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@Alexandermb Epic...

Update of map post alpha 23 (version 1.0.7 in the download section) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi everyone! I wanted to share my first 0 A.D. map - well, rather a preliminary version - with you. I was inspired by the map of Assassins Creed Origins which just crammed everything Egypt into a single place, often disregarding realism in favor of aesthetics and gameplay, which I did as well. I did for example borrow the idea of moving Cyrene, which is around 700km to the west into Alexandrias vicinity in order to add some Mediterranean environment. A further reason for me to pick that setting was that it allows me to have a lot of different cultures on the map. The upper Nile area is dominated by ptolemaic retro-egypt buildings, whereas the city of Alexandria is dominated by hellenic influences. Cyrene gave me an excuse for adding the Romans with some greek buildings, while I put the Persians, who were admittedly not really present at that same time, in the east. For purely aesthetic reasons I let Carthage occupy the Siwa oasis, and the Red Sea became a tourist destination for Mauryan coral reef divers. Map variants First of all, please take note, that this is not a final product, not even close. The map already includes most of the geological features and special locations I intended to add, but there are many areas that severely lack in detail, which is quite ok for sand deserts, but looks odd in places like coasts, riverbanks and rocky deserts. Blocking the map is also an issue, mainly because it feels strange, when the AI builds farms in the middle of the desert. The greatest thing that needs to be taken care of is balancing. Basic properties Type: skirmish Map size: giant Players: 6 Game version: alpha 23 (re-release) Right now (8.2.2018) I will only publish a 1 vs. 1 map. This has the benefit of being at least a little easier to balance out. I will provide A regular day version And a full-moon night version, because it looks just darn beautiful. I really love what you can do with the lighting and ambient conditions ... Update march 2018: A 3 vs. 3 map variant is now available and several small fixes regarding terrain, blockings and balancing have been made. On the long term I will try to release two varieties of the map regarding gameplay An all-in map: This one is outfitted with full grown cities and you will start with huge amounts of resources and a sizable army. Don’t try to play this with 7 AI players, as it will probably lag horribly. A stripped down version: Everything, except for the most prominent points of interest (e.g. the library) will be deleted. The difficult thing about this is that I will need to create a mod in order to achieve what I desire: See, if I make these buildings actors, all units will just pass through it, and if I leave them as entities, they will be taken over by the players within a few seconds and this would severely unbalance the game. Thus, I need to create a mod, which has all these buildings in a special version. I will increase those buildings capture points by a huge amount and also make them invulnerable, such that capturing them remains the only option. In some cases I might also try to reduce their functionality. Thanks to all the guys who helped me with useful tips and insights regarding modding. Gameplay In this map I tried to elongate the distance between neighboring players and create straight routes between the distant ones. In order to achieve the first requirement, the rare shallow banks of river Nile, meandering mountain tracks and marauding packs of soldiers prohibit straightforward shifts of large armies. On the other hand far away players can often be reached via wide patches of desert, which act like highways on this map. One major problem was the city of Memphis, which is located almost in the center of the map. I order to provide this city with a slight chance for survival I shaped the eastern and western desert like a bypass circumventing Memphis and relocated the city to the eastern shore of the river Nile, which I made impassable from north to south, while only the western riverbanks remained open. The Mediterranean Sea and the river Nile are navigable, which serves as much better means of transportation than the walk along the river by foot. Every player has wood in close vicinity to the starting point. No player will run out of wood easily. The banks of river Nile are especially rich in palms for obvious reasons. Stone is predominantly located in mountainous regions. Limestone can be found close to the pyramids and there is a rather large granite quarry in the very south. As I wanted the player to travel through the sandy dunes a lot metal can be found on the borders of sandy deserts. If you play the map, please let me know where you found too much resources and where they are missing. Players & Matches (and faction recommendations, mostly for esthetic reasons) Currently (9.3.2018) only the six players are available. Player #1: Alexandria (with greek and ptolemeaic entities) in the center north as Seleucids Player #2: Thebes in the very south as Kush Player #3: Siwa/Charga Oasis in the west as Carthage Player #4: Sinai in the north east as Persia Player #5: Memphis in the center as Ptolemeis Player #6: Cyrene in the north west as Romans Player #7: Red Sea in the east as Mauryan (buildings might be reverted to random later) Player #8: Desert nomads from the south west (random) Note: The AI does not get along with that map too well. It will soon be very crowded and very laggy if you choose a game with too many players. Proper matches would be: 2 players: Lower Egypt (#1 Alexandria) vs. upper Egypt (#2 Thebes) Lower Egypt currently has the edge, due to access to the Nile delta. 3 players: Lower Egypt (#1 Alexandria) vs. upper Egypt (#2 Thebes) vs. Siwa (#3) 4 players: Egypt (#1 and #2) vs invaders (#3 Siwa and #4 Sinai) Slowly approaches being balanced (version 0.19.10) 6 players: Egypt (#1, #2, #5) vs invaders (#3, #4, #6) Slowly approaches being balanced (version 0.20.7) Points of interest (selection) Alexandria: library, harbor, lighthouse Memphis: necropolis, pyramids, Apis sanctuary Fayyum: Crocodile sanctuary, Bahr Yussef channel & dam Thebes: Temple district, valley of kings Western desert: Siwa oasis with fortress, Great sand sea, Quattara depression, guelta Eastern desert: Red Sea coral reefs, mount Sinai, "Suez channel", deep wadi I collapsed some more screenies for you here ... ToDo and Changelog My ToDo-List is growing and shrinking all the time. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Unfortunately I cannot promise you, when or if I will implement them. You know, real life can be unpredictable ;-) Download Download the files and put them into the specific folders for maps and preview images. The paths I will state below are default paths for typical Windows 10 installation but may vary depending on your system and installation path. In case subfolders do not exist yet on your system, simply create them. Map files: Download: Version 0.19.6 (1 vs. 1) Version 0.19.10 (currrent) Version 0.20.7 (for upcoming release alpha23, new route through the red sea for balancing) Version 1.0.7 (30.12.2018, based on published version of 0 A.D. version alpha 23, design enhancments: red sea riffs, more nile river bank vegetation, parapets for persian base, fire places for town centers, small secret garden, other small fixes like missing ground textures, etc.) Path: “C:\users\yourname\documents\my games\0ad\mods\user\maps\skirmishes” When is the good time for deleting older versions from a post? Can I make the XML files all use the same PMP file? I noticed a zipped xml is about 10 times smaller. is the community OK with zip files? Map preview images: Download: Path: “C:\users\yourname\appdata\local\0 A.D. alpha\binaries\data\mods\public\art\textures\ui\session\icons\mappreview” In case you are playing this map, please let me know about anything that can be optimized. Thanks a lot in advance. Greetings mimesot

@av93

Well his arguments are pretty retarded. It's the typical eyesight of people who don't want to loose an advantage. If a game requires you to destroy/rebuild walls and you mastered this "feature" you don't want it gone. Because it's something other people cannot do aswell as you can. The issue with this is that this type of person does not differentiate between "good" and "bad" Actions and APM. You can get 300+ APM by just spamming right clicks. That doesn't make you a good player. Same - building and destroying walls does not define a good player. The point about "random maps": I think he is pretty spot on on this point. This is what makes AoE games different from other RTS. It's a good feature. But his view on "it's good luck/bad luck" like poker is bad. There should be some basic balance in the map layout. If it isn't, the game is not fun. No matter if 1v1 or 4v4. The easiest way to get rid of these people is to get someone who is a better player than they are, and then abuse them for dozens of games with the @#$% they say that should stay in the game. To the point they're so pissed off that they quit or admit that they were wrong. Indeed. Useless, tedious micro is cancer. Nobody needs units that are too retarded to move properly, or to destroy walls to get units through a wall. True, those purists are cancer for games. If you follow their opinion you'll alienate 99% of the community. This is probably someone who never played some other game and didn't evolve further at all. It's the same type of people who only play the most basic, unpatched version of a game, because they think that balance changes are unnecessary, because "it makes the game more hard" ... Which is retarded. AOE 1 Rise of Rome is Chariot archer spam in 99% of the time with assyrians. If MS/FE had put in the vanilla game stats I'm 100% sure the community would be even more dead than the one from Dawn of War 3 or Age of Mythology. AoE DE at least has some nice tool rushing options, and it's possible to use other civs than just Assyrians. I have decent sucess with Greeks and Sumerians in 1v1 for example. Considering that on the 1st day of "open beta" in AoE there were like 40 rooms open at the same time. The 2nd day there only were like 15 open. This shows that many people try it out but obviously they dislike somehting about the game - maybe the balance, maybe the gameplay, and maybe the controls. A lot of people expect certain "quality of life" changes to a modern game.

Ingame look, the normals works as they should so its magnific.

thats better reference, so i was like its a lion, but i see it has horns, and others didn't had head what kinda pokemon i will end with ? but this works better.

did it with the lion, i will with the bird too.

Almost nothing he says there interests me. He spends 3 paragraphs arguing against gates for Christ's sake.

had to make the horn's as a separated mesh, about the size, what exactly is the size its needed? i assume that grey line is player color as it is alpha.

the issue with settings is that people will treat the standard rules as "basic" game, so this won't help for competitive multiplayer I fear. Unless you make a "tourney" mode or "competitive mode" that automatically sets up certain rules. In theory this might work - a "fun game" mode where you can play whatever you want (unranked) and a competitive game where you set up certain rules.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone 110 but now i guess i can make one with a bith less, and a better texture.

There is a "quick" fix for that. Invert the green channel.

While that is interesting and would be cool, I think it might introduce additional gameplay ramifications I'd rather not have to deal with. Forward building is already pretty dangerous, and this would make it even more dangerous. That's just one ramification off the top of my head.

@Sundiata It's a lion head...

I don't understand why they didn't put farm queues and gates..

I don't need play that at 4K all I want is oldie or HD textures with some new gameplay.

Indeed, I feel the same way. And saying that higher APM being necessary to play well is something *good* is a bit too much for me as well. The more a high APM is required by a RTS game, the less strategic it actually is, the more it becomes a fight against the interface.

@Sundiata Better looking:

Didn't even bother with a search as I do remember that the Android port exits but has some major issues like a completely different render pipeline and it lags big time and it's very much a work in progress even worst then the main game Enjoy the Choice

Your search foo is lacking: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/15436-android-port/&page=11&tab=comments#comment-299683 Apart from that OSX/macOS/oohShiny is the system with the worst support you could try to run the game on, and that is not only related to those boxes really liking uncommon input methods. Though I guess for a few of those shortcuts you could try with cmd, or the actual ctrl key.

Sure I'll make the two.

I read through the mapfile now. Two organizational things: At this point we might want to start using our code review platform instead, then I can post inline comments right in the code, might make things easier. http://code.wildfiregames.com/ A copy of the WIP library code in the map is not going to be committed by me. The library file counts 430 lines, the mapfile 1136 lines. The library must be removed from the map. A random map script should consist of a buch of texture/entity/height constants + 20-50 function calls. Lops should almost always be library functions. I suspect your demo map will be that short too if the code is sorted. I didn't test nor comprehend the basic idea of the algorithm yet. But here things I discovered when reading the file for the first time: About your HeightArray, we pass u16 arrays to the engine, so that should be the same limit here rather than u32. That can be more easily created using new Array(g_Map.getSize() + 1).fill(0).map(zero => new Uint8Array(g_Map.getSize() + 1).fill(false)); (for example). Changing this.mSize before an operation and reverting this change afterwards is bad practice, just create a helper variable or repeat this sum. Magic numbers like 10000 should be avoided. At least a global constant, but better letting the random map scripts determine the best numbers themselves. Is that histogram thing only debug code and can be removed anyhow? The duplication in HeightArray.prototype.createAltitudes should be removed using a loop, possibly a function. Whenever there are x and z, those should be in a vector. Most often one create the vectors in advance. Sometimes it improves performance, othertimes it doesn't. I haven't an inacceptable occurence yet and I don't want anybody to read ugly code to reduce the loading screen time from 15 to 12 seconds in the best case (some maps need 1-2 min). "tObjMap.gCells[j][Symbol.iterator] = function* () {" never seen such code, probably avoidable. I have some reading to do. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/function* "var snowLimit = 32000;" that's a height right? In a23 I have moved most height constants to the top of the file and uniformly called them height*, i.e. `const heightFooBar = 3;`. They are grouped, so one can quickly compare their values and see which heights are used by the map immediately. for (let i = 0; i < mapSize; i++) for (let j = 0; j < mapSize; j++) Whenever we see that, we should think about transforming that into a createArea call on a MapBoundsPlacer. The effect on that area should be moved to a new painter in case it doesn't match an existing painter. This way it can be reused on arbitrary areas. In places where we only need to collect the points, we can save the result of a createArea call. if(test < idx) test = idx; Each statement on a separate line. if (g_MapSettings.CircularMap) { newline before the { while( space after while warn, log -> those are g_Map.log calls which also result in that thing being timed. let cent1 = (patches[dist.b1].barx - centPos) * (patches[dist.b1].barx - centPos) + (patches[dist.b1].bary - centPos) * (patches[dist.b1].bary - centPos); let cent2 = (patches[dist.b2].barx - centPos) * (patches[dist.b2].barx - centPos) + (patches[dist.b2].bary - centPos) * (patches[dist.b2].bary - centPos); That's exactly where the vector operations halve the width and height of these 2 lines and reveal geometric intent. (Isn't that a cross, product and perpendicular vector somwehere? I would have to interpret first) log("Creating base for player " + id + "..."); That entire loop is gone using rP20815 "crocodiles and palms on the shore" don't. That loop implements a custom coordinate randomization, but it should leave that up to createObjectGroups or createObjectGroupsByArea. One could implement a constraint for this g_TOMap.gCells[zx][zy].done check, though I'm not sure what that does and if it isn't redundant with tileclasses. I will test now.

Nice I'll commit it tonight unless someone has something to say.

HL3 confirmed

Hi ! Here are some news: -- The YAMG library with only the fractal generation program. -- A first version of a random map script named "Egyptian oasis". Mountains, pools, and of course camels and crocodiles. Here is a preview: and a more general view: If I understood correctly, this script is a candidate to enter alpha23 OAD version. I certainly would be glad it would be so, but I doubt because it should be seriously tested before, and time is very short ! That's why I post it today. I know there are still some problems and improvements needed, but I need help to test the main features. Let explain a little: The script is self sufficient. There is no need to install a library as I inserted all the needed code into. It needs only the standard rmgen and Heightmap libraries. The map creation is done with merging two height maps: a chaotic one for the mountains and a rather soft to install players bases and battlefield. This allow to control rather exactly how much mountains and water are on the map. The real problem with this approach is finding reasonable places for players bases. Most scripts (and maybe all of them), set the bases first and create terrain and relief around. I do the contrary, and my attempt works rather well, I think, but within some limits. Every base has the same starting resources, but the map can advantage neatly some players. Is it playable as is ? I hope some people will get the script and create some maps to give their opinions and criticisms. Suggestions about decorations and such are welcomed of course, but not so deadly wanted. If you find something really ugly, please try to report the seed, map size and players number settings. The script works without error on any map size, but is not really designed to create tiny or small maps with a lot of players, just because there is not room enough. I think it works best on size within medium to giant. Doing so, you may encounter some cases where some parts of the map are unreachable and even players probably cannot join, because mountains/water pools are on the way. I aware of this and will provide a solution. One word about the code (for the braves who dare to put their nose into...). It is not very clean yet, of course. The map creation is not the fullMap() method of the YAMG library but a brand new one. New too is the swiss-knife placer I developed for this. It's a very versatile placer allowing to create quite any area you want, particularly if you want to avoid geometric shapes and patterns. Quite everything is placed with it, except the players starting units and resources which are set with rmgen standard procedures. Waiting for you feedback... Friendly yours, YAMGLibrary.js EgyptianOasis.zip

@HMS-Surprise you might want to edit your topic tile to "Gameplay issues for OSX" as iOS is strictly for the iPhone not the Mac family as far I can recall no one has ported the code to iOS. Android yes though it struggles Enjoy the Choice