Radagast.

I must have failed to realize that our master Stan already created the young Liu Bang. So I redundantly started creatig the old one. Is it worth as a variation or should we use Stan's face texture for Jiang Liang and this beardy one for Liu (Guozu)? Sorry for the bad quality again.

perfect. This atmosphere the icon creates is interesting. I love wolves, but I'm not happy with what they eat, I'd prefer them being vegetarian. Keep it up, Stan! Your effort be honoured.

I realized that (you can also see it on the minimap), but still at times units penetrate into the forrest and then it's fun. If the pathfinder still makes problems we could shorten the way attacking Romans have to go until they reach the village. Doesn't the pathfinder performance depend on the number of obstructions? And the current pathfinder is O(n^3), but n here probably denotes entities' count and not obstructions, but that's somewhat equivalent (as each entity has an obstruction). So if we had 100 units + 100 trees instead of 100 units + 1000, then we'd have time_ratio = (100 + 100) ^3 / (100 + 1000) ^3 = [ (100 + 100 ) / (100 + 1000) ] ^3<=> time_ratio = [ 100 * (1 + 1 ) / 100 * (1 + 10) ] ^3<=> time_ratio = [ (1 + 1 ) / (1 + 10) ] ^3<=> time_ratio = [ 2 / 11 ] ^3 = 0.18... ^3 = 0.006<=> time_100trees / time_1000trees = 6 / 1000=> speed up of factor 1000. where factor means magnitude and 1000 = 10^3

Generally not even the code is a deal breaker, but as the 0AD team had to review it, that's the deal breaker and will take months. It's 2000+ lines + heaps of helper functions which belong somewhere else. The technology meanwhile has been replaced by a code solution. The shieldbearers also had to be removed. The solution I envision can be to try to spawn those entities and provide the additional entities as a mod. => If you have the mod downloaded + enabled, then you'll have more starting Gauls. Otherwise the map is still playable. But meh, I don't know, we have the configurator. And we really should use the time for different things. There are heaps of work to be done but noone working, only talking (me included), so let's go back to work.

Tree templates define an obstruction and an obstruction means the pathfinder has to consider it. => Performance issue. That's what Philip criticizes from time to time too: too many tree entities (though I love those trees and thus I want to only replace them with actors which don't have obstructions but are purely visual.).

- Weakened the Gauls. (Removed some heroes that were spawned twice. The heroes are still pretty strong, but you can loose them if you don't pay attention.) - Dealt with stalling attacks (idle units). - Centurio didn't hide after having a look at the Gallic village. - Tweaks to attack intervals. The constant Roman enemy attacks in the Defend-Village-Phase now are less long, resulting in more action. If you have performance issues, a) Lower graphics settings. (HQ Water off, Unit silhouettes off, Shadows off, ...) We should think about replacing some trees with actors in the Gallic\ Wars.xml (not using Atlas as this is heaps of work). The heroes were too much work to remove? Why not make it a mod, hey we have a mod launcher! Without heroes we have problems because the Gauls are too weak. There is no better solution currently because The interval Trigger Re Registering not really works. So the Roman attack interval stays constant. (But unit count of an attack still increases and decreases according to if the centurio is alive or not.) Have fun with finding the Centurio.

Ships are units too. I know it's misleading that structs like siege engines are in the units/ and not the structures/ folder, but the folder names really mean mobile/ and static/ and because not even that always is true, we should rather call them units/ and buildings/ which comes close to what it means but is not really worth changing. Units can garrison in other units too, so there is no problem concerning the tanks. They can be all: ship, vehicle, static fortress (if unmanoevrable). The limits are our work and effort. But the main entity type of tanks is unit.

If Rogue Republic uploads theirs, yes.

Sorry, bad texture artist here. :/ To complete, the tank chassis + turret as is has been created by blenderartist Heinzelnisse. It's CC3 licensed. The chain and wheels I had to remodel due to topology problems when importing into the pyrogenesis engine. There are several turrets attached to the main tank. If you think it's easy to create, why didn't you create the proof of concept yourself then? Be warned, you'll hit heaps of errors, it took me quite some time to overcome those ridiculous errors like "Failed to create VBO's 32xx". Anyway, it's done, badly, but it has proven the concept of Sander's turret code. They follow their targets while the tank moves.

Tank battle: (some partly destroyed)

Gallic Wars is not applicable for being integrated into 0AD SVN. Things needed to be outsourced into the TriggerHelper.js and the Gallic heroes needed to be removed as well as the Roman Centurio needed to not be overridden. (currently we increase his lifepoints, otherwise it'll all be too easy with those strong heroes) Fallen Empire Studios already thought of making it compatible, the uniqueness would suffer and it had to be rebalanced again and I'm against it as we now have a mod configurator, so no problem to launch 0AD once with Gallic Wars Part 1 and once without. Once we have the full campaign ready, including a system to change maps dynamically on a overview screen (which will not be this year), we'll make it fully historical accurate and get rid of the ultra-strength heroes. But for now it's a fun map, an alternation to 0AD with still a lot of historical accuracy, but quite strong and speedy Gauls (the druid's recipe still works).

Would they? They'd be our heroes, they've done a good job. Nevertheless I fear their creations aren't as sophisticated as ours as we use Turrets which is not even in 0AD trunk. Can we expect 3D art specialists (they have shown they know what they do) to maintain their own branch of the 0AD SVN version where the turrets are merged in an applicable way? - Not very likely. I'll provide more tanks and other type of weapons over the next time. I need it all for my 0AD Extended experiments to find a way into the future - quick. It won't be all disclosed until the final release, which is targeted for next year. I'll be more productive without - especially now that the ground work is done. Congrats to 0AD for a great A17 release candidate, featuring triggers, mod configurator, dynamic units on walls and other structures. Awesome.

I agree, having read the code is necessary and we have few of those that read the code. Though I think it's much easier to maintain the code inside the 0AD repository instead of the patches. Try to apply Sander's patches on trac and you'll see why. (automatic changes, e.g. search and replace being the other) Attachments to buildings using techs is possible since some months, but there seems to be nobody that cares to use it. Anyway, here you go: Sander's turrets work like a charm. Also I think Josh misunderstood the turretOnly optional option. But it's easy to misunderstand it. I'd also like to have the turrets TurnTo function to be compatible with 3D positions, to allow for tracking a plane, but else it's really great.

They at least did like our water. Remember their submarine screenies. And our water has again been further improved by wraitii. The problem is, if patches like TurretAI won't be committed, then it's hampering progress. E.g. how should we have used Sander's visible garrisoning hadn't he committed it? Is requiring people to use code before the code itself is committed really the way to go? It's at least not easing the content creators' lives, having to apply patches, directing possible users to apply this patch, then that, then rebuild, and well, then the entity might finally work. Thus it was important that Sander committed the visible garrisoning and I'm thankful for it , and that is true too for other patches on trac that will soon be backlogged or forgotten (e.g. template simplification using tech). And it's marked as a TODO. And balancing might be easier if such simplications/automations got committed. And the dev no longer has to remember that once he created that patch, whihc easily spins out of control. Having it in main version control is way easier as patches become outdated and are not updated e.g. by automatic search-replace changes in SVN. Of course there is a danger of it breaking things, but most is purely additive, at least most of what Sander created. In this special case I might have a chance to yet again provide the Turret functionality as a mod. We definitely should ignite or we will die from waiting for a virtual project to get adopted by more modders (see what a strong modder community even commercial games like farming simulator where multiplayer compatibility issues are a real pain in comparison to 0AD). They create all and everything as mod and have plenty of modders, while we stall around despite being not really less evolved (and still we have not even a Beta release and they have already 3 full releases despite not being fully finished, simply because fully finishing, isn't possible, nothing is perfect).

The quest is to add a tech for each simulation entity. And to set up the tech dependencies. Images like helmet evolution are helpful in the process.

Thx. The folder structure (hard-coded folders) is credit of the 0AD team and they've done a good job. The subfolder structure of the content organization (which is not hard-coded in the engine but in the simulation side/i.e. mod 0AD only) is my concern. The orders indeed need a state, especially if they should be visually expressed by picking a corresponding animation (e.g. GATHERING is a state in UnitAI). I think you even imagine a far more evolved and more modular concept than my minor self did. It makes me think about it. The technologies are the silverbullet here. They are so powerful we can even get flow of time with them easily without having to overthrow everything. They will also serve for defining which structures a civilization can construct, which units can be trained, and so forth. It's our underestimated silverbullet.

You are right. Can't someone of our devs log onto the system using Team viewer to quickly reproduce the issue. Installing into a different folder and such. Because the "Directory not found" sounds suspicious, it would be nice to investigate the file structure the installer has created (if such an installer was used).

Please someone create a proof of concept tank as mod to 1) show Rogue Republic, that Sander has fixed their Tank turret issues. 2) convince Sander to commit his TurretAI before A17 is released. The community needs to give the developers reasons to add features. Let's create that tank to use his TurretAI.

Thanks for pointing out. I forgot about that. I even wanted to add the same functionality for Actors but failed miserably, thx to leper for pointing out, that the entity Identity is a scripting-side component only and thus the C++ side can't apply the {Civ} to actor files. Nevertheless there's a solution for that: - Resolve researched tech tree (a bot should have access to its own technologies, doesn't it?). - Resolve which buildings/units the techs unlock, - Use those unlocked entities to create your plans. If a new tech is researched, then adapt your plans. (OnTechResearched event, at least exists for triggers, so there should be a way to provide the same for the AI).

Generally it's simply embarrassing that Sander's template simplifications don't get committed. Whoever prevents Sander from committing, seems to overlook the potential of his promotion via tech. We set up a mod to address this failure of the 0AD team. https://github.com/0ADMods/promotion_boni_via_tech But it's already been converted by us to use only relative boni as absolute boni simply make no sense and are not generally applicable (as units might have different absolute stats and thus adding e.g. 3 HP to a unit may be a huge improvement or not even noticable, depending on how high the base HP for this unit are). Excuse my drastically chosen words, no offense meant, just the long frustration about a stagnating endeavour.

Not even Aristeia yet abstracts the Civilization away. But the Civ tag doesn't need to be a class, it could still remain as is and mark the origin of an asset, e.g. where something came from if that is known. Thanks for the thoughts, the 0AD technologies already have exactly that functionality and are extremely powerful. Concerning the file structure I have a slightly different opinion because the engine has reasons to require: art/textures/skins/ art/meshes/ art/actors/ art/animation/ simulation/templates/ (general template hierarchy) simulation/templates/units/ (mobile, spawnable, ...) simulation/templates/structures/ (static) which is fine. The problem begins with the subfolders (content organization) where props is a subfolder which is misleading and has been misused over the course of time (initially being thought for specific props, i.e. graphical elements where e.g. the mesh's origin is specifically set to be easily attachable to a certain building's origin or root). The props subfolder anomaly results in 1) annoyance due to complicated and long paths (e.g. props/units/helmet/ instead of simply helmet/). 2) mislead developers and artists as they think only those props or folders are available for propping to another object, which is absolutely wrong (every object can be propped to another!).

The latest SVN issues are resolved. The AI wasn't set up properly for Player 3 (the trigger controlled trader). The map was once again rebalanced, the major attack frequency of the Roman garrison lowered to allow the Gauls to also spend some time gathering resources. Try to projtect your gatherer using palisades or conquer key points in the forrest that are easy to hold. Other than that you'll notice, that wood is a critically difficult to get resource. If you encounter the Windows SDL or something bug, when selecting the mods, then either use the command line: -mod=public -mod=map__gallic_warsor 1. Tools & Options -> Mod selection2. Select mod 0ad / public -> Enable3. Select map_gallic_wars -> Enable4. Save configuration5. Restart the engine/game.If you encounter errors in the process, click Suppress. Hey rada, awesome, could you make the ai use the testudo formation ?We could add it when the Romans reach their siege/attack positions, but our investment into more awesomeness is proportional to the community's interest and the community is ceasing to exist. Thus my current motivation is rather for adding my surrender system, new animals, surrender animations, inventory and other things related to 0AD Extended.

Thank you for the answers. I must apologize for my rude words recently. It seems I've lost patience. If you allow me to add, that I think Philip mainly doesn't want to get paid because he knows of the pressure that lays on a dev that is being paid. The whole community's hope and welfare laying in the hands of one man is not an easy to bear burden. That's why I thought of omitting all the development reports and also the monthly payment and instead am opting for the reward system. If you think 1000$ and 1 year is not enough time, then we can also settle on a time limit of 2 years which should remove most of the pressure. A reward system is less pressure for devlopers than paid development where expectations reach above the sky. You are right, it's the benefit of our new Mod configurator, that the Hannibal AI can still be added. I want to beg the community's and 0AD team's pardon for my rude words.

WFG has heaps of community funds. Why not give 1000$ + 1 year time to Philip for completing his already begun fix of the pathfinder? Why noone cares for a second AI (Hannibal) next to Petra?

Thx FeXoR for the interest, it's not a complicated change though. Basically it's changing nothing at all as the Civ is meta data only and nothing else. The unit's templates (Builder element in the XML) and the technologies define what is constructable, how much harvest you have, how efficient your archers' weapons are and so on. It's all pretty easy and the only things we need to clearly keep in mind are: - Only model entities if historical evidence exists. - Follow the historical process, i.e. model reconstructions. - Create an actor.xml for it. (now it's available in 0AD as eyecandy) The simulation templates part: - Think of functional things! Only think in those terms, because every civ had to survive and they tried to do as good as possible. It could even be generalized to make the civs consistent for gameplay: - They surely trained soldiers, so where did they train them and how. Don't distort these facts, so if the Celts did train their soldiers in the forrest, then they did and then they don't need a building for it. On the other hand if there are civs where there were several buildings that trained different soldiers, then add those. If a commander used to sleep in a tent, then don't increase the tent's footprint only to keep it consistent with the Egyptian Pharao's military caravan or whatever. Luckily Sander + leper + Itms are some of those that really cared for mods and changed things significantly to ease modders lives. But generally modding doesn't apply to what CoM does, as the Council or rather Fallen Empires Studio develops, adds new features, and content, all additive, and thus it's not really 'modding' (modification), but rather adding (Addons, Extensions). I have already used IRC but it resulted in frustration and loss of productivity. Without productivity 0AD will continue to stall and be a boring, depthless and laggy experience. Though I'm still a fan of 0AD potential and I hope there will be new momentum soon. Our repositories are located here: https://github.com/0ADMods/