WhiteTreePaladin

Turrets would be needed too. There has been some discussion on them.

I think the original reasoning for the free buildings was that the Ptolemies would have had many ancient structures already built from old Egypt. That's also why the build set was heavily skewed Egyptian rather than Greek. The longer building construction time was a gameplay concession for balance. Doesn't mean it has to stay this way, just that's what I remember in the discussions back when the Ptolemies were first added. (I haven't played AoM. It's possible the effect was inspired by AoM, although I don't remember it being brought up at the time.)

This looks really nice. Even if many players want to control individual units (Age of Empires style gameplay), perhaps one or two of the main civs could be retrofitted to be battalion based civs to allow for more overall civ/gameplay variety. Rome or one of the Greek civs would be good candidates.

You all think it's bad now? Back in my day, we didn't even have an AI, or any multiplayer either. Imagine playing a game like that, then having it rewritten so that all terrain is solid black, and buildings, trees, water, mountains, and pretty much everything just let units walk right through without restriction. Units didn't automatically migrate to fresh resources, they just stopped working. As a bonus, depleted resources didn't disappear, so you had to manually pick each tree to see if the workers would gather from it. I think one reason it seems there's less progress happening today, is that there's less obvious progress to make. We're closer than ever to a completed game.

We really need a "paint entity" brush feature in atlas for trees.

I like both. Perhaps one can be used for a different civilization?

Yes, but if I remember correctly, the code that handles ships is hardcoded to an attribute on ships. We'd probably want to base it on a new attribute, put the roll/sink properties in the XML, and update ships to use the new properties too. This would allow us to adjust the roll rate, etc. for different types of entities without having to recompile.

Looks like they fixed the preview! Thanks for taking care of that.

The recent black powder demo combined with this foliage would work well for the start of an AoE3 / age of discovery mod.

Yeah, I'm sure everyone involved would appreciate a better preview image. Not sure if that's possible or not.

Sounds like Age of Empires, with the maximum Age option set. I like Age of Empires well enough, so that's not a bad thing.

I believe the (white) design on the sails should be underneath the ropes that form the grid on top of the sails. Your other images (with a blue sail design) already have this though, so I'm not sure if it is just an issue with that particular image.

I'd actually put build limits on all the ships, but that's a separate topic.

That sounds awesome!

Ah, there they are! (I forgot about the win/loss ones - I'll have to add those to my album.)

I actually made my own album of Boris Hansen's music awhile back. I called it: "0 A.D. - The early years." I used the old menu screen for the album art. Track List: 0ad Main Theme (very different from current theme - nostalgic to me) Carthaginian Battle 1 Carthaginian Battle 2 Germanic Peace 1 Germanic Peace 2 Germanic Peace 3 Hellenic Battle 2 (Not sure what happened to Hellenic Battle 1 or if it even existed) Persian Battle Persian Peace Roman Battle Roman Peace Roman Defeat [edit] Sadly, I think I made that ugly ingame GUI in your screenshot. It was a different time... [edit 2] @feneur I don't see the Carthaginian or Persian tracks in your link.

It wasn't part of the commit process in the past, but I guess that changed at some point. Glad to hear that it's officially part of the process now.

@Alexandermb Can we backup those Blender files to the art repo when you are finished? Having the original blender files is really nice. (Collada loses some information I think.)

Wow, very nice work! I think ships should generally be smaller (and wider) if we want them to function like they did in AoE 2 where they mainly shot arrows. Right now our ships are just like our siege towers (that have fallen over into the water) and shoot arrows based on garrisoned troops. However, I think large ships could potentially be better, but that would require some gameplay changes. I would treat ships more like movable structures and give them build limits to prevent the AI (and players) from completely clogging the map. Another benefit of treating them like structures is that it allows for other types of gameplay such as boarding, etc. I tested code awhile back to allow sunken ships to stay on the bottom and then slowly sink through the seabed, but it never looked right with a perfectly intact mast and sail halfway sticking out of the water. I'm hoping that these new designs give more flexibility for part separation / animation. That will also allow them to break up when ramming is implemented.

That's true. Setting up PCI pass-through isn't all that easy and requires motherboard and processor support. Without that, graphics performance would probably be awful.

Not really. We usually know most of it but there isn't someone that knows everything. We are not tracking our team members. So some people might go AWOL and that's fine. We have an Absence thread but not everyone think to use it, nor has the time to. We all have external life constraints. Yeah, I think most of the devs are aware of what's going on in general. Sure, it's possible someone that hasn't been as active is working quietly on something, but that's less common and not really a problem anyway. I know that before I officially joined, I savoured every bit of news released hoping that the project wouldn't be cancelled. Right after I joined (a decade ago) there was talk of ending the project do to lack of developers. (Talk about discouraging!) Extended discussion ultimately lead to the open source release. To ensure success as an open source project, Philip rewrote the entire (rather unmanageable) simulation from scratch which resulted in the nice component system we have now. He also added the original AI (as it wasn't really a playable game at that time). All of this took awhile because he was the only one really available to work on it. While development has ups and downs, we're in a better overall situation now than we were back then because we have a fully playable, open-source game, and more developers. Once this next release is complete with much of the GDPR stuff, I think more visible progress will start to be made. (The holiday season may interfere somewhat, but that's not really a bad thing. )

We're not some faceless organization... right? ("Make dude" and "Make random dude" should be used as cheat codes somewhere.) Isn't having to pay taxes on income better than the alternative? [Edit] removing extra words.

Performance. If you increase that, then most people's computers will start measuring frames per minute rather than per second. It mostly related to pathfinding performance, which is a hard problem to solve.

To be fair, a hard stop doesn't really change much there. If anything, it seems to remove Gen. 2:4 from the first narrative and place it exclusively as the start of the second: "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven." Adding punctuation does require interpretation as do all aspects of translating. Even disregarding punctuation, it's not really possible to read a direct transliteration of ancient texts to English. In these translations, sometimes several English sentences are generated from only a few ancient words. The first narrative focuses on the overall creation and covers the cosmos (mostly from an earth based perspective, I think), the earth, and lastly, mankind. The second narrative narrows the focus to mankind, and provides details about his habitat (the Garden of Eden), establishes the Tree of Life, etc. The remainder of the book is based on this part, so it's essential for the story to continue. However, if you omit the first narrative, you lose the big picture of God performing the overall creation, and instead start by focusing on mankind. There would not be any mention of the order of when things were created or even the concept of units of time (day, week, etc.) There also wouldn't be any information about anything not on the earth, and most plant and land animal details would be lacking (with water creatures completely absent). To me this points to both parts being essential, with the second part naturally following the first in order to elaborate on mankind and setup the rest of the story. I'll admit that it's possible not all writers valued consistent and complete coverage the way I do though. That makes more sense. I thought you were claiming that they took two versions and manually mashed them together.

There are two "narratives" that some may interpret as two separate accounts. If they are separate accounts, they are rather complementary. The first narrative covers the overall creation and provides a timeline. It mentions each element of creation and states that each is good. At the end, mankind is created as both male and female; it then states that this is "very" good rather than just good. Considering that the creation of mankind was considered "very" good, the second narrative provides a follow-up and focuses on this in detail. The ordering in this section is less consequential because everything is related to humans, and no attempt is made to provide a chronology like the first section. Here things are introduced when it is convenient to bring them up in relation to the main topic, the creation of man. Except for the portion that provides extensive landmarks for location of the Garden of Eden, it's difficult to read more than a sentence here without the word "man" appearing. There are a few sentences about plants which are presumably included to introduce the Garden of Eden as a habitat for humans. There is also a very small part on animals which was included to show that there was no mate available for Adam. This led to the creation of woman which completed the creation of mankind. The first narrative could be seen as independent, but the second narrative would be rather incomplete as a full creation story. There are no references to the creation of light, darkness, celestial bodies, or even the creation of the earth itself.* Plant and animal details are sparse. There is no mention of the sky (except to say that rain had not been invented yet), or any water creatures. (The lack of sky or water in the discussion is likely due to humans being land dwellers.) The second narrative's major omissions lead me to think that it was intended as an addition to the first part rather than a separate, standalone account. *The beginning of Genesis 2 can easily be seen as a continuation of the first narrative. It can be difficult to determine where the second narrative actually begins as the first flows so gradually into the second. In Genesis 2:4 there is part of a sentence that mentions the creation of the heavens and earth, but it is either the conclusion of the first narrative or a reference back to it due to the wording: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,..."