wowgetoffyourcellphone

Such a grande planne™ is fine and all, but would take 20 years to complete. I got time (I hope), but just understand how much work this is. Starting with a tutorial campaign as you mention there is key to such a plan. It proves it can be done and with quality. Personally, I don't want something just thrown together. We are long past putting low quality content in the game. While this stipulation slows things down, it at least keeps the game consistent. So, let's develop a tutorial campaign first. Block it all out, scenario by scenario. Decide what the goals for each scenario are first. Here are some random thoughts: It would be a cool "behind the scenes" thing to name each scenario after a piece of music in the game (and then have that piece of music by the first song you hear). Each scenario can be a different faction, so the player can passively get comfortable with the varied factions, at least comfortable with the aesthetics and names of everything. Each scenario must have a goal in mind and revolve around that goal. "What are we teaching the player in this scenario and what are the steps to do it?" The goals for each scenario should have a natural progression and escalation. Start with basics and work up to higher level things. We can't teach every single UI feature, hotkey, gameplay feature, or strategy in one tutorial campaign, so choices must be made on what to teach and what to let the player discover on their own. We will need UI code to allow us to highlight things in the UI. Flashing icons. Circle overlays, etc. And the trigger scripts for these things. So, if the narrator tells the player to click the Hoplite button in the UI 5 times, then that button should flash and we have some kind of overlay to highlight it (a circle over it, an animated arrow, sparkles, something). Not only does this help move things along, player will expect this kind of user experience polish.

I like seeing it like this, in graphical form which creates immersion, rather than just a list of scenarios as in more modern games. The reason it's no longer done like this is less about and aesthetics than about the fact that it takes time, energy, etc. ($$) away from development elsewhere. Since we don't have a budget per se, the money consideration is taken away and all we need is someone to come along and want to create the assets to make this work, then have a programmer who wants to slap it together. Once the framework is in place, then creating the 2D assets for the maps and icons to click for the next scenario is pretty simple. Creating the campaign(s) and scenarios themselves doesn't have to wait for some great UI like in those images in order to commence design and construction. The game already has the "simple list" UI for basic campaigns.

The UI, the aesthetics, everything looks incredible. I love the leader (hero) selection graphics, Hell, all the graphics. Everything looks very very well put together. Color grading. Graphical cohesion. This is a benchmark for UI and in-game aesthetics moving forward.

I snuck it into Vanilla already many months ago, but only for skirmish maps and players still can't build farm fields in neutral territory to make the feature fully fleshed out. Best I can do on some skirmish maps is place gaia fields that you can gather from once you capture the Farmstead. I don't see much downside to just enabling building fields in neutral territory in the base game. Someone might exploit it somehow*, but we can always just catch things like that and plug the holes. *Perhaps place a Field foundation in FoW and when it gets destroyed you know an enemy is there. I don't think that would give much intel though, because it could just as easily be a single scout cav, so the intel could be dubious or misleading at best. So, this edge case isn't worth denying a feature for.

There might be a patch for this already, created eons ago, that could be useful. Or you may want to just start a new patch from scratch since whatever patch you find will probably need heavy rebasement.

This looks absolutely gorgeous.

Yeah, basically we can currently only have scrollbars for things with plain text, but not with interactive objects, etc.

We reeeeeeally need scrollable elements like this. Needed it for a long time.

Agreed

Do you have a list of changes?

DE's farmland feature is the easiest way to do it, as it requires no new component code except maybe some QoL stuff.

Bottom one looks good

I believe it is 0.25 x vs. Heroes

I hate it because I'd rather farming be something out away from the center of town. Obviously, it's more efficient to farm around the CC for various reasons as the current game design stands, but to me it looks so unnatural. I'd like to change that, but I'm sure the current player base would revolt.

Well, I also believe for sure that even if these assets were put into Atlas, they'd look good.

A really nice close-up look at the Greek buildings (Mythic Age textures). What I notice right away is that they don't bother trying to "infer" detail in the diffuse textures. If a detail is smaller than a texel, then they don't add additional noise by trying to infer it. They don't try to "bake in" extraneous details and shadows. They also let the normal maps do a ton of heavy lifting. Those things combined with really good AO makes everything pop. The lack of "noise" in the finished products makes everything look new and fresh and professional. Honestly, a lot of 0 A.D.'s legacy assets (specifically textures) fail at this. I wish we had more manpower to comprehensively review all of our textures, identify the problematic ones, and update them. And now Atlanteans.

Good job @nifa. You now have 2 great art assets that'll go into next release. Looks great^ So much better than the old statue.

I've noticed things like this too, like builders walking through a house after building it. I think if an object is spawned within an obstruction, it then ignores that obstruction for the duration or until it can exit again. It's an odd bug that's kind of an outlier.

FIXED by inverting the green channel again (like with the Colossus statue)! In its current state, it's already perfect for DE. I can scale it in Blender how I wish. One last request. Would you be willing to create a "modesty" prop for the EA version, like you did for the Colossus? Just re-using the cape texture, etc.

I think chicken placement needs adjustment due to Civil Centers being non-standard footprint sizes. Especially on older maps.

How is this going? I remembered that this was very promising! I'd like to use this to replace the Apollo statue in the Seleucid wonder (for the main game), and then a slightly bigger scale version for DE's Seleucid Cult Statue.

DE currently causes a hard crash when units build siege engines. This is a known bug in the game's code, but I don't know when that'll be fixed.