feneur

I guess that's one way to do things =) (Though, doesn't the "loss music" play throughout the entire game then? Not that it matters much, but anyway =) )

Not on a general basis no, it would take too much time to go through and make sure there is no sensitive information in them. However, specific threads like this should be possible. Though that thread is 18 pages long, so it seems like a lot to go through I'm afraid. I guess we could copy the posts Philip mentioned though

Just saw the "Observer-Oasis" map and decided to see how JuBot and qBot played against each other. qbot won, but it took 40 minutes (I used the warp time feature at times ). I think it would have been much quicker if qBot had used siege weapons earlier. JuBot didn't really survive that long if you look at actually being able to strike back, all its units were lost long before that, so it was more that it took a long time before qBot actually managed to destroy all its buildings (and because it sent a lot of troops after my observer camel instead of finishing off JuBot in the end-game =) ). That it took a while before qBot actually built any siege is probably a good thing in most games as the enemy is likely to be more offensive, but there was another thing that was a bit confusing. Instead of taking down a building completely qBot destroyed it partly, but then moved on to the next, which really doesn't do much harm. Not sure if that's a bug or just a feature gone wrong in this case =) But overall I'd say qBot seems to manage its economy really well, and is pretty good defensively once it gets going. The area that needs some work atm imho is attacking buildings, at least from what I could see in that game

Should be out within this week unless something horrible happens.

I think for Atlas having the ability for unlimited colors is fine. If people can't be reasonable in their color choices it's up to them, I think the benefits are greater. For default skirmishes/random maps I do think the choice should be limited though.

Ah, yeah. It's gotten out of help and feedback and into technical discussion now yeah I will.

Ah, forgot about that one. He went back and forth between a lot of things and I got lost Let's hope the programmers will work it out.

I would guess that it's just one of the new code changes that haven't been added to the tests. So hopefully isn't something to be worried about.

The .exes etc are included in the SVN to help developers and others who aren't able to compile So no reason to worry about them.

I don't think we should/will do specific colors for certain civilizations. The main reason is so that we have as many different colors as possible for each match so it's easy to tell units/buildings from different players apart. Limiting the choice to just a few shades per civilization would really harm maps with more than one player of the same civilization. It's possible to change in Atlas though, so for custom skirmishes it's very much possible to have the colors mean things.

At least nothing to see

Sounds like the best option to me. Sometimes you may want to set up the siege weapons in a certain spot to protect a certain area etc, or to avoid them attacking some certain units/buildings, but sometimes you just want to take down the enemy buildings and could care less for more exact control. Is there really a need for a certain auto mode though? Wouldn't it be possible to just have any direct attack order trigger the pack-->move-->unpack actions? Move orders just move it if it's packed, and pack and move (but not unpack) if you give a move order while it is unpacked. The only thing would be if you would want them to move and unpack, but don't want to direct it to attack a specific building/unit. Perhaps there could be an Alt-key modification where it would automativally unpack at the destination if you gave a move order with the key pressed? (Perhaps Alt+Shift or something if we want ranged siege to listen to attack-move commands )

As long as it's easy enough to use them, perhaps even automatic? And if they are powerful enough to warrant that extra either micromanagement or at least time/graphical change. But if nothing else it can be a good idea to balance things for that matter, to have the ranged siege require some setting up to even out some of the disadvantages the civs have which doesn't have any ranged siege.

Animations are really an area where a lot of work is needed, and due to both a lack of animation skills and previous (and to a lesser degree current) issues with the Blender Collada export/import it's been a bit sporadic. With the latest couple of versions of Blender the Collada support has been improved, so more animations have been added, and will be added. Hopefully mechanical things like the catapults should be done relatively soon. Organic things like animals which takes a bit more practice before one is able to animate properly might take a while longer before we have them all done.

That seems like a completely different issue, but thanks for trying to help

While I doubt we set up some specific high-level scripting it should definitely be possible. Just have the player share the same "player" (i.e. control the same units/buildings) as an AI that only has economic capabilities. The only issue that I can think of (though as I'm not a programmer there might be more that I just don't think of ) is what to do with the Citizen Soldiers. The easiest way would just be to not use them in the attack =) Perhaps have the AI defend the city as well as gathering resources. Either way I definitely think something like this should be doable without much trouble. Some kind of AI co-op mode is likely to be included anyway, so it's probably more an issue of implementing an AI that does things just the way you want it (And there would need to be some work done to allow what you mention in point II, but apart from the GUI part it should mostly be AI work that as well )

Well, we could, but then you'd have to wait for all the other awesomeness =) This release has been long in the making as it is, so unless something unexpected happens it will be out reasonably soon. Better to take the time to implement these pathfinding improvements without the stress of trying to get a new release out soon.

If someone else is willing to do the work perhaps, but I doubt it. You'd probably have to redesign the entire game to work with such controls, so it's at least not something we intend to work on.

All kinds, well not wood-working or metallurgy necessarily, but definitely a broad assortment of skills overall. To create the actual game itself we need people with programming skills, and people who are good at creating 3D models, at texturing those models, and at creating 2D art for the menus and background etc. We also need people who are skilled at creating the appropriate sounds and recording them, and at composing and recording and in some parts playing the music for the game, and at speaking the relevant languages for the unit voices. As the game is historically based we also need people who know enough of the history of the time to make it reasonably historically correct. Then there is need for skills which aren't directly related to the game as a product, but rather as a project, that includes management, PR, and perhaps most importantly a great deal of communication to make sure things go smoothly. You'll have to ask someone who's actually completed one to get a good answer to that one Donations I'd say personally at least. We haven't spent much effort on advertisements though, apart from the full time work Pledgie we don't really have that big needs for money currently. Just maintaining a web server + a domain name or two doesn't cost very much. If/when we implement some kind of lobby server that might change though, depending on how many people who will play the game at the same time. The main issue with advertising as I see it is that it's often controlled by someone else, and we might end up with ads for something that goes against everything we stand for etc. If the need arises for more money at a later time it's probably more likely that we will try to find a sponsor for e.g. a multiplayer lobby server or similar. To some extent we rely on word-of-mouth, but we do have accounts and post on IndieDB/ModDB, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and we try to get relevant bloggers and other sites aware of 0 A.D. We try =) The long answer is that partly we are finding our way and haven't really gotten all the way to a perfect release cycle yet =) Perfect is of not necessarily attainable, but things would certainly benefit from a slightly more well defined release cycle in some cases. Partly, and this is related to the learning as we go part, we are after all doing this on our free time, and haven't really done anything like it before. So while we can have ideas about what we want to accomplish for a certain release it's impossible to know for sure whether it's going to be possible to achieve all of it. Not only don't we know how long it will take to implement a certain feature, but the other factor making any kind of prediction hard is that we cannot know beforehand how much time a contributor will have during a release cycle. Overall things seems to work at least reasonably though, we've been releasing new Alphas relatively regularly. [i will have to ask Philip about that one, a caveat is always that it's hard to know for sure as people are getting the game from so many different places. And even the we cannot be sure they actually play the game. A rough guess from the web site stats is that we have Linux and Windows almost even (a bit above 40% each), but with Linux a bit higher, and Mac at slightly lower than 10%. The latter might change once it is easier to install the game on Mac and once we have the game working better on Macs.] Since we do this as a hobby it's all from home. And those homes are in many different places around the world, which of course adds to the fun in being part of this project, but also to the difficulties as it's hard to have real time communication when people live as far apart as in the US, in England, in Israel, in India, and in New Zealand.

I don't know the answer to the first question, but I do know the answer to the latter two: First the last question, the easiest way in most cases is just to click the building icon to be able to place it, then position your mouse in the in-game world and then instead of just clicking press the left mouse button while moving the mouse. As soon as you let go the button the building foundation will be placed. Unless you are in a spot where it can't be built, which can be used as a trick if you e.g. want to line up wall pieces (a proper wall system will come later): just rotate it in the right way while over an obstacle, then let go of the left mouse button and move to where you actually want to place the building. There it's just to left click and the foundation will be placed. It is also possible to change the hotkeys, later we hope to include an in-game options screen, but for now it's possible editing some text files. Please see: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Manual_Settings and if that's not clear enough feel free to ask for more help here

Hmm, while we certainly could answer those questions, perhaps it would be better to ask a real company? After all your class is on economics as far as I can see, so our experience might not be all that relevant as we don't have that concern to a great degree. Sure, there are costs involved with having a server etc and currently we have Philip doing some paid work on the game, but that's really an exception. I mean your questions are definitely relevant as to WFG, so I'm more curious whether or not your teacher would approve of this kind of approach to the task. I'm only asking since i don't want you (and to a lesser degree the person answering) to have to spend time on something that then will have to be redone.

A random texture sounds like it would look bad, the main reason not every building has its own texture is because that would make the game run slower. Having more than one texture for each building sounds even worse in terms of performance. There currently isn't a wall system, so yeah, that is something we intend to do something about

I'd say, don't read too much into it =) But if nothing else you can always think of it as killing off some of them/their offspring each year, thus still leaving the same total number of animals but also getting food

Cool

Now he does