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I think I've got it cleaned up well enough now, and finally got SVN set up to make a diff. Ticket here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3781

I'll keep on trying to get this done. I just have to battle with my day job. I guess I can give a little backstory. I guess first I'll blurb about the different races. The Zevestivan They are a bunch of reptilian nomads who live on a barren desert planet. Some time in the distant past they had an empire that spanned the stars, but their civilization collapsed on itself. What's left on this sand world had to restart in a dark age of lost technology. They've recently discovered a means to travel between worlds again and have set out to find their true world of origin. The V.R.A. A race of genocidal expansionist machines. The original creators made them to be like living beings in every way. Over time it seems their creators abandoned them or were destroyed. Left without guidance, the VRA devolved and rid themselves of emotional components to survive in space. Now they go from world to world, stripping them bare before moving unto the next. The Sov A race of bureaucratic, capitalist insectoids. They control an extremely vast commercial empire spread across multiple galaxies and billions of worlds. The have created a massive army of automated droids as their military. The Mylock The Mylock, like the VRA, are a race of created machines. They are much more evolved and were created to travel into and explore hyper-dimensions. As such individual Mylocks are nano machines, with billions of them connecting to form larger forms. The Ekoset The Ekoset are massive, cybernetic flora. They travel from world to world, terraforming them into greenhouse wastelands. They possess extremely advanced, self sufficient technology and energy shielding. The Jevorons The Jevorons are hyper-dimensional entities. While certainly conscious and sentient, it's unknown if they really classify as a life form. They inhabit the fourth dimensional crystalline latice that weaves its way through the universe like a skeleton, entering our three dimensional space to explore and guide other races into harmony. Aabtani Aabtani is Jevoron who broke away from its people over a disagreement of purpose. Instead of living in harmony with the Crystalline Lattice, Aabtani discovered a way to control and manipulate the hyper-dimensional structure as a weapon, creating a warped army that houses its will. Aabtani now spreads across the universe with the intent of usurping the Jevoron's dominance of space.

I would say it's all of the above We don't have enough people with motivation to focus on the design, and getting too much into details when it comes to balance and the finer points of the design doesn't make sense. We would certainly like for things to be differently, but this is the situation as it is right now and it wouldn't help if we tried to shut our eyes to reality. That said, there are some in-team discussions about some of the remaining big features, but at least some of them are depending on whether or not team members are able to create working prototypes of them for it to be worth mentioning.

Relax! At this time there's not a real effort regarding gameplay. Altough a lot could be done, I think that right now Devs are focusing in finishing the features, don't know if because lack of manpower, motivation or because it doesn't have sense to make a lot of effort when some features are missing. (Some words about gameplays and balancing from the devs would be nice, and would clarify things about how they want to work that stuff) Later, probably when Beta, I think that balancing, gameplay and all stuff will be relevant one more time. At first, they have a game designed, but when you have to make real the thinks on the paper, everything change. Also, reading the DD and some open tickets, I think that you can see thath some of the first ideas of the game were a lot of features without a cohesive design. Later, when you can play, you can decide what add, simplify or remove. Sometimes you have a lot of ideas, but makes things a lot of complex. Sometimes you add a lot of things that nobody uses. BTW, if right now you can play 0 a.d, (and I think that it's funny enough!) it's more to test the engine than for the real gameplay, and solve the bugs and make things work.

I love the idea! But doesnt the Juggernaut or whatever uts called, (really big boat) count as a second champ. The Ptolomies are designed to be an "average" infantry faction. But if the forum vets want to ignore that, then great! I personally think the Ptolomies are sub-average infantry, and this would help.

There is a patch that will do just that. It needs to be cleaned up before it ends up in the game but it's planned. It just hasn't been settled yet.

Yup, you're entirely right. I tried some stuffs to fix that but it just added more problems. I'm quite interested in your patch, looks good. Re normal maps: there are no visual artifacts. There's only a visual "issue" that you see flat reflections instead of seeing what you should see (a mix of water color and sky). Check out this picture, we see very little reflection in the distance, as the water isn't flat. Compare with this. And in-game in the attached picture. It only ever happens at low angles, but it looks very bad on cinematic shots.

This was my source regarding FBOs: http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_fbo.html Updating to 4.0 would alienate more than half of all players, and if it's optional then it shouldn't interfere with the rest of the code anyway. Eventually I'll look through his code and see what he's actually trying to do and how that could best fit in. I'm not really to the point where it's relevant yet anyway though. That's what deferred shading does basically. First all objects are rendered onto a scene texture without lighting, and then all of the lighting calculations are done on the scene texture rather than per-object. Basically the entire scene becomes one object when fragment shading, which reduces the number of fragments that need to be produced. The "if" I was talking about was actually the branch for the red-water issue, which is an "if" as opposed to an "#if". That's actually only supported by GL3.1 or newer, which I didn't notice before, but that's probably the only thing in the entire shader which isn't 2.0 compatible. TBH I'm not even sure why that compiles when the shader version is set to 110 and dynamic conditionals require version 140.

I see what you mean about normal maps now. That would indeed be a limitation of normal maps since the water surface technically remains flat, but the reason I removed the comment is simply because I've never seen any visually disturbing artifacts as a result of that. It might occur on huge maps, but I've never actually seen any of those, either (not that I've seen every map for that matter). The linear fresnel thing did indeed include reasoning, but I always found it to be visually disturbing. On the other hand I do see what you mean, since the water surface becomes invisible without any reflections at all (and irl the effective view angle would be distorted by lens effects). A more 'correct' solution would be to utilize a bias term in the fresnel approximation, which is what I ended up doing. The fresnel function I'm using currently looks like this: fresnel = clamp(((pow(1.1 - ndotv, 3.0)) * 1.5), 0.2, 1.0); where 3 is the power, 1.5 is the scale and 0.2 is applied as a bias through clamp. It ends up looking like this: Actually I do have a relevant question. For some reason fish display 'ghost refractions' that aren't fully opaque even though the fish are. You can see it especially in the bottom right of this screenshot: I think that's probably the culprit of 'off-colored-fish' issues that people have reported, but I'm not sure why it only happens for fish and not terrain. EDIT: Nevermind, the discoloration is a problem with depth, and I'm not sure how to fix that properly. Basically it uses the depth of the fish but the texture of something else due to the displacement.

The Undying Nephalim: I really like your work; keep it up. I think it's awesome that people use the Pyrogenesis engine for creating RTS games. :-) Plus I could use a good sci-fi RTS game personally. ;-)

The time frame for 0ad (part one) is 500 BC to 1AD, (second part 1 AD to 500 AD). Further it's 0ad, so a period which does not exist. Because of this anything in the period of 500 BC to 500 AD can be in game.

I say before, his acts needs a punishment

gameboy, please stop harassing people, that doesn't make things easier to program... Plus that makes us all uncomfortable when you target newcomers who already do their best and who don't know you yet.

Well, I finished up all the units for my second civilization: Here's a bit of general information about them: