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So, turns out 0AD is among the most popular online games played by North Korean Elites.... Like, fo' real... https://www.recordedfuture.com/north-korea-internet-behavior/ ... On a completely unrelated note, how about a Korean faction for Millennium AD?

Best not disappoint the Great Leader! Of course, I just didn't want the North Korean leadership to feel left out... Kim, if you're reading this, a Korean civ is on the shortlist By the way, this may well explain that weird Korean spam in the forums about casino's and gambling, that pops up every so often... Isn't there a MP-profile called Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-il?? Who knows, maybe he's actually... ... ...

@Skhorn you may enjoy this: Note: i placed manually the semi donut building behind the civ center they are two different buildings.

I was wondering about the official team statement about the game design. In general, it is fair to say that no one is entirely content with the current design of the game. Everyone obviously has their own idea of how it could be done; for some it is just the addition of a feature or civilisation, yet for others, myself included, they would like to see a more coherent game design present, streamlining the game and making the general vision of the game more original as opposed to the current scope, which seems to be Age of Empires + [placename]. I’m not really trying to give answers for what that should be; I have offered my view already in a number of ways, and others, having ideas which are oftentimes better thought out than my own have made their own proposals. In general though, I have heard no official team response from the ‘reformers.’ Obviously it is difficult to get a consensus on how to change the game, and I am not asking for anything entirely final. Rather, I just want to know what some of the 0 A.D. team members currently think about the issues and their thoughts on the current team’s stance; don’t feel like you have to be codifying some canon statement of the official opinion; I would just like a measure of transparency. To clarify, I have a number of points that tend toward most every discussion: Battalions/combat system: What are the thoughts regarding this feature? Obviously it decreases the possibility of totally microing everything, but the way it could make a much more organic combat system function is alluring. Citizen Soldiers: Some love them; some don’t; others prefer a middle-ground stance. This remains a pretty central part of the original vision of 0 A.D., but is it worth keeping in its current state or in any way at all? Also, is there currently much of an intention to add slaves, who in many cases were the basis of manual labour? Phases: While it makes it possible to easily distinguish the early from mid from late-game, some would find that it is an outdated formula that doesn’t align well with the current design of 0 A.D. Are there plans to make phases more decisive or not exist at all? Clarity of Roles of Resources: Food, wood, stone, and metal, the sacred combination of resources. Is there any intention to potentially make the resources have more specialised purposes to make the game more intuitive or rather attempt to work for a more realistic ideal for how prices function? Ambush Mechanics: As is, there are plans for this to be depicted in some limited way, but how exactly? Is line-of-sight going to be further reduced to allow for players to put more emphasis on having their cavalry screen the area? Is line-of-sight going to become more dynamic like in moba games or Company of Heroes 2 so that obstructions can be places to hide behind? Civilisation Design: Currently there is a general sameness to the way civilisations play despite definite differences in aesthetics. What plans exist for fleshing out the early, mid, and late-game strategies available to each? Is anyone currently working on doing that?

No, thank you. lol The fighting and sniping would be unbearable. Plus, a lot of the other modders already disagree with some of the main changes made in DE. Best to just have separate mods doing their own thing, and taking good ideas from each other when desired. While core game tries to make cool things possible. I think there should be various types of economic systems. A. AOE-style: Villagers build and gather, while Soldiers do nothing but fight. B. 0 A.D.-style: Citizen-soldiers and Females, exactly as the core game is now. C. Slave-based/DE style: You have Citizens, Slaves, and Soldiers. D. Any combo of above, perhaps have dedicated Citizen units, but also Citizen-Soldiers. Each culture can have any of the above, based on what makes sense historically. For instance, for Imperial Romans and Early Byzantines, you'd probably use an AOE-style system because the soldiers were all professionals, but add Slaves as a cheap gatherer. Spartans would use some hybrid system, with Female Citizens being your "Citizen" unit and Helots being the "Slave" unit, with your trash soldiers also being builders and Spartiate units being your dedicated fighters. Celtic civs could use some kind of peasantry system that takes ideas from all of the above. Iberians could use the classic 0 A.D. citizen-soldier paradigm.

My honest guess is that they will rely on mods to carry the gameplay forward. In an open source project like this, if you get someone on the core team with a strong vision for the game there will be a half-dozen others to tell him/her why it shouldn't be that way. That's why, IMHO, there has been no major gameplay change in years once the "base" gameplay features were put into place [ the work @elexis has done making cool and interesting scenario-based random maps notwithstanding; his stuff works within the framework of the existing core gameplay though ]. So, the best course of action would be for the core team to just make all the things you mention possible and let mods run with them. The core game doesn't have to have all that stuff, but if the engine can handle the kinds of features asked for by the major modders like the Council of Modders guys or suggested in the more fleshed out gameplay proposals [see ] then you have the basis for some cool stuff down the road.

After that OSX bug, we'll repackage, test again and finish the trailer and release announcement. -__-

Add nomadic to this system. and semi nomadic (immigrants).

lol, yeah, most units rush after anything that crosses their vision range like berserkers. That's kind of a different discussion, stances. Catapult behavior was kind of parallel to but not exactly like other units.

I think they're set to hold pos by default, and if not then they should be. We need real attack move and we need better defaults for unit stances. The current default unit stance is "suicide".

I think he has a 4K resolution screen... Why else would he need binoculars?

Have a look at the Release Process Draft. Feels like I am also pressing F5 too often, cause I cannot wait anymore. ;-) Already thought about testing the Release Candidate (RC) from releases.wildfire.com.

It's all explained on the Creative Commons site: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

People often complain about performance issues regarding trees, but in reality there are only a few tree models which are the prime offenders in causing performance problems. After investigating this I found that a few of the tree types use models which have excessively high poly counts that are many times higher than other trees (5x or more), and even higher than character models and buildings, and can easily lead to several million model triangles being rendered per frame. I'm listing them in relative order of ubiquitousness. 1. Cretan Date Palm (all variations). It uses 8 quads per leaf, while the older palms use only 4 quads per leaf, and also uses a much larger number of leaves than the older palms. I can understand the 'dense leaf whorl' effect that the original artist was trying to convey, but even then the number of leaves is higher than is strictly necessary. The models use over 2k triangles on average (according to how render stats counts them) and 6k for the cluster version, and the tri counts need to be cut by more than half. Whole maps get covered in these, and palm_tropical_tall also uses the same models. 2. Aleppo Pines. These models look great but they also use ~2k tris each on average, and are major contributor to performance issues. Preferably the triangle count should be cut by more than half for all aleppo pine models. The source of the excessive poly count is probably the leaf planes, although tbh I have no idea how it manages to be that much higher than other similar trees. It seems like it should only need 400-500. Used in a lot of maps, often in large numbers. 3. Palm Tropical. Very high poly, also very ugly so never gets used. Probably needs an overhaul. I think the concept is unique though, and deserves attention. 5. Fig. Uses ~1400 triangles and I have no idea where they're hiding. It doesn't seem to use a lot of leaf planes, so I suspect the trunk is just extra-high poly. Similar looking baobabs use only ~500 triangles. 600 would be an acceptable target. 6. New oaks. I'm not sure if I've ever seen them used, but they're all ~2k tris each. Blender isn't my forte but this is pretty important for overall performance. If someone who knows what they're doing could look into this it'd be greatly appreciated.

It's come to my attention that there was an approved plan for dropping FFP and ARB shader support some 6 years ago, but the dev that was working on it left so it never got done, and we've been arguing about it on and off ever since. According to a survey taken some 3 years ago or so over 95% of our users have support for at least openGL 2.1 (shader version 120) and more than 45% have support for openGL 3.3 or newer, while a good chunk support 3.0 or 3.1 as well. So this is what I propose: - We remove all traces that FFP ever existed, from config, shader effects, and anything in the codebase relating to those things. - We remove all traces that ARB shaders ever existed. There is basically no one using them and no one working on them. The legacy support is cluttering up the codebase and making it more difficult to support newer and more useful things. Additionally, I propose we add support for: - Automatically detecting hardware GL version to support whatever 3.0/3.1/3.3/4.x features the user's hardware allows (and that we can find good use for). - Allowing for choosing different GLSL shader versions automatically based on GL version support. - Creating a config/command line option for spoofing older GL versions for testing purposes, so it's possible for devs to manually choose which shader versions will be loaded. - And of course support for draw-call reducing features from GL3.1-3.3, based on whatever the user's hardware supports. Since some things have lower version requirements than others it makes sense to allow such things to be enabled incrementally so users can get as much as their hardware can provide. Finally, I think we should establish shader version 120 as the standard for legacy OpenGL 2.x support, since basically no users have GL 2.0 graphics cards and virtually everyone has support for 2.1. GLSL version 120 supports a couple of very convenient features that allow for efficient shaders, at least as far as what 2.x supports in terms of performance. Not every shader needs to be declared as #version 120 (if it doesn't matter then who cares), but it should at least be made allowable without question wherever it's needed. Note that a lot of shaders will likely remain as GL2.x simply because there's no benefit to upgrading them. The water shader and postproc shader(s) and even the terrain shader are good examples. At the moment the only shaders that I'm aware of that would benefit from GL3.x are model_common and the particle shader, to support drawinstanced and soft particles.

Would be cool to have these buildings for the Han. Right now DE gives them the Mauryan versions, but they look out of place.

I was about to be surprised, but then I remembered that North Korea has RedStarOS as their official OS.

Byza dock

Mogadishu wasn't exactly a good experience for "capitalism"... And Pyongyang ain't no Mogadishu... Kim would be like:

Yeah, a nomadic system too. So, then you have these 4 styles of play to choose from, and one style can be used for each civ. Some are obvious choices, others you have to make compromises to fit a game environment. AOE style Villagers/Soldiers Civs with "professional" armies Empires Ascendant style Citizen-Soldiers/Female Citizens Delenda Est style Slaves/Citizens/Soldiers Slaves only gather, trained at the dropsites after building a Market Citizens suck at gathering, but are good builders which can build civic and economic buildings Soldiers can't gather, but can build military buildings Nomadic style "Egalitarian" : Use the Empires Ascendant style, but Female Citizens are also Citizen-Soldiers too Slaves bought at the Market Ranching/Corral bonuses and Looting bonuses Dropsites are Ox Carts Cheap, weak, packable buildings No territory effects Any of the above can be tweaked, streamlined, made more complicated, or hybridized based on the civ. So, Imperial Romans might use AOE-style, but add Slaves as cheap gatherers, a hybrid style. Or they could use the Delenda Est method, where the soldiers can also build. Spartans can use the Empires Ascendant style, but add Helot Slaves. Iberians could be strict Empires Ascendant style. Scythians and Xiongnu would have the Nomadic style, but maybe the CC of one does cast a territory effect for some kind of bonus, while the other's does not. Lots of possibilities here.

0 A.D o muerte

And open source they can mod the game for their necessities .

So you're telling me that 0AD is completely FREE? And Open-Source???

Likely just because the game is free.

You can use the wireframe mode to see actual triangles, if you didn't find it yet. I think the current version of tries shouldn't be removed, but can be used as LOD0. At least for close cinematics our tries (and not only tries ) aren't ready, they need higher details and textures.

My guess is that it's actually 32 triangles per leaf (8 quads x 2 triangles each x 2 for back facing surfaces), rendered twice for opaque and blend passes. When you add in shadows they get rendered a total of 3 times, which I wasn't counting in the 2000+ figure (I only had the tree on the cursor for the test, so it wasn't casting shadows). One way or another that's still a lot of triangles per frame.

We need gameplay leader, for me the best is @wowgetoffyourcellphone using some of DE philosophy and testing in Council of Modders mods. I don't want be a clone of aoe... even Empires Apart was worried about that. slave system can useful to differentiate factions.

There's got to be something else going on here with the model or the render stats counter. 2000 triangles would mean each frond would have 60+ triangles if you had 30 fronds per tree.

blacksmith whitout wall & barracks together (see the lower lines of the barracks how is dark and then brighter again thats not related to AO, is because of the parallax and whitout parallax it looks simple and ugly:

Hmm, it would be nice if these guys got their own Workshop/Range/Stable/Elephant Stables models. They use Egyptian models for now, which don't look bad, but they use Hellenistic/Ptolemaic props like shields and such that don't fit the Kushites.

Nevermind, it wasn't too late. lol, but too late now...

the text could show properly with some language code software like "local emulator" at first, but it not work now?

I think the barracks and the blacksmith seems weird, although you could leave those and make another variation, specially the blacksmith could be placed near walls. But on regular city buildings does not seem to fit, what if you remove the walls and add more random blacksmith props?

Maybe it's not... So I just put on my tinfoil hat and realized, if messages during MP matches aren't saved in any way, and it's peer-to-peer and all, doesn't it mean that it could be used as some kind of low-key encrypted messaging system...?

It should probably be checked whether there are any restrictions placed on assets used in the Unity engine, and whether or not any such restrictions are compatible with the 0 A.D. license. And of course what your goals are. If you're just creating a project for yourself/a school project or similar there shouldn't be much to worry about, if something that is to be released for free probably not very much either. However, if it is going to be sold/combined with other assets some more caution is needed. Actually especially in the latter, as the CC-BY-SA license requires that the same license that is on the 0 A.D. assets applies to assets made with them, which might not work if you e.g. combine a 0 A.D. unit with a helmet found under another license. Exactly where to draw the line is a bit difficult though, so to make it easier for you it's best to either just use content that has a CC-BY-SA license (possibly combined with content you create yourself) or to only use content with other licenses.

A possibility for part II I myself have wanted to mess up with Sengoku period unit textures for a Japanese faction. But at the moment we still have a lot to complete.

Yes but you need give us credits properly.

Are you sure, that you're talking about C++? (It seems true for C#, no?) struct and class are the same except only one case: default members/methods and base access. Inheritance it's the same. Struct are used as PODs, but they can have inheritance, virtual methods, explicit ctors and other "class things". Compiler optimizes classes and structs equally. If there're virtual methods (vtable costs, but last time not so big as earlier) and/or inheritances, it'd be a harder work for compiler for both. I'm not sure, that I'm understanding you correctly. Structs are used as PODs. Subtypes are usually needed to have a shorter name, do not create an additional useless class file for a small struct and logically splited types. Compare: class TextureManager { public: struct InitParams { ... }; TextureManager(const InitParams&); }; And yours: struct TextureManagerInitParams { ... }; class TextureManager { public: TextureManager(const TextureManagerInitParams&); }; For me it's useless to make them globally visible.

Um, for Sins of a Solar Empire, it is nearly impossible to rush, especially if you choose anything besides TEC Rebels (since you don't care for pirates), or Vasari Loyalists (because they have general buffs for all ships). I mean, Sins is a fairly slow game, even slower than 0 AD because of the fact that you need to first fight over every planet that you need to colonise (or destroy ships that can bombard the surface). 0 AD also doesn't reward turtling that much because of the way resources and territory are handled. If you turtle too much, then your enemies are going to easily be able to siege you out some way because of the dynamic economy pulling you down. You need to kind of "rush" to get that territory like in other strategy games.

I disagree completely. Early cavalry raids are absolutely devastating. Very hard ai opponents quickly become trivial when you focus on offense from the beginning. I can easily win in under twenty minutes 1v1 vs the hardest ai, often before the 15 or even ten minute mark, and I'm not even especially good. It's to the point that I'll often purposely play defensively just to challenge myself. I suggest you build nothing but cavalry until you reach 20 population. Have them hunt until you do. Then start raiding the enemy, focusing on their women. You now have a ton of food from hunting and enough wood to start building houses. Spam women and boom your economy while devastating your enemy. It's totally op unless you have multiple opponents.

I can't wait to hear them in game.

@Djedptahiuefankh, once again, thank you! Very helpful stuff! Mmmm, I should read this... Incredibly interesting... I mixed in a little Meroitic: our timeframe is 500 BC - 1 BC, so late Napatan and early to mid Meroitic. This is the Meroitic: Bulahau: Blemmye/Beja Noba, from the Meroitic Nob. They are distantly related to the modern day Nuba people, and ancestral to modern Nubians. Frenemies of Kush. Established the Kingdom of Nobatia (Greek Νοβαδἰα), northern Nubia, during/after the collapse of Meroë Abore is the Meroitic term for elephant, as opposed to the Egyptian Abu. Amnirense qore li kdwe li (Amanirenas, qore and kandake) Qore ‘Irk.‘Imn (King Arakamani) I sourced almost the entire list from the Fontes Historiae Nubiorum Volume IV: https://digitalt.uib.no/handle/1956.2/3083#preview , which contains word lists from the "textual sources for the history of the Middle Nile Region between the eighth century BC and the sixth century AD". It's mostly late Egyptian, Napatan and a little Meroitic. Maybe you've noticed that many unit names are composite terms I put together. If you can come up with better/more accurate or appropriate terms, feel free to suggest some. I had difficulties for terms like spearman, pikeman, swordsman. I simply called the pikemen si3wrd (mutilators), for example. Merchant ship became D3y sbt (river-boat of exange), which is a little crude perhaps. Swordsman became knw hps (khopesh soldier), even though they carry a straight short-sword and not a khopesh... For the battle cry I was thinking something along the lines of rh.n=k ‘Imn p3 ntr (i)wd n "For you (are about to) know (what it means that) Amûn is the god who has sent us!" Or something simpler/shorter, like: H3k : capture, plunder H3t : advance Sm3, sm3n : slaughter, massacre, blood bath, kill, slay Knkn : fight Hd, ph : attack Hdb : kill 3’bt : suppression ‘h3 : battle, war, attack

disaggre.