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Hey folks! I haven't been active here lately, well, since about 3 years now. So some of you will remember me, but there are a lot of new faces I'm sure. It's time for a re-introduction! My name is Ben (aka historic_bruno) and I started with 0 A.D. in fall 2010, because I was bored and wanted to join a fun project. Something bigger than myself. 0 A.D. was first alphabetically on Wikipedia's list of open source games, so I clicked it and fell in love. I mean, I always loved history and Age of Empires. And I always loved programming, so it was a match made in heaven. I started looking at the code, adding a few small features or bug fixes here and there. Started hanging out in IRC and on the forums. It was my first time contributing to an open source project, and really the largest software project I had worked on at the time (right out of college - I had a degree in computer engineering). It kinda came along at the perfect time for me, where I was in my life, not happy with what I had been doing. 0 A.D. gave me a new direction and fresh perspective. Before long, I was working on bigger changes to things like the random map generator, game setup UI, and Atlas, and they invited me to join the dev team! I was incredibly excited to be a part of such a great team. From there, I learned so much about software development from folks like Philip and all the other devs. Eventually I had so many things going on in my life, that I couldn't spend so much time in IRC, and even following the daily logs became too much (for a while 0 A.D. was like a full time job for me). And then I found it hard to keep up with Trac, so I stepped away. But I never intended it to be for years! IMO, 0 A.D. is one of the finest, if not *the* finest open source 3D game out there. Art, music, graphics, and everything is top notch. I've always been proud of our releases, each one an improvement on the last, and even though we may be slower paced than some big studios, there is a lot of passion that goes into 0 A.D. It's kind of a gift to the world and to the FOSS movement in general, and that's a cool legacy for everyone who has contributed and followed along over the years. Anyway I'm glad to be back and can't wait to see what has been happening in my absence, and meet the new folks in this community! And most of all thanks to everyone who has been playing, testing, packaging, designing, creating, developing, and involved in whatever way to making 0 A.D. what it is :-)

atlas cedars and cedars of lebanon can be the same thing because they look like the same thing

@Sundiata

Meroë, Temple M 250, the so-called Sun Temple Art by Sundiata (Malcolm Quartey) The 1st century BC Meroitic period temple on the outskirts of the capital. It is still uncertain which god(s) it was dedicated to. Making use of the Kushite textures (by LordGood and Wowgetoffyourcellphone, if I'm not mistaken). I've suggested this structure as the Kushite wonder before, and thought I'd just give it a go myself. The model isn't finished yet (texturing). It's less than 10.000 tris (and I don't expect to add any more geometry), so I sincerely hope it can replace the current wonder (which looks great and can still be used in Atlas). (Those acacia trees were just a free asset I found somewhere. Using an HDRI to light the scene for the first time.) References:

I captured the whole awful process

The temple was built from sandstone and fired brick, which was then plastered with white lime plaster. In the 6th image of the references you can still clearly see the patchy remains of the 2000 year old plaster. So yes, this temple, like most, if not all Kushite temples, palaces and elite residences in other royal cities like Naqa, Basa, Muweis and others would have been gleaming white under the Sudanese sun (or broken white because of all the sand). Some of the Egyptian pyramids looked white because of the polished limestone they used (limestone is very rare in Nubia). Hahaha, lol... Why do I get this ominous feeling? Like this, right? https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Basic3DImplementation

Nice work @Sundiata . Keep it up. I knew you could do it.

Hey sundiata see if you can get it in the engine, that way you get familiar with the process and can start cranking out new civs for TM :p

Nice work Sundiata. Keep it up and you might be one of us one day

that's its utterly impressive. I hope have a such impressive building inside the Atlas.

What about useless stuff? I'm pretty good at useless stuff

oh lAWD he's done it! If you want to break up those walls a little bit you can add the downspouts from the set temples, but if not, it's definitely fine as is

As long as it's useful it's worth it

Yes, exactly. The only disadvantage that I see might be for communication since all players might not choose to allocate the existing colors in the same way. Maybe with a default allocation of colors (for example the one chosen by the host) that could be solved if desired/usefull. This way all players could have their favorite color (chosen among the existing one) as seen from their own perspective and the host wouldn't have to care about this anymore. Fears of the black player 's sneaky attack would be gone

Welcome back! (Though I'm more or less gone, so I guess I'm not the best person to welcome you back )

Your quality of work is a joy to behold, LordGood.

Multithreading isn't a silver bullet. It requires a lot of stuff: you need to synchronise different threads, you need to pass data between threads and you need code it without races. It costs a lot of time for complex projects, so as Stan said we may not have a visible benefit at all. Or its cost would be really huge. So it should be analysed before introducing the multithreading in all stuff.

<offtopic> Actually 0A.D. uses async/await during its development. For example some of my patches are waiting for other patches that are waiting for review (promises!). At the same time I may create async patches that are not related to the previous ones. </offtopic>

It's a very stupid process where i look at the thing and draw the plant, put in in the engine to see how awful it looks, and then try to make it less awful. every plant has a different, special, stupid process. The trick to grasses and ground plants seems to be a lightening gradient from base to top to make them stand out and be noticeable on top, but not betray the messy union where the polygons meet the terrain. I'm still figuring things out though of course you can say to hell with it all with water plants, which is why I'm having fun with water plants. I'll see if i can make a video or stream or something sometime in the near future

@Rolf Dew Thanks, very interesting, i think my concept is quite similar to settlers, but i admit i didn t knew this game, i will defenetley look in it more deep. You can also give me already your opinion on which features you think would be cool have in this mod, that are already in settlers:)

Can we get a closer look, and species? I recognize the prickly pears haha, those forage bushes?

Hey, What you've noticed is accurate, and somewhat known (mostly by me I guess): The rendering is draw-call bound and slow, the pathfinder can be slow, and the Javascript main loop is very slow (we use it for most gameplay stuff, which is why it's slow). Unfortunately, profiling spider monkey accurately is very difficult. There are few tools, and almost none that can be integrated with an existing profiler. What you'd see in OSX's instruments and I assume VTune are memory addresses, which are actually JIT-ed code and/or spider monkey code (mostly the former). With a lot of hard work, using JIT debug output and the trace logger, one might create debug symbol-like structures to document these, but it seems not super useful. What we did in the past (and probably will in the future) for profiling JS was using our internal profiling, which does have an overhead but can give you an idea of what's going on. _Overall_, though, we've already optimised most obvious bottlenecks. The remaining bottlenecks are not trivial to fix, and JS is somewhat of a lost cause.

Yep, i don't know how i get there, neither how i end finding that way of making it works.

I mostly fiddled around in Matrix3D.h, entirely replacing the contents of some functions with either calls to the Intel® Math Kernel Library or blocks of SSE intrinsics. I did not see any measurable improvement, but I've attached the file. The original code is left intact, commented out. Aside from these completely re-written functions, the only change is the addition of the <mkl.h> header. Couldn't hurt. Unfortunately I don't believe so. VTune Amplifier does have some JavaScript profiling capabilities, but as far as I know they're limited to node.js profiling. Also, I know pretty much nothing about JavaScript. I'm afraid while that JavaScript bottleneck is in place there's not much else I can do for 0 A.D. I do have enough from this to at least fuel the internal training session late next week. Depending on how that goes, I might produce a small how-to video/article based on this project. If I do, I'll be sure to post a link here.

This could be added to the modding guide