vv221

It’s sad to see you go, but not unexpected. No one can bear so many things by themselves for so long. I hope your replacement will be a team instead of an individual, to prevent people getting burnt out. Anyway, it’s good to see you have other projects now, I hope we will soon find some time to discuss these with a cold beer

I think an automatic slideshow would be a bit distracting. On the other hand I would love to get a random background on each game launch.

Tested on a Debian Bookworm/Sid with Python 3.11, the full mozjs build went smoothly.

Well done, it did the trick on my Debian Bookworm/Sid with Python 3.11.

The process is much easier than what I expected, so I plan to import all patches from the community mod in the coming days.

This is the main reason I’m all in favour of GitLab, because this is the one I can help with. Including for long term maintenance. I think that for equivalent features, volunteers for administration/maintenance is what should drive the choice of tools. So if other people feel ready to dedicate some of their time for the maintenance of the development environment, it might be a good idea to make these intentions known

I think this is should be the focus. We don’t want to "burn" people with the administration of the tools that will be adopted. This is the main reason I’m mostly advocating in favour of Gitlab, because as a Gitlab administrator and maintainer myself this is something I could help with both in the short term (helping in the setup and migration) and long term (helping in the maintenance and administration). I don’t think it is a perfect solution, I actually have more than a couple issues with Gitlab, but I have been working with it long enough to know of its shortcomings and can help working around them. I would still be willing to help if another solution is chosen, of course, but I would be much less efficient with other tools if I need to learn how to use/maintain them from scratch.

In my experience, GitHub ability to bring valuable contributions is overrated. I even took down the GitHub mirrors of the software I maintain a couple months ago, after years with no contributions coming this way (while we still get contributions on our dedicated GitLab instance).

Training otherwise unavailable units from captured buildings, with some limitations, sounds like a really fun idea. I would love seeing that in game

About formations: It seems you see that as a situation to avoid in-game, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would love to encounter in my games: the choice of battlefield having a heavy influence on the battle outcome. Forcing the opponent to follow you where they can not maintain the formation that is giving them the advantage sounds like an interesting tactical choice. Not following a fleeing army when you think they can lead you to an ambush is another interesting choice. If improving formations support in 0 A.D. can be the source of such choices, I’m all in favour of it

I only play occasional games of 0 A.D., against A.I. As with the dozen of other strategy games I play, I tend to assume a lot of things about "standard" buildings and units. The standard here being that you would garrison units in buildings for temporary protection and healing. For some special buildings, like temples, I will read the tooltips if I have not played for a while. But for common ones, barracks included, I have preconceived ideas about what they do and might not always check if I’m missing something. (barracks train soldiers, towers shoot arrows, houses increase population limit, etc.) … I just started a quick game to check, and the experience gain in garrison is obvious from the tooltip. I guess I missed in until then because building a barracks is something I do without really thinking about it, like some other common tasks during early game. Sadly I have no good suggestions about places where this information could be shown to ensure it is not missed. Loading screens and their tips could have been a good place, but here loading times are so short that I do not have the time to read in full what they display. A technology improving the experience gain would of course help in noticing that this is a thing, but this does not sound like enough of a reason to add a new technology.

I actually had no idea this was a thing To be fair I’m back to 0 A.D. after quite a while not following any news about it, so I might have missed this addition.

I won’t be able to help on the Flatpak side of things, but I’m currently building a .deb backport of Alpha 25b for Debian Bullseye (stable), using the source package from Debian Bookworm (testing). If everything works as expected, I’ll share detailed build instructions here. Or if you want to give it an early try, I’m using this wrapper around mmdebstrap to handle the backported packages generation: Debian backports builder --- It might take a bit longer than expected, I stumbled upon some tricky apt bug in the process…

@LienRag, please consider giving a try to a25, feedback on the current version would be a much better base for potential improvements What we all want (well, I guess this is what we all want) is to improve the feeling of uniqueness in the future releases, not that each of us stay "stuck" on a good ol’ build that will no longer evolve.

My remarks on this topic are not limited to 0 A.D., it is my experience with all strategy games allowing both single player (or human vs. AI) and multiplayer (mostly human vs. human) that there will be two distinct groups of people with clashing visions on where the focus should be between: balanced choices (civilization choice should not bring an obvious advantage/disadvantage), symmetrical gameplay, fair games based on skill diverse choices (including "easy mode" and "hard mode" ones), asymmetrical gameplay, game results can rely in part on luck We obviously can’t have both at the exact same time, this is why I tried to suggest options allowing to switch between one approach and the other. Of course I am not saying people are advocating *against* diversity in the civilizations But this lack of diversity is in my understanding a consequence of the push for balance/fairness. Because it is too tedious to balance wild deviations from the civilizations baseline, such deviations will be dropped if we do not think of the more relaxed solo or coop play against AIs. --- EDIT: Just to avoid confusion, I am talking here about *lack* of diversity compared to what 0 A.D. could be, not *loss* of diversity compared to some older release.