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I noticed. (And commented on it, in a report; I sometimes add a sentence to reports...)

Happy New Year! If we are friendly and act like mentors to new volunteers then we can gradually grow the development team.

Hey Stan, Please don't feel bad for quitting your 0 A.D. posts. Health and a fulfilling life go first, and I'm sure that everyone here knows that you have thoroughly thought about it before making your decision. Your work, care, and constructive attitude have had without doubt a huge impact on the development of the game and its community, and have made 0. A.D what it is today: Objectively one of the greatest open source games in the world. It can even compete with the best commercial games in the market which is - given the fact that this is all made by volunteers - not a matter of course at all. Thinking about the huge part that you had in it, what you did is outstanding and you can be more than proud of it! It is only natural that the colossal effort you put into 0 A.D. would at some point wear you down. So don't think about your retirement as a weakness but instead be amazed at how long you kept up. It's also a wise decision to make a clean cut as it's easy to get sucked back into old habits and wrongfully getting the feeling that one was supposed to deliver. Once you have established a healthy mental distance, feel free to drop in for some games or good company without any pressure! I wish you all the best and am sure that you'll find your energy again to have an amazing future :)

Stan, thank you for the outstanding job you did. Besides the remarkable commitment and contribution to the project development, I have admired your patience, tolerance, responsiveness and involvement demonstrated to every member of this community, from the newest forum user, to the ones claiming they know better. Even more so, considering the responsibility and high pressure that the role demands. 2023 has been a tough year for 0AD and the project is more fragile today than it was one year ago. My wish for the future is that the new leadership will successfully tackle the "few can ruin the experience of many" problem, that so deeply harmed the game and the community. Fair winds Stan. Whatever you'll do from now on, it'll be a success.

@Stan` I pray you win a big lottery or something that makes you so happy and strong and come back to work for 0ad, You might think I am being childish but I was thinking a lot how to get money for 0AD development somehow, but my life is kicking me here and there my Computer that can run 0ad with out annoying other players is dead, I can't even play now. I can with my laptop but will be dead slow and others will ban me

Since the sole role of leadership seems very taxing, I wonder if a leadership 'committee' would be better suited for a project like this. There could be 3 (or more) positions: Engine development lead, Multiplayer and lobby lead, Volunteer organization lead, and/or maybe outreach and public relations lead.

I think I speak for everyone when I say--you will be missed. You oversaw a great development period for the game. Thanks for all that you've given and I wish the best.

It was a great time to work with you! You've done uncountable amount of things to improve 0 A.D. in many areas. It was taking a lot of time and energy, it wasn't simple for you but you've made much further than many others in that situation. Thank you for all you've done! I wish you a nice journey and to only do things you really enjoy 0 A.D. development is keep going and I'll be always glad to hear your feedback if you came to say hello

Hello everyone, It is with great sadness and a little relief that I am announcing my retirement as project leader of both 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant and Wildfire Games. It has been an awesome 12 years and 8 months, with its ups and downs. Making it to the team will remain one of my greatest achievements ever. After 6 years of 3D art struggles, getting the chance to join the team was unexpected (and, to this day one of my proudest moments), and two years later to be offered the leader job came even more as a surprise. It has been an incredible opportunity to be the leader of such a project. I would not have met half of the awesome people I met if it were not for it, and I would certainly have not have had the opportunities to go to the places I went if it were not for it. I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Being able to spread the word about the game around the world has been an honor, and I hope the game will continue to shine at events. Recently, I had less and less energy and motivation to give to 0 A.D. The delay followed by the cancelling of A27 was no exception; I simply could not give the same energy I gave for the previous ones. The lobby became a source of permanent mental load and anxiety, first because of it is lack of moderation, then because of it started becoming moderated, and now because mods splat the community even more and the cheating is rampant. And it went downhill from there, as I started the longest break I ever took from 0 A.D. Those of you that know me know I was not really far, but I was simply not there. On the development side, I cannot seem to find any fun anymore. Everything feels more like duty than an actual desire, which can only work for so long until it breaks. The learning curve is just simply not worth the burnouts anymore. There are so many things I wanted to add to 0 A.D to showcase the true potential of the engine, as it is just immense, look at all the mods have done, look at all the thing people learnt about history, programming, art, bugs.. But I don't feel I can carry that vision anymore. I believe it is time for a change. I am therefore, effective immediately, quitting my functions as programmer, artist, video editor, documentation manager, translator, human resources, moderator, social media manager, public relations, system administrator, mod signer and modder, (all my mods can be considered archived until further notice). It is the only way for me to ever move on. I cannot just keep doing one thing for 0 A.D., unless I get a clean break I will continue feeling everything not covered by someone is on my shoulders, and it is a weight too big for a single person. I would like to thank everyone that made some or the whole journey with me, I will miss you all very much. I hope we shall meet again. I would also like to thank all the players that took action in the balancing department it has not been an easy task. I do not have ideas for the person who can or will replace me, nor do I know whether I should be replaced by a single person. I will leave it for the remaining people to decide what kind of leadership model they want to go for from now on. As for what I'll do next I do not know yet, but I've been working on Godot tools to import 0 A.D. assets and it's been fun, so I might continue that. I'm still working with Activ' Design this year as well. tldr; So long and thank you for the fish. May Wildfire Games and 0 A.D: Empires Ascendant live a long and healthy life after I am gone. Best regards, Stan

shouldn't balancing rather go on with the community mod? A lot of development can be made trough that project.

Thanks for the report! It seems it doesn't like DDS for some reason. I fixed the mod and uploaded the new version. Could you try it?

Just to clarify, do you mean that after Alpha 26 there will be no further development put into the game, or do you mean there will be no more "Alpha" stage development as you wish not to double up on the 26 letters of the alphabet, and therefore will be shifting into Beta phase? Personally, I hope for the latter, as I find this game very enjoyable and am sorry that I do not have the technical skills, nor funds, to assist in making sure it continues in development and grows to meet its full potential.

That is very sad to hear, as there is still much potential in the development of this game and many features to be improved on. New features perhaps could be implemented in the form of mods on top of vanilla 0AD, such as Delenda Est and Hyrule Conquest. Then 0AD can become a game like Minecraft.

Hi all! I'm currently in the process of reorganizing the the unit actors and unit textures in the development (SVN) repo. Please bear with me if you're an SVN player. The rest of the changes will take perhaps the rest of this week. It'll be worth it, as the reorganization helps the art team moving forward and makes it easier to maintain assets. And as I'm going through everything I'm improving textures, actors, and adding some new things here and there. So content wise, everything will look nicer to the end user. Lastly, I'm deleting old lower resolution lower quality textures and unused textures (trust me, in the end you won't miss them). This will reduce graphics memory load. So, sit tight. My project shouldn't last much longer.

event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.

During A24 I used SVN for playing with the development version, and since A25 is out I just use the SVN version to play A25....

Currently I have Alpha 25a. Installed via SVN, on Linux I'd like to update to 25b. What I know is that one can update the version with: svn up cd build/workspaces ./update-workspaces.sh -j3 cd gcc make -j3 But I believe this will not give me A25b, but a newer development version. Thats not what I want Is there a different bunch of commands which will change it to A25b instead? @Stan` is there a simple solution?

Will not be able to watch it live but here are my questions (not sure if their interesting for everyone/ answerable at the moment tho ) @Stan`: It's hard to stay informed about the development without hanging out in IRC/ reading trac and following the latest diffs all the time, so do you have an overview about what the team members want to work on for a26? Or ist it too early in the dev cycle for that? I know the roadmap and the tickets on there, but only because there is a ticket doesn't mean it will be done. Also some things have no tickets and get implemented either way (terrain update iirc). Not that I want a definite "that will get implemented", more a "these are the things we would like to work on". To clarify what features I mean: a25 got unit pushing, pathfinder multithreading, terrain update, turrets.. So what could be big things for a26: han? Further lag improvements, building hotkeys, campaigns ect? _________ Also how did you/ the team experience the development of a25 in terms of including more people into balancing and community interaction overall? Was it all positive/ helpful or is there room for improvement how the interested individuals/ the community can help? _________ Looking forward to watch it later

I regret that I wasn't very active during the test playing. Anyway, I just gave the new release a try and... wow, the game is now so much better! So smooth, clean, calming and beautiful. You've really done a lot of work during those past two years. I usually had to get used to each new release, but this just one just instantly feels better. Also thank you for the auto-training feature. It's a lifesaver for lazy players like me. I won't longer throw games just because I don't feel like batching new units to be trained. I wasn't closely following the development, so I missed that there was this much going on. I'm quite amazed, honestly. Interesting, I did pacman -Suy on Manjaro and I can't still see it there. Anyway, I use the swap version, so running snap switch 0ad --channel=latest/beta did the trick for me.

I would suggest two: one that they can start looking (but where we're explicit that further changes might be necessary) and one where we say it's String Freeze, go crazy. At the very least, the first one could tell them that they might need to clear a few hours in their schedule in the upcoming works. Certainly did not help I mean this is more or less what we're doing, but the fear is that people might mistake test bundles for actual alpha bundles (which have been tested), and then report bugs after-the-fact, which will simply waste everyone's time. Likewise, someone who doesn't know the game might get the impression that it's buggy, when they in fact just downloaded an alpha of the alpha. We're definitely going for a more porous definition than that, but it's partly because 'release blocker' is very arbitrary anyways. The plan is a minimum of 1 week, but 2 is more likely. Unfortunately, we have some pressure to move forward as we're stuck with a single SVN branch.

Thank you very much for this very transparent phase before the release! It helps me to to feel more connected with the game (development) and I really appreciate that!

The date of 6th June 2021 at 23.59 CET has been confirmed for the 0 A.D. Alpha 25 Feature Freeze, a major precursor to the actual release of the new alpha version of the game. What is the Feature Freeze? The Feature Freeze is the point at which new features cease to be added to the new alpha version and the development team focus solidly on final preparations and bug fixes to facilitate the release. What Happens After 6th June? From June 7th to June 13th there will a period of intense testing and bug fixing. June 13th at 23.59 CET – Commit and String Freeze. This is the point where all further changes are suspended, and release candidate versions of Alpha 25 are created and distributed for testing in a controlled environment. This is the final opportunity to discover and resolve any release blocking bugs or issues. Want To Be Involved in Pre-Release Testing? If you’d like to be a part of the critical testing versions of Alpha 25 then please check the thread here; https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/41264-alpha-25-pre-releaserelease-candidate-build-testing/ When Will Alpha 25 Officially be Released? A provisional date range has been decided upon with June 20th being slated as the earliest possible release date and June 30th. Please be aware this is still provisional at this stage and is entirely reliant on a smooth transition through phases described above, with no major release blocking issues being present in the final tested release candidate. Final confirmation of the release date will be announced in advance of launch – ideally 3 days to a week prior, as will any postponement and revised timescales in the event of a major issue being discovered. What Will Alpha 25 Be Named? A final decision on the naming of the new alpha will be made during the Feature Freeze period, but you still have time to get involved. Every new iteration of 0 A.D. gets a name and this is your chance to contribute your suggestions. The Alpha 25 Name Suggestions thread on the 0 A.D. Community Forum has been open since January 2021, but there is still time to vote for your favourite and put forward your own suggestions. 0 A.D. release names start with the letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the release version. Alpha 22 was Venustas, Alpha 23 was Ken Wood, Alpha 24 was Xšayaṛša, and Alpha 25 will start with a ‘Y’. Check out the thread here; https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/35736-alpha-25-name-suggestions/

Sneak Peek of 0 A.D. Alpha 25 A provisional date of June 2021 has been proposed for the ‘Feature Freeze’ – the point at which new features for the upcoming Alpha version of 0 A.D. stop being added and the development team focus solidly on bugfixes. This is not the release date. The feature freeze is one of the precursors to release, with the specific launch date to follow. You can find more information here. First Impressions of Alpha 25 Be sure to tune into the Tom0AD live stream on YouTube on Friday 7th May 2021 at 9pm CET to see a preview of the latest development version of Alpha 25 in action. The broadcast will feature Tom and fellow YouTubers, Alistair Findlay, and Jim Cogan (0AD Newbie Rush) putting the dev version through its paces live on air. And there will also be a live Q&A session with 0 A.D. Developer, Stan`. New Features Following closely on the heels of Alpha 24, this latest iteration of 0 A.D. will look to further build on functionality and further expand the existing feature set while also fixing existing bugs. With a shorter planned gap between alpha releases this time around, most of the proposed additions are subtle and geared toward small improvements in the current and future player experience rather than headline features. But there are a few notable things to look out for. Single Player Campaign Support: The ability for 0 A.D modders to create their own single player campaigns will be added. Alpha 25 will only include the base functionality for this with full campaigns scheduled to be added in later iterations. Improved Multiplayer Responsiveness A technical improvement that players may ‘feel’ rather than see, this is another progressive improvement step to smoothing out multiplayer gameplay and enhancing unit pathfinding. Before commands in multiplayer were processed twice per second, now five times like in single player. Ongoing Balancing Changes Numerous changes to balance of the game by way of micro adjustments to various civilisations, buildings, and units. For a full list of all proposed features/changes visit the Alpha 25 Wiki page. Get Involved! Your Chance to Name the New Alpha Every new iteration of 0 A.D. gets a name, and this is your chance to contribute your suggestions. The Alpha 25 Name Suggestions thread on the 0 A.D. Community Forum has been open since January 2021, but there is still time to vote for your favourite and put forward your own suggestions. 0 A.D. release names start with the letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the release version. Alpha 22 was Venustas, Alpha 23 was Ken Wood, Alpha 24 was Xšayāršā, and Alpha 25 will start with a ‘Y’. Check out the thread here.

I have been playing 0AD for a years, and I am at a point now in my life where I would like to get more involved, possibly from a development perspective. I liked the FB page, if you are interested you could also create an account on my social media network Sapadian.com which is free, anonymous, and has zero invasive tracking. Overall I think the social media presence for 0AD is really good, and I will keep spreading the word about Alpha 24 and the game in general.

Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 24: “Xšayāršā” (pronounced: Khsha-ya-ṛsha), the twenty-fourth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source real-time strategy game of ancient warfare. The release is named after Xerxes the Great, ruler of the Achaemenid Empire from 485 to 465 BC. Youtube: PeerTube:  Easy download and install Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and macOS. 0 A.D. is free software. This means you are free to download, redistribute, modify and contribute to the application under the same licences: GNU Public Licence version 2 (GPL v2) for code and Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0) for artwork. Although you might find some people selling copies of 0 A.D., either over the internet or on physical media, you will always have the option to download 0 A.D. completely gratis, directly from the developers. No “freemium” model, no in-game advertising, no catch. Top new features Balancing adjustments Building snapping Renderer improvements Hotkey editor Formation improvements Status effects (and modifiers) World population setting Lobby improvements In-game user interface (GUI) improvements Unit behaviour improvements Reinforcement-learning interface Art: new models New Skirmish maps Under the hood Balancing adjustments With the help of several of the top-ranked players in the A23 lobby, hundreds of balance tweaks have been made in the past year and almost all units and structures have been adjusted. The end result is a sleeker, more balanced gameplay experience in A24: Civilisations have been rebalanced, giving players more viable choices. Late-game has been reworked substantially, with less snowballing and more viable champions, which means more variety. Heroes can only be trained once per game, so you’ll have to know when to use them. All civilisations now have a stable, for training cavalry and chariots, and an arsenal, for constructing siege engines. Fortresses can no longer train soldiers but have a territory root, making them more defensive structures and better at protecting your base. Female Citizens and Citizen Soldiers can now place the foundations of all structures. Many, many other small tweaks and corrections. Building snapping City-building fans will enjoy this new option: you can now easily place buildings next to each other with snapping! This functionality can be toggled with Ctrl, and you can choose whether you want it on or off by default, so it is, as always, up to you. Renderer improvements This release introduces anti-aliasing in the renderer: you can choose between no anti-aliasing, FXAA and various levels of MSAA, if you have the GPU power for it. A Contrast Adaptive Sharpening filter has also been added to the engine. For using these options we recommend your system supports OpenGL 3.3 or later versions. The ocean shader also received some tweaks, most importantly near the edges of the map, which now looks better Hotkey editor This new in-game editor will make it much more accessible to change your hotkeys. Further, the hotkeys have been reworked to use scancodes, so the default hotkeys will be compatible with any keyboard layout! Formation improvements Alpha 24 gives you new tools to work with formations: you can now pick a default formation to put your units in when given “Walk” and “Patrol” orders, and you can also choose to automatically disband formations when your units are ordered to Attack or Gather, etc. Status effects (and modifiers) Modders will like this one: you can now give status effects to your units, changing their stats in various ways. Stat modifiers can also be applied directly by triggers and in other ways, without having to hack around auras or technologies. 0 A.D. does not yet use them much, but this really gives you more power to make new custom maps and custom game-modes without having to create a lot of new templates, e.g., tower defence mods. World population setting Despite our best efforts, the game can still lag when there are a lot of units on the map. World Pop (Population) gives you one way to still have epic fights but good performance: choose a maximum total pop which. When one player is defeated, their share is distributed among the remaining players. Start a 4v4 with 150 pop-limit each, and the last 2 players can have 600 pop between them! Will you keep that poor enemy alive to hinder your opponent or can you use the extra population capacity? Lobby improvements This was requested a lot: you can now host password-protected games in the lobby! This makes it easy to play with your friends without having to find your external IP or setting up your router. Further, we’ve also improved your security by hiding the host IP until players have successfully joined your game, which drastically reduces the risk of DDOS by hostile players. In-game user interface (GUI) improvements We strive to make the game more accessible and easier to use, and this release is no different: You can easily see your number of active gatherers under the resource count. An overlay with ceasefire time has been added so you don’t get caught out. Tooltips in general have been significantly improved, in particular the resource gathering rates. Map browser For those looking for an alternate way of picking a map to play, Alpha 24 introduces the "Map Browser". Accessible from a button in the Match Setup interface, users can navigate through maps a little more intuitively than using a dropdown menu. Catafalque overview Those who play the “Relic Capture” gamemode will no doubt be aware that the "relics" in question are Catafalques - reliquaries of dead heroes encapsulated within wheeled carts - and each of these has a small selection of beneficial auras. Alpha 24 introduces a "Catafalque Overview" screen, accessible from the "Learn to Play" submenu of the Main Menu, which makes it easy to learn their different characteristics. Civilization overview The long-existing “Civilization Overview” screen has had some background improvements. Because most of the information is now pulled from the game files, it is now considerably more accurate than in previous Alphas. Game set-up There have been a few added capabilities to the game setup, such as choosing the landscape of random maps when several are available, and a more obvious indicator that the game will be Rated for Online Play. Unit behaviour improvements This alpha improves on many small things: Ship pickup has been improved and should require less micromanagement. Units no longer ‘slide’ at the end of their movement, and movement in general has been improved, with far fewer cases of units being stuck. Cheering has been reworked: instead of cheering when receiving a promotion, units now cheer when all enemy units in sight have been defeated. If you’ve played MP, you might have seen an annoying strategy called ‘Dancing’ where enemy units would easily avoid arrow fire and force you to micromanage your archers. This is no longer possible, making the game more fun for all players. Packing/Unpacking behaviour has been improved. Reinforcement-learning interface Reinforcement learning is a Machine Learning technique that can be used to train AI to play games, and now 0 A.D. has one. We’re excited about this new possibility, because the extensive and easy moddability of the game means you could set up many kinds of complex environments and RL agents without having to recode everything from scratch. We invite any AI developers, researchers or anybody else to help with our AI. More could be found in here. Art: new models The new art developments are too numerous to list individually, and include reworked meshes, animations (including new idle, attack, defence and gather animations), textures and materials for a large number of units, as well as new models, including new horse models, textures and animations, new shield models and designs, new helmet models and variants, especially for the Romans, Gauls, Britons and Greek civs. Many new and improved unit textures, weapons and props for a number of civs including, among others, the Persians, Iberians and Carthaginians. The Ptolemies now have a few more historically accurate Hellenized building models and the Britons have a new blacksmith, while the Gauls have a new, more historically accurate wonder and an assembly building that can train trumpeters to intimidate the enemy. New scaffolding, dirt and decal textures for buildings have been added. Many of the ships in-game have been entirely remodeled from the ground up. Siege artillery has been completely remodeled as well, including considerably improved animations. There is also a lot of new and improved flora, including trees, bushes and grasses. We have new cliffs, new particle actors for snow and clouds and a few new terrain textures, as well as new sounds, and voices. There is a brand new welcome screen, and there are also many improved icons, and unit portraits for the GUI. This is in addition to a myriad of smaller fixes, corrections and optimizations. For more screenshots and details on the new art in this release, see our last two development reports here and here. New maps 0 A.D. Alpha 24 has been enriched with 7 new skirmish maps. Atlas Valleys, Farmland, Obedska Bog (day/night), Oceanside, Sahyadri Buttes, Temperate Roadway, Vesuvius Under the hood New Requirements: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and anything below macOS 10.12 are no longer supported. The game also now requires SSE2. Furthermore, while ARM macs are supported, unfortunately the code running on them isn’t native yet, so users on this platform should expect a performance loss. Several modules of the game have been partly rewritten or extensively modified for Alpha 24, which will make them work better and make it easier to extend them in the future. Notable examples include the GUI GameSetup pages, the UnitMotion component, and the renderer has seen plenty of changes with the removal of the OpenGL 1.0, 90’s style “Fixed-Point” pipeline. Which in turn raised the lowest supported version to OpenGL 2.0. In addition, we started to fully use the ARB shader pipeline.(Modders, all of this means you will also find there are plenty of new cool things you can do!) Alpha 24 sees the adoption of Visual Studio 2017 as the main Windows compiler (Alpha 23B had Visual Studio 2013) , and we have upgraded our version of C++ standard from C++11 to C++17, allowing us to write faster and cleaner code. This release also saw major upgrades to many core libraries we use. Alpha 23 was released with Spidermonkey 38, released alongside Firefox 38 in May 2015. This time, we’ve upgraded to the last “ESR” version, Spidermonkey 78, released in June 2020! This means we can use newer Javascript syntax, and the engine bindings have been upgraded. Other libraries have been updated on macOS and Windows, which let us support more platforms but also required us to drop some. The name Xšayāršā Xšayāršā (pronounced Khsha-ya-ṛsha; IPA: /xʃajaːr̩ʃaː/) is a transcription of the Old Persian name (x-š-y-a-r-š-a), better known by its Greek spelling: Xerxēs. Xerxes I the Great was the ruler of the Achaemenid Empire from 485 to 465 BC. We decided to name Alpha 24 after this inspiring ancient ruler to celebrate the ancient Persian civilisation, and to reflect upcoming changes in the internal governance structure of 0 A.D. The Persian Empire was considerably larger than any preceding state anywhere in the world, and its administration system would have a long-lasting impact. It consisted of about two dozen satrapies (provinces), which were former kingdoms or conquered peoples. Each satrapy was headed by a satrap (governor or viceroy) and supplied the Persian King of Kings (emperor) with a yearly tribute and troops, but were internally largely autonomous. This organisation outlived the Achaemenids and was continued under the Macedonians, Seleucids, and Arsacids (Parthians). Xerxes inherited the empire from his father Darius I the Great. He continued his father’s reforms and expanded the imperial building programmes. Early in his reign, he led an ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Greece, with victories at Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Athens in 480 BC, but defeats at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale in 479 BC. The rest of his reign was largely peaceful. The Persian Empire arguably reached its zenith under Xerxes. What’s next? This release cycle is the longest we’ve ever had as you no doubt noticed, and it was a bumpy ride. Despite this, we’re hoping to get back to a more regular schedule now. As usual, for the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter Y. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (c. 500 BC – 1 BC). Post your proposal here ! For press/media inquiries, please DM @play0ad on Twitter.