Samulis

Sorry for the incredibly late reply! You can send me a message with a link to the files and I can get them cleaned up and implemented.

Ah yeah, a car actually isn't a bad idea if you don't have any quieter place to record since they are usually rather well noise insulated and reasonably dampened aside from the glass as you mention. Maybe a middle seat, and get pretty close to the mic. Of course, be aware of noisy traffic passing by outside or other noises if in a city/town.

Do we have proper translations of all the terms ready? If so, go ahead. It is preferable that: All terms in the list (including recent additions like 'I will capture') are recorded, preferably with multiple takes. The recordings should be done with either a proper XLR studio microphone or at least a decent desktop USB mic. If neither is obtainable, then a cell phone or headset microphone may be used, but this is very much not preferred and much work will be necessary for me to make the audio usable. Also accept that if a cell phone is used to record the audio, your audio may be removed and replaced in the future with a proper recording if that becomes possible. The recordings should be done in the quietest, most "dry" (i.e. least echo) space you can find. Often an interior closet full of clothing and such works best. Be sure any noise sources like fans, air handling, refrigerators, desktop computers, windows, are either turned off/closed or set to their quietest setting. Every single decibel of noise improvement is worth it! The speaker should be about 10-15 cm from the microphone (no more, no less) when talking and should remain in the same exact relative position when delivering each line. The audio should not 'clip', i.e. pass the point '0 dB Full Scale'. The gain/input level shall be set so the loudest audio is at about -6 dB. If there is excessive distortion, noise, or other problems, I may not be able to clean the audio sufficiently for it to be in the game.

Welcome @Saifeddine! Nice to hear you are also in the Boston area, as I am currently. One project I have been considering tackling next is the lack of voice variety in the game. It requires recording a bunch of dialogue in various ancient languages. If this idea interests you, I have been considering working with a local studio to record the dialogue, perhaps with some local students, and could definitely use some help in that regard. If you are interested, I can PM you my Discord details and we can see what can be done. Omri is very much in charge of the actual musical side of things, but as said before, there is room for more works provided they can be adapted to fit the game's sound and style overall while also hitting the mark of the unique culture. The overall sound of the score is not really the same as typical for modern scores, as aspects of it reach back over a decade to when the game was begun, so it is an interesting challenge to write pieces which fit aurally and compositionally. I would deeply encourage at least a few playthroughs of the game with various cultures, or listening to the full soundtrack, before working on anything.

Some input as a non-programmer: My main experience is with Git, primarily using GUI-based tools like Github Desktop. I have not used much of any SVN. I generally think a lot of this comes down to a question of accessibility and features. Obviously with an open source project it is important that it is accessible, even to novices and less-technical people. I think anything that requires command line/text-based use is too advanced for many non-programmer contributors (art/audio), so I would encourage that we consider an option that has some kind of at least somewhat functional GUI-based option. Yes, command line is not really that scary and even a few hours of digging around the file system and doing basic stuff in there is enough for it to become second nature and very simple in retrospect. However, there are many people who are truly afraid of using it or have such a limited understanding of basic command line use that it is genuinely dangerous for them to be poking around on their own. I think the last thing we want is to have to spend a hour or more giving each new contributor a tutorial on how to submit changes. On the other hand, if something is so easy that even a total beginner can contribute to it without any kind of technical hurdle, it may lead to a risk of lower quality code or assets being contributed. In the current state, I feel like the use of SVN acts as a very minor gatekeeper and encourages less experienced potential contributors to spend more time on the forum. I have had occasional issues where people have submitted unusable content in merge requests to projects I have run on GitHub and had to decline them. Regarding sovereignty, I definitely agree that we should maintain some kind of local version, if not the main working version, on servers we control. Although I do not think a place like Github or similar is going to go 'poof!' one day, I have had occasional problems in the past with companies deciding to stop running services I rely on as essential and do not think it is healthy to keep something this large and important in one place, especially one controlled by another party. I can also see how using the same version control system as most mods might be advantageous as well. It might make it easier for those who have just started to get the hang of modding the game to then contribute directly to the game. I'll leave the actual deciding to those of you with more experience, but these are just some thoughts which may help provide a different perspective.

TTS would probably be good for visually impaired players, but I don't imagine there are many of those given how visually-driven RTS' are. Not sure why one would prefer it other than that, as most people read text faster than it is spoken (at least for romance languages). Edit: for things like civic centers under attack and so on, there are sound effects intended to help you identify those already without being as intrusive as a TTS voice. While I potentially support the idea of a voice chat in lobby and of course in multiplayer games, I don't quite understand how the game (or any other system) would calculate "player position" as shown in your example. There are no "player" units in the game, it's not an RPG or FPS, it's an angled top-down RTS. Would it be based on city location? If so, players would spend almost all of the time hard-panned left or right which is not comfortable in headphones, and it would offer a massive unfair advantage to players when trying to find an enemy in the first part of the game; the human ear is sensitive to stereo field changes of less than a degree, so it does not take long to locate an exact position even behind unexplored map. I think it would be better for players to simply be mono, or perhaps locked in a fixed place panned slightly based on which side of the map they are on. Honestly probably the simplest solution might just be to have some sort of integration with a 3rd party voice chat solution like Discord or Mumble or something... that way all that would need to be implemented is a way to add an optional field for users to enter their handles or similar callsign, no need for actual audio infrastructure in the game. I'm not even sure what a built-in voice chat could do any better than such pre-existing solutions.

Yep! 2003-2004 I believe. The engine was also used in an earlier game, Celtic Kings, and a later game which never received a US/English language launch. It seems Haemimont was very interested in tweaking the way the game worked internally, so each game plays rather differently according to the reviews I've read. The minimap is great with the abstraction of the dots. You can see unit flows easily and clicking somewhere on the map drops you out so you can see what it is. Edit: I think the mechanic of the fullscreen mini-map might have been borrowed from the Tactical (?) view in Homeworld (earlyish 3D space RTS).

A rather old RTS and not so easy to run these days, but Nemesis of the Roman Empire, also known as Celtic Kings: The Punic Wars ("TPW"), by Haemimont Games (still around) was one of my favorite games growing up! It's not the most historically accurate in retrospect (mixing Imperial and Republican Roman eras), but still a lot of fun. Came out around 2004 I believe, or around 0 A.D.'s early days. I put together a rather mediocre playthrough with commentary (haven't played in nearly a decade so excuse my rust and poor placement on map!): Interestingly it has both a time period overlap and several core mechanic overlaps with 0 A.D.: Capture of structures is prioritized over destruction (in TPW/NRE, buildings cannot be destroyed at all anyway; gates can be broken down though). Units have levels and gain experience through combat or stationing in a building which gives them experience trickle. Each unit has its own strength, xp, and armor ratings. Units garrisoned in a settlement/structure will fire from its defenses. Each civilization is supposed to feel totally unique, and it definitely does this very well in TPW. Wild animals roam around, including hostiles. But TPW also goes off careening in a totally different direction sometimes: Resources are localized, not unified. Each settlement or structure has its own resource levels, which are sent around the map using mules which carry up to 1000 food or gold each. You can easily set up repeating routes which will run whenever the value reaches over a threshold (100 units of resource). Two-resource economy: food and gold. Food is produced in the rural villages, gold in settlements. The number of population in each controls the rate of production. When you train units, you take pop out of the settlement, meaning gold production drops. You can add more population by sending it from villages, which reduces food production. There is no troop limit, but you can reach a point where you cannot support your army's food consumption, if you do not have enough villages or they are captured. Likewise, if you run too low in population, you will not generate enough gold to train more troops or have enough pop to raise them. Units require food to live and carry a small supply, care must be taken to supply food or an army will starve and become easy prey. You can manually train mules to carry food and attach them to the army. Rather than just armor and damage, units also have a bonus ability, such as dodging the first strike, reflecting damage back to their attacker, each subsequent hit gives more experience or ignores a greater portion of the enemies' armor, and causing a % of the enemy health as bonus damage. This sets up complex relationships much deeper than Rock-Paper-Scissors of traditional RTS, where certain combined-arms relationships are extremely effective (archers knock off more health on full-health, high-health enemies, making them perfect to strike an enemy first so infantry can finish off). The actual damage of a unit is a range (e.g. 18-48), the exact value being determined by the difference in level between the combatant and their enemy. Thus, even heavy units can be overcome by a highly-trained weaker unit. There are no mobile siege units in the game. Instead, 1-10 units can build a stationary siege weapon (ballista, catapult, siege tower) on the map in any location. The weapon then attempts to fire at the target, at a rate set by how many units are stationed inside. Such weapons are very vulnerable to a sally-out, but not vulnerable to fire from towers. Only archers and siege weapons can directly damage buildings. Damage is not used to destroy the building, but rather harm and eventually kill the enemies stationed inside. Once the units inside have been pacified - or they have fled - the army will then attempt to capture the structure. Rather than units being freely formed into formations, they must be 'bonded' to a Hero who will lead them and enforce their formation. The Hero also gives bonus levels and can apply modifiers in battle. Without bonding to a hero, units will fight okay, but they will just sort of wander around without any formation. Heroes are limited to 50 units. Around the map are various special ruins and structures which give benefits. E.g. Ruins contain powerful artifacts which only high level heroes can pick up and use, which can cause damage or heal allies or grant bonus damage/health. Healing wells will heal passing or nearby units regardless of side. Capturable forts, trade outposts, stone outposts, and training outposts each provide benefits and lots of LOS to their owner. Forts slowly convert stationed villagers into macemen, trade outposts convert food into gold, stone outposts gain 8 gold/s interest when at least 2000 gold is placed inside of it, and training outposts behave like barracks in 0 A.D. and give experience trickle to units stationed inside. The cheesiest voice acting ever recorded. Some stuff I really like from TPW I wish was in more RTS: Spacebar brings up FULL SCREEN "mini"-map from which you can issue orders even. Makes the logistics and overview of the battlefield much easier. When entering combat, formations will sort of 'merge' into a battle, finding enemies to fight like in a real melee, and try to push beyond just the closest enemy. Iberian priestesses don't heal but instead gift units experience up to a certain level when a tech is researched. Units in other cultures gain experience by having mock-combat with their buddies. Priests help them to heal while this goes on, though if an enemy attacks it can be disastrous!

I like this suggestion of 'tracer' lines, it was done to great effect in AoE III and many other games. It would be helpful so long as it is not too difficult or graphically expensive. Arrows and javs do have impact sounds, I do not know why they might not be working for you; maybe they are just too quiet. Right now it is just a single dirt impact sound because detection of material impacted is not yet possible and that is the 'safest' sound to use (material-dependent impact is in progress, hopefully for a25). Edit: regarding the bars showing progress of construction, etc. for a building, I think that is not a very elegant solution. In a perfect world, the buildings should imho be animated when working (like some of the later Settlers games), to mitigate immersion-breaking random bars floating over buildings (but that would be a crazy amount of work I reckon). It is also easy to mistake such bars for either capture status or health, which serves to confuse new players and even old players. I found the 'feature' more annoying than helpful when I tried AoE II DE: I'm trained to see a bar above a building in AoE and assume the building just suffered damage, then waste several minutes hunting for a hidden enemy. XD

Just move it out of the subfolder after extracting? Layout should be: (mods} dan-shaders shaders glsl fs & vs files mod.json

Generally I do this kind of folder setup by making a temporary 'staging' folder somewhere and then replicate the folder structure and copy in my files. Once this is done, you can install this as a mod into your own copy of 0 A.D. and instead of directly modifying game assets, you just modify your 'mod' files instead. If you need to add more files to the scope of the mod, just copy them out of the game files and into your mod and modify there. This is very useful for sound stuff at least, where I can A/B test new and old sounds by disabling the mod, no need to uncomment lines or even move around files. I can imagine you might find the approach useful too. I would start with Stan's mod file, extract the contents and/or install it, and then replace the files in the folder structure he's already made for you with the latest files you've updated. Continue work as usual working only in this mod folder, with the mod installed. When you have a new version for people to check out, pack up as a .zip and upload for everyone to try, no need for fancy archive management.

Yes, the issue with languages is primarily that not many people are willing to record the voice over lines, and some languages do not yet even have proper translations. Here is the list of voice actor lines: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Audio_Voice_List There is also an old list on the forum and much discussion about which words to use: People contributing translations or voice over lines is most welcome. Even if the voice recording quality is poor, it can still be used to show people who have a better recording setup how to pronounce the lines correctly. However, even the official list is somewhat outdated as features like Capture have been added, which do not have words in the lists.

It's going to sound a lot less dense because the original sounds used lower-fidelity recordings that were centered heavily in mid frequencies. The new sounds were recorded from scratch using professional equipment and so make use of a larger range of human hearing. By definition, it is going to sound less dense. Compromises between authenticity and convenience are important. In the bronze age, sword-on-sword combat was not technically possible due to how poorly bronze holds an edge (it would quickly dull or damage the blade to strike them against metal), so the 'shing' cutting sound is totally unrealistic... however, it does do a very good job making the swords sound different from spears and everyone knows that is the "sword sound", so I added it back into my 2nd draft sounds for a24. Javelins too do not really make such whooshing noises, but it again serves the game. We will probably be increasing the volume of many of these sounds you have commented about for a25. The problem is, the actual sound files themselves are not at a consistent volume level now, so we need to go back and re-process all of the sound files consistently before we start tweaking everything. a24's sound balance was done by ear over the course of a few games I played to get a playable, workable balance, even (and especially) when there are 200 units in a single battle, which can get quite loud. Changes were made to logging/lumbering to ensure it was slightly more consistent and also remained sufficiently different enough from new, much better building sounds. I liked the original lumber sounds too but some of them were very strange sounding; I might go with a hybrid approach, layering the two sets of sounds together, like I did with the sword attack sounds as discussed in the paragraph above. Here are some comparison videos of the lumber and build sounds:

Yes, we're still working on balancing sounds after we fixed some big bugs in the way sounds were being used that resulted in all of the sounds no longer being balanced. Expect more in the SoundsMod github project and of course a25. Unit selection and confirmation sounds have not been adjusted at all since a23, only really gather and combat sounds.

Sound attenuates with distance like real life. The further you zoom out, the quieter things become. Pre-A24 this was not done; 0 A.D. behaved like a 2D game, with all sounds of equal loudness no matter where they were on the screen. This was a basic flaw with 0 A.D. which meant that at far zoom, people mining on the other side of the map would be audible at 100% volume. Not only was this acoustically completely wrong, it caused sound to be extremely cluttered, with a sheer overload of equally loud sounds. You hear mining, but is it the miners right in front of you, or the miners on the other side of the map? Is it the tower in front of you shooting arrows or the enemy TC 1000m away? Now sounds at the top of the screen which are more distant will sound more distant and quieter, which creates a clean and enjoyable separation. The distance attenuation we are using is a fraction of real life, so sounds are audible much further away than they would be in real life, but it is still audible at normal zooms. [[Edit- A quick aside: we could redo the sound attenuation so it attenuates sounds farther from the camera more than closer by the same amount regardless of camera height, meaning the overall sound level would be the same regardless of zoom, but this isn't something we've discussed or explored yet, so I have no idea how good or bad this would be; just a thought.]] Now, I should note we are still working to balance the sounds a bit. There was a major audio bug where certain sounds where playing several duplicate times, which causes them to become greatly amplified (and massively wasted sound channels). This has been fixed, but as a result the balance of audio from before was completely broken. I spent a few hours tweaking sounds to be closer to a good balance, but it will need more work, and that is what a25 and the SoundsMod project is for. My goal with a24 was just to fix the most outdated or flawed sounds and then try to get the balance of sounds at least reasonable, even if not perfect, and I accept that there are sounds that are not quite balanced right yet. One other result is that battles will have a much larger dynamic range. Before the sounds would run out of channels so they would self-limit with more than ~50-60 combatants. Now each unit on each attack should only use one sound so larger battles should be even louder. Here are the old battle sounds, with the same fixed audio engine (i.e. what 0 A.D. would sound like if we kept the sounds the same): Now here are the new battle sounds: Not only are the new sounds to me audibly louder overall, they are also much clearer and less muffled without being irritating. If you want a battle to be immersive, zoom in a bit! Battles cannot be immersive at 500 m... that would be silly. You would not expect a concert to be immersive if you sit in the very back row... you would not expect a TV to be immersive if you're sitting two rooms away. When you play a city builder, you would not expect to hear people chatting on the streets when you zoom out 100's of meters, so I don't get why you expect a battle to be immersive if you zoom out a bunch here... The bow sounds are the same volume as other games, compared to their combat sounds. I compared the sounds to original AoE I-III, the AoE DE's, and a number of my favorite, more obscure historical RTS (Celtic Kings TPW, Empire Earth, Cossacks, etc.) and found that the bow sounds are appropriately less loud than melee weapon sounds. Many games have even quieter bows (like AoE III as Stan said, as well as AoM, which accurately depicts bow impacts as louder than bow shots), while others are about on par with these. In real life, bows are almost silent. They are designed that way intentionally and have been since their invention, because it is a hunting tool first and weapon second. We already are massively exaggerating the sound of bows to make it appeal to the Hollywood idea that bows make some massive whoosh when you fire them, and of course to make it easy to hear them when enemies are attacking which is an essential gameplay mechanic of the sound. I hope this answers some of the questions you have had about the sounds. They are still a work in progress, but the whole point is to improve them. Feedback is definitely welcome but we also have to make sure we are designing the sound without holding onto existing conceptions. It is easy to become stuck in Confirmation Bias, where the more familiar seems better, even when objectively it may not be.