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I think tooltips should display the most important info needed for the unit's primary purpose. All other info should go into the Library or unit viewer or whatever you guys call it. lol Same for the UI.

0 A.D. Development Report: May - August 2019 Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D. : Empires Ascendant, is happy to present its latest 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, feel free to visit our forums and join our active community, or just grab a task from our list of open tickets and get right to it. We are currently looking for Programmers, Animators and Artists. *names written in bold black are Wildfire Games staff and names written in bold grey are community members Programming wraitii has rewritten UnitMotion for better code and easier extensibility, with the goal in sight of introducing optimisations. He's optimised the Hierarchical Pathfinder, and is working on pathfinder threading. he has also worked on two patches, allowing triggers to give units modifiers, and making attack effects easily moddable so that, for example, a unit can both capture and damage in the same attack. Stan` Created a first version of the polycount guidelines and updated the art design document. He also added a glow material that also supports normal maps (basic_glow_norm). Stan` worked on many other fixes and improvements, such adding more animations to the atlas drop down list. vladislavbelov continues to work on the renderer among other things, improving the water's GLSL shader by increasing the reflection and refraction realism. He also added a tool to Atlas, which allows choosing water height by simply clicking on a part of the terrain with the desired height. Itms worked on our Continuous Integration system, and improved the developing environment for the programmers behind the scenes. He made the move from VS2013 to VS2015 as the default compiler on Windows, with help from Angen. He also upgraded SpiderMonkey to version 45. s0600204 increased the usage of pkg-config instead of hard-coding or library-specific programs, and added support for special characters (UTF8) in map names and descriptions. elexis rewrote source/gui/ to have a cleaner code structure and use C++11 features (most code still came from 2004), fixed a number of compiler warnings and some memory leaks. JoshuaJB fixed some memory leaks introduced by the implementation of STUN + XMPP ICE. historic_bruno has been working on MacOS build fixes. trompetin17 fixed an issue with atlasUI and added a "new" checkbox to the map settings tab. Imarok, FeXoR and bb_ have also been working on various smaller code fixes, improvements and reviews. Mate-86 has worked on a feature allowing entities to be affected by Status Effects, such as flaming projectiles igniting the target or poisoned arrows poisoning the target, which will cause the target to continue suffering damage for a while. Freagarach has replaced the gender-tag with phenotype, adding the ability to choose a random phenotype for a given template, allowing for different looks for the same template, as well as having male and female units from the same template with their correct respective voices. Freagarach, with assistance from wraitii, has also wrapped damage types in a Damage element in XML templates to make them generic. This places the damage types in a "Damage" container, just like the "Resources" are. Part of the effort towards having secondary attacks and a more easily moddable game. Angen made the AI aware of the existence of the new ranges and updated precompiled headers to improve build times. Krinkle fixed ESLint semicolon-related warnings and has been updating various wiki-pages on trac. minohaka helped testing and discovering regressions. Art Alexandermb‘s new fauna models and textures were committed by Stan`, including Marwari, Lusitano and Celtic horse breeds, new cattle textures, sanga variants, a new Maurya trader chariot with new animations and he animated the new Kushite hero chariot by Sundiata. He sorted his many new Celtic shields according to their specific civ, diffenrentiating the Gauls and Britons with the help of Genava55. Another big update were the many improvements to a variety of other shields, including the Greek aspis with new higher quality models and textures. And then there was the big Hellenic helmets update: Thracian, Phrygian, Boeotian, Chalcidean, Attic, Bryastovets, Corinthian and the Pilos helmet, with many variations. New meshes and textures for greaves were also committed. Many other smaller fixes and improvements were made, further enhancing the quality of his already Herculean art contributions, as wel as working on “the great animations re-export” together with Stan` (cleaning and committing) and assisted by fatherbushido and Enrique, in order to solve a flaw in many older meshes, while also taking the opportunity to improve on some of those animations and adding some new ones. Alexandermb has also been working on a number of formations like the testudo, phalanx and syntagma. wackyserious created many new Macedonian, Persian and Roman unit textures, a new Ptolemy IV hero texture and updated the Thracian Peltast, Naked Fanatic, Scythian Archer, Judean Slinger and Seleucid Pikeman and Cataphract. Stan` Made a new blacksmith for the Britons, improved the walls for the Gauls and added some detailing to their barracks. He unified foundation sizes and construction dust, added new scaffolds and updated structure templates accordingly. LordGood is continuing his prolific work in the flora department. Teak, dragon bamboo, strangler figs, bananas, areca palm, doum palm, Atlas cedar, holly oak, juniper tree and some new grasses are his latest additions. He has also been working on the Hellenization of the Ptolemies with a new tower and temple. Bigtiger has worked on some beautiful new flora as well, adding holm oaks, Euro birch, fir tree and a new fern to the collection. He also made new cliffs, new particle actors for snow and clouds and new temperate terrain textures. These new assets can be admired in three new excellent looking maps by Bigtiger himself: Farmland, Oceanside and Roadway. wowgetoffyourcellphone made new icons for the deer, boar, camel, horse, walrus and wildebeest. The Uffington White Horse he made back in 2016 will replace Stonehenge as the new wonder for the Britons. Other Gallaecio has been improving and correcting the English descriptions in-game. Stan` gave a presentation on 0 A.D. and it’s develoment process in Rennes for GrafikLabor 2019. user1 continues his work moderating smurf accounts in the multiplayer lobby. After discussions on the transliteration of Ancient Greek into English, the decission has been made to use the standards of the American Library Association and Library of Congress proposed by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates, who is, in discussion with Nescio, working to update all the Greek specific names, making them more accurate and consitent. Nescio has also been updating the English style guide, cleaned up the technology data files and applied some corrections to the new horse and cattle fauna templates (among others), added skirmishing templates to some structures and cleaned some obstruction and footprint sizes for others, improved a number of tool tips and improved and corrected some of the Roman and Persian specific names. Tom 0ad Has created five new informative videos, including “0AD Faction Overview 04 – Persians”, “0AD Faction Overview 05 – Kushites”, “The Ultimate Guide to Siege Weaopons”, “Top Three Tips to Improve. FAST” and “Essential Team Game Guide”. Likewise, ValihrAnt has made a number of enlightening videos, including “Unit Ranks & Promotions Explained”, “Top 5 Most Underrated Techs” and “Strategy Guide, Cavalry Rush Build Order”. HMS-Surprise, Unknown_Player, Feldfeld and psypherium organized the commentated Sunday Pro Games between April and June. This was a competetive community event, with Boudica ranking number 1! elexis, Stan` and wraitii have been updating an extensive list presenting all noticable changes to the end user in Alpha 24, since development started on December 26th, 2018. Changes include new 3D and 2D art, sound, maps, gameplay, user interface, renderer, pathfinder and more. Check it out at: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha24 Art Features A small selection of Alexandermb's new helmets with many variants: One of many new sets of shields. The Greek aspis for the Athenian faction. From top to bottom: basic, advanced, elite and champion. By Alexandermb: Macedonian, Carthaginian and Spartan units showing off their new equipment, by Alexandermb: New Macedonian unit textures by wackyserious: New unit textures for the Romans, Judean Slingers and Seleucid Cataphracts, by wackyserious: Some of the new temperate flora assets by Bigtiger: A lush display of some of LordGood's new tropical flora assets and cliffs: The new Oceanside map by Bigtiger. It's by the ocean... Mediterranean Islets, by LordGood: Hellenized Ptolemaic walls and temples on the banks of the Nile. Take note of the new palms and baobab trees. By LordGood:

So if a hero died, it spawns a tombstone of his armor and helmet? Sounds cool! It reminds me of 'Site of Famous Battle' feature in Total War games, where map is marked after a crushing victory/defeat in a battle. I don't know of any effect of the mark except my pride every time I look at it, though. It could work like Iberian monument, i.e. it will give attack bonus to the owner. I suggest making it capturable as well, so tombstone could either give 'pride' aura to the hero's enemies, or if captured back by the hero's own faction, give 'revenge' aura.

Yeah we need to rework the tooltips for sure. Adding some grid-like structure would definitely help a ton with readability, but the flexibility of the game's system make that difficult to get right. I think one thing we should do is take more vertical space, so that items are better separated, and then you can find the same info on the same vertical line. You might also note that HP is actually redundant with armour somewhat, since having more armour = having more HP for that attack type. One should find a few different cases for tooltips that are different and try and work something out that works OK for the general case.

I have come to think of current UI as an accepted reality, but seeing this, I know it could be improved a lot more. Simplifying it further with icons also works well with this. At least on the tooltip. We can have more liberty to explain what each icon means in the Detail (right click) window right? Just my two cents. Hack, Pierce, and Crush should be replaced with icons as well, I just don't know how the icons should look like.

Circle symbols from petroglyphs and adornments, a few ideas and mixture

Normally I agree, but reports such as these can have multiple uses, such as for PR purposes (dispelling the myth that "nothing" is getting done) as well as for morale purposes (bestowing recognition on those who have made contributions).

No. And they cost less.

i never felt happy with the corinthian_b2 i've did so i did some adjustments to the mesh and the texture: Right helmet will be the replacement of the left one.

Hello all. last week I was away and I was aiming to make the most of the break and use atlas, but it wasn't working. I took the time to think of an idea and hay presto the day I get back home is the day I work out how I can use atlas again. Yesterday I got to work and started to create. So here it is V1 of bog (working title) A resource rich map, with a swamp in the middle and a high ground ridge between the swamp and the up hill defensive start point witch is split Into 4 areas sheltered by mountains on each side and a pass through the mountains from the flanks. I'm happy with most of the texture paint around the swamp but not complete in base areas, I just got impatient and wanted to play. But could really do with some tips on texturing if anyone has any! I would love to know what you think of my map so far, and any tips or advice you have on it or map making using atlas. Is there a atlas hotkey manual I've just realised you can use shift and it will copy the texture you have already layed down.

good thats what i staged my screenshot on haha

Lion it's valknut not walnut one is a symbol for Odin the other is the nut from the walnut tree Enjoy the Choice

My mistake

Bornholm is Danish.

So for the little story, this is a petroglyph from Bornholm, Denmark Sweden. Dated from around 1500 BC, in the Nordic Bronze Age. It represents clearly both a solar wheel and a time wheel (like a watch). The symbol is appearing again but slightly modified during the Early Jastorf period (600/400 BC):

I can make the emblem with these.

Summary of the game : 4,3k infantry units, 1,3k cavalry units, 54 champions, 72 sieges units. A very long game in which one team took a significant lead in the "early" game. The course of the game was however slowly reversed through successions of small victories. Gamesettings: 4v4, 53 minutes of game time, random civilization, 200 pop. Map: Mainland (Normal size, autumn biome) T1 Players: Wendy(1705) - Sparta Unknown_Player(1644) - Mauryans MacWolf(1651) - Ptolemies randomid (∞) - Iberians T2 Players: PhyZic(1705) - Kushites faction02(1378) - Romans Edwarf (1465) - Persians aow - Mauryans commands.txt metadata.json

can we bring that in lobby announce? maybe ref to 0ad ticket, modding, forum and trac sides. i would appreciate to see that. talked already to @elexis, @ffm, @user1 (ack: @Hannibal_Barca). Maybe in conjunction with saying as to be supporter to the project/ or donator. I guess we need there a bigger announce and catch the people. Good day, f.

I was there in 1997... sigh.

Buildbot for Atlas I believe is broken because there is also problem with animations not playing and it has something to do with build process.

Well it's a pyrrhic victory then

It's an interesting idea, however that reference is a Tropaion: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tropaion

Thanks @Alexandermb! So it seems that the warships were financed and commanded by the upper class, boarded by middle class hoplites, and crewed by lower class. I guess the implementation could be that the number of warship is restricted by the amount of upper-class units. I just looked up on this. I think it's probably meant to be skeuophoros? I think there is a Serf technology implemented in a mod, probably Delenda Est. I might either make similar technology or make Helots have aura that increase Spartiates movement speed.

I tried playing a few games and must have randomly been the Ptolemies and Seleucids. Seems odd chances that I'd play as only them out of about 5 games lol.

Phase 2 usually allows you to build more than 1. Ptolemies and Seleucids have the real limit of 1. They have the Military Colonies as substitute.

So, the Alpha 23 displays this: And the proposal (the one I voted for at least) looks like this: But whatever your decision is, I'm gonna show how OCD I am regarding this: Now, I don't know how Capture Rate, Attack Rate, Movement Speed, and Loot will fit into that, but that's just my suggestion.

haven't been considered adding a tombstone everytime a hero dies using his helmet and shield now that we have proper visual atractive helmets. Something like this: Maybe even give glory to those mods using that resource everytime is gathered.

Hi all, so ive just done a quick re-texture on the starting areas on the first map on this thread. As far as I know these 2 files are all you need to download right? So here it is Bog Pit v1. Bog Pit.pmpBog Pit.xml Feel free to download and play or download and mess about with on scenario editor if you wish. If you have any feedback or make any alterations please let me known and put the file on this thread so I can enjoy your remake.

Reminds me so much of the original Age Of Empires campaign with the siege of Syracuse. Mirror tower, anyone?

Currently in the process of turning a hight map from the Richat structure into the lost city of Atlantis. I think I have rushed putting units in there as I was abit bored today and decided to assemble the royal guard. it spoils the pics abit but I'm not the best at getting great looking screen shots. In the completed area I have huge temples, a few military guard points and the royal quarters witch is behind the walls along the right hand side of the picture. Screenshot 2019-09-12 at 23.03.22.jp2

Good lord, I don't know why I keep getting names wrong... Thanks! Depending on the amount of development, we could write one every month, or every 2 months. I'll send you a copy for proofreading if you're interested.

Perhaps the file sizes are too large. Your screenshots are in PNG format which is really heavy (1.8 mb for one of the previous ones you shared). For the purpose of a forum post, I'd suggest simply opening the images in Photoshop and saving them in JPEG format with quality setting 8. It will reduce the file size by a factor of 3 to 10, with minimal artifacting which is only noticeable when you're a graphics person that zooms in to look at the pixels. On my end, uploading images bigger than 5mb to the forum is really difficult. I try to keep every image under about 1mb in size. Then I never have problems. Good luck on the map by the way, it looks promising.

I have been observing for some time now that some rulers use an elephant head on Hellenistic coins, almost anything on these coins is taken as a helmet. elephant scalp helmet,Uhu? Can be bronze or iron like Alexander Lion.

Day 7 (the remaining half) and 8 Spent the time reviewing patches (pathfinder optimisation, rally point lines, object selection, bartering, and probably a few other things). (I've been pretty slow since I find it hard to concentrate on reviewing for long, and also I've been clearing out my backlog of tickets and SVN updates etc to read and respond to, and other distractions.) I don't like reviewing patches, but I don't like not reviewing patches . But I do like that people write patches, since it's valuable to grow the game's developer community. So I get quite conflicted... Maybe it'll help if I try explaining how I see things. Firstly, I think code quality is important to maintain. There are lots of different ways of measuring the value of code: features, bugs, performance, number of lines, readability, maintainability, cleverness, etc. The most critical measure is features - we want to write an RTS game, and if we haven't implemented the features necessary for an RTS game then we've failed. Patches that add or improve features are therefore good. The other external measures that are visible to players are bugs and performance - if either is particularly bad, then people won't have fun playing the game. The remaining measures are internal to the code and totally irrelevant to players. But all of these measures are interlinked. More features means more code, and more bugs and worse performance. Performance optimisations hurt readability and maintainability. Clever code might implement the feature with less code but be harder to read and maintain (you have to understand the cleverness before fixing bugs in it); non-clever code might be very verbose which makes it hard to read (it's easy to get lost somewhere in the middle). When code is unmaintainable, its bugs and performance problems will take a lot of effort to fix. And most features have to interact with each other, so if one feature's code is buggy or unreadable then it becomes much harder to add new features that have to interact with it. That means that when a patch adds useful features, I think we shouldn't automatically accept it, even though it'll make the game better in the short term - we need to balance that with all the other quality measures else it will cause difficulties in the longer term. In the worst case, problems in the code can seem too hard to fix and cause progress to grind to a halt. (I believe that's what happened with our pre-2009 gameplay code; the only way to make major progress was to throw it all out and start again, which was very painful.) So that's why I think it's important to spend effort on carefully reviewing patches, even if they're clearly solving a valid problem, to provide a second opinion on whether they're solving the problem in a sufficiently good-quality way and identify changes that would improve the solution. That applies especially to new contributors, who are less familiar with the existing code and conventions and typically need to rely more on the second opinion of a more experienced developer, but I think it's also worth having people read and comment on changes implemented by everyone else (possibly after they're committed to SVN) so nobody can get away with doing anything too crazy. The difficulty is that reviewing can take a lot of effort, since you've got to understand the problem, and the patch's solution, and potential alternative solutions, and explain it all clearly to the original author so they can fix it. Often that takes more effort than just solving the problem yourself, and personally I find it pretty tedious and unenjoyable, but the hope is that the review comments will be something the original author can learn from and apply to any subsequent work they do. (And hopefully the comments will really be about improving code quality, not just about applying the reviewer's insignificant personal style preferences - I think I fall into that trap too much ). (The other trap is to focus too much on the internal quality measures as a goal in themselves, when they're not what really matters. The code only needs to be maintainable enough that we can finish the game with it, and maybe do some mods or a sequel etc - any extra effort put into quality will just be wasted. I think I fall into that trap too.) Anyway, that's just my opinion