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I managed to finish some more buildings with working decals, check them out: Thank you, that helped a lot.

Hi, I am one of the translator of Chinese (Taiwan) language of 0ad. I saw the announcement in Transifex today. The announcement reads it will be good for us to find a propriate font for Chinese (Taiwan) language to make the mod. I would like to suggest "Source Han Sans TW" subset OTF, and "Normal" style. Regular style is kind of heavy for reading some long text. And Source Han Sans is Apache license. This is a sans-serif style open CJK font. The other suggestion is "Droid Sans Fallback". It released under Apache license too. And it is a sans-serif style open CJK font. However, there are many glyphs in this font does not follow our conventions to write Chinese here. I do not encourge to adpot this one.

Well, the first official model is ready, the Zevestivan Command Church. Here's the high poly model in Maya: And a screenshot in Atlas: Just two quick questions 1) Is eclipse used to edit .json files? I attempted to make my own faction using Notepad++, though I get syntax errors when I go to the matches screen. I'm guessing Notepad can't save json files in the right format? 2) Is there a way to import the 0AD models in game into Blender or Maya? They are in the PMD format and I cant seem to find anything that allows me to import them. The reason being is that I'm going in completely blind as far as scale goes, I'd not mind having some Civic Centers as a scale reference for my models on. Thank you, I'll try that link out tonight if I have some time.

I tried last week week to get some grip on the settlement, but completely underestimated the complexity. Then I played a few games and tried to figure out why, where and when I create buildings and how that could be mapped onto Hannibal. First I made a list of the buildings which should be included/considered: Houses, fields, farmstead, storehouse, barracks, blacksmith, temple, market, fortress and towers. That leaves the ptol without a decent cavalry, but ok, they have houses for free. There is no way without houses, once build they are useful to train females and garrison them in case of an attack. I think, there is no rationale to either build them at the edge of a settlement or in the middle. So probably it is a good idea to place them away from the centre to have space for other buildings. A bot can easily do the micro and run coralls instead of fields or both. Again preferably suburban structures and mandatory for food. Farmsteads provide useful tecs and may reduce walking distances for gatherers. I like the compact squared layout of 8 fields with farmstead as center. Storehouses have tecs, and usually go with the other resources. They may result into another settlement with houses and tower(s), that depends on area risk and resource prospect. The blacksmith is only good for the tecs it could be placed everywhere and needs no tower. Barracks and the temple, because of tecs and garrison. Very near to the centre, like the market. Centre and fortress can guard each other. Well, and towers are useful everywhere. The thing is most buildings that should be close to the center (temple, market, fortress) are available later in the game and some space needs to be reserved. Also, these are rather huge buildings. Roughly there are three types: Ring 1: Temple, market, 1 barrack, 3 towers, 1 fortress Ring 2: Houses, + towers Ring 3: Support: fields, farmstead, blacksmith + towers(?) From that point I think the circular layout above make still sense and also a squared layout with center buildings rather close to each other, enclosed by a wide street. As Ascii art: Square Circle HHHHH HHHHH H H H HHHHH HHHHH HH T HH HHH CB HHH HH B C M HH HHH TM HHH HH F HH HHHHH HHHHH H H H HHHHH HHHHHThe square should also have exits/streets in W/E direction. Towers could replace houses as needed. I'm still not quite sure how it looks, because the civs with huge houses would fall in the square category. I plan to make Hannibal build palisades on alert in wide streets to slow the enemy down and remove them after attack. Images next week....

What? not a major power! sssss perhaps a playstyle that emphasizes the Minoan flourish in trade and art, and their naval prowess, like Carthaginians without their colonization bonuses or walls they have a VERY unique architectural style too, it would be a shame not to add them. besides, I already made buildings and all that (if you could PM me your email Stan (or any councilor who wants these), I could send over the files along with the Mycenaeans so I don't forget them down the road.)

Definitely don't use Notepad, it's probably the worst text editor you could choose. I recommend Notepad++ on Windows. I don't think that would cause errors though, please copy/paste the errors from the logs if it continues to be a problem. PMDs are lossy binary formats used only by the engine because they are smaller and quicker to load, but almost all of them correspond to Collada files. For releases, we only package the converted PMD/PSAs, but you can find the originals in SVN. It's recommended to have an SVN checkout if you plan to be modding, so you always have the latest changes. We also have a public art source repository with some Blender source files, but not everything is there yet.

I hope this is the right subforum for my question. Does anybody know what the main instrument in "Harvest Festival" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnH16V3ui1w is? To my untrained ears it sounds like a bouzouki. Could it be something else, like a laouto or something else though?

Yes, that is the plan

It's commited check the buildings out in actors (all) in Atlas

I'll see what i can do

A quick search on the net resulted in some basic information of Tang architecture - Green roof, white wall, red column, and the design of door and windows. The rectangular arrangements above the door seems to have some importance - Usually called Qi Zhu Ba Bai (七朱八白), or seven red and eight white, the 'white' here being the white rectangular shape. One of the few surviving Tang period building, the Tian Tai An....a Buddhist temple. The Chi Lin Nunnery at Hong Kong is one of the best modern construction that adhere strictly to Tang Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Lin_Nunnery Candidate for Tang flag

See I think the farms are just fine. I like the terrain conform because not all farmland is flat (especially in Mediterranean!). Flattening the terrain beneath them makes like like any other building, when farms are not ebven a building. yes, the prop can be randomized more but that is simple actor changes and some new prop meshes and texture. \

What we have now is an improvement over the old farms in terms of eye candy, but it looks too crowded, too uniform and patterned. I think part of that is the bug with prop variants, but even so, they are always going to be precisely the same layout. Some ideas: link several meshes together in Blender into clumps, then have maybe 3-4 clumps per field, they could be randomly mixed and matched (that's still props but at least it's not like 64 of them per field). Or there is the possibility of what wraitii and Philip discussed in IRC the other day, having the engine combine meshes together to take the manual work out of it. And just like a handful of trees in 0 A.D. can represent a forest or grove, a handful of plants could represent a farm IMO Then there's terrain conformance, well I wouldn't build a farm on the side of a hill, around here farmland is quite flat, I would expect the same thing in ancient times. So terrain flattening under fields when they are placed wouldn't hurt.

The .json files are just text files. Notepad++ works perfectly for me. Maybe you just used a wrong syntax? Not sure if which text encoding 0 A.D. supports. I'm using ANSI and that works fine (just to mention another potentially reason things break I could think of).

Dust storms and clouds disappear and reappear when zoom out. I liked clouds in old alpha, it make the game world feel alive and give a nice visual mood, but is broke for 1 or 2 alphas.

Packaging will happen very soon, then we need to test, I think this week is possible. For updates: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ReleaseProcessDraft

Considering it's not a finished game you can expect some changes to the gameplay. So it will mostly be the gameplay from AOE/Empire Earth + the fighting of total war, + specific things that will not be common to any RTS. Another good thing for you would be to watch 0ad videos, there is a video thread on the forums.

3) Personally, from a gameplay perspective, I don't see the point. Both are gonna occupy the same role so in a way one cancels out the other. 5) Well, I can't find any direct mention of flamethrowers used outside of naval engagements either. While I think they most likely had them, I agree, best save them for part 2 for now. Sijiao trebuchets are larger and stronger then whrilwind catapults but can't be moved around after deploying. 四腳 (Sijiao) means, for footed, because it is mounted on a fixed four legged frame. Agree that it'd be probably safer to just have double bows instead. 6) This is the passage from Needham's book, Science and Civilisation in China Volume 5, that mentions the Dragon Ships: "The Wu Yileh Pei Shih7 (Materials for the History of the Wu-Yiieh State in the Five Dynasties Period), written by Lin Yii8 only a few decades later, gives us an extremely interesting passage. The Wen-Mu King (Wen-Mu Wang9) was in command at an important naval battle when with more than five hundred dragon-like battleships he attacked the men of Huai" at a place called Lang-shan ChianglO (Wolf Mountain River). This was Chhien Yuan-Kuanll, the' seventh son and later (+932) the successor of the Wu-Su king (Wu-Su WangI2), Chhien ChhiuY They won a great victory over the other side's forces 'because fire oil (huo yul4) was used to burn them up'. Then the author's commentary goes on: What is 'fire oil? It comes from Arabia (Ta-Shih Kuo') in the southern seas. It is spouted forth from iron tubes. and when meeting with water or wet things it gives forth flame and smoke even more abundantly. \Vu-Su Wang used to decorate the mouths of the tubes with silver, so that if (the tank and tube) fell into the hands of the enemy, they would scrape olr the silver and reject the rest of the apparatus. So the fire oil itself would not get into their hands (and could be recovered later)" Pages 81 and 82 Note that it quotes from the second book you listed as well.

for me in terms of gameplay the biggest difference is the fact that your soldiers can gather ressources. I loved that since my first game.

yeah pikes are slow iirc

There should be "shuttle speed" that is same for all infantry as they carry resource back to drop base. Wheelbarrow can improve this speed.

I got it to work: I guess other engines I've used allowed me to be more sloppy with my models. Hopefully importing animations will not be too bad.

wratti I try something like this with modding.

I'd like it if we add several more actor entities/props that were a lot bigger and could be used to plot, say, 20 bushes, more water lillies or about half a screen of grass at once. Since the game currently struggles with rendering many small entities rather than few big ones, it could be used to optimize our actor rendering and thus allow us to make our maps better. I'd like to have some "forest undergrowth" stuff too like they had in AoE 3, with some flowers, bushes, small trees perhaps added. Note that for efficiency it'd have to be a single mesh, not several props. Should I make a task for this?