Yves

Maybe we should just skip the fixed point vs float discussion for a moment. 20% sounds like a lot, but I think you measured that at the beginning of the game and the bigger problem is later when the simulation starts using up most of the resources. Also it could make such a significant difference simply because other parts of the engine aren't optimized yet and have to do too many calculations. Philip indicated something like that related to the short-range pathfinder. Last but not least there seem to be different opinions that are well argued but still no real consensus. If you will eventually become a fulltime programmer you should start with a less contentious issue . Don't get me worng, but no matter if your right or wrong in that matter it would be good to add something everybody is happy with. There are enough tasks for that, it shouldn't be the problem. In my opinion the main problems currently are: 1. Pathfinder: Meaning the pathfinder itself that is used for unit movement but also the pathing functionality that the AI need and currently implements separately because there's no interface to the engine's pathfinder implementation that fulfills the requirements. 2. Multithreading support: Separating AI and Simulation from the rendering would about double the average framerate and would get rid of lag-spikes happening when for example the AI calculates the map for dropsite placement (multiple seconds on large maps!). I've tried doing that for the AI but my conclusion was that the spidermonkey upgrade needs to be done first (3). 3. JavaScript Engine improvements and Spidermonkey upgrade: I'm currently working on that in ticket #1886. It's difficult to predict how much that will improve performance. For Firefox the Spidermonkey performance improved a lot but our situation is a bit different. Anyway, the upgrade is need for various reasons - one being the multithreading support. An issue we have with all kinds of performance improvements is how to measure them. You are talking about 20% improvement which is inherently quite a random number you measure in one specific situation on a very specific plattform (Hardware, driver, OS, compiler options) and with unspecified settings. It would be very helpful both for making good judgements and for motivation to have better ways of measuring performance. What's missing is some kind of benchmark mode that tests different aspects of performance in scripted ingame scenes. It could be some camera movements over dense forests, over water, a lot of units fighting, an army moving through a forest and pathing through a narrow gap in formation, a maximum of 8 AI players doing their normal AI-calculations etc. It should store all the profiler information in the background to draw nice graphs later like how the ms/frame performance changed over time and what parts of the engine used most of the calculation time in these different situations. We already have most of what we need for that. I think that would be a very good task for you to start with, if you like. The pathfinder would be the most important task to continue but that's probably a bit though to start with. We already have two integrated profilers in the engine (simply called Profiler1 and Profiler2). Profiler1: "source/tools/replayprofile/*" contains a Perl script to extract profiling data from the text files generated by Profiler1. There's also a HTML file that can display nice graphs like that: Issues with profiler1: There's a bug that messes up the profiling data after some time. I havent analized it any further but you should get what I mean if you let it run with a game for a few minutes. It has some issues with multithreading In some situations it created huge files of profile data. I once got a 32 GB file and it has such an impact on performance that the data looses its significance Profiler2: Philip create this one which is very helpful for measuring accurately what happens in a single frame. Check the forum thread for more information. It even supports displaying multiple threads and calculations on the GPU. Profiler2 keeps the data in fixed size memory buffer and overwrites the oldest data when the buffer is full. The format is a binary format with much less overhead than profiler1's output. It makes the data accessible via web-server. Maybe it would be better to extend this profiler to save the data in the memory buffer to the disk. What do you think?

We have our own official 0 A.D. wiki here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ It contains a lot of information but parts of it are outdated. Of course you can create your own wiki but it would probably be better if you helped improving our current wiki.

Thank you, I updated the ubuntuusers.de wiki accordingly.

Yes it was a pitty that the same pieces of music repeated over an over when we have multiple awesome tracks available. I'm happy this is fixed now!

I'm sorry but at the moment you probably won't get a lot of help for translating the game. There have been some discussions about implementing proper localization support but as far as I know nobody has started working on it yet.

Check out this.

At least on this screenshot there are only very small differences and they don't look wrong or unnatural in my opinion. How is it when the trees sway in the wind? Does the overlapping cause any flickering or other undesired effects?

It looks very nice but it looks like our pathfinder will have to be improved before it's fully playable.

I missed that so much, well done!

This looks wrong. Please try setting windowed to true in your local.cfg (http://trac.wildfire...ttings#Settings). EDIT: If that doesn't work you can also try setting a fixed screen resolution in local.cfg

I will not use that smiley but it fits very well - It looks awesome! I'm not sure what you mean exactly. think consistency is one of the most important things about GUI design. I think beside making the design prettier the GUI also needs a very pedantic and persistent person to work on the usability.

Yes it's the most recent release. This was the topic I had in mind: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17106 It seems to be something different, but you could try running the game as administrator just to see if that helps, not as a permanent solution. Updating the graphics driver could probably also help.

I can see two error messages in the crashlog. One is about insufficent access rights and the other about changing/getting window resolution in sdl. Which version of the game are you using? I remember that one guy had problems with access rights too and fixed it by reinstalling the game (not sure what caused it). EDIT: Rev 13328... It's in the log. That's alpha 13.

The head/face is something that we usually look at first. Maybe you could try to make it stand out a bit. This face is much better than this one IMO. It transfers some emotion and stands out a bit while on the second one you can't see the eyes, the face is in the dark and the color is very similar to the rest of the image (the helmet, the belt, the spear etc.). I can't draw, so that's just my opinion when looking at it.

It looks like this happened when loading a saved game. In this case it's a known issue. EDIT: I didn't see these replies before posing. @gameboy: You can't solve it unless you change the code. I think qbot should work with saved games.

Looks nice, indeed!

I'll focus on the Spidermonkey upgrade (#1886). I'm trying to do that very carefully and have a close look at the details to do more than just adapting to the new API. It should really pave the way to a multi-threaded AI and adapt the way we use Spidermonkey to use the new features and concepts that are available in the new version. It's difficult to tell what will be ready until Alpha 14 and what not, but I'm sure I won't have enough time beside that to implement other new features.

Is the mod release a joke too or is that real?

I still think it's too big, especially his fist. It looks larger than his head.

The fishing boat looks awesome! About the ship I think that your previous sketches were more easily recogniced as a ship, but that's hard to tell if you already know that it's a ship and when it's not yet finished (no blue water etc..).

Wow, this is my favourite until now! Were the shields really so small?

What conditions do the Microsoft Stores have that can't be fulfilled by the original version of the game? I'm just curious.

I agree. I think if we put a system in place that allows translation, most of the work would be done by contributors from the community quickly.

I've filled it out.