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Palaxin

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Posts posted by Palaxin

  2. Make resource gathering more interesting

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    On 11/24/2015 at 7:31 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    I don't think the game need more resource, just more interesting way to get each one.

    This is exactly what I want, too. See also this comment.

    On 11/24/2015 at 7:31 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    Stone quarries look like open pit quarry. They are large and skinned for biome (sandstone pit mine for Egypt, etc.). They are more rare than stone mine are now, but are something like 10,000 stone or 20,000 stone, so can eventually be exhaust but last a long time. So, probably 4 per player on the map (fewer per player as number of player goes up, to encourage trade).

    Yes, I agree, but we would need some people willing to do new models and textures... I was always asking myself why you can't gather stone from the ground/pit in many RTS

    On 11/24/2015 at 7:31 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    Metal mine look like opening to a shaft mine with a slot next to it. Build storehouse on the slot to gain control. You garrison units inside the shaft mine to gather the metal. They come out and deposit the metal at the Storehouse (like Vespeen Gas mine in Starcraft). They are rare, remote, and infinite. Maybe 2 per player on the map (fewer per player as number of player goes up, to encourage trade). If Storehouse detsoy by enemy, the "entrance" to the mine "collapses" and any of your unit inside die. Enemy can build Storhouse on the slot and the mine entrance reopen.

    Shaft mining sounds also reasonable to me. I think you should be able to directly destroy the mine (i.e. the entry of the mine) no matter what the storehouse does. I'm really no friend of infinite resources, but mines could have large deposits and as time progresses gathering would get slower on the one hand (digging deeper), but you could garrison more units in them (more tunnels, mine system is growing). My mod actually introduces rare, but very attractive metal sources with a really high gathering rate to encourage riskier playstyle (but no shaft mining yet)

    On 11/24/2015 at 7:31 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    There are 1 deposit of the current stone and metal objects in the player starting territory to start of the match. After those exhauste the player need to find the open pit quarruies and shaft mines.

    Will not be changed in my mod. However, gathering at the initial sources will be much slower than now, whereas gathering at remote and rare sources will be faster than now.

    On 11/24/2015 at 7:31 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    If we were to add resource, I would want it to be GLORY*. It is gain by fighting (some unit gain more glory than other; Basic->Advance->Elite->Champion->Hero) and by building special buildings and Wonders. Temple trickle it. Heroes can cost Glory. Extra-strong Phase IV techs can cost GLORY. Upgrading rank of units can cost GLORY. Like, you can select a battalion and rank them all up at same time if you have enough Glory.

    Not a fan of highly artificial "resources". I'd rather split "normal metal" from "noble metal" or "iron" from "gold" to have a highly rare and precious resource. I don't think we need that, though.

  3. MinMod

    in Game Modification

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    Yes, all mines will still provide the metal which the game uses now. The new mines differ in

    • position: more valuable metals are found farther away from CC
    • gather rate: more valuable metals are gathered faster
    • amount: more valuable mines provide less total metal

    I'm still not sure if the mines should differ in the last point. Perhaps the amounts should be more equal. But a 4K gold mine otherwise would be an insane advantage. We will see in the testing phase...

    • Like 1

  4. Sibyllae Vox: gameplay mod

    in Game Modification

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    On the way I started to think about how resources could be categorized for a simple usage and smooth progression.

    I'm actually thinking about something similar and currently working on a mod that will introduce more variety for minerals (not more kinds of resources, just a system that should somehow encourage a riskier playstyle and add more strategy to resource gathering).

    Edit: sorry, I think you meant something different - what resources are most important in which phase of the game and which resources are needed for what, I guess.

    • Like 1

  5. MinMod

    in Game Modification

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin
    title tag added

    How To Play

    1. update or downgrade 0 A.D. to fit the requirements of the mod version you want to play
    2. download the .zip file of the desired MinMod version
    3. extract it to <0 A.D. installation folder>\binaries\data\mods
    4. run 0 A.D. and navigate from the main menu to Tools & Options → Mod Selection (select the mineral mod entry in the upper field) → Enable → Start Mods
    5. start a new single player game with a supported map

     

    ************************************************** VERSION 0.2 **************************************************

    Spoiler

    minmod_demo_02.jpg

    Screenshot from the MinMod Demo map. The original ore textures have been colored yellowish (gold ore, top), greyish (silver ore, upper mid), turquoise (copper ore, lower mid) and brownish (iron ore, bottom).

    golden_oasis.jpg

    Screenshot from the map Golden Oasis. Gold ore on the left side, silver ore at the bottom and copper ore at the bottom right.

    Download

    • required 0 A.D. version: SVN (r17785), Alpha 19 may work as well (no to minimal changes in the concerning files)
    • file: minmod02.zip

    Known problems

    • I only did a minimum of testing, so imbalances should be expected, especially on random maps.
    • The AI can gather from the new ores but handles them equally / doesn't take advantage of the different gather speeds. Therefore good testing either requires an improved AI (don't expect me to do this soon) or multiplayer games (if enough people are interested).
    • Each ore type uses a different color on the minimap. This may confuse some players.

    Gameplay

    • Iron: ~70% gather speed (sqrt(2)/2 to be precise), 24/12 max gatherers per ore
      Usually appears next to the initial CC
    • Copper: 100% gather speed, 24/12 max gatherers per ore
      Appears in random maps where there is no ore next to the initial CC and in most skirmish and scenario maps
    • Silver: ~140% gather speed (sqrt(2) to be precise), 16/8 max gatherers per ore
      Usually appears outside the initial territory
    • Gold: 200% gather speed, 16/8 max gatherers per ore
      Only appears in some skirmish and scenario maps where it can be placed carefully

    Technologies

    • Silver owls civ bonus for Athenians: +25% silver gather rate in each phase (and +10% generic ore gather rate as before)
    • Silver mining technology for Athenians and Macedonians: +100% silver gather rate (and +50% generic ore gather rate as before)
    • The two standard techs increasing metal gathering rate have been extended to affect also the new ore types

    Maps

    • Random: all random maps use iron and silver ores with copper being used for a few exceptions
    • Skirmishes: Acropolis Bay, Alpine Valleys, Death Canyon, Golden Island, Golden Oasis, Thessalian Plains
    • Scenarios: MinMod Demo, Gold Rush
    • all other maps: playable as in vanilla 0 A.D.

    Models

    • Iron Ore: red-brownish veins; no sparkles, 85% gather animation speed
    • Copper Ore: turquoise veins; few sparkles; 100% gather animation speed
    • Silver: grey/white veins; some sparkles; 120% gather animation speed
    • Gold: yellow veins; many sparkles; 150% gather animation speed

    ************************************************** VERSION 0.1 **************************************************

    Spoiler

    minmod_demo_01.jpg

    Screenshot from the MinMod Demo map. The different gather speeds vary between slave, female citizen and infantry units (unchanged) and between the different ore types (new feature).

    Download

    Gameplay

    • Iron: 60% gather speed, 3000/600 metal, 24/8 max gatherers per ore
    • Copper: 90% gather speed, 2500/500 metal, 21/7 max gatherers per ore
    • Silver: 135% gather speed, 2000/400 metal, 18/6 max gatherers per ore
    • Gold: 270% gather speed, 1500/300 metal, 15/5 max gatherers per ore

    Technologies

    • Silver owls civ bonus for Athenians: +25% silver gather rate in each phase (and +10% generic ore gather rate as before)
    • Silver mining technology for Athenians and Macedonians: +100% silver gather rate (and +50% generic ore gather rate as before)
    • The two standard techs increasing metal gathering rate have been extended to affect also the new ore types

    Maps

    • Scenarios: MinMod Demo

    Models

    • Iron Ore: red-brownish veins; no sparkles, 84% gather animation speed
    • Copper Ore: turquoise veins; no sparkles; 96% gather animation speed
    • Silver: grey/white veins; white, small and few sparkles; 120% gather animation speed
    • Gold: yellow veins; yellow, big and many sparkles; 180% gather animation speed

    Next Version (probably January)

    • more maps
    • gameplay feature balance
    • maybe other color for copper ore
    • maybe some basic AI support
    • maybe suggestions or uploaded maps in commentaries

    ********************************************** ANNOUNCEMENT **********************************************

    Spoiler

    In order to make an implementation for my trac ticket, I will upload my mineral mod soon here (probably next weekend). It is a first step to make resource gathering more interesting. I would be happy if you could test it and give me some feedback then. Further improvements would include texturing or even modelling which I can hardly do myself (especially the latter one). Also new maps could be created using these minerals or existing maps could get an upgrade. So I'm really interested in people who want to help me :)

    MinMod features:

    The four new minerals in my mod are

    • Iron: very slow gather rate (60% of current speed), but big/small ores provide 4000/800 metal in total
      Is the most abundant ore and should be spawned/placed near the CC.
    • Copper: slightly slow gather rate (90%), provides 3000/600 metal
      Is somewhat abundant and you should reach it from your inital CC without the need of further expansion.
    • Silver: really high gather rate (150%), but provides only 2000/400 metal
      Is quite rare and on some maps even the best ore you can find. Usually you need to expand your territory to reach it. Athenians will have an extra technology enabling them to gather silver at the speed of gold.
    • Gold: ridiculously high gather rate (300%), but very sparse with 1000/200 metal
      Is very rare and often situated in dangerous areas. These may include the middle of the map, places protected by gaia barbarians or by a large amount of wild animals.

    You still gather metal from them, it's just like different food sources which all provide food but have different gather rates and occurence. The generic metal ore used so far won't be removed so you can still play all maps like now. My goal is to include this in the main game and on the long term we may remove the generic metal (like generic celtic and greek civs) and replace the ores on existing maps.

    I'm using the existing ore textures (for each model in each biome I will make a set of four new ores). To keep this task as simple as possible, I'm currently just colorizing the textures yellowish (for gold), greyish (for silver), reddish (for copper) and brownish (for iron ore). It would be nice if we could replace them one day with better textures or even dedicated models.

    The gather animation of the workers will be slightly adjusted to their gather speed. The difference in the animation speeds is smaller than the difference in the gather rates (else it would look quite ridiculous). Currently the difference is slightly less than a 2.5 factor between iron and gold gatherers.

    Of course, all numbers may be adjusted, especially in the testing phase afterwards.

     

    • Like 3

  6. Possible LoS improvements

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Ok, thank you for the explanations. Lag is nothing you wish whatever you get for it :/

    I've expected that not all ideas would actually work well, but I didn't know that it's such a great performance issue. Interesting to know... So all in all you would get a little improvement in gameplay but be heavily punished by performance.

    I thought the one big problem is always pathfinding (I once read it took 70% of the AoK resources) and LoS would be not that difficult to deal with at least using a dedicated GPU (which I do not have by the way :D)

    Perhaps one day I will play around with the "simple" things, if I feel confident enough :) I need to understand the code much more at the moment.

    At least units hiding in the forest/trees/bushes is something mensioned in the design document, and is more easy to implement, I think.

  7. Possible LoS improvements

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    Some suggestions, copied from http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3634

    I would be glad to get some opinions, perhaps some of the described features may have been already discussed somewhere somewhen. Feel free to close the trac ticket, if it's annoying you.

    Note that I'm not able to implement the "Advanced" and "Fancy" suggestions nor can I say how easy it would be to do so.

    The "Simple" ones should be doable for quite some people, not sure if I would succeed.

    Overview

    It would be nice if the line of sight depended on the surrouding terrain, buildings and other big obstacles. Also the field of view could get a more realistic shape.

    This would provide a more strategic role for line of sight, I can think of situations like

    • scouting an enemy army without being seen
    • sneaking from behind to an enemy
    • more realistic guerilla warfare between (blocks of) buildings

    Terrain

    • Simple: adjust LoS like archer's range
    • Advanced: units cannot see behind hills/mountains, on top of a plateau (when standing on a lower place) or at the bottom of deep gorges (if not standing at the cliff's edge)

    Objects

    • Simple: units get an LoS Bonus when garrisoned on a wall (also tower, fortress or ship if implemented)
    • Advanced: Buildings and gaia elements like rocks with their height above the unit's eyes (human ~1.5m, mounted units ~2.5m, units on elephants ~4m, units on ships, buildings and siege towers perhaps even more) block the vision behind them.
    • Fancy: even if the obstacle's height is below the eyes' height there should be invisible area behind it like shadow is not "visible" for the sun; also smaller objects like trees or large animals could partially block vision (I don't know if this would demand too much resources for a large amount of units and therefore lead to game lags)

    Field of View

    Humans have a ​field of view of about 180° with decreasing vision quality at the edges. Animals have various angles and therefore a field of view in the shape of circular sectors. Actually I think it is debatable if animals should have an LoS since they can't communicate and therefore can't provide information - perhaps they could show some passive reaction if they detect something interesting instead?

    • Simple: LoS offset towards the current viewing direction
    • Advanced: semicircle LoS for humans and other circular sectors for animals (if they have LoS)
    • Fancy: modified "semicircle" LoS with less vision range at the edges e.g. vision range is described by something like r(θ)=sin(θ)*R for 0<=θ<=π where R=r(θ=π/2)=r(θ=90°) is the vision range straight forward. For animals the sine function would have to be stretched to match the specific maximum angle.

  10. Make resource gathering more interesting

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    Hello wraitii and Lion.Kanzen, thanks for replying :)

    That should already be the case.

    Yes you are right.

    But there are still many cases where the building costs don't really make sense though. For example the basic greek buildings like dropsites do only cost wood though they are mainly made of stone.

    On the other hand, the Mauryans also use wood for their elephant stables, temple and fortress (less than stone) but this is not represented in the costs.

    I know this is a game and there will always be deviations from reality. I think there is still some room for improvement and I could actually make a mod or patch for this.

    I like your idea to split from the trading principle of AoE and AoM since it always seemed somehow artificial to me. I will definitely think about this further and support your proposals.

    With farms not, we make the desition to don't replant (2012), but we discuss about leave a farm alone, if a farm is not working, start to loss hp and may be if lost hp the gather rate are lower or less.

    Ok, yes I would advocate losing HP for fields, but in this case also dead animals would have to lose HP. However, an abandoned farm should be build up first before gathering again, I think.

    Reseeding actually makes more sense when seasons are implemented (which seems not to be the case in the near future). Has this been a final decision to not reseed farms no matter if the game will implement some new features? I agree that at the current state reseeding isn't necessarily needed.

  11. Make resource gathering more interesting

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Palaxin

    I have read various opinions on this topic like

    1. Metal and stone usually are placed directly next to the CC. It should be more risky to mine them and therefore they should be placed farther away. I agree, my suggestion actually is to encourage more risky gathering, but still provide the opportunity to gather savely in the base which will be punished by other means.

    2. Balancing of food resources like fishing for villagers (is not really possible at the moment due to some citizen gather range / size of fish resource incompatibiltiy I think), fish and berry regeneration (don't actually know why it wasn't implemented - I guess some disagreement on design?) or making hunting more viable and nerf/change fields (also discussed, but again disagreement on design I think).

    I agree especially with the fields: they shouldn't give an infinite supply (and a reseeding queue really doesn't require that much work like in AoE2 if we allow batch "training" like for units - alternatively we could give the option to reseed automatically as long as there are enough resources). And till this day I really haven't understood why on earth something should grow on a field if you throw some wood on it. As seeds are no resource, I would say fields wouldn't require any costs except for a relatively long build time (perhaps 1.5-2.0 times longer than now) and some shorter reseeding time. This would also encourage hunting in the early game as building a field would be really demanding.

    I would also like to make field efficiency depend on the ground texture (buff on green and fertile ground and debuff/prohibition on desert, stony, snowy/icy ground). This would make decisions about building placement more interesting. I think Stronghold Crusader did this very well and this was also a reason why this game has been the most popular of the entire Stronghold series. Ok this is a interesting topic, but I won't focus on this further at least for now.

    3. I think I once read a ticket about the option to make the amount of resources adjustable in the game setup. E.g. on "low" a tree provides 100 wood, on "medium" 200 wood and on "high" 400 wood. Sadly I couldn't find it again (still need to look at older tickets). If I remember right already some work has been done for it which should be finished and included in the main game because it's a great idea IMO (at least for non-professional / non-ranked games).

    A bit off-topic, but still affecting resources gathering:

    4. Actually same thing as with the fields: why do I need wood to construct some stone buildings???

    IMO building costs should be (more) civ-specific, e.g. greeks, persians, seleucids, carthaginians, seleucids, iberians and romans would have a high demand of stone whereas the celtic tribes and perhaps mauryans would use more wood for most of their buildings. The exact costs would actually depend on the current model used for the building. Of course this would need a lot of balancing, but I'm sure this can be done and adds to the uniqueness of the factions and thus leads to a better gameplay experience. Probably stone slabs would need to provide a bit more resources to fit this increased demand.

    Even more off-topic, but interesting:

    5. Make trader garrisoning more viable, see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3428.

    Actually trading is an extra topic, but I just want to raise some attention for this problem which is quite obvious, but still nobody seems to care about it.

    6. "Mod for modders" to add/remove resources easily to/from the game.

    https://github.com/0ADMods/resource_agnostic

    I think it may be considered to include this mod into the main game (if it's finished?). Not because we need it but just for better modding support.

    7. Starting resources vs. max population display in the game setup: either we should use numbers for both (e.g. resources: "300", population: "200") or descriptions for both (e.g. resources: "medium", population: "high"). Just for consistency.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Thinking about point 1, some additional ideas came to my mind. Apart from treasures, we actually have a relatively huge variety of food sources (fish, fields, hunting, berries) and trees (different kinds of trees and also size, e.g. baobab gives more and some "wood bushes" give less). In contrast, you can just mine one kind of generic metal and one kind of generic stone.

    At least for stone there are also ruins and pyramids and I think it's OK if the stone mines just fit to the current environment as they do now (they somehow represent different kinds of stone). Still it would be nice to give them some specific names like "sandstone" for desert, "marble" on mediterranean maps, and so forth. That's not a big deal actually.

    Edit: IT SEEMS I CONFUSED SOME PEOPLE WHO THINK I WANT TO INTRODUCE NEW RESOURCES. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. I JUST WANT DIFFERENT SOURCES FOR THE SAME METAL WE USE NOW. Have a look at my mod.

    Now, the intersting part is about metals. Metals have very different properties (much more variety as stone - if you speak about chemical composition it may be the other way round, but I mean the macro scale). They can be very rare, heavy and noble like gold or quite light, abundant and reactive like aluminium (though it wasn't possible to extract pure aluminium at those days). They can be even poisonous like mercury to a higher or led to a lesser extent. So all in all I think we should somehow represent that variety in-game even if we stick to generic metal as a resource (like we have differerent food sources, but one food re-source). My suggestion is to differentiate between gold, copper and iron sources/ores, at least by giving the existing ores appropriate textures. This would actually be the chance to introduce some advantages and disadvantages of the ores and thus add some strategic depth. My ticket http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3635 gives a bit more detailed description of what I think. In a nutshell: you should have to decide if you want to slowly and safely mine iron, which is quite abundant also next to the CC, but quite inefficient OR if you want to expand your territory towards risky places with gold deposits which can give you a strong advantage in metal gathering if you are able to defend your gatherers against attacks and distractions. For existing maps we could either exchange existing metal ores with copper (which should fill the gap in between gold and iron) or leave the generic metal ore as it is and use the new ores only in new scenarios/maps.

    Extra: there are templates for small metal ores, but I can't remember to have them found once on a map. At least in Atlas you can create them - the textures are not always fitting to the big ores. Is that the reason?

    So what to do? As historic_bruno said it's best to do a small mineral mod for this. More or less I have only modified templates so far and do not have that deep programming skills. However, I would give it a try. If the whole thing works I would probably need some guy for making textures (new meshes would be even better) because I'm not experienced with this topic either.

    Thanks for reading, I would be glad to hear some opinions about my points (numbers are roughly priority) :)

    It would be also be helpful to collect more links to the tickets refering to one or more of these topics.

    • Like 2

  12. Heroes redesign concept

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I like this idea, too.

    As Karamel stated it would be still important to match the hero classes as close as possible to historical context. At least if you want to give your proposal a chance to be included in the main game (and not in a mod). It would be nice if we could get some dev's opinion - otherwise you can perhaps create a ticket if you are confident with your work.

    • Like 1
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