Flamadeck

I know. Have you seen how other formats are structuring their data? It's much worse. Some things so much worse. Also the Godot open source game engine supports glTF2 natively. Do not fear Blender add-ons dude! Blender add-ons are necessary to go from noob to pro! Many pros use them to enhance, accelerate and improve their workflow and artistic output.

Did you not read the post (considering the fast response that might be true you dirty meme spammer) before writing your reply? GlTF 2 stands head and shoulders above the other formats in terms of specification, test cases, clearness, speed and features. There is already a Blender exporter and glTF 2.0 supports specifying an external file for the big data, in binary format.

Recently Godot posted an interesting post detailing the state of standard asset exchange formats for game engines. Their post goes over previous and even previous version of glTF citing all kinds of problems, from ambiguity defects, crappy libraries to crappy coordinate conventions and even missing functionality for common assets in game engines. The post conclusion comes with a very unambiguous message: Why we should all support glTF 2.0 as THE standard asset exchange format for game engines https://godotengine.org/article/we-should-all-use-gltf-20-export-3d-assets-game-engines Would the glTF 2.0 format be interesting for the 0 A.D. developers to implement? A standard asset exchange format for game engines with a rich feature set and good documentation, tests, implementation and software ecosystem support would be great for asset developers and modders. What does everyone think about glTF 2.0? Is it an interesting format to support or not? Reply and discuss in this thread. Links: https://www.khronos.org/gltf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlTF https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specification/2.0/README.md https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Sample-Models https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-Exporter

SDL 2.0 has been officially released. The game 0ad can now be adapted for it because the api is stable enough. Offers many new features a few important ones are support for OpenGL 3.0 and higher, support for OpenGL ES, better keyboard support(scancodes vs keycodes, etc), Proper unicode inputand Lots of old annoyances from 1.2 are gone. Announcement on forums.libsdl.org http://forums.libsdl...opic.php?t=9375 Adopting the new release can improve 0ad, make it more maintainable, etc.

I meant things like walls that consist of multiple sections, by uncovering a piece of the wall you don't want that the whole wall suddenly becomes visible, especially if it's a very long wall. Drawing the range overlays, with modern OpenGL features can actually be done mostly, completely on the GPU. Also calculating the arrow paths can also done this way using OpenCL on the GPU. (OpenCL works on CPU and GPU) Modern GPU's have massive parallelism that you can exploit not only for graphics but for physics and other things too. The calculation of the arrows path and physical stuff is a good example of a parallelizable workload that you can run very well on the GPU.

@sanderd17 Thanks! Didn't know the tools where this developped already (since 0 A.D. is still in alpha). Don't mind that the models are not very detailed and the animations not realistic enough. Don't really care about graphics. Use to play games with much less detailed graphics than this.

@FeXoR Please read my post a bit better than this. By aiming for better GPU's we can push more calculations on the GPU, this allows for doing more non-graphical interesting things with our computational budget on the CPU (and GPU too, see instancing). When I said computational-intense features I meant all kinds of things, including AI and physics. The whole idea on setting minimum here is to be able to do more with the GPU, not necessarily fancy graphics. Mostly to make sure we don't have to use the CPU for all kinds of things, which would make 0 A.D. unplayable. Where you say it's okay to drop support, you say other resources. What kind would that be? We're talking about a computer game here where calculation power and memory are almost the only resources that matter. You make the assumption that a weak graphics card can produce nice graphics but the cutoff point would be where there is unnecessary fancy features. This is not true! A weak graphics card or cpu or too little ram means you won't be able to run 0 A.D. on low detail anyway.

In Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War there is a First Person Hero mode. The computergame Savage had another concept with combining RTS and FPS/RPG. Is it possible to implement a mod that gives this? Minimum is: - Camera perspective: being able to have a first person/third person perspective similar to FPS games - Being able to walk, move using usual buttons similar to FPS games. - Being able to do attacks on enemies using weapons similar to FPS games. Is the game engine capable of supporting this kind of mod? Would supporting it be requiring no, a little, or complete redevelopment of the game engine? Camera perspective looks like a sufficient general way would be convenient for scripted scenario's in campaing stories. Being able to easily record scripted scenario's for campaign stories would benefit from walking instructions. The third, don't know right now, maybe record scripted scenario's for campaign stories? Graphics don't really matter. Mostly being able to do the game mechanics the way just explained.

@sanderd17 What if you would go a different way. Go the other way. Make buildings visible dependent on what tiles are visible! With of course making only the building, or part of the building visible depending on the tiles visible. Should solve most issues to to tackle the problem this way.

Since the calculation of one arrow does not really depend upon another you could parallelize it. Let it run on the GPU using OpenCL. Alternatively you could also implement the equation as an animation, have archers two poses 1 for max length and one for higher, and do other things to limit the number of operations.

Short: The old fixed-function pipeline should have been removed already! The oldest graphic card I use is an ATI radeon X1600 supporting OpenGL 2.1. (Which will be replaced this year with a computer that has an ATI radeon HD7770 supporting OpenGL 4.3) Very old hardware in this case is more like approaching 15 years. The percentage of people not being able to play is very small. It will help create a good game and weed out very old graphic cards, setups that would hold relative computational-intense features back. The old fixed-function pipeline is deprecated already. Using it is technically a bad idea in all situations with new development, end of story! You need to make something that is great when released. It's important that 0 A.D. runs great on most hardware. Not all setups out there whatsoever, which is not gonna happen anyway. Features in newer OpenGL versions like instancing can be really helpful with improving performance SDL 2 is already in release candidate status. Hope that 0 A.D. will have an OpenGL ES 3 renderer in the future. (Fun OpenGL ES3 fact, you can have the OpenGL ES3 context in systems with full OpenGL 4.3 or later.)

Here is some very interesting approach to improving performance: http://www.reddit.co...uce_nearnative/ Achieving near native performance with Javascript.

RaFs hero mode is the most fun thing I have seen in the last 15 years in computer games. A more worked out game would really show how fun the hero mode could be, sadly the studio didn't got the necessary resources to fully develop the game and hastly finished it. Another game that did a similar thing was Savage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage:_The_Battle_for_Newerth So sad nobody seems to be able to develop this kind of thing fully.

A hero mode where you only have hero units with gametypes originally from shooters: death match, team deathmatch, capture the flag, team capture the flag last man standing, team last man standing and other things. Because the heroes have lots of hitpoints, this could be very interesting. Have artifacts spread over the map to have healing and other things.

It's more a suggestion for the game engine. Since it suppose to be able to be used for other games as well. In many situations, maybe in 0 A.D. also, it would be handy to have teleportation ports/portals. Mods may want to add fantasy stuff. Or another game might want to do something that needs them.