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The subject of this thread are the Catapults, a ranged siege able to attack enemy buildings from distance. I'd like to discuss about their usability in games, arguing about some weak spots of this siege obviously showed in the replay attached to this post. Let's begin with the range: Catapults are ranged units and, as all ranged units, they are supposed to attack from distance going to detriement of their health(they only have 100 hp) / armor and accuracy. Towers with range increase tech (expecially if supported by an outpost) are able to attack them in particular iberian towers that inflict higher damage than regular towers due garrison capacity. Since towers are able to attack them, soldiers trying to repair catapults will be damaged aswell making the repair even harder. There is a Seleucid Hero who decreases building health by 20%, by the way, since the aura range of that hero cover 70mt, such hero is forced to be under enemy fire in order to attack with catapults and benefit of the aura effect. Cost: They cost 350 stone each which is actually the highest cost of resources for a siege. Weakness: Rams, elephants, champions can easly destroy catapults (we are talking about few hits) due the patch/dispatch time and their slow movement speed. Sword champions expecially destroy catapults in 2 - 3 hits. Slow Movement: Infantry can reach catapults too easly due their slow patch time giving time to enemy infantry reach it and destroy it and for reaching i mean that, expecially without outpost vision range increase, it is really hard to move catapult before the enemy reach it, expecially talking about cavalry. The catapult would not move fast enough for escaping anyway.. Accuracy: As any ranged units, they are exposed to an accuracy factor which reduces the siege effectiveness if compared to close-quarter sieges. There could be a tech that increases catapults accuracy, there is one in the fortress for Bolt Shooter only. Summing all those points, i think that catapults aren't worth to train due their high cost and weakness. My experience is that the catapults can be rescued only if they are attacking close to the own fortress and garrisoning them into it when the enemy appears from the fog of war. However in the most of cases champions of fast units destroy them anyway giving no chance to save them. For their population / resources cost, they are really not worth to train, unless playing naval maps. A player should be able to retreat catapult without risk to lose it unless the enemy uses cavalry in order to reach it so fast to don't give no time for a patch, in this way catapult could have more "survivability". Replay attached to the post will show some of the points i listed above. 2017-01-20_0009.rar

First stupid question do you have enough free disk space that's the main reason to have the extraction fail or the downloaded installer is corrupt. Enjoy the Choice

As long as you don't publicly distribute a modified version of 0 A.D. without making the source available, or something like that that goes against the license, you are free to use 0 A.D. for whatever you want So I don't think there's much reason to worry. The thing to be careful with is if you combine 0 A.D./0 A.D. content with other content (whether already existing or newly created) that it should be abiding by the same license. If you are not going to make the result publicly available you wouldn't even have to worry about that though, but I guess at least the thesis will have to be made public? And perhaps the material used as well? Again, it isn't an issue with 0 A.D. it just depends on what you might end up combining it with Generally speaking you should be more than fine to use it in your thesis though

Ran some tests looking at things. There was some memory dumbness recently, though I've been working on fixing them. Still need to figure out if we need to call Clean() in UpdateGrid in the beginning, I doubt it. It seems, from my profiling, that BroadCastMessage is slow on its own because of the cost of calling the functions. Those are virtual, obviously, so they may be expensive if we call them enough times. It'd be interesting to look into it more, this may be a false positive or the real cost is calling JS components, I'm unsure. (EDIT: now that I think of it, it's much more likely that the cost is the cache-miss from accessing the component itself in the map, since we're using a map.) Another virtual call that might be more costly than we expect: the TestShape filter from our obstruction filters, notably used in the pathfinder's TestLine Decomposing TestLine, the std::map find is quite slow in general, probably in large part because we have tons of shapes and very few actually interest us so we waste a lot of time getting them back (as expected). It might be better here to store shapes in the subdivisions directly.