Jubalbarca

http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3290.0 Frontpage plug on Exilian has happened

The art tends to be the limiting factor in a lot of game modding, in my experience. Finding people with really good 3d artwork skills is rarely easy.

The question (which has been hounding the AI guys since I was doing it!) is what you give up in flexibility to allow better performance. If I recall, the main issues tend to be things like distance calculations and movement stuff (in particular things like resources, where one was continually cycling through all the workers on the map, then for each of those calculating distances to every tree on the map to work out which was closest), but I don't know how integrated those are now anyway, I'm pretty out of the loop. Out of interest, as a general ballpark idea, if one literally hardcoded the entire AI in C++ would all the above times become negligible/near instantaneous? I don't really know how big the JS penalty is and how much it's just that the AI is making too many calculations - because the alternative to pushing more into C++ is to work out a way to do less to start with.

Interested to see how this goes, sounds exciting! What kind of numbers of AIs per generation will you be testing?

http://exilian.co.uk/index.php We (we being Exilian) are giving you some front-page time at the moment, and FB/twitter shouts.

Does anyone play Mount & Blade here? That's got a very neat way of doing it, a start box that pops up with a module selector.

I know, I'm just not sure if "buildable terrain" could work as a thing or whether it'd have to be some specialised type of building...

Beautiful work! Excited by the much faster loading time too.

I think the way Age of Mythology did it, with some paving placed under the buildings (or even having some paving created around each like the gaia creep effect) would work nicely. Longer distance roads I'm almost wondering if one could build (with faster movement when moving on them?)

I think dynasties are probably a level of complexity too far, it'd make the came about three times harder to balance. 0AD has a lot more factions than R2TW, and having to balance three major bonus sets for each would take ages. Also it's a bit ahistorical, in that the different dynasties in question probably didn't usually bring massively different things to the table - certain individuals did, but that's represented by heroes.

That'd be really useful

I just find it's hard to make good-looking spikes. And the gradients aren't actually that unrealistic as Thorfinn points out.

Fantastic, added it to my site's additional maps index if that's OK? http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2558.0

Unless the garrisoning had an accompanying anim it would look really quite boring that way though; and if they're all in your city, well then it's sort of your job to protect your economy. Gold farms make sense (cash crops) - for trees what I'd like to see would be tree growth naturally occurring in areas of the map where there wasn't significant building, so the wood tends to replenish over time (which is after all how forests generally work, particularly on timescales such as that of going from a tiny village to a city).

I'm not sure exactly what you mean? The scores on this will work so you gain or lose depending on whether you won or lost the game and who you were playing against - it's a sort of percentage expectation of whether you'll win that determines your potential gains/losses.