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I recently got interested in helping with 0 A.D. development, especially optimization. I was thinking how could we accelerate pathfinding and in consequence reduce lag. It already seems quite optimized, A* with JPS optimization. One of things that are still possible to do is to apply parallelism to pathfinding. Toady I've found this: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI15/paper/download/9620/9366 By using method shown in the article we could not only run many pathfinding requests in parallel, but parallelize a single pathfinding request in a GPU-friendly way. We could use CUDA or OpenCL to implement it. Authors of the article have achieved 30x(EDIT: actually it's only x6 speedup. See my third post.) speedup of A* algorithm, which is quite considerable, however I am not sure how much would it speedup 0 A.D. pathfinding. I am not familiar with 0 A.D. code enough to start working on it, or even assess how much could it actually speedup 0 A.D. pathfinging. I have found few posts from 2012 about running multiple pathfinding queries in parallel(not parallelising single request), saying that this wouldn't be really useful for players without strong GPUs or multicore processors. https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/16018-supreme-commander-2-pathfinding/&tab=comments#comment-239673 Well, today we have 2018(2019 soon), and even things as basic as desktop environments have multi core CPUs in their requirements, and most 3D RTS games have dedicated GPUs in their requirements. Sure it would be much more useful for player with NVIDIA GTX 1080 than for player with intel i3 integrated GPU, however I think that speedup for most of players could still be considerable. Maybe it will turn out too hard to implement, not as efficient as I assume here, not good for every player, etc... But maybe it will turn out that it really speeds up pathfinding , at least for players with dedicated GPUs.

SALVEESTEGOFERRVMAVGVSTVSPRINCEPSROMANVM The neo Roman empire of the cyberworld is back with a new mod! A hardcore realism/strategy mod inspired by total war and the likes, for example there will be a bigger focus on capturing premade buildings in a map then literally building a set of city walls in 5 minutes. I intend to look for help from the community and from my roman style gaming community to be able to finish this very ambitious mod. The mod will be a fork of this masterpiece: as many of the planned features already exist there. This mod will: Have a heavy emphasis on friendly fire similar to total war, so one must be careful where their volley of archers shoots Have a heavy emphasis on battalion warfare, and it is planned for most units to be always in battalions (some new units are planned like patrol guardsmen that can walk around the city as single units, and scouts being able to be single units, etc) Have very strong buildings but more restrictive construction (similar to total war) so instead of building many buildings you will want to capture them, and battles will be more like: either fought in the wilderness where it is mainly just troops and temporary constrcutions (army camp will probably be cc there), defense battles similar to the OG total war games like this battle: Will try to add in some kind of supply lines feature and starving units, and also if possible a morale feature represented by some hacky method where when it reaches low it forces unit to be on the "fleeing" passive mode versions the animals that run away from you ingame are set to https://github.com/roman-modding-team https://discord.gg/vv5aWEn https://github.com/roman-modding-team/0ad-gameplay-mode

I like the idea because the recent Total War are impossible to mod correctly and the engine of M2TW is far too old and too limited. It could be a nice alternative in the gamer world. You want to do a kind of mix between a paradox game, a Total War and an Anno game?

Moved to Off-Topic.

I was wondering whether it would be feasible/practical to implement a way to target a group of units instead of only one? For example if you have some archers, you might want to tell them to hit the skirmishers instead of the melee soldiers in front of them. It could be also useful to counter players making their hero dance. The units doing the actions would only ignore other units until the one which were targeted are all dead...

Range units should prioritize the enemy ranged units on a mixed battle. If all units have aura the range units should not target enemy units within the aura of allied or friendly units. Then friendly damage can be avoided.

If you find other players i could be interested in trying a big game (6 players or more) with the patch, to see what settings it would free for those

You may want to do some graphs before/after the patches. See here for how to use the profiling feature: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/EngineProfiling#Simulationreplaymode Also make sure the MD5 hash of final state is the same, if the changes are not supposed to introduce different paths.

Oh, probably mostly some time. Code is quite well-organized and I'm quickly getting into it. I'm probably too young to be considered a real programmer(15 years old), but I'm learning fast and already have some C++ experience (programming since 11 years old). Probably many of you have programming experience much greater than 4 years but it's better than nothing. My main area of interest is computer science (training hard to get some nice title in Polish Olympiad in Informatics), and that's why I'm mostly interested in things like pathfinder optimizations. My amount of free time isn't very big, but maybe I could still help the project a bit. I will also have good chance to learn something.