janwas

It's asked fairly often, heh We've had an interesting idea related to this topic; stay tuned.

Wow. 5 gigapixels kind of defies comprehension Nice project idea as well - Google Earth has great (high-res) imagery, but their geometry seems lacking somehow. I've not seen anyone using radar data for heightmaps on this large a scale. Thanks for pointing that out, looks to be relevant for work as well

Hello Franco, congratulations on getting rid of MS - I'm trying, but haven't yet kicked the Visual-Studio habit, heh. Thanks for your interest in being a part of 0 A.D.! Circumstances do look difficult, though - it's definitely understandable that a job keeps you busy. I find that since starting work, I haven't been able to do any serious coding - only smaller fixes and management work. We've noticed over the years that anything less than say a 3h block every two days, plus half an hour a day to keep track of the forum, just isn't productive for programming (hence, 10..15h a week at minimum). Do you see that differently? In what direction would you be looking to contribute?

This is unfortunately impossible to say with any certainty. For example, a recent 'harmless' compiler upgrade has caused no end of trouble and thrown us back about 10 days (spent scratching heads and working around the issues). Were we a commercial shop with a fixed deadline (e.g. Christmas), features would be axed and the whip cracked after such an event. However, since we don't want to compromise the 0ad vision, the answer will remain: when it's done

Unfortunately I no longer know for certain Possibly gamedev.net ~2002, most likely via signature.

hm. Reminds me of the Tunguska flak with order of gun/missile changed and a new radar. The idea of combining guns+missiles is old, but the improvement looks to be that it's all automated. How did you come across it?

Sweet! It's nice to see an overflight of more complex / non-barebones test terrains Should be quite impressive to behold, especially if one has only seen screenshots so far! Props to Andrew for the operational cinematic camera and to Christoph for the sweet maps and putting this together It is a bit laggy at times, though - is that because your system can't quite write the video in real time? What are the specs?

hm, strange. Nothing has arrived here, either. But: "experience is what you get when you were expecting something else". This should at least make for a funny story, heh.

Hello! I'm Jan, (sad to say) erstwhile coder, now more management and helper due to full-time job. Your test application was received today. Feel free to send the real thing the same way, or via e-mail to Jason's aforementioned address with CC to mine (see below). Looking forward to reading it!

Interesting idea; sure, why not

Howdy! Rude: nah, annoying: a little. Each "are we there yet?" causes the trip to take a little longer because the drivers are thus distracted. We do also have news and even an SVN commit ticker for exactly the purpose of keeping ya'll informed as to what is happening. The facts are thus: 1) this game WILL be completed 2) available time of programmers varies so wildly that scheduling is basically guesswork 3) work continues! Unfortunately I can't make a reasoned statement as to when what happens, so I guess we can indeed leave it at "it's done when it's done", and checking back once in a while shows the progress that has happened since then. Off the top of my head, I am not sure what all is new over the past 6 months, but the executive summary is that the game is currently mostly 'playable' (you can send people around, build stuff, attack, etc.) in sandbox mode for the Celt and Greek civs (albeit without most sound effects).

The link works, but appears to be access-controlled. Here's the relevant text: Thanks for answering this, Philip.

Varies wildly. Min 2 hours, Max 16, Avg 6.

Ah, very cool. That would do it 5?! wow, that's early. I eventually read my way through the WW2 history bookshelf in the school library, but that wasn't until 13 or so. T-72, yes (albeit in a museum, where they show one basically cut in half). The best thing was being passenger in an MLRS (the project my dad was working on before that) driving through rough terrain. Whee! heh. Modern tanks have actually gotten worse in that regard than WW2! M1 guzzles 2 gallons per mile, while PzKw V (Panther) needed about 1.3, I think. Nice. Yep, impressive tank for its time.

Ah, he's employed by the government (office of military technology and procurement). The weird thing is: this office decides what research to pursue, the task goes to one of the (mostly goverment financed) research institutes, they produce a workable approach/prototype, and then *give* it to a company that then finishes/builds it. Sounded quite strange to me initially, but this seems to be standard. How did your interest in the military develop?

That's a good question. First, the number of tanks knocked out: 2 total losses, guesstimate 20..100 disabled (1, 2.). The official figure of 8 is really BS, because mobility kills and abandoned all-but-destroyed tanks of course count as 'lost' (even if crew survived). It is not a realistic picture that's painted when the media says "none were scratched"/"Abrams is invincible". Now why weren't there more losses? The most modern tanks the Iraqis could muster were some T-72 (export variant). Those were developed in the early 70s - some 10 years before Abrams, not counting the latter's various upgrades. Worse, they didn't even have real ammo for them. It is kind of a joke that destroying those is judged an accomplishment (and one doesn't even know whether the few dozen T-72 actually fell victim to tanks or air - I'd bet on the latter) BTW, the Abrams is practically a tank destroyer because its armor is very good for frontal engagements, but too weak from the sides/rear (as seen in above pics, one solid hit to skirt or rear or turret bustle *penetrates*, often leading to ammo cookoff). That means it's great for large-scale tank engagements where the enemy is in front (which was of course its design goal), but bad for urban combat where enemy can be behind or above you. So let's summarize here. I have seen various flamewars as to "which modern tank is the best?", all fanned by their respective partisans/zealots. Thankfully there hasn't been any real tank battle, so the question remains open. There is one bit of food for thought I'd like to pass on to balance the picture usually presented by the media: against a modern foe, most any MBT will fall to one ATGM hit (from beyond visual range). As a small consolation, Leo2A6 tanks have some protection against this and T90 has good countermeasures. Abrams looks to have the worst hand dealt here, actually. That's cool! I have an interest in tanks - no surprise, since my dad is in charge of German tank R&D.

Paul, I share your interest Indeed. Remember the Abrams tank knocked out in Iraq? There was talk of "rail guns" and high-tech experimental weapons, but the culprit is now believed to have been an RPG-7 with a newer HEAT warhead. heh, it is amusing to think of the arrogance that must underlie those statements ("of course our tank is invincible!"). In reality, firepower will always defeat armor eventually. The Abrams is only now getting reactive armor plates (as part of TUSK upgrade), which have been used in Chechnya for years. Now they can also have their 'revolutionary' "force field", which has only been around for 20 years. What will they re-invent with glorious fanfare next? hm, that article is a bit short of details. I wonder if this APS can protect against KE as well as CE rounds?

heh, interesting question. I've had TODO lists for quite a while because at some point I just couldn't trust my memory (either it's getting worse, or there's just more stuff to keep track of ). About 2 months ago those were just constantly getting longer, so here's what I do now. Separate plain text files for: calender (future appointments), todo (<- that day), mid-term stuff that needs to be done and recurrent weekly times, e.g. sports. Each of those are displayed (via notepad) on every Windows startup, and I copy stuff for that day into the TODO (only takes a few seconds). Over the day, I always check back at the computer what's next and tick those off A bit primitive, but it works.

Hi folks, a little background: supported languages isn't just a matter of translation: it also affects hows text is stored in the engine, and how we display it. The easiest for us would be to use the ISO-8859-1 codepage - we'd only support all Western European languages (i.e. Latin-based alphabets). We could also use an 8-bit encoding for other alphabet-based languages, but we'd have to remember what codepage we're using when editing/displaying the text. (Hebrew chars and say French might have the same value). The full monty would be using Unicode - this is necessary if we want to support Asian languages. That would entail different text processing in the engine, as well as a special display algorithm (we can't pack 10000 chars into a texture - we would need to have a font engine render our text from .TTF). Now neither of these are problems, we just need to know up front. Hence, how much do we value translations into non-Western-European languages, especially Asian?