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See here for related discussion. I've started working on a concept for our user interfaces and will showcase some of the new layouts below. The new theme will be rolled out throughout the game, but will not influence the in-game HUD, the main menu screen, or the new website design for now. I'm going to focus on the windows that need the most work. Here are some windows using the existing UI theme: **** Work in Progress warning **** Here are the windows using the new UI theme: On flat white and black backgrounds: Thoughts: I focused on making the design more modern, clean, and legible. The thick gold frames are gone, being replaced by a solid top frame with an optional title area, and a lower 'weight' frame to hold it in place. This somewhat resembles the structure of a Roman Standard flag. I'm using a temporary background pattern texture that comes with Adobe Photoshop for now just to quicken the design process, but this will be replaced with a compliant texture. That's it for now. Hope you guys like it!

Let me introduce this topic by stating that 0 ad's rendering is also fairly slow, right now. A big part of that is trees: since the use transparent materials, they are currently distance-sorted (a usual technique to avoid blending artifacts). However this makes batch sorting basically impossible. Now, I've done some tastings and it seems to me that alpha on trees is basically used mostly as a "1-bit" method: either transparent or opaque. With such a technique, distance sorting is formally not too necessary, so we could speed up rendering a lot by having not all materials sort by distance, particulalrly with trees. On Gambia river, I basically get it to render twice as fast 180 to 100 ms for "Render" in the profiler. Its my MB air which is slow, and I lowered the camera to have lots of trees. But still. So basically I'm saying we should probably experiment with this, we might get a really really similar rendering for basically a much lower cost. By not distance-sorting trees, we could batch them much more efficiently. (if you want to see for yourself, go to line 482 of modelrenderer.cpp and add " && 0 " to the if statement, then recompile)

I recommend that Pureon continue on this path for a while without too much nitpicking from us, to see where he leads. I'd rather not dilute his artistic direction with too much "design by committee" so I say, you go with yo bad self, Pureon. Let's see what you can do.

Instead of a mysteriously appearing and disappearing banner carrier unit, why not make every unit able to carry a banner, then choose one out of a battalion to carry this battalions banner. That way, without the need for a range of different banner carrier units, it would alway fit the battalion (e.g. horse mounted for cavalry formations, etc, would even fit naval formations). It would be more realistic too, as there would not be any artificial constraints, like not being able to attack the banner carrier. If the banner carrier dies, just choose a new one (or break the formation).