fabio

I want to report a problem I notice with YouTube video embedded in the forum (using latest Firefox here). It seems that the forum always force the video to be played with Flash, even if I choose to use YouTube HTML5 when available. Just as an example see this post with embedded video. It plays with Flash on the forum, but when clicking to see it on YouTube the video is also available in HTML5/Webm. I have this problem only on 0 A.D. forum, see for example the video embedded in sauerbraten web page, it's correctly displayed in HTML5 mode. A possibly related problem is that when using my slow netbook video embedded in the forum make the page hugely slow. When the video is displayed in Flash mode in YouTube is pretty fast, so I suppose it's the forum it's embedding YouTube videos, possibly related to the forced resizing applied to the video:

After a couple of hours after reporting this I get all mails of last week. Probably someone saw my report and fixed it, unblocking the trac mail server.

There is still a possibly related problem: trac doesn't send me mails when editing ticket.

Having a look at the Tutorial AI it looks this is not a real AI but rather Triggers over "Unassigned AI". Would be possible to generalize the Triggers so that they can be used with any AI on any map? I was thinking at asymmetrical maps, where the computer opponent start with a big city with an "Unassigned AI", and after you reach the city phase the AI changes to Aegis.

Other games usually consider the tutorial the first, simple campaign.

Lastly: it should not be possible to select You in Player 2 and AI in Player 1; the tutorial AI should be hidden and only useable in the tutorial maps (EDIT: I mean something like r12626).

The enemy soldiers suicided before attaching them, note that I enabled the "Reveal Map" option, maybe related to this?

You can get stuck in the tutorial if you select the arrow rather than the sword technology (I just tried to see what would happen). EDIT: Well, no, after a while the enemy attached and the tutorial continues.

Nice work! A minor suggestion: these two tutorial scenario should be put in a dedicated section ("Tutorial") rather than Default, also they should start with a number ("1 - Introduction...") to make sure they are displayed in the correct order.

wildfiregames.com DNS is broken (no reply). As a workaround you may add this to your /etc/hosts file (on Linux, similar on Windows): 69.65.48.3 wildfiregames.com www.wildfiregames.com 92.243.18.55 trac.wildfiregames.com svn.wildfiregames.com EDIT: added svn also. EDIT2: for some reasons 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) still has the records in its cache.

You can use a software renderer OpenGL driver, see llvmpipe: http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

It's unfortunate that some users won't be able to play 0 A.D. on their older system, but I totally agree here. Hardware vendors no longer support these older cards, open source mesa drivers also dropped some older chipset in 8.0. Desktop users can still buy a supported card if they really want to play on newer 0 A.D.. Maybe you can also start to offer optional features on newer OpenGL 3.0 cards (in some recent commit I noticed however that something requiring OpenGL 3.0 was adapted to be compatible on 2.1 also).

I don't know as I never used it personally. Another non-youtube HTML5 example with subtitles: https://www.xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml

Distributing VLC may not be legally in some countries, while it's free software it include many patented codecs (this is also why Debian/Ubuntu/... don't ship it by default). But probably no one will complain with 0 A.D. since there are many others bigger sites still distributing it

Most Linux distribution only supports Ogg/Theora/Vorbis and Webm/VP8/Vorbis by default but they are not natively supported on Mac/Windows. Maybe Webm could be used also bundling the decoder for Mac and Windows?

The videos shouldn't have embedded text, but could use youtube subtitles that can be translated to different languages.

The in game shots looks really nice! What type of license do you plan for your game? If you use the same CC-BY-SA used by 0 A.D. there should not be any problem in using every 0 A.D. arts.

Wikipedia article has some examples of cutscenes used in games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutscene#Types

Eventually the configurable options should be removed from default.cfg and local.cfg and put in a xml file used by both the graphic engine and the option menu, so that every option could have: a short description (used for screen display); a long description (used in the tooltip); requirements (e.g. OpenGL 1.5, ARB_XXX extension, ...); if the requirements are not respected the option should be "greyed out" definitively; requirement for "enabled by default"; dependencies (e.g. advanced water may require water reflection); the option should be "greyed out" until the dependencies are also enabled; This should permits to configure these options without touching the code and also avoid syncing between the .cfg and the menu which can use the xml. Custom config can be saved in user.cfg. Also a couple of command line option could be added: safe -> start with the minimum settings; default -> start with the default setting, avoiding customized settings.

Theora and Webm/VP8/libvpx are likely alternatives. They are already used in games (see e.g.: game that use theora).

On the new Polynesia the darker areas are more noticeable and it's clear that they are the waves: Note: attaching a file in the forum gives: "Error The server returned an error during upload"

OK, I tested it. r12814, Cycladic Arcipelago 1 while viewing sea and a shoreline, changing options with the in-game menu: No Water Reflections / No Advanced Water: 20-24 fps Water Reflections / No Advanced Water: 15 fps No Water Reflections / Advanced Water: (this combination looks the same as the first one) Water Reflections / Advanced Water: 11-12 fps EDIT: Core Duo, Radeon X1600, 1024x768 windowed mode, Shadow PCF disabled, Ubuntu 32 bit with r300 mesa driver from git. Yes, the little dark points move, and I can see a repeating pattern on both space and time.

Do you know about the recently open sourced, MIT licensed (GPL compatible) Torque engine? It looks to have nice water rendering, maybe there is something that could be useful for 0 A.D.: EDIT: it is Direct 3D only apparently.

Yes, thanks, I know about it but I am using older r300 driver, the patch is only for r600 driver. I opened an interesting similar bug affecting both r300 and r600 with 0 A.D. some time ago, however: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44536

Sorry the performance drop was with superfancywater. Fancywater doesn't have a noticeable FPS drop. They depends on the distance and IIRC they move, however I am not sure since I cannot test again until next week. (Also a note that with superfancywater I don't see error by the graphics driver about unassigned input).