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Here's the product of today's stream. Keep an eye on this thread since I'll be streaming more during this week. (sorry, big gifs)

Frankish Horsemen - Old body mesh The clothes are based on Stuttgart Psalter depictions

I'll be streaming in a few minutes. Today in the menu we have some sweet new horse rigging, probably sculpting too and new meshes animations. twitch.tv/exmanko Enjoy!

Made a video of myself playing a game, with some commentary.

@Lion.Kanzen Shouldn't that be posted in their respective mod subforum? I'll just stick with the models needed for the main game for now, or I'll never finish with this. Also remember, the blender file with the armature and basic unit model is in the first post of this thread. Any artist/modder can download it and tweak the model or make animations as desired. For any model that is rigged into the given armature, all the animations that will be in-game will work with it.

A good thing is that maybe we shouldn't have the capture all the way from the beginning. Players need to research capture.

Original post still puts a smile on my face, haha 'bogus' GG MetaPhaze

@MetaPhaze I don't assume you will ever read this, but I'm working on wildlife balance, see #3778 and #3918. Currently wolves are overpowered indeed when compared to other aggressive animals and I want to change that.

There's another way to do friendly-fire targeting efficiently. Simply designate the archer's current target to be the closest enemy unit to the archer (using a space-partitioning tree to find this unit). If there are allies along the line the arrow would travel, and those allies are not right next to the archer, the archer doesn't shoot, and (crucially) doesn't choose a different target either. This would be fast, and result in correct targeting in most situations. In particular it would result in correct targeting if you use archers the way they were historically used - when no allied units except the archers/skirmishers themselves are in the line of fire. If the user has told the archer to attack a specific unit then that unit would be the archer's current target, instead of the closest enemy unit.

Can you post some more info? Like the path of your mod.json, the contents of it, the path to some of your modded files, ...

Why not have battalions for troops/soldiers and then individuals special units, like the spies (would be silly to have battalions of spies anyway), scout, etc. Battalions does not mean that there cannot be individual unit types.

It is actually a very useful change. I just have a lot of custom actors and modded actiors that will need changing to accomodate the new capability. lol

The disappointment for me with AOE3 was the scale was way too small. I wanted huge musket and cannon battles with formation fighting and epic bayonet charges and trampling effects for cavalry and protracted sieges. Basically, take what lacked in AOE2 and move it forward and innovate the tactics. I felt like the game was hamper by the "Age of Empires Feel!!!!1" that had to be maintain at all costs to please a demographic. This is something I feel is hamper 0 A.D. too. I actually liked the Home City concept, it was just half-develop for my taste. They improve the home city in Age of Empires Online, but that game was crapola otherwise.

I like abilities based in stamina/mana/energy bar. so Starcfrat is an rts based in that micro, that a thing I love, but the thing Imdesire to 0AD are special units with those abilities to be support units, like the Dark Templar, can be nice include spies and units with stamina or energy to get their skill to create another layer( optional of course) of gameplay, unconventional warfare based in spies and assassins, AOE 3 have that idea.

@Lion.Kanzen additionally, using spoilers could often help when posting several images or TL;DR excerpts from Wikipedia. No offense

True. 0 A.D. is a great game in many aspects but I think it still shares one weakness (in a less extreme way, perhaps) with AoE III: You do not have that much the feeling to make great advancements with your civilization. This is personal opinion of course. Visually it feels like you start and end in "Imperial Age", because the initial CC usually looks like a high level building from start and the structure models don't change at all. Advancing in phases feels a little bit arbitrary and not that epic than ages (I know that this already has been discussed). There is no real timescale. There is no feeling to grow a big empire out of @#$%. I know the reasons why there are no ages and I don't really question this basic concept. I would advocate though to start more nomad style like e.g. with some tents / a camp so you can regain a bit of the described feeling. Assuming we had infinite motivation, programming and artistic resources I would indeed go for the AoE I style where you start in Stone Age. Not before the start, but during the game you would make the decision into which civ you want to evolve. E.g. at the beginning you have to decide if you want to migrate to Europe or the Near East or America (symbolically, could be a huge GUI element like in AoM). Depending on that choice you can choose an early civ and from that develop into (one of several) later civs. The timescale is what I am missing most in 0 A.D. Gameplay wise it (currently) feels like you just pump out as many units as you can early on to hit XYZ pop at 10 minutes. After that you mass champs as early and as much as you can. Just mass production. No 3 militia unit rush, no attempts to steal the enemy's boar and lure it to your base etc., little things that made AoE II so interesting. I know this is Alpha so complaints should be spared. I also know that we will more likely have battalions and even more units than AoE II style microing. This is good and bad, but I'm sure I will always miss that early game with super @#$% units where every little achievement adds to bare survival. It might be time to write an RTS Utopia, a Chuck Norris of all Design Documents. Actually... it neither will be possible nor help anyone with anything...

We had a balancing team, but it was unbalanced. A balancing leader works better than a team for this.

The code is still fully compatible with the old actor format (which is handy, as now I can update one batch at a time). And since actors had no inheritance whatsoever, it means they all operate on their own, so aren't affected by the changes I'm doing. So if you don't want to change anything, it's not needed to change. But if you change it too (perhaps wait a bit until the dust has settled in SVN), the files will be a lot smaller and easier to create/maintain.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone: I just heard that the old actor files are still working (since I was fearing the same )

The problem with friendly fire is that our UnitAI code isn't clever enough. If the unitAI needs to check for every possible target if there are allied units nearby (like a soldier in real-life would do), it would cause a lot more calculations, and cause more lag. Because we don't want the micro-tasking of assigning a new target for every individual unit, it was decided that archers can just fire and never hit friendly units. Limiting ammunition would cause the same annoying micro-tasking, and a lot more shuttling over and back. Note that a secondary attack is planned for some units, but it's also hard to figure out when to switch between primary and secondary attack. It's easy enough to enable friendly fire though: just check the ballista template, the ballista does give (or at least gave in the past) friendly fire since it's more realistic indeed, and doesn't cause that much micro management (there are less ballistas, and the targets are normally big buildings).

Animations being ready is much closer than you think. Once I have the basics now (as I do) only simple modifications for each type of equipment are yet to be done, even cavalry only have 2 or 3 different animations, so the only thing I would like to make is some horse walk/trot/galop for the cavalry, so it wouldn't be much wait. Also I think it would be more epic to just commit all new units regardless their role.

Game had to have a balance between realism and gameplay. I doubt that devs would change the game in this way. Friendly fire exist IRC only with stone throwers. It was planned for ranged units, but never implemented and I think that has been dropped.