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Hey everyone, I am writing this post to let you know I will become mostly unavailable in the coming weeks. As some of you know, I pushed my limits a lot farther than I ever did for this release, and this combined with some of the threads here + AFK life has had a big impact on me. Probably because I always want to see and take the best out of people. Anyway, to be able to give my best again, I need some rest. And unfortunately, it seems that requires a complete break, else I get dragged in too many things at once, and will never stop until I break again. We have art assets to improve, maps to ditch and make beautiful again, and maybe even a new civ to add. Social Media might be a bit silent too for a while. If you see people having issues, don't hesitate to help / direct them to the forums. "All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us." I count on everyone of you to help make A25 a success and to be nice when I'm gone, and I hope to see you all soon. See you soon everyone, PS: If you really need to reach me you can send me an e-mail.

As noted here: the mauryan worker elephant needs a mahout (some person sitting on it and controlling it). If this is done it also can get back its ability to help on building structures. Corresponding ticket on trac: #6091

As there has been plenty of criticism concerning the new alpha, i am feeling the desire to make a list featuring changes that i consider huge improvements and points of criticism that i dont necessarily agree with. Of course this is just my subjective opinion, but my points are often related to general principles. 1. Game has more depth, as champions are now viable option, adding another dimension to lategame. Each faction basically got several new units. 2. Counter system working better. Spamming sling or for new alpha archers isnt really a viable option. As soon as melee units enter ur supposedly op group of 100 Archers and those melee units are even equipped with upgraded armour, ur gonna be in a pretty bad situation. You can react to game situation, countering what the enemy brings on you. 3. No dance. Dancing is Bug abuse and very nub thing to do. Point. !. 4. Civs are more balanced. I am not afraid any more when choosing to go with random civ, bc at least in lategame all civs have decent units ( champs) and offer decent winning chances,turteling until you get so far is more easy now with forts and towers. Gaul Brit and Ptol are no totally op eco civs any more 5. No GG (siege) deathwalls, even large amount of siege can be killed quite quickly when attacked with swords. This keeps the game more exciting, even if one player seems to have built up op army. Even horse archer spams die to good micro, towers and the right unit composition. Same for all cav strategies. 6. Game looks more nice. 7. Most of the criticism is just not true. Game is to slow, u cant rush etc is just not true. Yes, cav rush is more hard, u need to think twice if you can enter certain areas with cav, if ure enemy spams women though, like it is the case in many tg, its still gonna be worth it. Last alpha you could expect to get attacked by cav almost every game, this version its much more unclear whats going to happen. Also, if you want to fight early u can rush with units, archer rush since min 5,6 can be a succesfull strategy, i managed to beat better players then me using that strat, and also have been beaten by skirm rushs ( without total nubness happening). Also you can just decide to take brit and use dogs. I know each of this points can be discussed endlessly. I know most of this has been discussed in the thread " why is a24 not nice ? ", but i do not only want to give an opposing opinion but also change the tone of the debate, as the outcome of the other debate can more or less only bee: criticism is not true. What i really want to express though is that a24 is quite good and a step in the right direction.

One of the primary uses of domesticated elephants is/was building. Enjoy the Choice

To be honest, people that choose off/on wouldn't choose it again if they would try to play with it. Having corpses, at least the most recent, is crucial to know what units you lost, especially at the beginning of the match where rushes and small attacks take place. Also it doesn't make any sense, you can just set corpse limit to 0 and have both options, all games have this, since forever, is a basic optimization, is not hard at all to implement, gives more fps and after all you can change it to whatever you want. What's so hard to understand?

I've actually complained about this on several occasions both in Lobby and on #0ad-dev. This is what I call the multi-sampling of the mouse (and possibly kb) inputs. This evident when the game is heavily loaded and update rates bog down. (lag but not graphics lag). Ideally, as soon as a player selects a destination/command for a group of units (chop wood, build structures etc) the mouse data (button states and mouse position) should be recorded *once*, and stored for subsequent use in the mod js for that command. But what seems fairly obvious to me is that several routines are going back to the mouse interface and asking for mouse button state, and position over and over. In 23b it was bad in heavily loaded games. In 24b it is far worse. Now it appears that not only is the js code multi-sampling the mouse IO (not an SDL issue Stan), it is re-sampling the mouse raw data for *each unit in the group selected for the that command*. That is evident in the case of *unit spreading*. If you push the operations rates (like you need to, to stuff as many commands in unit time as possible) you can end up with a group of units spread out in a fan pattern (across the map)and stopped/idle instead of converging on command destination. Again, evidence that for each unit in the group the code is going back to raw mouse data and sampling raw mouse data. And of course since the player had long since moved on to the next command, the js code is seeing a moving mouse position and a different position for each unit.

I don't know wether I am possibly making something wrong, but when I remove default hotkeys from autociv after restart they are there again like nothing happened ^^ I solved the problem by disabling autociv. Now the removal of default hotkeys is permanently ^^ BIG thanks @nani

This video shows a lot of rams bunching up around houses, not destroying the houses and ignoring a nearby CC. Seems as though they are a bit confused trying to destroy the tower. This was a game me and Jammy played against the AI. The rams around the houses are the AI, enemy combatants. I'm blue, the houses are mine. Video and replay attached. 1315217833_rams_a24_AI_2021-03-0614-20-39.mp4 2021-02-26_0002.zip

@Sundiata i miss him too

Here are some results from tests done one year ago. #Protocol - 50 games 1v1 on mainland with a set of predefined (random) seeds, for each couple of civs, both players positions test - players are AI - tested on a fork of zeroad #Win-Loss results For each couple of civs, we compute the difference between number of wins and number of losses. In that context: - rome, brit, gaul are far ahead - kush, mace, pers are far behind There is perhaps an high civ unbalance or it is related to the way the AI use them. #Trading score There is the potential bias that it's easier to trade when wining the game. Pers, despite losing a lot of game, shows high trade income. That reflects there high trading bonus. #Trained support citizen #Trained infantry cavalry ratio From AI point of view : - Brit, sele, ptol look like cavalry civ - Athen, spart look like infantry civ #Siege and champions Elephants are counted as champions. It's strange that mace that is expected to be a siege civ don't produce a lot of siege. Kush and maur don't have siege units. One can notice that maur gained some by capturing an enemy structure. AI may miss something or the civ is too late at phase 3. Enjoy! PS: That's a quick approach, there was some extreme games messing the means.

I dont know the balance of your fork, but i'd compare it to the 0ad a23 balance, I'd say it only reflects the strategies the bot uses. Persians can be very strong in the late game using cav and the according hero. This of course requires the bot to build his game accordingly from the start towards that strategy. Mace had the advantage to get siege fast in their workshops. Your analysis is good, but I think this should be generated from real games from players over 1400. On lichess for example all games are recorded and are open available, I don't see a problem why 0ad shouldn't collect at least some data, like the civ. With this https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/4376 you could generate it out of the logs.

I enjoy it as well. A very nice refresh. The new art is amazing. Still plenty of time yet to play with new strategies and find out what seems to work best. I just wish my iMac would play it better, but when you buy a Mac you know it isn't for gaming. Still looks good.

I believe you got my point. We have 1.5% with 4K and 17.5% with GL2.1, so no choice at the moment. But I hope to move toward 4K. Not quite true. We were talking about toasters and support in general. And we support them not because of UI.

I feel a biasing in your opinion. Having intermediate numbers means inconsistent visual effect: you can't predict which unit will disappear. So your "crucial to know what units you lost" doesn't work always, only when you have no continuous battles or you have the pretty high setting. In our code it requires workaround to implement that. Also there is a better in terms of performance solution: showing 2D icons instead of "heavy" units.

Not in our case, we still have a lot of users with small displays (1366x768). You're talking more about aliasing and similar stuff. Pixel perfect in our case is more about how an image fits onto a display. Also shifting and scaling affects how GPU renders it.

For example Raspberry Pi, or platforms that still support only OpenGL1.5 and not higher. I agree to move forward, the question is how many people we're ready to "lost" and when. Not quite right, in that case we loose only people which think that if a game doesn't use RTX or something similar then it's a bad game. Because the game is playable on the modern hardware, even with scaling. You need powers of two only by technical restrictions of the final texture. So if UI uses an atlas then a piece of it can be a not power of two. Not only, you also have a lot of visual elements like buttons or icons that affect an impression.

Chill out and be happy :-)

This video goes with ticket #6088. See there for the issue. 1235697852_Housebuildingrotationbug.mp4 Thanks!

Another shader that shouldn't be used in the game (completely GLSL, no C++). Font is stored in the shader itself encoded by ivec4, colors are chosen as average and a little deviation from it excluding average neighborhood.

Gratifying to be able to read this from a member so important to the community. Thanks to you for all the dedication you have with 0a.d for all this time. I wanted to share this with @Nescio who was certainly the one who worked the most patchs on a24.

I knew this was a tough one; I tried hard to get anything to work; infinite thanks. And it works perfectly. float getLODbiasFromIR( float IR ) //add 5 for 512; add 6 for 1024 cubes { float denominator = IR - 0.3472; float numerator = 0.1342 + (1.293*IR) - (0.123*IR*IR); return numerator / denominator; } One subject not dealt with yet is rougness/smoothness, improving the Phong model, and how spec power and Fresnel combine. But I'm just waking up for now. EDIT: Spreadsheet updated: EDIT2: LOL, when someone complains "it's too dark", "it's too bright", ... I'll just ask them "would you care to review the math?" FresnelTable.ods

When I try to use the mute function it gives me errors.

It depends on your camera position. If you're not looking at a battle then pathfinder is more expensive.

Yea, admittedly, if the elephant would just be paired with a mahout, I wouldn't have such a problem with it. My problem is just with autonomous animals. I've proposed giving it a mahout myself, several times if I'm not mistaken, and it seemed like such a simple, straightforward fix, but was never done. Can we all agree to give it a mahout? You know, I've noticed the same thing and it can cost you units. Like retreating from enemy area, a certain number of your units will break off and start fighting enemies on the way. Like they just stop and reassign themselves to the nearest enemy. Especially when you have a large group, some of them maybe get a little stuck behind other units, and it just seems to cancel whatever order you gave them. .

Suggestion: differentiating the civs with deeper changes in the mechanisms of gameplay similar to Age of Mythology, Warcraft III and Starcraft 2. People generally object that there are too many civs for this. Counterargument: Grouping the civs by similar features and each groups having different mechanisms unique to their groups. The civs inside the same group could have also a few moderate differences like actually in A23 and A24 or like it is in the majority of AoE2 civs. Goal: having real different gameplay experience from switching to another civ. Note: this has nothing to do with previous suggestions proposing to make the game unbalanced on purpose with tier-list. I still think the game should be balanced. Examples of group (this only an illustrative example): Bellicist civs: Romans, Macedonians, Spartans Inheritor civs: Seleucids, Ptolemies, Persians Far-away civs: Maurya, Kushites Thallasocratic civs: Carthaginians, Athenians Barbarian civs: Britons, Iberians, Gauls Example of unique mechanism: the inheritor civs group could have a unique free building at the start because they have prospered in a territory with a very long story. Or a bunch of free houses because there were a lot of prosperous cities on the territory they acquired.

At the "scale" of the game it's best to depict institutions rather than granular details like the relative strength of the average man and woman. So, the roles of the lower, middle, and upper classes might be ripe for depiction, while family dynamics could be best reserved for an RPG game or something similar (unless worked into the game in a very broad sense). Dunno, I haven't quite pinned down the working theory yet.

While all of that may be true, I personally don't see the need to depict sexual dimorphism in an RTS game. We're not building an anthropology simulator after all.

There is nothing that can fix losing 90% of one sex and the gene pool that goes along with it. That's just extinction.

@Alexandermb if you're internet connection and schedule allows it, I think this is a job for you (we miss you )