Fire Giant

Whoa, my first post here in many years! :-) Awesome progress, I can't believe how much has happened since I slipped out of active involvement in the project. The new main menu is beautiful! For those who don't know, I was the UI coder for the old main menu -- while it made me extremely proud to see that something I worked on was still in the project after such a long time, I'm happy to see things moving on :-) The game is becoming incredibly polished these days, and somehow I wish I was in my teenage years again and had all that spare time I had back then, to really contribute to the efforts. But I am incredibly pleased to see that so many people have stuck with the project and that it is making such awesome progress to completion. The persistence and discipline at WFG are incredible, and really set this project and this team apart from so many other communities! All the best going forward, I'll be sure to keep track! Malte P.S.: For those who still recall me from the old days (seems like it's been ages!) -- I'm now doing my PhD in Cambridge, although I am currently around the bay area doing an internship at Google. Still checking out the 0 A.D. website every could of weeks, though! ;-)

20-25% sounds like a good figure to me, at least if we're counting documentation, too. The screenshots might give the impression that the game is already further ahead than it actually is, but one has to keep in mind that most of the art seen on the screenshots will have to be redone over and over, plus there's still a good part of the gameplay logic missing. For example, it currently isn't possible to construct buildings in the game, and the unit training is at a very rudimentary stage - just two example of essential RTS features that we haven't yet got in completely. As Bobby already said, a major problem is the "management overhead" (as I like to call it): Due to the fact that we're not meeting each other in an office building every day, there's a lot of communication delays which decrease the speed at which we can make progress. An example: If I have some question regarding the networking implementation in order to write the multiplayer user interface, I need to contact Simon (our resident network programmer), but it might be that he's not available due to not having internet access or being unavailable due to real life workload - I'd have to email him and wait for a reply then (or hope to meet him at the weekly programming department meeting), and I cannot just walk over to his office and ask my question. Thus, I might have to wait a week for an answer which is crucial to my progress (and here, you'll realise, the great value of extensive documentation comes in handy, because it could save a lot of time if I can just look for the answer to my question in the documentation).

FileZilla is open source, AFAIK. I think there are open source FTP servers - though most of them are not for windows. The online windows one I know is WarFTPd and that one is not open-source. But I'm sure there are others As far as I know, FTP ought to work through routers/firewalls on the client side if you use passive mode, but the server side needs to have Port 21 forwarded.

Sorry to be picky about this, but... Has been in Trillian since 1.0. Custom, scriptable notifications are available in Trillian (I think even in the basic version). Trillian Pro EmotiBlips. Integrated with Trillian by default, customizable by plugin. So I guess I'll stay with Trillian, but of course, this is just a matter of personal preference

Or, to be more precise: www.trillian.cc I have to admit that I got addicted to Trillian during the three years I've been using it now - when I recently tried other messengers (mainly due to needing a good messenger for Linux), I found them all very annoying and difficult to use - not to mention that they were missing features like Metacontacts, good logging, customizable user interface and clean skins, which have been around with Trillian for a very long time. In fact, Trillian is IMO one of the best windows applications out there

You have to differentiate between seasons and weather. Of course, those are linked, but it's not the weather that has an influence on the gameplay, but the four seasons and the results of likely-to-be weather in the mediterranean biome during those seasons. Each season will likely have characteristic weather effects assigned to it (like snow in winter) and all further weather effects (like cosmetic rain in summer etc.) would not have direct influence on the gameplay (you could possibly "fake" that with a trigger in a custom scenario, though). Yes, this is correct and I think this is the way it's planned: Purely cosmetic features go to the game options dialog, but gameplay-affecting features have to go to the game setup, since it might pose kind of a problem if one player doesn't have seasons activated and all others have

For example in order to improve game performance - all those "nice to have" effects are putting additional pressure on the graphics card and the rest of your system, so it might cause lag in multiplayer mode if someone is at the lower end of the system requirements Mhm, EDIT: I think you got Ken wrong here - the seasons DO have influence on the gameplay, but you can decided whether you want to play with or without seasons (it might seem inappropriate on some maps, for example).

*comes back from the shadows of inactivity* Romans, of course The RVF shall not rest until all other civilisations have been ... convinced ... to obey the Roman rule over the world.

No such tests in Germany, either. I don't think that they are a particulary bad idea, though - many people over here get through the education system by not doing anything for school and just getting their low-average marks until they finally reach the last two years, where everything counts for the graduation. Then, they realize that they need to know the old stuff and have lots and lots to learn - and might get a worse final exam result than they could have had. If they were "forced" to work harder all the time by such tests - where performing well gives them advantages, probably more students would care more about their study results. Those are just some random thoughts, though, since I don't know the exact role and procedure of those tests.

Unfortunately, there are not Egyptians in 0 A.D. - but there are Romans (hint, hint ).

Hmm, not sure if this is the right topic, but I've been experiencing problems with changing my signature, too - it simply doesn't seem to work any more... there's nothing about memory exhaustion, though, so it's probably not related to this problem at all. It seems more like a JS problem to me.

Hey Ben, "Mr. Particle Engine"! Nice to see you stopping by. Well, as Jason said, we've been making quite some progress during the last months, but, being self-critical, it could have been better. At least on the GUI front, there have not been many great achievements through the past months, at least from my perspective. The multiplayer GUI is in the works, though, and should finally work soon But the GUI will not be visible on screenshots for a long time, so that's probably nothing interesting anyway... The major hurdles right now seem to be - to me at least - gameplay issues, like fundamental aspects of unit-world and unit-unit interaction, some world issues (like water), AI fundamentals (pathfinding, computer AI) and some graphics engine features. Of course, there's more work to be done (GUI, network synchronization etc.), but that's not critical right now

I've been reading all the books from Simon Scarrow's "Eagle" series again last week ("Under the Eagle", "Eagle's Conquest", "When the Eagle hunts", "The Eagle and the Wolves" - all about the Roman conquest of Britain from the perspective of a young Optio of the Legions), which was a lot of fun. I'm anxiously waiting for the release of the fifth "Eagle" book as paperback in June, and I'll be sure to get the English version from my bookstore no later than a week after it has been released Besides these, I haven't read much in recent times, because there were always other things to do (at least if my maths course-books do not count). Oh, and of course, computer literature, but mostly in online/ebook format, so these aren't really books.

Yes, it was a great day. I was at school when the flight took place but checked the internet in my breaks to be "up to date" - after all, the A380 is going to be worked on in Hamburg, too, and much depended on the success of that flight. Now the Europeans can officially claim to have built the "king of sky" airplane (and they are not likely to be surpassed on that any time soon It's a great example of what international co-work can do (especially for Europe, where - incomprehensibly to me - a lot of people are still against the EU integration and things like the European constitution).

Wikipedia is your best friend if you know what you're searching for - Google is if you are not yet too sure. Still, I've also found myself surfing the Wikipedia for random things and reading pages where I got through a lot of link levels. As for recognizing people, I first glance at the avatar, too - if some of you exchanged your avatars, I'd get really confused