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Hi everyone, I'm trying to improve cinematic camera code. I think the adding cutscenes in scenarios maps makes them more exciting. After trompetin17 AtlasUI2 merging, you can find patch with UI tool at #3301. Cutscene starts when path has added to playlist from map triggers, and after every path end triggers are receiving an event: which path was ended. I want to share with you for some results. Example of camera movement: And camera path for that: UPDATE0 Camera movement with target movement:

I've given this some more thoughts, and I'm convinced that a good way forward would be to scale everything up, including time. It'd play out more like SimCity, with some basic actions taken and then a lot of fast-forwarding. With support for some sort of supply lines and seasons. With seasons things can get really interesting strategically, and it helps make the game not too boring at any time. A gameplay that's more automatic, like some sort of huge-scale Caesar game, but where you can give a lot of input on a lot of things if you want. Basically make it a game about supply lines with real season support and things will get interesting. But really I'm also quite convinced that it's nowhere near being possible with the speed of current computers. It would require too much dialing down.

Gangways for the roman 5: I also think that landing animations should be doable ... that is: to have units board or leave a ship it would have to land, making it vulnerable to melee units. (And the possibility of having burned wrecks of enemy ships on one's shore ... how cool would that be? ) What do you think about that? Well yes, as I said, I would be up for having ships in 4 parts (front back left right) with their own health and damage models and different sinking animations depending on which part(s) is(are) destroyed first (including the awesome one where the ship breaks into two parts). And providing some floating debris (barrels, planks, corpses, oars ...) shouldn't be a problem in any case. As for sails and rigging: yes, that can be done. But what happend to the discussion concerning that warships in a battle never had sails up? you could simply use the garrisoning system and leave it up to the player to provide their ships with infantry (and replenish it once the ships lost some). I would also totally be up with player chosen upgrades to the ships (e.g. siege artillery, light artillery, corvus, fire pots, archer towers, nothing (for extra speed) etc). How does that sound?

Dear players and contributors, As some of you may know, I have been working on integrating the new pathfinder, designed by Philip (Ykkrosh) some time ago. After months of work, I am proud to announce that the new pathfinder has been included in the SVN version of the game. However, you must not think every problem 0 A.D. encounters has been solved. The new pathfinder is in, but a lot of features are still to be implemented and some new bugs have necessarily been introduced. What is the new pathfinder? The new pathfinder is actually a new long-range pathfinder, and the short-range pathfinder has been modified and tweaked a bit to adapt it to the changes. The new long-range pathfinder implements an optimization of the A* pathfinding algorithm, known as JPS (some information here). It also comes with an entirely new "hierarchical pathfinder", which doesn't compute any paths but deals with the connectivity between two points on the map. As a consequence, it is now possible for the pathfinder to know when it is useless to try to compute a path, thus improving the performance. Before, the pathfinder computed a lot of paths before understanding that some point was unreachable. Why is not everything fixed with the new pathfinder? The main thing is that the new pathfinder is designed to solve the big problems that the old pathfinder had (for instance the discrepancies between the long-range and the short-range pathfinder, the fact that the AI couldn't access the pathfinding code, and also performance). However, not all its features have been implemented. There is still a lot of things to do, but now that the new pathfinder is in, this work can be done. On top of that, things that used to work, like formations, are not properly supported yet by the new pathfinder and are currently disabled. A lot of bugs that were fixed in the old implementation are likely to reappear in this new one. What is still to be done? - Already almost ready, but still not in: Improve the grid update performance - Coming soon: Reenable formations JPS cache Remove the AI pathfinder Discover and fix unit motion bugs introduced by the pathfinder change - For the future: A lot of things that are now possible! What else can I learn about the new pathfinder? A PDF, written by Philip and currently being updated by me when I have time, is here. You can also take a look at Philip's progress reports he wrote when working on this new pathfinder here. What can I do? You can help us by testing the game and giving some feedback! Please open Trac tickets only when you are 200% sure it is not already reported (see the list of open problems here), else post in the forums and we will do our possible to file the issue and try to fix it. We would like to have a not-too-buggy A19 despite including this huge change, which is not a simple objective. Please help us!

I’m writing after reading a post in /r/truegaming about RTS : http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/3961xs/what_happened_to_rts_games/ This will mostly be an “idea rambling” that I post here so that I can have a written trace somewhere but I do have some key points to make. I don't really expect a discussion though I'd gladly take part in one. The reddit thread discusses the reasons why we haven’t seen any new “true RTS” in the vein of e.g. AoE2 in the last circa 10 years. Except for the last, all the big reasons have been stuff we have already stumbled upon when discussing the future of 0 A.D.: It is very difficult to get an RTS rightAn average RTS is not “OK”, it’s actually “bad”, which means you must get it rightThe RTS community was actually divided between those that enjoyed the micromanagement, strategy and pressure (aka starcraft players), and those that relished more the overall macromanagement and/or basebuilding (those play Total War, city builders, Anno)MOBAs took the remaining RTS playersThe obvious problem here is that it is simply very difficult to make a good RTS that will strike the right chords for both the starcraft and the TW players. This requires having competitive MP and fun SP. Something that AoE2 had, and that for example AoE 3 failed (arguably SP simply wasn’t fun enough. Campaigns were subpar for the standards and the AI was bad). My main addition to these points would be that indeed the TW/citybuilder crowd would mostly play SP/casual MP, whereas the starcraft crowd took over actual MP and made it competitive. So basically unless you had a few friends to play in LAN, playing MP means bowing to the starcraft crowd in a classic RTS. I do believe 0 A.D. is on the good path to strike those two chords fine. We have a solid MP game, which can get fairly competitive (adjustments pending). SP is still very subpar, but the AI had gotten considerably better to the point that it might be time to start thinking outside the box a bit. Campaigns with triggers are now a possibility, and I have no doubt we’ll get interesting ones. Now, the problem is that none of this is really new. This isn’t a huge issue because we don’t really have concurrence, but still. The big thing that people want/wanted 0 A.D. to have is realistic ship movements and realistic formations combat. My personal opinion is that neither is achievable/really desirable given the current format. So the question stands: how can you keep the classic RTS formula yet still bring new stuff? Well, I do believe we have all the ingredients, except for one: map size. Imagine for a minute absolutely no gameplay changes to 0 A.D., but all maps are at least 20 times as big as a huge map right now; Suddenly unit travel time is no longer irrelevant. Suddenly attrition can be simulated in a way that makes sense. Suddenly strategic economic position becomes a real thing. Suddenly the base building aspect can become as important as the fighting. Suddenly trading makes sense, suddenly raiding becomes closer to the real thing. Ambushes matter. Territory control matters. And all units suddenly get more realistic. Now this would probably require some changes. The number of different resources might need to be bumped up a bit (perhaps with “raw/manufactured” variants of each material?). The “global stockpile” principle might need some adjustments, but I don’t think you’d need to go full Anno (perhaps with dropsites having “range” and some possibility for trading to move resources internally). Resources would be less accessible on the map, more scattered, so terrain control and scouting would become more important. Strategic positioning of your buildings would probably become much more important (note that this fits well with a system where buildings would be costlier, and possibly need individual upgrades) . One could probably introduce a “maintenance” cost but it’s not certain that this is a necessity. This means much slower games, more on the scale of EU3 or RTW. You’d start with a very simple base, discover your surroundings, and develop slowly into a full scale civ with multiple bases/towns, while still trying to crush your opponent. Rushing would basically be ruled out, but you probably still would be able to strike at vastly different times depending on your focus. An hour attack or a 8th hour attack would become the new strategy. Clickfest is almost automatically out. Yet it doesn't get boring because things would always be happening as you could vastly increase the number of actions before you have a complete city. As for combat, this would make formations finally relevant because the scales would be right, and for the rest you could keep current simplifications. I think this could be a very, very enticing game if done right. The fun of building a base and the fun of classic RTS warfare. It would shift the focus from “basically all military” to “50/50” and that would imo be a very good thing. As a final word of conclusion, I am not suggesting this is the direction 0 A.D. should take, if only because it would be quite a dramatic departure and I am about 100% sure that we could never make it work (it’d be forever too slow with the current engine). I'm saying if someone ever wants to restart an RTS from scratch, this is the way to go.

wraitii: Very nice writing! (How could I miss this?) I'd like to add some more things that IMO cause the lack of well done (if initiated at all) proprietary RTS game development: - Software companies tend to focus more on visuals to have auto-generated material for advertising. That somehow rules out realistic and interesting scales for RTS games. This point is somehow valid for open source games also but not to the full extend. - Software companies have the declared goal to raise the profit / "fun to play for x hours" ratio with the target of reaching that of cinematics. This suits the more fundamental goal unregulated markets tent to: To artificially raise the demand by making it's value decrease fast to ensure/better future profit. (This only works because the consumers often think short term). For open source games that's entirely different. So IMO we should focus (and AFAICS are) focusing on long lasting fun game experience. - Some PPL seam to be bored by long games while IMO the actual fun comes with games that do last at least one hour. This tendency seams to increase. That is mainly true for the micromanagement fraction IMO. They also seam to be of the "more visible" kind making it good for advertisement to focus on their appetite rather than disappointing them and invoke their angered outcries. I especially agree (well, mainly on everything but especially) on: - It is very hard to get an outstanding RTS going. - We should not focus to much on things like naval warfare like ramming or other features that are IMO edge cases mainly. Keep it simple to be able to get it right. - Micro and macro oriented players should both be considered in game development (especially the scale of things). This way we can get the balance within our range of things. I like that we are more on the macro side but I don't think we should lean there to far or at least not exclusively. - Scales like map size and attack range variety matters! It can make a game feel like an entire new one. To make this count things have to be implemented carefully and with the global picture in mind. To many features and hard capping should be avoided to be able to examine the change in feel with the change in scale (and other basic things like over all damage/life ratio). For me formations are part of the "crippling the ability for natural evolving stuff to appear", too. I also think (while focusing on comfortable and casual gaming) we should keep an eye on competitive multiplayer. I'm enjoying to see that others feel about the same as me Thanks much!

I don't use Fedora, and different distros use different naming conventions, but it's listed as a package here: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/nspr-devel Also on CentOS, which also has yum, I typically use "yum search <<keyword>>" when I want to find a package. "yum search nspr" might find it for you.

If somebody already doesn't know, there's a new expansion for Age of empires 2 HD. In a recent interview, one microsoft guy had said that's called African Kingdoms (the theme was already know), and will feature Berbers (with camel archers) Mali, and probably Portugal (it's shown a white king on the front). In the interview there's also a imatge of a new AoM expansion. The post where i found the info said that the civs that are probably in are the celts, chinese and some mesopotamian civ (probably babylon or persia) Source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1067222 BTW, the announcement that I'm eager to hear are 0 ad going Beta (and a aoe1 remake that I know that it will be done someday)

Whenever I try to place the dock, unless almost the entirety of it is on land, it physically won't place. I'll try again, but same thing with the walls-whenever it was red, it wouldn't place it. EDIt: You are absolutely correct, I feel so stupid. Thank you!

Running the AI on every computer makes it impossible for the host to cheat with the AI. Deterministic AIs also make debugging easier, as we can reproduce AI behaviour of a certain game and see what went wrong. Determinism is generally something wanted in multiplayer development, and thus enforced by OOS errors.

Does this approach really solve more issues than it brings with it? If so please state which ones.

I would guess that the people who would be mostly interested in this are not even aware of the possibility for them to code AIs for the game. The more skilled programmers can probably find things out on their own, but the others might not even know about the game at the moment. More documentation is usually better (as long as it's not giving the end result of more outdated documentation of course), so I think it might be a good thing in the long run. It's not something that's very likely to get a lot of people enthusiastic in the short run though. So I encourage you to not give up just yet