Dunedan

Seems like source/tools/i18n/update_templates.py contains a bug which includes leading and trailing line breaks and tabs when extracting strings from XML files. While a fix should be straight-forward, as we're in string freeze we want to pull the fix into main only and have a separate r28-only workaround for including line breaks and tabs when looking for translated strings from XML files.

Seems like it's broken for all languages, so something going wrong during the extraction of the translations seems likely.

What all of you seem to forget is that the instructions to compile a23 are quite different from the instructions to compile recent versions of 0ad and that the versions of some libraries a23 depends on aren't available on modern Linux distributions. In my opinion that makes compiling a23 on a modern Linux distribution quite complicated.

There have been some changes to the lobby for r28, which could receive wider testing before we release, so it'd be great if some of you could test multiplayer games using the lobby with the release candidate. What I'm interested in are answers to the following questions: Does connecting to the lobby work as usual? (verify that lobby.tls and lobby.verify_certificate aren't set in your user.cfg or that they're both set to true (which is the default for r28) Are there any changes in your ability to host games, compared to a27.1?

While translating I noticed a historical inaccuracy. Somewhere r28 contains the following sentence as part of a string: According to Wikipedia that battle happened 338 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chaeronea_(338_BC)

The upcoming release 28 includes a complete overhaul of the text rendering. You might want to try out its current release candidate to check if that further improves the situation (don't forget to disable the mod before doing so).

The Italian translation should be fixed now, so starting with the next nightly build and release candidate translations for Italian should show up properly again.

We've figured out in the meantime that this is caused by vandalism of the Italian translation and we're working on fixing that.

In addition to what @Stan` said, there isn't even a way to translate strings for (American) English in Transifex, as that's the language we use for the source strings, so they don't need translating and therefore can't be translated there.

What about other languages than those two? What's the language you use for your operating system?

Yes, it should. Using a VPN would be another option. Also check out the FAQ entry regarding this topic https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/FAQ#what-shall-i-do-when-joining-multiplayer-matches-fails-with-an-error-message In that case you just require a public IP address from somebody else (Cloudflare in your example). Some kind of public endpoint at which a host is available at will always be necessary. In future we might improve the situation by also supporting IPv6, but that brings its own set of challenges. See https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/4301 for details. You can join games where servers are hosted on public IPs without NAT being involved. That's true for Minecraft, Wuthering Waves, as well as 0ad hosts who do proper port forwarding.

The current version of Debian, Debian 13 (Trixie) includes 0ad 0.27.0. There is also 0ad 0.27.1 available in trixie-backports. If you run an older version of Debian you either need to upgrade Debian or install 0ad from another distro-independent source, like Snap, Flatpak or AppImage, as detailed on https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GettingTheUnixRelease.

That doesn't warrant ignoring the instructions how to report violations: Violations have to be reported privately to one of the lobby moderators. So please do that in future. To quote comments I made earlier in this thread:

That's because right now 0ad doesn't ship with fonts which contain glyphs for these characters. There are mods for east Asian languages to install to fix the display. The next version of 0ad will come with new text rendering, which won't have that limitation anymore.

No, you don't have to buy anything. You can continue to run it on localhost and create a self-signed TLS certificate as well. See the instructions at https://github.com/0ad/lobby-bots?tab=readme-ov-file#choice-b-self-signed-certificate.

In general the instructions in https://github.com/0ad/lobby-bots should still work, although I haven't set up a multiplayer lobby using them in quite a while as using https://github.com/0ad/lobby-infrastructure/ is just much more comfortable. Regarding your specific error, I can only guess based on the limited information you provided, but somebody had the same problem in the past using SleekXMPP (the predecessor of Slixmpp currently used by the bots): https://github.com/fritzy/SleekXMPP/issues/250. So my guess is you try to connect without TLS encryption, which Slixmpp doesn't allow with PLAIN authentication out of the box.

How do you run the bots? Do you use https://github.com/0ad/lobby-infrastructure/?

So you can login with other users, e.g. when using 0ad, but login fails for the lobby bots?

I know you're tired of hearing it, but I feel I have to repeat it here once more: Using smurf accounts is a violation of the Terms of Use. If you encounter smurfs or players using duplicate accounts for other reasons, please report them to a lobby moderator.

The next release of 0ad won't have this requirement anymore. See https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7742 for details.

In theory it might be, but unless there is a way to automate that, that sounds like an absolute microing nightmare.

One merchant ship with five garrisoned traders has the same efficiency as two merchant ships, however 1 ship + 5 traders costs 500 food and 500 metal, while 2 ships only cost 200 metal. As all the units count towards your population limit, 2 ships aren't just significant cheaper, but they only incur a population of 2 instead of 6, you'd have with 1 ship + 5 traders. Therefore garrison traders in merchant ships usually doesn't make sense at all and might be only helpful if you have land based trade at first and switch to merchant ships later on.

We keep having an eye on the rating disputes and take action if necessary.

That's wrong. You might have been thinking about interpreted languages which use a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), like CPython, which results in them not being able to utilize multiple CPU cores when using threads, but that's a limitation of such languages and doesn't apply to C++. And as a side note: Even in languages which use a GIL, multiple threads can be faster than multiple processes, depending on the kind of work to be parallelized. Check out for example the commit linked below, where I speed up validation of entities. I compared using multiple threads vs. multiple processes, but as more time is spent loading data from disk than doing actual CPU heavy computation, using multiple threads instead of using multiple processes was significantly faster, thanks to threads having a much lower overhead than processes. https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/commit/e755ef715565409b93cecdb2d84b5098a518fef6

You're probably looking for the multiplayer lobby. "Join Game" is for directly joining a game, "Game Lobby" for the multiplayer lobby.