feneur

BlenderNation is probably the top resource for Blender news, in either case it's a site for Blender news that is visited by lots of people daily. It would be nice to get 0 A.D. featured there, mostly so we can attract new contributors (hopefully animators ). To just get them to write about 0 A.D. we'd most likely just have to send a screenshot of something in 0 A.D. modeled in Blender and write a short text saying "Several contributors to the open source RTS game 0 A.D. use Blender, if you have the skills you can join too", and I'm sure they'd include a quick article. To make the most out of it I'd suggest we try and go about it a little more thought-through though (After all, if we just have an article posted and it just sounds like a cheap way to look for more contributors I doubt we'd get any, at least any who are good enough to be really useful.) I'll make contact with them to discuss things, but even for a first contact it would be nice to have a few thoughts gathered, and in many cases they just post directly what people send them, so it would not be a bad idea to start thinking of exactly what we would like to say First I think we most definitely should include a screenshot or two, preferably of one or more things created in Blender Second, we should include a quick description of what 0 A.D. is, and some information about the art related things. Collada, DDS, etc etc. Third, I think it would be a good thing to include a few words about how it is to work with Blender for 0 A.D. from one of you artists own experiences. Some good things about the process, some obstacles along the road (can't be all rosy or people will think something is wrong, just something to make it more engaging, like "in the beginning I had to force myself to remember to always turn on option X in the Collada export dialog" or something ). Finally we should write something about areas where people can contribute, modelling and animation (mention the Mauryan Indians). Also, it might make sense to mention the texture maps needed after myconids changes are in since it's so closely related to 3D, but I'm not sure how relevant it is

There's already the IRC channel: #0ad on irc.QuakeNet.org (either use a separate application or just click through to the web chat: http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad ). Maybe we should advertise it more though

No. (Of course it's not entirely impossible to have some kind of basic lobby done already for Alpha 11 depending on how useable what Martin has created already is, but generally speaking it's not very likely. Mainly because it's a quite bit thing and will probably need quite some work before being truly useable )

First, welcome back Martin Second, well, the main thing is that it should make it easier to connect to other players and improve the chances for people to have fun with the game. That's of course not news to you, I just want to start looking at the actual features from the right perspective Below is a list of the things I would like to see, listed roughly by importance. Preferably it should work from within 0 A.D. Mostly because of the first reason mentioned above, to make it easier for people to connect to other players. Having to launch another application would make it a bit more complicated. There should be a way to search for games based on certain criteria (they can be defined later, but the general concept should be there from the start). Things like map type (random/scenario, water/no water), victory conditions/match type (conquest, fortress, kind of the hill etc depending on what we can realistically implement), whether cheats are allowed or not, number of players. A list of all existing MP matches, not sure whether in-progress ones should be displayed, but at least in some cases/for rejoining there might be reason to display them. The way I see it the main list should contain the name of the match (either automatic based on match type/map type or custom entered title), a few details about the match. Then you could click on it to see more details including the location of the host/already joined players (as that can be important), the above mentioned criteria, perhaps more technical things like ping etc. You should be able to see/enter descriptions for your match. Say "I and a friend likes to play teamed games against multiple opponents" or whatever you want (though perhaps there should be some moderation to avoid people writing too bad things =) ). It would probably be a good idea for the long run to have some kind of user profiles, both for the community aspect ("I've played x games against player y and won z times", "player y is always a helpful ally" etc etc) and to make it possible to store some stats about players for the competitiveness ("games won/lost" is always a curious one to have as that doesn't say much about the "quality" of the match, perhaps there's a way to do something more complicated and useful). Linked to that you should be able to at least send messages to players who are currently online, perhaps have some kind of PM system for persistent messages as well, but that's lower priority imho. User management, things like blocking users who are behaving badly, some kind of permissions system so you can set up other users as admins to help out with moderating, the ability to delete games if e.g. the description is bad (in the obscene, hateful, spam sense), etc. As mentioned above a friend list would be nice, as well as the ability to block certain users. As far as I understand that's part of this No reason to have a multiplayer lobby if it isn't connected to something (then you'd still have to search for games via IP or something), perhaps you're just thinking of the leaderbords etc? Either way I think it all should be connected. Not necessarily all implemented at once, but the development MP lobby part of the server/user side implementation should take other community aspects like the possibility to include a leaderbord into account I would prefer if it was possible to do both the community part and the find a games part from within the game, and at least the former from a web interface as well. Not sure how easy it is to integrate a login system with both the game and a web server though. I'm sure you'll have a lot of things to think about after a while, my list is at least a fair amount of work I'm sure Development of the MP lobby server can continue a fair bit into Beta though as it's not gameplay/balance related. There should probably not be any major new features in the last couple of Beta releases though, and more or less bug fixes in the final ones. But still, I'd think we'll have at least 5-7 Beta releases before we're done (Maybe more, I'm thinking we might benefit from shorter/more focused release cycles in Beta, and thus more but smaller, but that will have to remain to be seen what works in practice )

That's planned. Cavalry units will be able to capture female citizens. Actually that's about what's been planned See http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Persians#CIVBONUSES and http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Iberians#CIVBONUSES and http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Carthaginians#CIVBONUSES

Well, in the specific case of triggers etc it's not just about the triggers themselves but all the other things needed to be implemented with them and more importantly the campaigns/scenarios would have to be created (which would take several months at the very least). Also, I'm not sure what would be the value of diverting the development effort even further, as said above the development can be split enough as it is with people working on what they want (and as above I'm not saying that's all wrong, I just don't think it's something we should encourage even more). If someone wants to implement triggers, sure go ahead, if you really don't want to do anything of the other things, if it's good enough we'll include it. That's probably where my main point is though (apart from the fact that if we e.g. asked the community "what features would you like to see the most in part 1?" we'd get all kinds of responses, everyone listing their own pet features, and many which aren't relevant to the main idea of 0 A.D.), to know the code well enough to be able to implement one of these bigger things you'll most likely need to have spent so much time and submitted patches etc that you already are on the team As for open decision making, apart from "too many cooks..." (an important reason, though opinion may differ as to how relevant it is) it's mostly due to 0 A.D. having been a non-open source project first and it's hard to completely shake that mindset (not as important in terms of value, but probably more important in terms of what actually affects how things are done). Either way I don't think the solution to moving the project closer to completion is to start discussing adding more features =) I most definitely think we should do a more open overview of things when we're done with part one and start deciding what's going into part 2 and in what order (That said, there's always the risk of some people with a louder voice being heard over other people who might have a more valid point to make, so I still think it's relevant for a limited number of people to make the final decision. )

Plumo, he hasn't got any code in the game yet But yeah, let's just say that if he keeps up like this it's not going to be long until the question is asked

Well, apart from some things which potentially could be cut (formations, maybe not have as advanced diplomacy as we'd like) there's really not much more we can cut. Apart from smaller things (and performance fixes etc) there's really just diplomacy, and the sound system and pathfinder rewrite (both of which are being worked on). A multiplayer lobby server would be good to have as well, and I guess that can be seen as pretty large. There's still a bunch of smaller things of course, but most would really not be worth cutting, we need to have something to set 0 A.D. apart from other similar games or at least make it worth playing. And with all the things we've already cut, triggers, cinematics, etc there's really not much left to cut (See http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameplayFeatureStatus ) About e.g. the Android port and other things, it would most certainly be nice to have all the more important things done first, but in most cases it's a matter of either have some less urgent feature implemented or none at all since it's people doing things because they find it interesting. Also, at least that work proved useful since it brought about some architectural changes which made things work better on the other platforms as well. I'm not saying your thoughts are wrong, just that it's proved to be futile in the past to try and do things more strictly There are still things where I'm sure you could help out, but you need to be aware of the issues

Hello Glen, thank you for your application. Would you say you're comfortable with writing more technical documentation? I'm asking because we've already got a guy who's more comfortable working with more user oriented documentation (like the gameplay manual etc) and it would be nice if you could complement each other

That's far too much micromanagement for the general game imho.

I would say that's very educating A learning experience (hopefully), and pretty representative of how things are in the real world (where people pay a lot for things which really aren't worth it just because they're of the "right brand" etc). But that's at least not going to happen here If we let people actually pay for things as opposed to donating it's just going to be additional things like the physical things mentioned above. The thing to remember though is that money in and of itself isn't a solution to any of our problems (apart from perhaps paying for a multiplayer server in the future if that is necessary), sure we can pay developers, but to make it fair it would have to be for more extensive work and then one or more of the developers would have to be able to set aside that kind of time, which is not too easy to make happen.

There's no way we would make people pay for 0 A.D. in one way or another. Voluntary donations is one thing, but we're not going to do something that forces people to pay to get the full gameplay experience. That said, if parts of the team, or someone else for that matter, decides to do something along the lines of a paid expansion/paid additional content after part one, that's another thing entirely. But we're in no way going to require anyone to pay for part one (in part or in full) and any such things would be in addition to the game, not in a way that forces them onto people. Since the game is open source there is no way we can forbid anyone else to do a paid game with the Pyrogenesis engine, just require them to release any changes to the code under the GPL and any data that is based on our data under the CC-BY-SA license. They're perfectly free to e.g. create their own data and charge for that though

Wow I don't think I've realized before how big difference it actually makes with AO until I saw those comparison screenshots you've just posted. Really great work

Cool, and thanks Paul and Dominik for posting here so we know something is going on so to speak

I think ribez way might be the way to go, maybe as tabs to make it possible to discover? Also, for non-citizen soldiers there should be no reason to display the build panel at all, so for them the stats could be displayed at all times, or am I missing something. The main thing is that all functionality is easily available, the stats are less important to be able to access quickly. If one wants to be drastic one can say that if you haven't got enough knowledge about the static stats beforehand you won't benefit much from being able to access them quickly in the middle of the battle, then it's too late. (Though of course techs complicate things.) Seriously though, I do think we should try and have the stats easily accessible, I just don't think it's necessarily worth having them always visible. Pity we can't count on people to have large monitors Then it wouldn't be much of an issue as we could have displayed it all =) Apart from the portrait sticking out of the central panel I've got to say I'm overall in favor of the new layout of the GUI though

Cool And if you're already used to getting things into another game engine you're probably better prepared than someone who isn't (Unless you'd expect things to be exactly the same of course, but I don't think you do )

It would be good if you would be able to prove that you are able to get an object into the game, and we're thinking about making it required for Art applications, so please help us review the process by mentioning anything unclear in the instructions All the textures used in the game are available in the SVN - see below - (though not necessarily all source textures, that's a more complicated issue and some might be personal files from some of the artists etc). Please read through: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ArtDesignDocument and http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Modding_Guide and to make things easier for you probably http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/TortoiseSVN_Guide as well (if you're just using a release version you will have to extract the public.zip to be able to edit/add things, and if you join the team you will have to learn using SVN in any case, so just as well to start now ). Then take say the well model and export it to COLLADA, include it in the game following the instructions in the documents linked above (ask if anything is unclear), and take a screenshot of it in game (or in Atlas is fine as well, just as long as it's obvious it is in the game ) and attach that screenshot to a post in this topic

For programming, please see: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers for how to get started Any questions you have feel free to post in this thread, in the technical discussion forum, in specific tickets or in the IRC channel For design, do you have any existing work you can show us? For the Mauryan civ, please join in the discussion in this topic: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16056

I'm not sure what you mean, but perhaps you're asking for a higher maximum height for the terrain? A workaround for now might be to lower the sea level as some of the height is locked up down there so to speak.

Just as a general comment: In my experience the important thing (unless you deliberately want to confuse the reader) is to make it clear that it's at an earlier point in time and another character (especially if it's a relatively close POV). Point in time isn't all that important to clear up immediately imho, as long as it doesn't e.g. feature a character that has died before or some other inconsistency (though that in and of itself is of course a way to tell that it's earlier in time, though I personally prefer a clearer notice ). That it's from another characters POV though, that should be obvious from the start for me to feel comfortable (Again, your intention might not be to make the reader comfortable, so it depends a bit on what you do with it as well ) That said, if you're just going to be telling the story from that other POV for these chapters you'd better have a good reason, otherwise at least I would be disappointed as a reader if you didn't come back to that POV later.

I'd say it should vary (i.e. if your units are part of the battle, the music plays, if not it doesn't), you should have to scout to know that other players are fighting a battle if you're not part of it. I don't think anyone is prioritising this above attack warning sounds. Attack warning sounds shouldn't need a whole discussion thread about when they should occur since the requirements for playing the sound are straightforward. Battles are a much more subjective idea and are more complicated to define. Agreed, it should be fairly straight-forward. And most of the questions, like how often should the sound play, what should the visual indication look like, are things which are best finalized when testing the game. I.e. make a quick mockup version, include it in the game and test it, does the sound play too often/often enough, is the visual indicator obvious enough/too distracting etc

When it's done It's hard to tell how much time the web developers will have, and even harder to tell when =) Hopefully within a couple of months at most, but summer could either be a good or a bad thing depending on what other things they will be doing

It sounds very much like an issue with either the drivers for your graphics card or the graphics card itself. Could you please look at http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths to find the log files and attach the system_info.txt to a post in this topic? Also, is it just the ground that is black? Does buildings/units/water look as it should? Perhaps you could take a screenshot? (Press F2 and it will tell you on the screen where it is saved, then attach that to a post here as well )

Just press Ctrl then right-click on a building and you will garrison the unit/units No need to click icons

As a general rule I don't think we want to complicate it more than peace/war music. That said I do think there should be audio/visual signs that other things happen, I just don't think it's worth creating new tracks for (And most definitely not complicating the programming even further )