Hello chaps , These are some things you seriously should change

[GustavoUlate80]

First and most important , you guys should make a dead zone in the game (this is a zone where if you scroll the mouse to the edge of the screen , the "map" will move eastward or any other direction like in AOE or any other game. Better said , a person to scroll the map should just have to drag the mouse to the edge of the screen instead of using the keyboard ( If you have this "dead zone" made already you should make the zone much more bigger like in any AOE game.

Second there is an animation problem concerning the female citizens , if you guys didn notice , they walk in a strange pace, you should better fix that.

Third and crucial if you want the game to seem more newer because it seems like an old game: add anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering ( or let there be a choice of filters such as bilinear , trilinear or anisotropic filtering 2, 4 , 8 or 16. Also ,change the camera perspective to a more 3d one such as the rome or medieval total war cameras or if you know these games a choice of cameras taken from empire earth and empires : dawn of the modern world.

[feneur]

You may be taken more serious if you say things in a nicer way. You could have said "Here are some things I think you should improve", rather than saying these are some things we seriously should change. Just a hint.

The scrolling should work as you describe, it can be a bit tricky if you play the game in windowed mode, but should be no problem when you play the game in full-screen. We might still need to tweak it a little, so thanks for your input. Not sure if they'll help with your issue, but there have been improvements to the window handling (resizable window when windowed and the possibility to toggle full-screen by pressing Alt+Enter) which will be included in the next release. Or you can check out from SVN if you can't wait (In that case you'll have to build it yourself unless you're on Windows and it's more likely to include major bugs than an official release.)

The animations for the females (and other units as well) will be reworked, there are a lot of them though so I can't promise we'll have them all done by the Alpha release.

When it comes to graphical enhancements: We'll probably refine those things when we get closer to a finished game, but since it's just "icing on the cake" it's not our priority now. I mean it's not all that important whether everything looks perfect if the game isn't funny to play.

The camera will be edited a bit, probably already for the alpha, but most likely tweaked in later releases based on feedback from players.

All in all thanks for your concerns about making the game the best it can be, it's our interest as well. Just be aware it's still a work in progress so you don't judge it as you would a final game just yet.

[GustavoUlate80]

Thanks for the tip, and also sorry if the way I said it was not nice that wasn't my intention , I didn't think I was saying it in a bad manner . It is just that If you guys need to change something in an serious matter ( since many people "would consider this an'old game' (the website itself in 0 AD said this) " I myself wouldn't. if you want to make it look 'newer ' "you seriously" should change these defects.)I believe that these things I pointed out are some of them.

[GustavoUlate80]

This could be another addition to make it more 'newer' : SSAO as a option

SSAO definition

I also found this :

SSAO implementation and script

Also advances shadows , shaders , anti aliasing and Anisotropic filtering should be implemented

[Mythos_Ruler]

It also needs normal maps, specular maps, HDR, Bloom, distance fog, and an LOD system.

Edited June 15, 2010 by Mythos_Ruler

[Sophokles]

Can you explain what anisotropic filtering is? I know it makes things more visually pleasing, which is why it's often alongside anti-aliasing, but I can't find a good description of what it *does*.

[Arthur_D]

Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

[Zoomastigophora]

Do we even have per-pixel lighting? It seem like it's all being done per-vertex, except the water system.

[Aldandil]

If you make the graphics too fancy, then the game may run at a snail's pace on any machine that doesn't have oodles of RAM and a super-amazing graphics card. At the very least, the really fancy effects like anit-alising and anistrophic whatever should be optional so folks with weaker machines can turn them off.

[emperor77]

I'd say fancy graphics is the last thing a developer should worry about, gameplay and having fun is much more importany in my opinion.

[feneur]

Fancy graphics is indeed our last worry, for now gameplay will have priority until we have the features we need, and as much as possible we aim to make it possible to turn the extra effects off so that as many people as possible will be able to run the game.

[oshron]

I'd say fancy graphics is the last thing a developer should worry about, gameplay and having fun is much more importany in my opinion.

as long as the graphics are better than Civilization or Empire Earth 3 id be happy. i think the ideal should be AOM-class graphics; those ones were good, and that game was from back in 2002. you could easily make out everything, and thats the most important thing in my opinion

[Ykkrosh]

I think most graphics drivers come with control panels that let you set global AA/AF options to apply to all games or to specific games, so there isn't really a need for each game to duplicate those controls itself. It's probably still nicer to let the player select the options from within the game but it's not really necessary.

Do we even have per-pixel lighting? It seem like it's all being done per-vertex, except the water system.

Yeah, the only fragment shader is for water and everything else is per-vertex lighting with diffuse texturing (plus player-colour modulation, and shadows) and that's about it. The current renderer code has some flexibility to support more shader effects, but I don't know whether that really works or how easy it would be to utilise.

(Maybe in the long term it'd actually be better to use an existing fully-featured well-maintained graphics engine instead of extending our own - our engine is fairly modular so it probably wouldn't be infeasible to replace the renderer (keeping the current code for actors etc), though it would still be a lot of painstaking work to sort out all the details.)

[Zoomastigophora]

(Maybe in the long term it'd actually be better to use an existing fully-featured well-maintained graphics engine instead of extending our own - our engine is fairly modular so it probably wouldn't be infeasible to replace the renderer (keeping the current code for actors etc), though it would still be a lot of painstaking work to sort out all the details.)

But then where's the fun in that?

Also, unless players are playing 0 A.D exclusively, it's a bad idea (I think) to have them set AA/AF in control panel because that forces it on for all games. Probably less of a problem for nVidia users that can setup profiles for individual games, but it would be a total pain in the @#$% for ATI users like me .

Edited June 20, 2010 by Zoomastigophora

[GustavoUlate80]

I believe users should be able to change the options of aa/af HDR SSAO and others from within a game since this is super important for users who do not know how to utitilize the control panel or find a way to apply these without side effects( like in AOM when you apply AA the text and other things in it look wierd) also , it should be something incorporated into the graphics engine so as to later not have problems with the engine

[jomas]

I'd say fancy graphics is the last thing a developer should worry about, gameplay and having fun is much more importany in my opinion.

I agree with that, my computer isn't the worst but the game(in my opinion) looks great from the screenshots alone, and i would love to end up playing this game.