Wijitmaker

Interesting... why do you Candians suppose the political ship of the people is changing course after the last 12 years?

Thanks and welcome to the forums Just for clarification, prior to completion (while the WFG is still in development) we most likely will not open source the project. Mostly for the reasons stated in this thread here already. However after release - depending on bugs, feedback from players, number of interested parties, etc... we are seriously considering open sourcing the project. One of the goals being to empower more hobbyist independant game developers.

Oh us artists use quite alot of tricks that we've got up our sleeve as well as perfecting techniques and always brainstorming on how to make things better.Yeah I think Matei was just making note that we aren't really doing anything fancy with our art besides player/object color. No gloss/specular maps, no diffuse maps, no bump maps, no fancy 3d materials - just pretty much plain old flat 2d diffuse maps (with some some transparency here and there).

My, these last few months of 2005 have disappeared in a flash. This year has been an amazing year in terms of progress. So much has been done, but so much remains. I can not tell you how much the support the fans of the game mean to the people working on the project. Thank you again for your ever present encouragement. Please continue to stand with us as we approach the finish line of this grand adventure. Here are two small thumbnails of newly released screenshots that we hope you enjoy. You'll find the screenshots in our album HERE. [img center]http://www.wildfiregames.com/~art/screenshots/celtic-onslaught-thumb.jpg[/img center] [img center]http://www.wildfiregames.com/~art/screenshots/celtic-onslaught-03-thumb.jpg[/img center] Unfortunately, I'm unable to name one single member of the month for November, December. There has been a tremendous amount of work completed this month by a number of people and there just isn't a clear cut individual. This is a team effort after all, and that showed this month in a big way. Thank you all! Notable staff accomplishments for the month of November and December: Improved elevation painting in the random map generator Updated the Cantabrian Highlands random map with eyecandy and more complex terrain Several new trees Atlas: Terrain texture painting and blending Atlas: Entity placement Implemented auras. (allows us to implement resource collection specifications, hero morale, entity conversion, healing, and much much more!) Converted and updated entities (organization, formatting, attributes, and more) to an improved format Updated documentation for entities to reflect new format Fixed a number of gameplay bugs, such as button interaction problems, crashes when a building or tree was tasked to move, crashes when projectiles hit dead units, immortal units, corpses that you couldn't walk over, problems with animations on ranged units, and training UI functionality. Enhanced the entity order system to make it more flexible and moddable. Several new terrains New helmets Entity documentation Heal action (now obsolete - with the new entity order system... but hey it was an accomplishment!) NU splines (for cinematic camera) End of game hack Nine new ambience sounds for structures created by Avenue Audio Mocked up Ambiences example of how they will be used in game Atlas: Entity/actor placement, movement, rotation, etc Atlas: Toolbar Celtic Structures updated and tweaked Celtic Fortresses (2) Greek Special Buildings (2) Greek Siege Weapons (3) Greek Super Units (4) Greek Ships (3) Greek Heroes (5) Redid the female meshes (3) and animations (2) New animations (15+) Misc. UI artwork Six new history articles: Biography: Lucius Sejanus Battles: Battle of Milvian Bridge Biographies: Diocletian Biographies: Clovis Biographies: Trajan Biographies: Germanicus Caesar Transparency in the renderer was optimized Linux compatibility improved Render Stats updated Minor cleanup in patch rendering Optimization of line of sight (fog of war) Officially eliminated all .png files and replaced with .dds Improvements with .zip files Minimap updating optimization improved Atlas: Improved texture blending Sced (our old editor) has been replaced with Atlas (our new editor) Few fun camera modes added (lock, unit view) Profiler output to an text file

Merry Christmas! Hope you all have a wonderful day with friends and family in this festive time of year

I can understand that Something you have to keep in mind is that RPS dyamics was created years ago when computer had difficulty trying to simulate real warfare. For example, in games like the original AoE (or perhaps even older?) there was only one type of an attack (no peirce, hack, crush, etc...). So in order to have their little 16bit-pixel-sprite-spearman an advantage over a knight was to code in a bonus that says: versus a knight the spearman has a 50% higher attack strength. Well, games (and computers that run those games) have developed to a point that we don't have to use RPS dyanamics as a crutch to try to relate realistic simulation to the players. We can actually simulate most things quite effectively without. And this is why we won't be hardcoding bonuses for units in the game. We instead will use the game as the engine that drive the simulation dictated by the unit statistics (in their entity .xml files).

Amazing how the internet can give a voice to such an array of viewpoints on this little blue ball some call earth. What's fearsome, the video or the comments below it?

Cool, nice list! Thanks Mabuse Zeus (Jeffrey) is out for a bit doing some webprogramming stuff, but I'm sure he'll catch this when he returns

Why thank you We probably won't post a screenshot of the ship because we are still working on issues of scale for ships and we'll wait till our water can do some neat sky reflection effects and bump mapping (which it doesn't at the moment).

This individual has been awarded the following due to outstanding accomplishments as the 0 A.D. Staff Member for the month of October: Jan Wassenberg (aka janwas): Jan has always been a sure and steady hand in the programmers department, doing the work that seems to be rarely mentioned in these monthly reports because they are mostly bugfixes and numerous additions to the low level code that is hard for most readers to grasp. Yet, without his hard work we would be frustrated beyond belief. Jan also played a large role in the hiring process for the latest recruitement job. Thanks Jan! We salute you! [line=200][/line] Notable staff accomplishments for the month of October: Implimentation of Line of Sight (including Fog of War, Shroud of Darkness). Optimization of Simulation speed. Atlas: Implimentation of terrain brushs (standard/custom) Atlas: Improved ease of compiling Biographies: Demetrios I Poliorketes, Darius III Codomannus, Seleukos I Nikator Supersized screenshots Improved DXTC compression Established initial XML spec for controlling OpenAL, group, and actor/entity/sound file specific parameters Initiated design for high level computer player AI scripting Continued creation of Greek unit art assets New flora and geology actors Evaluated various defect tracking solutions Set up, tested, customized, and settled on Flyspray Created Doctrine with Mission, Vision, Objectives statements, and FAQ for FPQA department Several low level optimizations Improvement of debug outputs Support for uncompressed .dds files (to replace .png) Made model rendering significantly more flexible from an optimization point of view Overall time spent in the renderer reduced by about 35% in some cases New programmers spent the month getting orientated with the project More documentation in Wiki (especially with Entities) New layout for session creation UI menu in the game (and more options). Coding Convention templates updated and established First official ship for 0 A.D. created 2nd stage of the Celtic structures are completed Few new concepts for the Persians units have been roughed in

same problem here - it doesn't save my session passwords anymore...

The forum has a bug with usernames for some odd reason - Hopefully Tim can correct the problem soon.

Hey long time no see icewyvern Project is going well (check out the news archives if you want to travel back in time). Hope all is going well with you. Have you heard from Render, Nomad, or Aga in the last year? Haven't seen much of those guys either.

Allow me to translate for you. Morgan is putting together a FAQ for the Quality Assurance Testing (the group of people that will be basically alpha/beta testing the game - finding bugs and reporting them to the dev team) If there is anything you would like to know that you think belongs in a Frequently Asked Questions document - now is a good time to ask! Examples (some of Morgans included): * How often is a test build released? * How many hours does it typically take an individual to test a build of the game? * How do I apply to be a tester? * What kind of a computer do I need to test with? * Is there any special equipement/software needed to test? * How many testers will there be? I'm sure you can think of more. So if you have any questions about testing the game, tester, or the process of testing - please ask, so that Morgan can type up the answers in the official testing FAQ.

I just pulled the name of some greek map I had on my computer. I did a google to confirm it's existance and found this: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Cities/Tanagra.html

Bummer, the team was making some fine progress too. Our very own project "The Last Alliance" could potentially have the same problem that KQIX is having. Currently, the TLA team is praying to dodge the bullet with this: http://wildfiregames.com/tla/legal.html Read over that, perhaps the same might apply to KQIX?

This individual has been awarded the following due to outstanding accomplishments as the 0 A.D. Staff Member for the month of September: Matei Zaharia (aka matei): You see the first five accomplishments in the list just below? Yeah, well, Matei single handedly tackled the first four and helped with the last. This last month he was our "seek and destroy" programmer. Thank you Matei! May many more tasks fall to your sword in the coming months! Accomplishments for the month of September: Expanded some key aspects of the Random Map Generator (classes and constraints) Created two prototype random map scripts Added health bars above entities when selected Groundwork laid for building construction in game There is now water in the game! Organized and trained a group of guys (XML Monkeys, as we affectionately call them) to do in-house XML work Hired Morgan Ramsay as head of FPQA (Quality Assurance) Groundwork for AI Design Two musical scores Preliminary interface soundfx More sound department documentation 20 more terrain textures New WFG website RAW website updated with css and standards-compliance Many bug fixes More technical documentation Resource manager updates (specifically texturing) ASM code and self-tests Many interviews Hired four guys to help out the programming department: Joe Cocovich, Will Dull, Nicolai Hähnle, and Walter Krawec Hired Allen White to the art department Functions for Line of Sight and Fog of War Caged the Camera NASM/Premake Integration More gaia eyecandy actors Atlas updated with Terrain editing, map loading, and camera controls Reorganized actor structure Forums upgraded GUI script updating continues "Foreign Rule in Egypt", "The Battle of Chalons" and "Thracians" Investigated normal mapping Several Roman structures are completed First draft (elevation) of real world maps were created

Thanks Tim! See on the right side under the 'latest images' - the poll doesn't show up anymore. All I see is: What aspect do you feel 0 A.D. should spend the most time on? () 0% Total Votes: 25 Instead I should be seeing this: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8952

Nice work Tim! Here are a few more things I noticed: *Poll *emoticons *looks like some of the specially made BB code isn't working? for example: [img left]http://www.wildfiregames.com/~art/hyborian/CivUnits/Roman.jpg[/img left]

Hmm, I dunno if there is anything we can do to fix that problem - looks like a flash plugin problem to me. It doesn't use the transparency codes that Firefox uses in Windows.

Nice progress Tim! Perhaps it is an option in the forum config?

Just in case you were wondering why the images / poll and other features of the website are currently not working, we have recently updated our content management software for the site. If you see any bugs, please post them here. Hope to get everything back in working order in a few days. Thank you for your patience.

Oh, my I didn't realize how much I would miss that subforum mod you made Tim! I think this has been mentioned, but new forum members have no names for some odd reason...

We mainly upgraded because of security/optimization reasons and also our contract was about to run out in a few days and we wouldn't have access to any future updates. But... here are some of the new features:

That is strange - maybe it is related to the database errors yesterday.