Radagast.

Always interested in your efforts ... I believe if you build a complete universe but noone is there to discuss, show and improve it .. then it's all senseless!! I'm quite happy with your efforts and I think to keep the parameters low is one way to get towards a dynamic, and later on more easily to a more genetic algorithm.

well done!! Thanks for sharing. 0 A.D.'s timeframe is quite general as there are a lot of mods, so in total there are dozens of civilizations it appears. And the timeframe furthermore just is a question of possibly change some props, re-UV-unwrap and retexturing. Building onto your great models will finally be a lot less work as sometimes even textures can be reused. Thanks a million!! Generally all props should be assignable to all factions (and I think this is already possible). Thus we should split our models as modular as possible and export each propable part (even clothing) as a .. well prop. Hence each base model should supply as many null objects/empties as possible for as many (prop-)objects in the game as are feasible. This helps later for having for example one and only one slave tunica which fits all factions' units. Of course not all slaves looked the same, but for sail patterns or helmets this is still valid as it was common practice in ancient times to reuse captured enemy armour, clothes ... (from the base model we still see the orignal faction if we have to derive it lateron - not sure though if we can use that for determining the original tribe of a captured unit once it is freed by friendly troops - propably only works if on a map each faction only exists once). Keep up the good work. (Can the animations be reused too??) I have an eye on the ox wagons for using them as supply chain ... next month I will have time to set up a branch - hope we use git or mercurial, still not sure though. I could confuse it with another roseetta stone (blender) where we mainly moved to git recently..

Wow, didn't know there is yet another civilization rising .. it's looking very good! Thanks dudes!

Hey, a genetic algorithm is a goal, but even without it was not easy to win against Aegis on certain maps especially if you don't save the simulation (this takes the AIs out I guess). Now wraitii has written the new version and it's looking very promising. I encourage all of us to track the commits more closely by looking at all changesets (diff, the differential/gear symbol). This way, one learns about how 0A.D. works and I'm convinced this is a time saver. First, because from examples one sees typical errors that can happen (once they are corrected and you examine the changeset). Second because there is no need for posting development reviews/updates because it's obvious from the commits. There were really plenty of other people who committed really useful features. In the long we need to add genetic evolutionary algorithms and walkable meshes, once I get around it, I will give the capturing of units (and conversion of loyality to own tribe only after some years have passed - so that caputered units still can be freed by an army). I also wish to give herding and coralling a chance because I'm into open source and an ancient historian hobbyist (while aerospace student in reality). Not sure how much time and how quickly I can dig into these ventures, because of other currently much more important (because real world) open source projects (physical machines that shall save our communities of reprap, blender, opensourceecology, .. some time and also solve some of the energy transmission problems we have in the world by allowing for Do-It-Yourself small energy plants for exchanging central by distributed power). AIs fighting each other in alliance (2 teams, each 3 civilizations) was what I tested with the old qBot and old Aegis (from a month ago probably). The result was that one AI was completely destroyed. One other tried to help out (I think by accident) and two others were involved in heavy fighting on their frontiers. Strangely a large set of mountains seems to have saved one of the tribes. Then a dispute for the last free piece of land next to ourselves ensued. While a small army tried of mine tried to keep the fields clear because it was important land for an ally. There was so much interest in that area that several factions tried to build a civic center and one even started sending an army. Almost brought to the brink of doom, the last men were gathered to start a counterattack on the monarchy of Corinth by land and sea at the same time as a last ressort. Both armies were teared down but the Corinthians gave up in building the civic center from that point on (perhaps this was random). The interests of the other city-states still was high, then I saved the history simulation and once restarted some days later all was quiet and no more interesting actions happened (either because both AIs had issues to continue their efforts because they lost track or because one tribe (the ally) succeed in building a civic center on the last land available. Good work nevertheless. Not only the devs, also the artists! (the last days also many new goodies and stables and new textures for corn were added!).

I think it's your decision, nobody wants you to feel like all this work was for nothing. (that's perhaps how the spidermonkey devs feel now seeing those results... but you already differentiated about that some posts above) Is it a lot work to maintain it any longer? Then I'm for the upgrade. If it makes the next upgrade easier and the next upgrade is planned, then put it in (upgrade) if you like. If you think, we should throw it all away because an upgrade has no benefit so we'd better stick with the old version and you are not angry, then I'm for that. But imagine what will happen, once the 31/32 Version has real performance improvements. Then everyone will ask you again for hammering out another upgrade .. so I don't know what is best.

Can't we change to eclipse? Is this complicated or is eclipse not strong enough? I don't know visual studio too much, because that it's not open source compelled me ... I personally use a simple text editor or eclipse (what is especially strong for debugging hardware of almost any architecture in combination with OpenOCD). Not sure, but the herding/coralling should be possible with scripting only, I still have to dig deeper into that, but I have pseudo code somewhat ready and in a preliminary state. Will look into this after failing/succeeding in my studies, will see in March.

I get the point. Thank you for your time. I didn't know of the implications, 6x as wide as currently you say ... oh dear that's a shocker. So as this is only really useful for bridges I fear walkable meshes are the way to go. I will try to acquire some knowledge and read some papers once I finished (or failed) my engineering studies. The resolution of 4 m x 4 meters is fixed is it ? No possible workaround ? What if we omit the battlements in a different height and just somehow assure the units walk in the middle so to avoid unrealistic walking in the battlements. Is obstruction resolution 1m x 1m? Then we could make the battlements 1m deep and put obstruction onto it to avoid units standing in there? The fences make me think 1x1 is the obstruction resolution but your comment in trac makes me wonder about how the fences work: If fences have very narrow obstruction shouldn't then the minimum obstruction width that is possible be small enough even for the battlements? As you said the terrain rendering is tied to the heightmap. So that means it is not possible to have a very steep slope, 100% to say? Height is being interpolated? And would walls stay at ground leven if we heighten the middle of the walls (which are 10meter deep since your recent TerrainModifier changes I think). So if we lift the height in the middle of the wall, will the building float ontop or stay on the height it was once placed at? Good work in the TerrainModifier patch! Sounds promising. And your changes for making repairng units follow the object to repair once it receives new order is brilliant!

Couldn't we simply heighten the heightmap at the positions where the walls are located? It has to be steep enough that people can't get ontop without climbing (that is vertical movement only what we have no animation for anyway). A stairs then has to be provied just like being able to add gates to walls. The stairs will just be that steep so that it's still possible to walk upon. The problem will be that across walls where gates are placed unit won't be able to stand/walk on the wall. This is because then the gates would be untraversable. If a gate is locked, the heightmap could be set there too. I have no idea how difficult it is to change the heightmap values on the fly ... and it's not as flexible and cool as to have walkable meshes (then we could even have placeable bridges). Where to walk upon could be determined via the steepness, so of course if there is a steep jump in height (as it is for the towers or battlements) it is not possible for a unit to reach those. The question is if it would be possible to include hollow meshes? That would add to many mesh vertices, would it? So probably rather take the heightmap adaption way for making walls traversable. Perhaps also add the climbing feature for slowly climbing rocks, but using a attack tower storming a wall should be possible without climbing, so that's optional. For the constructable bridges we could go the on-the-fly-heightmap-adaption way too ... 1) place the building, get center/origin and extent 2) adapt height to a higher value within the buildings extent. Unfortunately without walkable and hollow meshes e.g. crossing below a bridge will not be possible as we can only either increase the heightmap value (hence cannot cross below the bridge no matter if we remove the obstruction elements) or we remove the obstruction and keep the heightmap value according to the landscape height (lower in the case of the bridge and the walls). I am surprised as to how many patches lie arround in trac. We should not be arguing too much about whether brushes are infinite or not but simply use the natural solution as proposed by sanderd and already completely implemented by apha123: constant regrow (perhaps depending on season or weather). People don't like the fact that it's infinite but that's the reality. The problem for the berries if all fruits are harvested all the time in nature is that they can't seed new berry brushes. Once we add that, non-harvested brushes will seed and reproduce while permanently-harvested brushes will never reproduce and could die out finally (after years, what will be within the time scope of city phases). What do you think?

In foreign times I think the people did not pay in terms of money but rather in terms of goods. Of course, at the market, the people pay with money/gold coins or other seldom materials or exchange goods. As the citizens don't harvest money, but food and other resources, they cannot pay duties to the protecting elite or government in terms of money. So I think taxes in form of money are out. And currently units don't have consumption, so all gathered resources are payed to the leading units corresponding to a tax of 100 percent. I prefer the introduction of surrender and being a vasall for a certain amount of time. In this period almost all goods will go to the conquering units and the state will change to neutral or ally or 'forced ally' until your country is freed from the occupying units either by your allies or by a rebellion started once you 'think' you have enough soldiers or regained a good enough strategic position (or both). Or you choose to stay on the other side because it's hopeless (what will fury your former allies). Once units have the need to buy other things, a money system will make sense. Good you introduced it into the discussion, it made me think about the role of money in Ancient worlds and I hope someone knows more about that than my humble self. This is an animation I would need for storming defending walls anyway. The question is, how generic can the solution be. If the animation has to be recreated for each faction that is not favourable. Usually animations/rigs can be fit onto several objects/meshes. But no idea how it is here in 0 A.D.. Carrying goods is already available and the main work will be the graphics work I think to make more goods carriable. Or did you mean by 'to make carry' something different? This looks like a cosmetic/graphics change: Exchange the heap of metal with a mine and make people garrison into it or at least disappear shortly and come back again with goods. Good point.

Oh my god, an AI half-god reads this thread. I have to figure out how to add to the AI development. Do we have an alternative for using the stamina? Will stamina decline with working hours too? Would fit to the night day cycle. So units would rest at night unless the alarm bell has been rung. The at the beginning of this thread mentioned 'update notification' must not be streamed, or? It's enough to check for a newer Version on 0 A.D. startup, no? For me personally as I use development builds anyway this notification looks not important. The package manager automatically detects updates of 0ad.dev . And a check for a newer version now and then is no problem. Ah, I forgot two things: Is the simulation speed of 0.5 x normal enough? After reaching some complexity of the civilizations .25 (1/4 of normal speed) would be better. As a nice side effect the lower the speed the more fluently the simulation.The other idea is to create a moat - either as building ... or preferably to have 'diggers' (units) that can carve out arbitrary amounts of ground earth or mountains. To have the earth as heap next to the moat would be cool too - perhaps even make the earth transportable for blocking enemy roads. Okay, I'm starting to dream now. That's not doable for now for sure.Just for me to remember this idea and implementation if I have too much time: Make walls climbable, that is create generic animation that works for all units and make reaching the top of the walls possible this way. Then the walls only can be left to the inner of the country the walls defend once all units on the walls are defeated. Then the units climb down the towers. The defending units can lock the walltower doors so that enemy units have to jump loosing half of their health in the process.Also make setting buildings on fire possible.This night I also came up with another idea: Javelins and arrows should be limited. Each arrow could cost one piece of wood, each javelin two pieces of wood and one metal. For the future there could be support units that transport javelins, arrows and water automatically to frontier units.Is adding water as resource a bad idea? Water could then be used to put off fires or to mix hot oil to defend walls and towers. Water also could restore some stamina, so support units will automatically bring water to the frontlines just like the javelins and arrows.Or is making spears break after heavy use at the frontline a bad idea? In reality there was heavy piercing until all spears were broken, when a secondary weapon came to use and the two frontlines started rather pushing until a breakthrough occurred. (Hence most units died once panic made the way or in a rout or while fleeing the enemy, just like it still is nowadays to a certain degree.)The camera restriction also is too high an angle I think - it gives a much greater impression if setting the camera restriction endpoint lower, so that it feels more like you are in the middle of the happening. Currently in the incredible developer overlay restriction has to be deactivated. Especially in combination with the focus on units this gives a great impression! 0 A.D. has so much potential! And it is already incredible. With all that factions, even Thebans being planned, I really believe you, that there is a lot of inertia - so changes/additions should be careful with being as generic as possible and should neither render produced artwork useless nor must it create escalating maintenance and adaption work. This is why dynamic solutions look so more appealing to me than static ones. But whom am I telling that. Excuse my enthusiasm.

Thank you Primus Pilus, I value your words. I now have a better grip on the state of the simulation. - Then after the introduction of capturing we can change the default behaviour of own unit when foreign females penetrate own territory to capturing instead of killing (what seems really rude to me and I am quite busy in stopping my units by standground to keep save the foreign females of this ignoble death. - What would be great is to make the other civilizations diplomatic attitude more friendly towards one another if you help the enemy constructing his buildings (what works, my units have successfully built a civic center for an enemy [Thebes / i.e. currently hellenistic fraction]. Also tribute should lift the moral of the enemy civilization and should make them more friendly towards the tribute paying civilization. - I realised this feature some time ago and it works brilliantly - it's the way I save my females usually unless the situation is hopeless and more resources are required for recruiting more soldiers. In this case an option to surrender to stop the slaughter would also be quite nice. Imagine, you could be the vasall of the enemy for some time ... Instead of Auto guard we could use Aura - just like with the Heroes: Alternatively why not use the aura of the women they have for making the male citizens work more intense. I read that this is already implemented. So if a female citizen in the surrounding of civilian soldiers looses health by an attack this would lead to alerting the males instead of increasing their productivity. The problem here will be to track the loss of health. It's not enough to simply analyse the state of the health. So when a woman looses health thereafter a check for soldiers in the surrounding has to be made: Store last activity, make them attack the source of attack that was responsible for the woman loosing helath shortly previously. Oh no, this is so sad. This is such an important feature - imagine the flair it had if you knew that it's going to get dark soon .. toches lighting up and your non-busy units litting a campfire for surrounding units ... then suddenly the weather turns rainy and your units clear the fields and your intelligence tells you, a big army camps outside your walls and an attack is eminent. What will you do, will the weather change just in time to make your skirmish troops more effective again. (I believe rain and mud gives ranged units an advantage.) .. okay, I'm getting off focus now. I get the point, double click is a good solution. I also can imagine implementing a commander giving this order independantly. Say, is it possible that from one unit other units can be influenced? As there are formations already working quite well I think this commander-like influence on charging/non-charging can be issued analogously. (I.e. if the own units have completed the formation and (perhaps better or?) the commanding unit realizes the enemy is near enough for the soldiers' available stamina a command for charging is issued automatically. It could even be implemented using the Aura influence of a hero, something like a second aura. That is, the second Aura increases as the confidence for attack raises -- once this Aura value is high enough, it does no longer only increase the morale of surrounding units but also changes their advance mode to 'charging mode'.) I read in the Feature Status overview that this seems to be planned and I think that an easy solution would be making all buildings full-fledged units (the same category as the catapults are). Catapults can be packed and unpacked already - and the nomad feature requires exactly that. Your notes to the timescale also make sense, of course a tree could not grow that quickly. Trade is important and I already like how this is solved. qBot and Aegis build markets too, so that works really good.

First post. Followed 0 A.D. for some time now. ... and it's brilliant. Never seen a history simulation (how I call it) before - it's the first real history simulation attempt ever made. And it is genious, always using the 0ad.dev version for UNIX operating systems and it's really wow (unless you don't save as then the AIs stop working (both the no-longer-supported qBot as well as the Aegis - the Aegis is more vulnerable for saving issues and not even produces units any more but remember that I'm using a development version, so it's even more impressive that it works that well - and it does!!). Keep going, this is already really big and a worldchanger like open source is. (I'm into open source even though I'm working for open source hardware projects usually.) So here my wishlist: (apart of the 0A.D. official part 1 feature list: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameplayFeatureStatus) I don't like: Females being attacked ... this really is a no go - even historically the greatest barbarians (that in reality not really were barbarians anyway, only were called like this as everyone called the 'other' barbarian) did not attack females without reason, once capturing is ready please change that to capturing.Allies don't help you!Enemies don't get more friendly - no matter how much tribute you pay. One always has to change sides to change the diplomatic status.If the aggressiveness of units (military) is set to stand-ground all is fine. Unfortunately once the defensive (2nd most defensive option) status is chosen, foreign units are attacked even though those don't attack own units.Building complex wall systems is ... complex. (Yet it is brilliant!) Walls can't have units ontop. (see: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/797)Buildings shoot arrows even though they are ungarrisoned. (That is unrealistic and I doubt that this is necessary. If you want a building to be defended, garrison it - just like the real thing. : -)What is outstanding next to a lot of other brilliant features of 0 A.D.: Historical accuracy.Units can repair allied buildings, heal allied units, even build in allied territory, can harvest food for the ally, can protect allied units, ...Catapults are just like the often wished Nomad features. It's possible to deploy and undeploy them, so that basic nomadic feature indeed already exists.Units automatically help on the next due task (building another building after finishing the own building task).Units are dressed realistically - and gain experience.Walls and Doors - even lockable. : -)What I wish (and even plan to work on once I get around all the how it works and have finished studies and some of the opensourceecology and reprap and blender projects): Soldiers should shield females in case of a war. Also, heroes and leaders should be shielded by a special guard. Guarding is possible from Alpha 15 up, so new would be to have units 'absorb' arrows and other attacks.Growing trees? (Animation? low priority)Trees should seed themselves.Animals should get children, the population dynamic can be as easy as a Fibonacci row for the beginning - or we look for a proper scientific paper. Also, hunting animals (carnivores) should decimate populations they eat and vegetarian animals should decimate the ever-growing plants.Buildings and complete countrysides should fall under growth of all sort of plants and trees - resulting in a decay just like the outposts do.Weather and seasons interchanging.Day and night alternating. In the night some torches and lanterns lighting up.Physics engine for making possible to craft own technological innovations instead of the fixed technological improvements (probably combine it, e.g. research metal crafting first before being able to construct arbitrary leader-defined machines of which most will proof physically useless -- until the right innovation/invention was made). This way, civilizations could evolve by assembling new siege structures, improve walls for defences, et cetera - of course such innovations should not have to much influence - and should affect all civilizations within reach (even enemies) too, that means if one civilization invents a new siege structure that works, that should become available to all cultures just like it is in reality. For example the nuclear bomb was among others made possible by Wernher von Heisenberg, and still all the high powers (many countries) with the adequate means worked on it (perhaps make the technological innovation researchable once a physical accurate system, e.g. a cannon was invented and tested by one civilization). Otherwise if breakthroughs like new clothing is not available as researchable option to other peoples, it is impossible to balance the simulation - imagine a tank crushing the spartans, that's just too unrealistic. Breakthroughs have range and reach the farther the more advanced the civilizations become. What I can foresee for the distant future is having commanders assigned to armies/units and giving those commanders independant control in warfare. This means, they can decide formations and regroup their personnel according to the tactics of the opposing force. This will propably be even harder to implement than the proposed ecosystem for mushrooms, animals and plants.