feneur

No, as Mythos_Ruler said you'd have to choose a scenario in case you want to be able to choose what sub-faction the enemy will select. And since the choice of what sub-faction you will use (in the cases where there are sub-factions, namely Celts and Greeks) is made a bit into the game it's really not that strange that you cannot affect that in the beginning.

Welcome! Price of Persia would have been more original though, don't remember seeing that one before Hope you'll enjoy your time around these forums and that you'll enjoy the game when it is finished.

Well, XML is used for far more things than the web. A lot of programs use XML based file formats, I think AoE3 does as a matter of fact. Javascript may primarily be a web scripting language, but in the evaluation of different languages that was done in the early development it was chosen to be the scripting language for 0 A.D. All the "heavier coding" is done in C++ though.

Is there a reason why you'd only have five civs? It's of course wise to limit the number to make it possible, but I just wonder if there's any reason for the number five

I've seen what Michael is planning for you for October, and I don't think you will be disappointed, just don't expect to get everything at one time

We'll see what happens But the main reason why we haven't put up any screens of the UI is that we're likely to change it before the release. And I believe most concept sketches are up, haven't taken the time to look through the archives and compare it with the Design Document though so I'm not sure everything is up. When it comes to info about the civilisations one reason why we haven't told you more about them is that the exact details might change during playtesting if we discover something that's making the game unbalanced etc. And of course, we'll have to keep some info 'til later too

Well, unfortunately I doubt that the only thing I can say for sure is that if there doesn't happen something unexpected or we lower our standards dramatically it's not going to be finished within 6 months to a year. Programming being the bottleneck, and I'm most definitely not saying that we don't have skilled programmers on the team, just that it's been hard to get good new programmers when the ones on the team don't have the time anymore. If we wouldn't still have some of the "old programmers" left there wouldn't happen all that much, not that there haven't been skilled people applying, but in some cases they've underestimated the project or their free time and left too soon, and due to the size of this project it takes a lot of time to get into the programming in any case. But we just might have a few things coming up that could help speed things up a little bit, as always one should expect too much though

The current plan is to make the game available for Windows, Linux and Mac, in the end that will be dependent on what systems the programmers have access to so while we aim to make it available for all three platforms we can only promise that we will try

Great to see you around I see you registered quite a while back And yeah, we're still here, it's sometimes frustrating that we haven't got it done yet, but it'd be foolish to give up now

Well, I think Michael said something about this at another place in these forums, but as that was some time ago I might say something here The first thing to remember is that there's a difference between many good screenshots and many not-as-good screenshots, and that is that the former takes more time. Another things to remember is that, as you said, it takes time away from actual development. Since we do want to keep people interested, both to have a community so we're not entirely disconnected from the rest of the world so to speak and also so people can get interested enough in the game to become a part of the team. It's also matter of keeping some things "hidden", not that we are a company and need to keep things hidden from our competitors in that way, but so we can have some "new" things to reveal later on when we want some more attention.

We are proud to present our official screenshot for September, 2008! It's a sunset scene featuring Celts and Iberians and some units we haven't shown you before. Click the thumbnail view below to experience our latest work:

Patience is a virtue they say, that's got to mean that it's hard right? Looking back at the last months it seems that day 4 of a month is the last, and that we didn't post a screenshot in May I'm afraid We did however forget to post a news post about it on the front page for August We'll try to improve in that area (Don't forget that we're posting a history article each month though, am actually impressed at how Joshua (Shogun_144) manages to get one written each month despite all the other things he's got to do).

He's hinting at: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11970

I didn't mean it as "don't see fighting at all", but rather as "since gathering they will not necessarily be in the center of the hardest fighting" The difference from villagers is partly that they will be more resistant to rushers, but I'd also say that it will give you more flexibility as you can use your citizen soldiers to gather when you're "between battles" so to speak. And one thing that's easy to forget: as some of your soldiers (the citizen soldiers but not the super units) will be able to repair things you will have more flexibility there too. In a game like Age of Kings a villagers isn't exactly very useful on the battlefield except when repairing and hopefully you don't have the need for repairs all the time. Also please remember that the exact rates will have to be decided upon after testing, there's gotta be a balance between fighting skill increase/gather rate decrease after all And just to be clear I want to add another thing, it will not be a continuous decrease but only when the unit gets enough experience (from fighting) to upgrade to the next level. I think it will depend a lot on how much you want to micromanage your units. If you have a unit that's upgraded you can of course still let that unit gather, but there's more use in having that unit "go to the front" and create a new unit to gather as they are more effective that way.

Indeed we've got one though obviously we forgot to add a news post pointing to it

Well, there's already a division between military and economy in that the super units don't gather at all. And I'd not say that a player needs to keep some soldiers from fighting as it's just to create new units when the old ones upgrade if you want to keep the most efficient units gathering. Also I doubt that the units you use mostly to gather aren't the ones who'll see the most fighting in the first place. Especially since the units get better at fighting when they upgrade and thus are more useful for that (The biggest reason why we want to have it this way though is for balance reasons )

If we would have had civilians in that sense that could have been a possibility, but since we're using the concept of citizen soldiers that's not the case. In a way it's the opposite: as soldiers gain experience and advance in level they get better at fighting but they get less good with the economic tasks. The exact amount this goes down will have to be determined by playtesting as I'm sure it can make a difference. Keeping track of exactly what a unit does and letting that influence his fighting abilities seems a bit overdone to me personally but in any case I think it would be too much work for little gain. It would however add an RPG element to the game which some might like.

Indeed, but those situations are what you've got cavalry for

Ok Well, I don't know who created it as that was before my time here, but would you please enlighten us to what elements you're interested in. That will make it a lot easier for us to help you

You mean the main page as in: http://wildfiregames.com/ or as in http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/?

Perhaps you can see what the road looks like, but you cannot see whether someone is running out of gas or intending to stop driving and block your road etc Plus I have yet to see a metaphorical radar

If you will get tshirts? Do you think we're made of money? =) Seriously though, I cannot promise that we will offer tshirts and other things, though it's very much possible.

True, but those are just a question of whether or not the game can continue being developed. It's generally not as if the development is going to go a lot faster if we can buy a fancy server or something. A bit smoother perhaps, but not really faster. I believe that the main reason why we don't do something like this is because we don't want to sell merchandise for a game that's not yet finished. It can be a totally different thing once it's released though.

Please point us to where we've said that. Programming is the big bottleneck for the moment, mostly because the game is so large at this stage that it takes a lot of time to learn the code. Thus it's really only the old coders who still continue to write since a lot of people who join the team to program don't seem to have understood how large this project is and how much time it takes to get done. A reason why programming is one of the hardest areas to get done quickly is just that it gets harder the larger the project is. I mean, it's not more difficult to create a model for a game that has 200 units than for a game that has 20, it just takes more time or more people. Writing code for a large game is more difficult however, there are so many things that needs to work together and work in the first place so that adding more people isn't always the answer as it often can take a lot of time to get people up to speed in working with the game - and then they realize how difficult it is or how much of their time it will take and they leave, thus making the time spent on teaching them wasted.

Just how would more money speed up things when we work for free?