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http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1983 Felt like doing a quick one. Based on this image for shape and texture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alectoris-chukar-001.jpg partridge.zip

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1975 I wanted to do a bird, so this time it's just a decorative animal. Very low poly, 134 faces (if its just going to be flying, no more should be needed). I just put on some half-assed texture to try the alpha for the feathers (the texture is just projected from photo from underneath! it has claws on its back now Added a basic rig to it as well so i could pose it. hawk.zip

Fixed the texture. darn hard to find good photos for the wing from above. http://www.flickr.co...shi/6580254701/ http://www.flickr.co...shi/5488404797/ Edit: Aw crap. He had NC on those photos. Edit2: I sent him an email asking if he would consider dropping NC on those two photos.

It has been noticed, but there is no solution yet: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1796

For those interested in our progress we showed up another update here : http://www.moddb.com/games/rogue-republic/news/battle-for-kaliningrad

What have Mongolians have to do with Scythians besides both being nomadic? ______________________________________________________________ Aaahhh the Scythians. I have heard stories about these people. Appearently they smoked some kind of weed. And I've read they used arrows with poison (could be a unique gameplay element; units affected will very slowly lose health and die unless you heal them). Besides that. A nomad faction would be very interesting, but how do you do it? Fragile and cheap structures that can be build outside of own territory (maybe make them lose health like the outpost to balance it futher?)? But stronger buildings can only be build inside territory (I see in this thread they also made stone structures). Obviously, the Scythians should not be able to build walls, not even pallisades. About the weed which I wasn't sure about, this is where I got that from: http://listverse.com/2010/01/05/top-10-interesting-facts-about-the-scythians/ It talks about female warriors, perhaps all the Scythian females (I mean citizen) should be able to fight, be citizen-soldiers. This would also make them defending their nomadic outposts easier. They should not have siege weapons, but would that be balanced? If the poison element would be added, you could have very effective raids, so siege weapons may be less important.

I think units moving around freely would interfere too much with gameplay. Certainly if you can kill them. Something that would maybe be nicer are animated units on the building grounds (with of course, different variations). Like a blacksmith walking around in the blacksmith building, going inside sometimes, hammering the anvil other times. Or a woman sitting on the civil center court, making some clothes, also going inside sometimes. A merchant in the market going from side to side, waiving with some objects. If it could react to the environment (fleeing inside when under attack, doing a shooting animation for defensive buildings) it would even be better. These units would die with the building btw, and they can't be attacked separately. But there is much more important eyecandy to be done than just this (s.a. more animals and plants).

Better version of the file: https://dl-web.dropb...WbUlIMEcNKHovdw Me wanting to add ballistic trajectories saw that there were some problems. I brought sqrt(2) twice in the calculation, instead of once. So in the end, it differed a factor two. The correct test to see if units are inside the range is this: (t.x - s.x)² <= 2*range*(s.y + range/2 - t.y) (I also changed some numbers to different ides, to avoid divisions and extra operations) or in 3D: (t.x - s.x)² +(t.y - s.y)² <= 2*range*(s.z + range/2 - t.z) This means realistical units can only shoot half as high as they can shoot far on flat terrain. The ballistic trajectories added are done via the numerical method to solve a root for a bi-quadratic function. I could have done it by hand, but to calculate the real trajectories, you get complicated functions, with lots of operations. So probably not doable in the game for every arrow. Using the numeric methods in the draft does mean that, if the unit is almost out of range, it won't find a trajectory. And there are also some sign problems (S can only shoot upwards and forwards, not downwards), so sometimes you have to imagine the mirrored trajectory. You would need this to calculate obstructions though (I heard people want walls and buildings to obstruct arrows), so I'm not throwing it away for now. But the complicatedness of the real traject shows in some way how really simple a basic range check is. @K776: what's the best time to be on IRC? When are the most developers active? @Zeta1127: You can easily add custom height bonusses. If you change the check to (t.x - s.x)² +(t.y - s.y)² <= 2*range*(s.z + heightBonus + range/2 - t.z) Then it will be exactly like 's' is always 'heightBonus' higher. @alpha123: It uses exact physics (hopefully now without mistakes), so the hight a unit can shoot is certainly limited (to exactly range/2). ballistics.zip

I actually thought of bringing this up after noticing just how important terrain is in Starcraft II. I say go for it. I was also considering not allowing units to shoot too far up. So if some archers are on very high ground they would not be able to be shot by units on regular ground level. I'm not sure if that's going too far however.

Just nuke support for cards that old - you have to draw the line somewhere. This game has been in development so long that you've actually lived through a major technological shift in GPU hardware architecture and corresponding APIs, meaning that many of the old requirements/assumptions are no longer valid. Maintaining a legacy codebase for an increasingly diminishing audience will just burn out existing developers and turn away potential new developers that don't want to be saddled with that much legacy baggage. Plus, as the team has clearly become aware of, maintaining that degree of legacy support virtually guarantees your game will look like something from the early 2000s. As long as you maintain a forward rendered render path for older/weaker GPUs (e.g. first generation SM3 cards and older), you should still be able to cover a large audience and not make your graphics engineers want to kill themselves. Plus if this goes through, I'd be interested to see if I can contribute again, especially if myconid is serious about implementing a deferred render path of some sort as building a rendering system from scratch has been a personal goal of mine for a while.

I got Rise & Fall running on Windows 7. I took some screens of their ships and water. I was playing as the Egyptians. Despite the overall feel of the game being garbage, a few parts stand out favorably. First the bad: -- Base building and Buildings: Dumbed down considerably compared to Age of Empires. The building textures are excellent but the building designs and models themselves are not aesthetically pleasing one bit, nor are they realistic. There are no houses; you build a granary and this brings the pop limit up to 50% of max pop. You keep upgrading this one granary to bring the pop limit closer to max pop. There are no farms. It was very difficult to create a "city" because nothing really fit together or looked authentic. -- Economy: Dumbed down considerably. No trading. No bartering resources. No hunting. No herding. Only two gather-able resources: Wood, Gold. One "dropsite": The "Settlement" which can be upgraded for dubious benefit. Gain another resource, Glory, by building statues. That's it. -- Ships are hard to use. The ramming function is frustrating to use. I'm not entirely impressed with the idea of having units running around on deck. It feels micro heavy, but it's an interesting experiment. -- Things are very unhistorical. The Persian heroes are Nebuchadnezzar and Sargon, for crying out loud. Ships look ridiculous, as you will see. -- No random maps. Map selection is very limited. -- I am confused regularly by the GUI at the bottom. It's not designed well and conveys information poorly, if at all. -- Game is laggy and glitchy even on my quad core rig. -- HORRIBLE MAP EDITOR. I AM CAPITALIZING THIS BECAUSE THE MAP EDITOR ACTUALLY ANGERS ME. Atlas is already much much better and 10x more usable than the RAF editor. My god. -- The Campaigns are poorly designed and buggy. The Good: Most of the big good things have to do with heroes... -- The Heroes level up with input from the player, kind of like researching Ages. Each level gives you access to Advisers in the Advisers screen, which are basically techs that you research with your "glory" resource. This is basically the tech tree of the game. -- Hero Mode: You can eventually take control of your hero, RPG style, and slash through hordes of enemy soldiers. This is kind of satisfying. There are even commands you can make while in this mode to coordinate the actions of your soldiers with your hero. You can run onto ships, up ladders, etc. I just wish this was a little more developed. You'd need to design the game from the ground up for this kind of feature, so it's not something we could just retrofit into 0 A.D. -- The "Hero Medallion" as I call it in the upper left corner of the screen. We something like this for our heroes. -- The water is just gorgeous, as you will see. -- Like how a tree flashes white momentarily when you task a slave to go chop it. We need that in 0 A.D., that visual feedback. -- They have multiple real tree species like how we're doing it. Not sure why they added this bit of detail when everything else seems so devoid of detail. -- I like how units can run around on walls, BUT it seems like to do this they had to do a lot of weird things with walls, not least of which they made them absolutely MASSIVE when compared to other buildings. Don't like this. -- They build siege engines like they construct a building. They don't build siege engines in a "Siege Workshop" or Fortress like 0 A.D. does. I'd like to do this in 0 A.D. for siege towers. -- Soliders spontaneously form battalions/formations. -- Last but not least, the music in the game is very very good, and pretty much Hollywood-level quality. This makes sense since the composers actually work in Hollywood. The best music I have heard in a AAA RTS game, bar none. Admittedly the bar is set kind of low. I do want to praise Omri though--some of his stuff seriously approaches AAA quality work akin to Rise&Fall. This will be a high point for 0 A.D. as it is for Rise & Fall. Things I would like to have seen: -- Customizable heroes, like in Battle for Middle Earth 2. Example: -- A more authentic unit rosters. Spartans are cool and all, but no Pezhetairoi or realistic Hypaspists? Once again, Hypaspists are generic swordsmen, le sigh. There is 300 years worth of Hellenic and Hellenistic soldier-types to choose from and they pick the most generic line-up imaginable. Same for Egyptians, Persians, and Romans. -- More special things beyond big ships and hero mode. Should have made the control points more interesting. -- True battalions like in Total War or Battle for Middle Earth 2. So, here are my screenshots of the Egyptian boats: I screenshotted this one right as it was destroyed. The dudes fly up in the air (kind of comical) and the ship breaks apart. I do like the look of the first level of the "Settlement" dropsite. This is the "tent" on the right side here. It could be a good basis for the Huns' Civic Centre in 0 A.D. Part 2. You'll also notice that they used selection circles that are exactly like our current ones. The one pixel selection. This makes the game look unpolished, IMHO. A lot about this game is unpolished, which is sad.

While I am someone who is usually against discarding support for older versions/computers, I think that we should proceed drop the fixed renderer. The reason? dvangennip explained it well. I agree with him.

Are those 1-3% actually playing the game? I can imagine someone trying the game, only to find out that their older hardware does not run the game well, so they play only once or at least not that often. I think that on older hardware the game isn't going to run smooth or even playable, given the load on the CPU (which will probably be underpowered as well). Thus, my point is that not many actual players may be lost, at the benefit of the more than 95% who would benefit from an easier to maintain/develop code base.

I'm really surprised to hear that you've been supporting those old cards. I used to have a computer that had one, but I upgraded the card because I couldn't play any of the newer games - and this was several years ago (got a different computer now). You can get better graphics cards than that cheap on ebay, and swapping them out isn't hard. I can't imagine 0 A.D. plays well enough on hardware that outdated to make it worth the effort to support it, though I can't test that. I'd drop it.

I say drop support for the old chips, everyone needs good reasons to upgrade and being on such old hardware only holds progress back!

A software renderer isn't going to work, it would basically need to be a 2D sprite based engine to achieve playable speed and that would require lots of changes to art and a whole new rendering engine, it would be easier to keep/rewrite the fixed render path.

Those (very old) graphic cards that you mention, isn't performance on those very low already? To the level of making 0 A.D. unplayable? This is just a guess though, I don't know for sure. If it were up to me, I'd drop the fixed function pipeline and go for shaders only. They've been supported (and preferred) for many years now.

Wow, i didn't know there were people with so old computers, the oldest i still have here is from 2008... I really feel sorry for these people, tho, but i guess a graphic card upgrade isn't that expensive, so they'll catch up with us very soon (at least i hope so).

I've already said it internally but let me go ahead and say it publicly: as much as I feel for the around 1-3% of the people who will be left out when the switch happens, I think it is much more important to pave the way for future improvements and an overall better graphical gameplay experience. Technology advances at a fast rate and eventually everybody (of the the said 1-3%) will catch up. That is the great thing about open source and tech... they just keep getting better and better. On a side note, eager to see how far the capabilities of the engine are pushed and what the limits will be. Only time shall tell

I must support the idea of alternate game modes. It would be nice to be able to add one or more additional game modes that have never shown up in other games before. Here are some suggestions that may or may not have been seen before: Zombie survival mode: Zombies are continually coming from all over the map, and your goal is to last as long as you can. The zombies get more numerous as time goes by. This might be combined with multiplayer play to either hold out longer or to combine forces. Autonomous mode: The units move on their own and the player just gives general commands. This idea is based off of the Globulation style gameplay. Creating the AI could be done essentially by pulling it directly from Globulation with the necessary tweaks. Speed edit mode: You are able to increase or decrease the game speed during multiplayer by either earning bonuses in game or using resources. For example, if you want to increase game speed, you pay perhaps 500 gold to increase speed one level. This could be used to throw off the other players tactics. Decay mode: Everything is continually losing hp and for buildings you have to continually repair them, and units have to hunt, farm, or some other method to restore health. This would take a lot of micromanagement, so it might be part of Autonomous mode. Extermination: One player is the hunter, and can build anything. The other is the rats, and they can only build economic stuff. The hunters job is obviously to exterminate the rat, and the rats job is survive by massive numbers alone. CTF: Simple capture the flag. I don't remember any other RTS game with this. Tower defense: Self explanatory, build towers and defend from waves of enemies like any other tower defense game. Perhaps there can be additional towers in this mode that don't show up in the actual game. I'm running out of ideas, but it would be cool to see some of these implemented. I personally am not a programmer, so I am unable to do the coding part, but I am a 3d modeler, so if any of them require additional art, I could probably help with that.