A breakthrough occurred. Red water, broken GUI and displaced waves now are a thing of the past in 0BC.
There have been more severe issues than described in the related 0AD trac ticket though. This other GUI related issue has not yet been reported as to my knowledge but I've had to deal with it already while being an active modder of the 0AD community and it requires to restart the game. Nevermind, we now could fix it.
After in depth analyzing Philip's recent render optimizations it could be concluded that his changes are a very significant improvement and not the cause of the issue at all. (How could it be different, Philip is the mastermind of 0AD, it's a legend as alpha123 once correctly stated).
When debugging the water it was also found that wraitii has done an amazing job once again and that he really deserves to finally be paid for his work despite wraitii rejecting the money himself (he be honored!, the community should really praise wraitii more for these epic water works!).
The high quality water (foam, waves) was developed over a short paid development period by the 0AD coder wraitii. And if we consider the overall contributions by people like wraitii and Ykkrosh/Philip, then it's really been due since long that these people get rewarded for their work. That's why I once proposed a reward system for 0AD, when I still was an active 0AD community member (because 0AD still not knows what to do with their fundraiser funds!).
There's still hope, 0AD wakes up again. (Despite the different vision of 0AD, the 0BC team still admires 0AD and the tremendous efforts put into making it what it is: epic.)
Upcoming Animation Rework
Let's continue development in high speed to make the time machine happen. Next is the Animation rework, almost finished already. Stay tuned! With it comes epicness like transition animations, which allows units to mount and unmount on a horse - or to draw a sword animation!
For this update, Radagast will try to create a video demonstration (or you think animations are not all about moving images? :).
Wraitii wasn't paid for his work on the water -- it was discussed, but in the end he worked on that to get back into development in preparation for paid work, work which didn't happen as there wasn't enough time left at the end of the summer.
Thanks for clarifying.
I must admit, I wonder if you ever did have a look at the code wraitii had to add for creating waves. If you call this a 'preparation'/warming up for paid development then something is wrong with the 0AD leadership. Do you want to tell us what wraitii did (adding waves) not requires in-depth engine knowledge? To me it looks as if that was an excuse because he was fired at .. an excuse that had not been necessary if you had fully valued his work and ensured him that you support him. Adding waves is not minor at all and well worth being paid for it. (If you think it's easy and a 'preparation' task, why then you did not add wave rendering yourself if it's so easy?)
You probably also think it's all pretty normal that wraitii's contributions suddenly stopped exactly at that point of time ... A pretty strange coincidence ... (not the first contributor 0AD loses due to not fully supporting them .. unfortunately wraitii was a long-time contributor and even a pretty capable one, but the 0AD team can continue like this if they think it'll lead to anything)
Their list of features to be added is long, unfortunately lost or demotivated all people capable of coding it.
You can still convince me otherwise.
(Sorry for my current nastiness and that publicly, but well 0AD is an open source project and decisions and quarrels should be transparent too. Because we're dealing with public property - and public fundraiser funds.)