Jeru

Wolfire Games, developers of indie games Overgrowth and Lugaru argue that Mac gamers spend 4x as much on games and that Linux gamers spend 6x as much. <blockquote>With Overgrowth, we were already planning a simultaneous Mac, Linux, Windows release just out of principle, in order to include everyone. However, it's nice to see that the numbers are on our side as well! </blockquote> Right on. Read the whole thing.

The way I see it, Judah/Judaea/Palestine was always a backwater to the Seleucids and the Romans, more important for its location than for any economic reasons. Also the Jews are more famous today for their enormous spiritual and cultural impact on Western civilization via Christianity than for any military conquests. Today we find it difficult to imagine Europe before Judeo-Christian morality, with Spartan babies left on hilltops to die and Roman gladiators killed by wild animals in arenas to entertain the crowd. I'm not a huge expert on Roman times, but I know the Jews would rise up against the Seleucids when it was politically opportune in terms of internal feuds within the Seleucid dynasty, or when other small peoples under the Seleucid thumb were rising up at the same time. Having said all that, the Jews certainly have an interesting story to tell within the 0 A.D. time frame. I think a Jewish mod/campaign would be an awesome add on for 0 A.D. once we take care of civilizations with some greater military prowess. I would love to work on a campaign about the Maccabees or about Josephus Flavius.

Sorry for the long lull in news, everyone. To compensate, you can mark your calendars: July is the month we plan to release the very first alpha version of 0 A.D.! We can't commit to a particular date yet (though we have one in mind), but what we mean by "Alpha" is that by then we should have a version that has all the bare-bones components of a playable game. These are detailed in our Alpha Release Roadmap, which is itself a work in progress, and include a new in-game GUI design, basic victory conditions, basic enemy AI, floating ships and some bugfixes. More music, sounds and art will probably be thrown in the mix as well, but the details are still being worked out. In other news: We forgot to inform you guys that we uploaded a screenshot of a fortified Persian city a while back. We've been getting some pretty great feedback, so thanks, omicron1, eggman, Kormiac Rue and MrBlack103! Also, while you are waiting for the 0 A.D. alpha, you may be interested in the Humble Indie Bundle - a pay-what-you-want, DRM-free bundle of 5 great indie games worth US$80. Not only do you set the price, you can set how much of it to set aside to developers and how much to give to two charities - the EFF, which makes Free Software like 0 A.D. possible, and Child's Play, which donates toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals worldwide. There's less than a week left, so if you're interested, buy it while it lasts!

Hi wraitii! We don't think new posters or French people are necessarily lamer than the general population. Welcome!

Hehehe. I think you can do better than that. Especially if the Israel faction is supposed to represent Jewish civilization as a whole, and the Dome of the Rock was built by Muslims.

Welcome, Andreas! Nice to meet you.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to run an empire that spans the greater part of a continent without trains and telegraphs.

Yeah, some of those ideas sound really cool for mods or expansion packs. I looked it up and the feasibility of the heat ray idea is discussed on Wikipedia.

As they should be!

Whoops, missed that

Some person on the Ubuntu forums suggests pinching code from Spring RTS.

(Watch out from depicting Mohammed as a deity or otherwise... Have you been following the protests/threats against South Park?)

Thanks! You are welcome to keep tabs on 0 A.D. using RSS, Twitter, Facebook etc. Also your forum participation is much appreciated!

Thanks! Can you link to the thread it was discussed? Funny they found 0 A.D. interesting in an MMORPG forum.

You're invited! Thanks!

It ain't built for gaming, I'll tell ya that

Thanks, mo0n_sniper! We love kind, thoughtful feedback like yours. How did you find out about 0 A.D.?

AoK had a special set of tooltips for absolute novices that could be switched on/off. Maybe a set of tooltips, or expanded data within existing tooltips, should be available to be switched on/off.

It runs on my netbook.

Good job, SMST! I look forward to seeing more of your screenshots and other fan art.

Hi, I'm not sure what a building queue is but I know you can queue unit production, technologies etc. You can also queue tasks for a unit. That is all documented here and here. (Part of the documentation is deprecated and the session GUI is being redesigned right now). Units will respond in their native languages, or as close an approximation as we can get. I wanted to give you a link to the relevant documentation (it has the battle cries and everything) but it is visible only to team members. This is unfortunately left over from before 0 A.D. became open source and I hope this is fixed quickly.

Hi, Germán! Someone from the programming dept. will be with you shortly. How did you hear about 0 A.D.?

Great! Thanks, Gustavo.

There's no doubt you are incredibly enthusiastic about helping 0 A.D. get done! And we love you for that. You are my new friend. But Gustavo, it's also very important to have good skills to be able to help out. It takes a long time to learn game programming at the level needed to work with the existing code (though I encourage you to keep learning!). I don't know game programming myself. Neither do most contributors to 0 A.D. I think the sentence you said you know video editing is more useful than the entire application you wrote. Can you show me a video you made? Also, maybe you can let game development websites in Portuguese know about 0 A.D. Also Linux fan sites sometimes run stories about us, and I heard there is a strong FOSS movement in Brazil, so maybe you can spread the word to more potential contributors from your country.

Hi, Gustavo! I'm so glad you are so enthusiastic about 0 A.D. About video editing: Would be great to have a new trailer for 0 A.D. We haven't had one of those for a few years.