poVoq

Yeah, never got beyond playing around with the camera angles in the config file. Not that I would have really been able to make this mod myself anyways. However the lack of easy modding options in 0 A.D., i.e. you basically have to fork the entire engine if you want to do more than simple addition of units or such, is really a bit discouraging. But maybe I am just too used to the nice mod support in most open-source FPS engines. Edit: but maybe this has changed by now... didn't check. And of course for a skilled programmer with in dept knowledge of 0 A.D. code base having all the source code available is the 'easiest' modding option... but for us tinkerers having a precompiled engine runtime and tinkering with configs and script through & being able to make a seperate game by simply having a subdirectory in the game folder and starting it with a execution argument or from an ingame mod menu simply makes things much more accessible. For the fundamental idea to make a hybrid of an ARPG and a RTS, 0 A.D. still seems to be the best option however.

How? Especially if you only have these files and no copy of 3Dmax at hand? It's nice that these work fine, but for expanding the set or modifying them an .fbx export would really help in the medium term.

No real point for a screenshot, but it works like this: After choosing a faction you can also choose a commander doctrine, these then open a tree of special commander skills (while playing to earn special points that allow to to select additional skills to become available, i.e. each time choose one out of three skills). Typical stuff would be to call in a special air-strike, or reinforcements from off screen, or call to arms motivation boost of your troops etc.Then the skill has a cooldown and can only be used again after some minutes.

So a bit like the commander abilities one can choose in Company of Heroes? Could be linked to important historical figures instead of "divine powers"?

An export to .fbx would be probably good if someone wanted to continue working on this without C4D. At least in Blender .dae imports are notoriously broken, and I hope it would work better with .fbx

Ah, cool. Would be an quick way to make RTS animations I guess (for other genres it is way too imprecise). .iqm/.iqe can also be re-imported into Blender with only little loss. But it has become a bit of a standard in FOSS FPS games, and is definitely nicer to work with then collada for rigged character meshes. See: http://sauerbraten.org/iqm/

What would not work? The guy behind that tool is pretty responsive and would probably be willing to fix smaller issues.

With this open source tool you can easily load the Ryzon animations and apply them to other rigs I think: http://www.moddb.com/mods/r-reinhard/videos/iqebrowser-v212-teaser Edit download here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/r-reinhard/addons/iqebrowser-v212 Edit2: Ahh it seems like you can even use an old Kinect to do motion capture in your home with the above tool See: http://www.moddb.com/mods/r-reinhard/videos/iqebrowser-v210-teaser

If the lacking animations are a problem, maybe using the CC-by-SA licensed Ryzom animations would be a short-cut? http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?t=5138&p=62621 They include simple sword fighting and crafting (mining etc.) animations... not sure about bow shooting though.

Awesome work, can't wait to see these in game fully animated!

Looks like Spidermonkey just got a massive speedboost: http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-twenty-two-times-faster

There's actually plenty of 0 A.D. art in Stunt Rally already

Back when I tried this (sorry I seem to have deleted the modified config since then, and never did any code) it only extended the global config, e.g. you can add new key-bindings and overwrite others and also change the camera settings but you can't have a completely seperate local config that doesn't carry all the RTS specific stuff that rather interferes with the ActionRPG settings. ---- But it is great to hear that there is some renewed interest (especially with a iterative development style that keeps close to 0AD). Not sure if a Blender hybrid integration is really needed if the collada export is working ok now. For high quality RPG like animations one can probably reuse the Ryzom ones, which were recently converted to the much more usable iqm format and which could probably be easily exported to the 0AD also. So all that is needed art wise are some higher quality character models that could in the long run also replace the really low poly RTS models from main line 0AD if kept reasonably low poly. Something around 3000 tris should look and run fine for that. If this really takes off I could probably find the motivation to start doing a modular character set like described above (I am a sufficiently skilled 3D artist, but lack motivation to work on something that isn't a working project). Anyways... looking forward to see where this goes!

Yes, I did just that as an experiment a while back and also changed the camera zoom and angle to fit for a action RPG. It was working quite well, except that the remaining RTS controls from the default config were not possible to remove and thus were messing up the overall game-play.

hmm ok, C++ functions seem to make more sense in most cases then. What about modding though? If you don't want to modify core 0AD but still have some performance problems, using some compiled asm.js javascript code might be helpful, no?

You are thinking to much in the limits of 0AD only... inventories would be usefull for mods... something like Warcraft3 with usable items for example. And last time I checked using a completely own config file was only possible if one would fork 0AD completely into a separate game, a mod always has to extend the existing core config/mod. This might be intended, but is not very user-friendly for creating total conversion mods without forking. Sometimes forking is undesirable as you might want to keep it a mod during early development for people to be able to quickly download and test/play early versions without messing up their main 0AD game. It also makes it easier to contribute back to the main game if your are modding and not forking. Edit: practical examples mentioned in the mod forum: making a turnbased game like Civilisation, or a ActionRPG-RTS hybrid. Both need quite extensive changes in the config etc., but one could start small an keep it a mod for 0AD if true moddability was possible (and not just extendability like it seems to be the case so far).

I assume that means asm.js extensions would be usable now too? ( http://asmjs.org/ ) Would that be of any help with 0AD?

Yes, this would be really useful. Btw. is it now possible to use a completely separate main config file in a mod instead of just extending the default one?

While many people know Javascript, it is not exactly the most liked programming language and for modders still not that easy to grasp. Having an background as an artist, I really like those node-based shader editors (or Blender's somewhat limited logic blocks), which allow you to easily conceptualize the flow of a program visually. Something similar also exists for regular Javascript programming: noFlo: http://noflojs.org/ and they also recently successfully kickstarted their development environment: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noflo/noflo-development-environment I think this could be really awesome for modding and given that itself also runs under JS, it should even be possible to integrate it in 0AD. A big strength of such a system is also the shareability of code blocks, which could really kick off modding by vastly lowering the entry barrier for new developers. What you do think?

Every time I had to deal with collada it was a major pain in the a**. I have to agree with what is stated here: http://opengex.org/ Otherwise: the developers of the Godot engine have their own "fixed" collada exporter for Blender: https://github.com/okamstudio/godot/tree/master/tools/export But I guess that doesn't help in this case.

Pretty cool game: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/resurrect-revenge-of-the-cats-ethernet-as-open-source-project/ Not much left and you can download and try it right now. It's not just another FPS! Hopefully this can become a similar success story as 0 A.D. after it became open-source.

This would be still cool How is the status now regarding the heroes and the posibility to have total conversion mods including custom configs? Would the GUI scripting allow for something like an inventory with "item tetris"?

Honestly... I agree those look fine for ingame models. However maybe actually using a smaller resolution texture (currently there are multiple 1024x1024 maps, right?) might help. After all on a typical screen the model is maybe 500x500 pixels in total at maximum, so the engine has to combine a lot of texels into one on screen pixel. A sharper 512x512 texture would thus maybe look better in game than what you currently have, without loosing any real texture detail on screen at all.

Heh, those buildings give me a bit of a steam-punk vribe, still nice looking... though as previously mentioned a bit too monochrome. Oh and great to hear that you are going open-source with your game... please also use CC-by-SA the the license for the graphics to have full compatibility with 0 AD assets.

Hmm... actually to my experience living in Nepal for 3 months, something like this (buffalo cart) is much more common than oxen carts. Not sure about Mauryan time though