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Dear players and contributors, As some of you may know, I have been working on integrating the new pathfinder, designed by Philip (Ykkrosh) some time ago. After months of work, I am proud to announce that the new pathfinder has been included in the SVN version of the game. However, you must not think every problem 0 A.D. encounters has been solved. The new pathfinder is in, but a lot of features are still to be implemented and some new bugs have necessarily been introduced. What is the new pathfinder? The new pathfinder is actually a new long-range pathfinder, and the short-range pathfinder has been modified and tweaked a bit to adapt it to the changes. The new long-range pathfinder implements an optimization of the A* pathfinding algorithm, known as JPS (some information here). It also comes with an entirely new "hierarchical pathfinder", which doesn't compute any paths but deals with the connectivity between two points on the map. As a consequence, it is now possible for the pathfinder to know when it is useless to try to compute a path, thus improving the performance. Before, the pathfinder computed a lot of paths before understanding that some point was unreachable. Why is not everything fixed with the new pathfinder? The main thing is that the new pathfinder is designed to solve the big problems that the old pathfinder had (for instance the discrepancies between the long-range and the short-range pathfinder, the fact that the AI couldn't access the pathfinding code, and also performance). However, not all its features have been implemented. There is still a lot of things to do, but now that the new pathfinder is in, this work can be done. On top of that, things that used to work, like formations, are not properly supported yet by the new pathfinder and are currently disabled. A lot of bugs that were fixed in the old implementation are likely to reappear in this new one. What is still to be done? - Already almost ready, but still not in: Improve the grid update performance - Coming soon: Reenable formations JPS cache Remove the AI pathfinder Discover and fix unit motion bugs introduced by the pathfinder change - For the future: A lot of things that are now possible! What else can I learn about the new pathfinder? A PDF, written by Philip and currently being updated by me when I have time, is here. You can also take a look at Philip's progress reports he wrote when working on this new pathfinder here. What can I do? You can help us by testing the game and giving some feedback! Please open Trac tickets only when you are 200% sure it is not already reported (see the list of open problems here), else post in the forums and we will do our possible to file the issue and try to fix it. We would like to have a not-too-buggy A19 despite including this huge change, which is not a simple objective. Please help us!

Awww lookit me show off my new maps! ha!

Thanks for all the work on this so far Philip and Nicolas (I added a link to the "testing the game" part of the announcement in case someone who isn't already using the SVN version wants to help out test the game )

I just finished making 2 custom maps for 0ad, so i wanna hear you opinion about them. you like it? or do i need to change or add stuff?

Oh if nothing else I can at least hack up the backgrounds into layers now, that's fantastic! Sounds simple enough for me to use too haha Cheers Sander

But if the Mobile game/browser is bad, give to our game a bad look( negative feeling), if the people don't know nothing about us.

Some suggestions committed to SVN (see first post). Ranged unit damage nerf (lesser nerf for skirmishers). Landed in r16759.Mauryan Champion Swordsman damage nerf. Landed in r16760.Decrease Crush Armor for female citizens. Landed in r16757.Decrease HP of female citizens. Landed in r16757.Decrease peacock HP. Landed in r16757.Reduce phasing costs and phasing time. Landed in r16758.Increase fortress cost and build time. Landed in r16760.Other Alpha 18 issues can be continued in this thread, but discussion about these changes should migrate to thread for SVN testing feedback.

In the desktop version of Facebook you can report ads, is there a way to do the same in the mobile app? And if so, could you please do that the next time you see something like this? I don't think there's anything we can do, at least not unless we see it ourselves, but if people report it there's at least a chance that it will be removed.

Another tiny update: It's slowly starting to look like a proper warship I hope you like the progress

incredible, is great LG i love your gothic church looks like Notre Dame

I made it a bit easier to add new backgrounds, and you can decide which layers tile and which don't. Currently, you can add up to 5 layers for a background set, if you want more, it's easy to change. To add a background set, you just need to add two small files. See the files in http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/gui/pregame/backgrounds . First, you have to make a .xml file in that directory, similar to http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/gui/pregame/backgrounds/hellenes.xml , there you define a sprite for every image layer. Every sprite must have a unique name, and define what texture to be used. The first sprite is an example of a tiled sprite, the other two are non-tiled. Best is to at least make the background tiled, so that people with big screens get a nice view. Foregrounds can be tiled or non-tiled. A non-tiled sprite should always have a 2:1 image resolution. Else there will be some strange stretching. Then, after the sprites are defined, you need to add a simple JS file, similar to http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/gui/pregame/backgrounds/hellenes.js . That JS file defines the order of the layers (the background should be placed at the top). You also define whether that layer is tiled and which sprite to use for the layer. The offset defines the layer motion as a function of time and the screen width. The Math.cos function makes it oscillate to the left and right (note that for tiled layers, you don't need oscillation, and you can just keep scrolling to one side). An offset of 0 would make the image centred on the screen. The constants are there to define the speed of oscillation, the width of the oscillation, and the average offset to the screen centre. I hope this makes it easy enough to add backgrounds in a way the artist (and not the programmer) likes. EDIT: if you add backgrounds, and you want to test them, it's obviously annoying if they appear only randomly. The best way to stop loading other backgrounds is by giving the other JS files a different extension (f.e. "*.js.backup"). That way, they won't be read.

2 suggestion: 1. Ptolemy lighthouse should just lift black map from all the water. Should not actually lift all fog of war from the shorelines. My suggestion make more sense and not be so overpowered. 2. Rename "Persians" to Achaemenids. This make sense since other civ are Seleucids and Ptolemies. Ptolemies because can confuse between old and newer Egyptian empires otherwise. Achaemenids because the Persians had 2 major empires, the other being Sassanids. In Psrt 2 you would have 2 "Persians" civs, so good to differentiate now in Part 1 and also teach a little about the name.

The idea that I had in mind was that ships cost food, wood, population and metal based on the units that are coming with them plus the cost of the ship, and then would serve as combat platforms aswell as transport ships. So the crew can enter/leave the ship, if you loose men in sea battles you can replace them with newly trained soldiers or mix them with other kind of troops, like archers or javelins for example. Training times would be pretty long for them (something like 50% of the time training the army on land would take + time for the ship itself). So getting a ship early on is a really decisive aspect, and with fishing boats being garrisonable you could help defending your sea economy in case of harassment (fishing boats would need to be manned manually though with units trained on land). Players could decide between getting a ship raid going with "real ships" or try to secure their economy with "fisher militias", or come up with a sea force themselves later on. Alternatively, peeps can go ahead and raid the coast like pirates with using those combat ships to get harassment units towards the enemy resource gatherers. And since you cannot have many ships you've got to decide what to do and can't do everything. This makes scouting very important. "does my enemy go for early wood/food to get naval warfare going? is he going for land attacks? are there fishing boats somewhere? Is it worth trying to raid his eco with naval units?" and so on. Question would be if those comabt ships would be trainable in age 1 or 2 though. Maybe there can be a regular military ship in age 1, and age 2 adds customization options (like another infantry type ship, or artillery upgrade options/trainable siege ships and so on). So there would be sea action in age 1, and age 2 would serve as a "real deal" for heavy naval battles opposed to skirmishes. Sort of like the jump from age 2 to 3 on land. edit: this would work similar to common "tech rushes" in other RTS games - you invest your villagers into many different resources to get a technological advantage in form of having a superior unit that can be used in various ways. And if your opponent scouts you he can react to that by raiding you on land to delay the ship or make the plan fail, or or to buy time to get a naval force by himself in time. Makes scouting very rewarding for whoever does it.

Maybe a bit off topic, but I don't want to spam mass topics in this forum. So I post here instead. What about ship warfare? I've read some cool stuff in your wiki about ramming and entering ships in naval combat. I REALLY love that idea - I also loved naval combat in Rome II, which has ramming and entering possibilities, too. If you look at age of empires, naval maps are pretty boring - just spam galleys all day long and hope you have more than your opponent. The idea of ships being real "tactical" weapons with flanking and ramming is just awesome. I'd love to see something like that. As for implementation, I'd love to see no transport ships at all. Instead, all regular ships are spawned with a garrison, but are rather expensive. For example you construct a Trireme, and it comes out armed with like ... idk 20 soldiers. When it's out the Trireme can be used to transport these troops to the shores to raid enemy villages. Additionally, you can later on build/upgrade them with ballistae, catapults and stuff like that (maybe even individually). Little fishing ships can be garrisoned with a few spear infantry units/archers to raid/capture/ram enemy fishing ships early on, creating a very unique dynamic on the sea. As a drawback, most ships would be VERY expensive, take long to train and be rather slow. That way, loosing ships/microing/repairing them becomes very important. That would be something entirely new and very awesome.