Stan`

Not really most of them use model.fs

GPU are actually very under used. The game is mostly cpu bound. The switching is mostly done by the driver. The point of those materials is to allow artists to have models with only a few textures eg only diffuse, or diffuse + spec, diffuse +spec + ao, diffuse +spec + ao + parallax, diffuse +ao etc. If you load a material requiring more texture you'll get warnings.

According to vladislav "we might have up to 200-300 shader switches per-frame" And yes all are used.

Well thankfully we don't have a shader per object. But we do indeed have quite a few shader. ---------------- basic_trans family For transparent objects Has a bad perf impact. basic_trans_{ao}_{parallax}_{spec} Special one basic_trans_{wind} (moves like if pushed by wind) ----- no_trans family No special stuff plain old diff spec normal parallax no_trans_{ao}_{parallax}_{spec} ----- player_trans family. multiplies a player color on the texture player_trans_{ao}_{parallax}_{spec} ------ There is also basic_spec creates a spec without specular texture basic glow creates a very faint glow effect using the alpha channel of the specular. objectcolor.xml is like player trans but you define the color in the actor

Ah yeah I see. In general the specular was made for metallic parts but I can see how that went wrong for some stuff.

Well it stayed as poc as the mod was not finished. Nowadays Nephy works on another mode called Hyrule conquest. I suppose we could use it for shields. I'm not sure I get you. Are we talking about the new bronze shields speculars that were made yellow so they could keep that tint or do you also talk about b&w ones ?

Could be they have normal maps / spec maps, or use player color, or something else. Everything looks very green?

I need to ask ricotz, but it's very likely it will come at the same time with the release.

https://github.com/Balanced-Annihilation-Reloaded The issue is binary patching archives I suppose we don't even need to version anything. I really liked the idea of an autoupdater. Not sure how the official maintainers would look at it, since it could be a security concern.

Yep see EDIT2

More scaringly. <variant frequency="0" name="Briton Fortress Old" file="structures/defensive_building.xml"> <variant file="structures/defensive_building.xml" frequency="0"> <variant name="Briton Fortress Old" file="structures/defensive_building.xml"> <variant name="Briton Fortress Old" file="structures/defensive_building.xml" frequency="0"> are equivalent <variant file="structures/defensive_building.xml" name="Briton Fortress Old"> <variant file="structures/defensive_building.xml" name="Briton Fortress Old" frequency="0"> work. current <variant frequency="0" name="Briton Fortress Old" file="structures/defensive_building.xml"> EDIT: IMHO variant should always be last to be overriden. Refs: https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP18054 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3286 EDIT2: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3572

Well those variants have frequency="0" but sill get picked because they are before (in the file) the frequency="1" variant

Broken by https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP24919#change-8EjCxaI5SRRT It seems setting variants ignores the frequency="0" not sure why.

Actually this one made it so it's fine. It's just retired

Those are other materials used by the game. I was merely wondering how they looked next to your new ones. I am all for discussions! I believe they are the entire point of these forums. I said agree to disagree because I got the feeling the discussion was over and you were giving up. Just so we're clear, nobody is plotting against you. If we make you feel this way, if I make you feel that way, it's because of a miscommunication through these forums.

Once again it wasn't rejected. I emitted a concern with the amount of work it requires. I'd actually would like to have @vladislavbelov's opinion on it as he probably has plans to change some things about materials too and maybe there is some common ground to be found. I'm gonna emit a lot of concerns because I have been there a while and I've seen a lot of projects left alone. When I commit to something this big I like to have other team members back me up. Because at the end of the day I might be the one doing it instead of something else. Having a new material to migrate to sounds good for a smoother transition. Also I wonder (because I've been too busy to test) how your shader works for objectcolor.xml, basic_glow basic_spec basic_trans_wind etc

Not necessarily. Can you upload you system_info.txt, crashlog.txt and crashlog.dmp? Usually in %localappdata%\0ad\logs.

Some are compatible, some aren't (e.g. you might get away with the same binary on Kubuntu Lubuntu Ubuntu and Linux mint, but it won't work on Fedora) Having scripts to download binaries is the goal of this ticket https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1814 (It's only for windows for now) Yep https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5366 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/art_source

We have too many distros on Linux/BSD to provide binaries Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Mageia, Haiku, FreeBSD,OpenBSD, NetBSD to just name a few. In December 2018 we released, and things seemed to get back to normal. However most of the team was weared down because of the GDPR compliance the long time without commit, and the rushed re-release due to segfaults. Then, people also got very busy with life, leaving only a handful of developpers, most of which could not tackle the challenges at the time, either by lack of knowledge, time, or both. Time passed by with little activity on the programming side, while the art part got a lot of changes. At each big holidays we were waiting for someone to finally get the time to tackle the spidermonkey upgrade, which was the big roadblock, along with macOS issues (hidpi, sdl2 etc) and the occasional library upgrade e.g. NVTT and each time, he either ran out of time, or had to tackle other problems and could not deliver. this went on for at least a year. In July last year, I burnt out. I had a big breakdown and left 0 A.D. for almost a month. After this sad episode, I decided that I wanted to give it one last shot, or let the game die on its own. So I took even more things on my shoulders than I ever did before, trying to micromanage everyone, get people in touch, fix some issues on my own, talk to maintainers, get help from other projects, look for new contributors. and generally try to move the project forward, even though forward was as blurry as "get a release done". Around september wraitii got back and the heavy task of finishing spidermonkey was given to him. In December he was almost done, and since that made a release possible, all the energy was shifted towards fixing the game breaking bugs, and releasing. I think we're at the end of the tunnel here.

Well we've been trying for years, but for people on macOS it's usually too hard to compile as you need to install XCode and other things, for people on linux it's fine generally, and on windows you have to install the 40GB of Visual Studio if you want to use git (svn has the exe), which is usually a major turn off. The biggest problem isn't here though. Development version is highly unstable and people have a hard time syncing (since the game is p2p that means you have to have the exact same version on all machines if you don't MP gets out of sync) Art assets are compressed PNG becomes DDS DAE becomes PMD and PSA for releases, and if you use SVN it's done on the fly and adds a bunch of extra gigabytes in a cache folder plus overhead when running (it's in a separate thread though) We also have people with very limited bandwidth e.g. venezuela. tldr; We tried but didn't have the same positive encounter as you did.

It is but things went horribly wrong :/

It's been 2 years! Linux distributions were starting to drop support from the game, some developpers were starting to give up, and a lot of people felt like we'd never amount to a release. So we decided that now was as good as ever, especially since we managed to put behind us the biggest roadblocks, in order to go back to normal development cycles of 4-5 months. If anything, it's just a bad timing I would not call (1000+ objects * time to render AO) few But I suppose we will agree to disagree on this. Also I never said we would not do it. I said we would not do it now We all work for free here, so in that regard we're the same. I will share my experience with you then. I started here in 2011. It took me 7 years to make it to the art team. During which I spent my time working on a lot of 3D models, a lot of which were just thrown in the garbage can because they were not good enough. I spent years telling myself I was not good enough for any of it. And to this day, I still do. If you leave, I will probably also consider it a personal faillure. So trust me when I say I have been in your shoes. The hardest part around here is to deal with the frustration. One of the persons who answered this thread had to leave and now makes his own mod, because the gap between what he wanted and what the other persons working on this project was too big. And at the end of the day, one of the goals of this project is for people to have fun working on it. If it's only a chore, then everyone burns out pretty fast (I've been there too) Anyway I hope that helps you a bit, if not I'm sorry. All the best, Stan.

If it's the final one yes. If we find a big bug e.g. units completely stuck all the time, then there will be another rc, which in time will become the release. There seems to be some issues with translations strings, but it doesn't make the game incompatible.

Actually it's the SDL2, in order to keep supporting Retina screens. (Still no HiDPI support)

Yeah it will be part of the release announcement, we had to drop 10.12 and below because it wouldn't work for more recent macOS @wraitii might tell you more.