows the standard convention.
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Thanks for your support, gentlemen.
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All the included art was taken off the website, so yes, you won't be missing anything.
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Micromart. It's the 14th-20th July version, so nip out to your newsagents while you still can.
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Yes, the UI as it stands is completely scriptable, so you'll be able to change the user interface (including the main menu) and include those changed scripts, additional texture sprite artwork, ogg audio files, etc) in the mod pack.
Exactly how mods are enabled/disabled is something that we'll need to work out at a later date, but probably "global" mods (like the menu mod above) would be toggleable either in a mod tree toggler tool or at least in a .cfg file (it'd have to be done out of game, since the game's already loaded by the time you reach an in-game UI, and then it's too late to load the mod
). The plan is that scenarios in turn could include any amount of "local" mod content, that's only active during scenarios in that mod pack so that it doesn't override the rest of the game.
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Going off what we have at the moment, I can't guarantee that modpacks will be *easy* to make (that'd require much tool development, and therefore it's dependent on the degree of tool programmer resource at our disposal -- and they'll be plenty overworked by putting the dev tools and Scenario Editor together
) ... But in terms of doing it by hand at current, the engine is very flexible. You can build up secondary trees of assets which override the official game (so mods can be enabled/disabled without overwriting the release version), we're using open file formats as much as possible so that there's less need for converter tools, and we design our systems in an extensible, generic fashion. We're also aiming to script as much gameplay-specific logic and UI as we can, so that it can be adapted during development and beyond.
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Job Title(s): C++ Programmer.
Joined: 28th June 2005.
Department: Programming
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Birth Year: 1991.
Home Town: Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Interests/Hobbies: I enjoy playing piano and guitar, and I take lessons in both. Writing books is another one of my favourite things to do, and so is using my imagination. I have a passion for science and mathematics. It's so exciting to me!
Favourite Musician/Band: Pink Floyd.
Favourite Computer Games: Counterstrike. It has smooth graphics and awesome gameplay, with unbelievable customability and range of weapons and levels. The things that makes it great is that it doesn't end!
Bio: Andrew was born in 1991 in a suburb of Minneapolis called St. Louis Park. He has an older and younger brother, one 6, the other 17. His mother and father are still married and are both pharmacists.
Andrew is in middle school, grade 7, at time of writing. He has a clever and creative mind, and is good at problem solving (and fixing bugs
), understands program flow, as well as various graphics programming with OpenGL.This is his first "commercial" game developing experience, although he has made some simple games of his own, and progressively works through tomes of game programming knowledge.
Motto: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt."
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What if our solar system has been quarantined because we are still underdeveloped in space flight, therefore we are to be objects of study, or objects to be taken care of (quarantined) until that time as we "grow up" into the galactic community?
Strangely enough, in Microprose's "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters", the Ariloulaleelay (their equivalent of the Greys) are suggested to have had exactly that intention ... Alien abductions, sightings, and visitations were almost all situations where the Arilou popped in to keep an eye on the development of their human "children".
(They were also rumoured to have actually modified human DNA to give them a bit of a kick up the evolutionary ladder, which also explained away some of the physical similarities between the two races.)
If I recall correctly, the Earthlings also had to be given the technology for faster-than-light travel by the Alliance of Free Stars (which consisted of various superior alien races, from the silicon-based Chenjesu to the kamikaze gerbil Shofixti) when they joined the battle against the Ur-Quan Hierarchy.
(And their Earthling Cruiser ships were also suitably inferior in design ... Achingly slow with a low turning circle, and armed with unwieldly homing nuclear missiles and a short-range tactical laser).
Sorry for the off-topic. I just recently replayed this classic.
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Hmm, that's a pretty broad question, since it's a pretty broad task.
Let's try an example ...Take a tree. It's a source of wood, which units can harvest from it. When its supply (quantity of wood resource) is exhausted, it's removed from the map. It can change texture depending on the season (red leaves in autumn/fall, green in spring/summer, dead and snow-laden in winter, etc). Some units can navigate through trees and hide in them to perform ambushes.
Some of those are intrinsic traits (like the quantity and type of supply). That's defined as an XML property for this particular tree's entity. Some are tied up in events that fire when units perform certain actions (a unit gathers from the tree or a unit attacks another unit ... JavaScript logic defines what happens under that condition; manipulating the supply value, for example). Some are unique behaviours tied to a certain entity type (the hide-in-trees exception). Some are triggered by certain conditions (eg the change of seasons makes certain entities switch to a predefined actor variant with a season-specific texture).
All of these are high-level design requirements that need to be written in code form to make the game play as intended. That's the job we're offering. Writing the logic that makes an RTS play like an RTS. Think of all the steps and stipulations that go into constructing a building or training a unit in, say, Age of Mythology. All that has to be written from first principles when creating a new game.
We've been making do by having programmers and designers chip in with the scripting, but we really need to devote manpower to it in order to make substantial progress, write the code in a clean and efficient manner, and finetune the design implementation.
Tell you what ... Fill out the application form and we can bang out the details during your interview.
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Hmm, the Programming Department is pretty full at the moment. I'd say that if there's anywhere we still have a gaping need, it's having scripters to write the barebones of what makes up 0 A.D. gameplay ... building GUI screens and scripting player interaction results, event logic for entity actions, setting up entity attributes, and so forth (since the programmers are more than occupied with writing the actual generic engine).
In short, we need more people to help with making an actual game out of it.
I know you said you don't like doing interfaces (and we already have a new guy working on the GUI side), but maybe there's something in there that appeals.
JavaScript's syntax is practically identical to C's, and although it's object-oriented it's pretty easy to get your head around (you're just grouping properties under a parent object).
I instigated a recruitment drive some time ago (eg the Recruiting Scripters new post in the Archive, which describes the role and requirements in more detail) but didn't get much response, unfortunately.
Still, if you could fill out the application form in as much detail as you can, then even if there's nothing suitable at the moment, we can still keep your profile on file for the future.
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Job Title(s): Tool Programmer.
Joined: 11th June 2005.
Department: Tools.
Location: Norway.
Birth Year: 1981.
Favourite Computer Games: Total Annihilation, Team Fortress
Classic, Day of Defeat, Red Alert.
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As Bobby said, splash screens are too low-priority for us to have a definite answer right now (it's also dependent upon available free libraries for decoding movie files). More than likely we'll just incorporate our self-glorification into the main menu and credits.
Likely what'll happen (if it happens) is that movies will be called from a JS function when the GUI initialises. Since those scripts are modifiable, one could theoretically point to a different splash, add more function calls, or omit it entirely. But none of that's implemented yet.
On a personal note, if we do have splash screens, I'd probably add a toggle flag to the config menu to disable them. And because they're annoying and people might skip 'em, they probably aren't worth doing in the first place.
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"When it's done."
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The plan for provinces/territories is quite detailed and subject to change, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here.
But it's not going to be like Total War (no turn-based mode) ... Here, a single game map is split into different areas (provinces) that the player must seize (and hold onto) in order to exploit that region. As it turns out, Empire Earth 2's territory system is remarkably similar to what we came up with many, many months ago (although more complex in a lot of ways).
Consequently, recorded games (replays) should hopefully be adequate to handle your second request, since you're recording the growth of your territory during the course of a single mission.
We chose "ore" because there are a number of different minerals and metals (steel, gold, iron, silver, bronze, etc) that would have gone into manufacturing equipment or producing coin. That'd be more accurate, but since the player would then be managing a whole lot of extra resources that are gathered in exactly the same way (mining), it seemed like extra effort for no gain. So gameplay won out over authenticity in this case and "ore" provides a way to refer generically to precious minerals.
We do not currently plan for the engine to be open source. But, we are focusing on making it data-driven so that modders can alter the entity/UI/logic scripts and so affect gameplay.
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Could you give a tip about the kind of articles you'd like to see?
Community feedback would help give us some direction into what subjects you'd like us to write about. -
Job Title(s): UI Scripter.
Joined: 15th May 2005.
Department: Programming
Job Responsibilities: Designing and developing 0 A.D.'s graphical user interface.
Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Birth Year: 1969.
Home Town: Fort Assiniboine, Alberta, Canada.
Interests/Hobbies: Gopher Shooting and Fishing.
Favourite Musician/Band: James Taylor.
Favourite Computer Games: Age of Series. Each one has more features and offers variety as much as it attempts to balance the gameplay.
Bio: Mark doesn't do drugs, drink, or gamble, and even recently quit smoking. He likes watching movies like "Saw" and "Sin City", expressing his Road Rage when he drives, shooting our furry friends, the Richardson Ground Squirrels, and doing some Catch and Release Trout Fishing. Just his contribution to the environment.
He is most well known for the enhancements he has made to the user interface and messaging system for Age of Mythology over the past year. http://members.shaw.ca/markstrawson/
Motto: "I best learn by example. Theory is just that. From example, I can carry that forward with similar issues."
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Job Title(s): C++ Programmer.
Joined: 15th May 2005.
Department: Programming
Job Responsibilities: Coding and technical design.
Location: Georgia, USA.
Birth Year: 1984.
Home Town: Marietta, USA.
Interests/Hobbies: Climb stuff, even though I'm afraid of heights. Play tennis, soccer, etc. I love music. I like watching movies, as long as I'm with someone. I will pretty much do anything that involves being with other people, even if everyone thinks it's absolutely insane.
Favourite Musician/Band: Blink 182, Green Day, Disturbed, Oasis, Just About Anything.
Favourite Computer Games: Counter-Strike because it's always something new. It's a social situation where every new opponent brings a new challenge that I must overcome.
Bio: Dayle is a computer nerd who has the ability to be a functioning part of society. He doesn't snort when he talks, take 300 medicines for every little problem, and doesn't like to sit around and do nothing.
He is always seeking perfection in everything he does, pushing people to do the "impossible", because everything that can be dreamt about can be obtained ... It just might take A LOT of work.
Dayle is at time of writing studying Software Engineering at Southern Polytechnic State University, attempting to transfer to Georgia Tech and do Computer Science.
He is a web developer as well as a game programmer. He has been programming for 8 years and knows 12 programming/scripting languages, C/C++, Java, Perl, Visual Basic, Lingo, HTML, Javascript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, CGI Scripting, MySQL Scripting, Max Script, and Action Script.
Motto: "Wish in one hand and crap in the other, see which one fills up first."
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0 A.D.'s Programming Department is getting to a point where we need more manpower in the areas of GUI and entity scripting, and is looking for fresh blood.
There's a whole lot to do in making this game as playable as the design team want it, and that means time, energy, and talent. We're literally coding everything that we take for granted in the gameplay of an RTS from first principles. The more help we get, the sooner the game can be released.
Candidates should:
a] be excited about creating gameplay logic and user interfaces from scratch,
b] know JavaScript, XML, and good programming practice,
c] work well with others and a good communicator,
d] like to work hard, for free, like the rest of us crazies,
e] be familiar with historical RTSes, and
f] have a lot of time on your hands.
If you're interested, please fill out the Scripter position in our website's Application Form.
For more information about how we're using JavaScript in 0 A.D., this recent thread may prove of interest.
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Yes, that's the JavaScript syntax as used in websites (not Java), which we've embedded into our engine via the SpiderMonkey SDK. JS is structurally quite similar to C++ (and in some ways easier to use ... No distinct variable types or conversions for one
), so anyone comfortable with that should feel right at home.Please fill out the application and then we'll have more background and know how things look.
Those that look promising will be interviewed (typically via MSN) to bash out the details and answer queries on both sides, and then if it looks like the best thing for both parties, the candidate would come onto staff.I'll just mention that skill and time is only half the battle, though. We're better off being understaffed than taking on someone that isn't reliable and self-motivated, doesn't communicate how he's doing, or causes a disturbance that disrupts the work and well-being of other staff members. Hence the paranoid selection process.
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As we recently scripted the resource system, I can say that we aim to make it adaptable (after all, TLA will have mithral, trade goods, and all manner of things, and we need to keep their needs in mind).
As it stands, the resource pool is simply a JS object array attached to each player object, so each resource type is defined on startup from JavaScript, and therefore a mod could use more or less resources than what we're using for 0 A.D., have different names, whatever, without having to modify the engine source.
Of course, you'd also have to update the appropriate XML-based entities so they're capable of containing (eg trees) or gathering (eg citizens) any new resource you add, and perhaps modify the logic for gathering a resource if you needed that action to function any differently from the existing resource types. And also update the GUI so that it displays a new resource counter control with an appropriate icon and tooltip, is refreshed with the current value of the resource type, etc. And add a cost property to each entity that needs the player to spend this resource to get that unit.
Currently Population (how many population slots your units are occupying) and Housing (how many population slots you've unlocked by building houses) are in the list with the other resources (Food, Wood, Stone, Ore), with some custom scripted logic since they aren't gatherable in the same way as other resources.
So equally, if you wanted to, say, have two population counters, one for economic and one for military units, you could also script that yourself by modifying the bit where the population counter is updated when an entity is loaded onto the production queue. And go through each affected entity defining its alternate population properties and which buildings generate which type of housing.
So it requires some knowledge of programming logic and plenty of hard work, and isn't as easy as just clicking a button to inject a new resource into the game, but we're aiming to keep the meat and potatoes of gameplay mechanics adaptable by modders in this kind of fashion. You'll (hopefully) be able to do anything our scripters can.
Our hope is that modders will be able to take what's available and make an RTS mod that looks and plays drastically differently from 0 A.D. Given time, craftiness, imagination, and dramatic amounts of effort, of course.
Though hopefully it'll also make it possible to drastically adapt our own gameplay through testing during development, and make 0 A.D. fun enough that you won't have any inclination to make your own to replace it.
I probably gave away far too much information, but it feels good to be able to answer a question with some degree of knowledge for once ...
Shameless Recruitment Drive ... Incoming!
Incidentally, if anyone else is:
a] as excited about creating gameplay and user interfaces from scratch as I am,
b] knows JavaScript and good programming practice,
c] works well with others and is a good communicator,
d] likes to work hard, for free, like the rest of us crazies,
e] is familiar with historical RTSes, and
f] has a lot more time on their hands than I do
,... we're getting to a point where we need more manpower in this area. There's a whole lot to do in making this game as playable as the design team want it, and that means time, energy, and talent. We're literally coding everything that we take for granted in the gameplay of an RTS from first principles. The more help we get, the sooner the game can be released.
If anyone's interested, please fill out the Scripter position in our website's Application Form.
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Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please reinstall a copy of the above file
If it's of any help to you, I've started to experience the same situation the last few months. Strange thing is that it isn't a permanent problem ... It'll happen every couple of weeks when I boot up, and if I give it a cold reboot (just hitting reset ain't enough), it'll typically carry on as normal, happy as Larry.
The first time it happened, I naturally reacted with a certain amount of distress. Got out my Windows 2000 CD, booted from it, and endeavoured to do a reinstall, but interestingly it refused to do that either due to missing certain crucial files of a similar ilk (was months ago, can't remember the details; wasn't the same name as above).
At some point I should really reformat and do a thorough reinstall (I try to do it every six months to keep things clean) but been too busy with work of late.
Oh, and while it sounds like a virus issue, I'm running Norton, regularly update the libraries and run checks (also Adaware etc for spyware scans).
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It's funny how often the same questions are asked. Fortunately, this is why we have a FAQ ...
Audience: We want our games to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. History can be brutal, and ugly. The wars of the ancients were also outrageously violent, employing methods that are barbaric by modern standards. We hope that people of all ages will be playing 0 A.D., so we're obliged to circumvent mature topics like child sacrifice (Carthaginians), bloody heads on poles (Celts), and nudity (Greeks and Celts). -
Job Title(s): C++ Programmer, UI scripter.
Joined: 12th March 2005.
Department: Programming
Job Responsibilities: Designing and developing 0 A.D.'s graphical user interface.
Location: Ohio.
Birth Year: 1978.
Home Town: Rochester, New York.
Interests/Hobbies: I like games. Computer games, board games, sporting games. Especially the strategic kind for the former two, volleyball, football, and snowboarding for the latter.
Favourite Musician/Band: Cake, Counting Crows. Though I mostly listen to audio books.
Favourite Computer Games: Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, SubSpace, Diablo II, Age of Mythology. It's all about the gameplay. No matter how pretty a game is, if it's not fun to play, it will fail miserably. The interface is the sole gateway to that playability.
Bio: Since he was 14 and first touched a computer, Pete knew that was what he would be doing for the rest of his life. He's one of those people that never swayed from the computer science major through college and continued on to software development.
Pete specialises in UI design and development. At least he likes to think he does. He's super-proficient in C++, C, Qt, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, and reasonably proficient in _JavaScript, C#, Java, Perl, MFC, shell scripts, ASM, VB, and probably a few others. Basically, programming language isn't really a barrier. He likes challenes. Nothing is better than something that "can't be done".
He maintains a custom UI, detailed tech tables, a recorded game renamer, ESO statistics, and a few RMS maps for AOM.
Pete currently works full-time at Seapine Software, (mostly) UI development with C++ and Qt, creating software tools for other developers. He also does a fair share of network and file system programming tasks.
He was recently the father of a beautiful baby girl named Kira. Pete and his wife enjoy watching her react to and take in the world around us. She can be easily subdued by watching an AoM recorded game, and he hopes she turns out to be a great girl-gamer.
Motto: "There is nothing wrong with reality."
Joe Cocovich - greybeard
in Team Profiles
Posted
Job Title(s): Technical Designer.
Joined: 24th September 2005.
Department: Technical Design.
Location: San Jose, CA.
Birth Year: 1946.
Home Town: Pittsburgh, PA.
Interests/Hobbies: Making buffalo wings and cheering for the NFL Steelers on TV. Driving my RX-8.
Favourite Musician/Band: Linda Rondstadt.
Favourite Computer Games: I just completed Still Life, Moment of Silence, and Syberia II. I like the logic dilemmas, characters, and story development. My favorite, however, is Sanitarium.
Bio: Joe Cocovich is a veteran software engineer now enjoying his retirement.
His past professional experience has ranged from Section Head (Embedded Controller Applications) to Product Manager (Embedded Systems Product Management) to his most recent position as Principal Systems Programmer at the National Semiconductor Corporation, where he customised a document management database interface using Visual Basic that allowed improvement of technical documents submission cycle time from four weeks to four hours, and was responsible for the customization of editing tools used to create datasheets and other technical documentation.
The positions have been fast-paced, challenging and broad in scope and have required strong leadership, management, technical and strategic planning capability.
He has now decided to focus his career exclusively on Game Development. In recent years, he has purchased several commercial game engines and some open source engines and has been able to contribute to coding projects for several independent game developers.
Motto: "Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."