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Hmmm, Confederate and Union Soldiers... That's indeed a real strange problem...

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

Yes, I think after http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3149 :-)

I believe we already have libraries to do memory pooling (and indeed, do in a bunch of places). We probably need to work on it, but the underlying stuff is there I think.

That would be nice, especially the name of the map type in random maps

r17163 had a C++ change and there was no autobuild before r17167, so it's expected to break if you didnt compile

Ah ok, I look in Public template and missed it. Thank you. Can close thread.

Those sound like very interesting MP maps.

Both Seleucids and Ptolemies used military colonies, but it was more common for the Seleucids, who used them not only to make an army of non-natives (something both preferred as dynasties on foreign soil), but also as a much needed means of spreading combat-ready levies over a vast territory.On the other hand, not only the Ptolemies were an economic powerhouse, but the Seleucids as well. They controlled, for most of the dynasty's duration, the majority of the most important ancient trade routes, including the silk road (add to that the fertile Mesopotamia). And while all their fancy units may point to a purely militaristic faction, most of their wars (much like the Ptolemies) were defensive ones or against rebelling provinces. Both dynasties fielded relatively small armies as well, compared to their controlled territory size. So both should be balanced between military/economy, with a slight focus on navy and defenses for the Ptolemies (relied on garrisoned forts/towns and fleets for most of their wars) and on land armies for Seleucids (preferred decisive field battles mostly).I'm not sure how you guys figure out that (all?) Ptolemaic mercenaries where made settlers. Does the author claim this? From my impression on what I've read, they mostly went to gather mercenaries in times of war, which indicates short term service and not settlers. Sure they'd have mercenaries turned settlers (most factions actually did, even Spartans in their late years), but all of them or a vast majority, no.So imo this leaves way for two representations: Seleucids and Ptolemies realistically sharing many traits (like the military settlements) which holds true but makes for less diversity.The direction things are taking now. Seleucid focus on settlers (because they had more of them*), Ptolemaics on mercenaries (because they had more of them). Makes sense without going too far unhistorical (most factions don't get many things they had due to balance reasons anyway) and adds more faction diversity.* If you want to challenge this, try figuring out why the Ptolemies eventually had to train natives for about half of their phalanx to rival the Seleucid one in numbers.

I've been brainstorming these ideas for the last few days. I thought to post this in the "Suggestions for 0 A.D." topic, but i thought it would be cleaner to create a new topic, since it is a long post and i'm attaching illustrations. 1 - Smart Passive Units Priority: Can live without, but would be nice to have Nature: Not so cool micro-managing Short Description: Put passive units behind the aggressive ones. Detailed Description: Have you seen what happens when you select that whole mass of units (including medics) and command them to attack something? The medics walk to the position of the target, and since they are always focused, they become an easy target, you have to manually hold them back or select them separately, wasting your precious time right in the heat of a battle. Suggestion: Make the passive units (those that don't have any attacks / won't be used as warriors) stay behind everybody, no matter what formation they are (of course, with the exception of box formation). 2 - Smart Training Queue & Visible training queue Priority: Needed! Nature: To save time Short Description: Make the training queues visible under the building portraits and distribute evenly the training orders between the selected buildings. Detailed Description: I used to build a lot of Barracks/Archery Ranges/Stables/Castles, in AoK, to make unit training much faster. When i tried to select a bunch of them and order to fill all their queues with that unit, only one of the buildings would receive the orders, and i had to manually select each other one and make them train, wasting my precious time. Plus, to see if the queue was full in one of the building i had clicked, i used to need to click on each building and check it out manually. Suggestion: It would be nice to have training queues visible like this: Blue: Available units Red: Buildings + visible training queues Yellow: Barracks Green: Attached facilities I then spam clicks on the Mauraders' portrait, ordering the 4 barracks to train Mauraders, units that can only be built with an specific attached facility type. Note that only the two barracks with the needed facility answer to my command. Now, i order the barracks to train 10 Marines, the basic units that any barracks can train. Note that i only ordered the 4 barracks to train 10 marines and the game took care of dividing my 10 marines in all of the available barracks. 3 - Flying Units' Ground Position Priority: For mods, only. Nature: For better accuracy Short Description: A marker on the ground to show where exactly the unit is hovering above. Detailed Description: For strategic purposes, i'd like to see where, on the ground, that flying unit is. Only with a marker i can see, with accuracy, if the unit is within range of an AA Battery or not. Example Screenshots: 4 - Attack-move Command Priority: I can live without, but would be nice to have! Nature: Not so cool micro-managing Short Description: A command to move to the target location, but attacking every enemy on their path Detailed Description: Sometimes, even more against AI, i need the units to attack something as soon as they acquire range. I know the thing is there, but the fog-of-war doesn't let me see it, so i have to go there manually, make units stop when they're in range, select those that aren't in range, make them come closer. Suggestion: This is an unnecessary and annoying thing we could prevent with the Attack-move command. You click the icon of this command, click where you want the units to go and they'll automatically go there, but attacking everything on sight, and then resuming the walk. 5 - Show/Select Weapon Types Priority: Needs to be better thought of. Nature: To save time Short Description: A shortcut to select units by weapon type. Detailed Description: Remember those situations when there are so many units on the screen that you can't even seem to find your archers to call them back before the enemies reach them? You know they are there, but you can't find them on such a mess (corpses on the ground, rubble everywhere, soldiers of different colors but with similar clothes... Or different clothes for the same kind of unit), wouldn't it be better to rapidly select them all and bring them to safety? Solution: The player could be able to drag X unit's weapon to a button (similar to groups of control), so that you can easily drag your archers to safety without messing with your groups of control. I apologize for the long post, i tried to make it both complete and pleasing to read. I'd also appreciate deeply other opinions/better ideas on these matters.

Thanks for posting your ideas. They seem quite well thought out. The problem with ideas like number 1 is that every time you make units smarter the less direct the players control of them becomes. Since units are never smart enough implementing these things must be done with great care to not be more annoying than the thing that is being solved. This is a particularly annoying issue though and should be implemented, it should be approached with care though. We already have an implementation of the multiple building training. We use the system of duplicating your orders between all buildings. So fi you select 5 barracks and click the spearman button you will train 1 spearman from each barracks. I see no reason to change the implementation and prefer the way we do it to starcraft. Our GUI doesn't fit very well with showing the queues under the unit portraits. This is because we display multiple selected units as one portrait with number. This makes sense because the game is designed to have large numbers of units so we need a compact way of displayed large selections. Changing this for buildings is inconsistent which is not ideal. it does seem like a nice idea though, it would be good for garrisoning as well. Perhaps we can come up with another way of displaying the information. This is a planned feature. The current best method is to select everything, then control-click the unit icons to remove unwanted selection. Or set up better control groups before the battle. I would find this feature helpful. The main concern with this one is that if we add too many buttons to the GUI it takes up more room and overloads the user with too many options. One possibility would be to relegate this to hotkey only, or if we think it is important enough buttons could be added. Perhaps we can have a toggle-able advanced UI panel for users who want masses of buttons. A bit off topic and speculative is to add support for UI mods, I believe world of warcraft has may of these, so you could install addons to add these little GUI tweaks, this would let users decide for themselves what they want and allow people to distribute them separately from the main game distribution. This idea is exactly the kind of thing that this would be good for.

Another great idea. I like this multi-functionality of the Alt key. Double-Click a unit selects all the units of that type, regardless of rank. Alt-double-click to select just units of that rank.

what about Alt+click for choosing ranks instead of unit types?

Playing a few multiplayer games (against experienced players) has really taught me the value of territories. If you only play against AIs, you won't see this at all, because they hardly support territories. You need to expand if you want to gather resources safely after your base runs out, which places you that much closer to your enemies. The risk is having more land to defend, the benefit is more resources and additional/larger bases with defensive structures. Diplomacy and possibly technologies will add another dimension to territories. Don't be surprised if they continue to be tweaked and possibly end up as a game setup option

Chaos is life because Order is death. Explaining it further gets religiousy.

Seb of the web?