Have you considered moving to Unreal Engine?

[Sebastián Gómez]

Probably a really stupid question. Specially coming from someone who doesn't know about coding.

It's just that everything looks so good in UE: Lighting, textures, tone mapping and other effects. Having all 0AD civilizations in such a realistic gameplay would be a dream come true.

Is this task too big?

 

 

Edited September 25, 2019 by Basshunter

[Lion.Kanzen]

nope. because isn't  FOSS.

 

Edited April 16, 2019 by Lion.Kanzen

[Loki1950]

1 hour ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

nope. becausecisn't  FOSS.

 

In other words we can not afford the licencing fees for using a closed source engine which can go into the thousands depending on the perceived popularity by the owner of the primary licence.

Enjoy the Choice

[Lion.Kanzen]

and this... Epic games.

[Sturm]

Just to feed the speculation and compels you all to argue beyond the license issues, lol. What would you say about game engines such as id Tech 2, 3 and 4, which have been re-licensed in GPL by id Software?

[Loki1950]

But is mainly because Id's founder did most of his development of Doom using Linux GPLing his work was just his personal way of giving back to the community and Id is almost singular in doing that.

Enjoy the Choice   

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Most current issues relate to things that we have to write for ourselves regardless of engine like pathfinding, AI, etc. All a separate engine could really provide is a somewhat better graphics capability, at the cost of massive rewrites. We could use that effort to just improve the graphics portion of our engine without the dependence on external engine development. However, the main reason we don't have fancy graphics in 0 A.D. is mostly because we are trying to support old versions of OpenGL and by extension, old graphics hardware. According to the recent talk by @vladislavbelov if we dropped old hardware support, we could very easily add many nice graphical upgrades with our current engine.

[Sturm]

32 minutes ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

According to the recent talk by @vladislavbelov if we dropped old hardware support, we could very easily add many nice graphical upgrades with our current engine.

Still I hear the scream of thousands: drop off! drop off! drop off! 

[Stan`]

1 hour ago, Sturm said:

Still I hear the scream of thousands: drop off! drop off! drop off! 

Actually it's the contrary. People playing with toasters urge us not to do it

[dmzerocold]

2 hours ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

if we dropped old hardware support

On old hardware still, we have a lag issue...

So what is the point of supporting old hardware when it is laggy?

[Stan`]

7 minutes ago, dmzerocold said:

On old hardware still, we have a lag issue...

So what is the point of supporting old hardware when it is laggy?

Well depends on what you define by old hardware but I know 8 years old computer that can run the game just fine. The game also runs on jailbreaked versions of the PS4 (With Linux) and some people made it work on raspberry pi

[Sturm]

1 hour ago, stanislas69 said:

Actually it's the contrary. People playing with toasters urge us not to do it

Citation needed?  Joking apart, is there some kind of 0 AD roadmap, or at least a few lines of some developers' expectations for the future? What / when would be reasonable to leave old versions of OpenGL behind?

[Stan`]

According to this https://feedback.wildfiregames.com/results/ 50% of or users run on Intel GPU chips. Which aren't the best graphics cards, but make good frying pans.

1 hour ago, Sturm said:

What / when would be reasonable to leave old versions of OpenGL behind?

I'd say when most of our users support 4.5/4.6. A lot of Unix users have only access to OpenGL 2.1 (We are using 1.2) But that's not restricting us. Mostly we need someone to cleanup the renderer and use wrappers or interfaces so that we can switch between versions depending on the computer.

Old branch for OpenGL 4.0 from @Yves https://github.com/Yves-G/0ad/tree/OGL4

Presentation from @vladislavbelov (you are famous now) https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/0ad_graphics/

 

One big milestone is when Mac OS will be dropping OpenGL in favor of Metal. https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/

This would be a good occasion to switch to Vulkan and MoltenVK (Because doesn't support Vulkan either)

[WhiteTreePaladin]

6 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

According to this https://feedback.wildfiregames.com/results/ 50% of or users run on Intel GPU chips. Which aren't the best graphics cards, but make good frying pans.

Hey, I'm one of those 50% and my computer is not a toaster. (Although now that I look at it, it is sort of shaped like one...)

I'd buy a basic graphics card if I had too, so I personally am not opposed to dropping older hardware. It's just hard to determine where the cutoff should be though.

[Stan`]

8 hours ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

Hey, I'm one of those 50% and my computer is not a toaster. (Although now that I look at it, it is sort of shaped like one...)

Hehe. 

If we had to choose a graphics engine though I would go for Godot. I believe we could migrate 0AD code into a GDNative plugin and replace JS by Godot script which looks a lot like python though it now has variable types.

[Lion.Kanzen]

tiempo atrás preguntabas por estas cosas? @Trinketos

you remember those questions?

[Sturm]

1 hour ago, stanislas69 said:

If we had to choose a graphics engine though I would go for Godot.

Why not OGRE?

[Loki1950]

Ogre's API changes drastically with each version just maintaining the code base become tedious in the extreme as every library call has to be checked.

Enjoy the Choice

[Stan`]

3 hours ago, Loki1950 said:

Ogre's API changes drastically with each version just maintaining the code base become tedious in the extreme as every library call has to be checked.

Enjoy the Choice

That plus from what I've seen It looks worse than our engine. Same goes for the spring engine

[dmzerocold]

11 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

If we had to choose a graphics engine though I would go for Godot

you mean completely switching to GODOT game engine ?

[Stan`]

Yeah. That would suck though. Pyrogenesis is not that bad.

[Trinketos]

15 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Hehe. 

If we had to choose a graphics engine though I would go for Godot. I believe we could migrate 0AD code into a GDNative plugin and replace JS by Godot script which looks a lot like python though it now has variable types.

Godot eres un basado

15 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

tiempo atrás preguntabas por estas cosas? @Trinketos

you remember those questions?

Si las recuerdo.

Pero nunca intente nada

[Lion.Kanzen]

On 4/15/2019 at 9:33 PM, WhiteTreePaladin said:

Most current issues relate to things that we have to write for ourselves regardless of engine like pathfinding, AI, etc. All a separate engine could really provide is a somewhat better graphics capability, at the cost of massive rewrites. We could use that effort to just improve the graphics portion of our engine without the dependence on external engine development. However, the main reason we don't have fancy graphics in 0 A.D. is mostly because we are trying to support old versions of OpenGL and by extension, old graphics hardware. According to the recent talk by @vladislavbelov if we dropped old hardware support, we could very easily add many nice graphical upgrades with our current engine.

This mean AoE 4 is made for selling new computers (expensive) lincensed by Microsoft Windows 10.