zoot

The binaries are in binaries/system, but you'd need to get all the data files too. There is no installer, to my knowledge.

Only to be on the bleeding edge. Pre-compiled binaries are committed to SVN regularly (that's what most artists use to stay up-to-date in between alphas).

The code for a number of effects is in, but, with the exception of windy trees and distance fog, it may take a while before the art assets will be updated accordingly. HDR and bloom is not in yet either, to my knowledge. But by alpha 12 hopefully some of the changes should start showing.

Speaking of interplanetary pipes, wasn't one of the late founders of the 0 A.D. project an engineer on the Deep Space Network? I guess that's what's being used right now to get those flipping bits back from Mars.

Not yet

Very cool. Which controls (camera or otherwise) did you miss the most while recording this?

Thanks.

You're a programmer, your view doesn't count. IMO, it's totally noticeable. Not as a glaring issue, but as something that degrades the overall quality of the graphics. I challenge you all to find an in-game AOE3 screenshot with visible tiling.

Would you not agree there is tiling in the patch outlined in red in this shot from the scenario map Sicilia (you'll need to click and see the larger version to see it properly): In my experience, such patterns are commonplace in most maps. I agree the blending is worse, but this seems to accentuate the problem.

I did exaggerate it with that picture, but IMO the repetitiveness is quite apparent in-game, especially on large patches of grass (perhaps partially due to the grass texture not being super high-quality to begin with).

This is from the first 360-degree panorama in color of the landing site taken by the Curiosity rover.

The ability to deform terrain with a placeable mesh is already wanted for cliffs. You have any ideas for how it could be implemented?

What would the animation do?

You mean like shrapnel? That would be a transient effect/animation? It might look okay, but IMO you would still want a custom damaged model/actor/something for the sake of relaying building health info to the user for structures that were damaged off-camera.

Hmm. The problem is that if you also wanted 3 levels of destruction, that would be 3*3=9 actors, and you would need to name each of them in some hacky way (like "town_destroyed3") and then try and put the right name together at runtime. Also, a structure like the Celtic house already has 3 variants, so that's effectively 9*3=27 variants, and you would need some way to couple the randomly selected variant to the matching upgraded/destroyed actors. In the end, I think it would be tidier to branch inside the actor files somehow.

Sounds strange/bad. I assume you have tried updating your GFX driver? That seems to be what crashed.

Normal and parallax mapping are ways to simulate correct lightning of "bumps" and "dents" on a textured surface, so as to not make it seem completely flat. See this image of Gen.Kenobis rock with and without normal mapping: Hopefully, you can tell that the rock on the right seem a bit more granulated than the one on the left. To achieve this effect Gen.Kenobi has created a separate texture (don't ask me how ) that essentially tells the renderer where to draw bumps and dents.

Yeah, it definitely shouldn't be necessary to reboot Atlas to preview every little tweak. However, I wonder if creating a f*ckload of materials (one or more per actor) is really the right approach here? Would it not be better if things like normal map intensity could be set in the actor file itself?

This is an idea I've been toying with and might implement if it doesn't break anything: It should be possible to define a prop as only being shown if a certain condition is met. This would be useful for a number of things: - Showing different/more props for different phases. - Showing different/more scaffolding objects as the construction of a building progresses. - Showing different/ruined props on damaged buildings. - etc. Any comments on how/if this should be done? Specifically, what should the conditional test against? A JavaScript expression? Something else? (While looking into this I came across a link to this sikrit topic that might be informative. Perhaps someone could file a FOIA request for me? )

Tell him how to do normal/parallax too

It should be possible to host them on the wiki itself, at least that's what historic_bruno did in the "Actor Editor" article (hopefully he can tell you how).

Zaggy1024: Somewhat unrelated, but I noted that you made a number of references to imgur images in this wiki article. Just wanted to point out that that probably isn't a good idea as imgur (and any remote image hosting site) can randomly decide to delete your images, thus breaking the article.

There will be interest if artists see a need for it. Since there's no ticket, I'll assume there is no need at this at this point.

I get no obvious errors on ARB.

The Celtic mill bug is fixed.