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Greetings everyone, The new and hopefully final release candidate (RC) is here! Revision: rP24928 Windows: https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/0ad-0.0.24rc2-24928-alpha-win32.exe MacOS: https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/0ad-0.0.24rc2-24928-alpha-osx64.dmg All RCs are available here: https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc. The one you want is 0ad-0.0.24rc2-24928-alpha-** PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE POSTING & TESTING The RC installer will overwrite the current installed version. The RC will use your current config including mods, so make sure to disable EVERYTHING (fgod, autociv, and badosu's mods are not supported) You might get warnings about hotkeys, we redesigned completely the system, so you might have to fix some of them (you may want to backup your config file if your intend to play A23B again It goes without saying but even though we are really close to a release, this is an experimental version. macOS 10.11 and below are no longer supported. windows XP and Vista are no longer supported. If you want to help more you can also perform those steps Launch a random game Launch a skirmish. Connect to the lobby Play on the lobby with someone Launch Atlas and try things out there Open Unit tests demo (To see if there any breakage in displaying entity's) (It's in scenarios) Try mods through modio only. (A23B MODS WILL NOT WORK) Enable feedback and see if it works (Main menu) Connect to and use mod.io Test replaying new games Test Screenshots (F2) Test Big Screenshots (Maj+F2) Test hotkeys Test Saving and loading a game. Test Quickload/Quicksave If you need any help ping me And of course you can play games with the RC.

4K

I am already doing a lot of work on an entirely new terrain set for the game, so the current cartoony look of the terrains will be completely gone by Alpha 25. Example: If you want to delve further into the development of 0 A.D. and see how your work can be a part of the whole, then join some of the other discussions and take a look where progress if being made elsewhere. Some of the work is being done far away from the main repo. It probably feels pretty chaotic from a professional's point of view, but this is an entirely different kind of development environment than probably what you are used to. Every few years, someone comes onto the forum and tells everyone how things are going to go and runs into a brick wall of frustration and leaves. That doesn't have to be you. We are all interested in the work you are doing, but we are all also ruthlessly honest with our opinions. In a professional environment this kind of brutal honesty could be a detriment to a harmonious office, but here we welcome it. Fragile egos will often burn out and leave. I'm not saying you're fragile, just probably not used to the kind of critique we offer. Again, we are all interested in what you're doing here. Iteration, iteration, iteration, has been WFG's mantra since its inception.

We have too many distros on Linux/BSD to provide binaries Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Mageia, Haiku, FreeBSD,OpenBSD, NetBSD to just name a few. In December 2018 we released, and things seemed to get back to normal. However most of the team was weared down because of the GDPR compliance the long time without commit, and the rushed re-release due to segfaults. Then, people also got very busy with life, leaving only a handful of developpers, most of which could not tackle the challenges at the time, either by lack of knowledge, time, or both. Time passed by with little activity on the programming side, while the art part got a lot of changes. At each big holidays we were waiting for someone to finally get the time to tackle the spidermonkey upgrade, which was the big roadblock, along with macOS issues (hidpi, sdl2 etc) and the occasional library upgrade e.g. NVTT and each time, he either ran out of time, or had to tackle other problems and could not deliver. this went on for at least a year. In July last year, I burnt out. I had a big breakdown and left 0 A.D. for almost a month. After this sad episode, I decided that I wanted to give it one last shot, or let the game die on its own. So I took even more things on my shoulders than I ever did before, trying to micromanage everyone, get people in touch, fix some issues on my own, talk to maintainers, get help from other projects, look for new contributors. and generally try to move the project forward, even though forward was as blurry as "get a release done". Around september wraitii got back and the heavy task of finishing spidermonkey was given to him. In December he was almost done, and since that made a release possible, all the energy was shifted towards fixing the game breaking bugs, and releasing. I think we're at the end of the tunnel here.

Some more eyecandy ... also all handmade

A new blacksmith (forge) ... with "handmade" utilities

Delenda Est-izing Sahyadri Buttes

Some are compatible, some aren't (e.g. you might get away with the same binary on Kubuntu Lubuntu Ubuntu and Linux mint, but it won't work on Fedora) Having scripts to download binaries is the goal of this ticket https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1814 (It's only for windows for now) Yep https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5366 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/art_source

Thank you for the exciting new work Hopefully we will see this in A25, we got a feature freeze recently (the announcement was not public for a while) and am not sure this is too safe to pull in in a short timeframe. If the team deems so, great! Anyways, just to say I appreciate the innovations you're bringing and that exercising patience is somewhat important.

Developer 1: "What advantage do we give the Persians?" Dev 2: "Stable buildings!" (weak joke)

@DanW58 My friend, let me see the latest progress in your graphic production.

Please don't take things personal. People read and reply to your posts, which shows they're interested in your work and interact with you. Everyone has a different background and way of expressing themselves; people here are all volunteers with limited time; and most of us aren't team members (the team is actually quite small, and currently very busy with getting the next stable (A24) released), but contributions from others are certainly welcome. Criticisms are part of the process to get things improved. The fact people look at your proposals and give feedback indicates you're appreciated. Proposals are rarely embraced immediately, therefore it's advisable to: be patient; try to explain it differently; improve it further and address concerns raised by others. That said, if you want to see something included, you should upload (and maintain) patches to https://code.wildfiregames.com/ In a forum post it's very hard to keep track of everything, go into detail, or review changes.

Yeah, probably.

I was thinking they could use their own look. Something like this:

More like x50-x1000, truthfully. In terms of "Full Time Equivalent", I would wager 0 A.D. averages under one FTE/day. Forgotten Empires, the makers of Age2, are 51 people at the moment. I'd wager the team making Age 4 is even larger. The gap isn't large, the gap is huge. Two decades, in fact

@tiagogarciafernandezThis is what Stan is asking for:

It's been 2 years! Linux distributions were starting to drop support from the game, some developpers were starting to give up, and a lot of people felt like we'd never amount to a release. So we decided that now was as good as ever, especially since we managed to put behind us the biggest roadblocks, in order to go back to normal development cycles of 4-5 months. If anything, it's just a bad timing I would not call (1000+ objects * time to render AO) few But I suppose we will agree to disagree on this. Also I never said we would not do it. I said we would not do it now We all work for free here, so in that regard we're the same. I will share my experience with you then. I started here in 2011. It took me 7 years to make it to the art team. During which I spent my time working on a lot of 3D models, a lot of which were just thrown in the garbage can because they were not good enough. I spent years telling myself I was not good enough for any of it. And to this day, I still do. If you leave, I will probably also consider it a personal faillure. So trust me when I say I have been in your shoes. The hardest part around here is to deal with the frustration. One of the persons who answered this thread had to leave and now makes his own mod, because the gap between what he wanted and what the other persons working on this project was too big. And at the end of the day, one of the goals of this project is for people to have fun working on it. If it's only a chore, then everyone burns out pretty fast (I've been there too) Anyway I hope that helps you a bit, if not I'm sorry. All the best, Stan.

Thank you all, gentlemen. I'm recovering my cool, slowly. But really, all this business of racing against the clock, working all-night'ers to try to make it to an upcoming release (an arbitrary deadline at that; needed just to implement "crisis management", probably), and then be told the work is not accepted, and for the most ludicrous reasons, such as a few art items with bad ao bakings not looking good... It is NOT FAIR. And I'm losing respect for Open Source as a result. Not losing respect for the ideals and values it embodies, but for the culture that's grown around it, where people who work for free are treated worse than paid labor in a mine somewhere in the third world. You try and "not take it personally" if you were in my shoes. I'll keep working on this shader, but no longer will concern myself with what wfg do with it. EDIT: I decided to cancel the psychic shader. Still working on the metal detecting one. You could say it is psychic enough; and it is much better than it was a week ago, as far as avoiding incorrect metal detections. It is solid enough I think to even expand detections to human skin and green plant material... At the moment it is far from compiling, however; but I've made a ton of progress (nothing to do with metal detection at this point; mostly with fake environment mapping with specular occlusion and many other crazy new features). As far as a future shader, I can simply remove the metal detection part, and this is good to go. I'm computing fresnel for non-metallic materials; plan to detect human skin and greens to give them the right dielectric and specular power for natural gloss. I don't have index of refraction input, of course, but will fake it for now; make it some function of the colors. It will be very easy to rework this shader once a texture stack is agreed upon. By the way, I was semi-wrong when I said shadows should not affect specular reflections. A point on a surface that by its orientation would be reflecting the sun, cannot possibly reflect the sun if it is in the shadow of another object; it is only specular reflections from other directions that are not affected by shadows, namely environment mapping. So now I correctly have specular highlights modulated by shadowing, but my pseudo-enviro-map NOT affected. The progress with this shader will not be wasted by added features, by the way. For example, currently there's no environment mapping, but when there is, having the reflected environment mapping modulated by (however fake) specular occlusion AND ground reflecting occlusion, will be far superior to standard (unoccluded) environment mapping, which looks like crap. In fact, I'm telling you: 90% of the reason why the graphics industry are working so hard to achieve real time ray-tracing is BECAUSE of the absurd look of environment mapping without specular occlusion --but don't realize it. Having ANY specular occlusion at all, however ad-hoc, is a million times better than NOT having any. Just a little bit of occlusion is enough to fool the eye; people are not going to be looking at reflections off objects with a magnifying glass and judging whether a pixel is correctly or incorrectly occluded... There just has to be a hint of occlusion; that's all that is needed, which is very cheap to achieve, in terms of instructions cost.

If it's the final one yes. If we find a big bug e.g. units completely stuck all the time, then there will be another rc, which in time will become the release. There seems to be some issues with translations strings, but it doesn't make the game incompatible.

Unfortunately 10.11 and before are no longer supported. Indeed, the reason is that the older SDL2 version was bugged on 10.12+, so we had to upgrade, but that upgrade meant we could no longer support 10.11 and earlier. We had to make a choice, and 10.12 being released in 2016 it seemed fair to upgrade. Your iMac should support newer versions of MacOS, so I would suggest you upgrade unless you have very good reasons not to (which you may). The build instructions are yet to be updated entirely, since the release isn't out yet.

Yeah it will be part of the release announcement, we had to drop 10.12 and below because it wouldn't work for more recent macOS @wraitii might tell you more.

Personally I found your insights interesting. The only thing is that it is really different from what is done currently, from a visual perspective. So it has huge impacts. This is why other people are prudent and skeptical. I am absolutely not competent to give any opinion on this matter, but I really like the final render of your shader. As Nescio said, try to argue differently and to explain your point of view. I understand your frustration but going in a personal and political argument is not helping you.

I am very impressed with the ideas you offer. it can make this game that much better.

Thanks for the message, created some tickets. https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/6024 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/6025 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/6026

Topic soundtrack :v (10) El Gran Silencio - Chúntaro Style - YouTube

True, I know and I'm not disputing that. From page 2 of that encyclopedia entry, though: The Meroitic language is only superficially known, although both of its scripts (explained below) were deciphered a hundred years ago by the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith. The reason for our poor knowledge of the language is the lack of bilingual texts and, until recently, the isolated position of Meroitic among the African languages. Since Griffith’s time, nearly all progress toward the translation of the texts was made through the painstaking procedures of the “philological method.” This approach takes the rare known elements of texts (e.g., Egyptian loanwords, divine and royal names, words understood through their iconographic context) and attempts, through guesswork, to derive the meaning of the neighboring elements. Using this method, Griffith was able to establish approximate translations of the standard funerary texts, which are very numerous and highly stereotyped (Griffith 1911). In contrast, the royal texts include narratives that naturally utilize a richer vocabulary and possess more varied syntactic structures. For this reason, only rare stereotyped passages, such as initial royal protocols and lists of enemies killed in battle and of captured women and livestock, can be even partially understood. Presently, no more than a hundred words can be translated with some certainty. Also see https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mero1237 While the case for Eastern Sudanic (or at least its Northern subgroup) is better, what you wrote and what I responded to was: I'm certainly not arguing Meroitic is a Cushitic or Afroasiatic language. I'm merely urging caution with stating as a fact a poorly understood language belongs to a poorly understood language family. It's even worse than that: while scientific racism is no longer acceptable, ordinary people have internalized racial concepts, and millions nowadays self-identify as “black” or “white”.

I'm pretty new here as well, but I read across a lot of stuff in the forum, also your posts. As far as I can see the people here have many different interests, there are artists, historians, gamers, programmers and so on, and for many of them it's not their professional field (my field of studying is actually completly unrelated to this :D). I can only speak for myself, but I had a hard time trying to understand what you were writing (due to my lack of knowledge and since it's not my mother tongue), but I like your dedication and I read out of your posts that you seem to have a lot of professional experience, so I'm pretty excited for the results Anyway, what I'd like to say is that a huge part of the community might not follow you on every step but when you present a final result you will get the recognition for it. So keep it up

Well, the new stack is in the future; this shader is now, and it doesn't just make frequent improvements; it also makes a big general improvement in the lighting of all scenes, from an arcadish, too much ambient light, half way between 3D and cartoon, and scenes that look more realistic, more colorful. You can't say that darkening saturated terrains and applying ambient occlusions with correct gains amounts to just "often beneficial". You also seem to be looking for reasons NOT to adopt the shader, and ignoring any reasons to adopt it. But in so doing you know you hurt me, and then you have to consider what might happen if I leave. I have many years of experience in graphics, and not just years of doing what everybody else does, but years of pioneering work. I've alredy corrected many small mistakes and a big one in the current shader, namely that shadows were being applied to specular reflections. The version of the shader you are testing doesn't have that fix. The version you have doesn't have ambient mapping with specular occlusion; I offered you to test it but you didn't care. It seems to me I'm being subtly attacked from all sides here. First I tried to contribute a nice code cleanup of the VectorXD and FixedVectorXD classes, hiding away public members, etc. Wraitii rejected my patch on the basis of taste; he doesn't like get() and set() functions. Now I come up with great improvements to your shaders, and you just look for any absurd fears and excuses to reject my work. Though, to your credit, this is the story of my entire life. But this may just be the end of it. I frankly can't take it anymore and my health is not getting better. But really, other than for Elon Musk, I think this world belongs to @#$%s. All they care about is their bloody who's who, who is supposed to brown nose to whom, and such garbage. And they all hate perfectionists, AND gang up on them. They all agree behind the scenes, this guy is a perfectionist; let's get rid of him.

I'm basing myself primarily on the work of Dr. Claude Rilly, one of the foremost specialists in Meroitic studies: "Doctor in Egyptology and linguistics, director of the French archaeological mission of Sedeinga (SEDAU), co-editor of the Meroitic Newsletters, member of board of the International Society for Nubian Studies, of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, of the Sudan Archaeology Society (Khartoum), he is currently a research fellow at the CNRS and director of the SFDAS. He is regarded as one of the world’s specialists in Meroitic language and writing on which he wrote his PhD thesis at the EPHE (a higher education institution of training and research in humanities and social sciences). His research fields concern African linguistics, historical linguistics, Meroitic studies and North Eastern Sudanic languages in a comparative approach." Of course, he has his detractors, but they are not as widely cited in specialist literature as he is... I think Dr. Kirsty Rowan of the University of London is one of the main contemporary proponents of the Afro-Asiatic classification, and disagrees strongly with Rilly and most other specialists, although she seems less specialized in Meroitic studies than Rilly and her work is also critiqued. Me and most others strongly favor Rilly's work for a number of reasons, but I'm personally not a linguist so there's not much I can say other than that Rilly is far more widely cited in specialist literature. Rilly states: "The position of Meroitic within the Nilo-Saharan phylum, and more precisely in its main branch, East Sudanic, had already been assumed by Bruce Trigger in the 1960s, but without sufficient linguistic evidence (Trigger 1964). The present author recently confirmed Trigger’s assumption. Meroitic belongs to a sub-group of East Sudanic, which I had termed “Northern East Sudanic,” also comprising Nubian (a group of languages from the Nile Valley and western Sudan), Nara (a dialectal group from Eritrea), Taman (a dialectal group from the Chad-Sudan borderland), and Nyima (two languages from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan)" You'll probably find this an interesting read: the entry for Meroitic in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology by Claude Rilly: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3128r3sw He has written a number of books on the subject that go into much greater detail, if you're interested (though I've only read excerpts myself) Of course languages aren't just deciphered/translated and classified using bilingual texts. When available, they are the holy grail for translations, sure, but they are not common. Other approaches are required to help translate and classify Meroitic, which have focussed on comparative methods. Aside from obvious loanwords, Afro-Asiatic consistently seems to lead to a dead end, while there is a growing understanding of the relations between Meroitic, Old Nubian, and modern Nubian languages as well as a few other Eastern Sudanic languages. Sure, but not entirely relevant here. We're talking about Eastern Sudanic Languages here. Their (sometimes contested) relations to Saharan (and certain Sahelian languages further West) are of no concern to us here. The Nubian Language family is entirely uncontested to my knowledge and their relation to a number of other Eastern Sudanic languages are widely accepted. It's within this context we're talking. I think a lot of specialists would disagree. It seems to be mostly non-specialist, more generalist linguists who contest this. But again, I'm not a linguist myself... You missed the most important part: historical Kush → Biblical Cush (grandson of Noah) → ...?... → unrelated Cushitic languages. In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, scientific racism informed many academic opinions on Nile Valley history (and African history in general). The Afro-Asiatic speakers of the Eastern Deserts have skull types and hair types that led certain types of people to classify them as so-called "Caucasoids", distinct from the inherently inferior "Negroid" types. So when the true extent of Kushite civilization started to be uncovered, there were attempts to reclassify the archetype Aethiopian of Antiquity as Caucasians with darker skin. But this idea conflicts with the actual populations of the Upper Nile regions, so a convoluted explanation was fabricated, claiming that the "Caucasoids" of the Eastern Deserts were the real Kushites (hence the term "Cushitic"), while the local populations were more recent transplants with no claim to the history of the region. It's rooted in things like the Hamitic Hypothesis and things like that... Modern academics don't even touch these subjects anymore... It was just an embarrassing period in Western academia that we'd all just like to forget about, but one way or the other, inadvertently, and often indirectly, still influence modern historical narratives, especially outside of specialist circles, in the general histories. By the way, the biblical Cush is also clearly associated with the historical Kingdom of Kush in a number of verses. And medieval Hebrew oral traditions even cite Meroë as the capital of this Kushite Kingdom (which Moses supposedly ruled for some time, following an Egyptian military expedition he led, even marrying a Kushite princess, according to these traditions).

Furthermore, we might want to replace Tagalog with Filipino (the standardized national variety); cf. Indonesian vs Malay. As you can see, none of the five entries there is about the kingdom of Kush. Is this true? I'm certainly no expert, however, I vaguely recall: Meroitic is too poorly understood to be properly classified (too few bilingual texts); Nilo-Saharan is a proposed language family; Eastern Sudanic is undemonstrated. For comparison, the Altaic language family (lumping Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages together) is no longer accepted either. By the way, it would be nice if you could improve https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/SpecificNames#Meroitic Basically historical Kush → Biblical Cush (grandson of Noah) → unrelated Cushitic languages.

Yeah, Kush with a "K", is used to refer to the ancient Kingdom of Kush, while Cushitic with a "C" refers to the Cushitic languages, spoken by non-Kushite peoples, even though both Kush and Cush obviously share the same etymology. Lay people confuse these two all the time. I don't think that the official standardizer, la RAE, is a historical source, and considering how often this stuff gets confused even in English, I'm not sure we should follow "official standardizers". When we look at the Spanish Wikipedia page for the Kingdom of Kush, we get 6 matches for "Kushita" and only one match for "Cushita" (the second match for Cushita refers to the unrelated Cushitic languages). Cushitic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages, while Kushites spoke a branch of proto-Nilo-Saharan. Using Cushita or the even rarer Cusita with a "C" even risks playing into Oromo nationalist sentiments and the likes, who like to illegitimately claim Kushite history for some ugly reason.... There's a whole, really ugly backstory for why "Cushitic" languages were named as such and it's highly inappropriate for us all to continue using that term, but these things are difficult to change once they've been coined. Either way, we should not continue associating Cushitic people with Kush proper, even if official standardizers (who know nothing of this history) say so. I know it's confusing... But it is what it is...

EUREKA !!! I got the metal detection algorithm to NOT detect human skin as metallic. Women's arms no longer look fatally sun-burnt. In fact, there's now far fewer false metal detections than before. EDIT: Added more screenshots with random civs, different maps. Note how just a handful of items look metallic. Sometimes a couple of small pots. Particularly in the last screenshot below, notice the shields inside the roofed patio; they correctly reflect sky from our general direction, in spite of being in a dark place. YEY!!! model_common.fs model_common.vs terrain_common.fs

Here is a club.

D3558 by @wraitii

The last uploaded replay is simple, there are entities blocking the construction site, due to the sheer amount of entities, they cannot get off. The other replay/savegame is more tricky, it involves apparently non-existing entities, we're investigating.

Buenas ; Nuevos bocetos para edificios "Mayas Preclásicos"; (que conste que no he abandonado el desarrollo de Arsacids/Parthia "Arsácidas" y tampoco" Lusitanos") -Hice 2 modelos de 2 colores haciendo un total de 4 modelos para cada edificio; Centro Urbano; Barracas /Cuartel; Casas; Edificio especial- " Cancha de Pelota"; Fortaleza; Mercado; (serán mucho más bonitos con los adornos de mercancías ) Puerto; Templo; En sí , estos son los edificios sin decoraciones , les faltan las decoraciones propias de cada edificio , como escudos y lanzas en las barracas/cuartel , mercancías en el mercado , utensilios domésticos en las casas etc... pero como no sé si estos bocetos serán aceptados , por eso no los he puesto... Disculpen las molestias*

A simple windmill - not ready yet, and the pictures are not the best, but i have to go sleeping

this was the plan ...

This kind of problem is typical of games using the method whereby the scene is rendered to a depth texture from a light source, and then the depth info is transformed and compared with when rendering from the camera. "Depth buffer" is it called? Precision is a big issue with this method. There are offsets that can be tweaked, but ultimately you'll end up either with shadows that don't make it like they should, or light that doesn't make it that should have. I once saw a paper about a possible solution for this problem, but I no longer have the link; it involved transforming the scene BEFORE rendering the depth textures, then compensating for it numerically in the depth render, so as to end up with a depth buffer that roughly aligns with the view frustrum and better uses the depth bits. A more expedient solution is to make sure the assets don't have cases of self-shadowing that's cast too shortly (from too shallow a depth difference). In the case of the building shown a few posts back, making that ledge twice as high would probably cure the problem, if the problem is what I think it is.

Improving Belgian Bog:

Stan, I'm the LAST PERSON on this planet to ever give up a discussion; just so you know. I was born this way. My best friend and I, when we were kids, one time we got into an argument that was vast, involved physics, philosophy, ethics, epistemology and the meaning of life; and we argued for 3 days almost continuously; and finally we arrived at our basic difference of opinion: He believed that once we humans come to discover and know everything, the laws of the universe would be a bunch of equations explaining everything. I believed that once we humans come to discover and know everything, the laws of the universe would be a single equation explaining everything. That was when we realized that our basic difference was a matter of opinion that could not be resolved. And we agreed to disagree, and we did so wholeheartedly.

I can't see...