FeXoR
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Posts posted by FeXoR
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Great thing in general, even better for 25 min
That's a job for the animators, I think. Adding a physics engine would take a lot longer than 25 minutes!
Hehe ^^
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What kind of "emergent behavior" is supposed to occur when we place some hoplites in phalanx formation? They'll move slower, and because their shields overlap they'll get an armour bonus. Melee cavalry in a Wedge formation will get a charge attack bonus. All of these things are "hard coded" with the formation, so I'm not sure what you're saying.
Some examples a units could "naturally" benefit from formations:
- Units with shield might have a chance to catch arrows with their shield but only in the angle the shield faces. In a formation all units can hold their shield towards the outside of the formation because the other side is guarded by his comrades.
- Tall units with high piercing resistance could be used for others to hide behind if no enemy melee units are near.
- Siege engines could be guarded by melee troops defending them against enemy cavalry.
- Units could swap places when a unit at the edge of a formation gets hurt. With healers present the wounded could be healed inside the safety of a formation. A fresh one could take his place.
- If there where a moral system, moral could go down when fighting while moral regeneration dependent of how many ally unit are near. When circling (like the "got hurt"/"heal" example above) more units would allow higher benefit from it. Moral could just be a damage modifier so damage is scaled down between full damage (full moral) and half damage (no moral left).
- In general harder to kill units/melee units could guard the edges while ranged units could fire from within safety.
Those are just some examples that came to my mind. I don't have the highest interest to have any of those in the game but I wouldn't mind. I just don't want to have things in that seem "enforced"/"unnatural"/"artificial"... I don't know how to explain better x)
However, I think formations could work great. But until this is indeed the case, please let the player decide if he wants to give a command to all selected units separately or as a formation.
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Perhaps a (not to large) picture of the region of the world could be added to every map (random and scenario) where the rough location of the map is marked. Since not all maps are in a specific region of the world (like random biome maps) it might be a better idea to just add a picture to each map that might by default does as said above but also could display something very differently.
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Actually it is a good opportunity to implement crowdfunding
Some people likes to donate for nothing in return,
Ofc. they should get something in return and they do. They get attention, a banner in the forum and the good feeling they supported something they have chosen to like and so it's more likely the game will get awesome... and they made it possible.
In addition (dependent on the donation) they could get physical material around 0 A.D. like an installation CD, printed artwork/game manual/historic civilization notes/..., CD stickers/jewel case. Other non-gameplay non-physical stuff could be granted as well like special avatars, being named as a donator in the credits, perhaps even other artwork to use in the game. But giving them an advantage in game is a bad idea IMO.
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I think this is the wrong way and the benefit of formations should come out as emergent feature from the basic rules of the game.
As for the speed issue:
I think its perfectly realistic that formations move slower than individuals and not a problem gameplay-wise.
When moving units to the enemy, units should march in a loosely coupled formation more like a snake than a fixed column.
The effect on speed would then be negligible.
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The benefit of formations in real world comes from covered flanks and higher morale if you have your own troops around you.
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If you merely give bonuses according to in which formation the group is, you are missing a lot of emergent behavior,
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Yep
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The idea for the column formation is that units should move faster in column formation, which helps speed things up considerably... but they're also more vulnerable in Column formation (they have half of their armour while in this formation). Units should fall into Column when tasked to move over long distances, then fall into line formation or battle formation or phalanx formation when they get close enough to the destination.
Sounds reasonable to me (and about balanced since movement speed increase has a drawback in armor here). Still there are some other things to consider e.g. changing a formation leads to longer paths for each unit, what happens if the army hits another army on its way, etc. So in the end the units might reach their target later while giving a move order has the aim to get units to a destination as fast as possible AFAIK.
I mainly would like to have the possibility to give a move command to more then one unit at once (like most other commands) with the same possibilities available elsewhere (like running/charging or attack-move) and without any other stuff (like formations or glue functionality). But I don't have this alternative though it seams straight forward. Please add this... ATM I'm using the attack option for this which seams quite strange (using an attack command to make the units move).
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Donating is different to paying to get advantages in the game
Please don't
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I agree with Geek377 - I don't think anyone wants an army to take up to 3x longer to get to an enemy base (formations constantly turn to avoid obstacles) - we need to think about gameplay, not just realistic movement speeds
Shaped formations don't fall under the category "gameplay" for me, it's more visuals.
To make units try to stay close to each other (maybe a kind of glue functionality like in Warcraft III) is one thing and does have a gameplay value because if they get into the fight together they are more efficient (But with the drawback of the speed of the group is reduced to the speed of the slowest unit in the group, though one could still gather units close to the point to attack and then attack together). Making them form a pre-defined shape is another think that is mainly visual. Enforcing the "nice looking" things to be effective by enabling features for them that are not otherwise available is a very bad idea IMO.
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- When moving in formation, and changing formation/direction, some units move much faster to get to their new position in the formation.
However, it seems like there is no way to order units to move that fast on their own.
I don't think you should use this 'speed hack' for keeping up formations but rather slow the other units down.
I totally agree
And finally on the speed issue, I disagree with you. It seems more logical for a group of soldiers to move faster in formation because they are basically marching.In my book "marching" is slower then "walking". If you march you have to watch what other units do marching with you especially if you have to form a specific shape with them. So it's more exhausting than simply walking. Moving in a formation should be slower (or cost stamina) because of that.
If the player is not allowed to make it's units run individually but allow running in case of formations it pretty much feels like enforcing formations to be of use.
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I think it should be quite simple but it's probably too simple.
Music on: Enemy force is 3:1 within radius
Music off: Enemy force is 1:1 within radius
(yours v.s. theirs) = (NB = no battle, BU = battle music for us, BT = battle music for them)
* 1 v.s. 1 = NB
* 1 v.s. 3 = BU
* 10 v.s. 10 = BU & BT
* 10 v.s. 1 = BT
* 30 v.s. 10 = BT
* 10 v.s. 30 = BU
What does radius mean? On screen? A fixed radius around every point of a grid?
It seams to me like that battle music would be on most of the time until players filled the map (which can happen quite fast on tiny to medium maps).
I think battles should rarely happen so the player gets his blood pumped with adrenaline if the battle music starts ^^
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Here's a crazy idea... How about make the battle music be controlled by the player, and confer some sort of advantage in battle?
Make it sort of an overall health, some heroes could bring more than others, and it would run down over time. The player would choose when to go into battle mode, and when to turn it off and save some juice.
While the music was on units could perform better, as it wore down the effect could lessen, thus stimulating a battle fatigue.
OK, too much, right? I'll go back to coding now...
This way it would have a gameplay impact at least. With a cooldown I'd like it on the first glance
Shouldn't be overpowered though. Perhaps heal 10-20% stamina, 5-10% health and add 1 piercing and 1 hack damage for all units.
It would then work about like powers in AOM or TBfME though no supernatural background is required.
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Oh, didn't even notice it was the video thread x)
Here we go (Who made this one and when?):
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the tree must place in group not individually
That would make pathfinding a lot easier but also would not be very realistic. Trees in forests are more or less equally distributed (simply because being to tight to each other makes them get less light). So I decided rather to define a tree density and not to use many small groups of trees. As a side effect it generates much faster then with clump placers avoiding itself with the same number of trees in total and it looks like wider areas of the map are covered with woods. And, as said before, it makes the map unique.
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Having the town bell make garrison females only would sometimes make you loose a battle if your citizen soldiers loose the battle outside the civil center and the civil center does not deal enough damage before it is destroyed. Garrisoning only the citizen soldiers may perhaps lead to earlier deaths at your side (females) but may lead to a victory of yours because citizen soldiers add damage to the civil centre and the civil centers high armor and health/structural points protect your damage dealing units. So in the second case you'd loose less.
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My thinking is we should add Hard difficulty cheating AIs as soon as possible (even if the difference between the non-cheating bot is just a resource multiplier). Otherwise users will start looking for a challenge elsewhere.
I agree as far as the non-cheating AI is kept the main developed bot.
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The main simplification seems to be that they only calculate the fluid physics in 2D. It is probably still too advanced for our uses but perhaps some approximation could be found that looks reasonably nice, even on lower-end systems.
Additionally incompressibility is enforced that reduces complexity to n*log(n) which is quite nice. At the surface it's fully 3D still as far as I get it. The grid used seams to be quite rough and particles are used to further increase the visual detail level.
However, astonishing!
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Really nice!
I noticed that some very different textures where used for wood (e.g. for the roman army camp) which does not look very fitting. It seams it's the case here for the carrier of the roof and the arbor of the bucket rope, too. Doesn't look bad though. Just wanted to mention.
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Consider something like this for rivers:
Is this really calculated in real time??? The Navier-Stokes equation is pretty complex to calculate even with further simplifications for high fluidity...
This also seams to include a general physics engine (including most of mechanics like inertial and gravitational mass, coherent bendable materials etc.). I'd strongly advise not to try to implement this on our own but rather use an existing physics engine if available. It's hell a lot of work and has to be implemented extremely efficient.
Of cause it would be cool to have though ^^
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Now supports brit/gaul: http://fexor.dyndns....ack2012-6-9.zip
Roads are not placed any more by default.
Any idea how prevent resizing of my avatar?
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My suggestion is that when melee troops manage to reach ranged troops in combat, ranged troops should fall back to a melee alternative. Therefore eliminating the annoying process of watching my troops travel across the entire map chasing one javelineer.
Thats a problem caused by 2 decisions IMO:
- Ranged units are faster than melee units (when both unmounted)
- Units stick to a target until it's dead (or another target is given manually ofc.)
IMO attacking units (especially melee units) should check for a better (closer/attacking/healing) target whenever their current target moves (ATM melee units can't deal damage to a moving target anyways even if they are faster since they can't attack while moving and when the target is reached and they stop to attack attack the damage would be dealt somewhere in the process but at this point the target is out of range again).
I know that balancing comes in beta but I'm not quite sure how to balance ranged mounted units if they are fastest (even if as fast as melee mounted). They can't be hit but by other ranged units if the unit AI avoids enemy melee units well and if facing a ranged food army (which might be more cost efficient) just run somewhere else to attack. In case of Iberians they can even destroy buildings and siege engines well.
Melee units should run faster than ranged units (when running/charging is implemented) which would make some sense because they may be stronger and so might charge faster even with the heavier equipment while still walking slower than ranged units. That would make stamina a real issue for melee units. Still ranged mounted units would be a problem...
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ops... i missed that he wants isometric games
btw, MegaGlest is actively developed, Glest not anymore
Nice to know, I'll have a look (made a mod for glest with more complex unit dependencies though only one race then).
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qBot has surprised me a few times since we implemented Phases, but 99% of the time I defeat qBot handily. lol I'm actually starting to wish it would cheat a little more (gets free tech upgrades at predetermined times, etc.).
I'd like the AIs to be implemented without cheating as far as possible before adding cheating ones for better players
. The non cheating ones could be OK for medium difficulty if done well. -
The wind blown sands grace the city walls.
farmers bend their backs under an oak tree bough,
While fighters born, stoop ore the plough.
The sands speak of chaos,
Battles without end.
wars to impend.
Straighten your spine,
And ready your spear,
For battle, is here!
Welcome to the 0AD community.
I don't get how your post fits here but am quite sure it makes sense to you
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How well does that work for contributors who don't have an SVN account? I suspect not at all.
I have no personal SVN login and I have no problems updating things AFAIK.
About the game roadmap
in Game Development & Technical Discussion
Posted · Edited by FeXoR
There's another problem with voting. Assuming the community votes in the end they may vote for something that the programmers don't want or at least don't want to do. Then the propellent forces pushing development forwards - motivation to code for 0AD in the free time - will start to fade.
I think the team is doing a great job! Even if I don't agree with all concepts I think they are on the exactly right track of how to create an awesome open source project and am sure they or their successors will reach finalization.
Another minor thing: I think for an unfinished game this one is played by quite a few people. And AFAIK the game is in general getting better playable each alpha release (and additionally more feature-complete and pretty/ambiance rich). Many positive comments (like my first glance) was about how much care is taken here for the detail. Though I'm only a fan for detail if it's not very time consuming/resource needing other's might say that's what make a game great.