feneur

Well, I both agree and disagree =) The web site sure could be better, we've been aiming for a new site for quite some time, but web designers seems to be busy people so we haven't gotten very far so far. That has kept us away from doing much about the FAQ etc as it has seemed a bit pointless to do a lot of work on the old site. On the other hand, we've wanted to keep the news in general from going into too much detail about the development so people who just want the big news has a chance to do that. If you want to follow the development closer you can do that by following the forums, IndieDB ModDB profile, Facebook page. That's not to say we couldn't do more, but just that we shouldn't do too much as some people don't want to know everything before they play the game (and don't want to play the game until it's finished) and at least don't want to know much more than the releases. The exact balance is of course hard to find, so thanks for your suggestions. We'll think about them and see if we can do some of it. In general though: if you want to follow the development more closely the other places are more useful than the news on the main site (and will continue to be).

It is indeed intentional. One small extra thing that can give you benefits if you tend to it (i.e. make sure they leave their first resource at a dropoff site before starting to gather the next), but which doesn't punish you terribly if you aren't careful.

Looking forward to hearing your new recordings And I'm sure almost any microphone is better than a webcam microphone, so hopefully it should be more than good enough

I think I meant possibly trade, and the bounding box patch wasn't in then I believe, and perhaps the rally point marker line patch was on my mind as well So something like that. Great to see that update Philip, and a great write-up of the issues involved in reviewing patches. Perhaps something like that would be good to have written on the committing patches page in Trac? (After the process related stuff of course so people can find the most urgent things without having to read through a lot of text, but it would be nice to have something like this available there so people committing patches get a greater understanding of what's going on with their patches. And why it might take a while.)

TLA has indeed been indefinitely postponed. The people involved in the project simply were to busy with real life to keep working on it.

It's actually a feature, not a bug Or rather, not the long time, but rather the fact that the game converts all textures to .dds. This allows for artists/modders to use PNG files for maximum ease of use, but at the same time the game can use DDS which is more efficient. For release versions all textures are preconverted, but for SVN versions all new textures will have to be converted. It only does this the first time each texture is used though, so as you say the next time it should be the same as using a release version of the same map.

During the last month we've had the joy of welcoming four new team members here at Wildfire Games. First we had the chance to reward three of our most diligent Open Source contributors: Jonathan, Jeroen, and Yves, who all have worked hard programming for 0 A.D. and we thought it was time to recognize that. Jeroen (vts on the forums) has worked on fixing things, perhaps most notably making selecting units a lot easier (a more technical explanation: he's worked on making the bounding boxes correspond better to the actual models). He's also worked on adding rally point marker lines. In other words: the rally point you place to tell newly created (and ungarrisoned) units to go to a certain spot on the map can be a bit hard to find at times, but with this feature you get a line on the ground showing you the way to it. And also roughly the way the units will walk to get to it. It's probably easier to see how useful it can be from a screenshot though, so below you have one: Rally point marker line, the line going from the building to the rally point. Yves (Yves on the forums) has mostly been working on upgrading to premake4 and other compile related fixes (a less technical explanation: he's made it easier for people to build the game - the process of turning the code into an actual game that can then be played). Jonathan (quantumstate on the forums) has been (and still is) the leading force behind qbot, one of the AIs for 0 A.D. A video showing a match against one of the latest versions of qbot. Second, we've gotten a new artist on board: Enrique (Enrique on the forums), who has already created some marvelous Roman buildings which will help enhance the game world. New Roman temple (to the right, to the left is the Hellenic temple for reference).

There is music setting in, but it will be redone eventually, so perhaps it will be more to your liking =) As for "screaming" letter I'm not so sure about that myself We've been talking about making it more exciting, adding some kind of cool overlay with spoils of war or something behind the dialog (but overlayed over the game world), but have put that idea away for now as we haven't had the skills on team. And even when we do other things have priority, like new main menu backgrounds or unit portraits etc. It may still happen before the game is finished though The problem with the second part of the message is how to say it short, because it's probably mostly so you can see the end result of the game, where the enemy put his buildings etc (if you lost at least, otherwise there won't be very much to look at), but also as you said you might want to continue playing even without the enemy.

Units do heal when garrisoned though, but yeah "active healing" (i.e. a unit which can heal other units) is not implemented yet.

The debug build produces an .exe with a different name than the one in SVN, so that doesn't cause any problem. And the conflict isn't really much to worry about unless you absolutely cannot stand the notion of there being conflicts =) It's just the SVN saying that you have another version of those files, so nothing to worry about in that sense.

That's one thing There are a few more things which might make it as well

To some extent your asking for two completely opposite things, on the one hand you're saying territories need more strategical value, and on the other you're asking us to remove one of the things which gives them strategical value The ability to limit your opponents access to resources is one of the nicer things about territories as they are right now. And don't forget that you can still gather resources which aren't in your territory, it just takes longer as you cannot generally build a resource dropoff point nearby. It would perhaps be one thing to make Outposts buildable in neutral territory, but the problem I see with that is: what happens when an enemy builds a Civic Centre nearby and his territory expands to cover the area where you've built your Outpost. If Outposts doesn't affect/are affected by territory at all, then you essentially have buildings in enemy territory. Just giving them a bit of territory would also present problems. Not only would they be outside of the general paradigm with buildings cut off from CCs loosing loyalty etc, they would also just be tiny pieces of territory inside enemy territory in the above scenario, to me that doesn't sound like fun. Especially not for the person building the CC, having to fight off an Outpost just to be able to use the newly acquired piece of territory properly. Edit: Also remember that we intend to have an unlimited game mode without territory limits etc for people who don't like these restrictions.

I'm sure there is some way, after all that sounds more or less like watching two AIs play out a game If you want more direct tips for how to do I guess you'll have to wait for someone with more direct knowledge of the scripting, but for now/if you want to take what little advice I can give, I suggest you take a look at how the AIs in the game does things. The two most up-to-date are Jubot and Qbot. Jubot is in the game, and qbot can be found via the links here: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15159

For the second time we'll highlight two contributors to the project who has done remarkable things in the last month. This month we've decided to shine the spotlight on Alexander (fcxsanya on the forums) and Jonathan (quantumstate on the forums). Alexander for his work on trade and barter, both of which should be included in the upcoming Alpha, and Jonathan for his work on qbot, a new AI which might be included in Alpha 8 as well. As you can see from the fact that both of them answers questions about being on the team both are presently on the team, but the award is for October, and Jonathan didn't become an official member until November. Alexander: Tell us the basics about you? My name is Alexander, I’m 24 years old and I was born and currently live in Novocherkassk, Russia. I’m married and have a six months old daughter. I work as a programmer in a small software development company. What do you find motivating about contributing to 0 A.D.? When did you join the team? What made you interested in joining the team? I first found 0 A.D. in summer 2010 and I was impressed by its scale and quality. The key factor of my interest was that 0 A.D. have free licences for both code and art. At that time 0 A.D. already had a pretty solid game engine and awesome art. In the same time it had wide room for improvements and I found out that I’m able to accomplish some tasks. I started to contribute as a community member and in October 2010 joined the official team. I was interested in joining the team because I wanted to follow development more closely, keep abreast of developments and I liked the team members whom I had met. What has contributing to 0 A.D. meant for you? What do you find best about being a part of the team? Later on I realized that this team/community is even more important for me than the project itself, I feel myself very comfortable here and I'm glad to work together with all these guys Jonathan: Tell us the basics about you I'm Jonathan or quantumstate and 21, I am currently studying in my last year of a maths undergraduate degree in Cambridge. What do you find motivating about contributing to 0 A.D.? Basically i got started because I felt i should do something in the summer break and the AI is fairly bad so needed improving. I also seem to suffer from overconfidence in programming so I enthusiastically attack a problem thinking I can solve it fairly easily and then find it is 10 times harder than I thought. Also I love the AoE series of games and AoK: The Conquerors is my favourite game so making a better RTS in the same style is fun. Being open source was quite a big factor as well, I like the idea of open source and it is pretty practical as well for new people joining since the barrier of entry is so low. What has contributing to 0 A.D. meant for you? Joining an online community again is nice, it has been years since the last one I was in died. Also my C++ is slowly improving as I read random bits of the codebase. Contributing to a real project which people will use is also good, in the past I have mainly done random small projects on my own which nobody would ever care about. Also since I will be applying for jobs fairly soon I hope it will look nice on a CV. So contributing to 0AD is awesome in a lot of ways . When did you join the team? What made you interested in joining the team? What do you find best about being a part of the team? I joined the team on the 3rd November. For programmers the changes aren't so significant since there isn't any hidden programming discussion. I get to be part of the "peanut gallery" watching the artwork progress which is quite nice I guess. I also look nice and official on the forums now.

So in essence what you are saying is make the territory borders into city borders?

Terminologically speaking the cavalry are citizen soldiers as well =) But yeah, if you don't use them to hunt they're not much use in the early game, so I'm not arguing with the point your making

There could be a profile or two for someone who had their profile put up but then that was about the extent of their contribution to 0 A.D. But yeah, in general it should be safe to add the people in the profiles Ok, then I say let's see your going through the commit log as your evaluation period and then you can join the team officially

If you want to do this seriously I suggest we make you an official team member so you have access to the staff forums and archives, that will make your job a lot easier The team profiles page is really not a good source =) We tried to keep it updated, but people were lacking in adding the information needed, and a lot of people joined and then disappeared without getting much done so they had to be removed etc etc.

Sweet Nice work Ben! Yeah, as soon as Philip is able to review that patch and its finalized and committed selections should be a lot more accurate Alpha 8 will be great

Splendid The AI should be a much tougher opponent in Alpha 8 (I'm starting to be certain it's going to be good enough to be included But it's of course up to you if you think it's ready )

I'm not sure whether it is just the bounding box issue or something more, but it seems like you sometimes needs to click somewhat beside an object to be able to select it. I would presume it's towards the center of the screen, but when I tested the cases I noticed (or rather remember =) ) were all where I had to click to the left of the object. Not sure if that part does make any difference though =)

Any local/non-committed changes?

(About that image: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1023 )

No need to close topics unless the discussion gets out of hand Perhaps someone else will have a similar problem some time down the road and want to ask a follow-up question about it etc

In other words: the last couple of days Philip has been reviewing code other people has submitted (when he did the final work on his thesis he didn't have time to do that, so the backlog was pretty big), once he's done with that he'll continue working on writing new code