[Dual monitors]

I like the game, good job.

I've found a few old threads about dual monitors. They suggest switching to windowed mode and miximizing on one screen. I think that's a button now (found it already so that's good). However, it works great except that the cursor leaves the monitor and moves to the other monitor. So I can't scroll around without the keyboard. Didn't found a solution for that in ~3 threads. Maybe lock the cursor within the window as long as it has focus.

Otherwise good game! I would be less confused if the units were a little larger, but I can understand if you're going for realism.

Hi! Some details about your system would help, can you attach the system_info.txt from the game's log directory? Recently there were improvements to the game's multi-monitor support, but it also depends on your OS.

[9 New Randomly Generated Maps]

ah wow these look awesome! A map preview shot is usually done in atlas, where the map is generated then the unrestricted camera can be used to zoom out to where the entire map can be seen.

You could do that in-game as well, by disabling Restrict Camera in the developer overlay (Alt+D), and you could hide the GUI with Alt+G. Atlas is probably more convenient though

[WIP Atlas UI Changes]

The floating panels are nice for a demo, but IMO they should be docked more like the current Atlas UI by default. I can see in the previews that it was necessary to move the panels around a lot to work on the terrain or whatever is behind them, which would be annoying if it was the default behavior. Otherwise, let's get it reviewed, tested, and committed

[How do I add mods to 0ad alpha 18 on Linux?]

the last is at home/local/share/0ad

Is there a local but not a .local directory? I think that should be ~/.local/share/0ad/, unless it's different on your Ubuntu for some reason. That is the correct place to put your mods, don't put them in cache or config (nothing good will happen if you do).

[Has anybody successfully connected to a cross-platform MP game?]

Also, in case it's relevant, multiplayer is slightly broken in Alpha 18 for OS X 10.7-10.8. For 10.7, it will instantly crash, and for 10.8 there will be an instant OOS. Newer versions should be fine though, and these issues will be fixed in the next release.

[Suggestions for 0 A.D.]

Implement a Hide actor/entities toggle button in Atlas. So that editing the terrain underneath an object/prop would be much easier.

I like that idea! Need to pass it along to trompetin17, who is working on a variety of Atlas improvements.

[SpiderMonkey Build Failed]

I don't use Fedora, and different distros use different naming conventions, but it's listed as a package here: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/nspr-devel

Also on CentOS, which also has yum, I typically use "yum search <<keyword>>" when I want to find a package. "yum search nspr" might find it for you.

[Idea for Skirmish map (Random Environment Settings)]

Any reason why you would want that and not fully random maps? Skirmishes/scenarios are going to be mostly static by design, introducing randomness to them feels like they are becoming a random map instead.

That being said, the old RMGEN tool had a way of loading scenarios into the map generator, so it is possible to have random maps based on static maps, and manipulating things like the environment or terrain. The API for that doesn't exist yet, but would be possible to add.

[SpiderMonkey Build Failed]

Why is this dependency not included in the command to install the other dependencies?

Probably an oversight, I think previously it was assumed system SM (libmozjs) would be used by default with those commands but the situation changed since the upgrade to SM 31. Still, libnspr4 is listed as a dependency for all distros.

[WIP Cinematic camera]

Cool! It would be nice to have a mode where the camera rotation will interpolate along the path, too, rather than having to hardcode all the rotations. It could point tangentially along the path or whatever looks best. Does that make sense? Maybe it's too much for the first version of the patch.

[Any start point for AI development?]

Hi! I'm new playing 0ad =). I'm a Computer Sciences and Mathematics student in Spain and I need to do a BIG BIG work with AI. I thought I could develop an AI for this game because it's open source and it's easy to develop to it. But AI development documentation in 0ad is NULL... How could I begin to learn? Beggining reading code is difficult... Any link or useful resource?

You don't say exactly what you need: a detailed guide on how to write an AI in 0 A.D., or a very basic skeleton of an AI where you insert whatever logic you imagine it needs? Do you need a very high level API that has most of the functions already implemented, or a low level API that provides data and you implement the rest?

For 0 A.D.-specific questions, you could ask one of the other AI devs.

[Atlas trouble]

Actually Atlas doesn't work on Windows XP.

It works on XP SP3, though in A18 it's necessary to patch the broken AtlasUI.dll file (see this post). In A19 it won't be necessary.

[Graphics]

Yeah, you shouldn't have a problem finding a decent, cheap PCI-e graphics card that works with Linux. Years ago, I upgraded my old computer from a GeForce4 Ti (pre-shaders) to a GeForce 7600 (one of their last to support AGP) and it really helped game performance, even though the overall system became too unstable to use anymore.

[Graphics]

the output of lspci is:

yahia@yahia:~$ lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:00.5 PIC: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 I/O APIC Interrupt Controller

00:00.6 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Security Device

00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge

00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237/VX700 PCI Bridge

00:02.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 PCI to PCI Bridge Controller

00:03.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 PCI to PCI Bridge Controller

00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. Device 5337 (rev 80)

00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 07)

00:10.0 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.1 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.2 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.3 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.4 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)

00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to ISA Bridge

00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237/8251 Ultra VLINK Controller

00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 7c)

00:13.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A Host Bridge

00:13.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to PCI Bridge

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 [s3 UniChrome Pro] (rev 01)

80:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A/VT8251 HDA Controller (rev 10)

Hmm, it doesn't list PCI express (PCIe), maybe they didn't include one on that motherboard, though it's advertised as a feature of the chipset... Care to open the case and take a look at the PCI slots? This image shows the different types side by side: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#/media/File:PCIExpress.jpg

[Graphics]

The output of lspci | grep VGA is :

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 [s3 UniChrome Pro] (rev 01)

do you think is possible to play the game with this hardware?

That is an integrated graphics card from the Via chipset. For some reason, Debian has chosen or defaulted to a software driver for you.

You may have a few different options. First, you need a better driver, and surprisingly there is a project called OpenChrome that works to develop open source drivers for your Via. If you want to try installing the driver, it's available as a Debian package: xserver-xorg-video-openchrome. I don't know what performance you will get with that, probably not worse than software rendering, but it might not work at all or it might have a lot of bugs (it's always a risk with drivers). I'm no expert with Linux drivers.

The next option would be to buy a better discrete graphics card. According to this page, you have a PCI express slot, which is good - that would let you buy just about any graphics card from the past 7-8 years (I wouldn't spend much though, and you would have to check your power supply's max output). Please post the full output of running "lspci" to confirm this.

[Graphics]

Graphics Card : VMware, Inc. Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.5, 128 bits)

OpenGL Drivers : 3.0 Mesa 10.4.2; OpenGL 3.0 Mesa 10.4.2

Are you running in a VMWare virtual machine? That wouldn't be a good idea on your system. In any case, it's using software rendering, which will be extremely slow even on brand new computers. If you're not using a VM, you need to find better graphics drivers.

What is the output of this command:

lspci | grep VGA

[Graphics]

Can you post your system_info.txt from the game's log folder (see this page)? That should give us an idea of whether your system can run 0 A.D. well. Another thing that might help is a profile capture with Shift+F11 when you notice the game is very slow. Please attach those files in a reply.

[Not closed after exit]

If the game process is hanging, please run it in gdb and then break into the debugger and find the backtrace with "t a a bt full" (see this article for more details)

[Extract:error writing file public.zip]

I agree with what Alexander says, and if that doesn't fix it, maybe the download was corrupted?

[Atlas Editor does not start]

Sorry, I've been quite short on time lately and didn't have a chance to follow up on this. I'm attaching a fixed version of AtlasUI.dll, which you can copy to the install binaries/system folder. I have tested and it fixes Alpha 18's Atlas editor on XP SP3 for me.

AtasUI.dll.zip

If you still need it, that should do the trick for you

[What is a castle pluggable?]

That's really interesting, I never imagined people would use games that way, much less 0 A.D.

[Alpha 18 on OSX Snow Leopard?]

It wasn't an easy decision to drop older OS X support, but there wasn't much choice, once we decided to use C++11, that restricted us to libc++ on OS X (libstdc++ didn't have adequate C++11 support), which in turn limits us to 10.7+.

I will discuss it again with leper, r16226 might have broken the libstdc++ build, but I was never sure why that was necessary.

[Multi-player games and command channel encryption?]

Note that it is currently possible to impersonate other players by sending network messages (commands) on their behalf, and that is something that should be fixed. There is a TODO in the server code about that. I think that would be a reasonable place to start.

[Siege units should require man-power to work]

I don't really play this game's multiplayer so I can't comment on the micro, but I do hope to see little people pushing/operating the siege weapons added in the future.

If someone makes the animations, you will see that

[Lags...]

Which version of the game is this? Did you build it yourself or is it from a package? Which map? It might help to provide the commands.txt for that game, from the game's log directory.

According to the profiler snapshot, most of the time is spent in "unlogged," which is interesting.