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Thanks! Back from a nap and you guys solved all my problems. Well, a table is not an option with a shader. Actually, it is; I have seen people commit complex things, such as the Fresnel formula, to a little texture, and read it for an answer. But I don't like that; it is slow in its own way, ocupies a texture unit, and has a precision problem; but if many cases of complex functions crop up it might make sense to put them all into a single 16-bit texture and have lookups for several functions. But definitely f(x) = 0.6217/( x^2 + 1.207*x - 1.585 ) is a lot simpler to compute than my powerz abomination. And it works like a charm and a half, too! So, in glsl: float DiffuseEscapeFractionFromDielectric( float RI ) { float temp = (2.207 * RI) + (RI * RI) - 1.585; return 0.6217 / temp; } So, I'm going to make a drawing for diffuse case; so I'll be back in 2 hours or so.

With matlab I found a good one: f(x) = 0.6217/( x^2 + 1.207*x - 1.585 ) has an R^2 of 1

I like what the shader does to Delenda Est's metal mines. The "metal veins" have a shimmer. I hate what it does to the terrain textures though. I forget, but did you say that will be worked on later?

First the low quality of the video hides all the qualities your shader is supposed to present, second you seem to overestimate how many follow progress enough to see an obscure post in a dev subforum. Lastly, your stats are great, compared to many veteran 0ad casters so chillout XD

The "Rathaus" oder "Bürgerhaus" ...

I made a little demo video, for the undecided ... The fish need alpha.

Hello, I want to inaugurate this new A24 replay section by dumping a few of my multiplayer replays, showcasing the new unit balance and the increased diversity of units that can be reliably trained. I have a feeling sometimes players don't make use of all tools available to them. Champions, trade and siege (3v3).zip This teamgame showcases a lot of different unit types, but notably champions swordsmen, some champion archers, some trading, catapult+ballistas attack, and camel archer lategame composition on the other side. Roman sword cavalry champions (3v3).zip Features roman sword cavalry champions, quite a powerful unit. Cavalry and champions (3v3).zip Features sword infantry champions from Seleucids, cavalry compositions from mauryan and ibers (with a few firecav champions) Archer cavalry and roman champion cav (3v3).zip A teamgame that shows those 2 units in action. Valihrant (Koushites) vs Feldfeld (Mauryas).zip Small rush early game. Features town phase CC expansion, archers and elephant archers from Maurya, against archers and nuba skirmisher cavalry from Koushites Valihrant (Mauryas) vs Feldfeld (Macedonians).zip Features town phase CC expansion from macedonians. Skirmishers and champion infantry spearmen from mace against chariot archer champions from maur. Valihrant (Macedonians) vs Feldfeld (Athenians).zip Features a moderate early game rush. CC expansion from macedonians in the town to city phase transition. Gastraphetes from mace against slingers + ballistas from athenians. Feldfeld (Ptolemies) vs cl2488 (Ptolemies).zip Features mercenary swordsmen and mostly slingers against pikemen and slingers. StarAtt (Iberians) vs Feldfeld (Carthaginans).zip Features mercenary cavalry from Carthage. ElDragon (Kushites) vs Feldfeld (Carthaginans).zip Features village phase expansion from Carthage, with a composition of Sacred Band infantry supported by archers later. Archers and pikemen/spearmen from Kushites. You can download all replays bundled here: Feldfeld's replay dump.zip Hopefully that can address a few of the complaints I have read about the new version. For example, the diversity between civilizations has been reduced, yes, however keep in mind to compensate that the new balance between units should make some civilization specific strategies (eg. a unique champion, mercenaries) viable whereas it was not the case in A23 (which was notably a lot of slinger spam). About archers being OP: yes it is true that they have a very good accuracy, possibly making them OP, but they are less efficient than other ranged units against melee units (which have been improved in this version). Remeber there are other options than making citizen soldiers ranged units. Of course this doesn't mean we won't find OP units in the future. Champion melee cavalry look quite strong, champion archer cavalry maybe too.

Hi all, as some of you may know we're planning to include campaign support for A25. With that also comes the opportunity to include a tutorial campaign. Since devs usually are nose-deep into the game, community voice is particularly important in creating such tutorial. I was personally thinking about splitting the different learning goals in subsequent scenarios: Basic interactions (for those compleatly new to RTS) Selecting entities Giving orders Notion of resources and population Entity creation (and stopping to create) Basic economy Resource gathering Corralling Dropsite position (mind the docks!) Fishing Treasures Territory Basic warfare Diplomacy Building defenses Capturing Unit classes 0 A.D. interactions Batch training Selection modifiers (idle, military, deselect) Queuing orders Secondary orders Order-one Pushing orders to the front Structure snapping and turning Advanced economy Diplomacy (tribute, shared vision and dropsites) Trading (international bonus) Bartering Advanced warfare Scouting Siege Loot Strategic positions Covering retreat Other tips and tricks Keep producing entities. Always. Tips from pro players? This way, people can choose what extra training they need without doing a lot of boiler plate actions first. One can couple the different scenarios, such that one follows the other (with the basic interactions one being optional). Following a storyline would be nice also. IMHO it would be nice to use random maps for the tutorials, such that when one plays the same one again the feeling is still a bit different. Let me know what you think, what can be improved or elaborated! Also, if someone wants to take a shot at one of the scenarios, please do so (I guess economy is (partly) handled by already.)

Channel dedicated to the study of Ancient History, with particular interest in the martial field, through a multidisciplinary approach in which the study of sources and the analysis of finds are combined with experimental archeology. All the videos are in Italian but numerous videos include some English subtitles. Gioal Canestrelli is a serious guy with some academic background and a reenactor: https://www.ibs.it/libri/autori/gioal-canestrelli https://independent.academia.edu/GioalCanestrelli

Preliminary results for our statistics: 800x600: 0.31% 1024x768: 0.88% 1280x720: 2.28% 1280x800: 2.11% 1280x1024: 1.80% 1360x768: 1.49% 1366x768: 21.68% 1440x900: 4.52% 1536x864: 4.43% 1600x900: 5.05% 1680x1050: 2.68% 1792x1120: 0.39% 1920x1080: 37.87% 1920x1200: 1.67% 2048x1152: 0.44% 2560x1080: 0.79% 2560x1440: 5.70% 3440x1440: 0.92% 3840x2160: 1.40% Other: 2.15%

as mentioned before, for low theta: for theta ~ pi/2 should be similar (inverting the functions and adjusting approximations). A great solution (from my limited experience with audio synthesis), if the function is periodic, is to use a wavetable and interpolate between points. i.e. use a sample step, store all function results to a hash, access the hash for the previous and next value for a particular input, interpolate linearly between. PS: Ugh, nevermind it seems the function is more complicated than that. Still at least you can get the trig approximations that nani suggested.

That's exactly what is good about current balance. Core units (archers/skrim/slingers) are usable. I think skrim/slingers need to be looking into to increase dmg, possibly. But either way the good thing about a24, imo, is that all civs, on the basics, are usable.

Hahaha, well, that's the problem; I don't know what the function is. I made the huge table in page 1 of the spreadsheet to find out the angle of semi-reflection for each index, put the results into a table in page 2; now the trick is inventing a function that fits the data. y = 0.514 / x^7 + 0.486 / x^2 works nicely; but maybe something not involving powers would be nicer, performance wise. FresnelTable.ods

Use taylor expansion for 1- cos(x) =~ 1 - ( 1 -x^2/2! + x^4/4!) = x^2*(1/2 - x^2/24) Taylor Expansion error 0.9800 -0.0200 0.3317 -0.0005 0.2497 -0.0002 0.1313 0.0000 0.0819 0.0000 0.0562 0.0000 0.0410 0.0000 0.0312 0.0000 0.0247 0.0000

Whoops Glad to see the song is indeed related.

I'm going with Ynys Mon, because it implies a massive rework for the brits & celts, which is what people are asking.

Well ideally the UI should look good on all resolutions. That said, the current situation of having it look bad on the most used by far resolution to suit a minority of people with outdated machines or low end laptops is silly.

i report 'violation of the Terms of Use' : opponent name: PrinceofRusset (1111) my name: seeh - he PrinceofRusset was host - his attacks with many horses runs in my pickers - he exit the server 10 seconds later without any comment https://youtu.be/DH8ulD3HJZQ 2021-03-02_0009.zip

I have seen some spears set to passive before being sent to the battlefield in a24... Passive can help save melee heroes that can be trained only once. I would guess that for an average player who have all his units in the same control group, having some form of security for his hero would be great. About healers, I am not sure what is the best solution since it is has negative effects for both the owner of the healers that need to regroup them all the time with the rest of his army and the attackers who need to regroup his soldiers chasing them. Just thinking out loud, maybe removing the running part of the flee sequence for military units (and healer?) could reduce the issue and prevent the abuse. Just giving my own view: I like that it is currently possible to fight with women. If 20 women are far from safety it seems desirable that they can fight one spear cavalry. Changing stance makes it easier to try to surround the cavalry. I only need to micro each women to their position around the cavalry, no need to click on it on top of it. I have also changed the stance of women to target several unprotected rams. They would attack the one closer to them before moving to the next one. This would be an important change to the overall gameplay since civic center and women would be much more vulnerable than they are now. Without testing it extensively, I am not sure if I would like it.

If you changed it once, it'll be remembered for your next game. This is _usually_ good, but sometimes lead to undesirable behaviour. If some map has pre-defined teams, it'll also change the team settings, so it can happen without noticing.

Hey @gameboy, thanks for the report, we're working on a fix.

I had to refresh my memory. What I did to terrains was three things: I got rid of the specular channel; I ignore it with full prejudice, since ground never has much specularity to speak of, unless it is man-made polished stone, or smooth ice; but even in those cases the specularity is dielectric rather than metallic. Even so, some grounds, particularly the Acropolis elevated ground, were so bright in diffuse they still saturated even after removing the specular channel. So what I do is detect unsaturated (gray-scale) material that is too bright, and dim it down by using squaring, color*color, which dims while increasing contrast. This did wonders for the Acropolis and the Badlands maps, both of which had very bright tiles around where you start the game. Belgian Bog did not really need fixing but it got a little bit of darkening and contrast enhancing of the stone paths, and they looked beautiful; I appreciated them for the first time. The third thing I did, and which I'm thinking perhaps it's not entirely correct, is I multiplied ambient lighting for terrains by 0.5, to compensate for the fact that we don't have terrain AO bakes. I'm thinking this is perhaps unwarranted because if we did have such AO bakes they would look about 80~90% white on average. So, yeah, I think I'll get rid of that 0.5 and report back. Thanks for the reminder. EDIT: And regarding specularity of grounds, now that I have Fresnel, I could bring the spec channel back with some arbitrary Fresnel and some arbitrary but very low spec power, to make it just a blurry shimmer. I'll experiment with that.

If you gonna use that as your metric you gonna be disappointed :-) Be patient

I just checked the video stats in Youtube; 13 views so far; average view time 2 minutes and 3 seconds. That's less than half the video. So most people click away before getting to half of the video. I frankly don't understand this community. This is a waste of my time like no other.

Look for the unit that has `VisibleClasses` you want: https://github.com/0ad/0ad/tree/master/binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates 0ad also shows the classes of the unit if you open the detailed stats modal (right click somewhere xD)

Yeah, I don't understand the argument against them having this ability. If it looks "weird" for an elephant to do this on their own, then just add a driver?

I know I'm totally irrational about this, but I loved watching the elephants putting wooden beams on buildings with their trunks.

The biggest proof that a24 is better than a23, is to join a team game and see at least 6 different civilizations, where before we only had two haha

Test with all hotkeys finished for a minute: Results: 98% shorcuts work like expected :-) ( https://youtu.be/UsEluryKil0 that really works great I don't really need many shortcuts either . not yet but some does nothing at my (k)Ubuntu : - [x] Wall shorctus - [ ] does nothing: - [ ] E + Space - [ ] W + Space - [ ] E + Ctrl - [ ] W + Ctrl - [ ] D + Space - [ ] Select Farmsted - [ ] ctrl shift F - [ ] ctrl F - [ ] space ä <== whats syntagma? - [ ] space 9 <== format wedge recomandet deactivate in camera settings: q w ... and more # conflicts: Space T pressed and released space first: opens - [ ] friends/alians Chat and - [ ] builds Temple Space T pressed slowly - works a expected: - [ ] builds Temple

DONE! The water shader now uses TRUE fresnel for reflection and refraction coefficients. This is the Fresnel formula from Wikipedia; no approximations; no hacks. And it works! Updated also the Phabricator water_patch: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3603 metal_shader_set_v1.2.pyromod

I'd also like to hear some thoughts on altering or removing the passive stance. The main problem is with units doing the weird run and thus avoiding shots and baiting the attacking units after them. Most noticable on healers and women with the loom upgrade as units will run straight into the enemy army to try and chase them. Then there's also players who put the hero on passive stance and position the hero in front of their army as an easy alternative to dancing. Edit. Also with melee units becoming more usable and necessary, dancing should be far more difficult.

Hi, this topic is not used to explain a problem, but a big congratulations to Wildfire Team for the Amazing new Alpha 24! Keep it going! Don't give up!

That's why we don't have siege in military camps now, Romans soldiers became retards and cannot construct it XD. That's why we don't have siege in military camps now, Romans soldiers became retards and cannot construct it XD.

Sound attenuates with distance like real life. The further you zoom out, the quieter things become. Pre-A24 this was not done; 0 A.D. behaved like a 2D game, with all sounds of equal loudness no matter where they were on the screen. This was a basic flaw with 0 A.D. which meant that at far zoom, people mining on the other side of the map would be audible at 100% volume. Not only was this acoustically completely wrong, it caused sound to be extremely cluttered, with a sheer overload of equally loud sounds. You hear mining, but is it the miners right in front of you, or the miners on the other side of the map? Is it the tower in front of you shooting arrows or the enemy TC 1000m away? Now sounds at the top of the screen which are more distant will sound more distant and quieter, which creates a clean and enjoyable separation. The distance attenuation we are using is a fraction of real life, so sounds are audible much further away than they would be in real life, but it is still audible at normal zooms. [[Edit- A quick aside: we could redo the sound attenuation so it attenuates sounds farther from the camera more than closer by the same amount regardless of camera height, meaning the overall sound level would be the same regardless of zoom, but this isn't something we've discussed or explored yet, so I have no idea how good or bad this would be; just a thought.]] Now, I should note we are still working to balance the sounds a bit. There was a major audio bug where certain sounds where playing several duplicate times, which causes them to become greatly amplified (and massively wasted sound channels). This has been fixed, but as a result the balance of audio from before was completely broken. I spent a few hours tweaking sounds to be closer to a good balance, but it will need more work, and that is what a25 and the SoundsMod project is for. My goal with a24 was just to fix the most outdated or flawed sounds and then try to get the balance of sounds at least reasonable, even if not perfect, and I accept that there are sounds that are not quite balanced right yet. One other result is that battles will have a much larger dynamic range. Before the sounds would run out of channels so they would self-limit with more than ~50-60 combatants. Now each unit on each attack should only use one sound so larger battles should be even louder. Here are the old battle sounds, with the same fixed audio engine (i.e. what 0 A.D. would sound like if we kept the sounds the same): Now here are the new battle sounds: Not only are the new sounds to me audibly louder overall, they are also much clearer and less muffled without being irritating. If you want a battle to be immersive, zoom in a bit! Battles cannot be immersive at 500 m... that would be silly. You would not expect a concert to be immersive if you sit in the very back row... you would not expect a TV to be immersive if you're sitting two rooms away. When you play a city builder, you would not expect to hear people chatting on the streets when you zoom out 100's of meters, so I don't get why you expect a battle to be immersive if you zoom out a bunch here... The bow sounds are the same volume as other games, compared to their combat sounds. I compared the sounds to original AoE I-III, the AoE DE's, and a number of my favorite, more obscure historical RTS (Celtic Kings TPW, Empire Earth, Cossacks, etc.) and found that the bow sounds are appropriately less loud than melee weapon sounds. Many games have even quieter bows (like AoE III as Stan said, as well as AoM, which accurately depicts bow impacts as louder than bow shots), while others are about on par with these. In real life, bows are almost silent. They are designed that way intentionally and have been since their invention, because it is a hunting tool first and weapon second. We already are massively exaggerating the sound of bows to make it appeal to the Hollywood idea that bows make some massive whoosh when you fire them, and of course to make it easy to hear them when enemies are attacking which is an essential gameplay mechanic of the sound. I hope this answers some of the questions you have had about the sounds. They are still a work in progress, but the whole point is to improve them. Feedback is definitely welcome but we also have to make sure we are designing the sound without holding onto existing conceptions. It is easy to become stuck in Confirmation Bias, where the more familiar seems better, even when objectively it may not be.

Hello hello hello. It's me again. First serious ranked game in a24 and of course I'm crushing my enemy with Ibers elite cav(op). My opponent did not have the dignity to resign so he pretended internet drop and it disconnected me. It's second time when this noob is doing this kind of thing. There must be a punishment. opponent name: Raffut1969 my name: Daniel_King commands.txtmetadata.json @user1

Does the laptop where it lags have screen scaling ? Eg a 125*% zoom on windows. If so you need to disable scaling foe 0 A.D. by editing properties or disable it entirey

1) I've checked your stats and they don't really look that bad. You have about 50 % win ratio. In my opinion, as few as two games won could get you above the initial rating. I wouldn't switch for another account, not exactly because it's not allowed, but mostly because you now have a history of games won and lost, so people can check that you aren't a smurf or someone that just installed the game. There aren't so many people playing regularly, so it's even more important whether your name sound familiar or not. 2) Well, the regulars don't keep getting worse over time. :-) 3) You never know for sure. There are even some low-level players with high score. It's easy to achieve when you only play rated games against players you know you can beat easily (and especially if they are overrated). The rating serves as an indicator but it's not absolutely reliable. 4) I agree that communicating the host's intentions is really something we should work on. Often people get unassigned without any explanation. It wouldn't be hard to tell in the host name that the game is intended for higher-level players. On the other hand, I wouldn't say it's bad not to include newbies in all the games. I've seen way too many games getting spoiled by unskilled players that just want the game to start fast and then quit the host a few minutes later without any explanation. I wouldn't come join the training of Real Madrid CF and then be all surprised why they don't let me play with them, like come on, guys, it's just a game, right. I can totally play football too. Even though there are no real pros in this game, with all these leagues it's started getting more serious and more sports-like, so I see some resemblance. 5) The host name alone allows for more text than most stable hosts are willing to enter already. :-) 6) I don't know about any specific documentation of 0 A.D. rating system. Anyway, I know it's just a customized version of the Elo rating system, which is used for chess games. The important things to know include that only the current rating of both the players and the binary game result is used to determine the rating adjustment. The bigger the difference in the rating, the more points you can get if you win "against expectations", and the less you lose if you lose. The exact course of the game or factors like the number of total games played aren't considered.