wraitii

0 A.D. release names start with the letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the release version. Alpha 22 was Venustas, Alpha 23 was Ken Wood, Alpha 24 was Xšayaṛša, and Alpha 25 will start with a Y ! As with previous releases, we give everyone the opportunity to propose release names. Let us hear your best proposals!

We have a name ! As many of you guessed, with no Hans for A24, Xšayaṛša was the pick. It is a transliteration of the original Old Persian name for Xerxes, with Xerxes I featuring in 0 A.D. I've locked the topic, please wait with eager anticipation for the A25 name suggestion thread, and it's going to be a doozy because Y is not a common letter Thanks all for your suggestions!

I think it also comes down to what the gameplay is. 0 A.D. EA is currently more similar to AoE, so a more similar UI makes sense IMO. Fair point, I'm willing to generate some discussion on this too. I intend the implementation to be somewhat flexible, so you could somewhat easily mod the top-right icons to show the unit roles, IMO.

I've started a mod: https://github.com/wraitii/ui_mod / https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3472 So far i've begun with the selection details:

Your concerns about Auras have been addressed as I had to implement variable range queries (UnitAI broke):

Hey, yeah we tweaked some things around because I noticed that UnitAI range checks where breaking, and LOS uses center-to-center (as you well know) for now, so we need to match it. Here's how things stand: Alert Raise is edge-to-edge Auras use center-to-center again - the reason is mostly Nescio's concern that edge-to-edge gave too big an effect to structure size BuildingIA is edge-to-edge (so building arrows) BuildRestrictions use center-to-center again - the reason being again that structures sizes can vary, and I didn't find either particularly better. To be honest, since buildingAI is edge-to-edge, it might make sense to change that one again Gate range is edge-to-edge TriggerPoints are edge-to-edge Collision detections for arrows is edge-to-edge UnitAI is center-to-center

Yeah that's a fair point I think, but I don't believe we need to change this further for A24 at this point. If you're playing 0 A.D., you probably can call back whoever called you since it's unlikely to be urgent work stuff

Do you not have a 'mute' key on your keyboard? I see your use case, but I did not consider it worthwhile given that I assumed most keyboards would have a 'mute' key for these purposes. Maybe I was wrong. The reason for the change, by the way, is that: pausing the music breaks the victory sound in SP (could be done differently) The game auto-pauses when you open the struct-tree (and a bunch of other things), which is annoying since it used to cut the music. I don't think I'm going to consider this a major use case, to be honest . You could just disable music then. It does, but on A23 that doesn't pause the music, nor on A24.

Pausing the game mutes the sounds & ambient sounds, but not the music. Are you referring to 'background pause' here?

This is a classic example of a shadow bias problem. It shouldn't be particularly new, can you verify that this only happens following a recent commit? Edit: Vladislav confirms an issue -> D3457

This didn't get fixed by updating the Player.js code?

Hello everyone, For the purposes of helping me review patches for Alpha 24 (coming soon!), I made a quick mod to get an easy "macro" view of templates and try a few things out. My intention is that this mod should be compatible with most other mods, not just 0 A.D. itself, even most total conversion mods. I'm releasing it publicly, it'll soon be on mod.IO and it's on GitHub: https://github.com/wraitii/balance_test_mod See the wiki over there for some more documentation. I'll probably keep adding a few more features until I'm happy, and intend to maintain this somewhat since we don't really have a better tool. Here's a screenshot of the "good stuff":

I've merged the above patch. You can now turn the default formation off, put units in formation, and they will leave the formation if any order but "walk" and "patrol" is given. I'm unsure at this point if I should change the default configuration for "default formation", since it is only used for walk & patrol (e.g. attack-walk moves units individually). I haven't done so in rP24703.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone: you need to update your Player.js overwrite, you have no "Deserialize" function and it throws an exception now. Edit: your save games are also broken because of the same issue btw

Hm, this should be fixed since https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP24675. The solution is to remove the "unused" in your config file and set them to = ""

As written in the commit message, the Library is now supposed to be exclusive to Ptolemies. However I missed the thracian sword mercenary could build it.

I've made a diff that introduces a "hybrid" behaviour : https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3413 In this case you can have no default formation, but also force "no formation" on gather/attack orders.

Hmm, the argument that it's foiled by small spaces is certainly convincing, as the formations use a large pathfinder class. I think a 'simple' solution to improve behaviour would be to have the 'auto-remove formation' feature on, but not the 'auto-activate formations'. So you could put units in formation and then attacking would take them out of formation automatically, but walking wouldn't. Edit -> good point by Freagarach that attack-walk will not behave as it used to, which is probably a problem.

No, we're just single-threading really. The problem I was describing is that e.g. unit Motion can right now send messages to any other component, there's no "barriers". Essentially at the moment the only things we can really thread from the rest of the game are (NB: they are not threaded yet) - The range queries, which have their own data (but they need some clever thread pooling, starting a thread every time would be too slow) - the pathfinder, which also has its own data - AIs Yeah that's a know issue. The problem is that pathfinding is slow enough that fixing it properly was not really attainable in the past. Once the pathfinder is threaded, it'll probably be more doable. The visual field (LOS/Fog Of War) is computed per player, but AIs don't use it. The problem is that AIs are designed for threading, and that requires giving them their copy of the data, and we never got around to giving them their copy of LOS data. --- Most of the problems are known, but need a lot of rather substantial work usually. You're welcome to help

I think the main area in the simulation where memory fragmentation matters is the Sim components. Right now they're basically random, and we can do much better. Threading in general isn't that easy because the game's architecture assumes that everything can be modified mostly at any time. There are a few things that don't (namely the pathfinder is 'easily' threadable), but most things are.

While this is true, I'd like to point out that: - In MP, it makes more civs viable, meaning this actually increases diversity. - Our civs were never _that_ different to begin with.

Well, true-ish. The AI is actually not that great if you're a somewhat experienced competitive RTS player, but there's a big difference between the 'competitive' RTS play and the more relaxed style of play you seem to enjoy, and we ought to support both equally I believe you can 'cheese' the AI somewhat with towers and walls, if that helps. We should probably look at reducing the AI's effectiveness for the next Alpha, though, I agree, as this is a rather recurrent problem.

Yes we've decided that we'd merge the campaign patch for A25, but soon after A24 is released. We felt it didn't make much sense to have a campaign patch without campaigns.

Overall I think the main problem is that the AI snowballs better than beginner players, whatever happens. It collects half as fast, but it can easily get twice as many units. One interesting thing would be to limit the AI pop to a % of the Player's pop at lower levels.

I'm pretty sure I wrote a patch for that earlier in this thread, or perhaps in another thread. IMO it's definitely a better way forward. Show information that's relevant contextually, not just 'show information'.