Jump to content

Josh

WFG Retired
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    396

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Josh

  1. Programmer (Graphics, Gameplay, AI) - Mikita Hradovich (yet another (game) developer wants to participate)

    in Applications and Contributions

    Posted

    I've created task for this

    By the way, could you please explain why such custom preprocessor is used? According to The OpenGL® Shading Language (1.10.59) spec, all directives are supported by built-in preprocessor (no #include support for to obvious reasons). I've checked Ogre3D ssource, there is no clear explanation here also

    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.

  4. Falling Trees

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Yes, ASAP. Work so far on new tree are very excellent. Best to do this comprehensively, IMHO. I am outsider, but I can see this straight. Let's not waste effort on making such an excellent selection of tree, then 1 year down the road decide to, oops, make them fall. keke

    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.

    • Like 2

  5. Settings and User Interface

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    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:

    1. An often unintuitive user interface
    2. 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?

    • Like 3

  7. Any instruction of compile using Eclipse on Linux?

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Hi. I am new to Game programming.

    I just finished making very basic simple 3d game, and now interested in learning about making game engine at many different platform and many different type of game such as RTS, RPG and etc..

    I picked up this one to study because it is RTS game that I have never tried programming, and also it support cross-platform.

    As a novice programmer, I am very much used to GUI stuffs.

    I just want to compile it using Eclipse or Netbeans on linux system.

    Can any1 probably make a video or text instruction with some screenshot, or whatever that teaches about how to compile it on linux system using those IDE?

    I think most of new game programmer rather want it to compile using graphical IDE like Eclipse but not typing in terminal to compile.

    And then possibly I can study and research about source codes..

    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.

  12. First launch, First bug

    in Bug reports

    Posted

    I wonder if the game crashed silently but continued to run in the background (pyrogenesis.exe), it can do that if it enters a debugging loop, I believe. That would lock the used files and prevent uninstallation, while running two instances of the game at once (on Windows) would certainly cause errors and crashes. It might very well be the cause of the mysterious VFS errors.

    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.

    • Like 1

  16. [REPORTED]Weird map bug

    in Bug reports

    Posted

    Well, I just downloaded the game in the 0.16 patch, hosted a game with an AI, and this happens in every map

    Okay! I just found out where this comes from, its from the "Post Processing" Button in the Settings, if I enable it it's when all that darkness happens, so I'll just keep it off, but you guys should look at it if it hasnt been reported already.

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

  19. I am not able to host

    in Help & Feedback

    Posted

    I ran in some problems with my ISP not letting me change the router so I ran the test a little differently. I changed my computer's MAC address to look as if it's my router and plugged it directly to the Internet.

    Luckily I was able to host. I think this narrows down the problem to:

    2. Router - it might be handling WiFi and LAN DMZ/UPnP in subtly different ways.

    I want to thank you to thank you both for you help and patience. Although the problem isn't solved untill I buy another router I think this thread is close to an end.

    I'd like to be proven wrong though. I'll be checking if you have some more debuggind tips on this :)

    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.

  21. Design discussion: Threading to use more than one CPU core

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    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).

    • Like 2

  22. I am not able to host

    in Help & Feedback

    Posted

    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?).

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...