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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.

Dan, what I meant is except for metal all others are similar enough to not care. I mean photorealistic rendering can't be done as a 1-2 frames per hour don't allow for a fun game. So we end up with compromises anyway. As for implementation, as it's 0ad we definitely need a 3rd distinct uv for the metal bit map! More seriously, clever encoding shouldn't be a concern. What is important is to make importing and exporting from lets say blender straight forward. So I downloaded a pbr texture for use in blender. It comes with the following maps: albedo, ao, height, metallic, normal, and roughness. Sure you could substitute metallic and roughness with specular, diffuse and glossiness. I guess blender also supports the latter somehow but the former seems like it's more intuitive for an artist as it's closer to how we perceive materials. I'm not fond of the approach of detecting material. Let's say the algorithm works for the current assets. Now I would like to add a new model and the algorithm misdetects metal. So how should I know what to change to get the heuristic working. To me it seems this approach is a pain in the neck for artists. I might be wrong ofcourse. The screenshots at least demonstrate that 0ad may profit from a more realistic render.

The Ptolemaic ship in-game was a placeholder that has been replaced by 2 dedicated Nile boats in Alpha 24. The decision to temporarily use the Ptolemaic ship was based on their proximity and interactions with each other, but I haven't seen any literal sources stating that Kushites ever used Ptolemaic triremes. One interesting note here is regarding one of the rarely mentioned, yet one of the most difficult periods in Ptolemaic history, namely the Great Revolt of Thebes, during which a short lived native Upper Egyptian Dynasty ruled Egypt from Aswan (close to the border with Lower Nubia) to Asyut (Middle Egypt), for almost 20 years, from 205 BC to 186 BC. The first of 2 Upper Egyptian pharaohs during this period, Horwennefer reconquered Upper Egypt from the Ptolemies with Kushite military support. See: "Second decree of Philae: demotic and hieroglyphic text on the outside wall of the mammisi (temple of royal birth) at Philae.", 186 BC: "When it was announced to his Majesty through the mouth of a friend of his Majesty, who loves the king, by the chief of the cavalry Aristonikos son of Aristonikos, concerning Komanos, who is one of the first friends of his Majesty: "A battle took place in the South in the area of Thebes with the impious man, the fiend of the gods Hr–wnf and the troops of the Ethiopians, who had united with him, slaying them, seizing as captive this wicked men alive," [...] "On the 3rd of Mesore it was announced to his Majesty: Hr–wnf has been captured alive in the battle against him in year 19, on 24 Epeiph. His son was killed, the commander of the army of impious men, together with the leaders of the Ethiopians who fought on his side. He was brought to the place where the king was. He was punished by death for the crimes, which he had committed, and so were the other criminals, those who had rebelled in the sedition, which they had made." Also important to note that the revolt started as early as 207 BC in Edfu, basically on the border with Lower Nubia... And according to the linked paper, after the final defeat of Ankhwennefer, Horwennefer's successor, he fled south, possibly/(probably) to Nubia. See: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/files/TheGreatRevoltoftheEgyptians.pdf @Nescio & @Genava55, see that paper, it says something interesting about the possible causes of the revolt. Stating that "native Egyptians were armed and trained in order to fight in the Macedonian phalanx. They became self–confident and, when they found a leader, they revolted.". Which may mean that Kushites weren't just fighting against the Macedonian phalanx, but actually fought alongside Egyptians trained in this formation, which in turn might explain the adoption of long pikes or even specifically the sarissa among the Meroitic Kushites as well. Just a thought... I've actually been researching the topic of gunpowder artillery among precolonial subsaharan African states, and cannons among native states of the Guinea Coast from Sierra Leone to Nigeria were indeed surprisingly widespread. For example I found one Itsekiri merchant chief, Nana Olomu, who possessed at least 106 cannons and 1640 kegs of gunpowder! Jaja of Opobo for example had 50 war canoes fitted with breechloading cannons and he even had machine guns... Oba Kosoko, the King of Lagos used more than 40 cannons during 2 battles, trying to resist the British conquest. But I've honestly never seen any references to 20 swivel cannons on a single African ship. The highest number that I've come across so far, for a single boat, was among the navy of Allada. In a 1778 operation, Allada used two armed boats, each of which had 4 brass swivel guns and 24 large calibre blunder-busses mounted on it. Most of the African gun boats would have looked more like this though: King Eyo's state canoe: King Koko's war canoe: Igbo war canoe: Honestly, I believe this thread contains the largest number of depictions of Nubian boats you'll find anywhere... Kushite naval history hasn't been written yet...

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

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.

First of all I'm not part of the project and don't represent it so you can just ignore me all together if you want. Secondly if you already know that you fixed the issue that I might have encountered no need to get upset as you obviously agree with me that there were and still might be pending issues. I have other things to do so reaction time is bound to be slow, if you want me to always use your latest changes clone the git repo and push a branch to github or wherever so I can add your repo as a remote. Then there is no need to copy unversioned files from different threads witch might or might not be part of the same effort around and no need to notify me that there are changes in the first place. Also with proper commit messages I already know what got changed since the last test and I can reference a commit hash when I comment. All I can say is the direction is worthwhile however the version I looked at clearly isn't there yet. That there is a need to touch assets is obviously just a guess, I'm happy if you prove me wrong, but if you have to touch them it's a lot of work. With a new stack right after this all might be in vain. This is also not just about vanilla but also all assets in mods, so even if you fix everything in vanilla others still have to fix the rest. Collaboration is always more about communication than coding, if you are completely averse to this you better stop earlier than later. This has nothing to do with brown nosing, bashing or the like but is just the nature of it. As for a new stack, me thinks it's a good thing. If undertaken don't expect it to land within days. Planing, discussion, implementation and finally reviewing will take a lot of time. This is far from a one-liner after all and involves the interests of many. Perfectionism is a prime source of stress. Nothing will ever be perfect. Anyway take care of your health, that's most important.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo_(subculture) probably this ^

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).

Anybody else who wants to join this Punic War?

The first hero of the Romans is the "Sword of Rome". The second one the "Shield of Rome". So the third one should be called the "Club of Rome"! (Scipio Africanus, 20% attack bonus)

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

When I traveled to Athens, I saw a lot of the mist ogles! Okay, I'm out...

+++ Carthaginian catastrophe: Italic embassy collapsed! +++

Download here: https://github.com/dpikt/pop-chart A mod that adds a chart for total population to the game summary. I couldn't find an existing mod that did this so I created my own I haven't tested it out on any machine other than my own, so let me know if you have trouble running it. Any other feedback appreciated as well. Cheers!

Hello, This is a message to the creator of the fantastically brilliant FGOD mod - it's both a huge thank you for creating this uber-usual addition to the game, and a Youtubers cheeky wishlist of features I'd love to see added or adjusted slightly to make it even more brilliant and useful for me when I'm doing replays and analysis videos of 0AD matches and for my viewers when they're watching them to help them keep track of whats going on. So, long before I started doing 0AD videos, I first saw the FGOD mod in action in videos on the Tom0AD Youtube channel, where the use of the onscreen overlay has become pretty much ubiquitous, so it was a no-brainer for me to use it. It allows me to easily keep track of populations, breakdown of the types of troops each player has and which phase they're in without having to change views or click on any menus, etc. There isn't anything else out there that does this as far as I'm aware. And while it is great, I'd be really struggling without it, and I doubt it was ever conceived with this use case in mind, but there are a few things that would really take it to the next level; 1) The Overlay - Text Size, Readability and Overall Size The font is so tiny! I'm very short-sited so I do need to get quite close to the screen to make out the writing, so larger text would be awesome. I'd love it if there were more character space for the players names - I reckon 15 to 20 characters would be enough space to display their names in full. In fact, the whole overlay could be be considerably bigger without getting in the way of the action on screen. When I'm doing a replay commentary I'm generally focusing the action right in the middle of the screen, so the overlay on the periphery could be larger without covering key developments in the game. This would also useful for anyone watching the replay on a small screen. I don't think there is much you could for someone trying to watch it on a mobile phone, but for an Ipad or something similar, a slightly larger overlay would make the difference between being able to read the text or not. I think the background behind the overlay could be a fraction darker to help the readability of the text. 2) The Stats Once the game is over, there is nothing better than pouring over the stats to see where it was won and lost. The FGOD mod has a few additional charts that the base game doesn't have, but the following would be, for me, an absolute game changer. Population Count. I've mentioned this in the 0Ad feature request forum, but hadn't previously considered a mod providing this functionality. At the moment we can only see a chart of troops created and a matching chart of troops lost/killed. A chart tracking the actual populations over time would effectively show the fluctuations of both. You could see when someones population boomed or stagnated, or dropped dramatically after an attack, etc. It's such a simple thing to see and understand, it's brilliant for analysis - I find it hard to understand why it isn't actually there in among the charts built into the game, it would great to have it. Anyways, many thanks again for creating the mod. I'm sure you'll continue to improve it how you feel is most beneficial, but thought I'd throw my thoughts in there. Appreciate it's a bit of a niche requirement - but if you ever do produce the official Youtubers version, I'd be first in the queue to download it!!!!! Keep up the great work, it's massively appreciated. Many thanks Jim