sanderd17

sbte (whoever this is on the forums) added a patch: http://trac.wildfire...com/ticket/1906

Isn't that all a bit too much of micro management? Are the attacks always ranged vs melee? In that case, I would say always prefer ranges first, and if the unit you're fighting comes into the minimum range circle, switch to melee. An alt+right click could use the melee attack directly. I think differencing between primary/secondary and initial/primary would be a bit difficult for the user to get. And hard to control if you're fighting with a complete army.

I like the idea of packed and unpacked buildings. Maybe combine it with some buildings that aren't movable, but always lose health. But I do think that buildings should only be able to execute their functions when being unpacked (only movable when they don't have a queue f.e.) As for balancing, I assume making the units strong or cheap enough would fix that. The Scythians didn't have anything like a siege tower, did they? That would be a nice replacement for a defence tower, but only if it's historically accurate.

Colors look great to me (I also thought they used vivid colors), but the feet look a bit un-detailed to me. If you see the detail of the drawings below the statue, you would also expect to see some tones on the feet. It's also something you see very well from the game's bird perspective.

So I make a ticket for this? EDIT: done (http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1906)

I've recently had two times the Persian cavalry unit turning the wrong direction when attacking. See the screenshots after a tiger and wolf attack. Basically, they start running away from the animal, until it's outside their minimum range, but when attacking the animal again, they only make a quarter turn instead of 180 degrees turn. The projectiles they fire do go in the right direction, but the actor is facing the wrong direction. When you give a new move command, they face the right direction again. It happens with all ranged units I tested (cavalry and infantry), but it's clearest visible with the cavalry units, as they have a triangular selection marker, and they move faster than the animal, so they can fire a projectile before the animal goes back into the minimum range circle. It also happens with a regular melee unit vs ranged unit. But only if the ranged unit can walk faster so he can prepare a throw. Is this a known problem? It's a 5 days old build, so I hope it's still the case.

i don't think this needs a UI change. there are lots of things not represented in the UI, such as the attack vs armour damage calculation, the projectile reload time ... the player just learns these while playing, and they should be available in some documentation or tutorial.

The difference between dogs and the others (horses and elephants) is that dogs operate on their own. Horses and elephants are always mounted. It's not just the horse you get, it's the horse cavalry unit (including rider). The same for sieges and ships, you could say they're mounted with some units to operate the sieges and ships (although it would be nice if some of the sieges could show the units).

Did you look at the image at 40px? The glow becomes so small it doesn't disturb the image any more. I have to agree it looks ugly at the current size, but at 40px, it's quite OK.

It's not planned as far as I know, but it could be interesting game-play wise to have a nomadic people. The next civ will probably be the Ptolemies: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16960

And you've never been hit by the hind legs of a horse. If you are unarmed it is quite difficult, but as almost every unit in 0AD is armed and armoured, they should be killable in every 1-to-1 fight. Dogs also have no armour at all. If a dog attacks, their most vulnerable parts are in the front. If you hit a dog on the nose with a sword or your fist, they pass out, if you stab them in the throat, it's also over. The problem with fighting against dogs is that they never attack alone, but then we're again with the numbers. I do really like the idea of a kennel increasing the dog population limit. I didn't expect this was technically possible. As Pedro said, some info in the tooltip would be enough. Maybe in the same format as the hero build limit. And in the kennel tooltip some info like "increase dog limit with 10 dogs". I also like the alternative bloodhound idea from Idanwin. If that's possible to implement.

100 food is cheap, but 1 population isn't. You can't really use them to create a big army. I don't mind they get taken down so easily, it's reality. they just should be cheap.

I've been wondering about the celtic war dogs. According to me, they're too expensive, but also too powerful. Just look at it, they're just as powerful as the celtic melee cavalry unit, while I know for sure I could survive a dog attack from a single dog, but not a cavalry attack. Even the horse on its own is more dangerous than a dog. But the price is also ridiculous. 100 food and 1 population for a dog? That means a dog has twice the value of a female, and you have to build houses to have more dogs. I suggest the dogs should cost less than a female, and no population. Something like 40 food. The attack value is more difficult to suggest, as the system will probably change to an exponential system. So I don't want to give a hard value for it, but it should be less than every other citizen soldier. It would make the game more realistic I think. An army with dogs is only effective if there are lots of dogs. Btw, maybe a nice technology for the kennel: "train bloodhounds" -> makes the dogs have a large vision range, more than normal soldiers (bloodhounds can smell humans from a big distance). What do you think about it?

Let me argue for the Germanics. Not a lot was known about the germanics, as they didn't bother to write something down, and didn't make long lasting structures. But some things were known. F.e., the Romans have never concurred a lot of Germanic tribes. After beating and murdering some Germanic tribes (s.a. the Eburones), he didn't move any further, and even called the Germanic Gauls the bravest of all Gauls (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar). Germanic tribes also invaded the Western Roman Empire, without a lot of fighting. The Franks concurred France, and called it after them. The Angels concurred England, and called it after them. They did all that without a lot of fighting. It all went quite easy. In fact, the only big wars they had were between different Germanic tribes and their offspring. They concurred North America without much trouble, Africa, India, big cities in China .... The only big wars they had to fight were between offspring of Germanic tribes. See the American civil war, the 100 years' war, the world wars... Guess which language we're talking now

Many thanks to Erik, it's a fine game you brought. Also thanks to Michael for taking up the lead. I'm sure you two can keep the steady and continuous growth of the game. As a reaction to Zoot, there's nothing wrong with a staff that's paid full time or part time, if others can also have the possibility to earn something. If you take something like a bid-for-fix system (http://www.bidforfix.com/), people can just take up the challenge, and if a fix gets released, the money can go to the developers who worked on that fix (it doesn't matter if they're part of the regular paid staff or not). Or some other system that gives rewards to the casual contributor.

I guess map makers can do this. There are rocks, there are bushes/grass you can use to obscure the source ... It all depends on the biome how a source is hidden.

I hadn't found the readme either. Is there any way to have the ./pyrogenis -h command be transformed into a cat xxxx/readme.txt Or even make a man file for pyrogenis?

I like your ideas. In small communities, everything happens around the civil center. In large communities, it's distributed.

You don't need a completed project to present at FOSDEM. Certainly not for the lightning talks. The lightning talks are normally about a single component of the project. Something innovative and finished (maybe it could be the pathfinder against next year F.e., this year, Wesnoth gave a talk about the animation engine. It's a hexagon-based game, but some units come out of the borders of the hexagon. As they don't use GPU acceleration, they need to be clever in other ways, so they calculate which tiles need to be updated when something is animated. An other game, Unknown Horizons, was just talking about how they used Jenkins to continuously test their software. You also don't need to bring promotional material if you don't have a booth. People don't expect to get something at the talks, they just expect a decent technical explanation of the subject, and a possibility to ask questions. I didn't know about LSM btw, until a month or two ago, when it appeared on other places I follow too. Is LSM always in the ULB? FOSDEM is, but I wonder if it's some kind of twin event (one in the winter and one in the summer).

heh Idawin, you should be glad you live in Belgium. as the prisoners are getting computers with internet access on their rooms now. I guess you'll just have to ask to install Blender

But they have serious problems with ranged units. They can't catch them and go down pretty fast. Btw, aren't elephants a bit too slow. I checked the speeds of a persian war elephant, and a persian cavalry spearman, and the walking speed is 7.5 for the elephant, and 10.5 for the horse. The charging speed is 12 for the elephant, and 25 for the horse. It's also the even worse with the maurians: the champion elephant has a walking speed of 7, and the cavalry javelinist 11.5. For charging speeds: 14 and 28.5 While if you look up their speeds, horses have the following average speeds: 6.4 kmh walking 13-19 kmh trotting 19-24 kmh lope 40-48 kmh gallop An elephant has the speeds 10 kmh walk speed 40 kmh charge speed So you see there's not a very big difference in charging speeds. And furthermore, as elephants don't change their running mode, they can gradually speed up without losing a lot of extra energy. While a horse has to change its run mode to something more energy consuming (e.g. trot to lope). I think speeding up the elephants could make them more interesting (and more realistic) to use, without changing the armour and attack stats. http://www.elecam.org/Downloads.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse

I think this is something that should be decided in the atlas (per map). If you could draw cost fields (which are in some way needed, doesn't matter if you use A* or flow fields) in Atlas, then you could make that swamp is slow to go through, and what you colour as road is fast to go through. Of course, automatically generated cost fields are nice (like making hills slower than flat terrain), but hand drawn cost fields could make maps more interesting.

What do you mean with oscilating paths? Units moving left-right-left-right ... ? I think that can be solved by smoothing it out. Don't go to the exact pixel with the least cost, but look 3-4 pixels ahead. That's only a very small calculation, and if the resolution of the flow field is big enough (so that every obstacle is bigger than 4 pixels) it should not cause routing problems. For the formations, you're right. You take one unit to follow the flow field, and the others will try to stay in a grid relative to that each other. Unless there's an impassable obstacle, in which case you have to break up the formation, and use regular pathfinding to get back in formation after the obstacle. The units going through each other could also be solved with dynamic flowfields. So, what's needed to implement this? 1. a static cost field per movement type (which only includes terrain and relief) 2. a dynamic cost field (only depending on non-movable entities) The dynamic cost field is updated every time a tree is cut, or a house is build. When you combine the two, you have the total cost field. The cost field should directly influence the moving speed. Btw, it would be nice if you could draw that static cost field in Atlas, so you can make a swap that's slow to cross etc. Now they just walk through a swamp as it's solid ground. After that, per command given to a unit, you need 1. Static flow field, this depends on the destination and the total cost field for that unit 2. dynamic additions to that flow field: for every movable unit, the ground under it becomes impassable until he leaves. As this can while travelling, this can't be included in the general flow field. Note that big units can have a "keep away" aura. If you have a "keep away" aura around a unit, other units moving won't go very near to them. This is good for sieges, so they can always follow their optimal path, and other units will go around them. After sleeping a night on it, I like it more. I think it should work with one big calculation per movement, and only local updates to avoid other moving units.

Flowfields are just a stored routing tree. And you can store it because you have the same destination point for a bunch of units. So it will bring a higher performance to the game, but I do see some problems. Since the flowfield is used by multiple units, the performance gain is because it doesn't have to be recalculated. So when you work with big units (think ships), if you want them to not go through each other, you need to edit (or re-calculate) the flow field. It looks like in that game, they allow units to squeeze together, which makes perfect sense for small units, but not for big ones. Also, I don't immediately see this working with formations. It looks like that game mentioned will not have formations, so units more freely to the same point. While in 0AD, units will need to stick to a certain grid, but also break apart on the right times. It would be great if there could be better cost fields already. A cost field where a forest is a really high cost for a siege, and a moderate cost for infantry. And a flat surface has no cost for any unit. With a good cost field, recalculations of the route should be fewer (as you don't have a lot of chance to bump into something), and the paths would look more logical.

the 'dangerous building site' problem is indded a very obvious one, but also the 'dangerous path to a safe location' is unknown. Sometimes, a location can be reached via 2 paths, and the AI makes the wrong choice. Maybe some other thing, do you plan to make the easy modes more fun? Easy modes should also raid a bit more at the start of the game.