Itms

Welcome!

He's just having a break, no worries

Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present this monthly 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? Head to our forums and join our active community! FOSDEM @ Brussels 3-4 February Those who'd like to meet members of the development team and are available this weekend, can join us on FOSDEM: "a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels". We'd love to see you there, and maybe grab a beer afterwards! The Team expands! We are proud to accept temple into the 0 A.D. programming team! May his commits be many and his whitespaces few (C++ joke)! Programming Itms, our project lead, has been working on a breakage in Jenkins, a tool that helps us ensure code quality by running tests in order to check the code for warnings, and has looked into goodies for FOSDEM (spoiler). mimo updated the AI to support the new combined victory conditions, among his ongoing improvements to the AI. He has improved the performance of GetEntityState by merging it with GetExtendedEntityState (performance improvement when selecting many units), reported some map errors and reviewed temple's formation patches. elexis "I like Vectors" has rewritten a lot of old random map generation code that will allow the player to select the biome on random maps. Other features: River maps are rotated arbitrarily, so that players get a truly unique map generation each time. The game now supports uncapturable Gaia fortifications. bb has committed the new game setup User Interface, providing sufficient space to add more game settings for the foreseeable future, and the combined victory patch. Vladislav reviewed a few patches and returned to working on post-game charts. Imarok committed a couple of minor GUI fixes. More importantly: he also worked on secure lobby authentication and a mod version test in the lobby (multiplayer). gallaecio has improved a couple of English strings. s0600204 worked on the template viewer patch. It is a new dialog that can be opened from the selection panel and structure tree and displays statistics and descriptions about the selected unit or building. temple worked on unit AI with dropsite distances (e.g. mill, storehouse) and visibility checks, fixed blinking territory and a couple of things with formations. He also fixed dock placement and updated some patches, which are waiting for a review by other programmers. Now he is turning his attention to the diplomacy color patch, together with Elexis, and balance changes for the next alpha release. Art & Sound LordGood has been working on the building sets. He committed a Ptolemies stable, archery range, workshop & elephant stable and a Roman stable & workshop. Stan has done some crash reporting and tried to reproduce call stacks, has worked on fixing the soundmanager bug that has been here since r9055 and has commmitted templates for new heroes. On the art side: he created many new helmets and caps. Alexandermb, a skillful new artist, has been very active. He has had his new models for horses and spears committed, aside other art improvements like giving siege weapons engineers. Omri Lahav, our composer, has not been idle in January. So much so that we'll dedicate a separate development blog to his work of late! Stay tuned! Community Contributions Dunedan and fpre's efforts to help with alpha 23 GUI and lobby patches, both coding and reviewing are greatly appreciated by the team! Lion.Kanzen recorded new sounds for the archery range. Hannibal_Barca has uploaded a beautiful winter river map. wowgetoffyourcellphone contributed new icons for dogs and for cavalry. Bigtiger created a beautiful skirmish map: Via Augusta. Leyto created a Muskox texture, that was committed to the game. Image: LordGood's Roman Workshop, front-side and back-side (centre). - by @plumo

In a private staff discussion, we had thought of "B. Population Cap"/"A. Housing limit" However, the issue was that using "Housing limit" would make us change the majority of strings related to population and we would end up with something that is not commonplace in RTS games. I feel like it's the B. word that especially needs an original idea.

Thank you very much for contacting them and getting involved and of course for all the translation work!

I'm curious to know why you think so I agree it's a very positive thing for us when people realize we still aim at something even better, but on the other hand at some point we have to create something that is complete and officially released for the general public, don't you think? We will still have Part 2 to start working on, if what you are afraid to miss is the ability to follow developments.

All the members of Wildfire Games wish you a Happy New Year 2018. May it be full of wonderful surprises and of achievements in your projects and personal lives! As for 0 A.D., the year ended with a great recognition from our community of players and followers: we were awarded a Honourable Mention in IndieDB's Indie of the Year competition! This is the best we can achieve considering we already made it to the top 5 in 2012 and cannot be ranked again... unless we enter the Released category! Be sure that we are headed towards that direction. We are looking forward to all the new things happening to the game in 2018 and we thank you, old-timers and newcomers in the community alike, for being a part of it

Hello, this was reported by @GunChleoc six months ago and the issue came from Transifex and their new PO parser (which Tutorials uses because it's a recent resource, while others still had (have?) the old parser). Was the issue fixed at some point only to reappear, or is the bugged parser still in production after such an amount of time? You should contact Transifex directly. Their support is usually quick to answer questions so at least we have an update on the issue.

I moved the topic to Help & Feedback. Thank you for promoting 0 A.D. @rugk Maybe you'll be interested in this other topic:

Only a few hours left! Rush to the IndieDB page, and don't forget to login if you can http://www.indiedb.com/games/0-ad

He did retire, and it was his choice to leave without big announcements. It goes without saying that we are extremely grateful for all the work done, as the community is. He is greatly missed already. We did as well! But I'm thrilled to disclose that @plumo is very happy to be back and that you should see regular development reports again The cavalry models will be for a future report This one is already going through validation on IndieDB.

I think asking him is not a problem at all, and it doesn't even need to be official, if you folks want to ask him as members of the community that sounds fine to me. However, if we need to put money in this, then my opinion is we're not ready, for all the reasons mentioned above Any publicity is publicity, I agree with that, but it makes no sense to spend money on presenting something that might significantly differ from the final product. IMO going to Beta is a guarantee that the game is ready to be judged by the general public. We will also be in a position of handling criticism from players that are outside the community, which is something we cannot dedicate most of our time on right now.

I don't really know that piece of code, you should ask @wraitii about this. And of course the mount/unmount gameplay decision needs debating, I'm looking forward to publicizing our decisions about the design process, as promised. (like a lot of things, it is still in progress)

We indeed made it, and the follow-up announcement is now online! Share it

We are happy to announce that we made it in the top 100 of Indie of the Year 2017! In this competition celebrating the independent games and mods created by professionals and hobbyists alike, we made it to the second round and you can send your votes until December 21st. We need your help to overcome in the Players Choice - Unreleased category, in which we have some serious contenders - and you can of course cast as many votes as you want in the Released Games category, and in the Mod of the Year sister competition. Do not forget to log in to your IndieDB account if you have one, as this action gives you a chance to win prizes, and it also means more points for us. Vote for us here! 2017 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB The first part of the competition was the easy one, now is the time to highlight 0 A.D.! Spread the word for the competition but also because everyone deserves to play a great free and open-source game of ancient warfare.

Hello, when we release Alpha versions, we pull complete enough translations inside the game installer. If you keep up with the pace, that means CAT will be in Alpha 23, good job! If you want to test your translation in-game, you should play the development version. It contains the latest translations from Transifex, which are pulled in twice a week. Follow these instructions (note that if you are on Windows, you don't even need to compile the game, just start binaries/system/pyrogenesis.exe). Thanks again for the work!

We usually make it to the top 100 but for those years we weren't on the podium nor in special mentions. We count on everybody to keep 2017 out of that list

This is up now, feel free to share with your friends

In my opinion, regardless of whether Enrique comes back, we shouldn't wait for him if we have good models. They can be improved (or not) by him or someone else later. The important thing is estimating the quality of @Alexandermb's work, for which I fully trust Johnathan and you (they look good to me but what do I know ): if it's "good enough as a placeholder", maybe don't commit it; if it's "matching the quality of the game art, though Enrique could do better", I think we shouldn't keep our old horses

It is this time of the year and IndieDB once again organizes the Indie of the Year Awards, a competition celebrating the independent games and mods created by professionals and hobbyists alike. We had the honor of being highlighted during the 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2015 editions and we would love to renew the experience for the 2017 edition! The promise of releasing the game is becoming more and more realistic and the latest Alpha versions of the game have brought the players a fully-playable game on all kinds of platforms. We still have some planned features in store... but not many anymore. To support us, you have until December 10th to get us in the Top 100; if we make it, we will once again mobilize you to get us even higher in the leaderboard... The results for the Players Choice in the Unreleased category will be unveiled on December 27th. Vote for us here! 2017 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB Don't forget to login if you have an account! Your vote counts more this way, and as an extra incentive, you can win prizes by doing so! Every member of the IndieDB community who votes can win a game, and your chance increases with each participation. Thank you very much, we will keep you updated! PS - You can also vote for your favorite(s) 0 A.D. mods for the Mod of the Year Award!

Back to you! First of all, you might be able to find the version of VS you're looking for there: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/older-downloads/ Also, the support for VS 2015 has been committed to SVN, so you should be able to use it. There will be a few warnings but nothing preventing you from building the game and contributing in one way or another

Hello, as elexis said we don't support VS 2015 but that will change in the upcoming days! Can you stick around in order to make sure your issue is fixed when the support is released?

It is indeed

I had the chance to drop a word about this to people from Debian at the Capitole du Libre, who knew who to contact so that the maintainer for the package gets some help. I hope we can have the game in stretch and jessie backports soon, buster shouldn't be long now that sid has it.

Hello @gw1500se! In order to force debug output, it might be interesting to run the game inside a debugger. Either the crash will leave you with a stack trace, either you can break into the debugger at the moment the game hangs to see, with some luck, what it is currently trying to do without success. The basic instructions to use the GNU debugger on Unix can be found here. Don't hesitate to ask for help and I hope we can track the issue down! Thanks for reporting