wraitii

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.

I haven't recompiled my libraries in a while, so maybe that's it? It does look like you're right, so I'm just going to go with "my libraries are outdated".

I found why I had an error trying to compile AtlasUI: it couldn't find the linked library libjpeg. I added to the library search path the proper file and it worked. Then it couldn't find libtiff, so I added "/usr/local/lib" to the path (perhaps unnecessary, unsure?) and relinked in homebrew and it worked.

Terrain height is something we'd have to deal with (and rely on the mapmaker)... I hadn't thought about the LOS issue though, I'm not sure it still applies.

I'd like it if we add several more actor entities/props that were a lot bigger and could be used to plot, say, 20 bushes, more water lillies or about half a screen of grass at once. Since the game currently struggles with rendering many small entities rather than few big ones, it could be used to optimize our actor rendering and thus allow us to make our maps better. I'd like to have some "forest undergrowth" stuff too like they had in AoE 3, with some flowers, bushes, small trees perhaps added. Note that for efficiency it'd have to be a single mesh, not several props. Should I make a task for this?

It's not even a GUI change, you can already plop buildings form other buildings simply if you add those to the templates. And iirc it's extremely easy to have them self-construct but I can't recall how I did it last time. Anyway the idea sounds pretty cool so I say go ahead Exporting 3D models can be slightly tricky, yes. And that does look like you lost the UVs. By the way, the engine: -only handles triangles and single-faced polygons (so you have to do double-faced ones yourself) -only handles "smooth" rendering: to have sharp angles, you need to split polygons (effectively doubling the vertices) -can handle up to 4 textures (I think it's 4 though that can be modded to be higher, perhaps you'd have to change C++) for whatever you might need - shaders currently use "diffuse, specular, normal, AO" but it could be something else entirely. -can handle basically any number of polygons per unit that you would require. The biggest slowdown right now is that we don't instance so it's rendering several small units that is really costly. -cannot handle fancy transparency effect such as distortion through glass or stuffs like that. -has only one water plane.

Everything is collada files, including the animations, iirc .pmd are binary collada files generated by the engine's archiver. Some files are of this format in the public art because they're really old.