0 A.D. Development Report - AUTUMN 2017

[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! 

[av93]

Did @fatherbushido retired (as the title says?) If so, I think that's important to say thanks for all the good job done (even if I didn't agree in the gameplay decisions. I think It's so important to greet new members, but also say goodbye and thanks, cause one day you realize than somebody important of the team that contributed with effort goes away without notice. But maybe it's only on vacations or resting?

BTW, I miss these post. I follow track and codewildfiregames to try to understand in what are working the devs (at this point I'm more interesting in the game developing that playing the game itself,  lol), but sometimes the intentions aren't clear (didn't saw nowhere that campaign implementation or secondary attacks were being reworked another time). Kudos for the work done, and if it's done all the stuff of this list, it would be a great release.

As I said, I miss this kind of posts: I understand that are time-consuming, but I was thinking to say that if you wanted to promote to the IndieDb Awards, a post like this was needed. But you did it already You missed the Alexander new cavalry models, as always, images are exciting also for the public, think about it if you post it in IndieDb

[Stan`]

@av93 Alexander's are not committed yet. I'm too slow and I apologise for it. I need to start the review and do the cleanup afterwards now that we have ponies as well. Also some of the concerns are being addressed IIRC

[Itms]

8 hours ago, av93 said:

Did fatherbushido retired (as the title says?) If so, I think that's important to say thanks for all the good job done (even if I didn't agree in the gameplay decisions. I think It's so important to greet new members, but also say goodbye and thanks, cause one day you realize than somebody important of the team that contributed with effort goes away without notice. But maybe it's only on vacations or resting?

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.

8 hours ago, av93 said:

BTW, I miss these post.

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

8 hours ago, av93 said:

You missed the Alexander new cavalry models, as always, images are exciting also for the public, think about it if you post it in IndieDb

The cavalry models will be for a future report This one is already going through validation on IndieDB.

[wackyserious]

2 hours ago, Itms said:

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

This is great, things like this remind people about the game, specially in social networking sites where 0ad have accounts. This gives people who have once in their life have played the game (whether several alphas ago or these past two alphas) to have faith and renew their enthusiasm to the game. This is good news.

[av93]

11 hours ago, Itms said:

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.

Just a few lines like these are enough, no need of big announcements if he doesn't wanted to!

[Andrettin]

Cool! Are archery ranges, stables and siege workshops going to be added for most or all civilizations, then? When I click the link for them, I get the following message

"You do not have permission to view this content."

[Stan`]

That's because the link is incorrect I think. @plumo

[elexis]

Indeed that subforum isn't available to everyone and the two graphics should just be posted in the report.

[s0600204]

9 hours ago, Andrettin said:

Cool! Are archery ranges, stables and siege workshops going to be added for most or all civilizations, then? When I click the link for them, I get the following message

"You do not have permission to view this content."

The link in question points to a post containing an image that can also be found here on the @play0ad twitter feed, and here on Facebook.

These two posts on LordGood's twitter feed are also relevant and may be of interest.

And to answer your question: yes  - at least in Atlas. They might not be made part of a civ's build order in-game (discussion is ongoing as to that), but they should be available for map creators to place in Atlas.