Jeru

If you're interested in indie gaming besides 0 A.D., GameInformer is running a special seven-day coverage on all indie games that received nominations in this year's Independent Games Festival. (via The IndieGames Weblog) Edit: On a similar note: 0 A.D. hasn't accepted funding outside of PayPal donations, but it's still cool to know about Indie Fund, "a brand new funding source for independent developers, created by a group of successful indies looking to encourage the next wave of game developers". (via @Wolfire)

I guess I misread your post, sorry, welcome to the forums!

Hi Alex, no part of 0 A.D. is written in Java. Only C++ and JavaScript (which has very little to do with Java except its name).

Hey everybody, we have started an official 0 A.D. Twitter page and linked to it above. Some interesting recent tweets include CC-licensed music; a new study saying Carthaginian child sacrifice never happened; and secrets revealed from a Bronze-Age shipwreck. (0 A.D. doesn't really cover the Bronze Age but it's still interesting). You're all invited to follow us! Next, we've hooked up the RSS feed with Feedburner, to make it easier for new fans to subscribe, and launched a page called In the Press, which documents some of the awards, news coverage and critical acclaim 0 A.D. has received. Also, have you been wondering what gameplay features of 0 A.D. are done and which aren't? Philip (Ykkrosh) compiled a feature status report. Discussion can be found in this thread.

I recommend the relevant part should be copy-pasted... Hard to find in that long transcript anyway.

Hi Tyrannosaurus! Welcome to the forums.

Whoa! Nice work.

Hi Anarion! Thanks for your message. You're welcome to jump right in whenever you're ready.

I searched trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki for "Random Map" and I found these three documents: Random Map Generator Random Map Scripting Functions Random Map Scripting Interface Are those any help? If they are, I can make more prominent links to them elsewhere.

Keep following us via RSS or Facebook, rjs23... In the next coming months and years we hope to make some nice progress, and you can keep track of how the RMS part of the game evolves and even suggest how to implement it best, make feature requests etc.

3rd Place! We're pleased to share that 0 A.D. has won third place in ModDB's "Indie Game of the Year" contest for 2009! That means we're the third most voted for game on ModDB out of about eight hundred indies. First of all, thanks! We feel it's a well-deserved vote of confidence in our endeavor, and we think it helps promote sharing ideas, learning how to develop games and appreciating ancient history. This couldn't have happened without a lot of hard work from our team members and the firm support of our fanbase, and we'd like to thank you all with a big, collective sloppy kiss. We thought this could be a good occasion to tell everyone a little bit about what we've been doing recently. Consider it an official "state of the game" address. How ready is the game? Our programmers say the codebase is about 40% done. But looks can be deceiving: Even though the game has been in development since 2001, progress has been more dependent on effort than on time. As detailed below, just in the course of a few months the game has made a giant leap in progress, most of which is under the hood and is meant to lay the groundwork for future development. By contrast, the art is very much advanced compared to the game's current stage of development. Art for the Hellenic and Celtic civilizations is pretty much complete, and we've made a great deal of progress on the Roman and Carthaginian civs too. Overall, about all the moving units, like hoplites and cavalry, are done, as well as 70% of the buildings. The bulk of remaining art work is left primarily in the Persian and Iberian civs and modeling things like ships and siege engines. What's been the recent progress over the last few months? Our top achievement over the last few months has probably been in the programming department. One of our programmers, Philip, known on the forums as Ykkrosh, has effectively redone one of the most important parts of the game engine, called "simulation". That part is in charge of changing the state of each entity in the "world" represented in the game, like handling harvesting resources, doing damage to stuff and handling death, which our programmers say has been proving particularly tricky. About 15,000 lines of code were changed or introduced in a single codebase update on January 9. Meanwhile, the art department has mostly been working on the remake of several buildings for the Carthaginians, Persians and Romans. Some new ships has been designed like the Roman quinquereme, the Carthaginian trireme and two Hellenes triremes (not yet released). Also, there have been a lot of work on the animals in the game. About 10 new wild animals have come alive into the game, including African elephants, camels, giraffes, crocodiles, zebras and hawks. Artists have also given attention to the siege engines, advancing them from a primitive state, with the help of some new members. How much has going OS promoted development so far? Well, honestly, not quite as much as we had hoped. Most contributions have focused on small bugfixes and getting the game to run on different platforms, which is important in and of itself. But, we're looking for more contributions! And we have an idea how to get them: Making contributions easier and our progress more tangible. By making contributions easier, we mean we've been working actively on the main development bottlenecks that have been blocking progress, to make it easier for new programmers to get involved - Like simulation, as explained above. Previously, simulation was a buggy patchwork of code, a veritable ball of mud that was difficult for new contributors to understand and debug, and we hope it will be more inviting now. By making progress more tangible, we mean that over the next few months we intend to start releasing regular, (barely) playable alpha versions. The first of these is set to include very basic implementations of the following features: basic session GUI; pathfinding; construction; resource gathering; combat; enemy AI; victory conditions. They should be more easily installable, without fiddling with SVN or compiling code. And changes to the engine should be easier to implement now that the simulation code is much improved. We've learned that many contributors start out by fixing a bug they encounter when playing, and that removing barriers makes it more likely for potential developers to try out the game. Also, we're now inclined to believe that regular releases provide a momentum that is very inviting to potential contributors, and we hope all of that works out soon. Overall, thanks again for your interest in 0 A.D. Everyone is, of course, welcome to get involved. Together, we can make 0 A.D. worthy of awards in 2010 too.

Oh. That explains it. It's all there. I think the relevant documentation needs to be fixed for newbies like me. The file says: Graphics Card : Mobile Intel® 945 Express Chipset Family OpenGL Drivers : 1.4.0 - Build 7.14.10.4906; iglicd32.dll (6.14.10.4906)

I only have a readme.txt in \binaries\logs. I have run the game. I have Win XP SP3.

I don't have system_info.txt anywhere for some reason.

Aldandil, Thanks for your question. The other day I added to the bottom of this page a few other ways you can contribute:

Two interesting spottings from the internet: Bruce Shelley, the mind behind the Age series, says . He also says he feels closing Ensemble Studios was a mistake. Most of the interview is about Settlers 7, though, which I found less interesting. (via HeavenGames) For all those who've been wondering when 0 A.D. will be ready, a few words of wisdom from 37signals, the small, zippy, famous software company:<blockquote>Software development is inherently unpredictable. There are just too many moving parts and ice tips that turn out to be icebergs. If you treat the estimate as a “best guess based on the limited information available to me before I start the work”, though, you’ll change the frame and break the cycle of deadline anguish. Now the task becomes collaborative and you can share new discoveries with the stakeholders.</blockquote> Read the whole thing.

I edited the form instructions to make it updated (FOSS, not freeware) shorter (no need for discussion of perfection in game design) and less formal (for crying out loud, we're just a small team of volunteer game designers, not Swiss bankers).

I can't help with the debugging, but I can help with this: Awesome! You're very welcome to join by starting a new thread with a short application according to these instructions. (Sounds bureaucratic and all but it helps keep things organized)

Just a few quick announcements: First, thanks for voting for us in the Indie Game of the Year contest! We appreciate it a lot. The top 5 indies will be announced on ModDB on Friday, February 5, at about 4 pm GMT and we can't wait to hear the results. Next, if things are looking a little different around here, it's just because we decided it was about time we changed a few things around the website, while a brand new one is still underway. Old-timers will already be familiar with 0 A.D. being free, open-source software, and maybe even with some of the nuts and bolts behind 0 A.D. development. For newcomers, though, we made sure to update the key features list, explain it all in new Overview and Get Involved pages and make a summary stand out on the home page. <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/0-AD/300383354858"><img src="http://www.wildfiregames.com/0ad/images/facebook-32.png" height="32" width="32" style="float: left; padding: 0.5em; border: 0"></a> Last but not least, we've started an official Facebook fan page for 0 A.D.. Feel free to join us, so you can get updates and share your enthusiasm with everyone!

Turns out 0 A.D. wasn't even nominated for the Editor's Choice for Best Original Art Direction or for Best Upcoming Indie Game this year. But we might make the top 5 next Friday! Keep your fingers crossed.

I couldn't be bothered with landscapes and camping for more than a day at a time. I like big cities with lots of stuff to do, like New York. Would like to spend at least a week in Montreal someday.

Mark your calendars, if my calculations are correct, we should expect announcements at these dates and times: Editor's Choice for Best Original Art Direction will be announced at 4pm GMT tomorrow, Jan 27. Editor's Choice for Best Upcoming Indie Game will be announced Thursday, Jan 28 at the same time. The top 5 indie games of the year (combination of released/unreleased), as picked by voters will be announced on Friday, Feb 5, at the same time.

Great! I look forward to seeing what you guys can come up with.

Definitely a good idea, Crescento, thanks for your support. I agree 0 A.D. could use some more effective advertising. I believe Kimball would be very interested in collaborating with you on this project and I'm sending him a heads-up.