Mythos_Ruler

I've noticed the bug where their units travel all the way across the map to gather from my berry bushes is back.

Yep, by all means, let's include as many features as possible. myconid's work is very exciting. Just saying the art dept will likely be focusing on things other than making normal and displacement maps for the foreseeable future. Though, I'll likely play around with terrain textures to see what I can do, if we add these features.

I see. The Market replenishes its resource stockpile over time (commerce and whatnot), and Traders take from this available stockpile. Interesting. Would be even more interesting if this was a global stockpile or something, similar to how resource bartering effects all markets on the map.

I can see it working nicely for, say, terrain and some stone walls, but at our zoom it would largely be useless for units and even many structures. Indeed, this is my main concern. Our active artists are: Pureon, Enrique, Eggbird, and myself. We're all busy doing essential work already... Pureon and I are even doing essential non-art work. I'm stuck doing technologies for another alpha or two, and Pureon is working on sound and other stuff. I'm more excited about AO, HDR, Bloom, etc., because it could take 1 programmer a few weeks or a month to get it all going and then BOOM, it dramatically increases the look of the ENTIRE game. Normal&Parallax mapping will take our artists (I'm not kidding) 100s of hours to make (folks need to appreciate the sheer number of models and textures we have now), and then it would only look good on one object at a time. An artist could spend 3 hours making bump maps and displacement maps for an object and it would be barely noticeable in the game by most players. A programmer could spend 3 hours and get bloom implemented and every single player would notice the difference. On the other hand... Having these mapping features could attract additional talent to the project. Additional art talent means more content over time, which is always good. And Indian architecture is so richly detailed, it could really benefit from these mapping techniques. And we don't have to drop everything just to add normal maps for everything in the game. If we just focus on terrain textures first, it would make a greater impact than if we, say, did units first.

Is there a "Mark All Read" button on the "View New Content" page? Can't find it. Edit: Nevermind, I guess it's a moot point, with the extra viewing options on the left. Very nice.

It would be nice if the spoiler tag had a button (like quotes and code have buttons). Is this an option or a mod? The

Which feature are we talking about, though? I see about 5 or 6 separate features being discussed in this thread. If it's normal and parallax mapping, I can live without those. AO, bloom, HDR, are enough to make the game look nearly AAA.

There are other considerations besides a simple cost:population ratio, like construction speed, armour, health, building footprint, villager time (time spent building that seemingly overpowered 150W house could have been spent fighting or gathering resources), etc. But yeah, I think it all balances out. Walls are not considered.

1000 of each resource is rather much. 300 or 250 of each should be standard or "default", with options for 1000 (high resources) or 10,000 (Death Match).

Dummy helpers work. You have to link them to the model and select both the model and the dummy helper when you "Export Selected."

Or even for WFG to expand upon the game for 0 A.D. Part 2 or anything that comes after.

Parallax mapping would make rooftiles look fantastic. And using it only in specific cases (like rooftiles and other areas) could help keep the performance hit low.

Playing against Macedonia on Oasis Gold 2, Macedonia didn't make another Civ Centre until around 25:00, which is wayyyy late. Should probably get it's 2nd one up by 15:00 and 3rd by 20:00. :/ But yeah, the resource gathering improvements cut down on some of the slowdowns, so that is nice.

Throw some distance fog in there and we got us a stew goin'!

I'm most excited about the SSAO. Works wonders for the buildings, especially those with colonnades.

They do not exist. We don't have support for normal maps/specular maps. We do have support for specular materials, but I don't think that would work on terrains.

I could see a river or tide moving up and down.... but actual "floods" during a standard scenario or random map would be aggravating.

You can do this in the SVN version of the game (and of course, the upcoming Alpha 10).

Yeah, I didn't notice much difference.

Hmm, a good idea. I'll try a long game now.

I could see it turning green to signify that it has been "snapped" to something, like another wall tower or a cliff face.

Hehe, sorry, yeah, I threw it into SVN because... Good work!

LOL, well, I just did that because the Iberian ram is rather weak. Plus they throw flaming javelins, so it makes sense from a visual standpoint too. None of this is by any means "final."

Exactly how I designed it. No anomaly there.