Mercator 0.12.0 is out (see start of this thread). Since the last release 0.11.3 quite a bit has happened  (in fact so much that it could almost have been called 1.0) It stays a 0.x beta because it has been used by few people and almost only on Windows, and 1.0 should wait until it has been really used on Linux and macOS too. A great many of the ideas, and much of the testing, came from @lilypoppy - thank you! The starting positions, the heat map and the accessibility check were his ideas, the Q / W / E keys his suggestion, and his report from Ubuntu is why Atlas is found on Linux now.  Mercator sets up a map's settings and players, forms the terrain's large structures, places walls and entities as the game does, checks the whole map, and hands it to Atlas (and takes it back) for the fine work Atlas is good at. post-Atlas comes afterwards checks maps and converts them for other game releases. And here below is a lot of text illustrating new features, but you might be wanting to test yourself and look at the documentation instead: Download from the first post of  https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/169940-new-atlas-helper-tool-mercator/  I hope you can have fun creating maps!   Changes in mercator 0.120: The big things         A Terrain tab - the terrain formed before Atlas gets the map, shown as relief with its own 3D view. Start from flat ground, the map's own terrain, a greyscale picture or real elevation data (GeoTIFF, SRTM, DTED, ESRI grids - or a place chosen on a world map: its elevation is fetched once and kept). Then form it: a lasso that changes, copies or exports a piece of the terrain, and a low-pass filter that rounds off the terraces a heightmap leaves. areas raised, lowered or set to a height, and lakes: poured with a click, shown, or sunk to the water height - which is how you get a lake in the mountains with the map's one water height; rivers, roads (road, track or path), ridges and coasts, drawn and kept as objects you can change; a coast closed into a ring is an island, and the outer sea goes outside it. A river has two banks are the south / east and the north / west one, and Natural bends gives it steeper banks outside a bend and flatter ones inside; textures by rules (height, slope, distance from the shore, with presets for temperate, Mediterranean, alpine, desert and tropical land), with softened edges (the blocks you see in Atlas are the game's 4 m texture tiles) - and textures of their own for roads and rivers; Apply bakes it into the map's terrain; every earlier terrain file is kept under a dated name, and everything stays an object, so it can be changed again. And since the manual could not explain every parameter in words, each tool has a drawing of what it does to the ground - a profile of the road (across and along it), river, ridge, coast, area, lake and outer sea, with the parameters on it - small beside the tool buttons, enlarged by a click, and all in the manual. Starting positions (lilypoppy's idea). Choose a player, a civic centre or nomads, the starting units (the civ's own to begin with) and what goes round the start - biome, distance, trees, mines, berries, chickens - and click on the map: it is laid out as the game's random maps do it, as ordinary planned entities you can edit afterwards. The land each start begins with is outlined on the 2D map and in 3D by the game's own territory rules - far over open ground, short across deep water or a cliff, a border where the next player's start is stronger. Drawing tools in the Entity Placer: free curve, line, rectangle, polygon, ellipse. A shape can be moved, turned, edited by its points (a rectangle or ellipse by handles) and filled - the inside at a density, or along the outline every x metres, with a mix of kinds by weight, keeping clear of roads, rivers, lakes, the sea and cliffs. Clear inside deletes what stands in a closed shape; Check vegetation lists the trees on a road, in water or on a cliff, so you can delete them. A lasso selects what stands inside a free line, Q / W / E are the arrow, Move and Turn, and the selection can be made - and acted on - in 3D too. The same tools draw the Terrain tab's curves. A heat map of where units can go and an accessibility check (lilypoppy's asks): the ground coloured by the game's own passability classes - where a building can stand, where units walk, fords, deep water, cliffs, land nobody can reach - and a check in the Summary for players who cannot reach one another, resources nobody can get to, passages too narrow for siege engines, and a player with little room to build. A colour key explains every map view. Clearing that is part of the Entity Placer: Clear round the selection takes the trees, bushes and rocks out of the way of the buildings, walls, fields and shapes you select - and along the Terrain tab's roads and rivers, lakes and the sea - with a ragged, soft edge instead of a ruled one. Map packages: File > Open... takes a zip, a .pyromod, a tar or a folder of maps, asks which map when there are several, and never changes the package. More Draw walls has the rectangle and polygon icons: a closed wall of the set and player you choose. The Summary compares what each player's island holds (Balancing by Island) and what each starts with to fight, and checks for trigger scripts nobody has. The minimap is the map's preview, drawn from the terrain by itself and written with every save (unless you chose a picture). AI behaviour (random, balanced, defensive, aggressive) in Edit player; Help > Forum page...; Ctrl+S saves into the game; a map with no players is said when you leave Map Management; Undo goes back 50 steps. The little help (?) over a map says only what applies to the mode or tool you are in; tooltips are wrapped; the 2D maps are lit from the north-west so slopes can be seen. Fixed A large map showed as only its lower left corner in Atlas. The game reads a map's size from the XML, not from the terrain file; applying the terrain now tells the XML its size and the water's height. (Sizes beyond the game's largest, 512 tiles, are said to be untried.) "This install has no Atlas" on Linux (lilypoppy, Ubuntu 24.04): the launcher is nowhere near Atlas's library. Mercator now looks where packages keep it and, where it cannot tell, starts Atlas. The Entity Placer stayed empty after a crashed Atlas - it shows the map again as soon as the game lets go of its files. Thousands of trees were slow: with 10,000 trees an edit took 7 s, now 0.7 s. The Terrain tab's 3D window drawing nothing, an Adjust window taller than a laptop screen, cut-off buttons, and a help text that was too dim

Hello. I have built a web-based observer for live 0ad matches https://map.veredus.io It uses client-server architecture, so simulation does not happen in the browser. Browser only renders what server sends as a compressed stream. Right now it randomly runs 1v1 or 4v4 match with all players being AIs to demonstrate capabilities. I specifically asking @Dunedan and @Stan for permission/API to get live matches IPs/ports from lobby so that they can be broadcasted instead of soulless AI playing with themselves. I believe such a webpage is a good landing to attract more (potential) players. Some features(in random order): - desktop and mobile view - ~30MB of stream data per hour - assets served via CDN (2.4 GB full game, but only what is shown is downloaded, saved to local storage via Cache API) - translations from original game - WebGPU and WebGL fallback - playback control: pause, seek, rewind. - delay to live match to prevent scouting via observation - sharing with current time offset "I" key or four finger tap on mobile cycles through debug panels. Settings allow changing the visual enhancements. Please also share your ideas at to how this can be used. Any feedback is welcome.

@Thalatta, the only thing I'm questioning is that you single out a group of players as a minority that has co-opted the gameplay side of things and refuses to open up to "improvements". You don't name anyone in particular, but it's obvious which side you're pointing the finger at. And you started doing that very early on, right from the beginning of your time on the forum. We've discussed this several times already. You're not in a position to decide who represents the best vision for the game. As for my criticism of your contributions, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings so much that you'd feel the need to start listing them and even tagging people. It was a more general remark, evidently poorly worded, intended to question your lack of humility. I'm sorry.  But it's clear you're not the only one who thinks it's appropriate to single out particular groups of players as holding back the game's progress. Perhaps I'm the one who's wrong. Time will tell.

The competitive scene has held this game back in terms of gameplay. It's been like this for years. Almost a decade.

It's very nice of me to have included the underlined part, because the rest, and more, you can find in the first page of: What strikes me is your pretension that I can't possibly understand what's written there, or that I haven't seen similar things in other threads, or felt it in the game itself (that must explain your comical denial that I even play it!). When you posted there, why didn't you state how utterly offensive finger pointing is, or disrespectfully denigrate other's general contributions? What I said was not directed at anyone in particular, but refers to the issue in particular, while you jumped to belittle someone in particular, with ad hominems unrelated to the issue in particular. I was going to say it's utterly irrelevant if I know or not who they truly are, but it's actually in my favour since, again, my criticism is not directed at specifically anyone, but known philosophies (as in that thread), and you ought to learn all these differences already.   Fine, I just give pacing issues more weight than you, and while it's not just about training times, they are one of the first things one explicitly encounters. Batch training gets around pacing issues (lowering APM), but it's not optimal to ask all newbies to handle that from the start instead of queuing units one by one (more intuitive for many, for some time at least). And I think the different difficulty levels should behave along those lines also. All "basically, the single-player experience". Regarding competitiveness, I wouldn't even care if batching was faster than it is now for large batches to keep things almost unchanged for average batches, of course, all balance-pending, but you can't just insult, dismiss and deny the possible existence of an issue for which there are even threads already. And think way more carefully about your replies, because I'm going to answer next with a very telling paragraph made of quotes from that thread.   Everyone agrees with that, too bad you qualify the help (most through MP) @lilypoppy gets for his campaign, among other things you still lack any sensible grasp on, as demonstrating "so little". If anything, it's him who's in a position to evaluate that, not you, by any means. That's just how you get whoever is actually trying to collaborate on factors you mention are lacking to lose any interest in the project and leave.   I think sometimes the problem is the denial of how each aspect is seen by each group. That's why we all agree in improving the SP experience, but don't seem to agree on what that exactly means. I think the thread mentioned makes it clear how each side sees "training times" for example (as if that were not expected already, or a "data analysis study" was needed and not just a shut down attempt), and why I consider it another factor in the SP experience (which is extremely important because it relates to the vast majority of players, who play offline). Still, I've stated now and in the past that I don't support the removal of the competitive aspect by any means, even proposing a Normal and Competitive Presets (for parameters that cannot be harmonised), and Achievements to motivate players to gradually switch from one to the other to basically get more offline players and hoping to slowly convert some into online ones.