wowgetoffyourcellphone

This is a totally separate topic, but Battle for Middle Earth II had some interesting things for their Gondor walls, which I think would be good to have for 0 A.D. Namely, there were "sally ports" which were small doors that allowed only allied units through one soldier at a time, while "gates" had greater "bandwidth" and allowed everything and anything through (provided an allied unit initiated the gates to open; the current 0 A.D. gate behavior). I liked this. Also, one could upgrade individual wall sections to arrow towers or catapult towers. I'd really like this for 0 A.D. It would add dimension to siege warfare.

An anomaly on the Doum Palm (I believe) Also, I hope you don't mind me saying the Medit Fan Palms seem to have like 20% too many fans, but that's just me.

I wonder if this could be a final step before 1.0 release. Call it an optimization pass. For now, it seems better to leave everything in separate files. The current DL size of 0 A.D. is not onerous at all.

Indeed, the max texture size in originally-released Age of Mythology was 256x256 for EVERYTHING. Terrain textures? 256. "Cinematic" textures? 256. Extended Edition might have increased the maximum size, but back in 2003? Yeah, 256. lol

Just loading times, right? Once they're loaded into memory there's no problem for modern rigs?

A good Wonder for a Palmyrenes faction.

How about a random map like this? In DE I call it "Nubian Frontier".

It would be neat to unlock Thureophoroi and Phalangites for the Spartans with a Hellenistic Reforms tech, which is what I partly do in DE. But a part of me just wants to keep them Classically-centered. What to do.... what to do...

At one point, all unit portraits used texture atlases and then were given an ID number that would pick the right section of the atlas texture. Though, that seems like yet another complication to now add something like that again. But maybe there are benefits that would outweigh.

Yeah, that was weird. WEST, EAST, and TIMURIDS. lol I wonder if they're using Unreal or some other widely available engine.

The problem is I'm not sure if many of my new changes would be compatible with A23. I guess finding that out would require less lazinessssss on my end. For instance, the new trees by LordGood and the afore-screenshotted stone quarries and cliffs would have to be bundled with DE.

Oh absolutely. Save everything. You never know what could be useful in the future. Thank you! I figured there would be a name for the concept I was clumsily describing.

If you play the Git DE, you get to preview a lot of cool stuff that official dev version hasn't yet implemented. I like to take all the new stuff added to the game and immediately play with it and iterate and try to get as much out of it as I can to showcase all the hard work of these guys as best as possible. Plus, perhaps my experimentation can be added to the core game or at least inform the team members on how the cool features and assets they've put in their game can be used, and then they decide. You can try out stone quarries right now on the Saharan Oases 2 and 4 skirmish maps. You can also gather food, berry-style, from these gorgeous fruiting Date Palms by @LordGood:

Hey thanks. I should probably update it................. Whenever it does get updated though it's going to be so much better. Luckily those with the dev version of the game can play updated DE now from Github: https://github.com/JustusAvramenko/delenda_est

Won't using 1 giant texture necessitate a model for each texture, since the UV would need to change? So, what you'd be doing is trading many textures for many shield models. Cost-benefit analysis for this? And would this make modding more difficult?

As an aside, I think it would be super sweet if Iberian houses would "snap" to walls when being placed and look like this. Standalone houses would look like they do now, but if you "snap" them to walls they'd line up into row houses. Ima dreamer.

It's probably good for someone to go through and standardize the texture sizes. 512x512 for a unit texture, for example, would be excessive. And then comparatively, it wouldn't make sense for a boar texture to be larger than a unit texture. No need for helmet textures at 512 if an entire unit is 256. Got to look at comparably sized items in the game world. A small vase should be 128. Etc. Judgments need made, but it would be good if artists made those judgments before they committed them. It's been better lately, but I am sure some stuff has fallen through the cracks.

Someone asked me recently how I manage to make the game look so good in my screenshots. One of the major reasons is I refuse to use half of the assets in the game. If I think some tree models are ugly, I don't use them. If I don't think some terrains are up to snuff, I don't use them. I don't care about visual variety, I care about visual coherence. Just a thought. It's one of the reasons I am so excited about @LordGood new assets here. They're a much-needed update! I'd like to see some of the older/uglier gaia assets updated, definitely! If you would update some of the existing trees , bushes, and rocks that maps already use, then you can automatically make maps look better without touching a single line of map code. Some older stuff that can use updates: flora_tree_tamarix flora_tree_fig flora_tree_olive flora_tree_aleppo_pine (I like the funky and distinct trunk shapes, shame about the texture/canopy geometry) flora_tree_pine (a mix of "generic" pine trees) props/flora/bush (dire geometry) props/flora/bush_desert_dry_a (I use this one a lot on my maps, specifically desert and snow maps, but the geometry of the mesh leaves a weird "hole" in the middle) a lot of the "bush" actors in general. Only the small ones are good as-is (like props/flora/bush_medit_sm and _dry, I use those a lot) A lot of the decorative "stone" actors too. I use geology/stone_{biome}_med a looooot for general spiciness. I hardly ever use the larger stone actors because most of them just don't look any good, lol. If some of these can just be updated, then boom, a lot of the maps that use them automatically look a ton better. Same goes for the existing terrain textures.

I am very much in favor of streamlining the maps in the game. There are currently 90 random maps in the game, of extremely varying quality. Many of them don't really follow any kind of theme, some are generic, some are specific, some are "novelty" maps. I'd rather a game have 10 supremely high quality random maps, than 90 random maps that are "all over the map" in quality and theme, lol. That's not to say that the game should only have 10, but 10 amazing maps would be better than 1000 mediocre maps. Ideally, each map should represent the game at its best. New players booting up a map that looks and plays bad would not bode well for the rest of the map set as far as setting expectations. Part of the problem is that the maps can only (understandably) use the assets that the game provides and the assets themselves vary in quality too. It would be great to go back and either (preferably) update or (unfortunately) eliminate some older legacy assets which are just not up to snuff, then adjust the map scripts accordingly. Some kind of overhaul is needed, definitely. Discussion can be had about how to organize the maps too. Novelty maps, like Snowflake Searocks I think should be organized separately from maps which are highly focused on the game's themes like Jebel Barkal. Just to name a quibble. Sorry, went on a tangent. Hopefully I didn't annoy anybody like @elexis

I like some of the UI elements, like the gold icons.

These are going to look super nice. So, are any of the old Celtic shield assets going to be retained?

Thems cliffs are the hotness.

This is a great idea, actually, so I don't have to make multiple versions of the same map with different numbers of players.

While not ideal, DE makes this work with the 'Upgrade' feature. You can switch the Maiden Guard from Sword to Bow to Flaming Arrows and back.