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I've hidden three recent posts because they were unrelated to the topic, and if anything only could serve to cause conflict. If someone wants to be sure that others take their opinions/suggestions seriously I would advise to not bring up old conflicts but rather new ideas

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My most sincere apologies for keeping you waiting for eternity. Thanks to stanislas69 I can resume making animations for cobra. Old animations are quite bad so I decided to make new ones. A new test skeleton has 38 bones (added 8 bones for hood animations). An example animation of the hood: Does it justify increase in number of bones? Should I use this test skeleton or return to the original one? A new walk animation: A picture of the new walk animation without hood animation (for comparison): Changes from the old walk cycle: + new path with more turns looks better (in my opinion); + almost no sliding; + movement forward is even; - new path with increased number of turns combined with symmetrical wave is obvious (though changed head animation helps to some extent). If anyone can help me with following questions, I would be grateful. Main bone (the one that moves the whole skeleton) is almost in the middle of the skeleton but located far from origin point. Do I understand it right that with animations (like the one on the left side) clicking near the head in game will select cobra but clicking the rest of the body will not? If that is right than should I use edit mode to move the mesh with its skeleton so that main bone is closer to the origin point or just move main bone closer to origin point during each animation? Animation on the left side. Skeleton rest position on the right side. Main bone highlighted in blue.

Found two interesting videos recently This guy made a piano cover of Honor Bound: And the Greek Fire Department used Honor Bound for a drill video, hehe! O.

The german video game magazine GameStar has done a brief review of our favorite game! Was ist... 0. A.D.? - Age of Empires im Blut - GameStar

Selection is defined by a box as far as I know, and not really depending on the model or animation. At least that's the case for buildings, I'm not sure if it differs with units/animals.

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

I like the advisor thing at the beginning. If 0 a.d. did something like that, it could be done in the game setup, and players can make presets or decks of advisors. I'm think it could be free heroes that spawn at the beginning of each phase. Instead of training the heroes from fortresses. Provides opportunity to give each faction many many more hero choices, and the decks of heroes creates a meta level for the game.

Sure this will not annoy/disturb more than it helps? (I mean we also don't disable docks on maps without water) (Additionally this will make the persist map settings bug really annoying)

The Khan Academy is starting to get into the 0ad timeline so figured I would share:

It is not planned to add more factions/civs to the main game. Although there are mods which include more factions and there are tons of post suggestin more factions, like the ones you said. Checkout this subforum https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/forum/18-game-modification/ it may give you an idea

Should be fixed by now. thanks for notifying @Tomcelmare !(and thanks for pinpointing the commit to @Palaxin @leper )

I made contact with 0AD two updates before and was thrilled. Without any human enemy I learnt fighting the AI. Now it is no longer a matter of survive but whether I win within 40 minutes or so a random game. This surprises me, shouldn't an AI know everything about internal game mechanics and remain in principle unbeatable? I don't expect the AI conquering the seas or building sophisticated walls around its cities but managing the simpler tasks first. So I thought, what could be removed from the game, so the AI could win? Like in playing chess with a beginner without towers and/or knights on my side. I played without champions, heroes, walls, fences, tower guarded resource traps, siege weapons or didn't advance to city phase all to find out what the AI is capable of. I was not impressed, the AI doesn't repair its last civic center at 1% health while most units stand around freezed. It kept sending female units gathering resources guarded by 25 archers only to let them die one by one. It build civil centres randomly on the map without resources in sight and/or without any defense. Also I have the impression it tends to acquire resources just because it could and doesn't mind the cost. What works good is the startup phase, without the need to use a mouse it builds up an army very fast. But if one survives the first 3 or 4 attacks often only a depopulated city is left, easy to take down. But I don't want to troll here, actually the AI perfectly demonstrates 0AD is an exciting game challenging the player to develop new strategies in every round and spends hours of entertaining game play. May be it is worth to start over from the beginning. The AI should be capable to deal with minimal resources at any game phase. There is no reason for units standing around freezed. If a particular resource costs too much blood, it should be abandoned. Most of these defects are listed in this thread. What doesn't work is obvious, the challenge is to make it work. Some AI techniques are mentioned here, judging from what I internally use I think a good AI needs all of them. Whether and how a given resource can be exploited needs planning and monitoring. If a large scale attack happens all tasks should be dropped and the behavior falls back to defense only and depending on the outcome another fallback to building up. Ultimately a hardwired AI can be probably beaten any time by a human player on the long run, so some kind of learning is required to keep the player rethinking his approach. I tried to understand the AI sources and it seems they demonstrate very good the use of the API and was excited to see it's scripted in JavaScript. Isn't that the language most spoken among developers? Aren't there already libraries dealing with machine learning, planning, neural networks, agents behaviour? Isn't SpiderMonkey getting near native speed soon? How can all these existing resources be effectively exploited? So this is my proposal: Set up an AI tournament for 0AD. Needed is a standard map and the game stripped down to minimal features. Only civic centers, resources and barracks. No healer, champions etc. Let developers select two AIs from the command line to watch them fighting. Include the winner into next alpha. What do you think?