historic_bruno

If you mean 0 A.D.'s PSA animations, those are proprietary binary files and specific to the game, so I'd be very surprised if anything else used them (other than maybe a Max plugin we used before supporting COLLADA).

And it should be very easy to implement, there is already a greyscale post processing filter available in Atlas, I think you turn saturation all the way down to get it. That doesn't affect the UI but that's only a matter of getting the shaders to do what we want.

Yes! It seems much improved, but I still think we could do away with all the dying sounds. Not only because they're repetitive and we need more variety. Preferably we've have a different set of sounds for battles and skirmishes. In a skirmish you might want to hear an individual unit die, but in a battle you want to hear war cries, trumpets sounding, and then trampling feet, stuff like that to make it feel epic. Think of battle scenes in a movie, what do you hear? But even in a battle I suspect there would be a special indicator sound for certain units dying, like a hero for instance, maybe mourning/lamenting sounds? The battle music is a good first step, but we could do more to enhance the experience, like once(if) we add battle formations, there could be retreat and you'd hear the sound of retreat, or if it turned into a rout you'd hear frantic sounds of fleeing.

I also wonder if the install disk might have run out of space and simply failed to create files that are needed. You might check free space on C:.

Might be better to use debug_printf then.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, there is a possible conflict I didn't think of earlier, the Backspace key is already assigned to session time warp mode. That's probably a bad choice of a hotkey, since Mac keyboards don't have an obvious Backspace key. Maybe we can find a different shortcut for time warp rewind, and use Backspace or Delete for deletions (I think that's logical). I'd like to avoid special behavior that only applies to one OS since that makes specifying hotkeys more difficult and more confusing. Alternatively, we could add instructions to the manual whenever we reference the Delete key: Delete: Delete currently selected unit/units/building/buildings (use Fn+Delete on Apple keyboards)

Very very nice! And what about the new horse mesh, isn't there one that hasn't been textured yet? Though I guess you'd want to focus on new models first before updating/improving old ones.

If that error will be occurring often, we should disable it before A13, or log it without displaying anything (if that's useful).

Different modes doesn't sound as useful as what Mythos outlined. Except the terrain texture could be useful in showing what part of the map the player is viewing (since most are circular and can be rotated arbitrarily). I like the idea of pathing obstacles being highlighted. That could be done by indicating edges between pathing classes. For terrain we could do some transforms of the texture colors to restrict them to a limited band of HSL as Philip described. Terrain would be the most "faded" colors since it's in the background and generally less important than resources and entities. It wouldn't matter what colors because they would be distinct bands of intensity, but mostly they should be browns and greens. I think forests are useful to see, to some extent, especially if we change forest pathing behavior so they present more of an obstacle. But individual trees and animals are not important - individual mines are very important (thus the suggestion to use pixel art).

Do those games use SDL 1.2? Apparently there's an environment variable SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_DISPLAY you can set. It's mentioned here, I don't know much more about it than that.

The change would be having color options for each player in match setup. And wouldn't it be easier to refer to player numbers or names instead of colors, if one of the players is colorblind?

I wonder what we can do about this, I'm not knowledgeable enough about SDL and X to know if/how we can provide better dual-monitor support. It would be great if the game could run full screen on one only as an option, or spread out across both.

Those are some ugly colors... better to just let colorblind people choose their own Those could be among the options of course. Most matches won't have 8 players, so it should be fairly easy to choose, say, 4 distinct colors.

Our minimap is currently awful for everyone Especially on maps with lots of trees. We have/had some plans to improve it (see this topic), like using pixel art for resources and combining large clusters of entities together into single icons. Another thing that was mentioned was using HSL color model and separating colors by purpose within different S+L (saturation and lightness) bands. So for instance, terrain on the minimap would be one band, resources another, player colors another. That should make them more distinguishable for everyone, but I don't know how that would interact with different kinds of color blindness. Red-green is one we should always be mindful of. The other thing is what Erik mentioned, having customizable player colors that can be chosen by the player in match setup. This has been discussed in the past, I seem to recall Spahbod was working on it?

Yeah the AI gathering issue is back(?), I've noticed AI units standing around an unreachable sheep on a cliff, for instance, presumably they could reach it for attack but not for gathering. I thought the AI was supposed to detect these conditions and task the units to do something else.

This is great information, and since color blindness is actually fairly common, it's something we need to consider. There was an accessibility topic started recently: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16961 -- if you have time, perhaps you could comment on any other issues in 0 A.D. that affect how accessible/usable it is for you

No problem! Can you try using the Delete key (without Fn) in game to test if it works? I would like to fix both at the same time if necessary. It may be that wxWidgets and SDL handle the keyboards differently. It's not exactly hard to press Fn+Delete but it's less intuitive.

I think you're right about this. Mac keyboards only have a Delete key, unlike PC keyboards that also have a Backspace key. But the Mac Delete key in reality functions like Backspace, so "apparently" wxWidgets (which we use for keyboard input in Atlas) treats it like Backspace. What you can try is using Fn + Delete to get a PC delete-style action. That's a possible workaround, but I see no problem with us also accepting Backspace as a hotkey. Edit: if you have a keyboard with number pad, you might also be able to use the X Delete button for the same functionality. Do you experience a similar problem in the game, deleting your units?

Hmm if we're going to do this, would the whole thing be plastered or only the dome? It makes me wonder about our other Mauryan structures as well: not enough plaster, if this was a common trait? I favor the more historically accurate appearance, the same approach we've taken for other civs and structures.

Both of these are vaguely planned. The Atlas hotkeys system is completely separate from the game itself, so it would be nice to unify them. I guess that's also related to the current work on the config system: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1810 Hmm, which selection tool are you using? Is the simulation test running or reset/inactive? I suppose it could be a keyboard issue, but if so it's the first I've heard of this. That sounds like this known problem: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1126 I think now it's extremely unlikely that cliffs will make it into Part 1, but there's always a chance someone could decide to work on them. They are just very low priority compared to everything else.

Excellent work, once again!

Awesome, looking good!

A clarification on this: "grey" unloaded textures will still be seen if a loading texture isn't cached, but it fixes the most noticeable ugliness related to terrain blending right after map load (it would appear like jagged black/grey lines all over the terrain). For releases, we pre-cache all the textures, so grey textures are much less common, but the initial terrain blending was still a problem since A11. Hopefully nobody sees that anymore

Though we might add a skirmish mode that allows playing scenarios with different options. I wonder if we could make these differences clearer in the UI?

Well you can't translate it now, not very effectively anyway. We'll need to implement a translation system first. The English text is all scattered throughout the code, scripts and data files. My point was simply that we shouldn't kick that can down the road until the game text is considered "stable", since: a.) I don't see that happening, b.) it will take time and people are making offers to help every week, and c.) it wouldn't hurt to have the capability in place, it's not like we can be forced to accept translations if we're not ready. Or we could decide to keep the game English-only, that seems like a poor choice but still better than indecision IMO.