feneur

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

I think the best structure for a credits screen would be to list according to department (art, programming, etc), and before that list a few special people. Jason (Long time project lead, was important in RaW, contributed art, design), Ken (design lead, passed away a couple of years ago, but was incredibly influential and important to the projects early years), Department Leads, Philip, perhaps a few others from the old years whom I don't remember/know about. I don't think the in-game credits screen should mention exactly what everyone did/list people based on how many commits they have etc. Apart from the few mentioned above I don't think we should make any difference on whether someone has made a hundred commits or 2, it might be a good idea not to list the people who joined the team, but left before they had started doing any work (unfortunately there has been a few of those =) a lot fewer now since we went open source and have started making the application process more open as well, having people showing that they can contribute before we go through the work of setting things up etc). I'd say rather include than exclude though, otherwise it's too easy to miss someone who for example contributed a lot of models, but had e.g. Michael adding them into the game and committing them and thus doesn't show up in the commit logs. Also, if someone did some work that is no longer used we shouldn't exclude them. If you or someone else really wants to go through and list every commit feel free to, but it's absolutely not necessary. And likely to get outdated soon unless the person maintaining it is constantly updating the lists.

(Not everything in that document is relevant, but in this case something like that is not too unlikely.)

Perhaps if it's not too difficult make qbot locate clusters of resources outside of the current territory and build CCs nearby?

Having Alt+Right click as the general "secondary action command" sounds like a good idea.

Philip can probably tell you more about the technical details, but in short the game uses as much CPU power as it can, I believe it is to give the highest framerate possible.

Something like this is definitely planned, see http://www.wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=10066 for more info

One way to do it (provided we don't need the A and G keys for other things) would be to have Alt and Ctrl affect the right-click and be used while being pressed. A and G could be used to "bring up the function" (showing the cursors for the function in question) with a press of the key and then you would click with the left mouse button to make it happen. I'd say that's similar to how other games do it (don't remember if attack-move exists with a modifier button in any game I've tried, but I think I've seen alt for garrisoning).

Not sure how you play the game/when this is an issue, but it's something I personally have trouble seeing how someone could have time to think about in the middle to late game at least (I feel like I'm always tending to this that and the other, making sure I have new resources coming in, maintaining one or more attacks, perhaps defending somewhere, expanding), and in the beginning if you have time to sit and study the units move around I'd say you could probably scout more . I don't mean this as a criticism of you, and there are certainly things we'll do to reduce some unnecessary micromanagement, so there's probably plenty of room for adjusting things. It's more that I'm surprised as to someone feeling it this way as I have not experienced it to be a problem myself At least not in multiplayer, against an AI there might be time to sit and ponder for a while, but against another human being - not so much (And partly that I don't think we should speed things up too much until the game is more finished and we know how things play in more detail, especially in the end-game as you then can have up to 300 different units to manage. In practice it's never going to be that many as cavalry and ships take up more than one pop space and units might be killed, and there are formations and control groups, but just something to remember so the decision isn't just based on how a unit looks in a video or on it's own. )

Well, the trouble last time was that we couldn't be sure that Philip would be able to do the work, so it was more because of us not having any clear answers than anything else. We are aware that it could seem a bit weird though, so we're grateful people dared to donate anyway About more transparency now: Do you have any specific questions/suggestions for how to improve it?

I'll see if I can get Ryan and perhaps Omri and Paul to offer some more suggestions (Hopefully not too many, so you never will be able to choose due to the number of choices =) , but at least they might give you some advice on what to look for and what to avoid )

Well, if you don't want any restrictions there should really just be one civ and one building from which you could build all units (if there are more than one, having more than one means that you have to choose which to build ). On a more serious note though: the territories does add something, currently not as much as things like capturing and technologies (to enlarge the area your buildings influence for example) aren't implemented. They can be used to limit your enemies access to resources and by placing your civic centres strategically you could essentially block him from expanding. So the "rush" in 0 A.D. might end up being more of grabbing as much of the map as possible (or at least the useful areas with resources or chokepoints) than quickly taking out your enemy by overwhelming him with a small (relatively speaking) group of soldiers. One of the benefits of not having to sell the game is that we don't have to rely on catering to people's lessening attention span And one of the benefits of the game being open source is that if we don't make options that make it fast enough someone else is able to That said, it's not too unlikely that we will have some kind of deathmatch mode as in AoK where things are sped up and you could start with all technologies researched etc, and it's a possibility that we will include an option to turn off territories. It will not be the default/most tested/balanced though, but something to cater to people who want a quicker game is likely

Cool Looking forward to hearing the results

Well, considering the number of phrases isn't all that large I don't think that would be a problem, so it would probably be worth a shot. Try recording outside first though, I have no idea if it will be better (as I'm not working with sound, I do have a feeling it might capture as much noise as indoors if not more though, but I could be wrong ) but it will at least be easier to try than to have you go bug your friend