Mythos_Ruler

Not bad! Doesn't need fingers, so you can cut quite a few polys by removing those. Also, doesn't need a head, since heads are props.

Yeah, that's fine, brosephus. It might be possible to just edit the meshes and keep the existing skeletons. So, please continue.

The reasons for making new dude meshes are many-fold. Compatibility: The previously mentioned Blender compatibility. Compatibility is one of the major issues holding us back in the animation dept. It makes it difficult (i.e. impossible) for new talent to jump in and begin making animations for our existing units. Unit identification: A wider array of meshes, representing non-armored and heavily armored dudes, would give us distinctive "silhouettes" that would assist in unit identification from max zoom. This one is important and difficult to achieve with the current meshes which all have the exact same silhouette. Basically, what we'd do is have a set of "skinny dude" meshes for archers, slingers, skirmishers, and then a set of "beefy dude" meshes for heavy infantry. The proportions of the new dude meshes would conform more closely to an "ideal" artistic human proportion. Lastly, heroes would have a set of meshes with "heroic" proportions. They would be slightly taller and slightly more exaggerated, but not overly so. The key words are "exaggeration" rather than "cartoony." Basically, the design aesthetic would be less cartoony and more "stereotypical." We stereotype ranged units as skinny weaklings, while melee units are beefier and more muscular. And consequently, heroes are beefier than that, but not freakishly so, just enough to give each set a distinctive silhouette from a distance. A big thing that would also help this would be to have a specific set of idle animations for each type of unit. Right now they all use the same set of idle animations, which makes them less distinctive. So a combination of "stereotypical" meshes and new sets of idle animations for different types of units would make our units look 10x better and even assist in making gameplay better. Skinny, non-armored, ranged units: Beefier, heavy infantry ("Ideal") proportions, and then "Heroic" proportions for heroes:

There has been some discussion on IRC of just making all-new dude and dudette meshes. We already have a new horse mesh.

BTW -- your UI link is broken.

The Romans used these in their siege of the Gallic town of Alesia. That must have been brutal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a9J7xafruc ^A great vibe

I don't see it as an "artificial" cap. They represent specific people in history, so it doesn't make sense that you could train more than one of each. A standard hoplite doesn't represent a specific person, so you can train as many of them as you want to.

iirc, Hannibal only had 1 elephant (Sara or Sura) after he crossed the Alps. The others died of exposure. Though, Carthage used elephants somewhat effectively in Spain, and then disastrously at Zama.

A link to the bugs FAQ should be posted at the top of every forum and/or stickied to every forum.

Collada models "work" just like any other format once it's imported. But yeah, it's easy enough to export the models to collada or OBJ or whatever file format.

Yeah, until we get unit training limits put into place, it would be good to adhere to a set of "house rules" which includes training only 1 of each hero.

NICE!!!

Gonna make this helmet?

The closest the Persians have at this time is the Bactrian lancer, which is a proto-cataphract. The soldier is heavily armored, but the horse is not. The Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanid Persians had the "true" cataphracts. Romans in Part 1 are "pre-Marian" from the 2nd Punic War. I only included post-Marian units as scenario extras ("Easter eggs").

Who knows... We might throw a camel unit in, since they would make sense in a Persian campaign (they were used to good effect against the Lydians).

Here are some examples for you to go off of. What kind of soldiers are you interested in? Perhaps an Etruscan or other Italic soldier?

Do you use Photoshop?

I don't see any problem with having a few hotkey presets, as long as there is a preset available for WASDQE camera movement (as it is now). WASD for camera movement is intuitive to many types of players, including FPS and Total War gamers.

If a building is selected, we should try to make the unit training keys as they appear in the GUI. Also, we need to keep in mind that WASDQE are off limits, at least for the default hotkey setup (players can change it if they want to later).

Here they are next to some Thespian Black Cloaks.

We could probably also use some unit textures in the near future (we're thinking of adding lots of new units). Are you willing to try out a test project? Likely a texture for a unit or something.

Hi there. Right now most of the texture work we need done would be in the areas of map terrain, flora and fauna, and GUI. Have any interest in these areas? Kind regards.

Yeah, when we have running & charging, cavalry will be able to run down skirmishers quite easily.