agentx

> Entropy always increases (globally). There is, as far as I know, no known way to prevent this. There is. It's called life.

I wonder whether the existing textures look better on very steep, almost vertical map features with this proposal.

Will take some time until imperial walker roam public domain...

I might be useful to have a few criteria for when the game actually IS balanced. Looking back the forum's archive one might get the impression it never happened or that goal is kinda unachievable. Picking two random aspects and stating 'not balanced' is useful to point out rather huge issues. But somewhere there is a threshold balancing has to stop, because it's done, at least for a given template space. Otherwise the result is overshooting and starting over and over again. Regarding this release the rams caught me off guard and I'm looking for a counter strategy. Maybe all what's needed is a

I always missed a list of used textures, so you can quickly swap the brush. Is is really hard to memorize the texture names.

I've started this map in parallel with the bot a few alphas ago before even thinking about triggers, nomad mode and glowing textures. Now I have to rearrange priorities and decided to give up the map. My hope is someone takes care and finishes the quest. The Story: The map is about a lost civilization and a few survivors. Aeons ago on an island deeply hidden in a vast ocean the Chulthians uncovered the secret of unlimited resources. At some point in time the gods didn't like it any longer and a massive earthquake shattered and nearly destroyed the island. After the catastrophe the island was

> One last thing I'd like to know if it would be hard to program the AI to perform special tasks in the missions. That depends on how well your scripts are structured and what the special tasks are. If you need special battle behavior things get complicated...

> balancing by usage statistics Is there data telling which civ is preferred at the lobby? > What prevents templates from being machine readable ? If they are Xml parseable, they can be used right ? No, "machine readable" actually means "machine understandable". (Don't know who coined that.) Look at this tech: Interesting is cost, modification and requirements. The question for a bot is: Should and can I research this tech? The can part is simple, the planner does it. The should part is hard, very hard, he needs to link from "Armour/Hack" / add 2.0 to "I need units to protect my centre

@Stan, somehow yes, I use jsawk to find out what is available (best unit for task XYZ) off-game and then try to teach the AI to make a good decision. Adapting to special things is a whole topic for itself. I wish templates and technologies would be machine readable, so the AI knows to interpret e.g. health. But, that's the very far future, for now any property needs to be somehow (hard) coded. You can't expect the AI uses a unknown building properly to its advantage.

There is another dimension to this noise topic: Without "noise" the maps don't look natural or organic. Surely a hand trimmed English lawn looks perfect to the eye, but doesn't fit into the game's overall realism. When the goal is to create textures which always work visually a set of low noise textures is good. If the goal is to allow beautiful and realistic scenarios noise or better organic structures are essential. To my eyes the AoE shots above (both) look like cheap plastic. If you carefully work every single tile in a 0AD map, the result looks real and tiling is not an issue. So, I think

I was looking for a simple method to query all templates and found jsawk quite capable. It is a command line tool and works on JSON files. I've exported the templates (6MB) and made a smaller file (10kB) to test it. Jsawk needs SpiderMonkey's jsshell, you'll get it here at Mozilla, or may have it somewhere in the build folder after compiling. For simplicity I've put jsshell, jsawk and the templates JSON in the same folder. > ./jsawk -j ./js -i templates.A18.json.small -a 'return this.length'10-j tells jsawk where jsshell is and -i the input file, the command returns the number of templates

Paper + code: http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/index.html Now same thing for textures, please.

Here is a new version of the charts mod for Alpha 18/Release: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/354885/0ad/charts-0.0.18r.zip

I tried last week week to get some grip on the settlement, but completely underestimated the complexity. Then I played a few games and tried to figure out why, where and when I create buildings and how that could be mapped onto Hannibal. First I made a list of the buildings which should be included/considered: Houses, fields, farmstead, storehouse, barracks, blacksmith, temple, market, fortress and towers. That leaves the ptol without a decent cavalry, but ok, they have houses for free. There is no way without houses, once build they are useful to train females and garrison them in case of an

Stan, I think, you got my point: Regardless of the size of the map there is an upper limit to polygon shown, at least as long the cam is restricted.