Chakakhan

Looks like historic_bruno fixed this tonight!

Yea, don't worry, when I have free time means some time after October 1st.

I like the idea of having different "barrier" types. Each having different advantages and disadvantages. I think that would be interesting.

Wow, I never heard of Anno. What a neat looking game! I am going to have to purchase that and try it out when I have some free time.

Yeah Michael, Come on! I mean who attacks with only 120 men!!! Hey, I thought you were taking time off of 0AD for a few days... (AI creamed me by the way)

Well, we removed the sub-allocation of Sources and that eliminated some issues. Then we changed the way that we handle looped sounds and found that there is still a race condition on the buffers. We are currently looking at OpenALSoft as a possible solution on OS/X.

Hi Mirza, glad you are here!

There should be no issue running the game over a VPN. Once you have the VPN connected it should like you are on the same physical network to the game.

Great point! You have to be on the internet to play a lot of games now. I think this is one way the game studios get around pirating. Starcraft II has a hosted model as well (although it is modable). More people play Starcraft II mods than the actual game now. This is why I got so interested in 0AD. It has the potential to be all the things I imagined AoE might have become.

They have "Pro Packs" that let you start with an already leveled up Civilization. I agree that they did mostly strip things away just so they could add the leveling up concept. I thought the game was fun, leveling up took a bit too long though. The AI is really good and the pathing is really good, so that was entertaining for me from a technical perspective. The biggest problems are: Leveling up is tedious and takes too long.Online competitive play can potentially be very unbalanced. Advisers and gear can modify your stats pretty dramatically and you have to find these items to unlock them. So the fact that everyone has different stuff makes competitive play unbalanced.

This is true! I expected some new game play elements and there really aren't any. The leveling up concept doesn't really add anything new and exciting gameplay wise. But still, compare it to Starcraft II, that game still has simple tiered maps (mostly just 2 levels) with ramps leading up and down. There are some cool gameplay elements with the different races though and the game can still be fun to play with friends. It takes the easy way out on a lot of the technical issues that AoEo solved this time around. Hopefully there are some new features coming down the pipe.

I like this a lot! Nice little twist to it all. As long as there are knobs to adjust things, I think the complexities are fine and maybe even necessary to get things properly balanced.

Welcome back!

The SpiderMonkey and V8 APIs are too different to make them a "plugin" (without a huge development effort). All the API calls into JavaScript are different, the callback APIs are completely different, the Garbage collection mechanisms (rooting objects), etc. They are really very different. What historic_bruno was suggesting is that it might be easier to implement the missing v8 functionality you need in JavaScript and/or C++ so that it will run in the SpiderMonkey engine.

Back then, I would have pushed for Lua. It was the standard game scripting language at the time and Lua performance was much better than JavaScript. Now, JavaScript is a great choice! I think their arguments were weak, but I am glad they made the choice they did.

In the current implementation AI commands can override user commands, so we need to have some indicator in the orders queue to indicate if a command is user issued or AI issued (may already be there, don't know). This would allow us to have user issued commands that won't get overridden by AI commands. So if you tell them to move to a point, they will do their best to get to that point and not stop and engage the enemy on the way. It will also allow us to implement behaviors like attack move - move to this location but attack anything along your way. This is an example of a user issued command that can be overridden by an AI command. This is on our TO DO list.

I thought that this quest series was actually very useful, it taught you how manage worker production and farms production to maximize resource output. Once you get the hang of it you can actually do those quests fairly easily. I would just do it until it got hard, then play some other quests and come back to it later and was usually able to get the next level or two. I never did any one level more than a few times. I thought all the resource gathering quests were helpful to teach you balance. I thought some of the quests were very hard, but if I came back to them later with better gear and more practice they were easier to complete. I loved the game, my favorite of the Age series! The pathing and movement sets the bar for what I would like to see us do in 0AD. I quit playing because working on 0AD was more fun! Cheers, Kenny

Thanks for the feedback. The Unit AI (UnitAI.js) code is definitely a work in progress. It's a pretty complex problem and there is a lot of functionality in there. Also, lots of game play changes require this code to be changed to support the new functionality as well. There is a constant balance between providing infrastructure functionality and improvements and the improvements to the more visible aspects that affect game play. It is impossible to finalize something like Unit AI without having all the game play infrastructure pieces in place (we don't). So we haven't spent too much time optimizing this component because it is subject to lots of future changes. I don't think there is any specific work slated for Unit AI this alpha, but we are aware of the issues and we will be addressing them in the near future.

Looking Good!

I had one case where I had to remove DELAYLOAD for opengl as well. Only on one machine Win7 64 bit o/s.

It is a remote debugging system for SpiderMonkey. The server (0AD in this case) is written in C++. It talks to one of several standard Javascript debugging clients. The first one supported will be JSDT (the Eclipse Javascript debugger). So you can open up the debugger on another machine if you want or just open it up in a different window.

I am working on a script debugger, but it turned out to be a HUGE task. I am still shooting for inclusion in Alpha 7, but it could possibly slip to Alpha 8. It will allow you to step through the AI scripts and look at variables, set breakpoints and watchpoints, etc. Standard debugger stuff.

I like both of these ideas.

I think this is more than fine as long as the building attacks are adjusted accordingly. This is going to be an area where we differ considerably from a lot of other RTS games.

Hello Damjy, welcome! Look around, I sure you can find something that you can help us out with.