Arthur_D

And hooray for the people making the progress!

Well, I don't speak any of these languages, but I still think it's great! Keep up the good work guys (and gals?)!

For a while, when I found out about 0 A.D. I feared that it would eventually die. But actually learning that it had already been over 7 years in development made my fear much smaller. Why? Because keeping the project running for such a long time shows that these are dedicated people, not just some random persons saying "hey let's make the best game ever!" Open-sourcing it made my fear fade even more, because someone could take over if they eventually gave up. And the recent start on AI work gives hope that 0 A.D. might become somewhat playable pretty soon (a few months). So I'm more positive than ever that we'll get to see this game released sooner or later.

chess007_phoenix_clan: Of course, I'm not asking for ultra-realism. But I think it would add a little unique (maybe not unique, but haven't seen this before) twist to the game. Of course you could simply replace soldiers. But in the aforementioned Settlers 3 game, I've found it to be a real treat. Let's say I've got 100 soldiers. I attack with 70 and I get 30 of them damaged, more or less badly. Then I can just send them home to be healed and in the meanwhile use the 30 fresh soldiers along with the 40 fresh/not-so-damaged I am still using in the offensive manouver. How things will be balanced in 0AD is yet to see; maybe healers will be quite useful, or maybe not so. But personally I think many other RTS games make them too little useful. After all, a good emperor and warlord in ancient times took care of his soldiers, keeping their loyalty to him.

As I've been scooping around I found a little discussion about the planned healer unit. Here's my thoughts: The aforementioned discussion brought forward the idea of a moving healer unit which could be brought along with your army. The healer(s) would also auto-heal. I don't think this is such a good idea. It could easily get over-used, and even though you could make some artificial limit (like the healer having very few hitpoints) to the usefulness, a healer is in my opinion a defensive unit and should not be brought along in a fight. Another RTS I've played (and still play alot, since it's great for multiplayer games - you can save MP games), by the name of 'The Settlers III' have healer buildings which you can gather soldiers around, and then units would go one at a time and get healed (if they are close enough). This is more in line with my perception of what a healer, or a doctor, should be like. Still, this has some limits. While it's great for Settlers 3 to do it this way, because you have actual borders and towers all over the place, for 0AD with no borders it could easily become annoying. Let's say you take your army with you, and a worker which builds you the healer's building. After the battle, if the building still is there, you would in 0AD have to feed the healer or crush the building, making for lost resources. So my idea would be something in-between: let's say you make a healer unit. He(/she?) spawns with a backpack on his back, and then you could make him set up a tent wherever you want. You would of course then have the ability to make him pack his stuff again and move to another location where you would need him more. He would auto-heal units close around his tent being in an idle state, either one at a time rather quickly, or everyone around in a small area in a slow manner. What do you think?

Totally agree, great job!

Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

Professional recoveries often cost A LOT of money. I advice you to use a Linux live-CD and try to mount the partition as read-only. It might save your skin, or it might not. But it's worth the try.

Well, I agree that these things are great, but I'm less over-enthusiastic about it. Let's first see the results after a year or so from now on; then we can perhaps permit ourselves to have trouble sleeping at nights. Personally I'm more interested in 0A.D. than the Valve games, because the "historical RTS" genre is totally unoccupied in the Linux and open source world (maybe with the exception of Widelands, but it ain't too historical (or hysterically fun to play either)). So keep up the good work with 0 A.D., and I'll promise WFG will at least get some dough for the doing by me. ;D

Great work folks! Currently downloading from SVN after I tried the pre-alpha 2 package, and I'm going to svn up and test the game regularly. I want to keep an eye on this as this has been a long-time dream - a decent historical RTS for Linux! Thanks a lot for your effort!

Ubuntu 10.04, of course!