Search the Community

0 A.D. Development Report: May - August 2019 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present its latest 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, feel free to visit our forums and join our active community, or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Programmers, Animators and Artists. *names written in bold black are Wildfire Games staff and names written in bold grey are community members Programming wraitii has rewritten UnitMotion for better code and easier extensibility, with the goal in sight of introducing optimisations. He's optimised the Hierarchical Pathfinder, and is working on pathfinder threading. he has also worked on two patches, allowing triggers to give units modifiers, and making attack effects easily moddable so that, for example, a unit can both capture and damage in the same attack. Stan` Created a first version of the polycount guidelines and updated the art design document. He also added a glow material that also supports normal maps (basic_glow_norm). Stan` worked on many other fixes and improvements, such adding more animations to the atlas drop down list. vladislavbelov continues to work on the renderer among other things, improving the water's GLSL shader by increasing the reflection and refraction realism. He also added a tool to Atlas, which allows choosing water height by simply clicking on a part of the terrain with the desired height. Itms worked on our Continuous Integration system, and improved the developing environment for the programmers behind the scenes. He made the move from VS2013 to VS2015 as the default compiler on Windows, with help from Angen. He also upgraded SpiderMonkey to version 45. s0600204 increased the usage of pkg-config instead of hard-coding or library-specific programs, and added support for special characters (UTF8) in map names and descriptions. elexis rewrote source/gui/ to have a cleaner code structure and use C++11 features (most code still came from 2004), fixed a number of compiler warnings and some memory leaks. JoshuaJB fixed some memory leaks introduced by the implementation of STUN + XMPP ICE. historic_bruno has been working on MacOS build fixes. trompetin17 fixed an issue with atlasUI and added a "new" checkbox to the map settings tab. Imarok, FeXoR and bb_ have also been working on various smaller code fixes, improvements and reviews. Mate-86 has worked on a feature allowing entities to be affected by Status Effects, such as flaming projectiles igniting the target or poisoned arrows poisoning the target, which will cause the target to continue suffering damage for a while. Freagarach has replaced the gender-tag with phenotype, adding the ability to choose a random phenotype for a given template, allowing for different looks for the same template, as well as having male and female units from the same template with their correct respective voices. Freagarach, with assistance from wraitii, has also wrapped damage types in a Damage element in XML templates to make them generic. This places the damage types in a "Damage" container, just like the "Resources" are. Part of the effort towards having secondary attacks and a more easily moddable game. Angen made the AI aware of the existence of the new ranges and updated precompiled headers to improve build times. Krinkle fixed ESLint semicolon-related warnings and has been updating various wiki-pages on trac. minohaka helped testing and discovering regressions. Art Alexandermb‘s new fauna models and textures were committed by Stan`, including Marwari, Lusitano and Celtic horse breeds, new cattle textures, sanga variants, a new Maurya trader chariot with new animations and he animated the new Kushite hero chariot by Sundiata. He sorted his many new Celtic shields according to their specific civ, diffenrentiating the Gauls and Britons with the help of Genava55. Another big update were the many improvements to a variety of other shields, including the Greek aspis with new higher quality models and textures. And then there was the big Hellenic helmets update: Thracian, Phrygian, Boeotian, Chalcidean, Attic, Bryastovets, Corinthian and the Pilos helmet, with many variations. New meshes and textures for greaves were also committed. Many other smaller fixes and improvements were made, further enhancing the quality of his already Herculean art contributions, as wel as working on “the great animations re-export” together with Stan` (cleaning and committing) and assisted by fatherbushido and Enrique, in order to solve a flaw in many older meshes, while also taking the opportunity to improve on some of those animations and adding some new ones. Alexandermb has also been working on a number of formations like the testudo, phalanx and syntagma. wackyserious created many new Macedonian, Persian and Roman unit textures, a new Ptolemy IV hero texture and updated the Thracian Peltast, Naked Fanatic, Scythian Archer, Judean Slinger and Seleucid Pikeman and Cataphract. Stan` Made a new blacksmith for the Britons, improved the walls for the Gauls and added some detailing to their barracks. He unified foundation sizes and construction dust, added new scaffolds and updated structure templates accordingly. LordGood is continuing his prolific work in the flora department. Teak, dragon bamboo, strangler figs, bananas, areca palm, doum palm, Atlas cedar, holly oak, juniper tree and some new grasses are his latest additions. He has also been working on the Hellenization of the Ptolemies with a new tower and temple. Bigtiger has worked on some beautiful new flora as well, adding holm oaks, Euro birch, fir tree and a new fern to the collection. He also made new cliffs, new particle actors for snow and clouds and new temperate terrain textures. These new assets can be admired in three new excellent looking maps by Bigtiger himself: Farmland, Oceanside and Roadway. wowgetoffyourcellphone made new icons for the deer, boar, camel, horse, walrus and wildebeest. The Uffington White Horse he made back in 2016 will replace Stonehenge as the new wonder for the Britons. Other Gallaecio has been improving and correcting the English descriptions in-game. Stan` gave a presentation on 0 A.D. and it’s develoment process in Rennes for GrafikLabor 2019. user1 continues his work moderating smurf accounts in the multiplayer lobby. After discussions on the transliteration of Ancient Greek into English, the decission has been made to use the standards of the American Library Association and Library of Congress proposed by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates, who is, in discussion with Nescio, working to update all the Greek specific names, making them more accurate and consitent. Nescio has also been updating the English style guide, cleaned up the technology data files and applied some corrections to the new horse and cattle fauna templates (among others), added skirmishing templates to some structures and cleaned some obstruction and footprint sizes for others, improved a number of tool tips and improved and corrected some of the Roman and Persian specific names. Tom 0ad Has created five new informative videos, including “0AD Faction Overview 04 – Persians”, “0AD Faction Overview 05 – Kushites”, “The Ultimate Guide to Siege Weaopons”, “Top Three Tips to Improve. FAST” and “Essential Team Game Guide”. Likewise, ValihrAnt has made a number of enlightening videos, including “Unit Ranks & Promotions Explained”, “Top 5 Most Underrated Techs” and “Strategy Guide, Cavalry Rush Build Order”. HMS-Surprise, Unknown_Player, Feldfeld and psypherium organized the commentated Sunday Pro Games between April and June. This was a competetive community event, with Boudica ranking number 1! elexis, Stan` and wraitii have been updating an extensive list presenting all noticable changes to the end user in Alpha 24, since development started on December 26th, 2018. Changes include new 3D and 2D art, sound, maps, gameplay, user interface, renderer, pathfinder and more. Check it out at: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha24 Art Features A small selection of Alexandermb's new helmets with many variants: One of many new sets of shields. The Greek aspis for the Athenian faction. From top to bottom: basic, advanced, elite and champion. By Alexandermb: Macedonian, Carthaginian and Spartan units showing off their new equipment, by Alexandermb: New Macedonian unit textures by wackyserious: New unit textures for the Romans, Judean Slingers and Seleucid Cataphracts, by wackyserious: Some of the new temperate flora assets by Bigtiger: A lush display of some of LordGood's new tropical flora assets and cliffs: The new Oceanside map by Bigtiger. It's by the ocean... Mediterranean Islets, by LordGood: Hellenized Ptolemaic walls and temples on the banks of the Nile. Take note of the new palms and baobab trees. By LordGood:

0 A.D. Development Report: September 2019 – May 2020 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present its latest 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, feel free to visit our forums and join our active community, or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Programmers, Translators, Historians, MapMakers, Animators and Artistsa. *names written in bold black are Wildfire Games staff and names written in bold grey are community members Summary Programming We have been working on improvements on performance, both graphical and non-graphical, to make the next Alpha run more smoothly. The map editor will no longer be laggy (creation should not be hindered!) when changing the height. You can also now search the entities in a non-strict manner, e.g. “units ptol hlr” would show “units/ptol_support_healer_a” in the list. Art Greeks, Iberians, Celts, Romans, and Carthaginians have received visual updates, with better helmets, shields, and props. Flora has also been improved with better trees, and more variety in plants and props that can be placed over the maps in the scenario editor. The bear and the baby elephants now have animations, and hippopotamuses can now be placed using the scenario editor. Special artillery towers have been added to the game, as well as a new Gaul wonder and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. New sounds for weapons and for some animals have been committed. Balancing Work has been done towards improving gameplay to fix the current balancing issues with the help of some of the best ranked lobby players and some modders. Internationalization 17 languages have reached more than 90% of translation. Programming The whole team would like to welcome Angen as a new member. Angen has been an external contributor since the beginning of 2018 and has done a lot of work towards unit behaviour improvements. He is currently working on improvements on the formation system along with general unit behavior improvements. Angen added the ability to allow cancelling trade routes. He committed some fixes for formations. He implemented the ability to display tools instead of weapons when units are approaching resources. He made the trade gain by garrisoned entities configurable which will allow for a finer balancing a75397425a3774fd.mp4 bb has also been working on various smaller code fixes with the goal to improve consistency and to make unit templates cleaner and he fixed the lag that appears on windows when shift is pressed. elexis committed a patch allowing for map specific placement in the GUI game setup page, continued working on the GUI rewrite and fixed some bugs. He implemented game-setup options for landscape and daytime and added morepreviously uncredited people to the credits. FeXoR and nani have been working on the procedural generation of maps, to allow for more realistic maps. Freagarach made it possible for the same entity in multiple control groups (ctrl + number hotkeys). He allowed for status effects to affect unit speed (e.g. slowing down a unit when hit) this will be particularly useful for mods with magic. He also added a progress bar to show the upgrade status. Mods can now make projectiles deal friendly fire. This is currently unused in the game. He also allowed for some resources to not be barterable in the market, this will also be used in mods such as 0abc (link) and Delenda Est (link) upgrade-animations-and-progress-bar.mp4 Imarok fixed an error warning with AMD CPUs, fixed the display of actions cursors over the minimap and the usage of the patrol action, and did some cleanup in the minimap code. Itms worked on some improvements to the continuous integration system. He also did some library updates for NVTT (NVIDIA Texture Tools), the library we use for our textures, with the help of adrian and s0600204 on a library called FMT (This library is used to print warnings and errors). He also worked on build fixes for Mac OS. Krinkle worked on fixing JavaScript warnings, and submitted a few fixes for MacOS support, as well as some to improve the game’s CI. linkmauve did some cleanup of the rendering engine, by removing old platform specific code which was either deprecated or superseded by SDL2, and worked towards improving multithreaded debugging. Nescio has done a lot toward improving consistency in our files, renaming them to match the same conventions, and making them easier to deal with by simplifying some of them. For example all our map files had inconsistent naming conventions, and the presence of whitespaces in their name caused issues. Stan has created a feature for mods to allow buildings to construct themselves without the need of units. He made some optimizations to the engine, and did some cleaning up of the code. He also improved the scripts that help artists check for mistakes, and made a Blender importer for game objects, reducing the amount of work it requires. He also added the ability to play visual animations when a building is upgrading, and when a tech is being researched. He is currently working with the help of OptimusShepard to fix an issue with recent AMD CPUs. If you have Zen 2 CPU and want to help please head to this forum thread and tell us. Autobuildable video (3D Printing house) Researching animations user1 and Dunedan are working on upgrading the lobby backend to be able to provide new features for the next Alphas. vladislavbelov continued working on the rendering engine to bring improved performance and visuals. The next alpha will feature a FXAA filter, allowing models to look less jagged. He also worked on better tools to debug the renderer and easier access to those through the game. He added an option to use low quality shadows on more modest machines. He also worked on the map editor, allowing it to save the panel size between each session so one does not have to resize them every time, and a non-strict search to the Atlas entity list. He is currently working with Stan to add an option to resize the map with a specific offset. Snapping (1).mp4 Snapping to buildings (video) Screenshots with/without FXAA wraitii has worked on improving the engine, cleaning the code to make it easier to extend and to optimize. He has also been reviewing patches from Freagarach with aim to add gameplay features, such as status effects. Status effects will allow units to deal more realistic damage to others. For instance, it will allow flaming arrows to keep dealing burning damage after a unit has been hit. status-effect-test2.mp4 Art Alexandermb added a Transversal Crested gallic centurion helmet, sheaths, new idle relax animations for the hoplite, and scutum shields. He also made some citizen animations for the slave and siege engine operators. Likewise, there are some new Gaul idles for swordsman and new pikeman attacking animations, new Roman republican and imperial shields, gladiator helmets, Celtic Carnyx, while he finished the bear animations, hippopotamus animations, worked on improving camel animations and gave more options to modders, new animations for siege engines and improved existing ones. He worked on improving the shield textures, allowed elephant turrets to attack by giving them an attack animation, and animated the baby elephant. 5253d395bfdc8c4e.mp4 Bigtiger has worked on some gorgeous new elm trees, new poplar trees and improved the flora LordGood added new Ptolemaic houses, committed Enrique's pines, artillery towers, new unit sounds, Hungarian oaks, bolt tower and amphitheater, updated Ptolemaic sentry tower and added a new obelisk. He has worked on a few beautiful maps and provided screenshots for advertising on social media. Artillery Towers Hungarian oaks Pompeii amphitheatre for Romans in scenario editor New Ptolemaic houses Sahyadri Buttes, a new 5 player Skirmish map Atlas Valleys is a large 8 player skirmish map Samulis created new cattle sounds. Stan added an orange firefly particle and committed new improved berry bushes by BigTiger. He updated outdated icons and cavalry icons to use the new horse assets. There are now new lavender, new bluefin tuna textures and animations. Lately he has developed new icons for the unit actions and for status effects. He created three textures and icons for bears (polar, black, brown), made two hippopotamuses textures and created a model for the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. He also replaced the current Gaul wonder by a more historically accurate one: the sanctuary of Corent. Sanctuary of Corent Fireflies raw2.mp4 bear Mausoleum at Halicarnassus Hippopotamus wackyserious improved textures for Greeks, Iberians, Romans, and Carthaginians. Judean slinger Iberian Spearmen Roman Advanced Cavalry Cretan Archer Iphicrates Roman TRIARII wowgetoffyourcellphone made some Corinthian helmet portraits, worked on some animals portraits and has given feedback on gameplay and icons and has made some of the screenshots in this development report. Miscellaneous Balancing Nescio worked with Stockfish, Badosu, ValirAnt, FeldFeld, and borg- to get some gameplay balancing patches, which were committed by other members. Documentation Beau fixed some mistakes in the documentation.² Beise is currently translating the wiki from English to German. Nescio has also been updating the English style guide, corrected many templates for consistency, and standardized hero aura descriptions and generalised tooltips. Finances Jeru made a new financial report and submitted a development report to SPI our financial sponsor. Thank everyone for all the donations. You can see more information about supporting us financially here: https://play0ad.com/community/donate/. Lobby user1 and elexis continue their work moderating in the multiplayer lobby. user1 created a a special thread on the forums to report all issues regarding the lobby. Interviews Freagarach gave a presentation at Sogyo Stan gave an interview for the Waffling Taylors podcast (https://wafflingtaylors.rocks/). The podcast should be available in June. He gave an interview with Picasoft (in French - you can find an English transcript here). Picasoft is an association at the UTC (a French school) you can read more about it here. He also gave a presentation at Avanade He also held a stand at the Capitole Du Libre in November 2019. You can find a summary here vladislavbelov did a presentation in FOSDEM 2020 about graphics pipelines in 0AD. See this thread for more information. Translations 16 languages have reached more than 90% of translation. If you want to help with your native language head over to Transifex. Gallaecio has been improving and correcting the English descriptions in-game with the help of Nescio Tournaments There has been quite a lot of activity on the competitive side! Most of the replays are available on the forums, so you can see some of the best players in action. derekO organized “double elimination” a tournament fpre organized a “survival” tournament HMS-Surprise organized the Sunday pro games tournament 1v1 commentated between 17/01/2019 and 24/11/2019. This was a competitive community event with very nice graphic designs! marcusAureliu#s organized a tournament rain_ironwolf organized a Hyrule Conquest tournament Stockfish also organized a multiplayer 0 A.D. tournament called the Primus Pilus tournament from 30/03/2020 to 29/04/2020. HMS-Surprise eventually took over to finish it. This report was written by asterix with the help of Thorfinn the Shallow Minded, Stan and Sundiata. For more details, please check wiki:Alpha24 and the roadmap. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present this monthly 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 or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. 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? Head to our forums and join our active community! FOSDEM @ Brussels 3-4 February Those who'd like to meet members of the development team and are available this weekend, can join us on FOSDEM: "a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels". We'd love to see you there, and maybe grab a beer afterwards! The Team expands! We are proud to accept temple into the 0 A.D. programming team! May his commits be many and his whitespaces few (C++ joke)! Programming Itms, our project lead, has been working on a breakage in Jenkins, a tool that helps us ensure code quality by running tests in order to check the code for warnings, and has looked into goodies for FOSDEM (spoiler). mimo updated the AI to support the new combined victory conditions, among his ongoing improvements to the AI. He has improved the performance of GetEntityState by merging it with GetExtendedEntityState (performance improvement when selecting many units), reported some map errors and reviewed temple's formation patches. elexis "I like Vectors" has rewritten a lot of old random map generation code that will allow the player to select the biome on random maps. Other features: River maps are rotated arbitrarily, so that players get a truly unique map generation each time. The game now supports uncapturable Gaia fortifications. bb has committed the new game setup User Interface, providing sufficient space to add more game settings for the foreseeable future, and the combined victory patch. Vladislav reviewed a few patches and returned to working on post-game charts. Imarok committed a couple of minor GUI fixes. More importantly: he also worked on secure lobby authentication and a mod version test in the lobby (multiplayer). gallaecio has improved a couple of English strings. s0600204 worked on the template viewer patch. It is a new dialog that can be opened from the selection panel and structure tree and displays statistics and descriptions about the selected unit or building. temple worked on unit AI with dropsite distances (e.g. mill, storehouse) and visibility checks, fixed blinking territory and a couple of things with formations. He also fixed dock placement and updated some patches, which are waiting for a review by other programmers. Now he is turning his attention to the diplomacy color patch, together with Elexis, and balance changes for the next alpha release. Art & Sound LordGood has been working on the building sets. He committed a Ptolemies stable, archery range, workshop & elephant stable and a Roman stable & workshop. Stan has done some crash reporting and tried to reproduce call stacks, has worked on fixing the soundmanager bug that has been here since r9055 and has commmitted templates for new heroes. On the art side: he created many new helmets and caps. Alexandermb, a skillful new artist, has been very active. He has had his new models for horses and spears committed, aside other art improvements like giving siege weapons engineers. Omri Lahav, our composer, has not been idle in January. So much so that we'll dedicate a separate development blog to his work of late! Stay tuned! Community Contributions Dunedan and fpre's efforts to help with alpha 23 GUI and lobby patches, both coding and reviewing are greatly appreciated by the team! Lion.Kanzen recorded new sounds for the archery range. Hannibal_Barca has uploaded a beautiful winter river map. wowgetoffyourcellphone contributed new icons for dogs and for cavalry. Bigtiger created a beautiful skirmish map: Via Augusta. Leyto created a Muskox texture, that was committed to the game. Image: LordGood's Roman Workshop, front-side and back-side (centre). - by @plumo

0 A.D. Development Report - Autumn 2017 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present this monthly 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 or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. 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? Head to our forums and join our active community! 2017 Indie of the Year Awards We made it to the final 100! Now we need your vote once more! Support the team and community by voting your-favourite-historical-real-time-strategy-game in-the-making to the top! The list of planned features is dwindling, and with the extra attention a prize brings, new contributors flock to our forums. Programming Itms, our project lead, worked on the build system with the update to premake5 and added VS 2015 support. Now he is showing SpiderMonkey some love... All on top of managing and directing the efforts of the team! mimo , our AI programmer, cleaned a lot of legacy code, as the first AI prototype was added many many alpha versions ago. He also removed the old tutorial AI and improved mod support. elexis has refactored the majority of the random map generator code, making it easier than ever before to create of new random map script, implemented tab controls for the options page and reviewed many patches by external contributors. The engine code become more fail-safe (by marking simulation states as read-only), simple (only one way to access JSON data globally) and versatile (implementing it in JavaScript instead of C++). bb has been busy coding the prerequisites for secondary attacks. Imagine your legionarii throwing their pila before drawing their gladii (just dropping some Latin like it's hot). He also worked on combining victory conditions (so one can play regicide + wonder victory for instance) and has been cleaning up templates for readability (among his work on the template viewer). He is also working on an updated user interface for the game setup, with more space for the options, so more can be added in the future. Vladislav has written some validation scripts and has had some experiments with Atlas and cinematics. fatherbushido has mostly worked on the attack component, both his own code and reviews of features like the destruction damage ( for instance fire ships exploding upon destruction) by others. wraitii has finished some of the pre-requirements of the unit motion rewrite (more fluid movements of units) and rebased the single player campaign patch, laying the groundwork for campaigns to be added in the future. Imarok has worked on the mouse wheel batch size (a feature that allows the player to specify the number of units to train by scrolling the mousewheel) and an anti-impersonation lobby patch, which further secures multiplayer lobby authentication. s0600204 and FeXoR have finished the patch that would make the random map generator wall-placer civ-agnostic. leper has been auditing patches by other programmers, which is a crucial yet tedious task. As usual, community members played a key role in our open source development process! Sandarac has implemented an attack range visualization that lets you preview the attack capabilities before placing the buildings. fpre contributed a number of enrichments to the multiplayer user interface. Last but not least, temple has helped tremendously with a lot of patches and reviews! His contributions on an issue with the pathfinder, which was the cause of additional lag, were crucial! Art & Sound LordGood and Stan have been working on new graphics for stables, workshops and archery ranges. Stan also committed a patch by Alexandermb which added animations for siege engines. Ever wondered how a zebu would fall lifeless to the ground? Programmers call this ZEBU DEATH ANIM, tells you something about them, right? Well, Stan has been struggling with his animation for quite some time. He has asked for a Field Study trip to South East Asia but our budget only stretches so far... after all: we're free-to-play. Stan also worked on the visual move order indicator. Omri Lahav, our ever talented composer-arranger-musician, has been working on another music track, and has acquired vocal recordings to enhance a current track! Head over to the 0 A.D. Bandcamp page and check out the 33 (so far!) original recordings for this project. Judge the zebu death animation for yourself!

0 A.D. Development Report #16 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., is happy to present this 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 or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. 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 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 programmers and animators! If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Clockwise: New unit meshes, Mastiff, shark and fox Programming & Art Enrique, our talented lead artist, has been busy last month. He decided it was time to rework 0 A.D. meshes and armature. The results are bringing them up to par with modern RTS games. Now the help of animators is required (if you are an animator, please post an application) to make use of the new possibilities. He also updated the complete Persian building set with better textures and ambient occlusion. If that was not enough, he also reworked the cypress trees and many other plants. Mimo has been hard at work improving his AI bot: Petra, which is the toughest AI opponent to date. Among cleaning up code and bug fixes, he also added AI support for saved games! A feature that has been high on the community's wishlist. On top of that the AI is now able to send tribute to its allies! Yves, has set the goal of upgrading our SpiderMonkey to ESR31 for next alpha release. Performance will increase with this upgrade and memory usage will be reduced a bit. Check out the following links for more information about performance measurements and detailed effects of gcPreserveCode setting. Itms fixed bugs related to the new Fog of War and bug fixes submitted by community members. He also accepted the task of improving the pathfinder, based on Philip's and Wraitii's work. We think we speak for all of you when we wish him good luck! historic_bruno updated Windows version strings for 8.1 and 10 (technical preview), fixed a couple of OS X bugs and many bug fixes submitted by community members. Leper updated 0 A.D. with the latest translation work of our community and fixed a good amount of bugs, many submitted by members of our community. He also replaced CParser, which is slow, with FSM to parse our config files. Micket modeled a shark, a wolfhound, a mastiff and tuna fish. Some of his models have been textured as well (as you can see in the screenshot above). Stanislas69 has also been modeling a lot of different objects, among his first steps in animating. Scythetwirler fixed a bug in the rating system of the lobby bot.

0 A.D. Development Report #15 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., is 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 or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. 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 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. If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! Team News Our 'family' keeps expanding! A warm welcome to Scythetwirler, who has been working on our multiplayer lobby among other things. Translations Work has begun on translating 0 A.D. into many, many languages. Using the Transifex translating system, everyone can help! Check out this link. Screenshot of the Month Enrique's new horses (WIP). Animated transparent manes and moving armor are also in the pipeline (thanks to Wraitii). Programming & Art Mythos_Ruler added a new map (Savanna River), rebalanced many units/technologies/... and laid the groundwork for our next civilization: the Seleucid Empire. Yves has been hard at work upgrading Spidermonkey from 1.8.5 (which is old and unsupported) to a more recent version (v24 or later). He committed one patch that solves the massive performance problems we got with the new SpiderMonkey versions in lategame by changing the way different AI players are separated from each other. The second big patch adapted our code with the old SpiderMonkey version to match the most important constraints required by newer versions without updating yet. The third patch removed the JS Debugger temporarily because it will require a partial rewrite but doesn't have priority for the update. After these changes the WIP patch for the new SpiderMonkey is now much smaller and easier to handle (test, update and review). Wraitii added a fishing boat for our latest civilization: the Ptolomaic Egyptians. He also implemented some new animals done by Micket: crocodiles, sharks and hawks. He optimized the water code making it faster (speed-up of foam generation code, ...) and more modern. Last but not least, he is overhauling the Aegis bot (AI), squashing AI bugs and improving their capabilities. Sanderd17 implemented countless functionality fixes; his energy/time went primarily to reworking formations and chasing (i.e. attacking fleeing units, animals). Enrique has been reworking our horses, as they were getting a bit outdated. Your cavalry charges will be even more heroic! Leper & Historic_Bruno fixed a number of crashes and other bugs. A full list of changes is available in the SVN log (any similarity with 99,9 % of all Google Chrome change logs is pure coincidence...) Bajter and Kabzerek are working on the summary screen. Their changes should provide more information to the player (after-battle statistics...). AnnieQ has been working on new unit cards for the Celtic factions. BoeseRaupe has been working on the hero icon and a way to delete a units group with a right mouse click. Lordgood: Artiste extraordinaire and My Little Pony-afficionado, has created a new Roman tower and a new wonder & homestead for the Carthaginians. Our "Brony" (Brother + Pony) also started working on the building set for the Seleucids. Dumbo has been working on improving unit behavior when choosing opponents. Itms added a town bell function. Enemy raid incoming? With one mouse-click your female citizens rush to the nearest building to find shelter. Scythetwirler & Josh have implemented various multiplayer lobby fixes to the alpha 15/16 server and alpha 16 client. They are hard at work fixing the post-game lobby disconnects and the problems with hosting to improve your multiplayer experience in alpha 16. Apart from the lobby, Josh has also been working towards a more intuitive lobby login UI in the new "modern" style (WIP by Pureon), has done various UI engine cleanup, and re-worked the selection back-end to yield ~2% overall performance increase. Mimo improved the way trade works. Now the trade management is centralised so there's no need to click every trader. Stanislas69 has been reworking the Iberian barracks and corral, and the Gallic mill and farmstead. Music & Sound Omri_Lahav has been working on new peace tracks for the different civilizations and freshening up the score. A professional tin whistle player will redo the Celts / Gauls, a trombone player will record the low brassy parts on Honor Bound / Elysian Fields, and the Qanun player will be brought in to add another unique color to the Ptolemaic Egyptians. I think it is fair to say Omri is setting new standards for music in freeware software. LAVS has been working on battle sounds that will make every melee more compelling.

0 A.D. Development Report #9 (21/10/2012 - 21/11/2012) 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! Screenshot of the Month! This strategic land bridge was named after the nearby Greek city. Need I say more? Click the image to see a larger version. Art & Programming & Sound Wraitii added enhanced water rendering, shore foam and waves for your viewing pleasure! He has also updated the water settings for most scenarios. leper added diplomacy to the game! Is your ally eating up your CPU's power? Declare war! He also added resource icons in the in-game tooltips (patch by regular contributor zoot). quantumstate added unit training hotkeys (patch from mammadori), some more mediterranean textures and a tutorial scenario: 'intruductory tutorial'. stwf kept working on the Sound Manager. Hurricane Sandy cut off his electricity for more than a week but now he's back in business. Shield_Bearer added the Roman bireme (= an ancient oared warship). He is also working on new human models together with Kopesh and Enrique! Omri_Lahav added yet another new track to our ever-expanding soundtrack: Calm Before the Storm. Enrique kept working on the Mauryan Indians, a new civilization which will be fully playable in two alpha releases' time. Lately he committed the Mauryan fortress among with some more textures. He has also added rubble (when you destroy a building) for most buildings! fcxSanya reimplented training limits for heroes! Only one hero per player so choose wisely! Spahbod added a new map: 'Corinthian Isthmus'. Zaggy1024 animated yet another animal! Please welcome in all its glory: the peacock! historic_bruno updated some lists with contributors, and fixed Atlas and Collada dylib loading on OS X, for non-bundled binaries and a build error on MSVC (for most people this reads as: two bugs were fixed). Mythos_Ruler added normal/parallax mapping for Iberian & Roman gates, an attack animation for females and some weapons and shields for the Mauryan Indians. Last but not least: Myconid. Last week we decided to drop the fixed function renderer (which is barely used nowadays and was holding our graphics back). A road map was published internally with a list of planned graphical improvements. If Myconid can implement all of these (which he is capable of), then 0 A.D. will set the new graphical standard for open-source games. One of our newest asquisitions, Ludo38, has been making box art and wallpapers. Strictly speaking not part of the team (yet!) is Lordgood who has modeled and textured a few buildings for the Mauryan Indians. See you in a couple of weeks with the latest development news!

Wildfire Games, the international group developing 0 A.D. - Empires Ascendant, is happy to present the 13th 0 A.D. development report covering everything (or nearly everything) that happened since the 12th report in June. Most of the items covered in the current report went into Alpha 14 Naukratis, so you should be able to see them in action right now! First and foremost, Wildfire Games has launched a crowdfunding campaign via IndieGoGo, with the aim of raising $160,000 in 45 days. If successful, the funds from this campaign will go toward paying 2 team members to work on the game full-time (40+ hours per week) for up to 2 years! For our fans, that means more features faster and better performance quicker. Our stretch goals include another year of paid development so we can create an exciting single player campaign for the game! Click the logo below to check out our campaign! Screenshots for this Report (New Features) Multiplayer Lobby (Work in Progress) Want a human sparring partner? The new multiplayer lobby will greatly facilitate the organization of multiplayer games. Badmadblacksad wrote the framework for the lobby based on XMPP and gloox while Josh, alpha123 and leper added a wide range of features including IRC commands, nick highlighting, anti-spam filtering, moderator support, timestamps, and much more. Currently, Josh and alpha123 are implementing a game monitoring and reporting system in conjunction with a leaderboard based on an implementation of an ELO rating system by scythetwirler. Players will have the option to play rated and unrated games as well as team games. Viewing other online game-seeking players will be located in a simple, intuitive part of the main program. Art and Random Maps Pureon fixed projectile errors on the Mauryan elephant archer, added new icons, modeled new blacksmith buildings and a new Persian Palace, created a mockup for a redesign of the GUI, and made smaller ships' movement sounds quieter than those of larger ships. Enrique modeled new blacksmith buildings, textured new animal models made by Micket, textured new Stonehenge model from Ludo38, and improved the quality of our graphics even further by adding ambient occlusion, specular, and parallax to all Greek buildings. He's also been working on differentiating the Gauls and Britons further (see the Gaul houses above). LordGood created new Carthaginian and Iberian unit portraits as well as a British tower (see screenshot above). Ludo38 created a new model of the Britons' wonder, Stonehenge (see screenshot above). Micket modeled a gorilla, auroch, partridge, hawk, cobra, white rhino, and wolf (see screenshot above). They aren't present in the game yet, but expect a much more diverse animal population soon! Spahbod polished the random maps and fixed a bug with technology caching. Performance, Gameplay and UI Programming contractor RedFox spent a lot of time optimizing and rewriting numerous parts of the engine and the resulting performance gains look promising, as shown in his development reports. He also spent some time to reduce the size of the patch review queue. Don implemented a quadtree to improve performance. Josh is working on a multiplayer lobby (pictured above) and has also added scrollbar improvements and fixed test issues on ARM CPUs. Project leader Mythos_Ruler rebalanced many stats, added new technologies, and made animals visible through Fog of War. alpha123 implemented diminishing returns for farms, added player perspectives to the developer overlay, rebalanced stats, added hotkeys to jump to places on a map, and reviewed and committed several patches. historicbruno added an option to change game speed, fixed building issues and memory leaks, added UI sounds, reviewed and committed many patches, and much more. mimo implemented shared trade gains for traders, fixed many bugs, implemented corralling and herder (which is under discussion), facilitated garrisoning of ships, implemented an escort order, and added an indicator for the number of workers tasked at gathering resources or building a foundation. Programming Infrastructure and Other Important Contributions Philip started reviewing RedFox's megapatch, optimized the entity-component system, a core part of the engine, experimented with , added a Gerrit server (which, in conjuction with git, will help streamline development), and helped others with their patches. sanderd17's work includes terrain anchoring (see screenshot above), animation interpolation, restriction of formations for non-military units, a new pike elevation tool in Atlas, an improved BuildingAI, health regeneration, WIP auras, shoreline walls, platform-consistent JavaScript math functions, elevation advantage for ranged units, and much more. Yves, with assistance from Mozilla developer h4writer, has continued his work on upgrading SpiderMonkey. Unfortunately, the upgrade does not seem like it will help as much with performance as we hoped. leper added hotloading support for skeletons, reviewed and committed many patches, and fixed miscellaneous bugs. AI wraitii adapted AegisBot for the new changes introduced in Alpha 14 and is currently rewriting AegisBot to be stronger and more efficient . He has also made impressive visual and performance improvements to water. quantumstate fixed unit attacking bugs in AegisBot. Bug Fixes and Other Improvements ldsh improved hotkey support for non-QWERTY keyboards. idanwin added and modified some cheat codes. mpmoreti added an alarm to signal the completion of a technology. kingadami facilitated the task of checking how many units are garrisoned inside a building. Jgwman added combined costs to the gate conversion tooltip. Never blindly convert your walls again! Mackeul wrote a patch to let the game report nice error messages to Windows users with missing hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers. Have you ever been annoyed by projectiles blocking your view? Enjoy a unobstructed view, now that Markus fixed the bouncing of projectiles. stwf has been working on improving the SoundManager by fixing bugs and adding functionality. Just for Fun scythetwirler has given flying objects, such as the P-51 Mustang, the (see video). We also want to thank all our contributors that are committing patches with new features and fixes. Not all of them make it into the report, but we are grateful. We would also like to thank scythetwirler for his crucial help with writing this report. If you want to be part of this project, you are invited to head to our forums and join our active community! Importantly, we are always looking for skilled programmers who want to contribute in fields such as gameplay, AI, sound, and graphics. We are also looking for Animators and 3D artists, a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager, and Scenario Designers. Feel free to introduce yourself on the forums using our recommended application format. Your contributions are crucial! Thanks in advance. See you next time with the latest development news!

0 A.D. Development Report #12 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this month'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. If you are one, redirect yourself to this thread. Your contributions are crucial !!! On Performance Performance has been a major bottleneck for quite some time. We know the problems, and we are committed to resolve them. Last two months we've seen an influx of new contributors who are keen to help us fix the lag. sbte committed some patches (sim interpolation optimization) and a couple of memory leaks have been fixed (Markus). Kuranes has also been working on optimization and his work seems very promising. He added VBO support to minimap entity rendering (1,5 ms/frame to 0,8 ms/frame, which may seem trivial but every millisecond counts!). But this is just the tip of the iceberg, his many other optimizations are WIP or being reviewed by us, but when they are committed to the game the increase in performance will be noticeable! Last but not least we have Redfox, a retired 0 A.D. programmer who became active again. Currently he is working on font rendering, but like Kuranes, he is dedicated to implement major code optimizations, and he has the know-how. Their work will make 0 A.D. the enjoyable and fluid experience, you always wanted it to be! Screenshot of the Month Team News: Peter a.k.a. alpha123 has joined the programming team. Peter has contributed quite a few patches to the game and has been a valuable contributor in design discussions. Programming & Art & Sound Our new project lead, Mythos_Ruler has been busy as well. So busy in fact that I'm reluctant to write down all the things he has been working on last two months. The major new feature is the blacksmith. Although the models are placeholders for now, in the near future you'll be able to upgrade your units in this new building. He also added new technologies, a new Spartan hero (Brasidas), rebalancing and tweaking the stats of almost every unit ingame, a new map, normal and specular map for desert terrain ... we could go on and on, but we insist you check out our next alpha release. historic_bruno committed a lot of patches and bug fixes. I'll mention just a couple of them: updating Valgrind headers and fixing some memory leaks (patches by Markus), updating Boost Library to 1.53.0 and improving SDL 2.0 support among many other. He also added a game speed option to the match setup. Leper also had a productive period. He cleaned up code, and reviewed and committed many functionality patches, that were written by contributors like Josh and KareemErgawy among others. stwf has kept working on the Soundmanager. Memory leaks have been removed, code has been cleaned up and multiple song playlists are now used by civs that have multiple tracks defined. Wraiitii committed a few fixes and improvements related to water. More importantly, he is completely reworking the water code: adding support for different water heights (e.g. lake vs. sea), optimizing foam and shore waves ... On top of that, ships received a sinking animation! Never has loosing your fleet been more pleasant to watch. Enrique has been working on shields, unit props and buildings for our next civilization: the Ptolemaic Egyptians! He is also designing, modeling and texturing the new blacksmith buildings. Omri Lahav has been working on some new material for the Mauryans. He has just invited two new guest musicians (didgeridoo and celtic harp) to capture their performance. How many freeware, open-source projects have a live recorded soundtrack? We are sure you will hear the difference. Yves is working hard on upgrading Spidermonkey. The first benchmarks are a bit disappointing, but Yves won't give up. This is not a simple task, but in the end performance and functionality will benefit greatly from the upgrade. alpha123 and quantumstate reworked the armor system. Damage = Attack - Armour was changed to: Damage = Attack * 0.9^Armour (in case your unit has a 10% armor bonus). This change was necessary as techs now have the same effect on each unit. So a 10% armour tech will decrease damage by 10% for every unit. We also want to thank all our contributors committing patches with new features and fixes. Not all of them make it into the report, but we are grateful. We can't do it without you guys and gals! This month special kudos to sanderd17 who is giving archers range bonuses based on map height and Micket who modeled a Hippo and an Oryx (and a WIP tiger). We'll get back to you next month with the latest development news!

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!

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!

New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 Ken Wood Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 23 “Ken Wood”, the twenty-third alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source real-time strategy game of ancient warfare. Easy Download and Install Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free software. This means you are free to download, redistribute, modify and contribute to the application under the same licenses (GPL v2 or a later version for code and Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 for artwork, see license). 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 New Civilization: Kushites Mod Downloader Cavalry and Spartan Building Models Combine Victory Conditions Attack Range Visualization Diplomacy Colors Destruction Damage Unit Information Dialog AI Behavior Lobby Authentication to prevent impersonation Nomad Mode on all Random Maps New Random Maps: Lower Nubia, Jebel Barkal, Elephantine, Fields of Meroë, Hellas, Dodecanese, Scythian Rivulet Civilization: Kushites The most prominent feature of the new release is the introduction of the Kushites. The Kingdom of Kush was a Middle Nile Valley civilization between 785 B.C. and 350 A.D. The region became known as Nubia and is located in present day Sudan. Steeped in pharaonic traditions, Kushites considered themselves the true heirs of the New Kingdom. They were fierce in the defense of their homeland, facing Persian, Ptolemaic and Roman invasions as well as constantly testing the strength of their northern neighbours. The armies of Kush are diverse, with contingents recruited from all across its vast domain. With a wide array of trainable units, they can adapt to almost any kind of opposing army. Boosted both economically and militarily by their monumental pyramids, ingenious leaders and special technologies, Kushites gain a variety of benefits. Lead the Nubian kingdom to bloody war and see the emergence of the mighty Kingdom of Kush. Learn more about ancient Kush here. Economic and religious Kushite sites (10MB 6k-HD) A nubian city in full bloom ( 6MB 6k-HD) Temple Of Amun Pyramids of Meroë, photograph by Fabrizio Demartis, CC-BY-SA 2.0 Nubian Pyramid Two Apedemak Champion Guards and a Blemmye Camp ( 4MB 6k-HD) Harsiotef, Kushite King of Meroë (404 B.C. to 369 B.C. ) Looted bust of the first Roman Emperor Augustus, found in Meroë, photograph by Steve F-E-Cameron CC-BY-SA 3.0 Mod Downloader Beginning this Alpha, players can install mod files just by opening them with 0 A.D. This new version also comes with a mod downloader, that allows you to connect to the new mod.io platform and fetch mods from inside the game. Wildfire Games and the mod.io team have worked together to bring you this feature, and 0 A.D. is one of the first games for which mods are available from this new and powerful platform. Please note that only mods that Wildfire Games has tested against blatant security issues will be available through mod.io. However, you are always free to install mods manually from other sources. 0 A.D. Mod Downloader Millenium A.D., a free mod featuring Anglo-Saxons, Byzantines, Carolingians and Norse civilization at the of Charlemagne and the Viking Age Terra Magna, a free mod featuring the Han Dynasty of China and pre-columbian Zapotecs New Models Similar to previous releases, meshes, animations, textures and materials for a number of units have been reworked. This time with a focus on helmets, shields and clothing. But 0 A.D. Alpha 23 also comes with many new artwork, as the Spartan faction has received an entirely new set of models. All Cavalry units have been replaced with much more realistically looking, more fluently animated high-poly models. New Spartan Buildings ( 9MB 6k-HD) New Helmets and Siege Firing Animations ( 7MB 6k-HD) New animal type Zebu and new Cavalry models ( 6MB 6k-HD) Combine Victory Conditions The addition of new victory conditions throughout the last releases, such as Wonder Victory, Regicide and Capture The Relic gamemode have made it reasonable to allow players to combine all these modes arbitrarily. So if you ever wanted to play a game where you can choose between defeating the enemy by taking out the hero or starting an ambush on the relics after building a citystate and assembling an army, now is the time! Two heroes fighting for victory ( 9MB 6k-HD) Attack Range Visualization Similar to the aura range visualization of the former release, fortifications and mobile towers now reveal the range they cover upon selection. Furthermore, the attack distance is also drawn when in the building placement preview, so that the player can find the best suitable location prior to settling the position. Attack Range Visualization during building preview mode ( 7MB 6k-HD) Diplomacy Colors Both in traditional games with two teams and in diplomacy teams with interactive alliance buildup, players could have often used a quick way to find out where the border to the enemy lies and which parts of the territory can be considered a safespace. With 0 A.D. Alpha 23 players are rewarded with a way to toggle between the player colors and team colors (one color per diplomatic stance), enabling them to react to every threat to their city instantly. Blue indicates the player, green allies and red opponents ( 12MB 6k-HD) Destruction Damage One of the new features that targets 0 A.D. (but also mods and other RTS that once might use the Pyrogenesis engine) is the ability of units to deal damage to surrounding enemies when they are destroyed. The effect is demonstrated by Fireships that can and will sink enemy ships if not taken care of by the enemy combatant. An Iberian Fireship sinks nearby fishing ships ( 4MB 6k-HD) Unit Information Dialog Players and observers can now open a dialog that displays all the game related details by rightclicking on a unit during a match. It is also designed to provide sufficient space for historic background information in future versions of the game. Everything you wanted to know about the Amun Temple AI Behaviors The Petra AI now supports configuration of different behaviors, such as Aggressive or Defensive. Although still in an early stage of development, it aims at more diverse singleplayer experience. AI Configuration Dialog Lobby Authentication To establish a safer multiplayer environment, the possibility of player impersonation was ruled out by an improved connect mechanism that requires lobby players to remain authenticated at the lobby server when joining games. The new match setup option Furthermore, the lobby chat was made accessible in the match setup, running games and the summary screen, so players can stay in tune with upcoming games without having to leave the party early. Nomad on all Random Maps Players have enjoyed the "Unknown Nomad" random map since years. It required players to scout the randomly generated map and find a suitable location to lay the foundation stone of their city. With 0 A.D. Alpha 23, this game mode is not restricted to this map anymore but can freely chosen on any of the random map scripts. A Persian player starting the city at the river ( 10MB 6k-HD) New Maps The entire random map generation code has been revamped. The results of this endeavor are many more possibilities and comfort for map authors to generate landscapes and a new quality standard in map design. With Alpha 23, 0 A.D. was enriched by seven random map scripts and three new skirmish maps. Six of these maps take place in the domain of the Kushites. New Random Maps Lower Nubia Lower Nubia is the area between the first and second cataract of the Nile and formed the traditional border region between Kush and Egypt. The hostile and merciless Sahara desert makes defending your position on the river and its steep banks an absolute necessity. This map, like most other realworld maps below was created using realworld elevation data from the NASA Blue Marble series. New random map "Lower Nubia" ( 10MB 6k-HD) Abu Simbel Temple of Ramesses II, photograph by Than217, Public Domain Jebel Barkal The "Jebel Barkal" is the holy mountain that was used as a landmark by traders crossing the Nile river, near its fourth cataract. It is located near the Nubian city of Napata, which later became the capital of ancient Kush. The remains of the Napatan temple complex and the nearby pyramids were declared a world heritage site in 2003. Stone Ruins and the famous Pinnacle of the Hill, photograph by Maria Gropa, UNESCO, CC BY-SA 3.0 "Jebel Barkal" is the first 0 A.D. map to present a vivid, procedurally generated cityscape combined with regularly spawned attackers of adjustable difficulty. City Walls of Napata ( 11MB 6k-HD) Procedural Generation of the City ( 10MB 6k-HD) Temple Guards patroling Napata ( 9MB 6k-HD) Players start near the fertile banks of the Nile river. In order to attain resources, players have to either establish a tradeline there or reach the mineral abundance in the shelterless desert. Contrary to the average map, players find complementary advantages and disadvantages depending on the starting location, making cooperative teamplay and strategic decisiontaking much more relevant. New random map "Jebel Barkal" ( 8MB 6k-HD) The Pyramids and the Hill, photograph by Ron Van Oers , UNESCO, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Elephantine Together with Philae, the fortified Island of Elephantine was situated on the Nile River at the first cataract and an important Egyptian city, often under Kushite control. As the border between Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia, Elephantine became an important way-station for the trade in ivory and other goods. It was considered to be the home of the god Khnum, guardian of the source of the Nile, and boasted an impressive temple complex whose remains can still be visited today. This map was created using OpenStreetMap data. New random map "Elephantine" ( 10MB 6k-HD) Temple of Isis on Philae Island, photograph by Olaf Tausch, CC-BY 3.0 Temple of Aswan on Philae Island, photograph by Osama Awny, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Goddess Hathor in the Satet Temple on Elephantine Island, photograph by David Stanley, CC-BY 2.0 Fields Of Meroë The "Island of Meroë" is a vast peninsula flanked by the Nile and Atbarah rivers and formed the heartland of ancient Kush. This map comes in two variants, one depicting the dry season and one for the rainy season. The map demonstrates the new possibility to select the map biome in the match setup. "Fields Of Meroë" - dry season ( 9MB 6k-HD) "Fields Of Meroë" - wet season ( 10MB 6k-HD) Temple of Amun in Naqa, photograph by Coordinamento delle organizzazioni per il servizio volontario, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Hellas This unique random map script choses a random area of Greece each time, yielding a much greater surprise effect each terrain generation. A "Hellas" map generation showing a part near the Aegean Sea ( 9MB 6k-HD) Dodecanese "Dodecanese" is greek and translates to "twelve islands". It names a group of 15 large and 150 small islands in the southern Aegean Sea . This is the first random map script placing little bridges. New random map "Dodecanese" ( 10MB 6k-HD) Scythian Rivulet This is a map focusing on the beauty of pristine winter, featuring crispy mounds of snow, shown under a not-too-bright sun. New random map "Scythian Rivulet" ( 8MB 6k-HD) New Skirmish Maps Alpha 23 "Ken Wood" comes with three new Skirmish maps: Egypt, Butana Steppe and Via Augusta: "Egypt" (6 players) comes with prebuilt cities of geographically accurate civs ( 10MB 6k-HD) "Butana Steppe" (2 players) ( 11MB 6k-HD) ""Via Augusta" (3 players) ( 14MB 6k-HD) Under The Hood This release consists of almost 1900 patches (r19923 to r21819), i.e. several hundred of bugfixes, commits restructuring of the engine code and small features that can barely be listed. It also includes solutions to prevalent crashes and performance bottlenecks. Finally, the Pyrogenesis engine can be compiled using Visual Studio 2015 and premake5. The name "Ken Wood" Ken Wood, also known as Phoenix-TheRealDeal or tonto_real, was one of the three original gameplay designers of 0 A.D, together with Wijitmaker and Acumen. He was a retiree in his 60’s from Arizona, but he sadly passed away in 2006 after a long fight with cancer. It is thanks to the amount of energy and passion he poured into the early stages of 0 A.D. that we are celebrating another great release of our favorite game! We managed to reach that symbolic letter W for our twenty-third Alpha, and we keep remembering him through the development of the project. Ken Wood was instrumental in conceptualizing some of the core concepts of 0 A.D. Most notably, he laid the foundations of the citizen-soldier concept, and its female villager counterpart. He was also fascinated by Celtiberian civilizations and designed the Iberian and Carthaginian factions. He designed a Rock-Paper-Scissors counter system for units of the game, biomes for maps, and had big ideas for naval combat and realistic ship movement. If you want to know more about the story behind 0 A.D., see this article. We have also re-published an interview from the old website here. And let us not forget his famous quote, which gives us all the motivation we can need: For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter X. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 B.C. – 0 A.D.) and post your proposal here! Support Us The work is still in progress and can use every helping hand. You can support us by translating the game in your language at transifex, contributing art or code or simply by donating. If you experience a technical problem with the game, please report it at trac.wildfiregames.com. This is also the first address to visit when you wish to dedicate some of your time to help patching the code. Got any further questions or suggestions? Discuss them with other players and developers at the forum or talk with us directly in the irc chat. Subscribe Contact info for press, bloggers, etc.: aviv@wildfireTROYgames.com without the capitalized name of a city Ulysses spent some time in.

He did retire, and it was his choice to leave without big announcements. It goes without saying that we are extremely grateful for all the work done, as the community is. He is greatly missed already. We did as well! But I'm thrilled to disclose that @plumo is very happy to be back and that you should see regular development reports again The cavalry models will be for a future report This one is already going through validation on IndieDB.

Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 19 Syllepsis", the nineteenth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features building and siege engine capture, a new pathfinder, visual replay and more! Easy Download and InstallDownload and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. 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. Moreover, you can redistribute the game and modify it freely as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC BY-SA. No "freemium" model, no in-game advertising, no catch. New Gameplay Features in This ReleaseBuilding and Siege Engine Capture: Non-siege units can now capture buildings and siege engines. When you hover your mouse over an entity that can be captured, two crossed flags appear so you can issue a "capture" order. If you do, you will start gaining some of that entity's "capture points" at a certain rate. (On screen, you will see your color taking up a greater proportion of the width of the entity's capture bar.) Once you gain all of these points, you capture the entity, and it is yours! (Note: You can still specify a regular attack on buildings and siege engines by holding CTRL when right-clicking on a target.) There is currently no animation for the units which are capturing, that will be added in a later version.New Victory Modes: "Conquest Structures" (destroy or capture all enemy structures to win) and "Conquest Units" (destroy all enemy units to win).Ceasefire Game Mode: The game can be set so that all players are completely unable to attack their enemies for a predetermined time at the start of a game.Attack Coordination: Players can request allies (including bots) to attack a specific enemy by clicking a button next to the player name in the diplomacy window. Also, Petra AI now supports attack coordination.Petra AI now warns its allies when it needs a tribute and lets them know when it advances to a new phase.The Ptolemaic lighthouse now has its special feature implemented: It reveals the shore on the entire map.New Skirmish Maps: Tuscan Acropolis (for 4 players; map preview), Northern Island (for 2 players; map preview), and Alpine Mountains (for 3 players; map preview). Graphics and User InterfaceIncreased Maximum Map Height: The engine now supports an eight times greater range of terrain heights, allowing for the creation of maps with more diverse and impressive landscapes.Visual Replay: Re-run a game and understand what took place in real time.Aura Visualization: Units affected by an aura are now marked with an icon when the aura giver is selected.New animals: New mastiff and wolfhound units have been added as well as a new rhinoceros.The Roman units now have voices in Latin. Voice actors and people with knowledge in ancient languages are invited to contribute more voices to the game! Under the HoodNew Pathfinder: The pathfinder is the component of the game engine that picks a route for a unit to move along from its current location to its target location, so that it does not collide with other units or with structures or with impassable terrain. The new pathfinder improves performance, but at the same time, it also introduces some new bugs. We have done as much as we could to ensure it was bug-free, but please report anything unusual!XML Validation: In 0 A.D., the behavior of units, buildings and other world objects is defined by their components, such as cost, health and more. All of these are described in XML files. The "grammar" of the XML files is now checked for correctness before being used by the game engine, which helps prevent technical problems.The generic Hellenic and Celtic factions have been removed.Linux users, please be advised that SDL2 is now enabled by default on Linux. Getting SupportPlease see the "Get Support" page on our website to find ways to get help from the active and friendly 0 A.D. community. We are well aware there is some room for improvement in 0 A.D. Some known issues are: Lag, visual glitches or textures not loaded, missing animations and more. When you provide feedback, we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved. Thanks. Please Contribute!We are seeking volunteer contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. Programmers are especially welcome and can get started immediately. Interested? Log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers. Also, you are invited to register on our forums and start participating! Why "Syllepsis"?We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...). "Syllepsis" relates to 0 A.D. as it means "capture" in Greek, and refers to the building and siege engine capture feature implemented in this version (Thanks, bouke!). For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter T. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC)! Subscribe to 0 A.D. Development NewsContact info for press, bloggers, etc.: aviv@wildfireATHENSgames.com without the capitalized name of a Greek city.

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.

Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 16 Patañjali", the sixteenth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features localization into more than 10 different languages, an improved AI, a new GUI, big changes "under the hood" and more! Easy Download and InstallDownload and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. 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. Moreover, you can redistribute the game and modify it freely as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC BY-SA. No "freemium" model, no in-game advertising, no catch. Top New Gameplay Features in This Release Localization: 0 A.D. is now available by default in 13 different locales, contributed by volunteers from all over the world: Catalan Czech Dutch English (United Kingdom) English (United States) French Galician German Italian Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Scottish Gaelic Spanish (Spain) The Japanese translation is also completed, but due to the large font files, it would cause a larger download for other players and it also requires a computer with higher specs. So, we offer the Japanese translation together with the font files as a separately downloadable mod. See installation instructions for East Asian locales on our Wiki. Many more languages are currently being worked on and are planned to be released in future alphas. You are welcome to contribute in this area. Formation Updates: The Testudo formation (for Roman melee infantry) and the Syntagma formation (for Macedonian, Ptolemaic and Seleucid pikemen) have received new animations, and their movement has improved further over the previous version. The formations are also more moddable, which sets the stage for further developments in formations. New AI - Petra: Petra features more aggressive expansion and combat and builds defence towers and fortresses as a human would. Petra manages resources better in late game than the previous AI, Aegis, and is more robust to external conditions. It will also trade over land with allied markets, if there are any. Town Bell: Click on the new "town bell" button to sound an alarm and make your citizens garrison in the nearest structure until the enemy is gone. Once you sound the bell again, your units will ungarrison and go back to work. Global Resource Trading Settings: You now set the chance a trader will trade a certain resource, rather than selecting it per trader. This gives you a better overview of your trade, and makes it easier to manage. The "Wonder" Victory Condition: If you set "Wonder" as victory condition, a counter counting down 5 minutes appears after you build a wonder. If the enemy can't destroy the wonder in this time, you win. We also have an "Explored Map" game setting now, in which the entire map is covered with the Fog of War. This is an option that gives something between the "revealed map", where there are no secrets, and the default "dark map".Graphics and User Interface New GUI, new font: The new GUI style seen in the multiplayer lobby in Alpha 15 is now used nearly everywhere. The GUI font has also been changed to Biolinum, a free font created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project. Multiplayer "Ready" button: In a multiplayer game, all users must confirm game settings before host can start game. When the host changes a setting, players are set to "not ready" again. This is to avoid sneaky behaviour amongst some hosts, who would change the settings right before starting. New art assets: Animated flying hawks, Ptolemaic ships, Eurasian Wolf, Nile Crocodile, Ptolemaic buildings: Military settlement, Docks, Market, and quite a few new animations, e.g. a new seeding animation for farming units.Music New music track: "Water's Edge" (click to listen). This beautiful track is assigned to the Britons and Gauls.0 A.D. Soundtrack by Omri Lahav SpiderMonkey Upgrade & Other Development Updates We have implemented a new version of the JavaScript engine "SpiderMonkey" in 0 A.D. It supports new features of JavaScript such as Map and Set objects. These two types, for example, have improved performance compared to normal objects when working with certain kinds of collections. Modders and developers who are used to working with the latest features of JavaScript are also happy about the new features which are now available. SpiderMonkey also brings improved Javascript profiling and analysis features which allow for producing graphs. These features are another useful tool for performance measurements and for finding performance problems. The version in Alpha 16 (v24) does not improve performance yet. But there will be improvements for the next version (v31) which should be included in Alpha 17. Most importantly, the upgrade from v1.8.5 (which was released in March 2011) to v24 was quite a big step and a lot of work. Being on a current version means we avoid writing code for an old API that doesn't exist any more and it saves us a lot of work compared to staying with v1.8.5 and upgrading years later. Last but not least, it's a "must have" from the security perspective, and it enables us to report bugs or even request new features from the SpiderMonkey developers. This release contains many more changes and bugfixes not mentioned here. In terms of tickets closed on the project management and bug tracking system we use, Trac, this was another record.Getting SupportPlease see the "Get Support" page on our website to find ways to get help from the active and friendly 0 A.D. community. We are well aware there is some room for improvement in 0 A.D. Some known issues are: Lag, visual glitches or textures not loaded, missing animations and more. When you provide feedback, we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved. Thanks. Please Contribute!We are seeking volunteer contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. Programmers are especially welcome and can get started immediately. Interested? Log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers. Also, you are invited to register on our forums and start participating! Why "Patañjali"?We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...). Patañjali was one of the three most famous Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India. In honor of languages everywhere, we have decided to dub Alpha 16 "Patañjali". For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter Q. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC)! Subscribe to 0 A.D. Development News Contact info for press, bloggers, etc.: aviv@wildfireSANSKRITgames.com without the capitalized name of a language spoken in ancient India.

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!

Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 11 Kronos", the eleventh alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features new Celtic factions, many improvements to the graphics, functional gates, a new sound system, improved AI and more! Easy download and installDownload and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. Although you might find some people selling copies of 0 A.D. on physical media, you will always have the option to download 0 A.D. from us over the internet, completely gratis. Moreover, you can redistribute the game and modify it freely, as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC BY-SA. No "freemium" model, no in-game advertising, no catch. Top new gameplay features in this release:New Celtic Factions: Britons and Gauls will now replace the generic Celtic faction. Each faction features some unique characteristics, along with shared Celtic units and buildings:The Britons have chariots, longswordsmen and powerful melee soldiers. Their special building is the kennel, which can train war dogs. These are both inexpensive and great for hunting and combat. Also, their heroes include Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, who led a revolt against the Roman Empire.As experts of metalworking, the Gauls have heavy swordsmen and heavy cavalry. Special building: The Rotary Mill, which is available in Town Phase, and is set to increase the food production of nearby farms in mid- and late-game. (This feature has not been implemented yet.) One of the Gauls' heroes is Vercingetorix, chieftain of the Arverni tribe and enemy of Julius Caesar.[*]New AI script: Aegis Bot - Combining the best of two AI scripts, qBot and Marilyn, Aegis Bot is the toughest AI implemented to date in 0 A.D. It gathers resources efficiently and quickly spends them on training powerful military units. Also, it can discern when it is being attacked by a dangerous army and when it isn't, and then react appropriately to each case. What's more, Aegis Bot's flexible design sets the stage for exciting future AI improvements.[*]Gates - Wall segments of certain widths can be converted into gates. Once placed, gates can be either locked or unlocked: Locked gates prevent all units from passing, whereas unlocked gates are normally closed, but open automatically when your own units are nearby. Handle open gates with care, though, because your enemies can pass through them too![*]New sound system - Fixes several bugs, supports Mac OS X, and sets a solid framework for future sound features.[*]Shared LOS among allies - You can see whatever parts of the map your allies have explored and vice versa. Graphics improvements:To increase the game's realism, several post-processing effects and mapping enhancements have been implemented in 0 A.D.'s 3D graphics, using OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL). These will be disabled by default in Alpha 11 Kronos, since they are experimental and we don't yet know which hardware best supports which options, but can be switched on by changing settings in the user config file: Ambient Occlusion (AO) - Simulates a measure of how much each part of the model is illuminated by indirect sunlight. This effect darkens parts that are harder for ambient sunlight to reach, such as the areas inside arches (1-2, 4-5). Normal mapping - A technique used to accentuate the lighting of bumps and dents in a 3D model, and add details without using more polygons, which would slow down the game. This effect is easy to notice on the bricks and floor tiles of buildings, and in some terrains (3b). Parallax mapping - Enhances normal mapping, further increasing the "bumpiness" of surfaces, such as roof tiles, without adding polygons. Specularity - Some terrains and parts of buildings are now shiny, such as snow and the gold rings on the columns of the Roman temple. Trees in the game now sway gently in the wind. [*] Some extra improvements have been made to the way terrains are displayed: Custom terrain alphamaps - Allows different terrains to blend into their surroundings in different ways. Fancy grass material - A multi-layered terrain material makes it look as if blades of grass are sticking out of the ground, and at a fast loading time. Triplanar mapping for terrain - This fixes some ugly texture stretching that occurred in cliffs (6). Smooth Line of Sight (LOS) - As units move into the Fog of War or the Shroud of Darkness, the map is fluidly revealed, instead of a few tiles at a time. New art assets: Updated Celtic Broch fortress (7-8); Two scaffold props (9); Hellenic docks, theatron, gymnasion and fortress (10-11); Several sets of rocks (12-13); New Hellenic civilization centers (From left to right: Athenians, Spartans, Macedonians; 14); Macedonian & Spartan siege rams with animations; Roman quinquereme animations; New technology icons. The Atlas scenario editor and Random Map Scripts:Heightmap importing - Import an image file and Atlas will transform it into a 3d map, automatically rendering darker parts of the image as lower parts on the map.Random maps - Seven new maps are available: Pyrenean Sierra, Oasis, Northern Lights, Lorraine Plain, Sahel Watering Holes, Gear and Unknown. Also, some improvements were made to existing maps, such as Fortress, to make them prettier and more playable. Music and sound:Three new tracks - "Helen Leaves Sparta" (Spartans), "Rise of Macedon" (Macedonians), "Harvest Festival" (Athenians).Several revisited tracks - "Forging a City-State" (better bouzouki), "Celtic Pride" (total remake), "Honor Bound" (live trumpet added), "You are Victorious!" (live trumpet added), "Dried Tears" (total remake, plus live trumpet added). (Thanks, Avior Rokah!)All the other pieces of the score (19 tracks overall) have been re-mixed and re-mastered to a uniform sound quality and volume.New female citizen acknowledgment voices in ancient Greek, with phrases such as Ti esti? ("What is it?") and eisbalomen ("I will attack!"). 0 A.D. Soundtrack by Omri Lahav User interface and other features:Game setup and score screen changes - During match setup, small screenshots of the maps are available; The game summary screen includes player names, a market tab with trade and bartering data, and the map name and size (Thanks, hapsky!).Queued rally points - Use shift to place a sequence of rally points for new units to walk to, or to provide a series of tasks to do in order, such as constructing a set of buildings.New, more realistic ranged attack - Ranged units, such as archers, now miss their targets some of the time.Team & private multiplayer chat - Restrict messages to your allies ("/team"), to your enemies ("/enemy"), to a particular player (type "/msg" followed by the player's name) - or just chat with everyone at once ("/all").Other in-game changes - Hotkey to display all healthbars; Progress in technologies being researched is shown in the top right corner of the screen; Shallows represented on minimap; Improved wall system.Cheats - Entering "i want pizza" into the chat box adds 1000 food to your inventory, "bring me my axe" adds the same amount of wood, "your money or your life" adds metal and "i see a mountain here" adds stone; "jame jam" reveals the map, "the hive master" maxes out your population, and more.Increased support for OpenBSD and improvements to our build system (Thanks, anthonyjbentley!). Known issuesAlthough we have made a great deal of progress, there are still many things left to implement and fix in 0 A.D. Here is a partial list (full list here):Lag - The game does not run as fast as we would like because of several reasons, mainly pertaining AI and pathfinding. The problem worsens in these conditions: (1) When there are many units on the map, (2) On island maps and (3) With multiple AI players.Visual glitches or textures not loaded - Sometimes this is a driver problem. Please make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card. Missing animations - Some units glide around or don't drop to the ground when killed. This is a work in progress. Sound problems - We have implemented a new sound system in Alpha 11 and it still has several bugs. We intend to fix them in future alphas.Errors and crashes - Unfortunately, these can happen for many possible reasons, and a closer look is needed to determine the source of the problem.With your help, we can improve 0 A.D. Please report bugs with as much information as possible, including steps to reproduce the problem, on our bug reports forum or on the Trac system. (We prefer these media to the in-game feedback system, as we can use them to ask for more information and coordinate bug management.) Also, particularly when reporting errors and crashes, please post relevant parts of the logs (interestinglog.html) and crash dumps if available. These files are saved in paths detailed here. Thanks in advance for your help. Please contribute! REPORTERS/BLOGGERS, PLEASE MENTION THIS! We need your help to finish the game. Thanks. We are seeking contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. Programmers are especially welcome and can get started immediately. These roles on the 0 A.D. development team are great if you want to brush up on your skills and update your portfolio, if you're seeking a project for school with real-life applications, or if you care about the cause of free culture and software and are willing to work pro bono with a group of dedicated volunteers from all over the world. Interested? Log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers. Also, you are invited to register on our forums and start participating! Why "Kronos"?We name our releases according to development status ("Alpha" or "Beta"), successive release number (1, 2, 3, ...) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order ("Argonaut" for A, "Bellerophon" for B, ...). In Greek mythology, Kronos (or Cronus) was the leader and the youngest of the first generation of Titans. At the request of his mother, Gaia, he overthrew his father Uranus, and took the throne with his sister Rhea. Kronos and Rhea ruled during the mythological Golden Age, a time of prosperity and harmony, when people lived without toil, greed or violence, and no laws or rules were needed. To prevent any chance of losing the throne, Kronos swallowed all the heirs Rhea produced for him. Not fond of the idea of losing all her children, Rhea drafted a plan to give birth to a son, Zeus, in a discreet cave, where the divine goat Amaltheia would then suckle and raise the child. To fool Kronos, Rhea wrapped a stone in Zeus' swaddling clothes, and Kronos took it and swallowed it, believing it was the child. Years later, Zeus returned, and with the help of Gaia, made Kronos regurgitate the stone and the five children he had previously swallowed. Along with his siblings, who had just been vomited out of Kronos' stomach, Zeus led a rebellion against Kronos and the titans. They won this war of gods and imprisoned many of the titans, including their father, Kronos. In turn, Zeus and his siblings became some of the main deities of Greek religion, called the Olympian gods. Kronos was worshipped in Athens as a patron of harvest, but his myth later took a much larger role in Roman religion as Saturn, a god of agriculture, liberation, and time. (Sources: English Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Mythica. Thanks for the name idea, Geek377!) For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter L. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 BC - 1 BC)! Long time, no siegeWildfire Games will keep releasing new versions of 0 A.D. from time to time. Watch our news feed to get updates, or follow us by e-mail, RSS, Facebook or Twitter. And you're always welcome to join the 0 A.D. community on our forums. Contact info for press, bloggers, etc.: aviv@wildfirePANTHEONgames.com without the name of the set of ancient Greek gods written in all caps.

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!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #4 (Week 33) 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! Art & Programming & Sound Note:This week's report will be a bit shorter than the previous reports. Alpha XI is very close to being released (late August - early September). Not many new features have been added this week as we are approaching the 'feature freeze'-phase. It gives us some time to test the game and remove as many bugs as we can find. Myconid's post-processing effects made it into the game! The new features have been tested throughout the week and many bugs have been fixed. It will take some time before the artists let their models take full advantage of all the new possibilities (see previous weekly reports), but the results will be spectacular! Luckily, some effects don't require additional work. So enjoy a breeze through the trees and the smooth LOS (line of sight)! Omri Lahav never stops remastering existing tracks and recording new ones. Lately he has been experimenting with taiko drums and percussion, to create the most exhilarating battle music. In short: expect a lot of new music in Alpha XI ! Deiz added a 'Stop' button to the GUI for immediately halting units, improved gate closing behaviour when locked or when no enemies nearby and continued quantumstate's work on team/private chat for multiplayer games. General Kenobi has been updating his Scandinavian rock formations. Pureon has recently finished his amazing Brythonic Broch model, the new fortress for the Britons. I have very strong evidence (a personal message in fact) that this is not the last new building model for the Britons! Quantumstate added support for multiplayer chat, which Deiz continued, and support for cropped images in the GUI game setup (so playing in different resolutions won't affect map preview sizes). stwf kept working on the new Sound Manager, which we really want to include in the next alpha release! Wraitii kept working on Qbot XP - a new bot that will provide a greater challenge than its predecessor. How do we know for sure it is a greater challenge? Easy: Put Qbot and Qbot XP in a 1vs1 battle a couple of times and compare the results. Let's say Qbot XP came, saw and conquered. Zaggy1024 has been updating Roman buildings with Myconid's post-processing effects (specular maps, normal maps). Check back next Monday for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #2 (week 31) 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! Congratulations to three valuable contributors who were recently asked to join the 0 A.D. team: wraitii, myconid and Deiz. Some of their work has already been shown in last report, and a lot more will follow in the coming reports! Feature Spotlight! Eggbird has been putting the last touches on the Civic Centre for the Mauryan Indians. This new faction which will be added over the next few releases, and we expect them to be fully playable by Alpha XIII. In the following video you can see one of the props Eggbird has made for the Civic Centre. This column is known as a Pillar of Ashoka. These pillars were erected during the reign of the Mauryan king Ashoka (3rd century BC) and were inscribed with (legislative) edicts. Pillars have been found all over the Indian peninsula and beyond (one pillar was discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan). Art & Programming Deiz has been firing a barrage of fixes towards us including rally points for trade and improved gate behaviour among others. One of his usability changes also allows people to hold the Tab key to display all the health bars of the units on the screen. A feature that will be more than useful while your soldiers are in battle. Gen.Kenobi finished the Hellenic Fortress and then started working on other Greek buildings. He also worked on rock formations and uploaded a video tutorial. Myconid has kept working -- relentlessly -- on modernizing 0 A.D.'s visual effects. It would take a whole page to describe all the features he is currently working on. We'll show you all this visual candy in a special report, somewhere in the near future. The groundwork for Myconid's visual galore was recently reviewed and added by programmers historic_bruno and quantumstate . 0 A.D.'s models can now store multiple UV coordinate sets, which make it possible to add advanced texturing techniques such as lightmaps, decal maps e.a. A second patch by Myconid: data-driven texture loading was also implemented this week. This allows actor files to have multiple texture files. Pureon has been finetuning the animations for 'his' gates. For those who haven't seen these gates in action, check out the he made. He has also been cleaning up some of the redundant and missing XML references, together with Mythos_Ruler.After his work on the new GUI, Spahbod started working on implementing cheats! Rest assured that we won't stop pestering him until we can have a bigdaddy, pow and e=mc2 trooper! He has also finished working on a new random map: 'Northern Lights', taking you to the Arctic region. Zaggy1024 has finished the animations for elephants. He also added prop points to their backs (archer platform anyone?) Audio Our composer Omri Lahav, doesn't stop improving existing tracks and recording new material. Expect a lot of new material in the next alpha release! Recent addition to our ranks, Evan Bogunia, has been recording additional sounds. This week he has recorded sounds for horses. Check back next Monday for more 0 A.D. development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #1 by plumo, 0 A.D. Community Liaison The wait between consequent alpha releases can be hard, we realize that. To ease the pain we -- the international bunch of volunteers that is Wildfire Games -- will start showing what’s being worked on behind the scenes by our dozens of contributors. Starting this week, we commence with publishing a weekly 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 is a must-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. No wizard when it comes to 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! Badmadblacksad, historicbruno, and Pureon have been working on implementing gates to work with the existing click-drag wall system. Expect this feature in the next alpha release! Pureon also uploaded a teaser video. Art & Programming After his work on the gates, Badmadblacksad, departed on a well-deserved holiday. When he gets back, we’ll urge him to continue working on the new multiplayer lobby. One of our more reclusive contributors, Eggbird, has been modeling buildings for the Mauryan Indians, the recently-announced new civilization that will make a partial debut in alpha XI (for the complete implementation of this civilization you will have to wait until the release of alpha XII). Last week Eggbird has been putting the final touches on the civilization centre. Gen.Kenobi has been busy revising the Hellenic buildings. Last week he remodeled and retextured the market building. This week he has been working on the Greek fortress. Historicbruno has mainly been reviewing and implementing patches, submitted by other contributors like F00/Deiz, who personally whips programmers to greater productivity! This week saw the implementation of 'always visible hero selection rings'. This screenshot will explain. Myconid has been working ‘round the clock to add modern post-processing effects like Bloom, HDR and SSAO to 0 A.D. Making everything work on various systems and video cards is a long and tedious process but the results are well worth the trouble. Art department veteran (12,390 forum posts and counting!) Mythos_Ruler has been working on modeling and texturing units for the Mauryan Indians. He has also been editing the massive design document in our wiki. Pureon has been working mainly on gate animations (last week he finished all gate animations!) and on new icons for opened gate/closed gate. Spahbod has created autumn textures for the temperate biome. He has also been working on a new GUI for the match setup. On top of being considerably more user-friendly the match setup now features map previews! Thanks also to luziferius for these. Wijitmaker, an old timer who has been around far longer than any current team member can remember, is currently reworking some of the building and clothing textures to make good use of the new possibilities introduced by myconid (Parallax) and Philip (Specular Lighting). Wraitii has been working on a new and improved water shader. He is currently implementing more realistic shore waves. Zaggy1024 is facing the massive task to have all animals in 0 A.D. fully animated. Lately there have been rumors of walking (not gliding!) elephants. Audio Our talented composer Omri Lahav has been recording new tracks for both the Athenian and the Macedonian civilizations. He insists on recording the performance of a real flutist instead of just using a flute sample… once again we realize how fortunate we are to have him. Misc. You find 0 A.D.’s website slightly (we stay polite) outdated? We too! That’s why bstempi, Geek377 and gerbilOFdoom are working hard on a brand new web portal for your favorite open-source game. Project leader Feneur and PR guy Jeru are responsible for the promotion of the game among many other things. They keep the information on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and on portals like moddb up to date, whilst spreading the word (and the love). Last but not least is K776, our open source development manager who sets the deadlines and targets for every alpha. His catchphrase ‘Will this make it into next alpha?’ is becoming legendary. Next Monday: our second Weekly Report!