ShadowOfHassen

My vote is for matrix. Yes you need to get an account, but Matrix can be encrypted, and I have had a very nice time using it. I have heard that moderation isn't the best, though, So that's one minus. Another worry is a good instachat might detract from the people who use the forums. I've looked around the Battle for Wesnoth project and literally no one's on the forums. Another thing though, and It's something some people might not want to hear, is we might want to have discord. I know the privacy policies are gross, and it's not open source etc. etc. etc. I hate discord probably more than the average person myself, but from what I can see this project has only a handful of people working on it. I'm not saying 0 A.D. is dying or anything, but it's tiny for a game of this quality and size. We need to try to make this project a bit more accessible for the "new kids". Moving to git/Gitea is a plus, because people won't have to deal with a weird/ outdated version tracker. But we also need an easy way for people to get into the community. Most people don't want to have to download a new app, get another account, figure out an entire new interface and all that stuff. The communities for minetest, endless sky and even battle for wesnoth (which none of them look as cool as 0 A.D.) are bigger than ours. What's the big difference? Well they all use GitHub for version control, (but we have mirrors and that doesn't really help) but they also have discord. Again I'm not saying Discord is amazing, I really hate it, but we might want to grit our teeth and have a discord in some capacity in order to get more people. We can have bridges and stuff and backups and other methods but I think if we want 0 A.D. to flourish it might be our best bet. In summary, if we need an instachat my personal vote is for Matrix, but I would strongly suggest we as a community swallow our pride/take a hit on our lofty OSS values and embrace discord to a certain extent so we have more than two dozen people in the community. I know more people visit, but it seems like its only Gurkan Kan Wowgetoffyourphone, me, Vantha, and Stan and like 3 others are the people who post more than once or twice a month. And I'm sure contributing code is something similar. (Also, why does the forum text field say my content needs approved by a moderator?)

I don't know if @Vanthaneeds any help, but you could swing by the encyclopedia topic. He's trying to make a dedicated UI for the encyclopedia texts.

This I think is the biggest point. So many resources are poured into AI just for some dude to save 5 minutes writing a non-important email. It's very silly, though I might be biased because I like writing.

So just an addendum then.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying. If you meant "What would you add to the English style guide in time?" the answer would be the working style stuff that Vantha and I had been using, or it might be better to add in a separate writing style guide.

That can be done (assuming there is a Greek name) What I said is kind of a standard in writing. Most people don't want to have to read "one-thousand-eight-hundred-twenty-two-billion" and one looks better than 1.

I can add it to the normal style guide in a better written format eventually.

Thanks! I sent you a PM with more questions on the DD to keep this on topic.

Here are the rules we've come up, they're mostly arbitrary that we had to decide in order to make the articles consistent, i'm ok with changing most of it except for the US customary system, I kind of wrote the encyclopedia for myself and I like being able to know how big things are. Quote with the rules: That works for me, just as long as we're on the same page. A badge though like the community historian would be cool (but in no way necessary) "Writer at large" or "Grammer Snob" or something more serious sounding. I might poke around, it looks like it's written well enough. I was thinking of working on "customizing" some of the articles this week but I might just give that a polish instead. The document is basically to make sure the devs know what they're doing right? How would I do a patch or PR or whatever?

Aren't we moving away from phabricator? Still I think something like that could be easily done with gitea, all we probably need is a label for writing and we'd get notified if that's tagged. For the most part, all I ask is that devs don't merge any text changes from other people (if/when we get other contributors) until we can get it looked over. Though, it would be nice to also be able to make some additions to the style guide as we have our own style rules that we've been following. Yeah, I'm totally OK working with the articles in a kind of "unofficial" capacity, as long as we get what I say, above. Well, I'm not exactly sure I know how to maneuver trac, but when we finish up the encyopdia I'm certain we'll have moved to git, and I'll be happy to give those a look. Not going to blame anyone, but that would've been extremely useful in writing articles. I'll try to remember to give it a look once we move to git (sorry, but I have no clue how trac works, I've tried to figure it out but it eludes me.)

Basically the thing I'm hoping for is if in the far out future someone wants to add/change a new encyclopedia article, or campaign etc. text wise Instead of the devs looking it and say "Good," and merge it They contact me or Vantha to give it a look over to make sure it's consistent and doesn't have any errors that programmers might not see but drive English Grammar people crazy. I'm not really that worried about tooltips (though I'd gladly look them over) because I don't think someone is going to easily mess up a single sentence without people noticing. It anything longer, that might be bad. Now this doesn't require permissions, it just requires people to remember we exist, which I don't think would be too hard, from what I can tell the dev team here is smaller compared to some other projects and I don't think we would be lost in the masses. We just need people to be on the same page. However a fancy badge would be cool... but it isn't necessary. (Also, what does the community balancers do? I mean, it's partly in their name, but do they run the community mod?) For items outside the game itself, I'm willing to make some edits, however a lot of the technical stuff will probably go over my head, and so I wouldn't be of any help. But if there's anything else that needs to be looked over (wiki entries, blog post social media etc.) someone can always message me. I try to do a bit of encyclopedia each day, but I've cut down the amount I actually peruse the forums to have more time for other things.

Ah.

IA?

That's not going to happen, the amount of time I have to actively write things myself might wax or wane, but I'm going to try to stick around at least for editing purposes. Beside's we've basically opened the whole dimension of long form texts into the game, and like I said before, I don't want to leave the devs with another thing they have to worry about (if they don't want to)

I don't know exactly, but they're volunteering their time and if there's some easy things I can do to make their work easier I'll happily do it.

Thanks, that answers my first question. I'd rather not make translators' jobs harder.

So because we're going to start adding articles to mainline, (as soon as @Vantha gets the amazing new UI) there are a few things I'd like to discuss/ask. First translating. I'm assuming it is just the community translates it? , will the new places we're putting the articles be able to be translated, and second how is translation done, and is there a set of guidelines because I think for anything not American English we can get rid of the US customary measurements, and I'd like the translators to know that. Second. I know for a project like this, we have reviewers for code, art and even music, and I think we should have the same thing for large portions of text in game. Between @Vanthaand I we've put a lot of work into the encyclopedia so far, and I'd like to try and get the same quality of writing in the rest of the game. It would be great if whenever there's a patch with anything bigger than a tooltip, the devs could let me know, so I can give it a look and wait until we can get the text right before merging. Editing and in game text might not sound that important compared to art, code, or gameplay, but I'd still like to get it the best we can. Besides, with rumblings of new tutorials, campaigns, and the like; someone to coordinate the narrative/writing side of things will help the devs time to be focused on things they are more interested in.

I figured we could start with images from Wikipedia . I'm pretty sure their pictures are in CC in some way. If you have a suggestion, tell us! The only way we can get better is if people tell us what we do wrong (or even what they disagree with)

So the way I see it we should proceed like this 1. Fix bug 2. add engine code (with minimal articles to mainline 3 add the rest of the articles directly to svn 4 finish writing articles and adding them to svn (or git if it shows up first

It. Looks. AMAZING!!! So what are the next steps? Fix the bug then convert previous articles, then merge? Or should we do a hybrid. Fix bug, merge, work converting articles and add them directly to game? On one hand, we might not want to ship something uncompleted. On the other hand, this is an open source project. (Joke, don't hit me!) Also, it might be easier to figure out where all the files go in the main game with only a few articles than a billion.

Oh, goodness, they're evolving. Still really obvious but I did not expect this level of "qualiity".

PR for Athenian Units https://github.com/TheShadowOfHassen/0-ad-history-encyclopedia-mod/pull/151

I've always called it the Holy Roman Empire, because it was tied around the faith of the "Holy" Catholic Church. Of course, then Martin Luther came along and the empire kind of got broke up. The reason it was originally called the Holy Roman Empire was after Rome fell everything was in chaos and people just wanted to go back to the good old times of unity, and so when Charlemagne united the tribes of Europe they had peace like when they had Rome, which was why the Pope gave him the title Holy Roman Empire (Also, it helped the kings to make it seem like they were part of a government instituted by God and the Pope, and the word Rome had some kick in it as well) But no I haven't heard it called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation ever in the USA, but I was also homeschooled and have no clue what people are taught elsewhere

Pr for Atenian structures https://github.com/TheShadowOfHassen/0-ad-history-encyclopedia-mod/pull/150

https://github.com/TheShadowOfHassen/0-ad-history-encyclopedia-mod/pull/149 I decided we've had to much exciting encyclopedia news so here's another PR of boring edits, this time for the mixins we made for articles.