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Showing content with the highest reputation on 2015-06-07 in all areas

  1. Hello everyone. I've been playing 0ad for a while on and of and I'm enjoying it. I like the progress the game is making and I would like to give a little bit back to the community. I was wondering if there was an update planned to the naval units ingame. Currently they look ok, but empty (nobody on deck etc.). Is it perhaps possible to increase the size of the ships ingame and at the same time put infantry units onboard the ships (similar to how it is done with walls) as an eye-candy? Or use this system where there are several 3D models for a unit to increase the variety of the ships? And could ramming be done? In any case, I could take a shot at the 3D models/texturs of the ships, if that is ok. Perhaps as a teaser a slightly older model of mine: (a roman monoreme as used in the battle of actium, no textures, around 5k polys)
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  2. Could also be I'm not explaining clear enough even after all those posts, lacking the technical knowledge on some fields as well. Forests currently can either be impassable or randomly passable through small, hard to spot gaps. Besides the pathfinder issues with units being stuck or slowing down, this has other effects as well. It's hard to be sure on what's the passability of each forest mass (without using the developer overlay). That's bad for gameplay. You need to be able to easily spot all pathways, not having to manually path-scout each tiny bit between trees to know if you need troops or walls to guard a place. It's kinda mean when the AI or a lucky/more observant player pass through those gaps and the opportunities for this are currently many and hard to monitor in most cases. Also gaps that allow some units through but not all of them aren't that great for gameplay either and very small gaps in general are bad for they can cause even small numbers of units to get stuck. It's not by accident or foolishness that games like the AOE and Warcraft series have no gaps in their similar forest masses. Ofc the "real forests are random" argument can be thrown in, but it doesn't help gameplay at all. Another rather major thing to consider is trees often being almost on top of each other, with both aesthetic and gameplay issues (more workers try to gather there than possible, and this might have to do with the worker limit per tree and not the pathfinder, I'm not sure about it though - happens with other resources as well in random maps).
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  3. The thing is, the pathfinder is completely fixed now (apart from some bugs that we need to find, and some optimizations). So I don't know why we would suddenly have to change forests as well.
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  4. I'm mostly for it as well, even though I wouldn't mind the other option that much. It can be called realistic: You can pass through a dense forest, but generally armies would avoid them for being a pain to cross (losing direction, carrying baggage etc) and to avoid being ambushed, as most armies were better fit to fight in open or relatively open ground. Units represent larger numbers in such games so for me it's not a bad compromise in realism. Gameplay-wise it's also better on most occasions since vision/control of your units in forests isn't the best even if using silhouettes. Their function as natural borders is interesting as well, having player bases open on all sides on most maps isn't that great for an RTS game. It also fits better in a macro oriented game (it's getting old I know:p). That said, representing some units' and civs' strengths in forests (or uneven ground) would also be interesting, like ambushing careless armies passing next to/in forests, or crossing them to launch an unexpected raid.This made me wonder if a higher ground bonus could be easily implemented for melee units as well (fighting up/downhill). Like on most fields of game design there's pros and cons on each decision, both on realism and functionality. Whatever the choice, the terrible issues with woodcutters/military units being struck between trees and the uncertainty on if a forest is passable or not need to go at some point, with no distance between trees or fully passable forests.
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  5. Ok, a tiny progress report with screenshots. My recherches showed that during some of the biggest naval battles of antiquity (in the first and second punic wars), the main ships of the punic and roman navies were quinqueremes. The romans also had hexeremes as command ships, while carthage used some septiremes (that they bought from greece). Both navies also used smaller ships (Hemiolias, Trihemiolis, Liburnias, Triremes and Quadriremes) though these smaller ships were not the main fighting vessels and had tasks like troop transportation, scouting etc. In carthage, for instance, at 219 B.C., a squad of ships was made up of 50 quinqueremes, 2 quadriremes and 5 triremes. So what I wanted to start with is roman and punic quinqueremes. Here are some screenshots concerning the (about half way modelled) roman ship: It's based on a reconstruction from the naval architect J.F. Coates and on the way to being improved with images from coins, parts of ships that have been found since then and some literature that has been published since then. If anybody is interested, I can also provide a little background to the ships, if people enjoy it Yes, I agree: naval combat alltogether needs some overhaul. I've looked at a few multiplayer-matches on youtube and have not found a single one with mayor naval combat. Is it perhaps possible to enable ramming, ranged attacks and boarding as three seperate attack modes for ships? I also though of having ship models as 4 seperate parts (left right, front, back) that could be damaged individually, and depending on the part that is destroyed first, different death animations. I also though of having the option to change the armament in the ships after they are built. E.g. heavy naval artillery (light naval artillery also was on almost every large ship) <-> corvus (for roman quinqueremes) <-> siege artillery (a squad of roman ships that had siege artillery equipped just before was ambushed in the first punic war and several cities were bombarded from ships in antiquity) <-> archer towers <-> nothing (for extra speed and maneuvering) <-> fire pots (rhodesian navy used them for a close in battle once). I can certainly provide the necessary 3D models, textures, animations etc I've also found somebody asking about LODs somewhere. I'll also provide some LOD models in case this will be implemented in the future (and then people can have truly massive naval battles).
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  6. I'm currently working on some engine changes so that for compatible actors (actors with the same bones), it will be easy to switch animations and props all together. So we can easily switch in the future, no matter what is chosen now.
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  7. I have been on IRC this week, and there are quite a few changes coming in daily. I have been away from the game and a lot has changed in the last few years. It struck me that my time might best be spent on testing some of these changes and organizing others to help with the testing as well. Yea, I like the idea of getting a lobby room up for the SVN version as soon as the pathing code is checked in. I haven't played much and I suck, but all the more reason to play some games and get some experience with the game. How were the multi-player play events setup? Did you have a tournament? Do we have a TeamSpeak server? It would be great to have separate team interaction during the matches and then at the end of the game we could all get together and discuss how things went and what issues people saw. This would also be great for in depth design discussions. Thanks for all the great feedback. Cheers!
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  8. You know saved games are not supported across updates. You should save load a saved game with exactly the same version as you saved it with.
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  9. It's sad to see you go. As a programmer, I found it great to see what you could do with our code. Especially as the code is still made mainly with 0 A.D. in mind, and not with futuristic or fantasy renderings. Showing what other stuff can be done with code is both a motivation and a test. I'd prefer to see renderings done with our engine of course, but I have nothing against people showing their work. So that's fine for me (though starting a new thread in the off-topic section might be better for that purpose, as it's not related to the engine any more).
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  10. Yep, that is Brendan. He is a fantastic artist. I enjoyed working with him. Here is his blog: http://keo-art.blogspot.com/ For the last 6 years Brendan has been working at: http://www.venan.com/ He may still be connected to the PM system here on the forums. You could try: http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showuser=579 Otherwise I'm connected with him via LinkedIn and I could make an introduction for you.
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  11. Ah, so the state is not in the C++ code it is in JS. I need to look at the code to see how the API is implemented. We were talking about putting a lot of the objects back in the C++ side and providing interfaces to JS several years back because of the overhead caused by the AI. I will review the code and read forums to see what came of all of that. Cheers!
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  12. It seems to me that game save/load needs to be abstracted from the AI code. It should happen automagically.
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  13. The question of getting involved with AI development comes up from time to time. General consensus seems to be that indeed you start by digging through the sources and modify the existant bot to your needs. You say you "need to do a BIG BIG work with AI" - is this a master thesis or similar? If so, i suggest to check with your mentor before starting: The AI API is not stable and requires adjustment of the bot script code from time to time. See here. If you are doing a thesis work with a deadline, it may be advisable to check out and freeze a specific revision to prevent your module from getting broken at an undesirable time. Will your work have to become part of the official code base to be accepted in studies? If so, approach #1 is probably not feasible.Regarding the non-existant documentation, this has been discussed before - and it seems consensus that the difficulties caused by having to "read the code" are neglectible compared to building up your own concepts. The ultimate goal of an AI is to give the user (player) a challenging and fun experience. This is more of passing the turing test than building algorithms/structures. Besides the tutorial already mentioned, additional information may be gathered in the forums by searching for "AI", "petra", "aegis", "jubot" etc.
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