Jump to content

0 A.D. unrivaled?


Achilles_Knee
 Share

Recommended Posts

FYI - most people agree that Midway's Rise and Fall is not very good.

That puts 0 A.D. in a leadership space for this type of genre. Amazing development really.

I wonder how close 0AD will be to the following ideal I posted about what is lacking from RaF?

********************************

I remain bitterly dissappointed that the Age of Empires - Rise of Rome on the old MS ZOne play experience is gone, possibly forever...

To me, the perfect game would be Age of Mythology's performance and economy with RaFs units and game play.

I am still convinced that this type of game, that is Ancient warfare based on Persia/Greece/Eqypt/Roman Republic/Carthage has not been done properly yet.

I don't know if 0AD will fill the void or not, but I remain firmly convinced this genre can once again have a killer game with a thriving online play community...

RaF could have been that game...it is so so sad...

The things we need in the game are so obvious:

*sigh* - I guess I just don't get it. It seems so simple to me on how to make this type of game a franchise:

Age of Empires

Age of Empires: Rise of Rome

Empire Earth

Age of Mythology

RaF

The killer Ancient Warfare RTS is a combination of all of these...

AOE/RaF's gameplay

AOMs economy

RaFs hero mode

Start with cavemen like in EE (lol)

maybe throw in somehow the massive scale of Rome Total War MP battles...

Keep the RaF tech tree and units - (with less effective swordsman) - lose the outposts - put hunting/fishing/farming back in the game - make some units cost food only - food/wood - gold/food - gold/wood

What I mean by the above is the swordsman would be much weaker but only cost food - archers would cost gold/wood - spears would be stronger and cost gold/food

Bring back the record game feature...

Bring back market and dock trade...

Make buildings stronger...

Balance the game often with patches using a polling system for what needs to be changed...

*sigh*

Sorry for the rant, it just doesn't seem that hard to me to get this type of game right, we have so many examples of what works and what doesn't on the shelves...

***************************

Edited by Achilles_Knee
Link to comment
Share on other sites

You kidding? I think they're about AOE3 standard right now, if not even better. Anyway, maybe it's just the screenshots that aren't doing them justice (though I think they look fine).

I was really looking forward to RaF over the period before it's release, but as I learned more about it (AWFUL hero choices, a lot of historical inaccuracy) and after playing the demo, I just thought it wasn't the ancient-based game I really wanted, and had been waiting for since AOE1 started to lose impact. RaF also just seemed to be very much behind more recent RTS games gameplay wise, fairly generic units, lack of food (proves how important it is as a resource in this kind of game) and no huge differences between the four civilizations, bar unit and building appearances. Hero mode can be pretty fun, though.

Anyway, I hope 0 A.D. can fill the gap in the space where a great ancient-based RTS game should be. But I know this'll be a while until it's release, so until then... War Chiefs. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Keep the RaF tech tree and units

I disagree; the RAF tech tree is overly simplistic. For example, Greece is made up of the following: 1 swordsman, 1 spearman, 1 archer, 1 horseman, 1 super-spearman and 1 boat. The first 4 have 5 upgrade levels and 3 unit appearance changes, the super-spearman (spartan) doesn't change, and the 1 boat has 3 upgrade levels. There's also a catapult and a flame thrower siege thing,

I much prefer the variety available through the AOM techtree, though certain elements of RAF are very good: the ladder teams, the walls, the large boats, the large armies and the way formations work, etc.

Bring back market and dock trade...

Definitely. The economy is overly simplistic in RAF, and this is something which detracts even further from the game due to the simplistic of combat-unit choice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

yes i think it will, but the graphics are'nt exactly crisp and smooth...

If I were developer, it would demoralise me heavily.

I think, that graphic side of the 0AD is on great level. Keep in mind, that you cannot make every unit high poly and thus high detail. None graphic card would handle it. However, I wonder, how MTW2 does it that it has many, quite high detail, units and I've read somewhere, that geForce 5700 should be enough to run it.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We're not even near the polish phase yet

Yep, we're still on the norwegian and have to get the danish phase done before moving on :D

how MTW2 does it that it has many, quite high detail, units

Mostly by cheating and using low detail units when you can't tell the difference. And by having large armies as one of the core features of the game and spending a lot of time (including three previous games) optimising and polishing the techniques :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've seen it already. Magnificent as ever. But I wonder why do you use resolution 1280x1024 when it doesn't keep ratio 4:3 as monitors do. It must screw it.

I use 1280x960 and it is 4:3 (Yes, difference isn't big, but still).

Edited by Belisarivs
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1280x1024's not...? hmm, good point. Never noticed that. (Yeah, I'm rather inattentive for a math geek, meh, whatever.)

Strange, all my monitors are currently at 1280x1024.

How did that resolution come about anyway, if it's not the same ratio as the others?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From here, a claimed explanation is:

For mostly obscure hardware reasons, early DRAM/VRAM graphics controller implementations favored horizontal resolutions that were a multiple of the row size. 1280 is divisible by 256, the row size of a 64K DRAM.

One of those obscure reasons was address translation. If you form the linear framebuffer address as (2048*y)+x, it made doing blt hardware much easier: just map x and y onto the appropriate row and column bits.

Another of those reasons was being able to load the video shift registers at the same times each line. This made the timing control easier to do in the logic of the day (think MSI counters and gates.)

Modern gfx conrollers refresh the display using periodic burst DRAM access instead of actual shift registers; and they have hardware to help deal with the x-y to linear address translation. So the whole issue of row size pretty much goes away.

And 1024 (the vertical resolution) is also a multiple of 256, so a 24-bit framebuffer is precisely 3.75MB and you could make it nicely out of RAM chips no larger than 256KB without wasting any. 1024x768 is multiples of 256 too, and 1280x1024 is what you get when you add 256 in both directions. So it's not entirely arbitrary :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 6 years later...

RaFs hero mode is the most fun thing I have seen in the last 15 years in computer games.

A more worked out game would really show how fun the hero mode could be, sadly the studio didn't got the necessary resources to fully develop the game and hastly finished it.

Another game that did a similar thing was Savage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage:_The_Battle_for_Newerth

So sad nobody seems to be able to develop this kind of thing fully.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • 5 months later...

I agree. Also its really annoying in the middle of the screen it obscures my view. I think i never had a problem in other games because you dont notice when it stretches full width of the screeb. I reckon it should be on the sides of the screen after all we all have wide screens these days

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...