Member and OS Contributor of the Month October 2011

[feneur]

For the second time we'll highlight two contributors to the project who has done remarkable things in the last month. This month we've decided to shine the spotlight on Alexander (fcxsanya on the forums) and Jonathan (quantumstate on the forums). Alexander for his work on trade and barter, both of which should be included in the upcoming Alpha, and Jonathan for his work on qbot, a new AI which might be included in Alpha 8 as well. As you can see from the fact that both of them answers questions about being on the team both are presently on the team, but the award is for October, and Jonathan didn't become an official member until November.

Alexander:

Tell us the basics about you?

My name is Alexander, I’m 24 years old and I was born and currently live in Novocherkassk, Russia. I’m married and have a six months old daughter.

I work as a programmer in a small software development company.

What do you find motivating about contributing to 0 A.D.?

When did you join the team?

What made you interested in joining the team?

I first found 0 A.D. in summer 2010 and I was impressed by its scale and quality. The key factor of my interest was that 0 A.D. have free licences for both code and art.

At that time 0 A.D. already had a pretty solid game engine and awesome art. In the same time it had wide room for improvements and I found out that I’m able to accomplish some tasks. I started to contribute as a community member and in October 2010 joined the official team.

I was interested in joining the team because I wanted to follow development more closely, keep abreast of developments and I liked the team members whom I had met.

What has contributing to 0 A.D. meant for you?

What do you find best about being a part of the team?

Later on I realized that this team/community is even more important for me than the project itself, I feel myself very comfortable here and I'm glad to work together with all these guys

Jonathan:

Tell us the basics about you

I'm Jonathan or quantumstate and 21, I am currently studying in my last year of a maths undergraduate degree in Cambridge.

What do you find motivating about contributing to 0 A.D.?

Basically i got started because I felt i should do something in the summer break and the AI is fairly bad so needed improving. I also seem to suffer from overconfidence in programming so I enthusiastically attack a problem thinking I can solve it fairly easily and then find it is 10 times harder than I thought. Also I love the AoE series of games and AoK: The Conquerors is my favourite game so making a better RTS in the same style is fun. Being open source was quite a big factor as well, I like the idea of open source and it is pretty practical as well for new people joining since the barrier of entry is so low.

What has contributing to 0 A.D. meant for you?

Joining an online community again is nice, it has been years since the last one I was in died. Also my C++ is slowly improving as I read random bits of the codebase. Contributing to a real project which people will use is also good, in the past I have mainly done random small projects on my own which nobody would ever care about. Also since I will be applying for jobs fairly soon I hope it will look nice on a CV. So contributing to 0AD is awesome in a lot of ways .

When did you join the team?

What made you interested in joining the team?

What do you find best about being a part of the team?

I joined the team on the 3rd November. For programmers the changes aren't so significant since there isn't any hidden programming discussion. I get to be part of the "peanut gallery" watching the artwork progress which is quite nice I guess. I also look nice and official on the forums now.

[Pureon]

Congrats Alexander and Jon. Great to have you both on the team

[Jeru]

Huzzah!