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Hi folk from 0.A.D, This is the surpirse: Proudly present the Retexture (Also remesh) of the horses in 0.A.D. Introducing more colors variety and the alpha channel hair for manes and tails done by @Sundiata: The update comes with a video tutorial of modeling and soon sculpting process for how it was done. Also the update comes with another blend file for allow blender users to bake their own horse textures, (including neon green, red orange any color they desire) Blend File: Blend file will be 2.80, but also 2.79 users could benefit from it anexing the objects and making little adjust to the nodes Baking nodes: color is managed in by a simple slider with multiple tones, or just two if desired, The body color is handed such way by the Vertex painting colors, i have defined a body paint with RGB allowing to move by another 3 sliders the way the colors are influenced by such vertex paint. There is already some predefined colors, once it finished. i would share another video of the process of baking but sadly my pc wouldn't resist such thing and could loose it since my AMD 145 enough battles has won from around 7+ years of life, and so it is my Nvidia GT520 wich already loosed his fan around 5 years ago and had to adapt another one. Some preview of the cavalry updated: Horse mesh comes with little updates to adjust more to the quality of animations, this means better knees and shoulders (meshing speaking) for a better transition of bones when rotating or moving (ie: galloping, promoting) Animations remains the same, just trot, walking and galloping were changed to move legs movements more centered as mentioned before. Blankets and body armors seems to adapt better to the new mesh due to the way the vertex are placed, making a smoother view, yet theres still some props to adapt, and more to do: Also including some distintive genetic details (not everything but at least the most noticeable) for horse fauna variation: Lusitano colors Indian Marwari Ears: Persian - Arabian contexture: Celtic breed face shape: Why suddendly horses? because i was working on updates for Mythology A.D. And realized i will need better textures for a fluid transition when making pegasus and sleipnir. Comparisson from a gameplay distance of a cavalry army Hope you all enjoy it.

This is exactly why I am pushing for the use of the IPA. Your first sentence could have been replaced by 1 simple IPA symbol. You obviously care very much about the rigor regarding the transcription into Latin letters - the same sort of rigor could be applied here with the help of the IPA. It's a great tool once you get used to it. And no, I can't record a sentence right now, because I don't speak Greek at all. Since I speak multiple languages and have quite a lot of phonemes practiced, I could record a sentence though and probably make a fairly decent job of it if I had an IPA transcription with some pointers for what the intonation needs to be like. Which is the whole point I am trying to make - people versed in the IPA can pronounce pretty much anything with only a very slight accent given enough practice and some intonation pointers. I believe that it's a vastly underused tool and it should be taught in school along with articulatory phonetics, buy sadly pronunciation is usually vastly neglected in language teaching.

I've worked on an OpenGL4 renderer that uses more modern features like instancing and bindless textures in 2016. My conclusion was also that the renderer is a bottleneck and it's mainly memory bound. I've even tried Intel VTune Amplifier, but switched back to Perf later. By changing how we pass data to our shaders and reducing the number of draw calls, I was able to reduce that overhead by a lot. Unfortunately my work never got beyond the experimental stage. I've written a small blog in the staff forums. I've copied the two most recent post here, if you're interested (still from 2016). The code from the experimental OGL 4 branch is still around on github: https://github.com/Yves-G/0ad/tree/OGL4 Post10: January – Profiling, profiling and ... profiling: Post 11: 10th of July - Bindless textures and instancing:

I took your advice and started a very large 8 player map and built up to a population just shy of 300 units. Unfortunately by then several other factions had killed each other off but there were still a sizable number of units from various factions (I know one of my allies had 200+ units from switching perspectives). I then marched a very large force through some trees and buildings and I could actually see the game struggling along at ~5 FPS under the strain of the computations, even without VTune Amplifier running on it. (Also I might have a cavalry obsession) But surprisingly... it doesn't look like the pathfinder is the problem (unless the problematic part of the algorithm is showing up through something else that it's calling - could it have something to do with the std::_Tree activity going on here?). Once again, the biggest identifiable hotspot is BlendBoneMatrices. Render is up there again too. This time I see Bind in the top hotspots as well (it's memory bound). For the record, both the pathfinder functions I see here are listed as being bad-speculation bound, so that would make them rather hard to optimize (a lot of the time branch misprediction is unavoidable).

Tutorial Videos: Modeling: Sculpting:

Made a new tech portrait, free to use by core game and/or mods. Topic can be used for folks to post any new tech portraits they make or find (cc0 or cc-by-sa). Trade_Routes (made by me, from 0ad assets) Geometric_Masonry (made by me) Aqueducts (fixed by me to have the standard background) "mace_argyraspides" (combine some 0ad icons) Immortals (from 0 ad concept art) Falcata (made by me) Feminine_Mystique (from 0ad concept art) Diaspora (background fixed by me) Some Elephant tech portraits, from 0ad concept art Mining_Pickax (from 0ad assets) Monumental_Architecture (from 0ad concept art)

An easy thing to do right now would be to parse and piece out some assets from the Nuba village model for Atlas/scenarios/skirmish maps.

I should really get to work on more serious things... Anyway, a quick concept update: some lazy texturing using Carthage texture pack. One day, my sweet Sabaeans.... One day...

Interesting remark... I have no doubt that natural manes were the norm, in general terms, but since you bring it up, quite a number of depictions of horses with roached/hogged/cropped manes, that stand up right, exist from Antiquity. A very small number of horses have naturally upright manes (comparable to those of przewalski's and zebra). Actually wouldn't be bad for some of the Greco-Roman and Achaemenid elite cav...

Thanks for the feedback. It may well be that the pathfinder occasionally bottlenecks the application under certain circumstances - but so far we've located a few functions that are consistently eating up the CPU time, so focusing optimizations on them is likely to bring better speedup overall. This is especially true since what I've seen from both of the pathfinding functions, they mostly suffer from branch mispredictions, which aren't really something you can optimize in most circumstances. Unfortunately we have only 56% of players who support the GL4+. @Yves Thank you for this gold mine of a post! I'll have to dive into what you've provided. Depending on the amount of work needed to complete your experiment (as I do unfortunately have a deadline for producing training material from this effort), it might be extremely helpful to me, even if it's not necessarily something that can be turned around and merged back into the actual game.

Guys, version 1.0.3 is available!!!

Thank you so much for these first findings! The majority of the dev team is in CET, so the best window would be your morning work hours, which are roughly our evening. Regarding the renderer: this is an area of the code that I don't know very well, but Yves did a lot of research on it, as you can see; and Vladislav is the most active dev in this area, I let him take over from here. Regarding the pathfinder: it is not a surprise that the so-called short pathfinder is a bottleneck. There are plans to revamp or get rid of it, as it is a very old piece of code. I am quite happy that the hierarchical pathfinder appears as a secondary issue: it was already revamped a couple years ago So your findings in the pathfinder area are matching our current focus! We are going to upgrade our version of SpiderMonkey and we hope to see some performance improvements in the parts of SM that appear in your analysis. Looking forward to reading your next findings

trying : Magna @#$% laude

Getting closer to being done with the final cinematic and going back to adding in more factions, hurray. Just a few more weeks of relentless animating to go.

Here ya go! https://www.gimp.org/

how install?

I wasn't sure, but if you are saying... I'll take a look at how you have done it.

I see lots of actor fixing in my future. Carry on my wayward son.

Try Alt + Shift + D

As a player who uses an absurd and probably ineffectually large amount of cavalry in 0AD, I LOVE THIS!!

Very nice. But a varity in mane shapes would be the cherry on top. Also what mane types were common in that timeframe and cultures?

It's best to avoid English when approximating sounds, because English orthography is horrible and because English phonology varies greatly between different dialects. The classical pronunciatition of ω is /ɔː/; if you do want English equivalents, I'd say it's the sound as in more or saw (Received Pronunciation), not slow /sloʊ/. Unless otherwise stated, Classical Greek means 4th C BC Attic prose, the language of Lysias, Plato, and Xenophon. There were quite a few sound shifts later in Hellenistic times: α, ᾳ → /a/ ε → /e/ ει, η, ῃ, ι, οι, υ, υι → /i/ ο, ω, ῳ → /o/ ου → /u/ β → /v/ It is important to realize e-psilon, o-micron, u-psilon, and o-mega are modern names; in Classical times they were called εἶ, οὖ, ὖ, and ὦ, respectively (other letters already had their current names); e.g.: [EDIT]: In short, ε was /e/, ει was /eː/, η was /ɛː/, ο was /o/, ου was /oː/, and ω was /ɔː/ in Classical Greek.

I added a note to the download page: https://play0ad.com/download/mac/ Does that sound good to you?

Reduced a bit, however it always look's better with gpuskinning enabled: Also, color diferentiation between rank is no longer used, now every horse (depending on breed) uses the same color by variants; The variant reduce the amount of lines by also calling two props depending on the color, they will call a color range predefined by another variant with the tail and mane:

again? ...lol.

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Thanks @nani! I'll definitely look into using larger test cases - but just for the record, the stated "115 units" is just the size of the army I'm directly controlling/moving. I have other units going about their business back in my city and no idea how many the other faction has running around (I'll have to pause the game in combat and see if I can count just how many Iberian units come rushing out to fend me off when I attack). I suppose I should also mention that earlier (using a different VTune Amplifier result collected under different conditions), I did actually find CCMPPathfinder::ComputeShortPath as a hotspot! The cause of the bottlenecking, according to my analysis, was that this function was bound by branch misprediction. Unfortunately, after looking into the code for some time I was forced to conclude that there was nothing that could be done to mitigate the misprediction rate. I have not yet seen other parts of the path finder become hotspots but I'll try building a new test case on an 8-player map tomorrow. Honestly I was sticking to 2 player so far to allow myself time to actually build up a decent test case - I never said I was good at this game! In other news, I was able to run a tighter analysis (with a sample rate of 0.1ms) on the slow startup portion. In that part, SkinPoint is definitely the main hotspot, followed by BlendBoneMatrices. SkinPoint is 49.9% back end bound, almost entirely core bound. None of that was attributed to the divider, though, so it's just plain port overuse. I'm currently investigating whether it might be possible to vectorize the offending loop, as that can dramatically cut down on the port traffic, but ultimately it comes down to whether the nature of the loop is vector-friendly.

For the sake of keeping track of things, and for easy access by the developers helping me out, I figure I should recap all my findings so far. I started with the code as of February 1st, to which I added some VTune Amplifier ITT API calls to mark frames as well as place user events marking the durations of actual gameplay and the loading screen on the CPU timeline. This was the only initial change made. My designated test case is a save file from a medium sized random Lake map featuring the Romans (myself) versus the Iberians (CPU). My standard test procedure is to select my army of 115 units, march them westward along the southern edge of the lake, and engage the Iberian forces. On filtering down the Microarchitecture Analysis result that I'm currently working from to only the actual gameplay portion, I found three general regions of interest: a slow portion immediately after the loading screen ends, normal gameplay, and a bizarre "gap" where no frames were processed at all. Long version: Short version: I've written the dead section off as a fluke (and I don't think it could be optimized anyway). The slow part at the beginning needs further analysis to see if I can get meaningful data. I've concluded that CModelDef::BlendBoneMatrices and ShaderModelRenderer::Render are the primary functions to investigate. Analysis of Functions: BlendBoneMatrices assessment: Render assessment: Render is more complicated. It's overwhelmingly back-end bound (89.8% of pipeline slots) and almost all of this is memory bound (81.4%). Digging deeper into the numbers it's 74.6% DRAM bound, which essentially means that it's slowed down mainly by missing the last level cache quite often. Even more abstractly, it's not accessing data in an efficient way. It's a fairly long function and it had several hotspots in it. Hotspot #1, line 446 I haven't dived so deeply into the other hotspots of note in this function. So that's pretty much what I've got as of right now.

I still do not know how this resource could be used. In some maps it is scarce, in others you have even to throw it away

I sent an email to the Capitole organizers to see if the thumbnail could be changed It's not bad for 0 A.D. to have this (it certainly gives people the urge to click!), but I feel like it's a bit disrespectful of the person who appears, especially if we want to share that video and talk about it.

They look nice. One minor point, though, because I value consistency: your falcata and pickaxe have their tip in the wrong direction; please orientate melee weapons and tools from bottom-left to top-right, e.g.: [EDIT]: D1779

version 0.3.0 Added: Resize bars for lobby chat and sides panels (hover over the edges to show resize option just like if it were a window) *The resizes changes are not permanent (not saved)

team 1 DoctorOrgans -rome Rauls -britons n08212000 -galus phoenixdesk -britons team 2 randomid -galus mord -rome boudica -iber emperior -galus in this game, DoctorOrgans fast raid and constant attack at mord, for this decision DoctorOrgans lose more eco and mord lose all eco and pop, this war is more fun 2019-02-12_mord`s survival mode.zip

in current version when you write "start" (people often write start the game)it picks them sparta then they coomplain resign and leave game,lul