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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

thanks it finally worked, also saw some settings to reduce the speed of rendering and worked too, just went from 15 mins to bake 10242 to less than 1 min. The kushites have "camelry_javelinist, i think the camel should be renamed camelry_archer from the ptols Heres a comparisson, i will make the leather belts so if theres any desired specific textures for the blanket above the camel texture tell me so i'll make it or i'll leave the uv zone so @wackyserious or sundiata could make them properly since they are more skilled in the game unit textures, However the chest uv remains the same so it wouldn't be a problem recognize where the straps goes.

Chewing, mouth interior will be added as a prop for parallax.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone That helmet itself is Sarmatian I believe, which would be ok. It's just the face armour/mask that's conjecture. @Alexandermb & @wackyserious, I hope this helps a little. A collection of what I think are pretty historically accurate images of the Persian army during 0AD's timeframe. Remember they use mercenaries from all over, including Sarmatians, Scythians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, even "Aethiopians", so that also influenced their army composition and equipment over time. Brace yourselves: The Achaemenid Persian Army:

Looking good. Can't wait to have this committed. About the renaming it's in progress.

It depends on both... There should never be any black band stretching across any horizon. I don't know anything about alpha transparency and performance, but I do know that those black bands (whether they're caused by the skybox or by the map, it's the same black), are very distracting from an aesthetic point of view, and ruin otherwise majestic screenshots. This probably isn't an easy fix, or else it would have been fixed before, but it should be one of the (many) priorities. It would make for a much more professional looking game. Black band screenshots are terrible for marketing, is basically what I'm saying.

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.

There needs to be a bigger version of the Beja rhino shield. I have seen many references showing a larger shield.

Have a look at the carry_idle anims for cavalry @Alexandermb while you are at it. I will soon push my biggest patch ever to the repo.

@Alexandermb Great work ! With some luck we'll be able to commit those for A23.

oof, those normals are looking rough. Totally my fault, but still. Guys think it might be time for more true 3D rimmed shields?

Probably beyond the scope of this ticket, but I think it would be great to be able to pick a horizon texture as well regardless of the Skybox chosen. So, a mountainous horizon or oceanic horizon or whatever.

It's already the case...

One thing to be aware of is that the Persian army of 480 B.C., as described by Herodotus, was already very different from the Persian army of 400 B.C., as described by Xenophon. It's basically a modern redrawing of the Alexander mosaic:

This is incredible!

This map is amazing, thank you for sharing!

will copy the same position of the infantry and disable transformation for keep the same helmet's, however its possible that i could end exporting all animations again to make an standard look between armored/saddle/blanket horse to another whitout all those props, also maybe include the chairs (if the unit uses i) since now i could render the texture.

Hmm, the helmet prop point apparently has moved in relation to the head prop point for the rider animations, when compared to infantry.

Paint here any blanket texture desired, so it will be rendered this way Or if its better, this plain has only 80 tris, so it could be a prop same as the horse saddle/blanket. Heres an example using the horse full blanket texture

@Alexandermb I think the other references (all of them) are pretty good, with the exception of that face-armour :/. I searched and searched, but I couldn't find any references for that type of mask dating to the Achaemenid Persian era. They seem to become popular during the Parthian and Sassanid era, and are very common for late medieval Persia, but not the achaemenids apparently... I must note, by the time that Alexander invades, Greek mercenaries and their equipment were commonly used by the Achaemenids, so it's even unlikely that there weren't at least some of those face armours around, I just haven't seen any evidence.

Enhanced happy camels, yay!

I think the best thing about the game is how nice the tech tree page looks and how easy it is to use. lol

Actually, “gorytos” is the Greek word for the Indo-Iranian (Scythian, Median, Persian, etc.) bow-case, which was used to store the recurved bow, and, presumably, also the arrows. (A quiver does not contain a bow, only arrows.) E.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/PazyrikHorseman.JPG has his bow stowed away in his gorytos. Furthermore: the “sagaris” is the Indo-Iranian battle-axe the “acinaces” is the Indo-Iranian short sword (or large dagger, as depicted), which possibly evolved into the Greek “xiphos” Persians used the Greek “kopis” (or “makhaira”) single-edged sword as well, which was similar in shape to the Iberian “falcata” (a 19th C name), in name to the Egyptian “khopesh”, and in function to both This man has both a kopis in his hand and an acinaces in the sabbard.

Dépends on what black bands you are referring too. If you refer to the horizon when having the camera at the ground level it's the skybox. If you refer to a corner appearing on the screen to the skybox then yes that's because it's not transparent. Alpha transparency for this could have disastrous performance though.

http://iranpoliticsclub.net/photos/U04-Achaemenian3/index.htm persian quiver is called gorytos.

Oh my, I feel so silly now... So the black bands are created by the black edges of the square map, that's pretending to be round?? Ooooh, of course, duh... as @mimesot said: This problem really needs to be solved because it's a real thorn in the eye for screenshots... It's been brought up by many people for years.. 0AD looks gorgeous at low angles, and the low angle stuff puts 0AD in a different league than most RTS games. The black bands at the horizon just kind of ruin it... I don't want to have to photoshop my screenshots just to have something presentable, you know... It feels wrong... But black bands at the horizon are even more wrong... So the map should indeed transition into transparency, not blackness. Who can do this? @elexis?

@stanislas69 @lordgood i keep having this often the darker zone is the uv edges of the low poly mesh, why it keep lookin like that after the first 2 render did well? Nvm... is the CPU rendering... i spent hours trying to find this insignificant thing.

I didn't check the code, but looking at the map xml I'm almost sure that the 'Actor' element with the 'seed' attribute are storing the selected variation, example: <Entity uid="4347"> <Template>actor|props/flora/grass_field_parched_short.xml</Template> <Position x="1199.14869" z="103.9384"/> <Orientation y="2.35621"/> <Actor seed="62142"/> </Entity> <Entity uid="4348"> <Template>actor|props/flora/grass_field_parched_short.xml</Template> <Position x="1198.7306" z="61.08883"/> <Orientation y="2.35621"/> <Actor seed="14988"/> </Entity>

@Sundiata Lordgood's wicker shield textures (two new recolor variants)

Blender file. New_camel.7z

For your first question yes cyou can delete manually by editing the XML file. I think the variant is stored in the file. For your third question see ->

briefly mentioned in the spartan structure thread, regarding a full art split for the Greeks

In case that happens ... just a console error but no visual representation any more ... Assume you removed the Ptolemaic wonder. Could I simply search my maps XML for the phrase "structures/ptol_wonder" and delete that entity section and it will be fine? Is a missing entity uid of any concern? One further question. If I have an actor that has multiple visual representations that occur with specific frequencies when you place them (like it is the case with various stones and grass patches), how does the map file "remember", which one was chosen. I can't see my map pick a random kind of e.g. short cretan date palm each time I load it, fortunately. Sorry, but I have a third question. It is an issue with my map, which you can see in some of my screenshots, but I think this can lead to a feature request if feasible. You surely noticed the black horizon on most flat angle screenshots, which is not very pleasing. I guess this this originates from some kind of compromise. The skybox is needed to create, well, a sky and the beautiful reflections on the water. On the other hand there is the equally beautiful circular map shape with its smooth transition into blackness, which you usually look upon from above. What if the transition wasn't into blackness but into transparency and the skybox had a much lower lower boundary. As the botton of the skybox is black, you wouldn't see any difference at the transition zone when looking down at a steep angle. At a flat angle the transition zone would look much slimmer (except the terrain was inclined steep upwards) and transition from terrain texture to sky texture. If the terrain at the map boundary was sloped downwards you would even get a hard horizon line. Is this possible? Does the engine support alpha values for terrain surfaces?

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

@Skhorn From scratch I guess you could take panorama photos. And one picture of the sky above. Else paint it yourself. For that you could either A) Paint everything. B ) Make a gradient background and 1) Handpaint clouds and horizon and sun 2) Find cc0 cloud pictures and incrust them in the sky you just made same for horizon and sun. From existing you'll have to create five power of two textures (e.g. 256x256) top back front left right from whatever pictures. Put them in the folder named whatever you want it to be to find their location just look for a folder called cirrus Note 1 : there is no bottom texture. It's black. Note 2 : This could probably become a part of a a wiki page Note 3 : Textures have to be DDS. Either DXT1 or DXT5 if you need alpha. The game doesn't convert them see first post. Note 4 : You have to make sure the roof of the box somewhat transition without seams

Now that you said it, what about both?

You mean from existing files or from scratch ? Yeah that would need two skyboxes one with alpha transparency and slightly smaller and the current on. Doing it should be okay like you just basically have to call the function twice but I don't know how to handle the transparency.

Ah, my apologies! I will bookmark this thread and post here when I've had the chance to work something out. What will probably happen is that I'll post a draft (or several drafts) around mid-February, and then work on finalizing the tracks we like best. O.

0 A.D in the top. number 4. great publicity.