Jeru

Hear, hear. The latter would make a great Hanukkah gift.

Once upon a time, I planned a campaign for the Great Revolt aka First Jewish–Roman War. No idea if it will ever be an official Wildfire Games campaign, probably not.

Anybody following up on this?

Can someone help out our new friend?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9106072&postcount=25

Thanks, lybe! You're very welcome to contribute as much - or as little - as you like.

Hi Joe! Sounds like you need to drive a lot. How did you find out about 0 A.D.?

Thanks, Aceshighhhh! Your words are very kind and encouraging.

Welcome aboard, Tyler!

Welcome, Goblor!

Wildfire Games proudly announces the release of a pre-alpha version of 0 A.D. It's not a playable release yet, and it's still meant for developers only. However, you can now install 0 A.D. much more easily and see what we've achieved, and as always, you're welcome to join the effort as we go on. Easy to Download and Install Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, OS X and Linux. For the first time, 0 A.D. can be installed without revision control software, like SVN. Instead, the game is provided prebuilt for Windows and Linux users, eliminating the need to download additional software just to get the game running. This makes installation much easier than before. Some installable packages for Linux are in the works and we encourage developers to make more of them. Links on the download page will be updated as packages come along. This Is Not a Playable Release If you are looking for the polish of your average RTS game, you are in for a disappointment. Not all of the rules of the game have been implemented, the AI won't fight back and you may encounter lag. In short, this release is still a work in progress and many features have not been integrated yet. However, the foundations are in place. We want to start producing regular releases, and this release is the first step. Stable, Solid and Secure This release represents a lot of progress that has been made on the game over the last few months. It is now more stable, more secure, more debuggable and more extensible than the original July 2009 open source release was. The current code also allows us to properly support features like multiplayer in the future. An overview of the gameplay feature status is on our wiki. We have made this progress because we have completely redesigned and rewritten the gameplay code, adding about 17,000 new lines of code to the game. This was the major roadblock delaying progress over recent years, so we can now focus on producing a much more playable game. There is still a lot of work to be done, though. If you want to be part of this effort too, you're welcome to get involved! We know jumping right in to a project like this can be daunting. That's why over the next few months we'll integrate more features in a basic form and improve the developer documentation. Watch our website to keep updated, or follow us by e-mail, RSS, Facebook or Twitter.

Thanks for your interest, SypheDMar. The history dept has been focusing on other tasks (namely the design document) and the website design has been changed to better cater to newcomers and potential developers. Essentially I took over the box and used it to explain what 0 A.D. is. AFAIK there have been no new history articles for months and I'm guessing they're not a priority ATM. I hope this explanation is okay.

Gaming website DigitalBattle argues that old-school RTS games are a dying breed. <blockquote>"Remember back in the day, when RTS games were about base building and resource management as much as they were about combat? Remember classics like Total Annihilation, arguably the greatest RTS game ever created? And Age Of Empires? Sadly, RTS games are moving away from the tried and tested formula to a more arcade style gameplay in hopes of gaining a wider audience. Lately, RTS games have been moving away from the classic gameplay style of gathering resources, building a base and buildings units, to just “getting units” and storming into combat. Recently, in order to appeal to a wider range of audience, RTS games have moved away from their base to an almost arcade style gameplay, where the player isn’t required to posses great management or multitasking skills, only requirement is to know a bit of tactic."</blockquote> Do you agree? (via HeavenGames)

Hi Tom! We certainly don't want to get in the way so you're welcome to contribute as much or as little as you like. You said you liked "the broad solicitation of contributors": Thanks! Where did you hear about us?

Hey guys, just a small reminder: We are about to revamp the 0 A.D. website, and to make this come true we need a skilled web developer. A good understanding of (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL is required. Knowledge of the IPB SDK is a big plus, but you can learn it easily if you have good skills in PHP/MySQL. Knowledge of JavaScript and especially the jQuery library is also needed, though you don't need to be an expert, since it will just be needed for simple things. Commitment is a must: This position is for the long haul and you will be expected to support the website, fix bugs etc. for at least a few months. We have had a lot of applicants for this particular position, but unfortunately very few committed enough to keep in touch and contribute over time. Still interested? You're welcome to apply according to these instructions.

Hi maxpower, thanks for your interest. Are you writing a blog post or a news article about 0 A.D.? Yes, but most of it was due to added motivation to one pre-existing contributor, Philip. Most progress after the OS release consisted of his reimplementation of part of the engine called "simulation". Simulation was planned wrong and had to be redone, and the OS release gave him a shot in the arm, I'm guessing because he realized more help was on the way. Many other contributors pitched in with various bugfixes, like those which let the game run properly on different platforms. Those were great, and we're expecting more contributions, and even more substantial ones, in the near future. I will let Erik answer that, he keeps track of contributors joining and leaving the team. If you count contributors outside the team (like the bugfixers), it's probably under 50. (Philip - correct me if I'm wrong) We got a lot of interest, a lot of website traffic, and more people passing by on the forums, some of them applying to join the team, but only a few so far really offering heavy-duty contributions (the few, the proud!). Things that have got worse due to the OS release - I can't think of any.

Server Overload We apologize if you've been running into trouble downloading 0 A.D. today. Some popular websites have been talking about 0 A.D. recently, and the server is a bit overloaded. (Willkommen, Golem.de surfers!) We hope to have a better distribution mechanism set up by the end of March, so if you've been having problems, you're welcome to subscribe to our news feed and wait a week or two until it's ready. The Data When we said WorksWithU and some German-language websites have been sending traffic our way yesterday, we were looking at this graph: (x axis denotes days of the month) But it turns out that jump, pictured below on Tuesday at about 18:00, was dwarfed by today's traffic: Our programmer Philip (also known as Ykkrosh) writes: "The gaps on the right are where the server was overloaded and the logging process got jammed, and where it helpfully decided to reboot while I was increasing the hardware resources. I've limited it to 30Mbit/sec now, and replaced the Trac BuildInstructions page with a cached static file, and it seems mostly stable for now." The Music While you're looking at screenshots and graphs, you're welcome to listen to the music of 0 A.D., now embedded into our audio page. More music and sound will be introduced soon by our music and sound department leader, Matt Sherman.

Chris Tozzi from WorksWithU was kind enough to grant 0 A.D. project leader Erik an interview. Check it out. Also, we'd like to thank German-language Linux websites ubuntuusers.de and pro-linux.de for their sympathetic write-ups, which have sent a considerable amount of traffic our way. Danke!

January 29, 2010. Thanks! Spread the word!

Revised the Web Developer job description to exclude the IPB/Wordpress bridge issue, a requirement which we have dropped from the spec for the new website.

Fixed, thanks

Open source software advocate Kinshuk Sunil from India, who will be presenting 0 A.D. at an OS software unconference called OSS Pilani, tweeted us the following question: "are there any 0ad goodies - stickers/posters/etc - good for give aways?". We try to accommodate our fans as much as possible, so we put up png and illustrator files of the 0 A.D. and Wildfire Games logos, to help our fans create their own 0 A.D. graphics and schwag. They can be found at the bottom of the Get Involved page. We look forward to your contributions and would love to see what kind of graphics you can make! In other news, over this last month our programming department has reimplemented death, resource gathering, projectiles and construction, as well as some work on the in-game GUI. This is part of the reimplementation of the Simulation component of the engine behind 0 A.D., Pyrogenesis. (The reimplementation is discussed here.) Also, the description of winners of Independent Game Festival Awards over at Gamespot makes an interesting read.

Guess what? Mozilla borrows from WebKit to build fast new JS engine.

I have been following them a little bit and trying to emulate some of their best community outreach policies for 0 A.D.

Blender is a free 3d graphics software with its own community guides and such. You're much more likely to find help there than here. If you like programming, I guess similar communities can help you learn C++ and JavaScript. Google around, or buy books on Amazon, or sign up for a class where you live, etc.