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Just posting a to-do list for the future (not necessarily things urgent for the next release, could be postpone for the following one). Buildings: Updating the shields on the buildings: If you are looking for a circular thing as an asset, there is the wheel, a recurring symbol representing higher social status and mythological believes. Temples: Replacing the actual temple by more historically accurate buildings. The current temple can be slightly modified and transformed to a small feasting place if this kind of building is needed. For a new Gallic temple, @Sundiatastarted something interesting. For the Britons, maybe something inspired by Irish iron age sanctuaries (Dun Ailinne or Rathcroghan for example) or something purely British like the Heathrow, Hayling Island and Fison Way iron age sanctuaries. Taverna: Even if I like the building, I think the idea to make it an important structure of the Gauls falls in the cliché category. Feasting is an important part of the Celtic tradition, it is an institution that has huge impact on social and political processes in the society. Although it is not what everybody imagines with a small group of persons in an auberge/albergue like in the 1st movie of Lord of the Rings (The Prancing Pony). This kind of tavern could have existed but is related more to the merchants and artisans community and have little importance in the Celtic society. The game is skipping a lot of economical complexities so I do not know how this building could be include, although mods that are modifying the game to make it a city builder could use it. Monument: This is maybe the most pressing issue since it is the less accurate and the more cliché building of the Celtic factions (Stonehenge). @wowgetoffyourcellphone got an excellent idea with the Uffington White Horse for the Britons, although I am not sure if it fits well in the idea of monumentality (your opinion guys?) but clearly I think his idea should be include somehow. The other possibility for the Britons are among the sanctuaries proposed for the new temple (see above). Irish iron age buildings can be quite impressive. Bloodgate Hill Iron Age Fort can be used as an inspiration too. For the Gauls there is the Corent sanctuary made by @Stan`, maybe he wants to change to thatched roofs or wooden tiles like the fortress. No problem for me. The other possibility could be the huge sanctuary/assembly-place in Titelberg. The necropolis/death-related-votives-buildings of Acy-Romance could be an option if regrouped as successive buildings. Units: The name list of the units should be updated one day or another. The roster of the Britons and of the Gauls should be differentiated one day or another. I think we should wait what insight and design will emerge from @borg- modding and testing, with the feedback of other players. For the moment my proposals are waiting. Changing the roster is not something to do lightly. And the possible changes on the military design of the game can have huge effect in my proposals for the roster (notably about swords units). I do not know which conclusion the team reaches after the crazy flame-war discussion around Borg mod. The iron scabbard and the carnyx will probably be added soon according to @Alexandermb message. He already did a huge work on the shields, on the helmets and on the weapons. The heroes should be updated as well in the future. Currently they are some issues on the design of those.

New and Updated Skirmish maps in Delenda Est. (I'll update this thread periodically) Crocodilopolis

There is the common cliché of seeing barbarians as dirty peoples with huge beards and giant moustaches. Actually the few iconographic details found by historians and archaeologists are suggesting a lot of shaved faces and some trimmed and contoured beard and mustache. Classical literature suggests Celtic warriors were kinda some fashionista with proper hygiene, which fits well in their logic of bravado and to show off to rise in the society. Even the early Germans that were far more materially poor than the Celts in the beginning of their iron age got different traditions related to their textiles, to their hair dress, to adornments. This is an issue stressed by archaeologists, probably that most of the traditions, of the cultural habits and of the esthetics among the "Barbarians" is definitively lost because it does not stand the effect of time in most conditions. In the case of the description from classical literature you are reacting about, indeed it stresses the idea that the mustache was the norm. It comes from Caesar: The most civilized of all these nations are they who inhabit Kent, which is entirely a maritime district, nor do they differ much from the Gallic customs. Most of the inland inhabitants do not sow corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins. All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with wood, which occasions a bluish color, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight. They wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip. Ten and even twelve have wives common to them, and particularly brothers among brothers, and parents among their children; but if there be any issue by these wives, they are reputed to be the children of those by whom respectively each was first espoused when a virgin. Although there is a huge issue with the description of Caesar since the Britons did sow corn (another British word for wheat). Archaeologically there is no doubt about it. It falls again in the Caesarian propaganda. He wanted to conquer the Gauls and to justify this, all his work is animalizing the other Barbarians at the frontiers to show than the Gauls are less barbaric and closer to the Romans now. Suffering of the same fear of barbarians invasions. The Gallic Wars books are one of the only time the Roman accounts started to be fair and genuinely interested to understand the Gallic society because of a motive behind. The discrepancy between the Gallic quite fair account from Caesar and the classical Roman xenophobia for the Germanic and British parts is just striking in his work. Diodorus Siculus will copy the description without precising his sources and the differences between the Celts (are they Gauls or Britons? are they all the same?)

I mean for what it's worth, the Total War series has never been the best example of historically accurate unit designs and rosters. Rome Total War was and is an awesome game, but the depictions of Egyptians, Britons, and Germanic Tribes were... shall we say a bit fantastical. This is nothing much worse than that game at least to me.

Update: It is in vanilla now! One can remove a property from the resource json file to prevent it from being bartered, traded or tributed.

I post here since I do not know elsewhere to do it. Are you guys interested to open a thread with bibliography and references about ancient history? Like did EB in their forum. If you are interested in it, I can open a thread in the General Discussion section and keep it updated with the proposals of the other members. Trying to make it properly classified and readable.

if we ever implement a proper usage of shields to protect from arrows as well as formation bonuses, here is a new one for the scutum shield for use with the "closed_order" formation:

this is what comes my mind looking this "armor"

Battering rams are OP. They have too much health and normal infantry of cavalry doesnt do them any damage. PLS fix.

Another Meroitic period graffiti, from the Gate of Hadrian at Philae Compare this 2nd century AD (or later) Meroitic representation of a ship to the 14th century BC New Kingdom Period Ship from the Theban tomb of Amenhotep called Huy, Viceroy of Kush under Tutankhamen (first image). c. 1500 years of cultural continuity. CALLING OUT TO ISIS: THE ENDURING NUBIAN PRESENCE AT PHILAE https://www.academia.edu/26548898/Calling_Out_to_Isis_the_Enduring_Nubian_Presence_at_Philae?auto=download

Would it be difficult to add a flag to the renderer where certain actors are pre-rendered in the black map area of the map? It can be a flag in the actor itself, similar to the castshadow flag. What this would do is stop cliff objects (among other things) from "popping" into existence as the player gains line of sight/vision of the object. This kind of flag would be good for some select objects, like cliffs, large structures like Wonders, bridge sections, etc. Currently, you only gain vision of an object once the root origin of the model or actor is visible. This creates visual glitches in the way you see objects. I think everyone has seen this happen consciously or subconsciously. Would it be worth it to fix this? I think it would. It's one of those polish things that make the engine feel complete.

At least Rome 1 was easily moddable... I prefer it than Rome 2 simply for this. I understand totally that a game could skip historical accuracy if they assume it and do not hide the inaccuracies. Amateurs are often better than the developers. Historical accuracy at the level of nitpickers is a small market.

I just ran into this in a game I played: I don't think unfinished buildings should count to the victory conditions. I spent 10 mins running cav all over the map looking for the last unit of my AI enemy, and after using cheats to fully reveal the map, it turns out they placed the foundation of a dock but never started it. But because the dock is a production building, the game wouldn't let me win till I destroyed it, but obviously there was nothing the AI could do with it, it had nobody left to actually finish it.

I agree that the lack of true custom Tarantine Cavalry actors in the game is an oversight. In Delenda Est, Tarantine Cavalry look like this, depicted in a Greco-Italic style: Their shields could definitely be improved. A mix of small "aspis" style and round "spina" style shields would be good, as they are depicted on coinage with both types. @Alexandermb @wackyserious

I was sure they would do this since Three Kingdom is a romanced version... I was sure

Isn't this the actual problem. So, why add more flags?

If nearly everyone agrees that the mod is a large improvement (I niggle with some of it, but still think it's an improvement. Not as big of an improvement as Delenda Est of course ), then I don't understand the need with such an extensive process which will only serve to push back A24 even further. It's not like it couldn't be further improved in A25 or revamped in B1 (lol, which is where all this balancing stuff should be done, but apparently I'm the only one who cares about this). Point is, even this large improvement is not set in stone even after merging. It can still be further iterated moving forward.

Aside of the differentiation of the I will build and I will repair nothing to be reported.

What do you think is so inaccurate about these pieces? Just curious...

Small simple mod which enables stables as living space for animals. So now you cannot just build one stables and spam cavalry, at the start you have 5 free place for horses and every Stable adds space for 10 more. Limited units to buildings: cavalry and elephants @nani Life space.zip

IIRC it's broken it needed a few patches to work and alot more to be useful I remember there was some ticket about it.

AGE3 Wars of Liberty are better

Serbian archaeologists find sarcophagus with two skeletons and jewellery in ancient city https://www.reuters.com/article/us-serbia-archeology/serbian-archaeologists-find-sarcophagus-with-two-skeletons-and-jewellery-in-ancient-city-idUSKCN1IW1JB?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews The Viminacium site, near the town of Kostolac, around 70 km east of Belgrade, was a military camp and the capital of the Roman province of Moesia Superior, dating back to the 1st century AD. It had a hippodrome, fortifications, a forum, palace, temples, amphitheatre, aqueducts, baths and workshops. According to historians, it could have been the home to some 40,000 people. So far, only about 4 percent of it has been explored, said Miomir Korac, the director of the site.

Nice to discuss...

Actually I think everyone should be able to erect walls in neutral territory. It's a common tactic and well attested. Completely true. Personally I value historical accuracy, but I have no intention to impose my views on others. Please improve your mod in a way you think it'll be most enjoyable.

I've found this very interesting series of article on Reddit: it dissects how GTA 5 renders a scene. I wanted to highlight some differences with 0 A.D. http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-2/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-3/ Now obviously GTA 5 uses deferred rendering, which isn't entirely possible for us so far because we support older OpenGL. It doesn't change much, except it makes it much easier to support many lights, something which could be interesting. In part 1, one thing to notice is the use of LOD, and more importantly the huge amount of instancing: the number of draw calls to render the scene is about 1900. We in 0 A.D. are quite regularly above those numbers on much "simpler" scenes. In part 2, it explains how they actually swapped a hill with models on it for a single model to reduce draw calls. On the other hand, it seems like GTA has found no better way than us to render the ocean, or indeed even reflections on the swimming pool.

At the moment we are limited on the CPU side by the number of objects and not the polygon count of these objects. At least that's true for dedicated graphics cards. In my OpenGL 4 branch, I'm working on reducing driver overhead with OpenGL 4 functionality such as glMultiDrawElementsIndirect. So far, I've only worked on the aspect of uniforms and don't even do real instancing yet. Still, this has already improved performance quite a bit. I hope and expect to see some more improvements by introducing bindless texture management, which should then allow real instancing. In my opinion, it doesn't make much sense to work on a LOD system, before we overcome these limitations.

Some probably know Jenkins already. It's an Open Source tool for automated building and testing. The idea is to notice bugs as soon as possible after they are introduced. Let's compare this situation with and without Jenkins to show what I mean (not using Bob and Alice as names for once): Situation: Yves breaks a test only in debug builds Currently (without Jenkins): Yves has tested his change in the game and he has launched the tests in release mode. Everything works as expected and he commits. Two weeks later there's a forum post about a strange problem with the tests. Leper and Sander both can't reproduce it in their first try. On their systems the tests work well. After a few questions in the forum they figure out it only happens in debug builds and after an hour of collaborative analysis they find and fix the problem. Unfortunately some other commits were based on this change during the last two weeks and more changes need to be done. Future (with Jenkins): Yves has tested his change in the game and he has launched the tests in release mode. Everything works as expected and he commit. Jenkins does some automated building and testing with various configurations. One hour later, Yves gets a mail from Jenkins informing him that the tests don't work in debug mode. Yves has worked on the change just an hour ago and everything is still fresh in mind and he can solve the problem quickly because he already knows where to search for it. That's an optimal case but there are a lot of situations where automated testing can be useful. Just think about how often someone broke a test in the past which caused a lot of unnecessary noise on IRC when this person could just have fixed it an hour after breaking it and nobody would have noticed. I you have some time I recommend watching this video, it explains the topic quite well in my optinion (the general part in the beginning at least): I also recommend this short and general overview of what continuous integration means: I have started experimenting a bit with Jenkins and figuring out what can be done and what could be useful for us. Here's what I have so far: Basic building and testing procedure: Jenkins checks for new svn revisions every 10 minutes. It uses svn update for the checkout instead of doing a fresh checkout everytime. Runs update-workspaces.sh with the newly introduced option "--jenkins-tests" Runs make Runs our test executable and redirects the output to an xml file. Fixes a little incompatibility with the XML schema with sed and then uses the generated XML to display the results of the testsThese steps get exectued for both debug and release configurations. Jenkins has a web GUI which displays and visualizes all kinds of useful information. Unfortunately I don't have a DMZ setup at home, so I don't want to make the server accessible to the internet. But I've made some screenshots to give you an impression of how it looks: This is the overview showing a trend (currently a dark cloud because many builds failed while I was testing). On the bottom left corner you see build with two different configurations (debug and release) running. Here you see the tests listed. They all passed in this run. There are also nice graphs showing a history of the tests either for all tests or individual tests. Of course the graph is not very interesting with only two builds and 100% tests passed in both builds: There's also a build history showing when which tests succeeded or failed: Last but not least, Jenkins keeps track of commits and automatically adds people who do the commits to its configuration. We could assign email addresses to people and send mails if one of their commits doesn't pass a build or a test (I heard you can do that, but I haven't tested it yet). I'll continue improving my Jenkins setup to figure out what can be done and what's useful for us. At some point we should probably think about configuring a Jenkins server which is accessible through the internet. At the moment this would be too early IMO. I know that Philip already has a sever, but as far as I know he only uses it for building and hasn't integrated tests or anything like that.

I'm not familiar with Spidermonkey's exact implementation, but I've implemented similar systems in the past. As a result, the following contains a fair deal of assumptions. A useful thing to know is that many GC designs don't depend on system malloc(), but keep around one or more large chunks of memory and do their own allocations inside those chunks (it's faster). This means that the memory is reused, and even if a certain object is "deleted" by the GC, it's still kept around in the process's memory until it's overwritten by another allocation. Spidermonkey uses a simple type of "mark-and-sweep" GC (afaik) that doesn't move allocated objects around, so anything you allocate has a fixed memory address. Thus, you can access objects directly from C++ pointers, such as JSString*, without worrying that they might move... but when the memory is reclaimed by the GC and reused, the C++ is stuck with invalid pointers. So, my guess is that you are dereferencing a dangling C++ pointer that points to an object in GC memory that has been "deleted" but is still in memory and hasn't been overwritten. In theory, if the JS keeps allocating new objects of similar size as that string, you'll eventually overwrite the memory and get nonsense output.

If I understand it correctly, str is a global c++ variable where you store some text in function 1 using ConvertArguments. I believe this copies the value to a new memory address, ie str and "textfromscript" are not pointing to the same memory address. Which means that even after a GC that should destroy textfromscript, str still points to the correct text, and thus function 2 can access it. It doesn't seem related to the GC. The question is whether ConvertArguments actually copies the variables, but I'm assuming yes. (edit: str is actually defined twice in your code, both as a global variable and a local one in "main", which might mess things up...)