Dunedan

In r28 the font engine got replaced, so you could use any FreeType or OpenType font. All you have to do is add it in the right location (it's binaries/data/mods/mod/fonts/ by default, but should work with any mod too) and change you config to use them. Here is how that'd need to look in your config: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/commit/6ca52a0b23a311910e259cddf4ddab747374f22d/binaries/data/config/default.cfg#L659-L710 If you are stuck with Hyrule Conquest on a27, check out source/tools/fontbuilder2/fontbuilder.py for how to build the font files.

The problem is that without retrieving reports from all players, we don't know if the game is still in progress. As there is no artificial limit to the duration of games, we'd have to wait a few hours to be reasonably sure it's over.

To rate games we currently rely on both players "agreeing" about the outcome of the game. That means whenever a rated game ends, 0ad sends a report about its outcome to a bot which is responsible for handling the ratings. Only if the reports of both players match, the game will get rated. This is necessary to prevent players from sending fake reports to manipulate their ratings. In case one of the players disconnects and doesn't come back later, we won't get a report from that player and therefore can't rate the game automatically. The best solution I've come up with so far is to inform the bot already when a rated game starts and about which players participate. Then if only a single report gets received later on, we can wait a few hours and award that player the points. I've described that in more detail in https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/3951#issuecomment-62016 The non-host player loosing the connection and not being able to reconnect afterwards (no matter for what reason) is an interesting edge case I haven't thought about yet.

As soon as a release candidate gets published, mod authors should take care to update their mods. From this point on breaking changes are unlikely and a release candidate is a clear sign that a release is about to come out soon.

The lobby isn't resource heavy and right now we should be able to handle a few thousand concurrent players. There is also work in progress to make it even more scalable (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8679). However, as @Stan` already mentioned, with a sudden significant increase of players we'd definitely get trouble moderating the lobby with the capabilities we have at hand for that right now.

Good catch @yeager! I created a PR to fix that, however we'll have to see if it'll make it into r28: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8668

Shouldn't the sorting also depend on the selected formation?

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?