Josh

Hello nikagra, I forget the exact reasons. However we have a highly complex graphics system and the last time someone tried to remove it, things did not go well (for partially unrelated reasons). Try asking Philip on IRC if you want the full history.

You can also just host multiplayer game and set all the players to AIs.

We are always working on solving performance problems, but it's very difficult. We've already been working on it for years, and it's gotten better.

Making trees support falling is approximately the same amount of work, no matter when it's done. #131 would potentially add something like a physics engine (that's what AoE 3 used). If we took that route, it would automatically 'create' falling/collapsing anything.

Recently I introduced a new player to 0 A.D. and got a fresh view of our user interface from his comments and behavior. I think there are a couple key issues that we should step back and think about: An often unintuitive user interface Option creep (read this for a great explanation of why that's bad)More specifically: The lobby user interface is confusing and ugly. (the following notes are taken from my observation of a first-time lobby user)The lobby is hard to find. What is a "Game Lobby" supposed to by anyway? Why do I need an account? (Fix: Renaming and better labeling. Change to "Play Online" and add some more information on hover in the login/signup dialog.)What any of the colors mean is unclear and they generally make the interface look bad as they are non-complementary. (Fix: Re-evaluate our use of the colors and potentially tone down their use some while making our color choices complementary to the modern design)The user list statuses are confusing. Why is "Online" a status? Isn't everyone online? (Fix: Turn the status column into a single yellow/green/red status and sort the list by status, then rank)The chat box starts empty on user join and (in my tests) no one even knew it was a chat box until I told them (Fix: Enable chat history by default)The chat text entry box looks more like a decorative feature than an input method (Fix: Placeholder text and a send button)The host/join game buttons are in a weird location. They should be near where you select games. (Fix: Maybe re-evaluate the layout?)Games in progress in the same pane as new games is confusing (Fix: Create two panes, one for games in setup and one for games in progress)The options dialog is oversaturated (my own observation). Fix: combine graphics options as possible (eg. combine gentangents with perferglsl), and simplify the number of overlays. (eg. always show ceasefire time in ceasefire games, combine gametime and realtime options/displays into one)The game setup options are getting confusing (my own observation). Do we really need both "Explored Map" and "Revealed Map"? What does "Disable Treasures" even mean? Who are "Late Observers" and why would I let them join? Fix: Not as easy, but we may want to reconsider what features players actually use and give better descriptions/titles to the options that we keep. An easy first step might be grouping the options better and renaming "Late Observer Joins" to something more accessible like "Enable Spectators". We also shouldn't add more options for things like #3546. Developer features should be disabled if cheats are disabled and vice-versa.I would love to hear other people's input. For the most part these are simple changes, but they can get political (resulting in a commit-revert loop, like with Yes/No ordering). Hopefully we can come to an agreement here and incorporate the resulting decisions into our design documentation. Thoughts?

Also, our chat URL is http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad.

I would strongly suggest that you learn how to compile it via the terminal, all our developers use it on linux and most veteran non-windows programmers do most of their work in terminal. The instructions on the wiki are detailed, step-by-step, and well tested.

If you read the whole topic, there are pictures of it running on a phone. Somewhere on Philip's server there are also more recent screenshots (<6 months old (?)).

If we so wish, we can afford to push it to after A17 because (among other releases) A17 already has a number of performance improvements. With the school year starting after/around A17, it's going to be much harder to get algorithmic speed improvements in A18. It could be argued that moving ESR 31 to A18 would actually be beneficial.

Not anything significant. Our hosted git server is automatically updated at http://git.wildfiregames.com/0ad.git/ while the github mirror at https://github.com/0ad/0ad.git has to be manually updated. However, many people prefer the github mirror because github is generally easier to use.

Could you search trac and create a new ticket if it hasn't been reported yet? Also, what version of the game are you running? (since alpha 16 there have been some substantial changes to water)

Perhaps. It seems like all the errors like this reported in the past have been solved by a restart and reinstall. We should probably display a nice error message to the user when they try to start while another instance is already running on Windows.

It sounds like you're running out of memory. Could you check the RAM usage of 0 A.D. while running a scenario similar to the ones it has previously crashed on? (0 A.D. runs as pyrogenesis in the processes tab of task manager)

Have you tried downloading from http://play0ad.com/download/?

This seems to be the same error reported in ticket #2677 which should have been fixed in r15529. Could you check that 0ad/binaries/system/msvcrt.dll exists on your system?

You have to restart after enabling it or enable it from the main menu.

It takes 2 seconds here on a DSL connection. It probably was a temporary issue.

See http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GamePerformance for status on performance tasks.

You might be able to get your current router working by flashing dd-wrt (third party firmware), but if you decide to purchase a new router I'd recommend dlink.

That happens when you don't have enough free space to install the game. Make sure you have at least 1Gb free and try again.

We're working on making 0 A.D. more parallel, and your outline roughly mirrors our plans. However, multithreading is a lot harder than it sounds - especially with our limited resources. I think the current consensus is that most CPU time consuming part is the simulation (pathfinder in particular) and AI. I few months ago I did a few runs in a profiler and the results are here (see cpuprofile1.svg - cpuprofile11.svg and note that this doesn't show javascript time nicely).

Perhaps there's some conflict between the game's automatic UPnP-based port forwarding and your DMZ? If it works fine on another computer with the same configuration on the same network, that narrows down the points of failure to just: 1. Software - some other program might be conflicting with the port 0 A.D. uses. (I know we warn when that happens on UNIX-based operating systems, not sure about Windows) 2. Router - it might be handling WiFi and LAN DMZ/UPnP in subtly different ways. WiFi vs LAN doesn't matter to 0 A.D. as the operating system abstracts those. I assume you've already tried Googling for hosting issues on your router, but it'd be nice to get your router's make and model anyway. Also, to be able to do more specific troubleshooting, what operating system are you running and what is your level of technical competency (beginner? system admin?).

To help narrow down your issue: have you tried having another user directly connect to your external IP by using Multiplayer -> Join Game from the main menu?

This was fixed with the fresh autobuild. Please update your local copy and report any further bugs.

Have you tried recompiling?