feneur

This time Jeroen, aka vts is our featured contributor. He has been working on both minor fixes and big things like the wall system. Read on for a description on what "Featured contributor" means or jump down to read the quick interview with Jeroen. As you may remember we had a thing a while back called Member/Contributor of the Month, as you may also remember we have not any such posts for quite a while. It's definitely not because of a lack of skilled contributors as anyone following the forums/IRC (or for that matter the release announcements) knows. It was hard to keep to the monthly schedule, but since we still think it's important to highlight the skilled people who work on 0 A.D. in various ways we've decided to bring it back in a slightly different way. Both to honor the hard-working contributors, and to give everyone a chance to get to know them a bit. To give you some insight into who the people working on 0 A.D. are Now we will post on a slightly less rigid schedule, but that doesn't mean that the people featured are any less worthy And here comes the interview with Jeroen: Tell us a bit about yourself? I'm Jeroen, a 23-year old guy from the city of Ghent, Belgium. I finished my Computer Science studies last year, and am now employed at a financial company in Brussels as a security analysist. I've been a programmer on 0 A.D. for about a year now. My programming background is mainly one of personal interest. I believe it started as a teenager, when I became interested in building websites in Flash. To make them do more interesting things I started learning ActionScript, which in turn lead to PHP to be able to do things on the server side, more generally exposing me to the LAMP stack. I moved on from Flash websites to more traditional ones, and picked up some Java, C/C++ and Python along the way. Today, I still occasionally do web development, although I find my interests have moved more towards non-web development. I enjoy programming and general problem-solving recreationally. I tend to write programs just for fun, for personal use or because I have my mind set on learning how to write a program that does a particular thing. I enjoy a challenge in that regard. Game development was a challenge for me when I first heard about 0 A.D. (and it still is), and that was a big part of the reason why I decided to join the project. It's a subject I've always been interested in, but that I never had a chance to get serious with. Many aspects about 3D programming seemed very complex and hard to grasp for me, so I figured just diving in would be a good idea. There are some communities that I used to be a part of when I was younger. I used to be very active on Kirupa Forums, a board about web development (and anything related). I also used to be part of the Crossfire community, which revolves around the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory that I used to play quite enthousiastically and competitively. I still play it occasionally, but just for fun. Other than that: I'm a big fan of movie soundtracks, and am somewhat privileged in that regard as the annual World Soundtrack Awards are held right where I live. I also like to go for a run every so many days around my local track. On my nightstand are books about reverse engineering, windows internals, (popular) cosmology and religion, and our local variant of Scientific American. What have you found most interesting about contributing to 0 A.D.? I think the most interesting part has to be the way in which a loosely grouped set of people from around the world manages to coordinate an effort like this, and have been keeping it going for so long. I've said this before, but one of the things I really like about 0 A.D. development is that the people involved are active in such a way as to create a positive feedback loop: because people keep the project moving forward, everyone stays encouraged to keep working on it, in turn contributing to the feedback loop for others. Anything you want to add? Nothing especially important, although I would like to point out that I think it's great to be able to work with and learn from people who are vastly more talented and knowledgeable than me, and not only in the field of programming. Oh, and I also enjoy the occasional back-and-forth with people on IRC who appear to share my tastes in music (you know who you are)

Well, there are the shields which I'm sure will have player color, so I think that should be enough

Nothing is decided about part two yet. I don't mean this as in "this will not happen", but rather as in "don't take anything for granted about part two" We need to finish part one before we start on part two

Congrats Glad to hear everything went so well

It's very much possible to resize it, and in fact the resize option is not really recommended on non-blank maps, so it's definitely something we recommend you use before adding something to the map. The option can be found in the terrain tab, under Misc tools, see http://trac.wildfire...n_Tab#Misctools for more information. And in general it's a good idea to look through the pages of the Atlas Manual ( http://trac.wildfire...ki/Atlas_Manual ) as there are some aspects which might not be too easy to fully understand from just playing around with the game

I wouldn't say the Celtic temple looks too small. In fact, it's occupying more or less exact the same space as the others (the shape may vary, but they take up more or less the same area in total), so while I'm sure there might be other things one could change, the size isn't one of them. Another thing to remember is that some choices are made for gameplay reasons, and some for artistic reasons, and some for historical reasons. In many cases they can work together, but sometimes you may have to make a choice that isn't perfect in all points of view. To some extent the way the Celtic buildings look is because of this (to some extent it's down to lack of good references saying something else, so the more help you can provide in that area, the better any possible updates can be), each civilization should have a distinct look to it, and sometimes that means that some aspects are downplayed. That doesn't mean that you can't give the Celtic civilizations a distinct look while still making them look more "civilized", just that it's part of the reason why they look like they do

That is explained in the manual here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Manual_SettingUpAGame#HostingJoiningaMultiplayergame (I could have just pasted the number, but since the doc contains more useful information it's more worthwhile to link to it imho ).

Ouch, that doesn't sound optimal no Hope everything goes well though (Or hopefully "went well", as in: "I hope it's not still going on" )

About the foam, Michael (Mythos_Ruler) created a/or perhaps several textures a couple of years ago that he placed manually. Hmm, looking at them in Atlas (just search for wave in the object tab) I guess they are more like waves, but still, something to check out at least, perhaps it can be useful in one way or another

I personally don't think that's subtle at all, in fact I'd say it looks a bit extreme on the stone walls =) Perhaps it needs a higher resolution texture to make any difference for the straw roof/wood though, but on the other hand perhaps it's not ever going to make a big enough difference on such areas at the zoom we're using

What's weird about trade between ports that belong to the same civilization? Granted, if they are too close it can seem a bit weird, but the amount gained is really small if you put them too close to each other

Can you please find the logs according to this guide: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths and post the system_info.txt file here?

(The images are hosted on other sites, or rather were, so that's probably not something we can fix unless we can get the images from somewhere else.)

It is now if nothing else =) And also as has been mentioned the size of the contribution shouldn't really matter, if someone has submitted one patch shouldn't mean he/she's listed higher than someone who's submitted dozens. Each and every bit is valuable (That said, there are people without whom the project wouldn't have kept on going through the years, and who just by their passion and steadfastness - plus often huge amount of work - have meant that we have a 0 A.D. today. People like Ken Wood (Phoenix-TheRealDeal), Michael Hafer (Mythos_Ruler), Jason Bishop (Wijitmaker), Philip Taylor (Ykkrosh), and I think they deserve special mention. As it is now is fine, I'm just saying that they are an exception to the "everyone should be listed equal to everyone else" rule )

Seems like you're really getting somewhere And you seem to have a certain kind of style already, so keep at it I'd say

Just delete the files in the appropriate folder http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths should tell you where to find the folder for your OS

Ah, true that problem (which I personally wouldn't call blending as much as smoothing ) goes away. The trouble with reading things too quickly =) The actual blending (as in transition from the one to the other) between two textures still seems to be the same in the above/below though which obviously was what I was looking at

I don't know anything about the technical aspects, but just looking at it I don't really see that much difference between the before/after in terms of blending (depending on exactly what is going on there in the middle, it's hard to know whether it's several dirt/grass/grass-mixed-with-dirt textures or just the two grass textures with a dirt texture in between). There is a big difference in the actual textures though, and I wouldn't say it's fair to compare the blending when you're using such different textures What I would think might work best is what I think someone else suggested somewhere: to use different blending textures for different textures, say three different sizes. Or at least create larger blend textures that would make the transition smoother. As far as I can see there are two issues that would need to be thought out by people who know more about the programming for something like that to work: If we use different sized blend texture, how would it be determined which one to use? It could easily be described in the texture XML which size each individual texture would use, but if you have a transition between say a road texture which would use a sharp transition and a dirt texture that has a smoother. Perhaps it could be dependent on which one is on top (see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Atlas_Manual_Terrain_Tab#Texturepriority )? And is it possible to have transitions which covers more than one tile? (I.e. a blend texture that's larger than one tile.)

Not sure what's your point or the reason for those words. Myconid doesn't have any code in the game yet, so there's no reason to add him to the credits (yet! As soon as he does have some of his code in the game, of course he should be added ). Also, no one did mention him so I'm really not sure why you would say anything other than "I think you should add ..." Either way, thanks for caring for him

Another thing, you mention that you have some interest in programming? The sound system is currently being reimplemented, and since it is getting close to being able to be included in the main repository for the code it would be helpful if you would be able to at least compile it and see if it runs without issues. See http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15995

(Slightly off-topic as I'm sure your points are very valid about the Celtic buildings in general, but I would say that you are wrong about people not having rotting corpses/heads around. Depends on what you mean by around of course, having them in their houses hardly was common. But at least during the medieval/later periods it was fairly common to be far more liberal with having dead bodies around than we would think today. Granted, it was mostly criminals displayed in public and I guess in most cases not necessarily next to people's houses, but that's not the same thing as to say it didn't happen at all. )

Hello and thank you for your application You mention animation, how much animation experience do you have? Any of it that is good enough to show us? I'm just asking since animation is where most work is needed, so if you could provide any assistance there it would be great Modeling/texturing is very useful as well of course, so don't worry in either case Have you had a chance to look through: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Modding_Guide and most specifically the page linked to at the bottom of that page with more information on how to get an object from e.g. Blender into the game?

Cool, welcome to the forums

Looks like a really good start and what may become a great map I do think there are ways to improve it though (I'm just looking at the image at the moment). One of the biggest visual things you could do is to divide the terrain into smaller pieces, that way it won't look as repetitive as it does now with all these big chunks of texture

Yeah, there are other reasons to push Alpha 11 back a little, but this is not one of them