sanderd17

I think the "you" is fairly changable. The team quite often gets new members, while old members leave. I'm one of the more recent members. The best times to ask stuff on IRC is during the European evening/night, and a bit more in weekends. We don't have paid team members, so most of them are only available during the evening.

Catapults should be able to get in ships, at least in triremes. And for your 3rd suggestion, that would need a new model for every ship, so it will only happen when the art team has some free time. I don't understand your second suggestion.

A line? I may hope an entire file? A dae just is a text file (mainly XML with a lot of 3D coordinates), you just have to save it as .dae, and the rest will happen automatically (If you use Windows, you might need to activate displaying file extensions).

If you're still interested, you can join the #0ad-dev irc channel on quakenet. Philip and historicbruno will be able to give more help than I can.

IIRC, we will have to add some code for that. Currently, it's not possible to have positioned and looping sound. As once you start a positioned sound, it keeps playing until it stops, even if you move away before that point. This way, if you once hoovered a market, you will keep hearing market sound.

I've been busy with formations lately, there should be less running now, and formations should turn around smoother. But I didn't do any real behaviour changes yet. Currently, a formation ceases to exist when the units stop (you don't see this, but the units are all individual at that time). That's because units in formation have a special status that makes them follow the formation without any other possibilities (they don't react when attacked, they don't check for enemies ...). So they're a bit zombiefied. The formation itself also is an entity, but an entity without health, armour or attack value. You can't even select the entity. IMO, we should aim to make a formation a complete entity, where the stats are a sum of the member stats. It should be selectable, you should be able to attack a complete formation, and a complete formation should be able to attack back. But this requires a lot of code to get formations to behave in a right way. The formation should know which commands they should pass on to which members. Like in Phalanx, the first members should do the attack animation, but the entire formation should deal damage (as the other rows also help pushing). You can see that UnitAI currently is over 5000 lines of code. Making every unit command also work for formations could easily double that code, as formations need different behaviour in almost all cases. So, we're working on it, bit it will take time, a LOT of time.

0 A.D. is split in two parts, Pyrogenesis is the RTS engine, and then you have the scripted data. Our aim is that pyrogenesis is a general RTS engine, and that all non-general parts are implemented in the scripted data. So the scripted data are things like GUI: scripted in XML and JS filesSimulation code: any code that isn't needed in all RTS games, or might differ over different RTS games, like unit behaviour, trading, resource gathering ...Artwork: art for the game and the GUI...The general RTS engine can be subdivided in two main parts: graphics and simulation. Here, the simulation part is what all RTS games should need (a pathfinder, a position for entities, range queries ...). This part of the simulation also communicates with the graphics (starting an animation, finding the height of a unit based on the position ...). The graphics part contains everything about rendering. Some things are very general (like rendering objects), but some things might also be too restricted for general games (like our terrain is a grid of square tiles, our water is a single plane...). It's possible to use the graphics part without simulation, and thus only as a rendering engine. But it will require some work (some graphics need simulation code (like the position code) to know where or how to render objects), and it might have serious limitations for certain types of games. I hope the above post helped a bit.

We also don't want to break stuff. Some people are afraid you won't be able to garrison in ships any more (which is worse than not being able to garrison elephants)

Right, we should start gathering the new features added to A15

I think the older one was better. But there's no hurry, Lion. The Selucids won't be in A15 anyway.

There's no plan to garrison ships. For the elephants, I have a patch ready, but there was no time to review it: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2190

Also for us

I don't think you need a lot of code, but if you want something, I'm willing to help.

Well, since every unit will slice every other unit with one hit. I think nobody will ever make expensive units. And just spamming units takes away the "strategy" part of the game. I don't think I'd want to play a "real time" game without anything else

Currently, we're still working on the units of the ptolemaics (although most research has been done for it), and we've also started researching on the selucids. There are pinned topics in the Art Development forums where you can share references and stuff for those civs. The selucids are already available in Atlas for the SVN version, so it's already more or less decided which units they will have. Though since there's no art for that faction yet, it's easy to change. For testing new versions and patches, I highly suggest you install the SVN version. This makes sure, when you report a problem, it's a recent one. Most problems get solved in a week or two. Our development team uses quite a range of different hardware to work on by itself (going from intel GPUs to high end GPUs, different OS...). If you want to test patches, you can take a look here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/report/15 . That's a list of all patches ready for review. It's best to read the description of the patch, including all comments, and if the patch is applicable for you, you can apply it and report back if there are problems with it, or if everything works fine. Some patches are also still in the review queue because of other problems (code quality, not the wanted behaviour ...). Those will need to be handled by the team anyway.

You don't have to be connected to the internet to play the game in singleplayer mode, and we like to keep it that way. So we can't use the IP to eneble more or less blood (and it would make the code far to complicated for very little gain).

In our country, copyright ends 70 years after the death of all contributors, I didn't know AoE was that old And for music covers, you also have to pay the original artist. We can't forbid you to make such a mod, but we also can't allow you to share those works on our forums, or to have links from our forums to a copyright violating project.

We have always planned to first release A15 without translation features. As we're now finishing up A15, we don't really have the time to investigate the problems with localisation. When A15 is released, internationalization will be one of the first things we start working on and get committed. This isn't a change in our plans, it's how we planned it all the time (though we did plan to release A15 a bit earlier, but some other problems arose).

That's a design discussion. The houses are made of mud, and that's represented by having them free. But it does take a bit longer to build, and it needs more space than regular 5-pop houses. Other building do cost something (else the game would be too easy

In BuildingAI (the code that lets buildings fire arrows based on the number of garrisoned soldiers). But if BuildingAI is modified, a lot of templates will also need to be modified.

The AI doesn't seem the most efficient player for the ptolemaic faction, but I can see why it builds that many houses. The houses are free, but only give 5 pop bonus, so you need a lot of them. And the AI does build other buildings (farmstead, defense tower, fields ...) It just takes a bit longer than for other civs, as it's busy with all the houses.

Yes, it's possible, but it will take a bit longer than just "editing some templates" if we want to get it right.

@leper, you're right, but the code that selects the best attack is better than I expected. But there is a problem though, as the storm rams will always have one default arrow due to UnitAI (which they will use to attack units). So even if it has no garrisoned units. On elephants, the problem is bigger, because you do want the elephants to use the melee attack on regular units, but when using the same attack strengths as the defense tower, the elephants prefer the ranged attack to attack units.

Yes, except it's currently not possible. You'd need to add a ranged attack to the unit, and the unit would always use that ranged attack. And I don't see elephants tearing down fortresses because their rider is shooting arrows at it. Josh has done a bit of work on separate damage-calculation functions, and when those are in, we could split the buildingAI (=arrows per garrisoned soldier) from the unitAI (=standard attack). It's the same reason why ships have no ramming attack, else they shouldn't be able to fire arrows.

So, what are you willing to help with? If you want to help with balancing, I suggest you join the #0ad IRC channel on Quakenet and show you're a good player. Most good players have some words to say when it comes to balancing the game (those discussions also happen there). If you want to help out with art and/or programming, you can just search for a task and start working on one. Don't be afraid to ask us for comments or help. Either here or (a faster way) on IRC.