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I've been working on water rendering and mostly figured out how it works. It isn't yet screenshot worthy (and screenshots are terrible for conveying water effects) but I have made some definite progress already. Thus far: -I reduced the refraction displacement by half, which looks a lot better -I reduced the reflection distortions by more than half, which also looks a lot better (although it still needs some tuning for distance effects) --Currently I'm working on tuning the intensity of reflections and the fresnel factor used for intensity scaling. To Do: -Shore waves need more foam, and should produce foam trails when receding as well as when advancing. Also: shore waves seem to be recalculating the shoreline every frame, which may be contributing to the expensiveness. The shoreline really should only need recalculating if the terrain is modified or if you change maps entirely (ie in atlas), and should additionally be cheap to cache. It seems like someone was aware of that at one time but it just never got done.

I've looked through some of the graphics code and somewhat figured out how things work together, so I thought I'd report on what I found and what I want to do about it to let everyone know and get some opinions on what I plan to do. The renderer works and looks great overall, but is currently scattered between not less than 3 different places. Parts of it are under 'renderer', parts are under 'graphics', and the glsl has been dumped in with mods, which some of that should certainly go there but a lot of things definitely should be moved into the engine proper. I'd like to simplify the organization and keep all the graphics-related stuff that the engine should handle directly all in one place. That includes the GLSL, which needs JIT compiling and will need a new home in the engine. On a related note I think that maps should also have an option to include custom shaders, so that people can add things like fireflies to maps, for example. The renderer is also an ad-hoc mixture of GLSL and some non-GLSL stuff that is most definitely not very efficient. Overall the renderer performs excellently for the level of effects it produces but I think it could be better both in performance and effects. The admixture of code is bad for maintainability though, and I think the renderer should be moved entirely to GLSL. There was already a discussion about that 4 years ago and everyone seemed to agree that dinosaur cards weren't really worth supporting for all the downsides. That said, what I'd like to do is move everything also to OpenGL 3.1. The oldest/cheapest graphics cards you can buy today (ie GeForce 200 series as well as at least one generation earlier than that) support GL 3.1 and so do the vast majority of all embedded cards that have been produced since 2011. GL 3.1 allows for MRT, non-hardcoded conditionals, loops and other features which are useful for producing efficient renderers. I do not intend to use openCL, as not all cards (nor mine) support it (and it tends to be used for super expensive stuff anyway). Another thing is graphics options. I think a lot of things that are currently optional should either become defaults or removed. For example sky rendering isn't even visible in-game unless you hack the camera, and although sky is used in water reflections sky rendering isn't necessary for that to work. Lots of things that are optional also are trivially cheap and thus don't warrant options. Reflective/refractive water and 'use real water depth' fall in that category. Some things which are currently expensive (the shore waves part of HQ water, mainly) could probably be considerably cheaper than they are now, and may eventually end up in the 'trivially cheap + definitive aesthetic gain' list. FYI my current hardware is a Core i3 2120 with 4GB of RAM + Geforce 240GT with 1GB of DDR3 (not even GDDR). It's fairly old and low-end, and I'm also running at 1080p so I think the setup is pretty good for performance/generality testing (ati cards notwithstanding).

I think Tolkien stuff is still copyrighted. Conan Doyle books are just out of copyright these years (copyright looks a bit complex, but it should expire about 70 years after author death), and Sherlock Holmes can be freely used. So I think you cannot legally use Tolkien specific places, names and so on. But I think you can freely replace some names with generic ones, e.g. rather than Uruk-hai just use Orc. Looks for example Wesnoth game, it uses Tolkien-like factions, but with different names. This is just my interpretations, don't take it for sure :).

Well, there is a reason: they have infinitly more resources than we do (money, especially), which also explains why you're getting 0A.D. for free... Or maybe you don't pay for those games either which would explain things. We value your input but your post is written in a way that makes it unacceptable, so we're just going to ignore it instead of balancing those "ridiculous" bugs (congrats!)

I'm sorry for necro-ing this topic, I have questions, I'm curious of what would likely get us sued if we create contents based on the Tolkien Universe. I'm pretty sure that using copyrighted visual materials, like those that were in the movies is one.. But, is it safe or legal for us to use characters, places, names or things from the book? Like for example, if I name the faction Isengard and name units like Uruk-hai (Is it okay? or will it get me into trouble?) (I do have a Mordor faction WIP right now that uses the 0AD persian buidling set (with edited texture) as structures, so I'm sure it has no troubles visual materials-wise)

We will just reuse the Norse unit textures for now.. (I want to rework/improve the unit textures (again) the rework should start once the new unit meshes and animations are implemented, after doing my of research on clothing and natural dyes, I realized that most of the current details were either wrong or poorly done.) Note: Norse helmet (placeholder) Current shield patterns looks too Christianized, I might add animal style shield motifs

Better ask Yves directly, but it's all about performance improvements (like full instancing et all) Edit: here is his Git branch: https://github.com/Yves-G/0ad/tree/OGL4

I was actually wrong about that. MRT has been supported since OpenGL 2.0. I doubt that I'll actually even require any 3.x features. I also found a normal "if" condition in the water shader, so apparently that's nothing new either (nor something required often, but it's nice to know that it's supported). Also, I'm working on finishing up a basic patch for water reflections/refractions atm, which will probably be finished tomorrow. I'm not really intending to try to do all of that at once, but that is the direction I'm looking at for the long term.

The obnoxious black ring doesn't really help the effect either. Note that water reflections directly calculate the texture from the skybox and don't require the sky to be rendered in order to work, and there's hardly any reason to be looking at the sky anyway.

I confirm this bug.

The major problem with the sky is that it is squished. The sides of box are to short. It's like a pizza box now instead of a cube like should be.

Because with an unconstrained camera, it's easy to get "lost' so you don't know which direction the camera is facing anymore. If you notice, most games have reasonable limits on how far you can zoom or rotate the camera, those are camera constraints The sky is only intended to be visible in water reflections, it has never been directly visible except when the camera is at very low angles to the terrain:

I found a weird bug with ocean waves. If you set the wind direction north (or move the slider to the left in atlas) at some point it starts producing weird black patches where the waves should be. Moving the wind slider to the right gets rid of the artifacts, and they don't seem to appear if you rotate the camera around the waves, only when changing wind angle.

and not the last... as Feneur said, be need at last have a Beta for do it something like that.

Okay guys, I have idea. Let's put 0 A,D, onto The Steam.

As a follow up, since r17412 postproc, smoothlos and all water features are also enabled when using a OpenGL4+ compatible card (cards released in latest 4 years should support it). This is only effective if you remove any reference to these settings in your config files, otherwise the settings there have a higher priority. These will also be effective on next autobuild, you may get some warnings until that. After the autobuild please test and report any possible problems. Still missing is enabling materialmgr.quality to 10.0 but this should be done after having a GUI option to let users disable it (ticket #2596).

There's also the fact that we are not finished yet.

To piggyback. Make sure to add these to your local.cfg in order to get the most graphic bang. gentangents=truematerialmgr.quality=10If you have a graphic card (instead of integrated), it should be able handle this. In-game options do not enable ambient occlusion. Must use local.cfg like this.

Contrary to Michael's view, I think they actually look better than our current farms, not worse.

Which were the arguments to not implement LordGood's farms in the game?

Looking great! Still can't believe how good the water looks and I made it...

Or. A lord of the rings mod. *sigh* I think there was enough hints.

Okay, you are right. It's fair enough to have more victory conditions. Yet if a last-stand mode could be retained, I would welcome it. Thanks for clarifying, hhyloc. (and I didn't want to say people should not play multiplayer, just that the I wish to beat as many as quick as possible to have better ranking is not the first priority. But the discussed additional victory conditions are nice to have indeed.)

I don't like the 1 or 5 minute limit. My most epic 0AD battle was a last stand against an awesome amount of enemy forces. I had only 50 women left. And a market place as well as a tavern for recruiting mercenaries. It was pure epicness, build a wall to stop the enemy. Have the women repair the decaying buildings and try to rebuild houses to be able to recruit men which can construct buildings that give territory (which women not really can in 0AD.) The last part is unique. (in early Settlers all units were doomed and had to die ... pretty unrealistic) I remember 800 000 Chinese soldiers being defeated by an army of 200 000. If one believes victory is certain, doom will follow. To have different modi would indeed be fine. Sounds like realism to me. It's just the real thing. In this case we could offer you the choice to sign off with a remi. (or you wipe out the enemy) 0AD is not about ranking and multiplayer points in the first place I always thought it was about realism & epicness [pitching high cultures against each other in their peak].