Aeros

Just wondering, what is the status of this mod currently? If there is still activity or a lead in question, let me know - I would like to contact the head of this mod.

Because we're OpenGL the game actually supports any resolution you can think of. In windowed mode for example you can stretch the window to any resolution you please and the game will adjust accordingly. (Our editor is like this at the moment)

Let truth be known, all of you forumers are supporting and helping 0AD grow simply by hanging out with us developers and making it fun to interact, not to mention many a great idea has been shared here. What makes us confident is the majority of the ideas we hear we have already though about and discussed in great detail, and furthermore that shows our community is running on the same frequency of thought about RTS games as us. We have had some longterm and slowly developing plans on how to improve our structure and our significance as an online developer, and well, in short I won't reveal too many details right now but we are planning a unique move to create an open (or atleast, more open) development community as a means to educate, give people opportunity they have always wanted, and in the longterm increase the quality of the game and increase the availible manpower WFG has. We always like to take a very prompt tone with the public (partly because we all speak independantly yet representively of WFG - anything we choose to say is on our own behalf but all of us staff know to keep a proffesional and unanimous tone with the public), but atleast in the sense of the community here the bonds are much closer, down to even chatting with some of you regularly on MSN. We're very appreciative of the small stake out we have going on here with our community and I really am thinking there are no cons to being more open with you guys and letting you know how we work, what our current issues and setbacks are (they are always there when something so complex as this is being done). We basically are in need of manpower, and this is a vital ingredient for the successful concoction of 0 A.D. to be completed - even to reach our goal of alpha - and that brings us back to this poll, I'm curious of the stance of our forum community. If I may step ahead a great couple of steps, yes involvement and the assistance of developing 0 A.D. will mean getting to see and "play" the game, for the rather severe tradeoff of seeing firsthand there is much work to do before being able to play and the game you imagine playing (and we imagine playing) when seeing our screenshots needs a big helping hand before it becomes that smooth crystaline package of RTS gameplay.

@Fred If you can find a way of giving us $250,000+ to license a physics engine we would love to impliment it into the game. Otherwise, if we were to go ahead and code our own physics engine, look forward to 0 A.D. hitting the net in 2015 Unfortunately things get very complex if we want to have cutting edge features like this.

For those unfamiliar, we have a section of the site where (when we have time) we write about some of the inside processes we undergo in the development of 0ad. http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=1406 I was wondering, is there anything in particular you want to hear about? Such as how do we do this, how do we do that, what did it take to make this, what does this person do and why, etc etc etc, it can be about anything relating to the ongoing development of the game. So let us know what you'd like to hear about since we are a little overdo for a new article. I'm sure as well that when we are done with the bulk of production many of our staff will start writing about their experience as a re collective on the production of 0AD.

This is true, our solution is to use the next best thing which is a dialect closest historically to the Iberians, either Spanish or Basque

We always need enthusiastic and active people, if you're someone who wants to spend an hour or two every day until 0 A.D. is released then we'd love to have you. As for voice acting, I'm not sure the state of the sound department right now, we could in theory start recording these things now but it all depends - if there is no immediate work and you're interesting in docing, specing, and planning then you can take it on yourself to spec the voice acting for the game, figure out which dialects to use for what, figure out what needs voice acting in the first place, and things of that nature. If you're hoping to do voice acting for a campaign that won't take place until much longer like around beta (currently we are working towards a serries of pre-alpha builds to be concluded by a playable internal alpha) That being said, fill out an application if you want to help with something and we'll get back to you soon We value regular involvement and commitment beyond immediate technical skills.

What kind of ideas do you have interms of contributing to the music department?

Our internal names for 0 A.D. indeed are part 1 and part 2, the game was envisioned as a whole but for practicality purposes we split the other 6 civs into part 2. This will also leave us plenty of room to add more features in the future as well.

Technically any job is open, check the site in a month or so we're going to be putting up some new details on how people can contribute to 0 A.D. as well as more specific roles we are seeking to add, the job openings page is quite old we're gonna have to renovate it, something I've wanted to do for a while now

For me it was back in 2001 on WFG's home community at the Age of Kings Heaven's modding forum When Wildfire Games, then called Wildfire Studios anounced a successor to the Rome at War total conversion mod. I then joined the team in 2003 when I decided that I too wanted to help make this thing a reality. To read about the evolution of the 0 A.D. project and how it evolved from 2D mod to 3D made from scratch game, check out one of our developer articles: Journey into the Third Dimension

Perfect timing, this topic is something we are about to do a thorough sweep. Yes we very much need promotion to establish a community, and more importantly, to make interested parties aware of what we are doing in the hopes that they can come help in the development of the game. Its not an easy task and 0 A.D. will only be completed so long as there are people willing to develop it. If you guys have any ideas on what things could help promote 0 A.D. or what communities would be interested in this game, post here Lets start some discussion!

Willing, dedicated people who want to play 0 A.D. so badly that they do what we did and join the team to contribute

Well, explain your idea of moddb and what it would do for 0AD, for those of us in the dark

Mike I've been thinking... Myspace for WFG and 0AD would be an amazing tool to circulate around the game dev circles or RTS myspace groups. We would get a large inflow of tallent and community that we are needing right now, I think that idea should be higher priority than we placed it previously

I wager he means zest, spunk, shazam, boomalingaling dang. In otherwords he wants HDR and tax simulation support More features

We really are getting that response alot, the one about "aw man my crazy 3 ghz machine with 2GB of memory and a 256K radeon won't run that game", Our art, albeit done good, does not use any graphics technology that hasn't been around since around 2001 or 2002. I mean this is OpenGL we are talking about not Direct X 10. No HDR, no normal mapping (we simulate it by the artist taking that aspect into consideration on the texture as he designs it rather than making a programming algorithm dynamically burn those in) I mean there are no crazy physics simulations and ragdoll response matrices. We can't tell you exactly what kind of performance 0 A.D. in its finished state will yeild because we can't exactly test that out to find out yet We are still developing it, the game world is a rapidly changing dynamic playground and the simplest way of putting it is that nothing is yet set in stone, let alone been set to begin with But, what you can hold as true is that we aren't in a competitive graphical market, we aren't trying to stuff as much of the cutting edge into the game to "win over sales", we have some great artists who have a very powerful idea of what they would like the game to express artistically and that is what we are emphasizing way more than using about 80% of your system resources to render things like bumpy rocks and extra smooth skin, sweat drops, physics dynamics on peoples hair etc. So the bottom line is we aren't trying to make you buy a new graphics to play the game, and infact that is exactly something we are aiming not to require at all, I mean its a video game. Its about fun Not watching sweat beads dribble down peoples faces after a crazy battle. Sure its realistic but this detail doesn't fit in this style of game where the emphasis is strategy rather than a dynamic visual experience. The screenshots were beefy, but I get a decent framerate, which can be 2 to 3 times higher once we optimize our shadows So you guys don't have much to worry about

You guys realize that myself and a handful of other fanatics personally modded the crap out of that editor back in the day, and that people have begun to take for granted what the editor mods and hacks do for that game (basically the difference between usable and unusable) Otherwise stand-alone, the editor was so restricting it gave me a headache. But in terms of the 3D world and the possibilities that opened up, yes it was all very amazing stuff, very satisfying. Cinematics and lighting and the whole deal did alot and AoM saw some great things - but fundamentally the creative level can't compare with AoK because the interface was abysmal and time consuming to do simple things due to all the restrictions in place. Fry crying out loud you couldn't initially pitch the camera or zoom out in AOM's first editor, not to mention the trigger interface, the most important part - was horribly interfaced. The game had as many problems and setbacks as it had improvements. I threw in the towel when Age of Empires 3 came out, their editor was a perversion and was basically exactly like the AoM editor when it came out. It was even more primitive and annoyingly poor in design, putting more locks on the 3d world than you could do with 2D AoK.

Oh, ofcourse I wasn't being clever or giving you some wit by saying it like that, just ofcourse.. filling out some of the details. But yes correct, its one of the smaller things that is so easy to fix that its not a big deal, we did the best we can for the video without spending nights with no sleep looking for the right value to hit the balance we need.

In short, I wish there was some way of showing how exactly the dynamics of a game have to convene in order to make something look convincing to the degree where it hides the mechanics behind it that make it work. But alas, all I can say is that adjusting the bounding radius of the unit so that it's animation syncs and appears close enough to the tree so that the axe appears to hit the tree and then sync an audio sample so you hear a "thunk" is one of the easier things to fix, considering at it's core the tree, the axe, and the thunk are just a countless mesh of trillions of zeros and ones condensing at the speed of light into patterns in microscopic webs of silicon, the inputs and outputs of which have to be perfectly and coherently defined, calculated, read, and understood by well over a couple hundred thousand lines of programming code, or else so much as one comma in the wrong place will make the whole thing illegible and grind to a hault faster than you can even blink, let alone say "wtf!" ... We would very much like it for trees to fall when they are chopped down and visibly appear to diminish as you extract wood from them but alas, there are more important things that consume our attention than that sort of detail. For whatever reason, the mechanics didn't sync on the first time, or perhaps the thickness of a tree trunk wasn't anticipated at the time when we were coding the mechanics of woodcutter's collision boundaries that tell the game how close that unit can get to another unit, such as for example a tree. But the good news is that There will be time later on to polish these details If anything right now, the bounding circles of a soldier is a similar issue, but one that is a little harder to balance. How much space between units should we allow so as to find the right balance where combat is very close quartered, thick and dense, but you don't get clipping problems with units overlapping. We can't make them so small as to have a unit stand so close to another that his arm passes through the back of a horse, or completely through an enemy soldier's shield, yet if we put too much room between them we will miss the density of close quarter combat we are trying to portray, and probably end up with something even less realistic like units being so far apart that their swords won't reach the other unit when they attack (similar to the woodchoppers). But like I said, at its core its a simple solution, alot simpler than what it took to make it work in the first place. The equations and the math and the rules are all there, its just a matter of trial and error to find the value for the radius that works best.

Now isn't that so true, its the exact same thing on this end too No game or editor out there really cuts it to the golden age AoK designers, The only editor I've been using since Age 3 came out [and dissapointed all the map designers] is Atlas, the name of our Map Editor.

HDR? Are you looking at the palms? No, no hdr, just good art techniques.

Ah its been a while since we've gotten some good questions about the editor - I'll use this as an opportunity to offer you guys some more info. Firstly, welcome to our forums Impeached. 0AD is a project the concept of which originally started in 2001 as a mod for Age of Kings. The team expanded and raised its standards and dreams until eventually the production of a "from scratch" 3d game and engine began in early 2004. Currently the game is (at best estimate, though really these figures mean nothing in the long term) is at 45-48%, assuming that ~50% is when we can begin putting in the gameplay mechanics and slowly shift from doing technical work to game design work to begin making 0AD play the way we want...and assuming that 75% is a pre alpha, and 90% a closed beta...95% an open beta, and 100% version 0AD verison 1.0 [these figures are based on nothing, so don't take this as an official statement - each person on the team has a roughly different idea on our progress] We have a in-game video in the works which should be out soon, and the team has taken that as an excellent opportunity to impliment basic triggers and cinematics into the editor as well as work on numerous bugfixes to make the game more presentable. Its the first time in development that most of our resources are dedicated not to technical low-level coding and systems but rather to actually bugfixing and working on gameplay elements. Neat times As for the editor - this is a feature that right now exists exclusively for are barebones shoe-string needs. This means that most everything is not yet complete - however is extensively planned and documented and supported by our engine. Being a hardcore scenario designer, and having a team that is 75% intact from the HG RTS community of hardcore gamers, modders, and designers we have been working with tools like this for years and have high hopes and standards for the kind of power and functionality we want to use. There are a plentiful quantity of very creative and groundbreaking ideas and concepts we would like Atlas to have - as Philip mentioned the terms Mod and Scenario for 0AD are blurred. You can think of a scenario as a small-scale mod who's source and data is derived from its higher parent mod. What this means is that a majority or in most situations, all of the data like textures, units, stats, scripts, being used for your scenario will be the ones from 0AD. But should you choose to create new units, or art, or stats or even gameplay you have the power to do so. This is done by letting our game treat every scenario as if it were a mod. Each time you load a scenario, if you have any custom data included with the scenario the game will use that data instead of the stock data it comes with. All custom data or files are packaged up within the scenario file so there are no issues with having to overwrite game data. Infact you should never have to overwrite anything in 0AD - this approach to modding we are seeking to phase out and trully give a modder complete power and support from the game engine. So to answer your question, yes you can do that as well as create your own entire RPG or game in your little scenario, borrowing as much as you'd like from the core 0AD game or any future game made on our engine. To reiterate, a scenario map is like a mod that is only applied to the scenario. A regular mod works exactly the same way just that it isn't limited to working on a scenario and can be stand-alone. This is hard to say, as with anything that uses new ideas it intially will be received with a little salt and frustration. We however plan to have a complete help library built right into the editor, with roll-over help if possible and a rich database of information you can retrieve right within the editor. In terms of layout - AoM and AoE3's editors have perhaps the worst UI and design I have ever encountered. In terms of layout 0AD is roughly closest to Age of Kings, though trully our editor is it's own. If perchance you remember the Editor mods created for Age of Mythology - myself and a person called Reyk were the ones pushing that front back in 2003-2004 - you can rest assured that 0AD's editor will make alot of sence and if you know the basics the learning curve will be short and sweet. Here is what we are aiming for: these are some concepts created in 2004 for our Atlas design document (70+ pages describing the features of the editor). This is the layout and design we are aiming for and already implimented though like I mentioned the editor is on shoe-strings mode right now and has only what is vital to current development. Trigger Tool Terrain Tool Object Tool Beaware that these are concepts of what we intend to do. I can also already say it won't like exactly like this, but the layout and mechanics are right on track. Absolutely. The design we have in mind is a coordinate system where you can place points on the map and do a connect the dots type thing to create a closed shape, defining the area. Additionally you can use the classic style of selecting tiles, or perhaps specifying a radius. None of this is currently implimented to design so I can't promise everything will work, though once again this is what we will try. All supported through our system mentioned above that treats a scenario as a mod - this as well bypasses sync problems associated with replacing files (this will NOT be allowed online to prevent cheating, replace files and you will mess the game up and it won't let you play online - it will be alot easier to simply make a mod and then manage which mods the game will use through a menu.) What I really didn't expect when we were planning Atlas is that the vast majority of new features that have not been done yet that people suggest - we've already planned them years ago, usually in much more detail and scope. Content Designers, you will be in good hands - I again emphasize this team was started from people who did exactly this kind of thing for fun.

We're actually just fixing bugs at this point which at some point in development would have to be fixed anyway - just smoothing out some loose ends otherwise the video is 95% ready - we are just brainstorming if we are showing all we want to show and whether its presentable enough. Its actually quite a broad statement of how far the project has come - it just takes so many bugfixes and tweaks to get it to look smooth like it would if it was done So yeah, it shouldn't be significantly longer until you guys see it too

The same way you guys think our streets are paved of gold