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Yeah I totally agree. It looks fine on its own, but next to the other portraits it looks kinda faint and dim. I went ahead an redid the lighting in the original blender model and also adjusted the brightness and contrast in the final rendered image. I also increased the glow size a bit. Here is the result: If the normal process is that a team member commits the image, then I guess there is not much else to do for me Unless somebody suggests some more improvments. If my name is included in the credits (Foaly), I think it would be fair when the creator of the original chicken model (CDmir - Čestmír Dammer) would be included as well. Even though it is under CC0, it feels kinda wrong to take all the credit if somebody else has done 80% of the work. Or do you have a different policy for derived work?

Hello everybody! I have been following the 0 AD development for a while and I find this project just absolutly amazing! The other day while playing I saw something, that I thought I could improve. So I gave it a shot. The current portrait for the chicken, is just a render of the low poly chicken model. The model works really well in the game, but the image looks a bit too low poly for a close up image. This is what the current portrait looks like: I wanted to replace the image with a nicer looking one. Since I am not a very skilled painter, I simply took an available chicken model in a higher resolution under CC0 license (http://opengameart.org/content/chicken-animated), rendered it and edited it with GIMP. The result looks like this: Since this is my first contribution I don't really know the whole process of adding things to the repository (I hope this is even the right thread...). But before I get into all that, I wanted to get some feedback on whether it looks good or not. And maybe some advice on how to continue to get this submitted. Thanks in advance, Foaly

Here are some tips for managing your army effectively. These mostly assume you have an army of infantry champions. Use ctrl+q+click to make your army attack units only and ignore buildings. Almost always, you want to kill units before buildings. If you go straight for the buildings while enemy champs are around, your champs will get slaughtered while they are attacking the building. If there are enemy civilian-soldiers around, they can repair the building, or garrison in buildings, or just attack your units. So kill the units first. Another way to look at this is how much economic damage your army can do per second. Buildings are extremely durable and don't cost that much per hit point. Units, especially workers, are very fragile compared to buildings and cost a lot more resources per hit point. So it hurts the enemy more per second to be killing workers instead of damaging buildings. Your army has a tendency to narrow into a single file line when walking long distances. Don't send your army into a tough battle in a single file line, because the front part of the line will be badly outnumbered. There are several techniques for avoiding this. When your line almost reaches the enemy, select some troops from the front part of the line, and tell them to move backwards and a bit sideways while the rest of the line keeps moving forwards. Do this repeatedly until the line looks more like a loose clump. (If units have moved too far backwards, tell them to move forwards again to stay in the clump). Then select your whole clumped-up army and tell them to attack (ctrl+q+click). Another way to get your army to arrive at the enemy at once instead of single-file is to tell your army to walk far to the side of the enemy. Then when your whole single-file line is halfway past the enemy, have them all change direction 90 degrees and walk at the enemy. This way they will all arrive at once. This works if the enemy is stationary and your army isn't too big. Some expert players, such as The_Company aka nobody___, use box formations to get their units clumped up. I personally don't do this since formations sometimes make it hard to disengage from a fight. When in combat, always use ctrl-q-click again every few seconds. This will make your army select new targets. If you don't do this, some of your units will just be walking around aimlessly trying to reach specific enemy units that are blocked by other units. Doing this makes those aimless units stop walking and just hit the closest enemy. This makes a big difference. Don't garrison champions or women if a fight is happening! Garrison citizen-soldiers. Champions do a lot more damage ungarrisoned. A common mistake is for the enemy to capture a CC or fortress with 40 champions, and then immediately garrison 20 champions in the fortress even though enemy forces are around. Don't do this! If you do, the 20 champions outside the fortress may now be outnumbered by the enemy forces and can be killed. The reason not to garrison women is just that they don't shoot arrows. If there is more than enough garrison space for your citizen-soldiers, it's OK to garrison the women. Sometimes an exception to this is garrisoning a damaged champ army in temples. Only garrison in temples during a fight if you can garrison your whole army without leaving any outside to be slaughtered. This forces the enemy to capture the temples, and then you can ungarrison your whole army - now partially healed - to keep fighting. Never take a straight-up fight that you think you're going to lose, if you can avoid it. If you have 20 champions and the enemy has 40, your 20 units will be killed while only killing 5 or 10 of the enemy. It's not cost-effective. Only take an engagement that you think you are going to win, unless there's no other choice (e.g. you can't run). In the middle of a fight, you might notice a few of your units that are isolated and outnumbered by more of the enemy, even if you outnumber the enemy in general. In this case, you can select the isolated units and just have them walk around. If the enemy isn't paying attention, his units will spend the fight just chasing the isolated units instead of dealing damage. If your heroes buff your troops, make sure they don't get damaged. Keep them away from the main fight. If the enemy targets them, have your hero just run around near the fight so they can keep giving the buff and the enemy has to chase them. Targeting the enemy hero specifically can be effective if they are strong like Boudicca or Philip of Macedon, and it's a large battle. But don't chase the hero too far if they retreat. If the enemy is sending in a superior force to destroy your base, there are things you can do to make it a lot harder for him. Immediately garrison towers and your CC/fortress with citizen-soldiers. You should have several towers surrounding your CC, and you want to garrison all of them. If you do this, then when the enemy takes your CC he won't take your base! Your garrisoned towers will hold the territory and the enemy won't be able to delete your other buildings or convert them to Gaia until he takes the towers too. Also, of course, garrisoning towers/CC increases arrow count and makes them more difficult to capture. You want to avoid engaging his army with your champions for as long as you can (because we're assuming he has more champs so you would lose any straight-up fight). Jockey for position - if a small part of his army is in reach of yours, you can attack and outnumber just that part. If he sends more of his army into that fight, back away. The longer he spends in your base jockeying for position, the more he's being shot by arrows. If he is attacking or capturing buildings while you still have champions near, attack him. He's made a big mistake and these are basically free kills. Back away if he stops attacking the building - don't take a fight where you're outnumbered. Keep women away from the enemy champs, but if he starts to attack your CC (or fortress) you want the women to repair it. Try to put the women on the opposite side of the building from the enemy. It's better to garrison citizen-soldiers than use them to fight, but if you do have more cit-soldiers than garrison space, use them to fight. Don't let the enemy champs touch them though, unless the cit-soldiers are melee units! When attacking an enemy CC or fortress, you want to let your units walk without attacking around to the other side of the CC/fort. (This assumes there are no enemy units nearby except women, perhaps because you killed them). Your single-file line of units will encircle the CC/fort, and then you can have them all start attacking at once. (Ctrl-click to damage below 50%, then regular click to capture). This is usually faster than just telling them all to attack the front of the CC/fort, because it reduces the amount of time your units spend milling about trying to find an open spot on the CC to attack. If women or cit-soldiers start repairing, use only a few of your nearest champs to kill them while the rest keep attacking the CC. If enemy champs arrive, you have to fight the champs with your whole army or run away, unless the CC is already almost captured. Romans and Spartans both have strong swordsmen cit-soldiers and pike champions. This is a good combination, particularly for Spartans. Send in the swordsmen first with the pikes right behind them. The swordsmen will make up the front row and deal damage and take hits. (Romans should have their hero around to give the swordsmen +5 attack). The champs will make up the back row and deal damage. So you have 2 rows of attacking units, and your champs aren't getting damaged. It's cheaper to let the enemy damage your Skiritai or Roman swordsmen than your champs. Build temples on the side of your territory nearest the enemy base, or close to where the combat is happening. At least 2 temples is good for any given combat area, ideally protected by towers/fortress/CC. If you're getting damaged or starting to lose a fight, and retreat is an option, then retreat and garrison in the temples. Healing your champions helps you maintain a high kill/death ratio.

Hello! I'm Mikhail, and I'm from Russia My GTM hour is +5 GTM

Alright. Normally portraits consist of 5 different layers. I assume that you've installed the LayerFX plugin from here: http://registry.gimp.org/node/186 (make sure you install the layerfx.2.8.py and not one of the others). I apply the effects on 256x256 and then size the image down to 128x128 afterwards. The bottom layer is just straight black. Nothing special here. Now starts the fun. The second bottom layer is an Noisy Outer Glow effect. The color used is 7e8862. The exact glow size can be varied depending on the shown object but here are the parameters that work in almost all occassions: Above it is a small Smooth Outer Glow layer. Last effect is a Drop Shadow. This is to create a sense of 3D in the image: Then on top comes the portrait itself. Always make sure that the FX are applied to this layer. Also when resizing the layers, make sure that do a 'resize layer to image' action on the FX layers. Here are a few examples on what the final portrait could look like (the bottom two aren't sized down, and these also used exact the same parameters as listed above. The others have slightly different sizes / colors / noise amounts): I hope this helps!

I did some things :3