Leaderboard

Modified Oryx model, and voila, an Auroch. I think. Fewer references than usual (as could be expected as they died out a few hundred years ago). This is the Auroch cow:

Wildfiregames presents: 0AD's unit upgrade. -Why do you work on this upgrade when you should be working on pathfinder and performance improvements? -Please note that this upgrade has been done by an artist who hasn't any knowledge in programming. This upgrade has not taken away any precious work time to 0AD programming developers who continue to work on the needed pathfinder and performance improvements. -Why do you make this upgrade? For a number or reasons: Unit models are very old, around 6-7 years old. These new models are closer to today's industry standards. UV mapping and model proportions aren't ideal on the current models. The new ones have realistic human proportions and much better UV mapping. Old animations cannot be modified, only created from scratch. With the new models we can maintain the blender source files of the animations and modify them at will. Since we share the blender source files, the team and the community can make variations for their own model variations and still use the new armature. Old model's armature (skeleton) is very basic and limited. With the new model's armature we can achieve more detailed animations and are capable of basic prop animation -Are these new models already implemented? Do they work with the old animations? -No. The models are finished and ready to start animation production. We will remake all the unit animations and implement them when there are almost all of the required animations completed. However, the models are commited to the SVN version of the game with some test examples that you can check in the map editor. These examples and the models will be released in the next Alpha release (Alpha18) if you don't wan't to set up a SVN version. To check some unit examples in SVN, go to the map editor and in the object tab, search for all actors and filter by "newunit". Once selected click on "Switch to action viewer" to isolate the unit and zoom in. (please note these are just examples and they aren't final unit setups) -Do you have increased the number of unit variations of the game? -Yes, now there are non-armored unit variations, and armored unit variations with some differences. There are plans to add some more in the near future if time permits. -Can I make my own animations for my mod and use these new models? -Yes you can! Check at the bottom of this post to download the blender source file(s) of the armature and check the SVN newunit xmls example for setting up your own units. Don't forget to check the presentation video where there's a short explanation of how the armature works. -What is left to be done before I can play with these new models? -Since the unit heads have different size than the old ones, all the helmets in the game must be resized to fit them. Also as pointed a few lines above, we're going to upgrade all the animations to fit these new models. When these two tasks are complete or close to completion, we'll implement them and you'll be able to play 0AD with them. -Is there something I can make to help with this task? -Yes! If you are a skilled animator with experience in human models' animations you can open a thread in "Applications and contributions" subforum, tell us about yourself and show us some of your animation works! Male unit variations (Old Work in progress): (Click following images to enlarge) Female unit variations (Old work in progress): Download the blend file and start animating! Enjoy! New unit upgrade animation template.zip

Ancient Empires is a mod for 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant, aiming at historical authenticity and gameplay rebalance. Currently I'm working alone on it, but if you are interested in helping out you can contact me. Feedback and brainstorming are very welcome as well, you can check the specific threads and add your suggestions. The mod's main goals, changes and features are listed bellow. Gameplay: The mod is closer to Age Of Kings than any other RTS game, to which the tech-tree layout and parts of gameplay are pretty similar. However many concepts from 0 A.D. have been maintained, together with ideas taken from other games, the community, as well as several of mine. The game pace is slower and a bit more macro focused compared to the main game in almost every aspect. Counters (mostly soft) are reintroduced in many cases, inspired mostly from historical unit roles. For more details check here. Civilizations: For now no new civs have been added, as balancing the existing 12 is already hard enough. The tech-tree is made more clear by having a majority of common techs and units available at standardized structures and Civ specific ones available at the Fortress (with a few exceptions clarified at the history screen). Each Civ gets a mostly new set of bonuses and champion units, which are now changed as a concept. Links to Civ threads: Athen Brit Cart Gaul Iber Mace Maur Pers Ptol Rome Sele Spart Units: Unique units, the replacement of champions, aren't necessarily the most powerful units a Civ can have. Each civ gets a historically determined base rooster from the shared units, which range from cheap Skirmishers to powerful War Elephants. Unique units often come to fill missing unit roles or add new ones and are chosen from rare units that were dissimilar in function to other, more common units. So there won't be many unit duplicates per faction, like Spearman and Superspearman with the exact same role, only different in power and cost. Some exceptions exist, as this is a still a work in progress feature. Besides unique units, some Civs have slightly varied versions of the common units. For example, in place of the weak, basic spearman, the Athenians get the more costly and powerful Hoplite. Random Maps: The mod will focus on random maps instead of skirmish maps, to reduce copy-paste build orders and keep scouting important. Major Changes: Some core features of 0 A.D. have been removed or majorly altered. Citizen-Soldiers are gone now, to make raiding the economy a more valid strategy and allow for bigger price/attribute differences between units and civs without breaking balance too much. Female citizens have been replaced with male ones until a possibility for different sexes per unit is implemented (see help needed). Structure capturing was never implemented in the mod and probably won't be. Territory influence has a softer function. It is needed for the construction of some structures and prevents enemies from building in it, but most structures can be constructed outside of it. Line of sight and attack range are generally much lower than in the main game. Starting stone and metal mines are moved right outside of the players starting territory in most random maps instead of being close to the civil centre. You can find many more ideas here (not all of those fit with the mod's concept though).

since latest svn, ai should be able to deal with saved games and this has been implemented in Petra. It is now in debug phase , so everybody is encouraged to test it and report bugs either here or on trac.

Mail sent.

WIP. Incredible model by the way.

WIP, still need some fixes fox2 packed.zip

The triangle count is not much higher (around 250 -350 additional triangles only), these meshes still pretty lowpoly for today's standards. AFAIK the biggest performance problems are mainly caused by pathfinding and simulation calculations. So I don't think they would cause much bigger problems. There has been some improvements lately in graphical performance like better shadow culling and better alpha transparency handling too. Regarding unit detail, while it is true that the game is not meant to be played at max zoom all the time, people like sometimes to zoom into the battleground and enjoy observing how the battle unfolds (myself included), take good looking screenshots or use these models in other mods that the camera angle could be different than the standard RTS. Also my mission in this project is to make the game look as good as possible

fox.zip

Two versions I made using a pair of public domain images. They just need a bit of tweaking in the bottom part and the mouth interior. Now we need Strannik to animate it and this would be a great production chain