zoot

No one on the team has suggested that, to my knowledge, so that shouldn't be much of problem.

The goals are certainly sympathetic. Perhaps another item that could benefit from clarification is what "a complete game" means. It honestly isn't even clear to me if there will be a full multiplayer experience (with rankings etc.) nor if there will be a full singleplayer campaign. For all I know, the final release could just support playing against bots and via direct IP. The developers say they want to do full multiplayer and singleplayer, but there are no firm decisions to rely upon. This makes me less enthusiastic about contributing great amounts of time towards any of the core areas, even if I understand that they may not feel able to guarantee that they won't release anything unless it is superb.

I don't think the developers have unbounded resources, so it is not inconceivable that some things could be done in a better way. On the other hand, I don't think they want to release a game that feels mangled by cuts either.

What is needed to get some of this into A11? I have some time at a mediocre PC this week.

Nah, I'd just lose

I think leaderboards and that sort of thing is a somewhat different can of worms than just creating and joining games. The only clean way of doing it, that I can imagine, is to copy the existing functionality for executing a multiplayer game into a standalone or "dedicated" server application that can also track wins and losses.

Integration with a yet-to-be-made standalone server for leaderboards and all that stuff

AFAIK, there's lots of patches waiting for review. As a side-effect, reviewers feel bogged down and potentially become less productive.

This is the kind of thing that Git does well. Basically, it makes it simple to let new features gestate in a branch of their own.

Here is how this post was formatted: [quote name='German Diago Gomez' timestamp='1339922651' post='242301'] I'm sorry about the format for the post :-) [/quote] [quote] Can anyone tell me how to quote multiple times the same person? I'm going to reply by hand cause I keep getting an error of unbalanced quote.../quote [/quote]

Indeed. I guess those 'borders' are loaded and scaled for each side of the rectangle and that something else would be needed for circles.

I was posing a genuine question not making a statement about what the developers' preferences might be.

Can you give me an example of a decision that would not benefit from public input?

Yeah, I don't really buy into the 'louder voices' line of thinking. This isn't an assembly hall, it's a website forum. If I make a convincing argument, that doesn't prevent anyone from going back and reading other people's posts too. Furthermore, if someone's arguments fell short before the decision was made, it will still fall short after the decision is made. We can't really coerce people into sharing a poorly articulated vision. I'm not suggesting it's an easy task in any way, just that you'd want to consider very carefully if there are decisions that you have made in the past that could benefit from being reassessed in a more open way.

A different approach to accelerating development could be to do it more openly. Many decisions seem to be made on the staff forums. Not that there is anything wrong in that but it prevents other folks from taking 'ownership' of that part of development. If it is decreed that triggers (say) can't make it into part 1 then people will tend to accept that. If on the other hand it is 'opened', like laid out on the forums - "how would you guys implement triggers if we were to include them in part 1?" - then people at least get the opportunity to think about it, talk about it and possibly even begin writing some code about it...

Bitmap textures like this one (.png) can display aliasing artifacts when scaled. A neat solution might be to support vector graphics textures (.svg).

I suspect it is too much work to implement. Unless the art dept. can see other uses for something like that.

For what it's worth, Gameloft makes great games. Which titles have you been involved with? In any case, welcome to the forum

What about shadow volumes? My choice source of objective information, Wikipedia, says this technique is slow when the shadows are large, but that doesn't really seem to be the case here.

I've noticed that flickering on other shadows too. I assume its a bug. See the shadows at 0:12 in this video:

I see

Could more of the skeletal animations be moved to the GPU? Apparently it has been a concern in the past that they are too CPU-intensive.

Very nice! Might it be advantageous to introduce a slight bit of randomness? Perhaps in the phase?

As far as I can tell, they just trace linear trajectories through the texture (one texture per branch level). But you'd probably need some level of detail technique to be able to animate tens of trees at once.

This. "Using a hierarchical form of vertex displacement, [deformation and wind modelling] can be combined in a single vertex shader, fully leveraging the power of modern GPUs to realistically animate thousands of branches and ten thousands of leaves at practically no cost." If tree animation has to be very low priority, myconid's solution seems a lot more straightforward, of course.