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I am using A27 RC1 and have searched the forums as well as trac for similar bug reports. Unfortunately my search querys haven't been useful ... At around 1 hour and 26 minutes my ally (PetraAI, very strong, green, unfortunately I haven't take a screenshot) started spamming me every second with messages kind of "I'll start a massive attack against ... come and join me and get rich!" I think the needed fix is a must have for A27. What else information do you need? metadata.json commands.txt mainlog.html interestinglog.html

Hi everyone, For a few years now we have pondered whether git would be the right VCS for the development of 0 A.D. One of the main selling points of git is the ability to create numerous branches for parallel development of features and bugfixes. Several popular platforms (Github, Gitlab.com, ...) leverage this to provide a feature-packed development environment, where people can contribute, discuss, review, and test patches. Historically, the development of 0 A.D. has been performed using SVN, which is a bit old... but suits our needs in a number of ways, already discussed elsewhere. We are using Phabricator to supercharge SVN with a review and CI/CD platform, but alas, Phabricator has been abandoned by its developers. In any case, a lot of contributors in the past couple of years have expressed disappointment with the peculiarities of Phabricator. Thus, we have discussed finally moving to git, without any strong urgency or hard opinions on the matter. I have proposed myself to set up a migration path and a new development environment for 0 A.D., and I am proud to present it to you folks today. I have started working on this "for real" more than a year ago, and started dedicating all my "0 A.D. time" (which has been very scarce) on this project at the end of Spring 2023. It is still, unfortunately, very much a work-in-progress, but now is the time to reveal it and receive feedback. Ideally, I would like to collect feedback from the community, finish the CI/CD system, and fix bugs, over the course of the spring, with the aim of performing the actual migration, if the community wishes to perform it, during the summer. As always, delays should be expected. It is worth noting that personal changes in my life/work balance will give me more free time after the summer. Thanks in advance for the feedback you will provide Presentation of the Proof of Concept I am self-hosting the services for the duration of the tests, so that I have full control and do not divert resources from WFG. All URLs are under itms.ovh, which should eventually become wildfiregames.com Email does not work on this Proof of Concept! I have no will to setup email and I certainly don't want to spam anyone with tests. The services are not updated automatically: the full migration takes around 48h and necessitates some human input. The PoC I am presenting was generated from scratch the past two days. I will update stuff from time to time, when I fix bugs or when I'm bored, but don't expect the PoC to follow the actual development of the WFG services. Please test as many things as you want and don't hesitate to try to break things! Now is the time to make sure I didn't forget anything. All the data sent to the PoC will be wiped out whenever I re-migrate the services, and of course whenever the actual migration happens. Please feel free to play around all this. The services (this will be regularly updated) - gitea.itms.ovh The development platform. This is an instance of Gitea, a self-hosted lightweight alternative to Gitlab/Github. If, in the far future, we want to stop self-hosting stuff, Gitea is compatible with Github features to allow for easy migration. The git repository is at wfg/0ad. Commit messages were reformatted, contain the original SVN revision, links to other commits are preserved as much as possible. The HEAD revision is the HEAD of the SVN repo. A currently WIP of the "future" branch of the git repository, adding commits needed for development with git, is at my fork Itms/0ad. All Gitea users were imported from Trac. Since email does not work, if you want to login, shoot me a DM and I'll send you a password. All Trac tickets are imported at wfg/0ad/issues. The Trac wiki is imported at wfg/0ad/wiki. I tried to self-document the PoC as much as possible, so please read the updated pages, especially BuildInstructionsGettingTheCode and BuildAndDeploymentEnvironment. The FAQ is defaced beyond readability because of its formatting peculiarities, work is needed, my apologies to everyone who worked hard on the visuals of the Trac page... - trac.itms.ovh A read-only copy of Trac, upgraded to the latest release. This serves as a reference, and can stay online as long as needed. See below for the redirect tool. - code.itms.ovh A registration-disabled copy of Phabricator, upgraded to the latest version (RIP). All the inactive accounts were deleted, especially the dormant spam accounts. This should stay up as much as possible. We need to keep all the discussions on patches and commits. TODO: I need to find a (possibly ugly) way to disable the upload of new diffs. - svn.itms.ovh The old and new SVN repositories. This holds the current ps repo (which will stop receiving commits after the migration), the audio and art sources (which will keep working as-is), the new libraries repos for precompiled Windows and for bundled libs, and most importantly the new nightly-build repo WIP: This is currently the biggest missing piece, as I am now going to start working on CI/CD, and the generation of the nightly build. Please read NightlyBuild if you want to know how this will work in the (hopefully close) future. - ariadne.itms.ovh Ariadne is a small redirect tool I wrote as a drop-in replacement for Trac or Phabricator when/if we decide to drop them. A lot of links to Trac exist on the Internet. You can follow Trac-like paths on Ariadne to find the relevant content. Each Trac page displays a link to the associated Ariadne path. For instance : A ticket https://ariadne.itms.ovh/ticket/666 A wiki page https://ariadne.itms.ovh/wiki/Manual_Settings A SVN changeset https://ariadne.itms.ovh/changeset/28056 A Phabricator commit page https://ariadne.itms.ovh/rP28056 A file in the Trac browser https://ariadne.itms.ovh/browser/ps/trunk/source/test_setup.cpp Ariadne also provides a nice page for knowing commit correspondence, just use `rXXXX` as path: https://ariadne.itms.ovh/r28056 https://ariadne.itms.ovh/r28000 Enjoy! And see you soon for regular updates

Will take a look Another thing worth mentioning: I plan to delete all Trac accounts without content as part of the migration (using the Trac spam filter). I did not perform that in my PoC because I haven't set up the spam filter (useless in a read-only instance). As a consequence, I will only create Gitea users for active Trac accounts in the actual migration.

Yes I just restricted PoppaSmurf, I don't know how it appears to you. I can't contact users but I do have access to their email addresses (pretty much like in Trac). It is actually a good thing in my opinion that Gitea doesn't have a PM system. I would be unhappy so see communication even more split between platforms. Yes, I tested a while ago, it works. In the worst case I can debug that after the migration, emails can wait for a few days. I really don't want to test now and spam a wide public. I really had a hard time to decide between an organization and a user. Users need email addresses so I didn't really want that. Also I figured it might be handy to be able to add people to the organization if there is a need to manually edit imported Trac data... but that is realistically not going to happen. What do you mean about surprising? In terms of privacy you mean? (if yes, I tried to be precise in the privacy policy, and people who don't use Gravatar won't have their data sent there, so they are not supposed to complain unless I missed something). For the PoC, getting the profiles from Gravatar allows one to have a sense of the look and feel of the platform and of the community interactions. I wouldn't like to see everyone with generated avatars... For the actual migration, active users will be able to populate their profile, but IMO it would be a bit of a shame to leave all the old members of the community without a face. I'm very happy to see a profile pic associated with janwas or k776 for instance. Oh, that works for me, so that's a bug indeed. I'll track it and let you know Yeah I figured that out, now are you advocating for 10-char hashes? 7-char? Something else? I used the default color palette*, and since I'm not a designer, I try to trust the Gitea devs to have done their UX work. This can be changed at any time anyway, so I'm going to stay with those for the migration unless an artist offers insight. *apart for the new "activity" labels, so if your grudge was specifically against them, your concern is valid and I'll change those colors Can you be more specific, which alternative would you propose? I disagree, colors convey meaning for priorities or difficulties. I kept a single color for resolution, components, and ticket types. I don't have a strong opinion for the colors of the new "activity" label. I can try pascal case, but that wouldn't work for themes, so meh for the consistency Yes it is, labels are sorted alphanumerically (both in menus and in issue lists and previews), I need to group them and order them correctly for the users. I think you're correct. I'll check whether it's possible to disable that feature

Reminder: registration is now disabled on Phabricator. Only currently active users can post those updates. And indeed I forgot to write this in the top message: all the accounts without content were deleted on Phabricator. If you login to code.itms.ovh, you'll see that every possible dormant spam account was deleted. Of course, if the spammer has recently posted, my script will not delete them... But we can get rid of them manually and then we'll be fine.

So that means we'll have to keep deleting every single Phabricator spam message manually that are now on commits, diffs and sometimes on personnal profiles while maintaining gitea ? Oh sweet then. 100MB will make it harder to reach the disk size Also means the repo won't grow weirdly and exponentially like it did for me True. I also disliked the fact you could make the diff private on Phab because that's kind of anti open source to me and moreover it broke the bot as well. If you're gonna have private code maybe don't share it at all... X) Well I did my best.

Lately this forum has a bigger problem with spam. Maybe a solution would be to forbid new accounts to post links? Like you can't post a link in your first 5 posts, and neither if your account is still quite young.

No, that is really only a mirror. @Vantha just ask an admin to manually activate the phab account. Spam bots are just to common this days and the hurdles placed for them might occasionally affect legitimate attempts at registering.

I think that most of the users listed in the staff directory have moderation capability on the forum. Some of them, typically the most senior members, have administration capability on the forum. A user may have multiple roles, and only the primary role is visible when viewing a user's profile. So, there are some things that are not completely obvious about who is a moderator and who is an administrator. Active forum administrators as far as I know right now: vladislavbelov, Itms, feneur, Stan. Active forum moderators as far as I know right now: Norse_Harold, s0600204, rossenburg, Dunedan, wraitii, kizito, fabio, Freagarach, smiley. Based on quantity of recently handled reports, it looks like s0600204 is one of the most active moderators right now regarding spam, followed by rossenburg and me. vladislavbelov should be mentioned, as well, for handling most of the reports in late 2023.

Yes, I noticed it. It could be useful as a "Roach Motel" to catch the spammers. Or, if people prefer then I can lock this topic. Also, when you quote spam content, please remove the advertising links. Otherwise, you're making their content visible to the search engine web spiders despite moderators banning them and removing their posts. When they get links on our forum, that's how they harvest PageRank for their websites. That's part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I've edited your post to remove the hyperlinks. Please continue reporting spam. Somehow we're more effective recently than we have been in the past, because I'm not seeing it as often, and there seem to be less new users per week than there used to be (about 3 pages instead of 6 or more). And, at least one other moderator is apparently removing the advertisements from their profiles, which is great. I used to be the only moderator doing that, to my knowledge.

I was playing on the Naval Map: Islands with 3 AI in a 2v2, I was just watching my ships sail from island to island, then I suddenly got spammed by the same errors and it took a couple minutes for the errors to stop coming. What happened?

Thousands of accounts have a bot name, but since they haven't posted any content we don't have proof that they're bots. I think that we should have a policy that any new account that doesn't talk about 0ad immediately gets banned. At least one of these accounts with a bot name has registered, posted nothing at first, and then years later posted actual spam.

Why? I was recently having discussions with some smart community members. I shared with them my reasoning: Sniping is definitively not, following 0AD vision on Repetition - "If you find yourself doing the same action over and over without thought, then we need to either eliminate or automate such an action. Linear repetitious procedures are meaningless and boring." Manual sniping is as today, very clearly on the very repetitive end of the spectrum. Testing if this would be OP A mod in development from a very smart community member, gave me the opportunity to emulate some kind of "auto-sniping". I was surprise to find out it was indeed very effective, and beating by far a top player sniping skills: NoobDude (That I have 0 chances to beat normally). I was very surprise because my expectations was that it would make little difference compared to player manual sniping. So I though about just putting the idea into a hole forever... ... But since my initial reasoning was still holding true, and smart members were agreeing that it was, in theory, undesirable to have to have to spam so much clicks to control a very simple behavior, sniping still feels like a problem needing a solution. How could this be addressed unit_action.js, already have a kind of class filter for "attack-move". Another way I found to get a sens of what would such feature could feel like. "attack-move": { "execute": function(position, action, selection, queued, pushFront) { let targetClasses; if (Engine.HotkeyIsPressed("session.attackmoveUnit")) targetClasses = { "attack": ["Unit"] }; else targetClasses = { "attack": ["Unit", "Structure"] }; Implementing a stance, or hotkey, in main game that would help players "attack weakest unit in range" or another similar feature may change the meta. But this "sniping" meta of is arguably not most rewarding mechanics you can hope for a strategy game. TLDR: No script publicly exist for (practically) sniping in a multiplayer game. I think we should however seek to fix the compulsive clicking required for sniping. This won't end 0AD, but may give way to the implementation of more interesting mechanics, and game-play metas. Also the unfair advantage that this could provide may deter any moders to do it. The best approach could be to have it in native game.

Anti-Spam Mechanic Suggestion For as long as I have been playing it, 0 A.D. has been having problems with balance. In each and every of the last 6 releases (or perhaps more) there has been 1 "op" unit. That unit got spammed, it's that simple. Some may argue that we need a perfect counter system, then we don't need such a limitation as the following proposed feature. But then again, even if a counter system is implemented, I think that it is more effective in team games for each player to specialize a certain unit, then help out accordingly. It has happened in other games with perfect counter systems. It's very good from teamwork point of view but in ancient times armies weren't composed of 2 types of units. Alpha 17: Sword cavalry op, spam them and down opponent's cc with a rush Alpha 18-19: Hazy for me, I myself spammed archer champions and downed buildings, easily outranging them. Alpha 20-21: Champion rush and later spam. Alpha 21: Slinger spam. Alpha 22: Cavalry skirmisher/archer spam. No cav games: skirmisher spam + melee as fodder Summary: meh Proposal: Each unit increases cost of same unit type by 0.5/1%. This stackable "aura" would make such spams not as profitable and would incite some players to search for other, yet just as efficient army compositions featuring several unit types. As a side effect, this feature makes larger batch trains even more attractive, since they are trained at the cost of next unit only, not all those after. Example: +0.5% per unit +1% per unit Why did I choose 90 units? In Alpha 22 after players banned cavalry they started spamming skirmishers, it became common to see such armies marching about. Why this kind of anti-spam mechanic? It's easy to explain this 1%, the area is drained of possible soldiers, equipment is needed etc. Overdemand, this is the word under which 0 A.D. takes a step towards a more balanced future. In this post I am not siding with nor necessarily supporting other gameplay suggestions, I feel that this isn't a big overhaul. Some will say that this isn't enough, others will resent the passing of age-old strategies. From battalions to slaves and nomads, 0 A.D. has a vast choice of future paths, each leading to something different, something unique. The team is careful, taking steps slowly - sometimes perhaps to the detriment of progress - but they are I'm sure familiar with the problem the game faces and they wish the best for it. I'm not saying that we should throw all the gameplay suggestions away, just that they all encompass several changes that drag a train of other modifications with them and the team might not want to introduce them at least for now. Implementation: Ah, the step where all the enthusiastic developers say "meh" and go watch dog memes. It could be done with each unit class having a a stackable aura, but we know that global auras are problematic - especially when they come in big stacks. I'm not familiar with code so I wont say anything else but I hope it is possible to find a way. If you are still unmotivated, please click here Last one

The first one threw both of us off, I think, but when the other ones showed up I knew it was spam. It's almost sad. The old ones were trying to get free adds, these are messing with us for no reason. Hopefully when we get the Gitea we can movie all issue reporting there, and then lock down the forum a bit more.

I recently read the eyecandy topic again and decided it might be a good idea to make a big list of all the eyecandy that is in the game, will be in the game and should be in the game. Color code: Not in the game Not animated/unfinished (but no one is working on it anymore) Someone is working on it Finished and in the game! If you are working on an eyecandy model at the moment, post in this topic and I'll add it to the list/change the color (and add your name). Also give me a link to the topic. Don't spam this topic with suggestions, take a look to see if it hasn't been suggested before. I'll update this list regularly. Minifactions: African Tribes (link, hut variations, farmers and hunters) Polynesian (link with download) Pirates (ships, soldiers ; Illyrians, Tyrrhenians, Greek, Romans and Phoenicians, art can probably be reused) Fauna: Hippopotamus Flora: Hay Charred Trees (link) Hedges (like fences: short, medium, long, corner and maybe even 'arch' as a gate) Logs (needs more varieties) Tree stumps Geology: Iceberg Waterfalls (enrique, link) Cave entrance Structures: Nomad tents (are in svn, link) Roman Triumphal Arch Stone Bridge Stone Fence Wooden Bridge Aquaducts (LordGood, link) Roman Sawmill (Stanislas) Ziggurat (link) Columns (LordGood, link) Roman Arch (needs updating?) Trajan's Column (link) Dock Extensions Sphinx Ruins: Broken bridge (broken hangbridge is in-game, Roman bridge being made by Idanwin link, download) Greek Temple Shipwreck Mine entrance (think dwarves, link) Units: Elven Ship Roman Centurion (has aura that increases the effects of formation bonusses) Onager (Pureon, ) Archimedes Assassin Cicilian Pirate Dorkim Garamantim (Garamantine Infantry) Dugunthiz (example) Executioner Gaesofluxo Fijot (example) Gladiators (b,a,e and weapon variations, Stanislas) High Priests: Dastur (Zoroastrian - Indo-Iranian - high priest), Archiereus (Greek high priest), Kohen Gadol (Israelite high priest) Hunter/Huntress Kings (for each civ - regicide game mode) Makkabaioi Zelotai (example) Mercenary Cavalry (Camel) Pirate Ships (Illyrians, Tyrrhenians, Greek, Romans and Phoenicians where known to have resorted to piracy) Raft Shield Bearer Siege Wall (movable wall to protect infantry from arrows, basically a unit with a lot of armor and no attack) Spy (unit that can move undetectably into an enemy base) Watchmen (link about Roman and Greek watchmen) Statues: Aphrodite (huge & small) Egyptian Roman Hermae (one: link) Corpses: Skeletons (I believe there's already two variations) Body Parts Crucifix & Crucified people (no one is modeling, some information has been posted: link) Decaying Hanging men Impaled head Special: Anvil Amphorae Barrels Campfire Crates Dummy Piles (wood, stone) Snowman (they probably already made snowmen around AD ?) Tables Vases Wheel Archery target (LordGood, link) Butcher racks (Bloc, link) Cages (Idanwin, link) Gate lever (LordGood, link) Pillar of stones (link) Weapon racks (Idanwin, link) Gravestones (there's already one) Well (needs water planes) Armor racks Fountains Fisher racks Sign posts / Milestones (link) Torches Timetravel, Tourism and Myths: Mustang plane Lamppost (à la Narnia) (Idanwin, link) Mirror Tower (LordGood, link) Moai (link) Dragon (needs to be animated) General Lee (example link) Skeletons Trojan Horse Walls of Troy UFO UFO (Crashed) Unicorn Unicorn Cavalry Zombies

Hi To control sniping (that is annoying) u dont need to change damage of units The best way is to limit the number of units that can snipe ( like max 30 units) The same limitation should be put on number of champs ( like max 20) because some players ( often op players) turtle and spam many champs in that case nothing can stop them. This limitations can help to balance the game. The new community mod ( 0.26.6) doesnt solve the mentioned problems and also can causes problems ( like op early camel rush)

I think that is just how the game is supposed to be like ? If the pike/spear unit doesnt kill the jav cav players just spam cav jav and u are gg and have no option how to react ? Every intresting rts that shall not be just about spamming a signle unit, that has strategic depth and allows putting some thought into army composition to have any impact should have at least soft counter system ! If the pikes bother u just make units such as spear inf, sword inf, inf jav, archer cav that should all do decent vs pikes ! So i think there really isnt any problem.

I assume they don't do research, just automatically spam as much posts as possible wherever.

It was a sort of Easter egg idea. If it doesn't work, that's fine. On a side note, llama said Plutarch called Herodotus the father of history. Which was not the answerer. Who removed the spam posts? Are there moderators, or is it the job of the developers?

@implodedok What do you think about my suggestions about mitigating spam on an Invision Community forum system here?

I just tested the mod and I must say i really like the change to the melee. I was caught of guard by the immediate loss of survivability against ranged units, but after getting over the initial shock and switching mindset a little I found it much more enjoyable having my sword units do meaningful things instead of just taking damage like before. Blacksmith armour and such is much more important now and certain hero bonuses have greater value now. I also liked the nudge towards a diverse army to cover different things as apposed to a single unit spam. Overall a great change Now about the catapult splash damage, what is the radius size? I tested that too and it seemed to be non existent, in fact there seemed to be little impact at all from what I could tell, uncertain if I tested it wrong or what exactly the trouble is, so was a little disappointed by that.

With Giving more pop cost it would not change anything before you reach pop max anyway,.. But later, this would prevent the spam of those at late game as they virtually cost far less than regular units since you don't lose/replace them (hit and run) . Cavalry should be meant to be used as some skirmisher forces that will operate beside , sneaky and mobile.. But now, it just operates as the main component of a stupid spam game. The cav champs are so good that they don't even bother to avoid spearmen Just like Rams ability to kill humans was removed for the sake of strategy , cavalry cannot be plain and simply just better than regular units

Well this micro is really only theoretical until someone can make it work. I agree that the logic is simple, but this would be very difficult to execute. Don’t throw around the word sniping here as it’s not applicable here. The value of shift clicking in the situation is not there either, since the defender would want to respond in real time to the movements of the attacker. “Spam clicking” is a highly unrealistic projected outcome, like your personal boogeyman that you see around every alley.

As always we disagree on what is skill. The current meta for attacking and defending is all about mitigating defense building attrition. When you see an attacker retreat units in time and heal after inflicting damages to defender's eco, I see it as skill. When a defender use the attrition effect of defense building to weaken the attacker and slaughter them in a ambush in his city, seems like good plays. With @real_tabasco_sauce patch, defense buildings mechanic are about: For attacker, bringing a/a few units closer to cc and dance, for defender, shift-click all non-dancing or weaker units (new spam sniping mechanic). These micro seems to me extremely predictable (I wouldn't have posted if it wasn't that obvious). The random by default and focus-fire by user control patch the dancing obviously, but also increase the importance of sniping with building. Besides, it is expected that a lot of re-balance will have to happen if you change such a thing then how defense building works. Starting by the fact that towers and cc will be far less forgiving to rushes and raids, and turtling in general would be more efficient. A full garrisoned fort already shot over a couple of seconds to kill a solo unit so I doubt overkills are compensating the efficiency of focused fire. It's pointless to favorise spam-click meta mechanics, the more importance they have, the less others things are making any difference, like counter units, game plan, teamwork... The skills that also probably take the most time to master. The problem isn't user controlled abilities. You could have ideas to make some buildings have some user controlled abilities, if they are fun they'll add more to the game then adding more sniping similar spamy stuff. In that case since healing will not be rly useful anymore, I do think you remove some possible strategies and tactics to the profit of some mechanics that aren't so worth it.