ShadowOfHassen

I also think for the best campaigns we need support for all kinds objectives ie gat 800 wood etc as well as dialog and cinematic support in a very easy package. (Also basic scripting) Back to marketing I have two random and silly ideas. Idea number one could we team up with some of the other open source games and make a short of group project for advertising. idea number too which might not work could we talk to one of the Linux podcasting networks Tux digital or Jupiter broadcasting and do something with them? Also off topic is there any podcasts specifically about open source gaming?

Update on my side. We decided to wait on customizing on the existing articles until the encylopedia UI is in game, so in the meantime I'm starting pre research for the next civilization. (We might not have finished with the Hellenistic civilizations, I don't know, but I decided to start pre research for the Gauls and Britons. I want to try to use primary sources, so it might take a while.

Now hold on it's been more than 3 months... and flagship feature? You give us too much credit. Although @Vantha's new UI when finished is going to be REALLY cool. I think the naval update I heard @wowgetoffyourcellphone was working on to be more of a flagship feature. (Didn't mean for that to be a joke, the navy update if it's actually happening (I hope it will) will be cool. Talking about social media, quotes from the articles + screenshots and art would be a really cool marketing material I think, like one a day or so leading up to the alpha with the encyclopedia. (Maybe this alpha? Don't know how long the encyclopedia UI will take to be merged, but after that it won't take too long to get the roughly half of the game's articles in it.) I didn't see that on our website, did you mean the linktree? I'll write them if people will do the technical stuff and map design. I have an outline for a tutorial somewhere... I can help with at least one third of one of the three things we need to get done.

I was going to report that Trac is down right now... So is this people doing it one day early, or is Trac going to not leave without a fight?

I can edit a comment and add naughty stuff . I’ve been watching spiffing Britt and have been playing with exploits .

I'm not talking about moderation as much as support. People like helping other people. I don't know enough about moderation to speak about it, sadly.

I don’t actually see that as a problem if we get more community members. Naturally they’ll start helping with that stuff. in the meantime basically there’d be a few devs who just need to be @ed after the community stops triaging (that already happens now )

So what if we picked the biggest discord and granted it the status of "official community discord" have the people extended it and put a link somewhere on the website, then for anyone who wants to use discord they can. Because I think just a discord link for gamers/newer devs might be useful. (I will not be using it because I like the forums better, but I think it's a tactical choice that is needed.)

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.