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quantumstate

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by quantumstate

  1. I have new questions.

    Whichs builds attack the enemy without ranger units in them? Like Towers and Civil Center.

    I think towers, civil centres and fortresses.

    And I want know more about differents types of attack and defense. Like Hack, Pierce...

    When calculating damage each type is done individually and then the three types are added together to give the final damage. So pierce armour only affects pierce attacks.

    The way armour works is that each point reduces damage by 10%. So a unit with 5 pierce armour will take 10% less damage vs a pierce attack than a unit with 4 pierce armour. The damage reduction percentage is shown in the tooltip.

  2. What can you not understand with that previous statement? Looks pretty readable to me unless English isn't your native language.

    Thanks, but I am a native speaker. Perhaps you could reword it to help me understand ;).

    Second, I did mention that strategy was for the AI ...

    How is a strategy good for an AI but not for a human? If an AI can play a strategy then so can I. (unless it has very high micro management requirements, but infinite farms clearly don't).

    The picking berries and woman appearing magically is irrelevant to this argument and stupid.

    By this am I to understand that you want to remove that from the game on the same grounds? If not then I don't see the problem with arguing that since one form of non realism is acceptable then this form of unrealism is acceptable because it is actually more realistic.

    As for "other games" which have infinite resources and that's why "other games" suck ;) but 0 A.D. Is not "other games" now is it? ;)

    I disagree that the other games suck. Here are some examples: AoM, AoE3, AoE Online, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3 (night elves and wood). I might not say all are great games but I think some are (AoM, Warcraft 3). You are free to hold a different opinion of course but since many other people agree based on reviews I think infinite resources are ok from this point of view.

  3. What both of you are failing to acknowledge, is the point of this thread and argument.

    The point laymans terms, is the way we interact in a strategic way against either AI or humans.

    Sorry, I don't understand this sentence. Can you reword it?

    The whole nature of "logical" strategy, (i.e. logical meaning relative to reality, and not fantasy), becomes totally flipped on its head and doesn't represent realism that an "historical" RTS is supposed to.

    The line between fantasy and reality pivots on such mechanics, and the 0 A.D. team has to be aware of this, that it doesn't taint the game with unrealistic elements which destroys gameplay and the whole theme in general.

    I fail to see what is especially unrealistic about infinite farms. As other people have mentioned real farms do have a tendency to be infinite as long as you keep a bit of last years crop to replant. They definitely don't continuously consume wood. We have to sacrifice realism in a very large number of ways in order to make a playable RTS game. (glaring examples are gathering some berries in order to have a woman magically appear after 30 seconds).

    I was arguing in my previous post against your argument that infinite farms are unbalanced. The strategy you mentioned in the first post is not viable vs a skilled opponent. Infinite farms are not unbalanced, many other games have implemented infinite resources.

    • Like 2
  4. Good morning. Sorry, if I did not put my question right. The default_house_10 is Hellenic indeed, the default_house_5 looks more Ptolemeic to me. However, my question is if I can use for both types the same space, since only one of both is actually appearing in the game?

    Example: If I place these houses in Atlas editor (note that both types are placed over each other), then I will get in the game for the Ptolemies this setting with two houses supporting 5 population and for the Spartans this setting with one house supp. 10 pop. Is this how it is supposed to work or am I screwing something up here? Thx again.

    What you have done sounds correct. It is the problem with having different civs not having exactly equivalent buildings.

  5. I thought that scripting engines were allowed as long as it is not possible to run any code that is not in the original package. So as you didn't allow mods to be installed it should meet the requirements.

    Also for those interested this source linked from the wikipedia article gives a clear explanation of the possible legal issues with the GPL and the app store http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement

  6. Infinite farming is a completely sensible mechanic. The gather rate is lower than other resources and trading through the market is inefficient (though the rate change might need some balance as suggested above, that needs playtesting to decide). If two people are playing and one controls the whole map and the other is just farming and buying resources at the market the one controlling the map will have massively superior income (at least 1.5 times). This means they can easily win the game because they will be able to train more troops.

    There is an argument that it is too easy to cluster the farms very close to the CC currently. I think that increasing the obstruction size a little more is better, maybe so they barely overlap. Having ton place them a long way from the CC makes them very vulnerable early on.

  7. GIMP will work fine for textures as long as you understand what is happening. The issue is that the game does the player colour in an unusual way.

    What I think you are expecting to happen is to have a background of the player colour with the texture over the top so the player colour shows through in the alpha sections. It works slightly differently though.

    First with images you need to understand that each pixel in the image has 4 channels. 3 colours (red, green, blue) and the alpha or transparency channel. When you make part of the image transparent you only change the alpha channel, the colour components stay exactly the same. To see this in gimp you can use the layer mask as Enrique mentioned to show the alpha channel as a black and white image. You can disable the layer mask (from the right click menu of the layer) to see what the image looks like without the alpha channel.

    Now what 0 A.D. does with the player colour to create the final texture:

    1. Multiply the texture by the player colour and discard the alpha channel. So if the player colour is white then the image will be left as it was (multiplying by 1 leaves things unchanged). If the player colour is black the whole image will become black, if it is blue then the image will become blueish. You can test the multiply in gimp using layer modes, just create a layer with the player colour and set the mode to multiply.

    2. Take the original texture with the alpha channel and place it on top of the new multiplied image. Then the multiplied image will show through in the transparent regions giving the final texture.

    You can replicate this in gimp to preview what your texture will look like.

    1. Open the texture, there should be a single layer.

    2. Duplicate the layer.

    3. Remove the alpha channel from the bottom layer. (Now you can see the colours "underneath" the transparent sections).

    4. Create a new layer and put it in between the two existing layers.

    5. Fill the new layer with the player colour (e.g. #0000FF for blue players).

    6. Set the mode of the new layer to multiply.

    Now you should see an image which will look like the final texture in game.

    So it is important that you are aware of what the image is like "underneath" the transparent areas because it will affect what the texture looks like. This is why layer masks are useful so you can easily disable the transparency and see the colours in the transparent areas. (create the layer mask using the "Transfer layers alpha channel" option).

    • Like 4
  8. That looks really nice.

    One thing I am not keen on is the wood plank roof. Firstly it is flat, flat roofs are really bad at keeping water out, making them slope a bit is pretty easy so I would assume people in wet areas wouldn't make them flat. Also the lengths vary a lot, whever I have built something I tend to cut things to be the same length, everyone in the modern world does that so I woud have thought the gauls might have as well (producing wooden planks was a lot of effort back in those times so you wouldn't use them in a quickly thrown together structure you didnt care about).

  9. That new summary screen with the teams looks great :). I'm not sure feminisation is quite the right word though.

    I don't like the idea of having rush, boom, turtle ... scores. It is too hard to define what these mean so they will never quite correspond to quite what each player thinks they mean and will be confusing. I would prefer to stick to simple scores so it is clear what they mean. Things like wood gathered are obvious and useful.

    I don't mind the idea of acheivements though I don't care for them myself. I really dislike unlocking things though, I want to be able to play the full game unrestricted right away instead of spending time unlocking things.

    One starcraft 2 score that I found particularly useful for competitive play is average unspent resources.

    • Like 1
  10. Have any svn versions worked for you in the past? If they have it might be worth reverting to a known good revision and seeing if that still works. Then you can either narrow it down to one change in 0 A.D. or if it is still broken then it is probably something else on your system that caused it to break.

  11. I think it would be good if we could expand the market system a bit. Instead of only being able to traverse between two points make it so that it can travel between multiple docks/markets (and have a small bonus). There would have to be some sort of restrictions in place to prevent abuse cases though. Only able to travel to a certain number of trade points per player perhaps? (2 markets 1 dock per player?) A distance requirement similar to the civic centre might work too. That would also reward people who had larger empires more. I suspect that this one is could still be prone to abuse though so i tend to favour the limiting number of points per player

    Trade income is proportional to distance travelled. So it is most efficient to have markets as far apart as possible. Adding intermediate markets into this system is just confusing because either it is less efficient due to the shorter distances or you need some complicated logic about the total route length and then you need to stop it being exploitable. The purpose of distance increasing income is to give an advantage to a player who controls a large part of the map. Having people create a longer circular route within a smaller base goes against this.

    Also a small improvement that should be implemented (not urgent though) is that when building foundations are destroyed the player loses some resources instead of gaining them all back.

    Why do you think this should be the case? If you attempt to build something and it gets destroyed you have already lost out because you wanted it built and now it is delayed, also since the enemy destroyed it they probably attacked the builders at the same time so maybe you lost some of them.

    While things are being build they should have reduced armour or otherwise be more vulnerable too.

    They already do have less armour.

    Im not sure if this last one is in or not. When a building is being built and attacked I don't think it requires additional resources to get it to full health so it is essentially repaired for free.

    This was debated. It was decided that we want it to work the way it does. It doesn't cost any additional resources to "repair" while building. I see no gameplay problem with this. The building is already being delayed and more worker time is needed to build it.
  12. This got mentioned on irc and received this comment. It isn't comprehensive but should help a bit.

    14:03 <@leper> well we use libxml2

    14:04 <@leper> and relaxng

    14:05 <@leper> but on top of that is xeromyces which converts to xmb (so we don't have to load xml...)

    14:07 <@leper> then there is CParamNode (which I think the poster is asking for)

    14:07 <@leper> and then follows cmptemplatemanager

    14:08 < sanderd17> from xeromyces on, it's all code specifically written for 0 A.D., right?

    14:08 <@leper> yes

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