GamniX

This time we feature Deiz, one of the more recent contributors to join the team, but also one of the more productive recently. He’s mostly been working on tons of smaller things that together have improved the game enormously, for example he’s made improvements to walls and gates, the in-game chat, added the ability to resign and improved that, and a lot more. So, without further ado, let’s get to the interview:

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I’ve been dabbling in free, open-source game development for the last four years or so. The main project I contribute to is Naev, a game similar to Escape Velocity (a series which many old-school Apple users ought to know), though 0 A.D. has usurped my free time as of late.

It’s a much smaller project than 0 A.D., so although I’m primarily a programmer, I’ve ended up doing a little bit of everything along the way, from sound to art to web design.

What have you found most interesting about contributing to 0 A.D.?

The development team itself. Given my past experience, 0 A.D.’s development model isn’t unfamiliar to me. What’s new, though, is the team size. I’m used to working with a handful of other core contributors, where everybody knows what everyone else is up to, and adding a feature generally means implementing it yourself.

With 0 A.D., it’s refreshing to work with a team numbering in the dozens. There’s progress from others to be observed every day (whether through the SVN commit log, on the forums, or in the IRC channels). Not to mention the delightful laziness factor: It’s sometimes nice to be able to file a ticket and rely on another contributor coming along, sooner or later, and fixing the issue.

Anything you want to add?

I’m really impressed by how quickly 0 A.D. has progressed. I remember hearing of it around the time of the initial source release, and finally ended up playing one of the early pre-alpha releases. As I recall, the game was extremely sparse at the time — It had nice visuals, but was missing AI support, multiplayer, and a host of other critical features.

I rediscovered 0 A.D. some four months ago, and was floored by how far the game has come over the last two years, especially for being a wholly volunteer-driven project. It speaks to an active, healthy developer community, which is largely what spurred me to becoming a contributor.

0 A.D. Weekly Report #5 (Week 34)

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!).

Spoiler

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!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #4 (Week 33)

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!

Art & Programming & Sound

Note:This week’s report will be a bit shorter than the previous reports. Alpha XI is very close to being released (late August – early September). Not many new features have been added this week as we are approaching the ‘feature freeze’-phase. It gives us some time to test the game and remove as many bugs as we can find.

Myconid‘s post-processing effects made it into the game! The new features have been tested throughout the week and many bugs have been fixed. It will take some time before the artists let their models take full advantage of all the new possibilities (see previous weekly reports), but the results will be spectacular! Luckily, some effects don’t require additional work. So enjoy a breeze through the trees and the smooth LOS (line of sight)!
Omri Lahav never stops remastering existing tracks and recording new ones. Lately he has been experimenting with taiko drums and percussion, to create the most exhilarating battle music. In short: expect a lot of new music in Alpha XI !
Deiz added a ‘Stop’ button to the GUI for immediately halting units, improved gate closing behaviour when locked or when no enemies nearby and continued quantumstate’s work on team/private chat for multiplayer games.
General Kenobi has been updating his Scandinavian rock formations.
Pureon has recently finished his amazing Brythonic Broch model, the new fortress for the Britons. I have very strong evidence (a personal message in fact) that this is not the last new building model for the Britons!
Quantumstate added support for multiplayer chat, which Deiz continued, and support for cropped images in the GUI game setup (so playing in different resolutions won’t affect map preview sizes).
stwf kept working on the new Sound Manager, which we really want to include in the next alpha release!
Wraitii kept working on Qbot XP – a new bot that will provide a greater challenge than its predecessor. How do we know for sure it is a greater challenge? Easy: Put Qbot and Qbot XP in a 1vs1 battle a couple of times and compare the results. Let’s say Qbot XP came, saw and conquered.
Zaggy1024 has been updating Roman buildings with Myconid’s post-processing effects (specular maps, normal maps).

Check back next Monday for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #3 (week 32)

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!

Team news!

Last Saturday 6 team members (Enrique, Pureon, Feneur, fcxSanya, bstempi and Mythos_Ruler) participated in a staff multiplayer match. There is no better way to balance the game and to settle small disputes! In the near future we’ll start with matches between departments, if the fear for the art department team can be overcome.

Art & Programming

Deiz kept the pace high this week. The icons of technologies being researched are now displayed in the upper right corner of the screen (check out the screenshot below) and player names are now displayed in the summary screen. Add to this at least 10 bug fixes and improvements…

Enrique has finished the Hellenic dock and a scaffold object, which will probably be used as construction scaffolding (WIP). Now he is giving the Hellenic theatron a new lick-a-paint.
Fexor has been working on improving the wall system.
Gen.Kenobi committed a whole batch of new rocks.
Myconid‘s graphical improvements are in an advanced state, and are being tested thoroughly. Thanks also to community members like zoot, who provide detailed feedback on myconid’s work. A new graphical feature that we haven’t mentioned yet are windy trees. We will post an image/video of that soon!
Mythos_Ruler has been updating some maps and doing some balance work.
Pureon has been working on the technology tree and its icons. Unique technologies will be added later, many generic (common for most factions) technologies are already ingame. He has also been working on banners and other artwork for the new website, which is coming along nicely.
Spahbod implemented some basic cheats this week. He is also working on colour selection in the game setup screen.
stwf has been working on the new Sound Manager. Historic_bruno, wraitii and dvangennip have been testing the latest version extensively, as it is very high on our priority list (and on your wishlist, if you are using a Mac OS!).
Wraitii has also been working on merging his AI bot Marilyn with Qbot, the bot developed by quantumstate. This new bot, Qbot Experimental (Qbot XP) will provide more of a challenge. In addition he changed the minimap to display shallow water.

Check back next monday for more development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #2 (week 31)

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!

Team news!

Congratulations to three valuable contributors who were recently asked to join the 0 A.D. team: wraitii, myconid and Deiz. Some of their work has already been shown in last report, and a lot more will follow in the coming reports!

Feature Spotlight!

Eggbird has been putting the last touches on the Civic Centre for the Mauryan Indians. This new faction which will be added over the next few releases, and we expect them to be fully playable by Alpha XIII. In the following video you can see one of the props Eggbird has made for the Civic Centre. This column is known as a Pillar of Ashoka. These pillars were erected during the reign of the Mauryan king Ashoka (3rd century BC) and were inscribed with (legislative) edicts. Pillars have been found all over the Indian peninsula and beyond (one pillar was discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan).

Art & Programming

Deiz has been firing a barrage of fixes towards us including rally points for trade and improved gate behaviour among others. One of his usability changes also allows people to hold the Tab key to display all the health bars of the units on the screen. A feature that will be more than useful while your soldiers are in battle.
Gen.Kenobi finished the Hellenic Fortress and then started working on other Greek buildings. He also worked on rock formations and uploaded a video tutorial.
Myconid has kept working — relentlessly — on modernizing 0 A.D.’s visual effects. It would take a whole page to describe all the features he is currently working on. We’ll show you all this visual candy in a special report, somewhere in the near future.
The groundwork for Myconid’s visual galore was recently reviewed and added by programmers historic_bruno and quantumstate . 0 A.D.’s models can now store multiple UV coordinate sets, which make it possible to add advanced texturing techniques such as lightmaps, decal maps e.a.
A second patch by Myconid: data-driven texture loading was also implemented this week. This allows actor files to have multiple texture files.
Pureon has been finetuning the animations for ‘his’ gates. For those who haven’t seen these gates in action, check out the teaser video he made. He has also been cleaning up some of the redundant and missing XML references, together with Mythos_Ruler.
After his work on the new GUI, Spahbod started working on implementing cheats! Rest assured that we won’t stop pestering him until we can have a bigdaddy, pow and e=mc2 trooper! He has also finished working on a new random map: ‘Northern Lights’, taking you to the Arctic region.
Zaggy1024 has finished the animations for elephants. He also added prop points to their backs (archer platform anyone?)

Audio

Our composer Omri Lahav, doesn’t stop improving existing tracks and recording new material. Expect a lot of new material in the next alpha release!
Recent addition to our ranks, Evan Bogunia, has been recording additional sounds. This week he has recorded sounds for horses.

Check back next Monday for more 0 A.D. development news!

0 A.D. Weekly Report #1
by plumo, 0 A.D. Community Liaison

The wait between consequent alpha releases can be hard, we realize that. To ease the pain we — the international bunch of volunteers that is Wildfire Games — will start showing what’s being worked on behind the scenes by our dozens of contributors.

Starting this week, we commence with publishing a weekly 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 is a must-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. No wizard when it comes to 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!

Badmadblacksad, historicbruno, and Pureon have been working on implementing gates to work with the existing click-drag wall system. Expect this feature in the next alpha release! Pureon also uploaded a teaser video.

Art & Programming

After his work on the gates, Badmadblacksad, departed on a well-deserved holiday. When he gets back, we’ll urge him to continue working on the new multiplayer lobby.
One of our more reclusive contributors, Eggbird, has been modeling buildings for the Mauryan Indians, the recently-announced new civilization that will make a partial debut in alpha XI (for the complete implementation of this civilization you will have to wait until the release of alpha XII). Last week Eggbird has been putting the final touches on the civilization centre.
Gen.Kenobi has been busy revising the Hellenic buildings. Last week he remodeled and retextured the market building. This week he has been working on the Greek fortress.
Historicbruno has mainly been reviewing and implementing patches, submitted by other contributors like F00/Deiz, who personally whips programmers to greater productivity! This week saw the implementation of ‘always visible hero selection rings‘. This screenshot will explain.
Myconid has been working ‘round the clock to add modern post-processing effects like Bloom, HDR and SSAO to 0 A.D. Making everything work on various systems and video cards is a long and tedious process but the results are well worth the trouble.
Art department veteran (12,390 forum posts and counting!) Mythos_Ruler has been working on modeling and texturing units for the Mauryan Indians. He has also been editing the massive design document in our wiki.
Pureon has been working mainly on gate animations (last week he finished all gate animations!) and on new icons for opened gate/closed gate.
Spahbod has created autumn textures for the temperate biome. He has also been working on a new GUI for the match setup. On top of being considerably more user-friendly the match setup now features map previews! Thanks also to luziferius for these.

Wijitmaker, an old timer who has been around far longer than any current team member can remember, is currently reworking some of the building and clothing textures to make good use of the new possibilities introduced by myconid (Parallax) and Philip (Specular Lighting).
Wraitii has been working on a new and improved water shader. He is currently implementing more realistic shore waves.
Zaggy1024 is facing the massive task to have all animals in 0 A.D. fully animated. Lately there have been rumors of walking (not gliding!) elephants.

Audio

Our talented composer Omri Lahav has been recording new tracks for both the Athenian and the Macedonian civilizations. He insists on recording the performance of a real flutist instead of just using a flute sample… once again we realize how fortunate we are to have him.

Misc.

You find 0 A.D.’s website slightly (we stay polite) outdated? We too! That’s why bstempi, Geek377 and gerbilOFdoom are working hard on a brand new web portal for your favorite open-source game.
Project leader Feneur and PR guy Jeru are responsible for the promotion of the game among many other things. They keep the information on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and on portals like moddb up to date, whilst spreading the word (and the love).
Last but not least is K776, our open source development manager who sets the deadlines and targets for every alpha. His catchphrase ‘Will this make it into next alpha?’ is becoming legendary.

Next Monday: our second Weekly Report!

This time Jeroen, aka vts is our featured contributor. He has been working on both minor fixes and big things like the wall system. Read on for a description on what “Featured contributor” means or jump down to read the quick interview with Jeroen.

As you may remember we had a thing a while back called Member/Contributor of the Month, as you may also remember we have not any such posts for quite a while. It’s definitely not because of a lack of skilled contributors as anyone following the forums/IRC (or for that matter the release announcements) knows. It was hard to keep to the monthly schedule, but since we still think it’s important to highlight the skilled people who work on 0 A.D. in various ways we’ve decided to bring it back in a slightly different way. Both to honor the hard-working contributors, and to give everyone a chance to get to know them a bit. To give you some insight into who the people working on 0 A.D. are Now we will post on a slightly less rigid schedule, but that doesn’t mean that the people featured are any less worthy

And here comes the interview with Jeroen:

Tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m Jeroen, a 23-year old guy from the city of Ghent, Belgium. I finished my Computer Science studies last year, and am now employed at a financial company in Brussels as a security analysist. I’ve been a programmer on 0 A.D. for about a year now.

My programming background is mainly one of personal interest. I believe it started as a teenager, when I became interested in building websites in Flash. To make them do more interesting things I started learning ActionScript, which in turn lead to PHP to be able to do things on the server side, more generally exposing me to the LAMP stack. I moved on from Flash websites to more traditional ones, and picked up some Java, C/C++ and Python along the way. Today, I still occasionally do web development, although I find my interests have moved more towards non-web development.

I enjoy programming and general problem-solving recreationally. I tend to write programs just for fun, for personal use or because I have my mind set on learning how to write a program that does a particular thing. I enjoy a challenge in that regard. Game development was a challenge for me when I first heard about 0 A.D. (and it still is), and that was a big part of the reason why I decided to join the project. It’s a subject I’ve always been interested in, but that I never had a chance to get serious with. Many aspects about 3D programming seemed very complex and hard to grasp for me, so I figured just diving in would be a good idea.

There are some communities that I used to be a part of when I was younger. I used to be very active on Kirupa Forums, a board about web development (and anything related). I also used to be part of the Crossfire community, which revolves around the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory that I used to play quite enthousiastically and competitively. I still play it occasionally, but just for fun.

Other than that: I’m a big fan of movie soundtracks, and am somewhat privileged in that regard as the annual World Soundtrack Awards are held right where I live. I also like to go for a run every so many days around my local track. On my nightstand are books about reverse engineering, windows internals, (popular) cosmology and religion, and our local variant of Scientific American.

What have you found most interesting about contributing to 0 A.D.?

I think the most interesting part has to be the way in which a loosely grouped set of people from around the world manages to coordinate an effort like this, and have been keeping it going for so long. I’ve said this before, but one of the things I really like about 0 A.D. development is that the people involved are active in such a way as to create a positive feedback loop: because people keep the project moving forward, everyone stays encouraged to keep working on it, in turn contributing to the feedback loop for others.

Anything you want to add?

Nothing especially important, although I would like to point out that I think it’s great to be able to work with and learn from people who are vastly more talented and knowledgeable than me, and not only in the field of programming.

Oh, and I also enjoy the occasional back-and-forth with people on IRC who appear to share my tastes in music (you know who you are)

This is not related to TORCS, but today the CERN announced interesting findings. Maybe this is one of the rare moments during our lifetime where the horizon of mankind gets extended, so do not miss the moment (of course this is the result of a very long process, but I mean the moment of announcement).
Follow this link and Google for “higgs boson”.

Enjoy, Bernhard.

by cybersphinx on 2012 June 20

Somewhat later than anticipated, here is a new beta. Included among a lot of other changes are multiplayer balance updates, new decals to make cliffs more recognizable, and possibly better support for outdated graphics cards/drivers.

Note: If you can’t start the game for whatever reason, please make a trac ticket and attach the file WZdebuginfo.txt located in your config directory so we can look at it.

Known Issues:

• See also: http://developer.wz2100.net/report/17

We need your help!

Well, in order to try the find the issues with the dialog message being wrong, and also the odd map errors, we have made a new build with more debug info available to try and help us track down what is going on.

Get it here:
windows: http://buildbot.wz2100.net/files/bugfix … 45903e.exe
linux: http://buildbot.wz2100.net/files/bugfix … 03e.tar.gz

Remember, everyone needs to have this version to play together.

We need logs from both the hosts & players!

Bug Reports:
This release probably contains bugs, please report them so they can be fixed. If you have trouble getting the game to work at all, consider a forum thread, you will probably get help faster that way.

See BugReporting for details, in short:

• Search the existing tickets for your problem, if the problem has already been fixed in git, the ticket will be closed.
• If there is an open one already, feel free to add more info to it.
• If there is no report yet, make a new ticket (one per issue).
• Be as detailed as possible in both summary and description, and either log in with your forum account or leave an email address so we can contact you if we need more information.
• The more information we have, the easier it is to fix problems (or the other way around, the harder it is for us to reproduce a problem, the less likely it is to get fixed), so include savegames/instructions to reproduce the bug, crashdumps, backtraces, screenshots for graphical problems… whatever is relevant.
• When you attach files to a ticket, please add each text/image file separately and uncompressed, so we can view them easily in trac (savegames can and should be zipped, they consist of name.gam, possibly name.es, and the files in the name/ folder).

About the 3.1 series:
The 3.1 series is the first based on the new netcode, with new terrain renderer and many other changes. The main target are systems capable of OpenGL 2.0 (with shaders), but at least the important things like team colours should work with OpenGL 1.4+ (some things might look strange though).

Configuration uses a new directory, if you want to use old mods/maps/savegames, you need to copy them (see FileLocations). Note that savegames from 2.3 and 3.0 are incompatible, only those from newer master snapshots might still work. For mods it depends on what they do, don’t expect old mods to work either.

2.3 is now officially unsupported.

Changes since the 2.3 series:
(Items marked with a * were already in the cancelled 3.0 series)

• New terrain renderer*
• Support for 3*/5*/6*/7*/9/10 player maps
• Targetting by line of sight, preventing shooting through terrain or too early*
• Gates in multiplayer games
• New deterministic netcode that makes sure the same things actually happen for all players, should be much more cheating-resistant
• New power system, power is deducted in full at the start, and when power is low, in the order things were queued
• Unit targeting is more intelligent, they won’t all shoot one target when one shot is sufficient
• Remove fog of war/mist options in favour of a combined explored/seen mode
• Stored templates. Automatically adds a unit design when all needed research is available
• Command line parameters now need a ‘=’ (which was optional before), e.g. –resolution=1400×1050
• Apple systems: Drop support for PPC and Mac OS X 10.4, add support for 64 bit Intel on Mac OS X 10.6+

Changelog for 3.1 beta11:
General

• Change: CB sensor also defends allies (313738ed23)
• Change: Structures with no cost to build (oil derricks) deconstruct when abandoned, taking one minute for 100% build progress (5ba90fec42)
• Change: Queue building on burning oil wells, trucks wait until the fire stops (353357b1b6)
• Fix: Pathfinding improvements (d11516795a, 57a56f21c3, f7c6e38aa8)
• Fix: Loading of rearm pads in savegames (#3518, eb3001bd2f)
• Fix: CB fire against mobile targets (#3529, 193eba2a9f)
• Fix: Weapon reloading (74d8086132)
• Fix: Correct unit count of commanders after loading a savegame (#3062, #3513, b3f3b089f1)
• Fix: Correct factory numbers after loading a savegame (#3384, 737b3d9d24)
• Fix: Show correct number of selected units (#3479, 22799c2b26)
• Fix: Player switching in debug mode (#3264, 4a2f7d4399)

Graphics

• Change: Support texture animations on structures (190c7a99cc, 2d0a089bad, b59fe8bdb5, 07a2a9671b, e636d41472, da433789c3)
• Change: New skybox for urban maps (#3534, aca180e0e8)
• Change: New cliff decals to make cliffs more visible (4a53a0e010)
• Fix: Work better with archaic OpenGL drivers, and add a workaround option to the menu (f54eb00d70, 8b8282cc1f, 0c03151e25, 96272ebf50, f5a7fd52c0, 7867b7abe2, 691df6a183)
• Fix: Placement of droid selection boxes and group/commander numbers (#3547, dd8025d108)

Multiplayer

• Change: Add oil barrels to map preview (5b07a7b755)
• Fix: Sensibly handle multiple maps with the same name (#3531, #3180, 15c04ab10f, 2056093027, 1461b3a5a8)
• Fix: Don’t crash when a player fails to join a game (bf2483cbd7, 7a0cd2eccf)
• Fix: Don’t freeze when a player leaves (#3410, 53ce0a7c38, e0939a0217)
• Fix: Don’t desync when a player leaves (35f301b1ba)
• Fix: More consistent ping display (bedd8704f2)
• Fix: When a player freezes, don’t block communication (e.g. chat) between the remaining ones (e14c39fb38)
• Fix: Show all players when a player has left (#3461, 00b1968184)
• Fix: Play "Artifact recovered" sound only to the player who actually found it (#3488, acaf4620e0)

Multiplayer balance (ea7b1912fd)

• Nerf flamers, mostly by decreasing incendiary damage of flamers, to compensate the fact that it is unaffected by armor type modifiers. Also decrease incendiary radius to prevent ground flamers from causing incendiary damage to walls.
  * Inferno: price 80->110, incendiary radius 64->48, incendiary damage 40->32
  * Thermite Cyborg: incendiary damage 38->32
  * Plasmite: price 80->130, incendiary radius 96->60, incendiary damage 63->50
  * incendiary Mortar: price 150->200, pit price 135->170, incendiary damage 30->22
  * incendiary Howitzer: price 250->300, emplacement price 325->400, incendiary damage 60->32
  * Thermite Bombs: incendiary damage 200->120
  * Plasmite Bombs: incendiary damage 200->140
• Nerf machineguns to compensate the ROF fix that used to decrease with game FPS.
  * HMG: damage 18->17
  * AG: fire pause 3->4, damage 20->19
  * TAG: price 100->120, fire pause 3->4, damage 30->28
  * AG Cyborg: fire pause 4->5, damage 20->18
  * MG: ROF upgrades 15%/30%/45% -> 17%/34%/50%.
  * Whirlwind: fire pause 3->4
• Slightly nerf rocket branch in comparison to cannons. Most importantly, nerf MRAs to compensate the fix in indirect fire mechanics.
  * Minipod: range 1152->1088
  * MRA: damage 34->29, splash damage 30->29, reload time 145->165
  * MC: research points 4800->3600
  * HPV: research points 7200->4800
• Make T3 missiles homing, making use of the new homing-indirect targeting class. Nerf Seraphs to compensate that fact.
  * Seraph: damage 120->110, splash 100->90, targeting class INDIRECT->HOMING-INDIRECT
  * Archangel: targeting class INDIRECT->HOMING-INDIRECT
• Make walls effective even after gates are invented.
  * Gates: price 25->75
• Make cannon fortresses cheaper, while nerfing range, in order to make them usable in low oil matchups and less effective in high-oil settings.
  * Cannon Fortress: price 1000->900, range 1792->1408

Translations

• Update: Polish (#1347, 9fc92b7d64)
• Update: French (#3483, #3512, badb8c05cb, 113796a9d6)
• Update: Hungarian (#3485, d74ebad6a3)
• Update: Turkish (#3486, a400fe055f)
• Update: Dutch (#3484, c46d2d56ea)

Changelog for older versions: https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100/blob/master/ChangeLog
Full list of changes since 3.1_beta10: https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100/compare/v3.1_beta10…v3.1_beta11

Download:
As usual, downloads can be found on our Download page or directly on Sourceforge.

(82 comments)

TORCS version 1.3.4-test2 is available, as patch against the 1.3.4-test1 and as all-in-one source package, get it here.

This release adds support for Valgrind runs, and has lots of memory leaks fixed (beware, for the ordinary users there were no significant leaks, but during development it is annoying if you get spammed even with practically irrelevant leaks by Valgrind, so for further development it makes sense to clean this up). TORCS has no “definitely lost blocks” (caused by TORCS) anymore in the ordinary running path, I reduced as well the “still reachable” count (the console mode is even there almost clean).

For details about running TORCS under Valgrind have a look at the README file. As usual, hit Read More below to review the full set of changes. Please test this release very hard, because it is easy to introduce errors when fixing memory leaks. After having done the boring stuff, I will start now working on the feature part of 1.3.4.

Enjoy, Bernhard.