Aeros

Anyone notic the bug when the celtic bloke tosses his axe at the camera? For one frame when the axe is closest to the camera, its specular reflectivity reflects a whole bunch of off-scene blue background. I was stunned by the trailer too when I saw it, it was a year or so before I joined when I saw it.

thats what's been going on for the past 3 months He wanted all these documents but he said I shouldn't get any help on the transfer and to not tell anyone, so I asked if he'd like me to make an NDA to keep it legally private, and he flaked out for 2 months or so, but is back now. This is some guy from some latin country, I get weird yahoo advertisements in spanish and each email has a few major gramatical errors.

Update on the Frank Williams Saga

We've already thought of this and infact will have a much more efficient system to allow true power to customize (without having to make modding hacks through the game). I won't get into details since its a little lengthy to explain, but basically the same system that handles modded content can also double up to handle modded content within scenarios. Effectively, any content you have added to your scenario will be contained and managed in your scenario data files. This means you can add in new units or whatever you want and they will become part of your scenario, you won't need to make other people replace any files in the game or install mods in order to get your scenario to play. Note that this is one among many features we have planned for the scenario editor and for modding. Almost no work has gone into putting those features in, so as insurrance I must say these are plans and we definately will try to have them in, but I can't forsee any possible problems that may arrise. Yup, infact Nvidia is better at rendering OpenGL than Radeon cards. Hehehe, good to be remembered but that was years ago. Oscar is much better than me, hahaha. This is what I do now

Hoohooo, you guys wait, its absolutely gorgeous. I couldn't be happier with what I saw from it. Matei was getting around 3 FPS...but, hehehe, I believe that is why its still being worked on.

I agree, its horribly overdone in most games out there right now. If HDR is used correclty to mimick bright lights, you would not notice it unless you knew exactly what to look for. I don't believe there is much room for HDR in 0 A.D. (I'm speaking artistically), it would be more suitable for a game that has dramatic differences in lighting and contrast. Otherwise it would not be very noticable and we will feel bad for 50% of the processing time going to HDR and to compensate we'd want to turn it up alot so its very noticable....this is what ensemble did with AoE3 =P The swords practically look like lightsabers they are so shiny.

Very fitting thanks for posting it!

We recommend a 64MB graphics card or higher. Whether that system will be capable of playing 0 A.D. or not we won't find out until later. I can tell you right now it might be a stretch to try and run the game on that laptop, we will have to see what kind of optimizations we can make.

The system requirements will be more clear when the game is near completion and we finish adding features to it (that tax performance, it changes all the time). But it shouldn't be too different from other games being released at the time. You don't have to worry unless you have a really old computer.

Haha yes I get these all of the time... I decided to have fun with one of them. you know they'll actually respond back if you reply? I decided to mess with these guys a little bit, I told the guy I'd help him transfer his $65 million to my account only if he can help me transfer 4,000 Kilos of cocaine out of these docks in Colombia... but he keeps giving me stuff like So I'm gonna see if I can get him to agree on an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so that it can under law be a private transaction. He doesn't want to do that and seems to want photo copies of my drivers license and personal information like age, date of birth and occupation first. Wouldn't it be awesome if someone could scam one of these guys

I had some time to finish another song Balkan -> http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=781903 Only a few hours after putting it up I got an email from a DJ wanting a hard copy, hehehe

our fans are really slow, we had to make it obvious this time I mean come one...butt-rash....

Many improvements and changes have taken place with the graphics code in the past couple of months. Our shadow system has been updated so as to render self-shadowing in the game world. The team is proud to show this new graphical feature through a screenshot featuring an advanced Celtic village. Also we'd like to use this opportunity to reveal one of the Celtic special buildings. Upon researching all the technologies in the Husbandry line, the Celts gain access to the Genetic Engineering Lab. This economic building boosts the production rates of nearby farmsteads and enables the training of significantly faster and stronger cavalry. These improvements allow you to train cavalry equipped with a wide variety of enhancements such as horns to intimidate the enemy, scale skin to make them invulnerable to pierce attacks, or camel humps to prevent butt-rash. [img center]http://0ad.wildfiregames.com/~art/cheezy/screens/celts_genetics_lab_thumb.jpg[/img center] Click Here to view the screenshot

Oh rats, is it almost summer 2006 already? As has been said before, we're still aiming to get basic playability durring this summer.

and ofcourse...if anything catches you guys' eye, the forums are the best place to ask questions and hold discussions about whatever is on your mind related to 0 A.D.

We like to limit the screenshots to showing new stuff or to celebrate completions of new milestones in development...we could release tons of screenshots but we don't want them to get borring...rather we like to be able to go through our screenshots and see how we've progressed in the months that have gone by.

More likely than not...some suggestions fans have had, have been planned for years already

About your first suggestion to be able to store data from a scenario outside of a scenario - I already thought about this about a year and a half ago and planned it extensively. It works similarly to how quest vars in AoM work, just that these values which you can assign to anything will be called Logs and and you can call on them in any scenario to compare their value. Additionally I'm thinking of having some other event that can export all map statistics, like completed objectives, resource pool, population data, etc and assign them values that can be called upon on another scenario. We even had talks about saving an entire map state and being able to transfer it to the next scenario...It was rather complicated and I'm not sure if we'll see it happen, though with enough effort it probably could be done... #2...calling strings instead of integers...this is something inherently easy in programming so It shouldn't be too hard to do. #3 this is AoM and thats AoM's way of doing things, you don't have to worry By the way, I'm glad to see you here papaya!

This has been tried before and due to HeavenGame's business plan I don't think it will happen since we do not have $10,000 to give them to support a community for us as do the other game developers. Unless we really are a good game and have potential for a good community and HG is feeling generous, I'm skeptical about a 0 A.D. Heaven. If it happens it'll be close to our release time as right now we're ill-prepared for having that kind of a community.

Very well, what do you have in mind?

Haha, true martin there are alot of things AIs can improve on, I'd like to see the same for 0 A.D.

Stephen, I see you must be so anxious about playing 0 A.D. you're ready to play devil's advocate and bash us for being a different kind of organization than leading RTS game developers I don't believe that is the message at all. There are none more excited about playing and releasing 0 A.D. than we the developers. We are the RTS psyche making this game. The history of many of our memebers go back 5 to 7 years to the Age of Kings community when the concept for this game first sprung into place as an idea for a mod. To say that we are openly competing with Age of Empires 3 or Rise and Fall or any new or upcomming RTS is obsurd, thats not why we are here. If I can give my personal opinion, contrary to what you say I believe the RTS genre is actually going down in the dumps more than ever. One of my main drives to join this team was because myself as an RTS gamer was fed up with RTS games that do not offer the experience or gameplay that I am looking for. That is another point - the team is made up of RTS die-hards who want to create their own RTS experience. Furthermore the team is largely made up of students in their early twenties, or students like myself who are still in highschool. This is why we emphasis the hobbyist, amateur, and independant part of WildFire Game's existance, so that people do not make unealistic expectations of this team, despite the quality and effort it is putting out. To make the judgement that we are not doing anything and basically idling our time would be quite an assumption to make. You do not see the daily posts in our staff forums (if you are wondering why all staff have thousands more posts than normal memebers, this would be the reason), you don't see the daily conversations that take place through IMs on MSN between team members, nor the weekly meetings on saturdays, or the 600 page long design documents, our new wiki with technical references integrated from the TDD, not to mention the technology itself that we use to update copies of the game and distribute it to the team so we ensure we are all on the same page at all times. 99% of the details in the work going on in Wildfire Games the public does not hear about. We do not publish our 600 page design document detailing all the aspects of 0 A.D. and its gameplay because much of it will be subject to change durring testing, and furthermore we would like to be able to change things without having flame wars of outraged speculation erupt on our forums. We were aware this kind of reaction could happen. This is what happens when you create a website and a community for a game you just began developing. Proffesional companies don't even anounce that their games exist until they are ready for beta testing, regardless of the fact that they have been working on it for the past 3 years. It is natural for people who are following the progress to be dissapointed at how long things take, or to be dissapointed at the seemingly lack of initiative from the developers to reach out to the community. Thats not our intention, it should be clear that above all else our intent right now is to work on 0 A.D. and get it ready for you guys. That is how we spend our time. A community right now will be no benefit to us. We do not want attention right now, if we have alot of attention we get threads like this one, or we get so much feedback that we no longer can respond to it or debate it freely and openly in our own public forums here with our supporters. Please look at our sister project, TLA. The TLA team is independent of the 0 A.D. team and is in the pre-production stage of development for their game which will be using the 0 A.D. engine. If there are serious projects that are committed to completing what they will start we can make acceptions and give them resources before they are fully completed. As a matter of fact, not long ago we were contacted by a proffesional that wanted to use our engine. If we are among the 3 out of some 115+ internet indy game dev projects that still exist after 1 year of being anounced (let alone 5 in our case), I think this does say something about the indy community. In the best interests of completing 0 A.D. we would like to complete the engine and make everything ready as we see fit before letting a dozen mod teams try to micromanage our features to their needs. I'm sorry, this is yet another misguidance. There never has been a marketting story. We do almost no PR or relations outside of our own community (...for now....keep an eye on gamedev.net ) The attention of 2,000 15 year olds telling us what to do is not what we want right now. The only attention we get are from people spreading 0 A.D. by word-of-mouth to their friends, or from the original RTS community that we emerged from. But when the game is released, don't worry, you won't have any problem hearing about it, I'm positive the news will find you rather than the other way around. As for "marketting".... The game is free, all you have to do is click a link to get it. Its not like we're trying to get you to give us $50 here. I realize some of the community here may be feeling the same way about 0 A.D. hence the thorough and lengthy post with my opinion on the matter.

Will this game really happen?...well I don't think we would be here if that's something we don't intend to do...hehehe

Nice copy and paste action from the FAQ

Photoshop my friend I'll go into more detail on 0 A.D.'s natural art in the near future and you'll get to see how its made and what else we plan to do with our flora... if that'll be included in the upcomming article I mentioned. If not it'll go on our site as a developer article. I'm not sure about swaying animations or things like that, if do that I'd like it to be real and mimick real wind, which means they would have to sway directionally and not in random directions the way its done in other games, also I tend to favor still trees since if you have things like plants and trees and grass moving all the time, not only does it use up significantly more processing power than is necissary, but after a while it can make you dizzy or make your eyes hurt from seeing so many highly saturated / contrasted pixels moving, that and aliasing issues apply so it won't look fluid unless you're playing at a very high resolution. We might try it in the future if theres time, but its not something that'll make or break the natural environment in 0 A.D.