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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.

I have roughly... A first sketch for the Spartans! - may be a bit overloaded, just to show some possibilities/ideas...

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.

They got used to playing for 3 years the same thing over and over again. Now it's like it's a new game for them and that's why it bothers them. You renewed my hopes on this project, thank you.

commands.txt @user1 Greetings Honourable user1, I, PrincipalityOfZeon was spectating shade11 vs Melusines 1v1 rated to ensure fairness as a 3rd party. Lobby username of suspected victor shade11. Lobby username of the suspected offending player: Melusines Regards

I am grateful for the criticisms, as long as they are constructive. Criticisms like: the game is slower, the units are slower, impossible to rush now, these criticisms I don't take seriously, because for the most part they are not true. In general units move faster now than in a23. We slowed down the infantry javelin for reasons of economic balance, but some players can't fill it, and just scream, javelin is now slow, horrible. About the rush, I can guarantee that it’s still possible, I won more games with rush now than in the a23. I even understand that some players were so used to brit + sling rush and gg, that now they need to think a little more and it is necessary to leave the comfort zone. Now is necessary to use better siege units, the towers can defend better, so you cannot just make a lot of slinger and knocking down all the towers as in a23.

If I may ask, why the sudden interest?

Any city in Persia...

campaing.mp4

Well, crime and debt would fit more into a city simulator not an RTS. "Slave resource" could be bought also with other resources

Limiting slaves based on a resource might be a bit problematic; slaves were a fairly naturally occurring aspect of all societies and tended to come from one of three sources: debt, crime, or warfare. I would definitely like to see warfare play an active role in the acquiring of slaves, but again, limiting them sounds arbitrary.

So slave as resource and lootable from enemies? I think this is great. So you can tribute slaves to allies as well. You can even rename this to Manpower/Workforce resource if you want to be PC. My addition probably would be that slaves have XP and can be promoted to serf, freedmen, or even citizenship in some civs. And also perhaps some dangerous work locations (like mines or quarries) should have health draining aura, so in some cases slaves are better option than sacrificing citizens to mine silver or something. Although I still want slaves to be capturable though. It just makes raiding resource spots more exciting in DE.

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.)

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.

Nope, but related. I don't want to spoiler and make any promises. Because it's not the priority for A25, but I hope.

I have seen quite pretty vector graphics with a considerable amount of detail but I guess it takes time and practice... Sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean that each element should be 4K. I meant that the GUI as a whole should be designed for 4K displays, but the individual elements could have a much smaller resolution depending on their proportions... 4K masks sound interesting I wanted to include something that is decorative and breaks the straight lines - but I may come up with something that consumes less area... AoM was one of the games I have played most, so I am biased probably...

That you are right, it is important that they be different. And that not knowing how to play with certain factions has its consequences.

Actually I'm resting when writing that kind of shaders. This one took about half an hour AFAIK.

Another reason to wait for A25

Yes, that's it. Thanks @thankforpieOfficial for the input.

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.

In descending order of importance: It signifies the game isn't dead yet. No longer violates security policies in Linux distros and can be packaged again. No longer just broken on recent macs. My pet peeve feature: hot key editor was added. Improved artwork. MSAA / CAS Next would be the first negative so I stop here. Thou overall more changes for the better than for the worse.

What kind of tasks do you prefer? Usually it's useful to get some basic knowledge how the engine works first. I always can create a bunch of tasks to improve small things that can make a person doing these tasks more familiar with the engine. But these tasks don't have a lot of creativity freedom, they're more educational and relaxing (sometimes) than some hard-work research.

A few suggestions (as someone who has seen some catastrophically bad indie-RTS tutorials )... 1. A complete RTS tutorial system should be split into 3 separate and stand-alone segments: i. A primer on RTS controls and concept for completely new players. ii. A gameplay tutorial that teaches the specific skills needed to play the campaign and skirmish matches. iii. A multiplayer introduction that teaches fundamental skills and strategies players will need to know to be competitive in multiplayer. 2. We should be able to skip any of these segments or complete them in any order. Forcing someone with 1000 hours of AoE2 to relearn unit selection and tech trees in order to find out about some build orders is a @#$% move. 3. The RTS Primer really should not have any narrative elements or context. Its purpose is to teach new players how to play the game, which for many is a big enough challenge already. They don’t need a side helping of historical fan-fiction to digest on top of all that new information. 4. The Gameplay Tutorial can and probably should have a simple story to keep players entertained. However, it should be completely independent of any other campaigns. Forcing someone with 1000 hours of AoE2 to sit through hours of tutorials to get the prologue to one of the main campaigns would be a @#$% move. We also don’t want a very involved story unless there is the ability to skip it. The point of a tutorial is to teach gameplay. To much extraneous narration will get in the way and piss off anyone who genuinely needs the tutorial. 5. The Multiplayer Introduction absolutely MUST NOT have any narrative context what-so-ever. This is for the developers sake, not the players. This tutorial may need to be frequently updated, and that will be much harder to do if every balance change requires rewriting large chunks of the framing story and narration from scratch. 6. AND if you can possible help it. Don’t decide on a framing story for the tutorial until AFTER you have designed and preferably built the training scenarios. Otherwise people will get attached to their story devices and it will be much harder to make necessary changes down the road. But if you do all of this well, you can make a great first impression on new players and grow your active player base significantly.

It could probably be simpler, but I needed the geometry to curve it like this. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D557 could also be a solution.

at some point you should have a screen called brief. Which consists of history, objectives, summary and a historical map.(all RTS have it)

Obviously the Greeks are in the best position with their multiples colonies (Massalia, Emporion, Alonis, Taras, Cyrene, Odessos, Istros, Sinope etc.) and their explorers (Pytheas, Megasthenes, Euthymenes, Colaeus etc.).

Yeah I loved it too. Then again, I was young I think we could do something similar -> a civilisation arriving in a new unknown land (perhaps after being chased by a more powerful foe?), then rebuilding, then finding locals that are unfriendly, and chasing them (kinda bookending then campaign)

That campaign was pretty good

f(x) = (-0.123*x^2 + 1.293*x + 0.1342)/(x - 0.3472)

Age Of Empires 3 is ddosing 0 A.D. to stop its increase in popularity

Done! (But some secretive cabal out there has blown its cover for accusing me of "not doing anything productive" ... Figures!) void Reflectivity( float raydotnormal, vec3 RefractiveIndex, vec3 specColRGB, vec3 MatDiffuseRGB, out vec3 specularFactorRGB, out vec3 diffuseFactorRGB ) { vec3 FReflectivityRGB; vec3 sinRefrAngle; vec3 cosRefrAngle; RealFresnel( vec3(raydotnormal), RefractiveIndex, ReflectivityRGB, sinRefrAngle, cosRefrAngle ); vec3 FRefractivityRGB = WHITE-FReflectivityRGB; vec3 EscapeFraction = getDiffuseEscapeFractionFromDielectric( RefractiveIndex ); float cosAvgReflAngle = getCosOfAvgReReflectionAngle( RefractiveIndex ); //specular: vec3 RRratio = FReflectivityRGB * specColRGB; vec3 dead_light = FRefractivityRGB / ( WHITE - RRratio ); //simplification for infinite specular bounces: vec3 nbouncesRGB = vec3((1.0/reflectivity)-1.0) * dead_light; specularFactorRGB = FReflectivityRGB + nbouncesRGB; //diffuse: //First refraction and diffuse bounce vec3 temp3 = (WHITE-ReflectivityRGB) * cosRefrAngle * MatDiffuseRGB; //And computing the first diffuse escape: temp3 *= EscapeFraction; //simplification for infinite diffuse bounces: vec3 r = (WHITE-EscapeFraction) * vec3(cosAvgReflAngle) * MatDiffuseRGB; diffuseFactorRGB = temp3 / (WHITE-r); } Next step is to test this in the water shader. EDIT: Wait a minute; this is not going to be easy to test in the water shader... It is doable, I'm sure; but not easy. First of all, I'm already computing Fresnel for sunlight going INTO the water, and I'm doing that in the vertex shader, to relieve the fragment shader of some burden. Secondly, the refractive and reflective parts in that shader are separate functions. The refractive function is HUGE, and I don't understand half of it. I think I can do it, but it's going to be a hell of a lot of work. Won't be ready tonight, by any stretch of the imagination. Or, how else can I test this? In case you just stumbled here, this is (at this moment) a shader for glossy paint. Why a shader for glossy paint for a first century game? Well, a shader for glossy paint can easily be tuned to represent cheaper paints, plastics and most biological things. A glossy paint shader is really the starting point for representing non-metals other than matte materials. If a shader can represent a glossy paint well AND a metal well, it can represent just about anything that exists. Well, transparent materials are a separate category. Problem with testing is, the current texture set doesn't have a channel for gloss. I suppose I could do a color selection, like make all green things look glossy... Give all plants a refractive index of 2.5; make them look like Diamond Age plants

Yeah I'm currently working on benchmark maps and the possibility to start, save and end the game automatically by triggers. I have currently two benchmark maps. One for heavy graphics load, and one for a big battle scenario. For both maps I created a cinematic flight, so the user is not be able to move the camera. A replay wont be necessary as no AI is used. At the end the tester (you) should only start the benchmark map, and let it run until the cinematic flight has ended. Than you only need to apply and compile the new patch and run the map again. That's it. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3554

Live coverage here:

SpaceX's own video is up already.

Just another dock / port ...

SUCCESS!!! IT DID IT! LANDED ON THE PAD AFTER FLYING UP 10KM. STANDING ON THE PAD, DOH!!! It blew up on the pad as I was typing this message... But anyways, HUUGE progress. The sky-diving + belly flop concept is proven to work now.

Flood

A rather old RTS and not so easy to run these days, but Nemesis of the Roman Empire, also known as Celtic Kings: The Punic Wars ("TPW"), by Haemimont Games (still around) was one of my favorite games growing up! It's not the most historically accurate in retrospect (mixing Imperial and Republican Roman eras), but still a lot of fun. Came out around 2004 I believe, or around 0 A.D.'s early days. I put together a rather mediocre playthrough with commentary (haven't played in nearly a decade so excuse my rust and poor placement on map!): Interestingly it has both a time period overlap and several core mechanic overlaps with 0 A.D.: Capture of structures is prioritized over destruction (in TPW/NRE, buildings cannot be destroyed at all anyway; gates can be broken down though). Units have levels and gain experience through combat or stationing in a building which gives them experience trickle. Each unit has its own strength, xp, and armor ratings. Units garrisoned in a settlement/structure will fire from its defenses. Each civilization is supposed to feel totally unique, and it definitely does this very well in TPW. Wild animals roam around, including hostiles. But TPW also goes off careening in a totally different direction sometimes: Resources are localized, not unified. Each settlement or structure has its own resource levels, which are sent around the map using mules which carry up to 1000 food or gold each. You can easily set up repeating routes which will run whenever the value reaches over a threshold (100 units of resource). Two-resource economy: food and gold. Food is produced in the rural villages, gold in settlements. The number of population in each controls the rate of production. When you train units, you take pop out of the settlement, meaning gold production drops. You can add more population by sending it from villages, which reduces food production. There is no troop limit, but you can reach a point where you cannot support your army's food consumption, if you do not have enough villages or they are captured. Likewise, if you run too low in population, you will not generate enough gold to train more troops or have enough pop to raise them. Units require food to live and carry a small supply, care must be taken to supply food or an army will starve and become easy prey. You can manually train mules to carry food and attach them to the army. Rather than just armor and damage, units also have a bonus ability, such as dodging the first strike, reflecting damage back to their attacker, each subsequent hit gives more experience or ignores a greater portion of the enemies' armor, and causing a % of the enemy health as bonus damage. This sets up complex relationships much deeper than Rock-Paper-Scissors of traditional RTS, where certain combined-arms relationships are extremely effective (archers knock off more health on full-health, high-health enemies, making them perfect to strike an enemy first so infantry can finish off). The actual damage of a unit is a range (e.g. 18-48), the exact value being determined by the difference in level between the combatant and their enemy. Thus, even heavy units can be overcome by a highly-trained weaker unit. There are no mobile siege units in the game. Instead, 1-10 units can build a stationary siege weapon (ballista, catapult, siege tower) on the map in any location. The weapon then attempts to fire at the target, at a rate set by how many units are stationed inside. Such weapons are very vulnerable to a sally-out, but not vulnerable to fire from towers. Only archers and siege weapons can directly damage buildings. Damage is not used to destroy the building, but rather harm and eventually kill the enemies stationed inside. Once the units inside have been pacified - or they have fled - the army will then attempt to capture the structure. Rather than units being freely formed into formations, they must be 'bonded' to a Hero who will lead them and enforce their formation. The Hero also gives bonus levels and can apply modifiers in battle. Without bonding to a hero, units will fight okay, but they will just sort of wander around without any formation. Heroes are limited to 50 units. Around the map are various special ruins and structures which give benefits. E.g. Ruins contain powerful artifacts which only high level heroes can pick up and use, which can cause damage or heal allies or grant bonus damage/health. Healing wells will heal passing or nearby units regardless of side. Capturable forts, trade outposts, stone outposts, and training outposts each provide benefits and lots of LOS to their owner. Forts slowly convert stationed villagers into macemen, trade outposts convert food into gold, stone outposts gain 8 gold/s interest when at least 2000 gold is placed inside of it, and training outposts behave like barracks in 0 A.D. and give experience trickle to units stationed inside. The cheesiest voice acting ever recorded. Some stuff I really like from TPW I wish was in more RTS: Spacebar brings up FULL SCREEN "mini"-map from which you can issue orders even. Makes the logistics and overview of the battlefield much easier. When entering combat, formations will sort of 'merge' into a battle, finding enemies to fight like in a real melee, and try to push beyond just the closest enemy. Iberian priestesses don't heal but instead gift units experience up to a certain level when a tech is researched. Units in other cultures gain experience by having mock-combat with their buddies. Priests help them to heal while this goes on, though if an enemy attacks it can be disastrous!

Okay, so, the case for a dielectric, transparent, glossy layer over a diffuse base begins similarly to the case of dielectric over specular metal. We have a sunray coming in, 'a', that hits our dielectric and splits into a reflected ray, 'b' (the name of which got cut off in the pic), and a refracted ray 'c'. We already have the math for all that, except for one detail: My calculation of reflected light by the diffuse base was based on ndotl (normal dot lightray vector, or, the cosine of the angle), but light refracts and changes angle, so I should consider the refracted lightray, versus the original lightray. The good news is that the new Fresnel function gives me the cosine of the refracted angle already, as it needs to compute it internally anyways; so I don't need a special calculation; I just need to use that output of the function. So, our concern here is what happens from the moment 'c' is about to hit the diffuse layer. When 'c' hits the diffuse base, it explodes in all directions evenly. At least that is the simplified model of diffuse optics. Rays shoot out in a semi-sphere of even distribution. Some of the rays, shown in green, make it out of the dielectric layer; and some of them, shown in dark red, reflect off the dielectric interface, heading downwards again. This is simplified because the rays escaping are actually split, with a portion reflecting; however the portion is miniscule and can be ignored here. I put gray lines between the green and red, forming a triangle. This is the escape cone, whose half-angle (radius), which I marked in the drawing as 'x', and therefore solid angle, are a function of the material's refractive index alone. The higher the RI, the narrower the escape cone gets. THIS is what the function in the previous posts was all about. But note, as an aside, that the distribution of rays coming out of the dielectric and into the air is not limited to the cone of escape, because they refract, expanding again to a semi-spherical distribution. With this we can calculate how much light will refract out, and how much light will reflect back in to produce yet another diffuse spherical distribution, and so on and so forth. So, given a 'c' ray, let's follow the saga in pseudo-code: void saga_of_a_photon( vec3 ray_c, vec3 normal, vec3 MatDiffuseRGB, vec3 RefractiveIndex vec3 RefractingOutRGBlight, vec3 ReflectingBackInRGBlight ) { vec3 ExplodingRGBlight = dot(ray_c,normal) * MatDiffuseRGB; //diffuse explosion RefractingOutRGBlight = ExplodingRGBlight * RefractiveEscapeFunction( RefractiveIndex ); ReflectingBackInRGBlight = ExplodingRGBlight - RefractingOutRGBlight; } Before you jump horrified that RefractiveIndex is a vec3 instead of a float, there's a reason for it: most materials' refractive index changes with wavelength, so it is not the same for R, G or B. In the latest water shader I have the index of refraction for water as a vec3, not that I'm going to boast of noticing the difference in the results, but every little bit helps. And you might ask, how am I going to specify these "anisochromatic" refractive indices with only one texture channel, the definitive answer is I don't know yet. But seriously, chromium oxide, whose properties are what causes iridescence in chrome-plated Harley exhaust pipes, has steeply changing refractive indexes. To model iridescence I will need to model them correctly. There is one problem that arises from the picture and the pseudocode. I was going to grab the middle of the 'c' ray as my starting point to define the repeating cycle to then solve as standard geometric series. But now I realize I cannot do that, because the angle that 'c' is coming at is input light vector-dependent, whereas the reflecting-back-in rays are not. In fact, I would say that the average angle of light reflecting back in is (90 degrees - x) / 2. Don't forget we need to compute dot(ray,normal) at each diffuse bounce. So, my repeating cycle really begins AFTER the first diffuse explosion. Time for a break; I'll work on the other shaders for a bit.

I think Athenians and Spartans should be moved up a bit, because Spartans can spam out mass skirmisher + Skiritai which is still very deadly in decent numbers. Athenians have cheap champion archers and sword cavalry for defence as well as cata + ram. Slings have been nerfed but you can always go for mass spearmen backed up by archers and catapults. Also this looks like the exact opposite of Valihrant's rankings back in A23

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

It's Sunday! Thought I might be thwarted by A24 dropping and none of the Mods working, so had to improvise a bit! Now you can see how shamefully bad at 0AD I really am! Compare the speed my brain works at with the likes of @ValihrAnt in his replays, it's pretty embarrassing! Ah well!

I'm thinking of adding Memnon of Rhodes as another Persian hero. So: Cyrus II Cambyses II Darius I Xerxes I Memnon of Rhodes I've already established such a precedent of a mercenary general with Xanthippus of Sparta for the Carthaginians.

Put in in SVN earlier today, but I'll show some nice screenies