fabio

Just to let you know that 0 A.D. officially landed into Debian and Ubuntu repositories. So if you are using Debian 7 or Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) or later versions you can install the 0ad package and get 0 A.D. alpha 9. Debian packages link Ubuntu packages link Newer versions can be found in Ubuntu backports. See here for information on how to manually install it, or here to enable automatic installation of backports. nvidia-texture-tools package was also packaged some day before it (with the proper patches needed by 0 A.D.), and the 0ad packages use it. DONE in alpha 11: There may be a problem if you installed it from the Ubuntu PPA before: the PPA packages use a version number like 0.0.0+r11339-1, while the official packages use a version number like 0~r11339-1. This mean that if you want to use the official version you should remove the PPA version before installing it, otherwise the PPA version will always have the precedence since 0.0.0+r... > 0~r..., no matter if the PPA is alpha 1 and the official is alpha 9. Eventually 0ad official tarball should use a common version numbering to avoid this, e.g. alpha 10 could use 0ad-0.0.10.tar.xz. DONE in alpha 11: The 0ad Ubuntu packages in the PPA should also be rebased to use the same official build system (svn tree of 0ad svn tree of 0ad-data), to avoid package conflicts and to be comparable in features (e.g. linking to distribution nvidia-texture-tools). Features available only in the PPA packages should be sent to the official packages for merging (0ad 0ad-data).

It could eventually added in game, ticket 1305.

I was thinking of a similar idea: snow could be dynamically placed depending on various thing: uniformly on roof with a "small" angle; more to the lower (depending on the angle) for roof more vertical (supposing snow drops to the lower part and stops there); no snow on yards (we suppose someone will keep it clean...); no snow near the base of objects like building, trees (supposing they protect a little the nearness); random noise to make it more real. Dunno however if the dynamic snow make sense at all, are seasons really planned? About the new shadow and sun effects are they already in SVN? I am not able to see it.

Eventually there should be scripted AI for asymmetrical maps, e.g. an AI that start with a full city and doesn't expand, but according to some trigger change its behaviour, I wrote about this earlier: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15389&view=findpost&p=230149

I agree that eventually there should be one optimized AI with different tunings, where each tuning is a different config file. This should help keeping it complete and bug-free.

On Linux the max size is usually 128x128 (I checked in /usr/share/icons). SVG icons are preferred, I think.

Same image optimized with optipng -o 5 && advdef -z -4 (42KB smaller): EDIT: this is 512x512, a smaller size is probably more than enough. EDIT2: 128x128 icon, 10 time smaller in byte vs the 512x512 size after optimisation: EDIT3: original (up to alpha 9) 48x48 icon with shadow: Newer SVN (post alpha 9) icon, 128x128 still with shadow:

Would be possible to add dynamic texture to simulate snow (or other environmental effects)? This is how it looks like Settler 6, note that snow gradually appears over the buildings:

It says that Age of Empire Online sucks but to keep an eye on 0 A.D. which is historically based, has new factions, a graphic engine similar to Age of Mitology, nice code, developed by genial people and it's free.

This was committed in r11429 by quantumstate.

Nice and original screenshots

Maybe it could be added a two-click mode for buildings: the first click selects the place, then moving the mouse you can rotate it and the second click make the building start.

Yes, but this way it's more difficult to keep them in sync, they will eventually diverge and improvements become incompatible. Obviously developing a library that can be used by different projects is more difficult. In another news Spring 0.86 got recently released with many pathfinder improvements: 0.86 changelog.

Could the new pathfinder be released as a standalone library, so that other open source projects can use it (and, eventually, also improve it for us )?

There are many ways to workaround this: change the license to Android specific code to a non-free one, forbidding redistribution (obviously one can rewrite this code); trademark "wildfiregames" or "0 A.D." and forbids its use on Android Market (the code is still free, but cannot be distributed as 0 A.D. (see Red Hat and its clones)); just link from the 0ad web page the sponsored 0 A.D. Android App, asking to buy it for supporting development rather than downloading it for free; provide some plus service other than the game binary (let's suppose you can, for example, submit your game score to a central server comparing to other players...); That being said what I like most about 0 A.D. is the fact it is free (according to the FSF) and for sure I wouldn't be interested in it otherwise, but anyway it would be nice if developers can find a way to sponsor its development.

Nice, it's also faster than on my PC (20 FPS on Radeon X1600)! Maybe, when it will be more complete, you could sell it on Android Market to support 0 A.D. development...

This is intended, it will give a better compression ratio on the installer which uses a better compression scheme (lzma). Compressing an uncompressed file give better result than compressing an already compressed file with a weaker (zip) compressor.

Would be possible to enable read only access to these boards to all users?

If you want to follow the development see here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/timeline

OK, just want to add that selecting empty units to assign at another resource is not very easy when you have many units working in your city, all moving one near the others. Implementing a pause mode that let you select units and give them orders would help (obliviously only in singleplayer mode).

Currently all maps start with players with limited amount of buildings/units and one win when kill all the opponents. Is there a plan to add different gameplay modes as other games (BFME2, Settlers 6) have? Some examples: An AI that starts with a complete city and many units but will only try to defends itself, it won't add new buildings or units, just replace the lost ones. Reinforcements coming from behind enemy lines at triggered time. Different victory conditions, e.g.: kill an enemy hero; survive 3 enemy attacks; destroy a special enemy building; gather 10000 food while defending yourself; build a fortified city with 100 units (no enemy involved) in 10 minutes; develop a sustainable trade with an ally. Something like these would make game more enjoyable, especially on campaigns!

What about restricting buildings on a 2D grid (it obliviously complicate rotations but many RTS do this, letting them rotate only by 45/90 degrees) and/or adding to every building a border around it (except on some side of buildings like walls that must be connected) to impose a minimum distance and avoiding creating large obstacles to pathfinder? Will these help?

I didn't follow all this thread, just want to let you know about the open source game BosWars: http://www.boswars.org/ IIRC it didn't have formations but I remember pathfinding was pretty fast, maybe there is something useful there.

When a worker get some wood and the move to get food, the wood previously collected disappear. Is this the intended behavior?

I incidentally noticed in this commit that 0 A.D. can use some OpenGL 3 features like GL_EXT_transform_feedback and GL_ARB_geometry_shader4. What are they used for? I am asking because they are going to be implemented soon in mesa (see e.g. transform feedback patch) and I'd like to know what to expect from them (performance, improved rendering, ...). Also it would be nice if the game prints on stdout (or on a dedicated menu inside the game) all the probed extensions and their availability (as for example do id software games). Lastly, what about the OpenGL capabilities database? It looks like it's no longer updated. Thanks