feneur

For inspiration it's definitely fine, if you'd want to use the actual models/textures you'd have to follow the CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license, but not just to be inspired If you distribute the images anywhere it's appreciated if you would link to us/let people know where you were inspired though For where to find images, well, the easiest way is probably to download the game and look at the buildings in Atlas (the scenario/map editor), but we have posted images of the buildings for different civs when a new civ is released at e.g. http://www.moddb.com/games/0-ad/images/roman-building-set-for-alpha-9#imagebox etc if you don't want to/can do that

Welcome and thanks for the report, it's cool to hear about 0 A.D. being useful to someone else even though it's not finished yet if nothing else I assume(/hope) you're using the SVN version to stay on top of new development? Just so you take advantage of any new improvements (Though if you're short on time it might be better to be using a static version so you don't have to keep up with any changes =) )

Ok, I was uncertain which you meant since you said "unit" rather than "units" But yeah, for groups it can be a bit sketchy at the moment (not sure if it works at all I'm afraid), hopefully it should not be too hard to fix, but I guess it's at least not trivial, because then it would have been fixed already

Cool. It's definitely a skill in its own right to be able to create objects that look good at that scale, so great work I say (And welcome back )

I'll let the programmers answer the programming related questions, but I'll give my opinion on the "what should it do" questions I'd say for non-network game Esc should bring up the menu and pause the game, for network games just bring up the menu (unless perhaps it's the host, but it's probably not worth complicating things like that). Now for some arguments: I do think we should keep F10 as just bringing up the menu, but it's definitely a good thing to have Esc available as well since it's common in many games. In my opinion Esc is a bit more "brutal" =) so it's not a bad thing to have it pause the game as well, especially if we still keep F10 for the non-pausing menu if you just want to bring up an in-game settings menu to change the settings that can be changed while the game is running or something, so you have that choice. A multiplayer game should probably never be possible to pause (unless you mean a "hard pause" where you save the game, shut it down and then restart later), I guess it might be nice to have the ability in some cases, but it's probably just as well to leave that for the general pause key in that case. In either case pausing a multiplayer game should only be possible for the host if possible, imho.

Don't worry If everyone accepts the way things are they never will improve Sometimes the way you do things has to be questioned, many times there is a reason for why things are done a certain way and no reason to change them, but some times there is, and it would be sad to miss those opportunities just because people are afraid to ask questions RMS/AI is probably as you say one of the areas where this is the most apparent, if nothing else because they are both relatively new areas so even apart from the cases where duplication might be necessary it's probably one of the areas which can use the most simplification etc

Ah I (or someone else can feel free too) need to update that Atlas manual to cover all the new select/rotate stuff in Atlas (That said, I'd be happy if someone else would do so as the hard drive on my desktop seems to have broken down and I can't run the game on my laptop, so it's probably easier for someone else to update it. If no one has done it once the issues are resolved I'll take care of it eventually, but I'm not sorry if I don't have to )

It should work for a single unit, but there are troubles with order queues and groups of units at the moment if that is what you're trying to do rather than with a single unit?

I'll let the programmers say anything more specific, but a few general comments. Triggers (as in an easy way to create scenarios where things happen based on set conditions) are indeed postponed and unless things change dramatically will not be included in 0 A.D. part 1. (It should still be possible to create story based/event based scenarios with scripts though, and the reason why it's been decided that we will wait with including it is that overall scenarios/campaigns/triggers/cinematics will take so much time to both implement and then actually create the scenarios/campaigns. It's not too unlikely that 0 A.D. will have triggers etc quicker if we focus on having a released "finished" version rather than having every feature we might want from the start. A release version will ensure a lot more visibility, and will allow for 0 A.D. to be added to official repositories etc, which should increase the amount of possible contributors.) A big reason why some things seems to be duplicated is because of security, it's been fairly limited what different javascript scripts can do with other parts of the code. I'll let Philip or someone explain, but I'm assuming this is part of where you see duplication. Another reason is probably that 0 A.D. has been worked on by so many people over the years, and things have been redone over and over, so there are probably a lot of things that can be improved/unified/simplified still.

You should be able to delete actors the same way you delete entities (select with the move/rotate tool and press the delete key, see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Atlas_Manual_Starting#Deletingobjects ), otherwise I'd say it's a bug. There has been some work on selecting in Atlas not too long ago so perhaps that broke something.

Campaigns aren't created yet, so enabling the button wouldn't mean anything. Since there are no campaigns it wouldn't happen much when you clicked it. I guess we could add a note saying "campaigns aren't implemented yet", but I guess we're hoping that the disabled state of the button would say the same, especially since the game is still in development.

I haven't found that to be much of an issue in practice, but if nothing else it shouldn't be too hard to e.g. add the ability to limit results of pressing the , and . keys by adding the Alt key. I.e. press , to select any fighting unit, Alt+, to select only units with fighting ability, press . to select any working unit, press Alt+. to select only units with just working abilities (female citizens, trade units, fishing ships, maybe healers, though as they are more likely to be used in a more offensive way perhaps they should be selected by the , key).

Gates aren't fully implemented yet, so they "aren't supposed to work". The wall system as a whole is being worked on though, so they will be working soon. If I recall correctly that should be fixed in SVN, so it will work in the next Alpha release.

Just register and click on "New ticket" and start creating Please search through the existing tickets though as there are tickets for many issues already

Seasons have been postponed until part 2, but that doesn't mean that it's forbidden to work on such things, only that it's better/recommended to work on other things so we can have part one done as soon as possible (Also, for team members it does to some extent mean that it's, if not forbidden, at least highly discouraged to work on such features =) That said, it's better that people work on non-needed features for a while than get bored with 0 A.D. development entirely and leave the project, so it's not set in stone in that sense. Just that I and a lot of other people will be a lot happier if other things are done first ) Afaik there are no new shadow effects done, the specularity work that has been done is as far as I know just implemented in code (and possible to add to entire objects), but will be added as a texture mapped effect as time goes on.

It already exists. The easiest way is just to press the period key . (to select female citizens and citizen soldiers, and the comma key , to select champion units, heroes and other units who only have fighting capabilities), but there is an icon next to the minimap. It looks like a hammer and is located in the top right corner above the minimap, just click it and you will be taken to the next idle working unit (which will be selected for you). And yes, you will be able to control (some) animals. The main thing that needs to be changed for this to be possible is to add the ability for units/buildings/animals to change ownership. So that the animals "owned by" gaia (the "nature player") can change to be owned by the player.

It doesn't seem to be common as I don't think it's been reported before. If you get any error messages it would probably help to find the issue if you would post it. Also, details about your network would probably help. As well as the info from the in-game profiler (press the F11 key while the game is running), but I'm not 100% sure about which information is the most relevant at the top of my head (and not being at a computer with 0 A.D. installed) so hopefully someone else can tell you better what to look for.

A wall system is being worked on So in that case it's definitely not necessary to duplicate the effort =) From a non-programmer point of view I'd still say AI is one of the areas that would benefit the most from having several people working on it at the same time though. Partly because of the competition sense, but also since it's probably one of the best way to determine how to best get a good AI API. If the API just works for one kind of AI it's not much use in having an API =) Also, and here I might really be wrong not being a programmer so use caution when interpreting my words , to me it seems AI programming can take relatively different paths to the same goal. In other words, an AI seems to be possible to program in fairly different ways, and while we certainly can't foresee all ways an AI can be implemented I do think there's benefits from having more than one official AI being developed. With enough communication and thinking it should be possible to put the things that can be shared in the AI API to avoid too much duplication of effort, and if it can't be shared that directly/completely the code can after all be copied-pasted-and-then-edited if there are things that has to be done slightly differently. That said, it would probably be good if the different AIs filled slightly different goals. Maybe one should be more defensive and another more aggressive? Difficulty should be possible to incorporate in each single AI, but there might be decisions that may be easier if an AI only has to be really good at one scenario (though of course it doesn't hurt if it has some variation to its strategy to avoid making it too easy to play against).

Splendid It's probably the area where you can offer the most, at least at the moment. After all, while some things have changed, and others are changing, in the AI API I'd still assume it's the area you know best, and thus if you don't have much time it's probably better spent on working on something you're familiar with rather than trying to learn new things. It's up to you of course, sometimes learning new things can be more motivating In what way? Something like "Official bot #1 - qBot"? Or something completely different

Wonderful Brings back the memories

You can of course also use an old version of 0 A.D. for your AI development (the easiest way is probably just to have a separate SVN checkout of a specific version of 0 A.D. that's just for your AI development, and another/the release version for playing the game). It depends a bit on the objectives for the school project, and for your AI development. If you just want to try things out and play around it depends on how much time you're willing to put into it. If you might want to keep on working on it/release it for others it's definitely recommended to stay on top of the development, but if you just want to play around a bit in the short term using a specific, unchanging, version of the AI API is probably easier. For a school project that may even be required, to make it easier for the teachers to follow it if nothing else, but on the other hand it's more realistic to have to be able to keep up with changing APIs, so hopefully it could work either way. (Also, Jonathan et al are after all not going to change things "just because"/to make things harder, so hopefully the improvements will even make further development easier, and should be worth staying on top of )

He probable meant "AFAIK" = as far as I know.

That does look like a driver issue to me, but I could be wrong. Could you please post the file system_info.txt found in the logs folder (the location of that folder varies between operating systems, but http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ReportingErrors#Errors should tell you how to find it for your operating system), so that the programmers can find out what the issue might be.

Thanks for the write-up Philip I can't say I fully understand everything, but adding this flexibility is definitely nice for the future (Especially with the speed and added modes possible with these changes )

It's also a bit above the heads of us non-programmers for most of the time =) Good to see you take an active interest in this though, it's sorely needed Interface sounds would fall into this category, or am I missing something? Music should also be heard all the time, perhaps with pauses at times to give you a chance to hear something else for a while, but not limited by location I mean. Or perhaps you're talking about sounds "from the game world"? At least in theory that sounds great and logical, hard to know for sure without having experienced what it's like in-game though =)