Matei

It's really strange, because your test app got through. Maybe there's some incredibly smart content-aware filter. I'll try to MSN you, but please send a PM to me, Wijitmaker and janwas. Sorry for putting you through all this trouble but we really do need to see that application .

Hi Arissa, Welcome to Wildfire Games! Just to make it clear, our team members are all volunteers - nobody receives a salary, and 0 A.D. will be released as freeware. However, our project is ambitious and the goal is for us all to gain game development experience, so volunteering here could certainly be helpful for getting into the game industry. If you're interested in joining us, you should fill in an application form here. This way we'll also contact you to talk further (probably through email or MSN). What kind of work would you be interested in? I assume programming (which we do in C++) or scripting (in JavaScript/XML)? We are looking for people in both those areas, in several fields.

Lack of crispness could also be because you're seeing screenshots in JPEG, which is lossy compression. For example http://www.wildfiregames.com/0ad/album_page.php?pic_id=10087 loses a lot of detail in the trees (or rather, it gains unnecessary noise).

I'm not sure whether TLA will have Conquer the World either. It is something we thought about a little bit, and it might be added in 0AD part 2, but so far we concluded that scripted campaigns and single random maps add a lot more so we're focusing on those first. Anyway TLA and 0AD will use the same engine and it will be very easy to use a model from 0AD in TLA or vice-versa.

Our graphics are in pretty "open" formats, and furthermore we'll release importers/exporters from common formats. So, it's very likely that you'll be able to access them when you get the game. We certainly won't allow anyone to use them commercially, but I don't think it's even be possible to disallow personal use like you're mentioning. Lots of people use graphics from other sources for personal projects, and it's fine .

Welcome to the team Drew! I also have a human Mage, on Gul'Dan, though perhaps I should be playing him slightly less and doing more programming .

Do you know any programming? If not, the best thing to do is to learn some programming first, and then learn how to apply that to games (once you understand the basic concepts of programming, creating one particular type of program is just a matter of calling the right libraries, e.g. a graphics library, sound library, etc for a game). Personally I learned programming from books - they generally have more content, and it's easier than alt-tabbing between windows. Go to your local library or bookstore and look for books on learning programming. Read through a few pages and see if they make sense, and pick a book whose style you like.

I have a year of undergrad left, and after that I'll go to grad school for a Masters. Afterwards, I'll continue in academia if I find an interesting area to work on, or go into the software industry otherwise (or if I see a particularly promising industry position). I've done both research work and industry work in my summers and both have been interesting to me, but I think it's harder to get into research after working in industry than the other way around.

Hehe, the sequence "ad" is pretty common letters so you shouldn't make a rule that broad.

Romanian: rază de soare (Unless there's a more specific term for it that I don't know)

Great timing - we're actually just about to release a showcase on trampling and other features . Currently heavy cavalry can charge and trample units around them while doing that, though there aren't any graphical effects yet (people flying and stuff). Hopefully it will be more useful than AOE3's suicidal trample, though against certain formations, trying to charge into the front would be a very bad idea.

While we're on the subject of foreign music videos, I realy like this one: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4...tunak+tunak+tan This was popular both in India and on the Internet and it's very well sung but it's pretty funny at the same time.

OpenGL is an open standard that's been around for a long time and both Nvidia and ATI have been contributing to it heavily. Many games use OpenGL, such as Doom 3 and all games for Mac or Linux (since it's the main graphics library available there). The only reason you don't hear about it is that it's implemented by the graphics drivers, it's not a separate library like DirectX, so as long as you have the latest graphics drivers you don't need to install anything else to run the game.

I think blur makes a lot more sense in first or third person games than in an RTS. In an RTS, you're looking at a large area at a time so you want the view to be as detailed as possible, and blur takes away from that. It's not just from an artistic point of view - to play the game, you need to be able to tell units apart, which becomes harder when they're blurry. Blur is great in an FPS or RPG when you look at a bright light, because the bright object covers a large part of the screen and you can still tell what kind of object it is.

Once the game is released, there will be continual updates based on player feedback. Unlike most developers, we are very motivated to improve the game after release because it's not something that we throw away to start work on the next game to charge you another $50, it is our product. There will also be a 0 A.D. Part II which will add a bunch of more advanced gameplay elements and will obviously be very influenced by the response to Part I. However, right now the game is simply not far enough into development to be useful to a player (though it's getting there). It's not like we're holding onto it as a secret - we created it simply because we want people to play it, after all. We mentioned some of the problems with open-sourcing the game at this stage before. First of all, because we still need to implement some core systems, anyone working on the project would have to get very familiar with the engine and commit a decent amount of time, and if they're willing to do that they might as well apply to join the programming team; we wouldn't benefit much from people who just want to fix a few bugs or to add a minor feature. (Later, once the basic systems are all in place, this will certainly change however). Most open-source projects you see people contributing to are very mature for this very reason, and anyone who wants to actually commit to the main branch (rather than distributing a modified version themselves or creating a plugin) generally needs to be approved. We've never denied people who had something to offer and we've advertised at places like gamedev.net and gotten programmers, artists, etc there. Secondly, as soon as the game is playable everyone would start taking the gameplay in their own direction, and although everyone has an idea of what an RTS should be like, nobody agrees, and when you mix them up you end with a mess. AOM is a great example of that: you say you don't like the MU's and GP's, but they are exactly what a Blizzard fan loves to see in a game and if they had a choice they would add similar abilities to AOE3. Part of a game design is what can't be done; for example, Chess is beautiful precisely because a knight can only move in an L and a pawn can only attack sideways; throwing in features doesn't always help (the RPG example you gave is one where it does work because their goal is to create an interesting environment, not a strategy game). It makes more sense for us to first implement our design (which has been in planning for a long time) and give people an idea of how we want the actual game to play, then allow them to contribute to this concept or create mods to create their own game. Our team members are all gamers and the point of making 0 A.D. is exactly to let us create a game that gamers want to see, so we will use as much feedback as possible when there is someting that people can give feedback on.

There are actually people who reply to these things, such as this.

French eat frogs too, and French have amazing cuisine. I haven't eaten frogs but I've eaten snails in a French restaurant, they're delicious. (They're kind of like shrimp or squid, it's really not very weird).

I have one thing to add, AK, that wasn't quite covered by some of the other posts. A lot of your points seem to be about technology: Rise and Fall, AOE3, etc all have cutting-edge graphics effects, physics, and so on. Remember that many of these are "fixed cost" effects - you write (and debug ) a couple hundred lines of code and you have shadows, you write a couple hundred more and you have HDR lighting, etc. Thus, we can add many of these effects on later in development, especially as hardware support for them becomes more widespread. Just because development started in 2003 doesn't mean 0 A.D. will look like a game released in 2003. It probably won't look quite like the commercial games released at the same time either, but we'll do any new stuff that can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, part of what makes other games good is the armies of graphic and sound artists working on them full-time, creating models, textures, sounds, etc. We can't match that, but personally I'm very impressed with what our small team of artists has done so far. To put it in another perspective, think about why AOE1 is obsolete today: It has nothing to do with technology; it's because Ensemble Studios simply stopped working on it. If ES wanted, they could have patched it to Age of Kings and then AOM and Age of Empires III graphics level, at less cost than it took them to develop those games. They could have added better pathfinding, smarter units, higher population limits and a physics engine. But of course they didn't do this, because it makes no business sense. Instead they released the same sequence of updates with new settings as new games, so they can actually charge you for their work. In a sense though, Age of Empires 3 is what AOE1 would have been if they had continued development, so AOE is actually far from obsolete. Similarly, we won't stop at some arbitrary point and decide "this game will be released with 200X technology" - and unlike AOE, it's likely that we'll keep improving our engine as we begin working on 0AD Part II. Keep in mind that none of us would be here if we didn't believe this was worth doing. Also, a lot of us are new members: I joined about one year ago, a number of other programmers joined last fall, Morgan also joined us around that time, etc. We definitely wouldn't have joined if we didn't believe this was worth doing .

Javascript is just a simple general-purpose programming language (it's a full programming language, unlike AOK's rule system, although we will have some way to create "rules"). I'm not sure exactly what AI code will end up looking like, but if you want to have an "edge" when you start you can try learning programming using Python or web programming with PHP or JavaScript (all three of these should be fairly easy to pick up and have lots of examples available on the web; for PHP you need web hosting though). Basically if you understand programming concepts like variables and functions, many of which already sort of exist in AOK, you'll be fine. It will certainly be possible to do the things you can already do in AOK (which are basically if something -> do something), and you will be able to do some other things as well, like remember stuff in variables, do more interesting mathematical calculations, etc.

I'll have to agree that a lot of what goes into making a game look nice is not the 3D engine programming but the art. Take a look at the whizbang screenshot on Stuart's article about graphics, and compare with this and later this. Very little has changed in the renderer since then - there were some optimizations and bug fixes, more animation support was added and there is a very preliminary version of water rendering - but the newer screenshots look a lot better because our art has improved greatly. Also notice that the only graphics trick being used is shadow mapping, and even this is pretty limited right now (shadows only appear on the terrain, not on other objects). Other than that you're just seeing plain textured objects with no special effects. 0AD is very fortunate to have started as a mod and therefore to have had good artists on the team since the beginning, and they've only gotten better through years of practice. I'm definitely not against open sourcing but I don't think it would result in more than possibly some gameplay variants or little upgrades, or maybe more games about ancient times, at least not at first. By the way it looks like there is at least one open-source 3D RTS engine out there: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/. Hopefully development of other types of games will also pick up.

There is no clear-cut answer about which company to get a computer from. The best thing would be to look at reviews of individual ones. The most important things for gaming are probably the graphics card (take a look at the speed [number of shader pipelines, etc] in addition to the amount of memory, graphics memory isn't that important anymore) and the amount of RAM. As Qsr pointed, many smaller companies might have better value (I've never actually tried one of these though so I don't know about support, but it could be OK).

Animations are indeed currently shared between all units, and I don't see any reason for changing that so they'll probably remain that way. So when you add a new unit you can refer to our animations and it should work . About expansions: There is always 0AD part 2 of course. I don't know about small ones, but if I sit down and write a new random map, that probably sort of counts as an official map, and hopefully I'll have the time to do that.

I don't know the details of how our art is created myself, but I think we'll provide a plugin or converter for 3D Studio Max or GMax, and there will definitely be an image converter for textures. Unless your units are non-human, it will probably be possible to reuse our existing animations, and we will probably provide some kind of animation exporter too. Unfortunately I never played WC3 so I don't know about exactly which features it offered.

Ah, OK. I don't know myself. Most likely editing units will be easy and might even have a graphical tool, but there probably won't be an editor for other things because there are too many things you might want to modify (if we add a resource editor people might also want a damage editor and an experience editor and so on).

Programming will probably only be required if you want to change some type of behaviour drastically, e.g. change the way damage works or the way resources are gathered. We'll have converters from our art formats to common ones like BMP so you can edit the art, and unit stats will all be in text files which will be easy to edit by hand (though we might also provide a graphical editor if they get confusing). And of course, we'll try to make the map editor as powerful as we can, seeing as many of us started out as map designers of some sort.