AtlasMapper

Hello, While creating maps using Atlas, I would like to add units inside buildings or ships. I found this post: 2 years later, is there anything new with this feature ? Thanks for the reply.

There are lots of men half nude in the game, showing much more skin than the suggested model of Minoan woman. Yes, sorry. My goal is not to make any controversy, but rather to exchange opinions in a reasonable manner and to give a different voice. I admit choices have been made this way and won't be changed. I simply find it arbitrary and disproportional (especially the nudity/violence balance) and I wanted to share my point of view. But, again, it is just a personal opinion. I'm not trying to make you change your game design choice, but at least make you think about it.

I'm excited as a kid waiting for Santa How many time is expected between the RC and the final version of A20 ?

I find this topic very interesting, and the information you are gathering about the Minoan culture are fascinating. I would be pleased to be able to play with such faction you are building. But I have a general comment about these posts: I am always surprised by what might be shocking people or not. You are just talking about some breasts, and more specifically, some breast on a very little 3D model, hypothesizing it might shock some people. Let's talk about war, murders, factions of people killing other people. Well it is not so shocking, actually, we could even make a game from this and have lots of fun by killing people, taking soldiers to murder villagers. We can see it from a distant sight and still have fun by playing. But some breasts ? Well we might add some install option to block this content... Even if you remove blood, the game is still about war and murder. In my point of view it is much more shocking than a little model of woman with traditional clothes from the age bronze revealing her breast. Especially for a game with such an ambitious objective, trying to fit the historical reality as close as possible (from what we know). You can have men half nude, but not women with breasts out, too shocking. We are all humans, there is nothing shocking in some nudity, especially if it is a traditional outfit from ancient ages. Talking about children or young people, I find much more shocking that they could be exposed in a continuous flow of violence in games (not specifically this one), movies etc., than they might *barely see* some breast. Even if the model is really realistic, and you can zoom, etc.. In the end there is absolutely nothing sexual in this kind of content. It is just nature and history. I understand cultures are different among people, and what might shock somebody might be totally meaningless and not even noticeable for others, depending on traditions, etc. I don't say I hold the truth, but I just wanted to share my point of view, to make you have a more relative point of view about this specific question. And in the end, if we can respect other cultures and tradition, we could also respect some ancient bronze-age way of clothing

@trompetin17: Nice, I just added a post in the corresponding place (trying to get stuck with the original topic here) There are just comments based on my personal experience of Atlas, to discuss its potential features, not an order in any way. I understand the work is very hard. Thanks for your work!

@trompetin17: First of all, thank you for this amazing tool! I recently spent much more time using Atlas (several dozen of hours) than actually playing the main game. I have been disappointed and I couldn't find what I was looking for among the already available maps, and this tool is an amazing way to try to make my wishes real. You allow people to realize their gaming dreams, thanks! Beside these cheers, I have some suggestions. I believe you are probably already very busy by implementing all the features in the actual version, but you might find these comments interesting. There are just remarks, based on my humble experience of Atlas, and it is certainly related to my personal workflow, but here is what I have in mind: First of all, and the most important, I would love to have the possibility to see the entities UID when selecting them on Atlas. Maybe it could be possible to display it on the "display setting" panel ? It is very useful for me to set up triggers and scripting events. I know there are some trigger functions to retrieve the UID during a game, to retrieve their positions from a building or a trigger point or so, but these triggers points are limited, and getting UIDs would let me set up more easily some complex scripts in an easier and much more flexible way. In a similar point, (but probably at a longer-term), I would love to be able to select a few entities, and to group them (meaning attributing a group UID to act on this group and attribute an action to this group with a script). The latter point is probably more complex to implement, and probably requires to act on the depth of the game, not only on Atlas. But I had to tell. That would be really pleasant to improve the selection tool by letting the user chose what objects are selected. Eg. what I have in mind is a kind of list menu aside of the select icon, offering the options to select "all" ; "actors" ; "entities". I know you can switch between modes (probably not the "all" selection yet) by ALT-clicking, but this shortcut interferes with some OS commands. It would be easier this way for me. Moreover, when I work on actors, I don't work on entities, and in on another work session, I might want to remove all the objects at a time, etc.. But again, it might be related to my own workflow. Things would be clearer too this way (the ALT-click is not obvious at start). In a similar way, having a menu list to toggle between both painting modes (ie. left click normal, and right click "smoothed" mode) would be nice. I apply textures using a pen-tablet. I would love to be able to switch between modes acting on the left-click only. Moreover (but it is just a longer-term idea), being able to control the depth/size/strength of the paint or land tool with a compatibility with pen-tablet pressure would be amazing... But it might require a lot of work too. I would also love to have access to a list of available shortcuts from within the Atlas menu. I have other ideas too, but I don't want to flood you with all of this. The Atlas editor is already very pleasant and is really a huge source of fun for me. There are just some personal suggestions that would make it truly amazing to me. Keep going with good work!

@niektb: Yes please. I think it is better this way, thank you.

@sanderd17: It looks nice. So the version presented in this link is available since a year for core devs ? Moreover, do you think trompetin17 would be open and interested by comments from an Atlas user like me ?

Oh my, really ? Can you reveal/leak any future planned features ?

Thank you for bringing the truth, I now really feel like everything I said is nothing more that some useless and meaningless dusk.

Thank you my Lord, but my Lord is too good with this humble pixel-mess maker. Thank you for this humility lesson, and for underlining the huge gap that separates my Lord's skills and the useless mapping tries from this humble time waster.

Don't underestimate your potential . Maybe niektb will do it who knows. Or even @_kali, maybe this post will motivate him to generate more symmetrical multiplayer maps. This topic is made to inspire people for map making.

@sanderd17: Nice, it could be totally complementary to the @SeleucidKing "Gaia urban" map, in a total capture fest. No resources inside the city, just a few markets, and if the city is big enough and market far enough, it should be possible to generate resources to build new units (would be slow however, so starting units/resources should be available). I like the idea of this mandatory use of merchants, and it is not really used in the available maps. That is actually why I set it up this merchant need in my Aeolian map where resources are limited depending on the island. In the actual playable maps, I rarely have the time or room to build markets far enough to gather resources this way. It is easier to built dropsites in the numerous available resources spots.. But as you suggest, it might be really fun in a pre-built city!

@roofridder: You mean symmetrical ? I don't think a map should be pixel-perfect symmetrical to be a fair multiplayer game. Such landscapes look a bit too artificial, or even "synthetic" to me. But players seems to wish such maps. Lion.Kanzen also suggested this kind of map: But as I said, this kind of map are already playable. Have you seen these maps randomly generated by kali ? Especially Stronghold, and Safe House ? Anyway, if you really want your map, and even if nobody create it for you, I think you should try and retry to do it by yourself. It shouldn't be too complicated.

@Nescio: Also, aside from this, I would like to have your point of view about some possible battle scenarios on Crete during the 500BC-(1BC)-500AD time frame. I have gathered some information, but it would be very instructive for me to talk about it with you. I know it is a bit off-topic, so if you're interested and have some time to exchange on this point, maybe you could answer here. Thanks!

@roofridder: Can you please insert any screenshot in your message rather than posting a dropbox link ? When you write a message, you can from the bottom of the text editor: "choose files to attach". Ok, I can barely see the height-map pic, is is a cross-shaped landscape ? If so, it should be easy to draw without any height map import, directly in Atlas. Again, this topic is not intended to order me any map design, but rather to have a more general idea of what kind of map people would love to see in the game. Moreover, I am a newbie map maker, and my maps have no artistic value, nor any gameplay potential. So I am not the best person to draw you a map, I'm just learning. You should instead ask to some recognized map maker, namely @niektb , to draw it for you.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone: the tags don't work anymore, can you tag @niektb if you see this message ? Edit: Sorry, I finally fixed it.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone: The pic you did post is actually not on Kefalonia nor Ithaka, but on another Island, Zakynthos. But it is not far away, just a bit in the south. @niektb: @niektb I already changed the environment settings, and I like them this way (here is the before/after comparison). I am aware of the environment settings, I already used more cloudy settings on another map, and I plan to use some more different environment settings (night, dawn, etc) on some another projects I started. But I want to play on this island while in a sunny just starting afternoon (so, I selected the dedicated sky settings, and set up in a way I like). I don't want long shadows on it. I know you love to put some fog everywhere on maps, but it has not sense on this island. So no, I don't want to copy the Sporades islands settings on it. I don't find these settings nice. More especially, it is not because you or others decided that fog and sunset are the best environment settings for Sporades, and as this map is a Greek island, then every Greek islands should be foggy and under a sunset. I disagree.

Kefalonia & Ithaka are two Mediterranean islands, located on the west coast of the Greece, a bit in the south of the more famous Corfu island. The islands offer some beautiful insularian landscapes like this: But the topography of the island is also nice to set up some game battles! Here are the islands (Kefalonia is the big one, Ithaka is the smaller one): And here is my map: The map is intended to be a skirmish map, with just a CC and a few units at start. Each player is located on the cities indicated on the map, Lixouri, Argostoli, Sami & Vathy. There are some main roads linking each players, situated in natural areas (at the bottom of mountains/valey, etc). Player 4 on Ithaka (Vathy) start on an isolated island, (so he should be left in peace for more time) but will need to move quite fastly in from of the island, because of a lack of space and resources on Ithaka. The natural landscapes allow some nice games. Here are a few screenshots: (***, I can't edit the screenshots..)

Still improving the map. Some areas are now even more close to the reality (sitia, messara, chania, lassihti, etc..). I tried a few skirmishes modes, with 4 CC on the map for testing purposes. Despite the little room available at start, it is easy to build consequent cities (as usual, AI naturally put some new buildings and colonize places that are actually real cities on Crete, that's funny): It is possible to build quite big armies, and the landscapes allows also to set up surprise attack (eg. not only naval, but also along the south rocky coast, however, units will be naturally slowed down there). My tests were fun, I will now start to set up the three scenarios I did describe in the first post.

Yes, my tree issue was an actor problem. Now fixed: Thanks. So it has no relationship with the error originally described on this topic, sorry. I had to try.

@sanderd17: Oh that's not trivial for me to have some separated treetops, thanks for the information. I know & understand the difference between actors and entities, especially because actor trees can't be chopped. So during a game, a player can see trees but he can't chop them. I think it is disturbing because it is frustrating and more complicated to evaluate the available resources around players on a map (but I now understand its use for places impossible to reach). For these reasons, I didn't (want to) use any actors in my map. That is why I did talk about entities. But maybe I did something wrong by selecting some actors instead of entities ? But aren't these two component separated in 2 different menus in Atlas, is it so easy to make such an error? Anyway, it should be easily checked with your ALT key procedure if it is the problem, thanks for the detailed explanation . I'll tell you very soon if it it related to it (seems to be good chances it will be, apparently).

@sanderd17: Ok, so it shouldn't be the problem. I've recently spotted something else, that might be linked to that problem: On some of my maps, it seems to have some stability issues between sessions. When I work on a map (3D, landing, textures, add entities), then I left the map for a while, then I come back and work again on the map, some entities (especially trees) have a wrong display (here is an example: missing trunks of the trees) Moreover, I can't select some trees I placed before anymore, even if their displays are ok (on the example file, I selected the whole screen, but some trees are impossible to select, I also tried by double clicking another entity of the same kind on the screen). It seems that most of the problematic entities are on the top on some hills or mountains, so I wondered if any change in the land (making the hills higher, then modifying the coordinates of the entity on them, but with a bad handle of coordinates from Atlas) might induce the problem. Actually, when I lower the hills again it doesn't solve the problem, and I also have some problematic entities on a ground that has never been modified (flat area with no changes). So it should be something else. (To tell you with my simple words, it seems that when I save a map, not all the data are stored with entities, it makes as if my save files are unstable among time.) To be more precise, I should add that between the two working session on the maps (normal session, then the session with problematic entities), I did not change anything manually on the .xml nor .pmp file, and versions of 0AD/Atlas are exactly the same (A19). It was just a reload of the map. You suggested my previous problem might be related to some missing entities, or entities impossible to handle by pyrogenesis. So maybe you could find this other problem informative, and related to the same problem. Also, I did sent you the file of the map with the bugs/errors occurring at start, if it might help you to spot the problem. Thanks for any advice, suggestions or ideas!

@wackyserious: ok I'll try with bushes, just to satisfy my curiosity. But I believe in Atlas the "show passability" option is only applied for landscapes, not entities. So my example was wrong. Anyway my trees have some strange behaviors recently, I don't think they would cooperate in setting up some barrier.. (A little game: can you spot some rebel trees in the following pic ? ) @sanderd17: Nice, it will make my future map tests much easier. Thanks for the commands option list.

Oh so you should already be very skilled in map creation! I'm sure you could make this dream map very easily, and probably some even more complex ones. If you don't, is it because of a lack of time, or because the game hasn't enough feature in its current state to provide the fun you're looking for in this map ?