Dead Skins

[Keaton the Wise]

I think it would help the game if when a unit dies, its skin changes into something more...bloody. And there could be a gore setting to control how much...blood is on a unit. Perhaps there could even be a sensor that can tell what the unit has been killed by and controls if there are arrows in the skin or a long spear or just a gash or wound. Also, the more experienced the unit is, the more small wounds it gets on its alive skin. Is this possibility?

[idanwin]

I definitely agree with the death textures (not just blood, also paler skin), and I would even have them switch to skeletons over time.

[Stan`]

I guess that will be for a mod, or a later version of 0AD because adding meshes, wouldn't be great for the lag. Also, painting all the textures would be a lot of work =)

[idanwin]

As a matter of fact I still have a small zombie mod lying around somewhere xD

It had a few zombie-fied units and skeleton models in it. And a hellhound (which was just a wolf with a red skin)

[FeXoR]

It's a matter of taste but I don't want the game to become slower to annoy me with cruelty....

Edited January 27, 2014 by FeXoR

[sanderd17]

Extra textures won't make the game a lot slower. It will only slow down the first time the texture is used (so on the first dead), and it will use a bit more memory (but we're not really having memory problems either).

[FeXoR]

Extra textures won't make the game a lot slower. It will only slow down the first time the texture is used (so on the first dead), and it will use a bit more memory (but we're not really having memory problems either).

I don't doubt that.

Still: I think you can do the following to make the game twice as fast if you have a poor graphics board:

- Find a component that is not gameplay relevant and remove it to get thinks take 98% of the time or less they would take with it.

- Do this 20-30 times.

Ofc. ATM there are bigger issues like pathfinding and player/unit AI and until the game reaches final state graphics boards are most likely to not cause any lag.

Still, many components with little effect add up to a quite notable effect (ofc. thats might also apply to the look of things: the game might look much better then).

AFAIK there are some graphical drawbacks as is though:

(Not sure if they're memory or processing time bottlenecks)

- Many entities/actors on the screen e.g. trees

- Zoom out far (mainly the same reason). And having a good overview of the map is a gameplay relevant thing for me.

As the development goes now I get the feeling 0 A.D. is more viewed then played (and so components will be made more shiny as graphic boards evolve in fact leading to graphical related lags until the development process stops).

Edited January 27, 2014 by FeXoR

[sanderd17]

That's mainly because of the total number of polygons. When you just replace a texture, it doesn't make any difference. The polygon was going to be rendered anyway.

Next to that, we also do quite a lot on the CPU. Like calculating the position of every entity before rendering, distance-sorting some of the entities, calculating the prop positions ...

[FeXoR]

That's mainly because of the total number of polygons. When you just replace a texture, it doesn't make any difference. The polygon was going to be rendered anyway.

Next to that, we also do quite a lot on the CPU. Like calculating the position of every entity before rendering, distance-sorting some of the entities, calculating the prop positions ...

So textures don't generate any lag GPU wise and all lags (like e.g. cased by many entities) is CPU related?

Well, then I'm out of arguments

(Still don't like explicit cruelty... but war games. I must have a twisted mind ^^)

Edited January 27, 2014 by FeXoR

[Stan`]

I guess if one day having too much props become an issue, solution would to have an option to disable them, if they are only decorative and not scenario bound.

Next to that, we also do quite a lot on the CPU. Like calculating the position of every entity before rendering, distance-sorting some of the entities, calculating the prop positions ...

This is great for players with integrated chipsets, Now maybe in the future make the game detect if the computer has a dedicated gpu which goes with performance standards, and relocate calculation to there

[Keaton the Wise]

I guess that will be for a mod, or a later version of 0AD because adding meshes, wouldn't be great for the lag. Also, painting all the textures would be a lot of work =)

Hopefully you can squeeze it into the game itself instead if making a sort of death mod. Also, instead of painting whole new textures, why not edit the old ones and save them as <unit>/dead. Like: Hoplite/Dead.

[Stan`]

Even painting on stuff can be tricky... But we are here to learn =)

[wraitii]

Actually it does make a bit of difference. The more often we use the same textures, the faster rendering will be (because of a process called batching, basically).

[Stan`]

Yup but more texture need more time right ?