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 !!!

 

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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 of the fixes were 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.