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Germanic weapons

Hi @Alexandermb! I 've just updated the mod to have AI know how to use this mod along with several other updates. Download it here at GitHub. Let me know whether the AI match is challenging enough. Thank you.

So, since I added the coin resource, I've been trying to think of ways to "gather" it and came up with Market Vendors. Building a Market unlocks Market Vendors that you can build and trickle Coin resource. Eventually, I'd like to have units "gather" coin at the vendors by tasking citizens to the Vendor stalls. Need some animations for that to work though. For now, they just trickle the resource for you. I will adjust the "Market Taxes" tech to boost the trickle for the Vendor stalls. Eventually, it would be nice to have civ specific models, but for now they are generic. I want cities in DE to look lively and lived in. I think these go some way toward achieving that.

Already in DE's git.

The game gains a lil bit more graphical fanciness being isometric. This feature included in game config will surely turn some players community upside down (plus their heads will be struggling getting used to)

You are very useful trend guy.

Thanks for the catch up, to be honest i mostly lost all of the notifications or mentions sometimes and forgot about some stuff.

Gonna have to look over the video for notice that. About zoom HA! i knew it, everyone zooms in a lot to see details. i had a headhache because i wans't used to isometric

After re-exporting cavalry animations i will be committing the animations re-export and fix. Will include something for this feature.

Done:

Epic!!!!

Germanic wolf warrior Germanic clubman

@Alexandermb also check for more obvious missing art and bugs discovered by youtubers (if you do not want to watch them read @wackyserious notes) https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/15271-0-ad-on-youtube/page/70/

you need a animation for that.

Can you make a couple variations of this Carthaginian shield? Where the dolphins and palm tree are white and the background is player color (elite spearman). And then one where the background is white and the dolphins-tree are player color (sacred band champs).

all Euroasian nomads used same tactics. https://koryvantesstudies.org/archery/

Only need a few heros patterns and one more kardakes symbol to finish (ptol eagle remains untouched saddly). Rebaked them, fixed the blender bake issue: Here a comparisson of the shields Also, added demetrius and Craterus shield:

City Building Mod: Building Aura This is Phase I of my city building mod that focuses on improving building auras to simulate city-building. Download the latest version here on GitHub. Overview Base-building is one of the main parts of RTS games, including 0AD. However because of 0AD focus on combat, base building mostly revolves around build order, with building placement is usually optimized for resource gathering and defenses. The resulting city layout becomes strategic but unrealistic. Civic center surrounded by farms, houses built in countryside as walls; these are strategically viable but not realistic nor historically accurate. This mod attempts to bring realism of city planning to 0AD, to encourage careful building placement. Features Fluctuative Population With this mod, population cap is no longer based only on how much house you built, but also where you place it. Every single building in 0 A.D. has been revamped with new aura effects that influence desirability of its nearby area, simulated by house population. This means that a house built next to a civil center supports more population than a house in country side. Building a military base beside it will reduce the population even more. This will encourage you to find a good place to construct houses, just like a city planner would. Every building costs population to run, and default house population has been reduced by half to keep it spicy. Production Chain Imagine how a soldier got his weapon. Wood and metal are collected in the storehouse, then they will be brought to blacksmith to be forged, then they will be received by the soldier at the end of his training. If all of those building are very close together, the soldier doesn’t have to wait too long to receive his weapon. This mod emulates such situation by giving effects if the buildings are nearby. Storehouse fastens nearby blacksmith’s research, and blacksmith fastens nearby barrack’s training. By arranging the buildings in specific way you can optimize your barrack to pump armies as fast as possible. Infrastructure Units are also affected by this mod. In real life, in the area where a city center stands, roads and other convenience are made to anticipate crowd of people running around. This mod simulates this by giving units speed boost while walking around the city center. Putting your storehouse right next to a mine also gives gatherers one extra resource to bring back. Mix and Match Since every building influences another, there are bound to be some compromises. Barrack will reduce nearby house population, but house will fasten barrack’s training, so if you need soldiers fast then you can build them next to each other at the cost of one population. There are so many possibilities. Experiment and discover your ultimate city that serves your strategy to conquer the world. Improved AI Now AI has been taught basic lessons on city planning. Beware that the nature of this mod allows AI to optimize this and might get surplus population early if you're not careful. The city pictured above is not my creation, it's purely built by AI with tremendous efficiency. New update also reduced default house population to nerf the AI because it was just that good. Installation Mod is available for download on mod.io (waiting for moderator's approval). It is available both for Alpha 23 and Alpha 24. Simply download the one compatible with your installed 0 A.D. version. Extract the entire content into My Games\0ad\mods\public folder and enjoy. Alternatively it is available for download at GitHub. Choose the branch according to your installed version and download. As I am not well versed in modding nor I am in history, please let me know if you think the modding could be improved or if it can be made more historically accurate. Enjoy!

Hi all, I'm working on a City Building mod. This mod is trying to incorporate elements of city building games like Caesar or SimCity to 0 A.D. The end goal here is to have a RTS/city building hybrid mod using 0 A.D engine. The balance between the two genres that I'm trying to achieve here is to ensure that the city building part should be fun enough without getting too complicated. The plan I've made consists of several phases, each with different features to implement. But currently I'm focusing on two mechanics: I. Building placement In city building games, building placement is important. Especially housing zone. People will only live in your city if their needs are met. Job, food, desirable location. Otherwise they will leave. Resource and storage building placement is also important, finding sweet spots to shorten the route without disturbing existing residences. Since this is still a RTS game, effects need to be tweaked in such a way that normal player can play the game without crippling penalty, but player who takes time to plan the city can optimize it to gain edge. Implementation: Every building has aura that indicates their desirability, which will increase or decrease population count of nearby houses, e.g. civic building increasing nearby house population, military building decreasing it. Since resource management is already complicated in 0AD, alternative implementation is using building aura to increase performance of related nearby building, e.g mining dropsite increase nearby blacksmith research speed, blacksmith increase nearby barrack training speed, etc. This will cause crowds of buildings in desirable area, so to justify it every building is implied to have been constructed along with its nearby infrastructure, increasing nearby unit speed. Status & TODO: Released, but with general rule. These are the desired changes and their detailed implementations. A complete explanation of Phase I and download link is posted here. II. Economy In city building games, money is usually the only resource the player needs to build the city. It can be gathered from each citizen, or received by importing resources to other cities. Implementation: New resource available to simulate productions. Money: House and Economic buildings trickle money periodically. The amount of taxes will be influenced with the same rule as Phase I. The trickle should be low enough that player should spend responsibly, but should also be high enough so that it's not the first resource to run out before other resources. Money should be requirement of every building and unit creation, as it is analogous to builder/soldier salary. Weapon: Blacksmith will be available to construct in town phase and trickles weapon over time. This will be used to train soldiers. It would consume wood and metal, so wood and metal resource for unit training can be removed and replaced with only food, money, and weapon. Training time should also be made faster. Working animal: Horses/Elephant is trickled resources as well. Useful to train cavalry. Status: In progress. Money has been proven to be workable, but still tweaking 0AD GUI to support more than 4 resources. Weapon and Working animal is still being researched. TODO: Test other impacts of new resources, finding out other uses of money, learning about Summary screen (after battle) GUI as it is bugged out on Resource Tab. III. Citizens City building has NPCs that simulates production chain and distribution. To enhance the experience several new citizen types can be created that work like modified Trader but between resource dropsite and market/house/blacksmith. This is still in research phase. Feel free to criticize or ask if any of these doesn't make sense/needs work/impossible to implement in 0 A.D. I still have a lot to learn in modding 0 A.D, any feedback is welcome. I will keep updating this post if there's a new idea to share. Thank you.

Some things I'd maybe like to get done for alpha 24's release: Come up with some new socio-economic paradigms for some of the civs. Not all civs should have the Slavery paradigm. Mauryas: Caste-based system Celts, Iberians, Persians: Some kind of peasantry-based system Balance Elephant Archers some more Probably make their ranks increase their attack since I can't add arrows Convince some talented people to make more Cult Statues for the cultures that are reusing the Athenian cult statue Celts: Wooden Epona? Wodan? Draped in flowers and burnt offerings? Persians: Colorful Lamassu Nomads: Wooden Horse statue? Spartans: Bronze Leonidas statue Seleucids: Apollo statue, or maybe Alexander statue Macedonians: Herakles statue or different Apollo statue from Seleucids Thebans: Theban Sphinx Republican Romans: Mars or Jupiter Principate Romans: Colossus Convince some talented people to make Archery Range/Stable/Workshop for the Han Chinese With permission, add Terra Magna's Xiongnu so I can experiment with "nomadic" gameplay style Add the Scythians, based on the above Xiongnu Perhaps attempt 2 different possible "nomadic" gameplay styles, one each for the Xiongs and Scyths Can keep both styles or determine if one style is much preferable over the other Maybe a couple more mercenaries for the civs who currently only have 1. Unit actors More ethnically correct slave actors/textures Fix the Han scout actor (currently using the Greek scout actor) Fix all remaining portraits for everything Experiment with making gaia horses capturable Will add more to this list as I go along

In both Empires Ascendant and Delenda Est, neither the phalanx or syntagma formations show the correct animations.

I just got back. But I hope that I could STAY back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQdq-J1blms

I remember that we already discussed about that now. So: { "genericName": "Urban Cohorts vs. City Watch Corps", "top": "romans_imperial/unlock_urban_cohort", "bottom": "romans_imperial/health_regen_structures", "requirements": { "civ": "imp" } }

Well I figured out the issue. As a temp workaround you can probably add just the civ requirement in the pair tech (which is close to what nescio suggested above).

Thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to answer. I really appreciate it. Yes, I have been playing these types of games for years. I remember loving the very first command and conquer.... 1st Warcraft, age of empires etc etc... right through the next versions.... (Still play my old version of C&C Generals lol) I have never had any problem playing any of them. I just couldn't believe the summary at the end how much more resources the enemy had collected than me, yet all I had done was gather resources and build new people to gather more resources.... These are two awesome answers that I can look into. Cheers. Thanks again! (Just read the guide. Very close to what I was doing, but I just think more food and wood gathering needed. I was also building walls and towers straight after upgrading to level 2. Didn't know how to send archers into them. So I think I wasted a lot of time building def and barracks early.)

ok then we can continue. Only I can be sure you speak my language.

Si, ese soy yo

Very much like the one already in the mod! Courtesy of Millennium AD.

What, you don't want to only do imperials vs imperials game? :-D

Sounds reasonable wouldn't mind adding more variants.

Started to add variants files for shields for finishing details. This TASK will have as pre-requisite this other TASK for commit. Everything working fine so far! Will end this to re-export cavalry animations once more for commit the animations fixes with the new sheaths and pikeman shields bones adjustments. Missing Themistocles shield texture (will do it today) And 1 Kardakes Hoplite eagle sillouette.

The Assyrians can train Scythian horse archers. The Scythian horse archer are champion units. The Scythian horse archer shoot only when forward facing. However, as far as I know the Scythian horse archer where able to shoot backwards: http://www.warriorsfortheworkingday.com/ScythianHorseman.htm I am not really sure historically, if they where able to shoot backwards. Maybe, somebody else can find historical sources regarding the matter.

Try inserting a requirements line in your pair technology file.

Hi @Trinketos! After studying the code and consulted with @Freagarach on this thread I finally found out the reason why field is always built near the civic center and not houses. It's indeed in queueplanBuilding.js, specifically lines 220-227. To ensure AI do not clear area near Civ Center and plot Field change line 221 to if (struct.resourceDropsiteTypes() && struct.resourceDropsiteTypes().indexOf("food") != -1 && !ent.hasClass("Civic")) It will clear plot surrounding Farmstead but not Civ Center. Also a couple of lines below that you'll want to ensure Farmstead can be built on territory border, because currently AI prevents this. Remove line 249-258. I applied these changes to my mod and now farms are always built by AI in countryside.

I haven't touched anything related (yet...) i can confirm this.

@wraitii@Stan` @Freagarach @Alexandermb

Hi there! Have you been playing other RTS games before? Or any similar games? 0 A.D. has an AI that can be a bit tricky. But if you are interested in how the AI works, try to set up a match with both AIs, pitting them against each other. Watch what they do with starting units. Note what they build and train and when, when do they upgrade things, when do they attack. You can see that the AI does not cheat (unless on higher than Medium, they received extra resource I think). They are not very fast, but they are consistent. They never stop exploring. The units are never idle, always working on something, always building or gathering something. The buildings never stop pumping out units, but they research only when they have extra resources. They build markets and trade, exchanging resources when they low on something. You can see later that these are an obvious thing to do, but hard to do right. If you feel even the Very Easy AI is still hard for you, just use Sandbox mode. This is the easiest one, since the AI enemy don't attack and expand, so you can play in peace. This is the chance to practice what you've learned before. Try to set targets like create 50 soldiers, or reach City phase. Then try to do it quick. After that, if you already feel confident, try the Very Easy enemy again. I admit that I'm not a competitive player, just a fellow RTS game enthusiast that loves building things up and imagining what it feels like to be an ancient general. I know the shock of being steamrolled by AI on my first 0 A.D. game a decade ago. It sucked, but it piqued my interest. How could this lowly robot destroyed me. That's how I learned to be better and enjoy the game more. So, keep practicing and good luck on defeating the AI!

I hate this aspect of the AI (I also hate the way capturing in general is setup). All of a sudden, the AI will delete 20 houses all at the same time, and no human player would do that (or at least their attention would likely be elsewhere). It also robs the human player of the hard-earned benefit of capturing those buildings. I honestly think it all needs to be rethought. Truly.

Since aspis remake i had problems finding the proper position of the pikeman shield, but also struggle every time i try to properly place a sheath or a quiver, so i had this plan: Add a fully prop points for every piece for armor or weapon now that bodies and animations are being re-exported. We no longer have just a plain 0.A.D ancient era game. We now have a community of modders wanting to do their own era games like @Bigtiger 13th century mod and we no longer are restricted to mediterranean civilizations. So here i show the prop points for a fully armored knight of the 14+ century: A fully armored prop bones for each zone of the bodie allowing to modders to have a fully armored infantry whitout being limited to a plain visual. Sheaths/Scabbards and Quivers always have been an issue in 0.A.D. not only the exportation from blender but also the clipping with the bodie so i added 6+6 more animated bones + prop bones for every sheath for no longer have that clipping issue and open also the posibility of having a seax behind and a also the option to have a katana: Scabbards and Quiver whitout need to adjust to the bone position: For any modder exporting a prop is an issue because of the position. See ingame scabbards and quivers for example And our non existent sheaths: We have to make TWO ACTORS per quiver or sheath for each side and would require a THIRD one for back seax so. No longer this will happens and we only require a single sheath or quiver for both sides.

Seleucid infantry/champion_pikeman:

@azayrahmad i love all you said in the last post but im a singleplayer guy so... Does IA work in this mod?

They look very nice. And thanks for finding a ref for the pikeman.

Cherusci pikemen

New concept art: germanic shields

Watching Nookrium halfway at the moment. What I noticed so far Lack of harvest animation for the pig (Stream viewer jokingly said that it was being milked lol, and that was a sustainable way of having bacons, really laughed at this one) A particular cattle entity at Butana Steppes which also lacked animation. The guy failed to notice the lack in population point during one of his matches. Stream viewers are very interested on the game based on how they saw him play it. He zooms a lot and is mostly fascinated by the graphics, he praised it how each faction had different structure sets and was really moved the the appearance of the buildings. Interesting though that he looked at the mod selection for a first game cover. He somewhat wanted more available information about the mods in the mod selection area, other than the mod summary description. He downloaded the community maps mod ad mod.io

Thank you very much for your hard endeavor, I hope your audience will find it useful and insightful and as @stanislas69 said earlier it is a good and reliable piece of information for our newer ending quest (or puzzle) for better optimizations.

I mostly fiddled around in Matrix3D.h, entirely replacing the contents of some functions with either calls to the Intel® Math Kernel Library or blocks of SSE intrinsics. I did not see any measurable improvement, but I've attached the file. The original code is left intact, commented out. Aside from these completely re-written functions, the only change is the addition of the <mkl.h> header. Couldn't hurt. Unfortunately I don't believe so. VTune Amplifier does have some JavaScript profiling capabilities, but as far as I know they're limited to node.js profiling. Also, I know pretty much nothing about JavaScript. I'm afraid while that JavaScript bottleneck is in place there's not much else I can do for 0 A.D. I do have enough from this to at least fuel the internal training session late next week. Depending on how that goes, I might produce a small how-to video/article based on this project. If I do, I'll be sure to post a link here.

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I've finished my analysis. The bad news is I can't really do anything about it myself. After what I found last time I did some work trying to optimize the code, but I found that nothing I did had any measurable effect on performance. My changes caused individual functions to shuffle around a bit (and credit where it's due, the pathfinder did once pop up at the top of the list) in the Intel VTune Amplifier interface but I saw no improvement in the actual game. So I took a step back, thinking maybe I missed something at a more basic level. Now, as I said in my first post, the reason for this project is that my team is, as a whole, relatively inexperienced with using our product on video games. We're more accustomed to scientific applications and the like. So I'd approached this the way I was used to doing, and went straight for the largest known hotspots, ignoring the unknown modules. I also focused on the lengths of the frames instead of the overall frame rate. I conferred a bit with someone who was a little more used to the inner workings of video games, and re-evaluated my data. A large chunk of your time is spent in those unknown modules, and you have significant gaps between your frames - what's especially interesting is that if I filter my data down to only the gaps between frames, all the pathfinding, rendering, bone matrix manipulation, etc, drops away, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of what's left is "outside any known module". This kind of pattern can indicate that the bottleneck is an outside factor. Being a video game, the most obvious potential source is the GPU - it doesn't matter how efficiently calculations are being done if things end up waiting for the GPU to finish what it's doing. So I ran a GPU/CPU analysis, but it showed that the GPU wasn't the problem. There were gaps in the activity there, too. So now I looked at the large number of threads involved in your game, most of which are not doing anything most of the time, and thought that might be the problem. So I ran a Threading analysis and saw that there were quite a few transitions between threads happening in those gaps between frames. When I opened the call stacks for those top two objects, the call chains eventually went down into BaseThreadInitThunk (with the semaphore object going through a js::HelperThread::threadLoop function on the way). As I understand it, 0 A.D. is built on a mix of C++ and JavaScript code, and Thunking is a form of interfacing between two different types of code - such as two different languages. So presumably this is where your two languages are talking to each other. So what I believe is going on here, is that these gaps between frames are coming from the game having to wait for the JavaScript. A couple possibilities I can think of are that you might be interfacing the two languages too often, or you might be doing computations in the JavaScript that really belong in the C++. Unfortunately there's not much I, personally, can do to relieve that bottleneck. Technically, I now have enough content to fulfill the barest requirements of my project. Before I continue I want to make it clear that I absolutely understand that you're on your own schedule and I don't expect anything from you! I just want to let you know about my own timeline, in case it affects your priorities or decisions. If you guys do end up fixing your JavaScript issues in the next week and a half, please let me know and I would be more than happy to include the improved results in my initial presentation. If it gets done by mid-April, I would be happy to include a result comparison/improvement showcase in any official documentation I might produce from this, and if early enough, I might also be able to include a second analysis step. Thank you all for your interest, and good luck!

Thanks @nani! I'll definitely look into using larger test cases - but just for the record, the stated "115 units" is just the size of the army I'm directly controlling/moving. I have other units going about their business back in my city and no idea how many the other faction has running around (I'll have to pause the game in combat and see if I can count just how many Iberian units come rushing out to fend me off when I attack). I suppose I should also mention that earlier (using a different VTune Amplifier result collected under different conditions), I did actually find CCMPPathfinder::ComputeShortPath as a hotspot! The cause of the bottlenecking, according to my analysis, was that this function was bound by branch misprediction. Unfortunately, after looking into the code for some time I was forced to conclude that there was nothing that could be done to mitigate the misprediction rate. I have not yet seen other parts of the path finder become hotspots but I'll try building a new test case on an 8-player map tomorrow. Honestly I was sticking to 2 player so far to allow myself time to actually build up a decent test case - I never said I was good at this game! In other news, I was able to run a tighter analysis (with a sample rate of 0.1ms) on the slow startup portion. In that part, SkinPoint is definitely the main hotspot, followed by BlendBoneMatrices. SkinPoint is 49.9% back end bound, almost entirely core bound. None of that was attributed to the divider, though, so it's just plain port overuse. I'm currently investigating whether it might be possible to vectorize the offending loop, as that can dramatically cut down on the port traffic, but ultimately it comes down to whether the nature of the loop is vector-friendly.

For the sake of keeping track of things, and for easy access by the developers helping me out, I figure I should recap all my findings so far. I started with the code as of February 1st, to which I added some VTune Amplifier ITT API calls to mark frames as well as place user events marking the durations of actual gameplay and the loading screen on the CPU timeline. This was the only initial change made. My designated test case is a save file from a medium sized random Lake map featuring the Romans (myself) versus the Iberians (CPU). My standard test procedure is to select my army of 115 units, march them westward along the southern edge of the lake, and engage the Iberian forces. On filtering down the Microarchitecture Analysis result that I'm currently working from to only the actual gameplay portion, I found three general regions of interest: a slow portion immediately after the loading screen ends, normal gameplay, and a bizarre "gap" where no frames were processed at all. Long version: Short version: I've written the dead section off as a fluke (and I don't think it could be optimized anyway). The slow part at the beginning needs further analysis to see if I can get meaningful data. I've concluded that CModelDef::BlendBoneMatrices and ShaderModelRenderer::Render are the primary functions to investigate. Analysis of Functions: BlendBoneMatrices assessment: Render assessment: Render is more complicated. It's overwhelmingly back-end bound (89.8% of pipeline slots) and almost all of this is memory bound (81.4%). Digging deeper into the numbers it's 74.6% DRAM bound, which essentially means that it's slowed down mainly by missing the last level cache quite often. Even more abstractly, it's not accessing data in an efficient way. It's a fairly long function and it had several hotspots in it. Hotspot #1, line 446 I haven't dived so deeply into the other hotspots of note in this function. So that's pretty much what I've got as of right now.