wraitii

I changed the texture to be much brighter, more contrasted and use bigger spots so they are visible from farther away (also tweaked the model UV). I think it looks much better that way. I think I'll have to make the eyes bigger too. I've got some animations which I think are acceptable now, will work on them some more.

Except for the part where this is not a work environment but a public forum and work ethics have no place here. And that was an offensive comment. That was an offensive comment because it assumed that as a programmer I don't know @#$% about art, design, and things like that, and you didn't even have the guts to say it straight. You were even assuming I was only a programmer, which I'm really not. Now what you said there ^ is honest, literal, and likely true in general. I have no quarrel with that. Let's be straightforward. Also if you think no-one has noticed that our terrains were burned out or too bright, that our textures were sometimes ugly and hard to read, you're delusional. We just never got around to fix it. I personally think someone ought to redo all ground textures and make them coherent between biomes, but it's a huge task. That's what we aim for. And I'm not saying AOEO has a bad art direction or is incoherent or anything. It's great in that aspect. It's just that they chose the worst possible direction, in my opinion, and taking context into account everything is ugly about it. It's an extreme example of something very very bad done very very well. And well, the market agreed. And about those older terrains: dunno what happened, but if they're no longer here, it's probably because we lost the right to use them. I agree that the parallax grass doesn't really look good though. It was a proof of concept, but it's quite meh.

Yeah, I agree that the texture is too blurry right now, I'll work on it.

Undying Nephalim: I'll give it a shot this afternoon, I know the shader code fairly well and you ought to be able to do something cool.

That's not a game, it's a 3D render. Anno 1404 has a vibe that is quite similar to that, though it it obviously way less good looking.

I actually find that terribly hard on the eyes (not to mention ugly) ^

You're right that terrain Blending in 0 A.D. is an issue, and generally our terrain is not the nicest part of the game. But it turns out that changing it sensibly is not really the easiest thing either, sadly. Our units are slightly difficult to distinguish. This comes sometimes from old models, old textures, similar animations, small props, and also the fact that textures can become quite blurry at a regular zoom level.

It's obviously a high-quality 3D render. The wave foam is the worst thing on that screenshot. Replicating the effect is still basically impossible on current GPUs, except maybe for technical demos on very-high-end GPUS and using a ton of work beforehand (for light maps and so on).

Your example is quite extreme: that specific grass texture is really horrible. Many other textures are actually quite nice. Furthermore, the recognition issues are not caused only by terrain (and well, noisy terrain helps greatly hiding the low quality of some of our meshes). I personally dislike too uniform textures too as they look like a British golf course lawn, which is just bad. I do agree that several of our terrain textures are somewhat ugly, too cartoonish, sometimes of varying quality. Reducing their contrast or saturation might help on this. Changing some will be needed. However, your plank example is ridiculous: on the left you get voluntarily noisy wood, for specific uses only, and on the right you have burned out, washed out planks. Both are legit wood textures and have their uses. Finally: This will be your one and only warning: please refrain from further comments of that kind.

A quick pointer: if you have to preface your argument with "I don't mean to offend anyone", it's because you know very well that you're being rude and offensive. In which situation the sensible thing to do is to calm down and write your thoughts down in a concise, efficient, argumentative manner. People will not take you seriously otherwise. Indeed I have no idea what you are trying to say with this post except perhaps "this game is ugly and you guys suck" which I am quite certain is not constructive.

We have skyboxes which the engine can send to a model (check the technique for model_water in public/shaders/effects), you could use that to give an effect sort of chrome-y (it would require a new shader though but I'm sure something can be thought of). We could somewhat easily support some basic environment map to give a better effect though.

Basically you mean what you want to do is LOD, not new models? Again, read on what we want to do with this game and you will understand why it is open-source. The aim is not to finish it quickly, the aim is to make a quality, free, open-source game. So yeah, we're staying open-source. The project also has definitely not grinded to a halt, in fact in the last 5 years it's been rebooted from scratch. We tried, and failed, crowd funding.

In-game. I've re-changed my mesh to fit my animations using IK, it's mostly working now so I started working on some animations and will probably commit it sometimes next week once I'm satisfied with them and have touched my textures up again.

LOD can certainly be implemented, it should not be that difficult to do, just takes some times and preparation. I'm not really seeing how not having LOD can limit you creatively, though. The game is basically in Beta without the name now, someday we'll actually get the whole team on board and call it that. It still lacks a few fundamental features but it's very playable, includes a somewhat complete and competent AI, and is not as slow as it once was.

Kicking_Bird: I suggest you check the configuration file and change the material quality to 10.0 We indeed do not have LOD currently, mostly because we would have no artist to make the lower quality meshes (it could be automated but that would give a meh result).

No, you should only need one UV. I'm fairly sure it's just because the code is not obvious and slightly buggy.

Updated with flatter back, a bunch of other things, a mouth, and a "proper" texture. At least the UV-ing is good.

I felt like trying to model this evening, so I went out and made a Hyena. I think the model itself is fairly accurate (enough for the game at least), I did some crap texturing job but I really suck at texturing. Will probably try to armature and possibly animate it later. Any comments? Edit: update below.

There's indeed some form of bug/misuse here. Right now you would need to also add a "<define name="USE_SPECULAR_MAP" value="1"/>" to your material file, and I'd recommend making the specular map all black (if you don't want specular) or all white. But that shouldn't be needed. You also need "USE_SELF_LIGHT", you need to set prefer GLSL, and you need to provide a specTex. (I won't fix it right now since we're in commit Freeze for A18 but it'll be fixed in SVN soon.)

That sounds like a bug. I'll see if I can fix it quickly.

Indeed I checked the shader and it's the specular map alpha that matters for self-illumination.

Did you change your configuration file so that "materialmgr.quality" is 3 or more?

Are you using "Prefer GLSL"? I'm fairly sure this material only works in GLSL mode.

BTW because of what I'll call a bug for now you need to set the config parameter "materialmgr.quality" to more than 2. Your "turn them into something else" feature doesn't sound entirely impossible depending on what you want, but it would require some engine changes. You could create your own meshes that have a special "transform" animation that you would slowly update to change their shape, but changing their texture dynamically is currently unsupported (it's not impossible to add though, might even be added as a mod-only thing, not sure).

Basic_glow uses the specular map (defined by spec_tex) as a "self-illumination" texture, so you can use that to make your texture self-lit. We don't support actual glow maps as so far the engine can only handle one light, though I think with the bloom post-proc shader you'd get some bloom effect. If you need to, you could make your own custom material that uses the normal map too and still self-illuminates or something.