alpha123

Haha, wow, that's weird... my and my little sister started watching it partly because of him and some other people I respected on various forums that liked it. I can honestly say it's the best show I've ever seen. When I see LordGood again I'll have to ask him how he drew ponies, mine never turn out nearly that good. :/ Anyway, to keep this remotely on-topic, I think the icon with the eyes would make for a great quinquereme portrait, which would be nice because currently the Medium Warship has a much nicer and more powerful looking portrait than the Heavy Warship. Is there anything keeping the quinquereme portrait from getting in game? EDIT: Oh, never mind, the eyed portrait is used for the trireme. IMO we should use the eyeless one for the trireme and the eyed one for the quiquereme, although the eyes should maybe be more prominent.

I suspect he is/was very busy with school (although he's probably done with that by now) and/or life. I'd love to see him come back and do more unit portraits though, he's such an amazing artist (and is one of the reasons I started watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic but that's another story...).

At least trac.wildfiregames.com runs on Philip's own server, which of course he has complete access to. IIRC he was planning to run the autobuilder on that.

Like #0ad? (It's meant for multiplayer stuff, although yes, occasionally some dev talk happens. Still, the real problem is that nobody wants to play.) The problem is not that we don't provide a way for players to communicate, it's that there are very few people wanting to play multiplayer. Compounding the problem is time zones; when most American players want to play the European players are asleep. If some TeamSpeak or Hamachi stuff increases participation, I'd say go for it! Also, the lobby will probably be in soon, like Alpha 14 or Alpha 15.

One of the things that makes Starcraft (both 1 & 2) great is that it's extremely simple. It's a fast-paced game of strategy and skill, which makes it both fun to watch and fun to play. There are no complicated rules to keep in mind, but the game is still very difficult to play. In particular, Starcraft 2 makes macro as skillful as micro (this wasn't the case in Brood War, where do to all the oddities of the engine good micro was extremely difficult) which is something I haven't seen in other RTS games. Each race in Starcraft has its own "macro mechanic," which adds a lot of extra skill to the game. Being able to inject larvae or chrono boost extra Colossi while in a heated battle separates the good players from the weak ones. Age of Empires-type games have nothing like this; just keep your buildings training and claim new resource locations occasionally and you'll be fine. Another thing is that every unit has its use. Even the earliest units are useful until the end of the game. Also, each unit has a counter, so if you can scout your opponent and see what units they are making you can create units to destroy those easily. This makes scouting more important in Starcraft than most games, and finding and killing enemy spies (such as Observers or Changelings) is very important. Continually gathering intelligence on the enemy and making sure they can't do the same to you is difficult yet necessary to be a strong player. I've even seen some pros fake out the opponent, making them build units to counter a specific build when in fact the player did something entirely different. Then of course there are the completely different and yet well-balanced races. I haven't seen another RTS that pulls this off half as well as Starcraft 2 (which IMO didn't pull it off quite as well as SC:BW). Really there's nothing novel about Starcraft (except possibly its treatment of high ground and cliffs), but the execution is almost flawless. The simplicity combined with strategic depth makes Starcraft fun to play and fun to watch.

South Korea probably is. Although German and France are actually pretty good-size RTS markets.

Yeah, and in order to finish the game eventually we must not have a bunch of options.... Meh, I'd go with Spahbod's, but frankly I don't really care for this feature. Once capturing is implemented some scenarios could have natives, but that's purely up to the map designer.

I generally don't float more than 1000 resources until I'm maxed out, but I agree macro is really simple in this game. I tried playing StarCraft II recently and was blown away by the amount of macro attention that game requires (which is a good thing IMO). In 0 A.D. it's enough to check that your buildings are training something, build an extra house every so often, and build an extra barracks when you start to get too high on money. I'm not really familiar with the concept of 'upkeep,' but any way to make macro a little more difficult would be nice.

#657 #643 Breaking it up between females and citizen soldiers is a good idea IMO.

leper speaks German as his mother tongue as well, and additionally is a very skilled programmer. He visits the forums fairly frequently. alkazar hangs out on the IRC channel a lot and also lives in Switzerland and speaks German.

This summarizes my thoughts pretty well. That's not to say it doesn't have a place in an (eventual) campaign though, but it should be done with triggers and be map specific as opposed to actually being implemented in the game itself.

I have exactly the opposite opinion: The JVM is a very impressive piece of software, nearly capable of matching C++ in speed (LuaJIT still gets the award for best VM in my mind though). Java the language... um... this sums up my opinion pretty well. BTW, this is coming from a guy who used to love Java. I used it a lot as a beginning programmer, but now I wish I'd just discovered Lua or Ruby or Python. Java enforces a narrow way of thinking and overcomplicates things for beginners... and advanced programmers.

The fluid simulation is fantastic though.

Presumably you are familiar with StarCraft? Our groups work a little differently, as sanderd17 explained. So to add 5 swordsmen to the group, select them and then press Shift+1 Ctrl+1. sanderd17: That's a decent idea, although I'm not really sure if Shift+1 Ctrl+1 is much harder. I was using Ctrl+Shift+n for my experimental "restrict selection" stuff, but I don't really know if that's useful (also I think I lost all my work on it when I had some problems with SVN).

Java's actually a terrible language, especially for new programmers it complicated everything.

Neither, although the former is probably worse. Yes, especially when there are more in one player's territory than another. Do you know when they will raid? Do you know that they will raid all players equally? One of my problems with the idea is that something outside your or the other player's choices is influencing the outcome of the game. That would be fine with me. If we had such maps that would be great. Some multiplayer-optimized, symmetrical maps would be fantastic. I'm a pretty bad map designer though, plus the idea would have to wait for skirmish maps to be implemented anyway. Not any more, although there was a time when it was popular when most players went for a female-heavy opening. I agree that animal raids would give an unfair advantage to the rusher. I sort of like that idea, actually. I think it might work well for some scenarios, but not for general multiplayer; perhaps for some special multiplayer maps. . I would prefer no raiding bears at all, although raiding only for single player would be OK. That's true, it would distinguish us in an unconventional way. But I'm not really sure that it's a good thing. Do you mean that a bear would come by, attack a farmstead, and you'd have food subtracted from your resources? I don't think that's particularly difficult, although it's not trivial either. +1000

Do you want to know how a computer works or how to program one? Frankly I can't say I fully know how they work. As for learning to program, I recommend simply diving in headfirst. When I was 12 I took a few programming books (on Perl, of all languages...) out of the library and just started experimenting. I think that's a good way. If I may recommend a language to learn, I'd say Lua. It's very simple and easy to understand, but also quite useful. Play around with LÖVE (although stay off their forums, they're rather hostile ). LÖVE is a very easy-to-use game engine that makes creating simple games very easy. Start with something very small and simple - pong or something. Your English is fine. I understood you just fine. You should probably be aware that English is the language of programming though - the vast majority of programming resources out there are in English.

As a fairly competetive player, I would find this extremely annoying. It adds an extra element of randomness to what should be a deterministic clash of skill and strategy, and adds another thing to worry about which doesn't really add any new skill and which distracts from what the game should be about: building the biggest army possible and using it in the smartest way possible.

You simply need to pratice a bit more, soon you'll be beating even Very Hard AegisBot fairly easily. The AI really is very easy right now. I highly recommend the Starting Economy Walkthrough map, found under Scenarios and select Demo Maps.

I say do it, as long as GCC, clang, and VS2010+ support it. I tend to strongly dislike C++ for a number of reasons, but IMO C++11 is a big improvement, especially with auto, lambdas, and the smart pointer stuff. Also, move constructors could definitely give a speed improvement, albeit probably a fairly smalI one. I would be slightly hesitant to move if only VS2012 supports it; a number of people including myself are still on VS2010. Additionally, I feel like clang is a better compiler than GCC and we should try to maintain compatibility with it. (Although I'm not sure, do we even support clang currently?) Whoever maintains these forums: it's a real pain to post with mobile Firefox. The editor is incredibly finicky; it won't even let me insert a new line, among other things.

You are a very talented animal modeller, I really like these. However I think it looks a little bit blocky currently. Don't be afraid to go into a bit more detail with it, it looks very low poly right now. You could probably get away with 500-600 just fine.

Haha, oops. Sorry about that. It looks like the topic URL changed as well, that kind of stinks. Oh well. If any of you experienced/powerful mods know how to fix that, the previous ID was 1219.

*whistles* Nothing happened, you guys didn't see anything.... In my defense, those moderator tools are not exactly intuitive (at least to me). =P I didn't mess anything up too badly, right?

I took the liberty of merging this with the official "Suggestions for 0 A.D." topic, since there's really no reason not to. (They even have the same title and everything....) EDIT: ...And hurray, I managed to both unpin it and move it to the wrong forum! >_< Hopefully everything's fixed now.

I'm personally against an explore button, simply because we don't need it. It's not hard for a weak player to queue up a few movement commands on the minimap, while a strong player will usually want to be constantly checking on their scouts and scouting more intelligently than an Explore button could.