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Hi... A new version of the script for testing purpose only. It includes roads. This feature is not only decorative: it allow to detect unplayable maps where no path exists between some players. Since the algorithm tries to find the easiest pathes (avoiding steep slopes, water and mountains if possible), it's not very likely you'll see a road crossing mountains, but in some cases, they make their way through the mountains like here, digging a trench where the slope is too steep: As usual, if you detect some bugs or ugly things, please report the size, the seed and the players number of the offending map. Thanks in advance for you interest and testing... EgyptOasis.zip

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

in case its ok i don't see why not if render this into the camel uv i already did the high poly one still need to fix some texture placements

The detail in this map is gorgeous Just a word of warning, the Ptolemies and Athenians may see a change in art direction in the future. Native structures should still be available in the scenario editor, but it'll take a little bit of rebuilding if you continue developing this map

TL;DR: Don't bother trying, it's not going to work. Given the specs mentioned on wikipedia for G4s with lots of upgrades (which is I guess not what you are actually operating) you might have a better or equivalent experience by eg getting a Raspberry Pi. For those that asked if some x86 dmg will work on PowerPC do ask yourself what a cpu architecture is. That said PowerPC is dead, and has been that way for about a decade. Now since strange architectures do have a certain fascination I'll try explaining why getting the game to work on that box is unfeasible without lots of work. Now since the vendor of both the box, and the OS stopped providing any support for this about 5 years ago (at which point most support was already gone). So getting a toolchain installed that both supports the system and API and what the game needs is unlikely to be easy. The game does require mostly complete C++11 (soon complete C++11) support, OSX on PowerPC does not have that. I suppose one could try getting some recent GCC to build there and hope everything works, but I suspect that doing so while running OSX is not going to be easy or well supported. Now that rules out using OSX as the OS, but since there are other systems one could use we'll check another one. For the sake of example we'll pick OpenBSD since they tend to care about strange architectures and the game is in the ports tree. Now that we'd have access to a recent compiler to actually attempt to build the game we'll check if out one big dependency called SpiderMonkey (the JS engine from Firefox) would build and run there. Since that architecture is not one of a select few we'd not have a nicely working JIT, but that would only make the game very slow on a not that powerful (by today's standards) machine. A quick check of the supported architectures for Firefox reveals that it isn't built for macppc, a quick search reveals that Mozilla dropped support for PowerPC when releasing Firefox 4.0. So that rules out recent versions of the game at least. The SpiderMonkey version that corresponds to Firefox 4.0 is SpiderMonkey 1.8.5. For those not well versed in our SpiderMonkey to releases mapping (I'm just kidding, I also had to look that up) we did upgrade to 1.8.5 after Alpha 6. I guess at that point one could also stay on OSX, but if you want to run a by now over 6 years old version of the game that you have to most likely patch a lot to even build (there is some somewhat low level code that would need to be extended, though you could most likely reuse the arm version that uses compiler intrinsics for those) I'm not sure that is going to be a lot of fun. So to conclude this I suppose you will both have better support and better performance if you used eg a pi.

Maybe a separate announcement here in the forums and in the social networking site accounts was the lacking factor. A simultaneous announcement would have more effect, since only those familiar with the trac timeline will know of the implementation of the Kushite faction. @Lion.Kanzen Indeed sensed it. Congratulations to @Sundiata and to the fellow contributors.

Thank you, I somehow fixed it by replacing some of the code!

It would be nice feature in Atlas to take a snapshot map preview.

This is a common requirement for all textures to have a power-of-two size, see TextureFormat . It comes from historical issues of graphic drivers / libraries with non-power-of-two texture sizes. Unrelatedly: I compiled the information from this and the previous topic about the previews into a wiki page: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Atlas_Manual_Map_Preview

In any case thanks for working so hard on this. Keep it up !

We got a shortage of possible candidates Actually it's posting on forums and mentioning us. Because I don't think @elexis would be thrilled to look over replays in his tiny free time. But it might be useful to have a subforum we can check everyday.

Mask + helmet

Ok. mostly of update faction are from early original project, Persians, Romans, Carthaginians and Iberians. The Hellenes always have their weapons and armor updated.

@stanislas69 after keep learning how to bake better textures compared from the horse full blanket to this and others, remember me what other topics i left before where i could make an improvement and finish them properly. Same goes to the Xiongnu, i will make properly shields and other things now i know how, so it could end with a better performance meshes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post in this topic any kind of weapon/quivers/sheaths in need of an update, props needed yet not implemented, helmet goes to helmet topics, shields, to shields topics.

Wouldn't it be nice to change zapotec placeholders for females, here's an exemple: https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-photography-zapotec-female-dancers-oaxaca-mexico-girls-dancing-wearing-traditional-colored-costume-holding-pineapples-image71003597 Also, adding little figures and decorations should deepen the immersion feeling for any player: - The famous bat deity Cocijo (god of rain): http://art.thewalters.org/detail/78411/effigy-urn-of-cocijo/ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zapotec_-_Effigy_Urn_of_Cocijo_-_Walters_482788_-_Three_Quarter.jpg - The maize god Pitao Cozobi: http://art.thewalters.org/detail/80448/figural-urn-3/

Third Century east Roman Empire\ Dura-Europos. http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?action=profile;u=99364;area=showposts;start=15

commands.txt

First rendered try.

Have fun and stay tuned for the next update

Succeed! Thank You.

Is the Nile shallow enough for units to cross it on foot at any spot, without needing any transport ships? If not, the map will effectively consist of a few unequal islands. Also, if you're interested in a bit more historical accuracy (feel free to ignore): The Southern Levant (e.g. Palestine) was also controlled by Egypt in 0 A.D.'s timeframe The Nile delta historically had seven major arms: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Nile_Delta_Surrounding.jpg The North-South Suez canal did not exist, but a West-East pharaonic canal (dug by Necho II, Darius, Ptolemy II, Trajan, or someone else, depending on which source you prefer) connected the Nile with the Red Sea. The Nile valley is great for agriculture, but lacking in other natural resources. Mineral mines and stone quarries were located in the mountains beyond the eastern desert (e.g. towards the Red Sea coast). Wood was imported from the Lebanon.

Look from their cities, that's more accurate. http://cargocollective.com/dpart/Mesoamerican-Fashion

These is more related to that. but still out of the timeframe. in these cultures the nudity is common.

@av93 any idea how it should be? i would like that when gathering meat cavalry should be unable to move unless its canceled like the pack/unpack, so i could do a fast unmount animation and do a real gathering using the actual one from the infantry in the rider and keep the horse idle.

Godot 3 is MIT license

I love specific questions like that, even if I don't have the answer... I haven't seen any specific mentions of horse colours during 0AD's timeframe, but in the later post-Meroitic and Christian periods, a black horse with white socks was specifically mentioned as the preferred type. So I coincidentally used an appropriate type in my example...

Your modelling skills have become great now you need to boost them texture skills. Have a look at how the armor for the elephant is done for reflections. Look at prolighting sky's demo by Andrew price and look for free HDR textures you can set in the world as an environment texture.

@Hannibal_Barca just got an idea and forgot to mention you.

Nor the axemen, atm theres only kardakes skirmisher hoplite. Will make the helmet of the reference

Also, did this testing the same sculpting brushes addons i got in blender used in the deformation of the middle metal circle in the quiver.

Yes apologies about that, the tutorial is broken in that alpha. You need to add some more houses

Hello everybody, Today I present you an 0 AD tournament from the German youtuber CigarO. It is a German tournament, there fore I write rest in German. Um sich bei dem Turnier anzumelden muss man dem Discord Server beitreten[https://discord.gg/sHW6KnD] und im Channel 0AD-Turnieranmeldung folgendes ausfüllen: Name/Nickname im Spiel: XX Spielerfahrung in 0.A.D.: XX Mikrofon vorhanden?: XX Iternetverbindung: XX Startpunkt: unbekannt Teilnehmer:10 mfg Ougaming

No, only if you pay me $$$

Pre-Colonial African Cavalry Traditions Super Illustrated When I was a lot younger, I came across 2 images of African pre-colonial heavy cavalry, which absolutely fascinated me. At the time I had never seen African cavalry, let alone heavy cavalry. In those early days of internet, it was very difficult to figure out where these images came from, or what exactly they were depicting. Luckily, times have changed, and we now know a lot more about these images, as well as the much broader context of ancient African cavalry traditions. Even more interesting for us, it has become apparent to me that the earliest diffusion of horses and cavalry culture into Central- and West-Africa came from none other than Kush and its periphery, which makes the study of African cavalry traditions all the more interesting from a Kushite perspective. Quilted cotton for horse and rider, seen on this cavalry man from the Kingdom of Baguirmi (Chad), once part of the great Kanem-Bornu Empire (neighbouring Sudan). The riders often wear a leather or iron/steel cuirass underneath the cotton armour. This 19th century rider is wearing a quilted cotton skullcap... This can not be unseen... Neither can his double tipped spear. These are the cataphracts of ancient Africa: Imagine my elation when I stumbled across this exact type of armour in a basement exhibition on African history in the British Museum, by chance... They're even more imposing in real life! Those metal cuirasses were impressive, and were said to be able stop the ball of a musket. Chainmail was also widespread. Mounted body guard of the Sheik of Bornu, in full chainmail. Underneath his turban, he has a leather reinforced cap, made up of thick bands tied together at the top with those rectangular leather bits. Also, that armour piercing spear seems unpleasant... Studying the similarities between ancient Kushite cavalry and later medieval cavalry traditions is made difficult because of the spread of Arab and Berber cavalry customs to the Sub-Saharan regions in later periods, which has totally overshadowed the earlier Sub-Saharan horse periods from an academic perspective. Most people including academics don't know that horses were being bred in Sudan as early 1500BC, which makes an accurate assessment of the origins of African cavalry traditions nearly impossible in the popular academic world. I hope that my research in this thread (including the reliefs and graffito depicting horses, written histories mentioning cavalry, and the burial of entire horses and their equipment in some of the royal tombs) goes some way to addressing this issue. Experts in the field have long written about the importance of horses, cavalry and chariotry in ancient Kush, but popular attitudes are sometimes hard to change. Following points are interesting: the existence of an ancient and large indigenous African horse-breed, known as the Dongolawi, which is markedly different from Arab or Barb horses, originated in Sudan and fits ancient descriptions. It predates the Arab and Barb horses in Africa, and was bred and exported widely on a large scale during antiquity. It is now found all across the Sudanic belt (from Sudan to Senegal), but has been interbred with foreign horse-breeds. Pure Dongolawi are rare, but still widespread. The widespread similarities in Sub-Saharan horse-acutrements, including decorated bands of leather and/or cloth and metal across the chest and backside, metal bells, saddle-types, types of halter and types of stirrups and even the use of raised chamfrons as well as the use of semi-cercular cheek-guards is noteworthy. Arab, Berber and Sub-Saharan cavalry traditions share certain commonalities, but are also very distinct from each other. Arabised African populations use Arab cavalry traditions. Berbers cavalry is part of the Numidian and even Roman heritage mixed in with Arab and Sub-Saharan influences. I believe Sub-Saharan cavalry traditions primarily come from a third "mystery" source: Kush... Especially along the Sudanic belt, a vast biotope stretching from the savannahs of Sudan to Senegal, culture, people, religions and technology moved relatively freely. Many similarities can be found among the otherwise very diverse people of this vast region, including similar cavalry traditions. It is no coincidence that some of Africa's largest empires were situated along this biotope, like the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, Kanem-Bornu, the Hausa city states and the Sokoto Caliphate. Quilted cotton armour, which is first recorded in the Nile Valley in antiquity, was used by Kushites to cover horse and rider. This is a quintessentially African type of armour that was used in Sudan during the BC-era, and spread to Central- and West-Africa where it is used to this very day (mostly ceremonial). This specific type of armour is so wide-spread, that an ancient point of dissemination is almost unquestionable. It is used in countries from Sudan to Mali, including Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Togo... Quilted cotton was later spread in the Middle East by the Arabs through Egyptian influence and even appears in medieval Europe. In the book "On the Erythraean Sea", the Greek historian Agatharchides, relating to Ptolemy II Nubian campaign, refers to a native type of felt armour for horse and rider that covers the whole body except for the eyes: For the war against the Aithiopians Ptolemy recruited 500 cavalrymen from Greece. To those who were to fight in the front ranks and to be the vanguard - they were a hundred in number - he assigned the following form of equipment. For he distributed to them and their horses garments of felt (stolas piletas), which those of that country (hoi kata ten choran; "the natives of the country" in Burstein) call kasas, that conceal the whole body except for the eyes. This is almost definitely Kushite quilted cotton. "that conceal the whole body except for the eyes"... I think I might know exactly what type of armour it was, and why it was so important. It was used by Kushites as an effective protection against arrows, which made it important for Ptolemies in their campaign against the archery heavy Kushite army. Here's an example of a 19th century Sudanese quilted cotton armour for horse and rider, covering the whole body except for the eyes, almost the same as the one used by the horsemen of Baguirmi and fitting ancient descriptions: An ancient Kushite example?: The iron cuirass worn underneath the quilted cotton armour of the riders of Baguirmi: Anyway, enough talk from me, enjoy this very large collection of Pre-Colonial African cavalry illustrations: Pre-Colonial African Cavalry in etchings and drawings: Pre-Colonial African Cavalry in Pictures: Contemporary African Cavalry Traditions: Mahdist armour for cavalry men, Sudan:

it was supposed to be brown but can't win one agains't cycles render. Arrows are prop points too, so you dind't had to make another "quiver_arrows" mesh.

Only being able to build walls inside of your borders is annoying and tedious. It takes so long to build them already, and when I have to wait for my borders to be sufficient the wall is pointless because I am being hit with an attack. PLEASE allow us to build walls outside of our borders. All the turtlers are wincing right now playing this game.

Impressive...

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.

But then there were no surprise effect when we would announce to implement Kushites for alpha 23 rather than just randomly committing that on a tuesday night after months of preparation with the best contributors for the job at hand.

the attempt for the lorica musculata

Now is just the wings to go.

Wow... Not bad at all! Imagine historically accurate cheats in the form of Mythological creatures... A griffin for the Romans, a minotaur for the Greeks, and Han Chinese could summon a dragon

Well, the new project may be more suitable / convenient for your thesis and you can return to the mod any time later not being restricted by the academic work constraints. So this may turn out to be better for the thesis and not so bad for the mod after all If you already have some material (art or design/research docs) I would recommend dumping them into a github repo, so they will be already available for other people and won't be lost if you will return to the mod after a significant amount of time.

The Big Question A. How would you call the population limit of a specific player that can be extended during a game? B. How would you call the population limit of any player that cannot be extended during a game? Rules: The answer for A and B must be different. Feel free to provide multiple answers. Generally, the fewer and shorter the words, the better. Extra points if your choice for A cannot be misunderstood for B, your choice for B cannot misunderstood for A, and none of your choices can be misunderstood for a different concept (e.g. the sum of the A or B limits of all players during a game, or the maximum B limit of 0 A.D. itself). Explain! Explain! I’ve recently started working on an English Style Guide for 0 A.D. The goal is to provide developers with guidelines to follow when writting user-facing texts, so that game texts gain consistency providing a slightly better experience for players and a significantly better experience for translators. So I am reviewing translator reports about English strings, and trying to build the English Style Guide as I improve the affected English strings. I believe some of the core principles of English style guides for software are: Use unambiguous words to refer to a concept. Always the same words to refer to the same concept. Never use the same words to refer to two different concepts. And there is one clear case where the current texts of 0 A.D. break all of these rules: the population limit. (Thanks to @GunChleoc for bringing it up on Transifex) See, 0 A.D. does not have a single population limit. We have two different population limits: A. The population limit of a specific player during a game, that can be extended by building houses, researching technologies, and so on. B. The population limit of any player during a specific game, the one that no player can surpass regardless of houses built, technologies researched, and so on. And the terminology that we use in 0 A.D. to refer to them is often ambiguous, with different words used in different parts of the game, and with the same words use to refer to both types of population limit in different parts of the game. Used words include: population limit, population cap, maximum population, maximum population limit. So I wish your feedback in finding the right terminology to handle these concepts in the game texts. I propose to keep this topic open until someone proposes a clear winner or, if there is no clear winner some time from now, to create a poll to choose one. I would rather not rush the choice, but I wish to have this settled by the time I finish dealing with the rest of the issues raised by translators on Transifex (in maybe a few months). Advice Be creative. Check what other similar games use. Have a thesaurus at hand.

File format png. Also it musthave the file extension in the map file.

The Kingdom of Kush: A (very) Short History A very compact, crash-course in Kushite History I still have so much to do, but still managed to get bored, and made a very short, simple storyboard on post-Egyptian Kush (using Storyboard That). Just for fun. Basically Kush for dummies. A useful intro for school-kids and people looking for a bite-sized 5min introduction on this history. Individual scenes:

I will be presenting my paper on the next semester. It aims to generate and integrate a mod in the game that is based on the major indigenous groups that inhabited the Philippine islands before the Spanish Conquest of the archipelago. A secondary objective would be, to raise the global awareness and interest in the Pre-colonial history of our country, just like with the indigenous tribes of the Americas before the conquest and colonization of the Europeans. I will be working on the contents this summer and in the months to come. I need to have at least 50 respondents of different any nationality and ethnicity (other than Filipino) which will play the mod and provide some response through the use of online surveys. Posting this here will hopefully provide me with the respondents that I need. Though, I still worry if I will be able to get at least 50 respondents before I present my thesis. I will be posting here to give some updates on the development of my paper. I will be greatly thankful to those will take time to participate. Please do submit a reply here if you are willing to undertake in my thesis.