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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.

0 A.D. Development Report #11 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might provide an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! !!! We are in need of (skilled) programmers. Are you one of them? Redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Feature of the Month: Building Construction Programming & Art & Sound Our one-man-orchestra, Omri Lahav has been busy lately, very busy. Not only has he finished a new track for the Celts, the Hellenes and Mauryans will also receive some new tracks very soon. As always, when a track is released you can check it out on Bandcamp. historic_bruno added building previews that rise during construction (screenshot above) and a build script for OS X dependencies & bundles , making it easier for developers to work on 0 AD using OS X. Aside from tens of bug fixes, historic_bruno also took care of textures not loading. Remember when you start a game and everything looks grey for some time? This should be a thing of the past now. Pureon has committed the Mauryan headgear/faces and a siege onager. Long time, no siege! Currently he's tackling the Mauryan farmstead. Enrique has been working on the Mauryan elephant units and the Mauryan Market. Leper committed a lot of patches: player notification when receiving a tribute (by alpha123), template fixes (by qwertz/kosmo), tribute stats are added to the summary screen (by alpha123). He's also added user mod support and fixed a number of bigger and smaller bugs. stwf has posted a patch with a rework of the sound manager. This is currently being tested and will hopefully be implemented soon. Gen.Kenobi added normal, parallax and specular maps for all Mauryan buildings and ships. Spahbod added a new random map, Kerala. éminence grise Philip tinkered a bit with stats collecting (Windows 8 supported), he also fixed some static analysis warnings. Battle detection was implemented by zoot! For example: when a battle is raging, the game will change the music from peaceful to battle music. This is only one example of the benefits of battle detection. More on this later. ndragu committed a Mauryan warship. Yves' Javascript debugger attracted the attention of mmayfield45, who created a web-GUI. Mythos_Ruler committed a lot of balance changes. See you in a couple of weeks with the latest development news!

0 A.D. Development Report #10 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! !!! We are in need of (skilled) programmers. Are you one of them? Redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Screenshot of the Week Month The Mauryan Indians will make their spectacular debut in 2013! Stay tuned. Art & Programming & Sound historic_bruno committed a plethora of fixes! He updated libpng to v1.5.13, fixed multilined text alignment and added a link in-game to the manual. This is only the tip of the iceberg though. For a full list of code revisions check this . Or maybe it was this one.stwf has been working on a complete rewrite of the sound manager. This ought to fix bugs and remove memory leaks in the code. Pureon has finished work on the 'Crannog' building and he has also made new technology, unit and building icons. He has also finished the Mauryan houses (which are a treat!). Check for yourself in the monthly screenshot! Mythos_Ruler also worked on the Mauryan Indians, adding new textures and portraits, among with some general balance work. Enrique finished work on a couple of Mauryan buildings, notably the temple and the stables. Can you spot them in the screenshot (see above)? quantumstate updated the technology code (making it much cleaner), among many other bug fixes. He has applied Kingadami's patches for adding an fps counter to the game setup and right click selection removal. leper implemented some patches (by supertesters zoot , mimo and kingadami), stopping formation members from sliding, among many other fixes and small new features. Gen.Kenobi added fireworks! Yes, ... fireworks. But he also got enrolled in medical school, so yay, FIREWORKS! Spahbod fixed some major random map bugs, including the notorious "chicken problem". Doesn't ring a bell? Consider yourself lucky! Yves is working on a javascript debugger. As we are using javascript for many things, this tool will come in very handy. K776 is working on the web-GUI for the debugger. Last but not least we ought to thank Lordgood for his amazing design sketches for the Mauryan Indians. See you in a couple of weeks with the latest development news!

In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on the finances of the project as of 2017-03-31. Until 2016-12, 0 A.D. had funds in three places: Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter "SPI"); A PayPal account under the name of former project leader, Jason Bishop (Wijitmaker). This account was a legacy of the time before we became affiliated with SPI; An account on Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider. SPI Earmark for 0 A.D. As of 2017-01-01, the 0 A.D. earmark is USD 29,528.35 (Source: SPI Treasurer's Report). Other Accounts In our "legacy" PayPal account, we had USD 366.30 on 2016-11-30. This sum was consolidated with the SPI earmark in December 2016 and is probably reflected in the account balance mentioned above. We will not be using this account anymore and we have duly removed the references to it from the donation page. On Flattr, we have EUR 842.14 available, which are approximately USD 900. We have removed the references to Flattr account from the donation page and we intend to consolidate these funds with the SPI earmark in the near future. Total In total, we have approximately 30,428.35 USD. Concluding Remarks The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”), Adarash ("MishFTW") and Aviv (“Jeru”). We welcome your comments and suggestions in this thread.

0 A.D. Development Report #8 (Week 40 - 42) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Team news! Welcome aboard, Ludo38! Ludo has been contributing some great graphics recently and spreading the word about 0 A.D. He has accepted to join to Web Design Team. Another contributor that deserves her (!) minute in the spotlight is BrynnOfCastlegate (or just 'Brynn'). Brynn recently started making tutorial videos and other promotional material. Check out her first tutorial ! Screenshot of the Week A real-time post-processing filter FOSS - by Martins Upitis - applied by Zaggy1024. Note that this has in no way been Photoshopped. It is a screen capture taken directly from our 'Atlas' world editor. This is just one of many new effects and filters that are supported now in 0 A.D.! All credit goes to myconid for his amazing Postprocessing Manager! Art & Programming & Sound The day has finally come! Myconid has committed his Postprocessing Manager to the main code branch (some even claim the only code branch...). Main features are Distance Fog, Brightness & Contrast ("fake HDR"), super-fast Bloom and fast Depth-of-Field. All these effects and enhancements can be tweaked to your liking! Mythos_Ruler has mainly been working on technologies. You want to increase your citizen's wood gathering rate? Research 'Iron Axes' at the mill! You want to give your workers a moderate movement speed bonus? Research 'Shoes' at the Black Market...(No wait... that was in C&C:Generals). Mythos_Ruler also created a sandbox scenario for the Macedonians, among some balancing. (Call it coincidence but he always seems to be 'rebalancing' stats prior to a staff battle...) Quantumstate has been restructuring the code behind technologies. Talking about optimizing: he was able to lower the CPU usage of the CCmpRangeManager by 80%! This benefit won't be spectacularly noticeable as this is only a small part of the game, but the CPU usage is such a bottleneck that we are considering to spend the remaining Pledgie budget on a bronze statue in his likeness. We think the community would concur (for the record: your money is not being wasted; all money goes to the development of 0 A.D.). Spahbod has added two random maps: Nomad and Syria. He has also added a couple of map previews. Last but not least he revamped the match setup GUI even further: it is now possible to set a population cap (i.e. a limit on how many units a player can have) and to select the amount of starting resources. Enrique has made a night version of the Belgian Bog map, among with new shield textures for the Mauryan Indians. Lion_Kanzen also contributed shields for the Mauryan Indians. Zaggy1024 has been toying around a bit with Myconid's Postprocessing Manager, mainly improving the quality and performance of Depth-of-Field effect. historic_bruno applied a fix where water would not be animated in the editor (Atlas) and incorrectly animated while the game is paused. He also implemented rubble and debris (visible when a building is destroyed). OmriLahav has been working on a new generic track and a new early (=will play during early game stages) Celtic track. Yves added a splashscreen that appears on startup and informs the player about the status of the game (bugs, missing features). See you in two weeks with the latest development news!

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.

Poster, CD, and notebook cover. Now everyone should have received their perks, the notebook covers should have arrived last week or this week, and given the amount of time since the other perks were sent out those should have arrived as well. Actually there is one perk which hasn't been sent out... The top contributor is to receive a signed CD. Omri, the composer, has received the CD though, so it's just a matter of time before that is sent out as well. There were a couple of extra CDs, so those were sent to Omri as well as a thank you. If you are a member at our forums, and donated $11 or more you now have a "Donator" badge: The Twitter list has been updated with the new names from this fundraiser, and all the people who opted for it in our survey last year will be included in the contributors list in-game. We will let you know as soon as we have found the best way to use the money. It will not be spent on other things like the web server etc, it will only be used to sponsor direct development of the game. Finally, let us once again say thank you very much for your donation, and also for your patience. It's nice to finally be done with the perk delivery. We do intend to keep working on the game until it is finished as well, and hope you will keep following the progress.

0 A.D. Social Media Accounts (We need you!) I’ve been given the lovely honor to curate 0AD’s social media accounts. In this capacity, I would love to invite every forum member here at the Wildfire Games Forums to take a look at our current accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon. As you may know, 0 A.D. is completely free, libre, open source and volunteer based. No wages are paid in the development of this game and there is no budget for marketing. Exposure for this project is made up almost entirely of word-of-mouth advertising. We, the fans, are the developers of this game, both here on the forum, as well as on other platforms like trac, phabricator, GitHub and IRC. Together, we are all contributing towards the development of this game, however large or small those contributions may be. Every like, comment and share contributes towards the future of this game that we have all grown to love. The more people know about this game, the higher the odds that we will attract more developers in various fields from programming to art and translations. So, if you haven’t given these pages a visit yet, please take a look. And maybe give us a like https://facebook.com/play0ad/ https://twitter.com/play0ad https://instagram.com/play0ad.official/ https://mastodon.social/@play0ad (open source social media) Other media accounts worth checking out are: The Spanish language 0 A.D. Facebook page: https://facebook.com/0adfanslatino/ (managed by Lion.Kanzen) Our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/play0ad (release trailers and original 0 A.D. music tracks) Our Bandcamp site: https://play0ad.bandcamp.com (0 A.D. soundtrack) 0 A.D. on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/0ad/ Another reason I open this topic, is to receive community suggestions, feedback and comments about our accounts. And remember, there is also a lovely thread called “Your screenshots”. Don’t be shy to post some nice shots there. The ones that are exceptionally pleasing to the eye might receive a feature on our platforms. Our current followers, January 11, 2020: Instagram: 3 Mastodon: 22 Twitter: 3537 Facebook: 11,834 As Stan` the Man aptly pointed out to me recently: "" Some free promotional art (Click the image, then click it again to open the original sized file in a new window): Hero Portrait by JustinOperable, backdrop by LordGood. Ashoka the Great: Hero Portrait by JustinOperable, backdrop by LordGood. Hannibal: Hero Portraits by Victor Rossi, backdrop by LordGood. Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Queen Amanirenas: Remember, 0 A.D. and the Pyrogenesis game engine aren't just free. They are libre software:

In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on the finances of the project as of 2015-11-25. 0 A.D. has funds in three places: Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter "SPI"); A private account in the US, under the name of former project leader, Jason Bishop (Wijitmaker). This account is a legacy of the time before we became affiliated with SPI; Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider. SPI Earmark for 0 A.D. As of 2015-10-31, the 0 A.D. earmark is USD 34,410.05. Web hosting costs about USD 85-90 per month, or about USD 1,000 a year, and are paid directly from these funds. Some of these funds (approximately USD 5,200) will soon go towards reimbursing Erik Johansson (feneur) who has bought the perks we promised our donors. Edit (2016-01-08): The perks ended up costing USD 5,611.10. We know donors have been waiting for their perks for a long time. We sincerely apologize for the long delay in perk fulfillment. Other Accounts In our "legacy" US bank account, we have USD 332.82. On Flattr, we have EUR 619.75 available, which are approximately USD 662.27. Total In total, we have approximately 35,405.14 USD in all three accounts. Concluding Remarks The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”), Adarash ("MishFTW") and Aviv (“Jeru”). We welcome your comments and suggestions.

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.

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.

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/

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!

In the interest of transparency, the Wildfire Games team would like to report on the finances of the project as of 2014-04-21. 0 A.D. has funds in three places: (1) Funds earmarked for the project and held in trust by US-based non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (hereafter “SPI”); (2) A private account in the US, under the name of former project leader, Jason Bishop (Wijitmaker). This account is a legacy of the time before we became affiliated with SPI; (3) Flattr, a Sweden-based microdonation provider. SPI Earmark for 0 A.D. As of 2014-04-21, the 0 A.D. earmark is USD 34,272.78. We had intended to start using these funds to pay a programmer to develop 0 A.D., but unfortunately, he has parted ways with Wildfire Games several months ago, and we wish him all the best. We are now planning to use the funds to pay other programmers, who may already be contributing to the project voluntarily, to work more intensively on core features and on improving the game’s performance, so that the game won’t lag so much. Part of these funds are planned to go towards buying the perks we promised our donors. We will be distributing surveys to our donors shortly to make sure which perks they want. Then we will budget accordingly. We know donors have been waiting for their perks for a long time. We sincerely apologize for the long delay in perk fulfillment. Other Accounts & Total In our “legacy” US bank account, we have USD 383.54. On Flattr, we have EUR 430.82 available, which are approximately USD 595.13. In total, we have USD 35,251.45 in all three accounts. Concluding Remarks A monthly report of funds held by SPI in trust for 0 A.D. is also available on the SPI website under “approved minutes of past meetings“. Currently, the latest report available on the SPI website is from November 30, 2013. We have obtained updated data from SPI through personal correspondence with its treasurer, Michael Schultheiss. The 0 A.D. project finances are managed by the Treasury Committee: Erik (“feneur”), Adarash (“MishFTW”) and Aviv (“Jeru”). We welcome your comments on this thread and elsewhere on the forums.

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.

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.

0 A.D. Weekly Report #7 (Week 38+39) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Weekly (?) Report It has been almost a month since last report, due to the feature and commit freeze leading to the release of Alpha 11. Progress (read: commits) is again speeding up, so the weekly report is back! Screenshot of the Week Enrique brought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon back to life. Judge for yourself! Art & Programming Enrique has been putting the final touches on the Persian wonder. He also committed some new buildings for the Hellenic factions (a library for the Macedonians and the syssition for the Spartans). Now he is working on Mauryan building modules. Pureon has been working on new icons and a new, yet unrevealed building for the Britons. He is also brushing up on his jQuery skills to build an interactive faction map. Last but not least he committed some new GUI tile backgrounds. Myconid has been helping Enrique with shaders for the water & waterfalls for the Persian wonder. In addition he kept working on the Post-processing Manager, which will allow us to customize the graphical effects. Spahbod recently added new options to the match setup screen. Now you can set a population cap and choose the amount of resources that you start with. Stwf kept working on improving the sound manager, including a new threaded sound manager and proper distance roll off. Mythos_Ruler has done some work on the Persians. Historic_bruno implemented vision/range? and health/max? tech modification. This will support additional technologies. He also applied some patches like Fcollada build fix by pcpa, a GNU/kFreeBSD build fix by vincent and a 'force attack' hotkey to destroy enemy farms f.e., by quonter. Quantumstated fixed some formatting in Attack.js, and added a fix to avoid a technology from being queued multiple times. Sound Omri Lahav is looking for French horn players and people who are fluent in ancient languages. Did we mention he recently decided to compose a couple of unique tracks for every faction ingame? Check back next week for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #6 (Week 35) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Feature Spotlight! This week's report will be a bit different from the others as we are in 'feature freeze'. We are trying to make alpha XI as stable as possible, so instead of adding new, untested features we are focusing on fixing bugs. If you want to read about these fixes though, check out the log of latest code revisions. After whining for a whole week, I finally persuaded Myconid to reveal some of the things he has been working on lately. Adding AO (ambient occlusion), normal mapping, parallax mapping, 'swaying trees' and smooth Line of Sight was clearly only the beginning. Currently he is also implementing Bloom, HDR and Distance fog. His pièce de résistance will be the Post-processing Manager, which will apply effects to the entire rendered image instead of individual models (which he has been doing so far). Myconid was so generous to send me two screenshots showing some of his latest work. Can you spot the effects and enhancements? The winner gets a free copy of the game! Check back next Monday for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #3 (week 32) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Team news! Last Saturday 6 team members (Enrique, Pureon, Feneur, fcxSanya, bstempi and Mythos_Ruler) participated in a staff multiplayer match. There is no better way to balance the game and to settle small disputes! In the near future we'll start with matches between departments, if the fear for the art department team can be overcome. Art & Programming Deiz kept the pace high this week. The icons of technologies being researched are now displayed in the upper right corner of the screen (check out the screenshot below) and player names are now displayed in the summary screen. Add to this at least 10 bug fixes and improvements... Enrique has finished the Hellenic dock and a scaffold object, which will probably be used as construction scaffolding (WIP). Now he is giving the Hellenic theatron a new lick-a-paint. Fexor has been working on improving the wall system. Gen.Kenobi committed a whole batch of new rocks. Myconid's graphical improvements are in an advanced state, and are being tested thoroughly. Thanks also to community members like zoot, who provide detailed feedback on myconid's work. A new graphical feature that we haven't mentioned yet are windy trees. We will post an image/video of that soon! Mythos_Ruler has been updating some maps and doing some balance work. Pureon has been working on the technology tree and its icons. Unique technologies will be added later, many generic (common for most factions) technologies are already ingame. He has also been working on banners and other artwork for the new website, which is coming along nicely. Spahbod implemented some basic cheats this week. He is also working on colour selection in the game setup screen. stwf has been working on the new Sound Manager. Historic_bruno, wraitii and dvangennip have been testing the latest version extensively, as it is very high on our priority list (and on your wishlist, if you are using a Mac OS!). Wraitii has also been working on merging his AI bot Marilyn with Qbot, the bot developed by quantumstate. This new bot, Qbot Experimental (Qbot XP) will provide more of a challenge. In addition he changed the minimap to display shallow water. Check back next monday for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #5 (Week 34) Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read. If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and Graphics Programmers along with Animators and 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community! Feature Spotlight Community member Zoot posted this GIF showing Shield_Bearer's mapping effects on the Iberian buildings. People who are affected by Epileptic seizures should refrain from watching this as it contains fast moving images (probably we are exaggerating, but we care about you!). Art & Programming & Sound It's official: feature freeze is in effect! No big changes are allowed, only small tweaks to templates, art, or small code changes. During this phase the hunt for bugs is on! When they are squashed, we enter the commit freeze phase. The code remains untouched, so we can create installers for the various operating systems (Windows, OS X and Linux). To quote Borat Sagdiyev, I'm so excite! We are very excited as well about stwf's new sound manager, which will bring sound to Mac users! This week stwf and historic_bruno committed the sound manager to the main data branch (using svn), and fixed some related bugs. Pureon has been working on a new building for the Brythonic Celts: the crannog! This fortress is unique, as it is built on a small artificial island. And while it doesn't create units, it allows a major garrison to fire arrows at enemies! This week, Enrique committed the updated theatron and gymnasion for the Athenians. Currently he is diversifying the Hellenic civ centre (as both Athenians, Spartans and Macedonions will use this) and creating new models (syssition, farmstead and library). Myconid's mapping enhancements (normal, parallax) have been added last week. This week he has mostly been fixing bugs. Amish - who isn't Amish because he clearly uses a computer - has updated the Carthaginians buildings with Ambient Occlusion. Deiz committed a fix from yacka that prevents domestic animals to be manually deleted/killed, worked a bit more on the walls and fixed some other things. Mythos_Ruler added normal maps and specular lighting for the Persian city tile terrain, and updated some tooltips. Quantumstate added support for putting technologies in folders and added camera movement speed modifier keys. Gen.Kenobi kept working on his rocks, adding very high quality parallax effects. Wraitii kept working on his new bot, Qbot XP. After some optimizations the RAM usage should be lower as well. Zaggy1024 updated the Roman normal maps and added normal mapping to the Broch (Brythonic fortress). Check back next Monday for more development news!