Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week’s 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 be an interesting read.
If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. 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 a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community!
Feature Spotlight
Community member Zoot posted this GIF showing Shield_Bearer’s mapping effects on the Iberian buildings. People who are affected by Epileptic seizures should refrain from watching this as it contains fast moving images (probably we are exaggerating, but we care about you!).
Art & Programming & Sound
It’s official: feature freeze is in effect! No big changes are allowed, only small tweaks to templates, art, or small code changes. During this phase the hunt for bugs is on! When they are squashed, we enter the commit freeze phase. The code remains untouched, so we can create installers for the various operating systems (Windows, OS X and Linux). To quote Borat Sagdiyev, I’m so excite!
We are very excited as well about stwf‘s new sound manager, which will bring sound to Mac users! This week stwf and historic_bruno committed the sound manager to the main data branch (using svn), and fixed some related bugs.
Pureon has been working on a new building for the Brythonic Celts: the crannog! This fortress is unique, as it is built on a small artificial island. And while it doesn’t create units, it allows a major garrison to fire arrows at enemies!
This week, Enrique committed the updated theatron and gymnasion for the Athenians. Currently he is diversifying the Hellenic civ centre (as both Athenians, Spartans and Macedonions will use this) and creating new models (syssition, farmstead and library).
Myconid‘s mapping enhancements (normal, parallax) have been added last week. This week he has mostly been fixing bugs.
Amish – who isn’t Amish because he clearly uses a computer – has updated the Carthaginians buildings with Ambient Occlusion.
Deiz committed a fix from yacka that prevents domestic animals to be manually deleted/killed, worked a bit more on the walls and fixed some other things.
Mythos_Ruler added normal maps and specular lighting for the Persian city tile terrain, and updated some tooltips.
Quantumstate added support for putting technologies in folders and added camera movement speed modifier keys.
Gen.Kenobi kept working on his rocks, adding very high quality parallax effects.
Wraitii kept working on his new bot, Qbot XP. After some optimizations the RAM usage should be lower as well.
Zaggy1024 updated the Roman normal maps and added normal mapping to the Broch (Brythonic fortress).
Check back next Monday for more development news!