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Hi everyone, I'm an (ahem) older RTS player; started on AOE, went to AOE_RoR; AOK; AOKtC; a litte EE, AOM (for about six months, Titans expansion lost me); now playing Empires DotMW Demo and will be playing that game pretty much exclusively when it ships.

I've always felt that the RoR time period is extremely neglected in terms of RTS and was so very dissapointed in where AOM ended up...been eyeing this project for a while now with equal parts of excitment and skepticism (no offense).

Anyway; thought I'd finally join up and at least show my support for such a great idea for a game. The background information on this site is without a doubt the most researched and comprehensive of any RTS out there; and seeing as this is not a commercial project that is very impressive.

Any links to the status/schedule of this project would be appreciated; but mostly this is just a:

Hello everyone from a HUGE RTS fan!

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;) no worries there...I'm a sysop at a software development company (not gaming) so I know how projects of this magnitude can slip in scope and schedule...

the skeptic in me is saying "OMG this is the coolest RTS ever they will never pull it off!"

But hey; I've no clue it could be running already for all I know!!

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Welcome to WFG forums, Stephen. ;)

WFGers, for the most part, just call me Ken, though I've also been known as tonto_real, or just real. LOL, I'm an (ahem) older RTS player. Check my profile to see just how old. ;)

My background is somewhat similar to yours, up to a point; that it began and proceeded, though with much emphasis on the latter half, AoE/RoR/AoK/AoC, then we sort of parted company for a bit as I checked out Cossacks and a couple others, came back to AoC, and was so 'perturbed' by ES's announcement of what AoM would be (the legendary RTSIII) that I jumped onto this here bandwagon as soon as I knew there was a nascent interest aborning a little more than a year and a half ago now.

As long as about 3 years ago some members of Tonto Clan, which I had something to do with, wanted ES to do a 'remake' of AoE/RoR bringing it up to AoK then AoC 'standards', but of course that never happened and I'm willing to bet the farm it never will... especially now that MS owns ES. Consequent to that interest, there are about a half dozen 'old Tontos' that are members of the 0ad Project Team, who early on joined with the original 'modders' of Wildfire Studios @#$% Wildfire Games, and all of the rest of the approximately 40~50 staff that have 'hired on' to make the game in the past year-and-a-half. Today we are organised into a half dozen departments, each addressing certain areas of the game's development, just as you would expect in any fairly good sized commercial organisation. We of course, are not.

Tim also alluded to the fact that WFG is 'into' making more than just 0ad; indeed our Programming Department is designing our Prometheus engine to support 0ad and TLA, The Last Alliance, another game in the hopper, as well as a couple more things. BTW, we are always looking for people with good programming skills who might want to become bonafide members of the 0ad team and commit to working on portions of the project.

Yeah, NO doubt in our minds that this project will not take a great deal of time and effort to produce... especially in view of how we are having to go about it with our broadly-international all-volunteer force (of which we are inordinately proud) working online as our only means of 'communication', but we've gotten great people on board, as Tim said, those who will stick with it to the 'bloddy end', and though what you are able to see now on the 0 A.D. Website may change some as we all continue to cut our teeth on creating a 'real' RTS game of substance that will also be fun to play, we'll get it done one of these days (and, hopefully, before I roll over and die...lol). For your immediate edification, we are hoping to be into beta testing by the last quarter of 2004, about a year from now. If a bunch of amateurs can pull that off, whoa! But consider, too, that the 'pros' have just moved the release date for Rome:Total War back an entire year... not really very uncommon for the pros of the genre. No wonder you are a skeptic! :(

Again, we certainly welcome your interest as we welcome you to the forums.:(

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Thanks very much for the background. I do know some good programmers that I will indeed needle into at least looking at this site. I'm in the Seattle, WA area so obviously there are plenty of them around here...

I'm very excited to hear about the size of your team; that is great news. The project has a decidedly 'linux' open source kinda feel to it. Which is cool. I'll have to read up more about the other projects you mentioned here.

I can tell without even attempting to get on my soapbox that you guys are marching down the right path; we SO need a timeless 3D RTS based on this time period that sticks to the original and successfull rock/paper/scissors AOE ideal.

I feel strongly that the big developers have gone completely off the deep end; trying to add feature after feature to something that frankly does not need it. To me the Titans is an example of how hideous a thing can become when it forgets it's lineage and has tons of money and the wrong kinds of influences thrown at it.

The stuff I have read here it's like "yeah! exactly! exactly what I would do!" when I'm readint it so obviously, the excitment factor for me is way up there. Thanks again for the insight.

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