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Kicking_Bird

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Everything posted by Kicking_Bird

  1. - archers have unlimited arrows - archers can shoot arrows through walls, cliffs and hills - spearmen can raze city walls to the ground - soldiers are farmers - elephants don't have trample damage or fling people out of the way charging into battle - military strength is determined by HP, attack, range, defence and damage multipliers instead of skill and chance and unity type - like in RTW. Historically one arrow is enough to take down and unarmed solider/villager, not 4 Art is supposed to complement gameplay, and how you want the player to feel. Gameplay is the foundation for any game, and art helps emphasize the gameplay. People could enjoy the battles of Rome: Total War and Attila: Total War which are both more accurate and epic than 0ad could possibly be. It's either you make a fun game with reasonable goals inspired and based of history or toil about adding features to make things more "historical". 90% of people don't care about the native name of a gallic granary or a roman spearmen. Imagine history channel doing what your game is doing. Historian ~ The baguada of the tribes were feirce warriors who hunted and foraged for their village while the bodu cooked and made sure they were fed. Gaeroa used long spears in huge formations to fight against eques romanus, in the heat of battle. Gallic annedds were built of straw, stone hay and mud. Historians have a hard time translating it into English and you are just reversing the process. If people wanted to learn ancient gallic they would google it. I had the hardest time finding the egyptian race beacuse the team geniusly renamed it to the "Ptolemaic Egyptians" Yes, I do seem very misinformed and I'm sure many other players will be too if you don't create a proper foreword for this game and what it's about. Sorry if I've bothered anyone here. I shared my knowledge with your team, which I hope was constructive enough to make changes for the better in the project, but if this is the course of the games nature then unfortunately I'd rather work on my own things. I'm done trying to negotiate creative licences on an open source project with this team. I attached the tileable plaster texture I created for the house and UV sheet I began making, using deviantart's texture resources, I wish this team the best and hope to see the game makes it onto steam one day.
  2. No, I don't but the team is literally afraid of age of empires, you guys named the technology "loom" to "the loom" which tells me you are very hypersensitive. Does this game have time periods? Stone Age 3000BC -> Bronze Age 2000BC -> Iron Age 1000BC -> Conquest Age 100AD? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age Also this is pretty laughable but it is like age of empires, this team is just delusional. Archers have unlimited arrows, units have no morale and don't need to eat or camp, swords and arrows can raze city walls, there is no night or day or sleep and combat is based on HP attack/defense and not on skill or tactics. Celtic Kings: Rage of War is more historical and realistic than this game. Unlock simulator/clash of clans in real-time: ^ I'm by no means a historian and it looks like 0AD setting and environments take place all around 70-100AD+ which makes the "town phases" inadequate because all your doing is literately gathering resources to unlock new buildings... buildings and units you should already have by then. Staying 100% historically accurate is boring and what you are saying is contradicting, Roman soldiers can be foragers, farmers and lumberjacks but you can't have any wooden roofs? Archers have unlimited arrows? Swords can raze buildings? Can someone explain this project to me? Is it actually supposed to stuck in 100AD with no expansion, I don't care about mods I care about improving the vanilla version. And if you are attempting to be historical accurate, I to re-evaluate what I'm doing here.
  3. Okay, so now that everything has simmered down and we all cool this is another design topic I want to cover that compliments my last one about colour theory. Right now I'm working on a singular large UV sheet for use across all persian buildings - including the persian wonder, if you have to ask what I'm working on. I put way to much effort into these articles... I could be playing bf4, on netflix or working on personal projects but instead I'm here trying to help you guys Part 1 - Silhouette Designs You can click and hold the X button in the browser to pause the gif, drag and let go off the the X to resume it. A lot of the buildings and structures are blocky in game. http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/game_environments_design/silhouette-design-game-environments.php http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/game_environments_design/silhouette-environment-design-basics.php This is what makes the game worth playing, RUAH! And all your buildings evolve - that sense of pride and @#$%ing wow. @ 37minutes 2seconds - your embedding doesn't support time links Part 2 - Model & Texture Efficiency (Part) 3 - Revisiting consistency in colour theory
  4. You said Stans textures are blurry, I don't know what you're saying dude. What is a scattershot, it sounds like you are trying to type screenshot and going all old English on me. And I said for the fourth time now, I'll be back on the weekend with new textures and the persian wonder wip. Stan told me you need a wonder so thats what im working on. I have class now so keep it cool on here, bye.
  5. What happened to these terrains................. These terrains are perfect from 2008/2009, what happened to them and this project?
  6. A, B and D are good, the rest you don't need, just reduce the saturation a little bit and they will be as good as age of mythologies terrain. What the hell is this supposed to mean? You are threatening me? For what and with what. I have no problem in leaving, in fact I have much more important things to do, I'm here on my own darn time I tried to point out a flaw that no one has noticed in 10 years and make the game better - which is something you all want. If something has gone under the radar for so long there is nothing wrong with being a little aggressive and assertive about it. It's regular work ethics. It works as it seems and you are all beginning to realize what I'm talking about. And that wasn't an offensive comment, you are a programmer and programmers usually are paid and work in code and don't usually have an artistic mind or conscious about graphics or design choices. I don't know why you giving me threats lmao. ^ This right here is proof, you called AOEO ugly... its not ugly. Nothing is ugly about it. Its all very, very pleasant. What it does have, is way to much character in units units buildings and UI. Its over-characterized. 0ad in contrast has almost no character, and little consideration for unit and building silhouettes because if you make a game based solely on history it will be somewhat boring, like history is. And you cant recreate epic battles of history like TW series does just yet. You are never supposed to use "pure white" in game, which explains why a lot of you textures are over exposed and had color grading in them. You are supposed to use grey or a toned down white. AOE3 has lighting helpers. Also notice how SNOW looks like SNOW. The stone and sand textures in 0ad look like snow, if you remove the texture because the values are the exact same as snow just with different hues. I'll start creating new textures over the weekend, my break just ended and I have class in 3 hours and lots of @#$% to get done. Like snot? This was an example that I made in 2 minutes to show you people what NOISE is. And I haven't called anyone names yet. You are far more edgy than me. And I never told anyone directly, TAKE MY ADVICE! I've been showing examples to help them understand. Yes Stan those textures look great as a I said above you only need A, B and D, half the current texture library needs to be deleted along with the temp_ textures and the other half replaced with new ones. You need a maximum of 2-3 different hues per texture, your library has like 35 different grass textures including the temporary ones, pain in the @#$% to navigate and find which ones to actually work with. Dude, you have parallax on... distorted parallax makes everything "blurry". You should never use parallax for grass. Unless you want that "blur". Parallax is for brick, stone, water effects etc. Parallax only extrudes the texture visually in the Y axis, that "grass" you modded up looks like a hairy gorillas back when you entered its territory the grass is shooting directly up. There needs to be 3D grass on top of the grass texture. Never parallax terrain dude... You could parallax a stoney path texture or a rocky cliff with proper heightmaps and normals but it doesn't work for surfaces like grass that have infinite height ranges were each blade of grass points in a different direction with a curve. And keep in mind you're only noticing these things because I pointed them out, so don't make snap judgements like with this parallaxed grass. You need grass meshes on top of the flat texture along with small small 3d stones and other decorations. Since we have tiny insignificant, skinny units creating a light terrain will much better help them pop out and be distinguishable. And as i've said for the 3rd time now, I'm working on the Persian wonder and terrain textures to bundle them with this weekend. So everyone please calm their @#$% and get back to what you were doing. I made this post so that people wouldn't make the same mistakes in the future.
  7. yes, but keep in mind that in age of empires 3 units are thick and bulky and buildings are 1/4th actual size. aoe3 also uses colormaps or some way to blend textures so they wouldnt tile at all within the camera constraints. aoe3 also used a economic set of textures that were 512x512 0ad uses 1024x1024 and you can clearly see the tiling 0ad also has full size buildings or close to full size with skinnier tinier units
  8. 55-60% of that graphic level is achievable now, besides the depth rendered water and shore waves. 1. Firstly I previously stated in my color theory thread, you will never have these graphics until colour theory and colour harmony is applied across this game. That painting or render is artwork. Do you see any loud noisy textures? All the colors and textures complement each other, everything is within the right value range - there are no overexposed, underexposed, oversaturated, underaturated or high contrast out of place textures or colors or values. 2. You have to stop pixel painting in highlights on textures, you make a base diffuse map with some ambient occlusion, the specular map will control how much light bounces off the surface. You never need to paint in highlights unless its a cartoon game. 3. Secondly those models/objects are a lot more detailed, as I stated you need a LOD system or at least a toggle that can switch high/low models. 4. There is lots of ambient occlusion going on in that scene, you already have a baked ambient occlusion overlay UV2 shader, all you need to do implement is the second method which is vertex ambient occlusion: antongerdelan.net/opengl/vertexbuffers.html - I don't know if this will help or not but essentially you need to access and enable vertex colors and by enabling them they should overlay/multiply on top of the texture mapped on the faces. Vertex AO also takes no memory up and doesn't use texture space like local lightmaps, both of them combined will give convincing soft shadows So that covers 60% of the overall quality, these are additional shaders that will probably take longer to figure out and script and are more "next gen". 5. Fresnel lighting will massively increase the games graphic quality because it will have more realistic effect on shading, it should be used on rocks, stone, metal, buildings and units could use it aswell but a very low power of it. www.roxlu.com/2014/037/opengl-rim-shader - here is link I found on it for opengl. 6. Nearing the end, you would need a simple sub surface scattering shader for foliage, since light passes through leaves and leaves are not solid bricks they have different lighting properties: 7. Lastly we have image based lighting: I cannot begin to imagine what kind of math goes into this, sorry for the long posts. It's pretty cool stuff though. Well that was pretty much all the shaders and tools we need to make graphics like the one in the painting/render, (I think its a render because the ambient occlusion under the main stone building is way to dark and there is tiling on the dock roof). So there are all the examples you need Bruno
  9. This is the most extreme example I can give of noise. I hope you people understand what I'm trying to say.
  10. You are a programmer and I am quite certain you did not read the post at all. spot on... @57 seconds "however when used incorrectly, it can make the viewer feel lost, nauseous or even irritated, basicly colours can make or break your scene" - which is what I meant when I said the game is "ugly". @1 minute 21 seconds = value scale black -> white @Stan as I said I started working on the Persian wonder, I'm going to bundle everything together along with new terrain textures. My break ended and I have classes so I'll be done in around two weeks.
  11. No one seems to care about color theory, which I took my time to explain in my post which everyone ignored. You cannot achieve high quality no matter how hard you try without color theory, the game doesn't look good, to say to the very least. Please take your time reading the below info and trying to understand why this is so. I'm not trying to offend anyone but what my eyes are seeing confuse me and is hard to process naturally and sociologically. This all affects gameplay and enjoyability of the game as a whole, gameplay aside. AND FINALLY NOISE (3). This is the "noise" that I'm talking about, look at the circle below, do you see how nothing adds up? All the colors and values are broken and distorted and in general @#$%ed up. http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2014/11/color-theory-game-design-1-fundamentals/ http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2014/11/color-theory-game-design-2-4-glyphs/ http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/color-theory-for-game-designers-1.pdf http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/color-theory-for-game-designers-2.pdf You should always establish the values first and only then add hue (color). A good way to do this is to take a screenshot of the 3d model and paint a visualization in photoshop. Do you see how dark and @#$%ed up everything is in this beta build of age of empires 2 back in the day? It looks like @#$%. now look at how they fixed the color and value issues for their commercial release of the game: In closing
  12. So apparently I don't have permission to send PM's... or view profiles, what? Neither do the current .dae files import to max. gpa profiling tools don't work with this application neither does dx ripper, is this whole engine OpenGL? Also is there a database or .zip archive of the textures from CG Textures which we can still use, and the current collection, before the licence cancellation?
  13. I love creating lods, as long as its mostly on my own work. Isn't it fun for you to weld verts? If you did implement them I would create lod's for every building I create and everything else I would produce, occasionally someone else if they would need it. Units don't need them unless its siege equipment. Lods would give me the creative freedoms I need as 3d artist and make the game look alot better. Are there any pros for staying open source? Being open source is probably the reason this project was grinded to an almost halt, if it was commercial you could do crowd funding and have multiple resources... And it would get done faster and better. You could develop better tools and faster work pipelines. tris/mats/memory
  14. I just read up the cg textures clause conditions use, that's a real bummer, it currently winter up here so I cant do much. And not having lod support isn't exciting to hear. Will lod's ever be supported? Programming wise it sounds very doable with a in-house engine. I can get around textures, but having no lod's won't do as it severely limits what you can do creatively. Consoles were bad enough with the low memory, but having no lods is even worse. What are the current stretch goals or plan for this project? I mean 5 years ago 5 years sounded like a pretty good time frame, but its not even in beta yet.
  15. That isn't a problem, I asked if there is LOD stages. Every RTS has this, you can do as much detail as you want. Please tell me pyro has lods... if it doesn't tell the programmers to start programming lod stage support. Every video game ever has level of detail meshes, cheap mobile phone games are are the only exception. HD 3000 can run modern games fine: You are setting artificial boundaries for the game if you don't have lods and making it look like a game from 2002. There is plenty of content already in game, I want to create new terrain textures, foliage, rocks to replace the horrific current ones which hurt my eyes to look at, because of the high contrast and noisiness of them, they are just bad and reminiscence of the earlier builds that need to be replaced, they don't even have proper normal or specular maps. I would also like to start HDifying the Gaul civ's buildings and eventually all the buildings in the game, provided you do have and do implement lod stages, I would fix the pixel density issues along with the new buildings, which is another issue. I was also asking about accessing the second UV channel layer to overlay a multiply ambient occlusion on top of the first layer, commonly known as lightmaps, except instead of baking a scene, each building has its own lightmap. Do you have and could the programmers implement this? Vertex color ambient occlusion could be a temporary solution and is probably easier to access and code. You seriously need an AO solution and LODS for this game. It looks like some outdated game from 2002. Rome II is bugged, but its more fun than this right now.
  16. Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free? Yes Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license? Yes Skills and Experience: low and high poly modelling, mobile optimization, texturing, baking etc Staff: Iv'e talked to Mythos_Ruler on msn 5 years ago, what's up dude? Did you end up selling your playwrite? Work Examples: http://imgur.com/a/8iTZR I just want to say that I was here last 5 years ago in 2010 and on the random occasion I would remember this game and check the site, today I decided to play it and noticed no a lot has changed. It's been FIVE years. So here is a well deserved critique of things that need to be fixed in order to even qualify for crowdfunding or building a bigger fan and player base or even become a popular Steam title. a. voice overs are the same GrASSO, grosso, GrAsso b. user interface (grey gradients) is the same and looks like some kind of brushed steel, does not suite the time frame or theme of the game. c. sound effects (battle) are the same and undramatic like in age of mythology which sounds like bbq skewers being rubbed together vs age of empires 1/2 were it actually sounds like heavy metal is being bashed together - this takes away from experience, one reason of age of mythology was a "bleh" game compared to aoe1/2 d. low poly photo source environment models (trees and rocks are outdated, and a bunch of other things) e. noisy high contrast terrain textures (all textures should be low contrast and have shadows/highlights removed so cg lights light them properly with their normal maps) f. keeping the historical names as the primary object name of buildings/units creates a steep learning curve, MOVE them to HISTORY section of the menu and UNIFY the game names, axeman, barracks etc so people understand what they are working with. Keeping the historical names CRIPPLES your player demographic severely. Most people want to play a game and not learn a history lesson or try to keep track of all the different units with poorly organized suffixes g. campaigns have not been implemented since 5 years ago, they should be removed and multiplayer should become the focus, if you weren't able to get done in 5 years there is NO point in keeping that goal. h. pixel density of certain objects and terrain textures do not match i. trees and foliage is static, no vertex deformations or bending - takes away from realism j. super tiny gui anchored to the corners/middle of the screen, no gui scaling? Get Scaleform. k. no villager building hotkeys l. farms grown on stone tiles m. no colormaps to break up the obvious terrain tiling n. hard edges and blocky buildings, its 2015, you can chamfer the edges to make it smooth now... o. birds in every level, no other ambient sounds p. the specular mapping and normal maps seem to be barely working in game q. villagers should stay villagers and military units should stay military units. You claim to be a historical rts, legionaries didn't build brick barracks's in the middle of the battlefield, they pitched tents and built encampments. you should have the ability to call your villagers to arms or garrison them however, but never allow military units to build anything besides stockades and encampments (tents, palisade walls etc) maybe you could add a new building (tents) to allow military units to convert to villagers (logicically leaving their weapons at the camp to work and, rearming when you need to them to fight) instead of them magicly pulling weapons from thin air Its quite annoying when all the gui gets shoved in the corner anchor points on a 2560x1440 screen. It's super tiny. Also I have to ask, have the programmers implemented an LOD system? Implemented the use of UV2 channel for light mapping bakes? Are there any plans of implementing GUI scaling like Autodesk's Scaleform? That said I'd be interested in repairing all the terrain textures and creating brand new vegetation and rocks and see were it would go from there, I'm not going to mod. I want to work on the vanilla release copy of the game.
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