Nescio

@Sundiata, the Kushites have pikemen in 0 A.D. Do you happen to know of any supporting evidence? It makes me wonder about the extent of Macedonian-style warfare.

Another idea I'd like to try out but have no idea how to implement: 63. Instead of a player population setting, have a world population setting; each surviving player is then entitled to a 1/n share. E.g. a four player game with a world population of 600: all players have a maximum population limit of 150 at start; one player is defeated, the others can now have up to 200; then another is defeated, both survivors up to 300. Methinks this would provide an interesting dynamic (do you keep weak players alive to prevent stronger opponents from training more units?) while avoiding performance issues and improving realism.

Yeah, that's the idea, like this: To do it properly I need to have a set of decent weapon icons.

Like this:

Also, any opinions on using chess pieces for unit type ranks?

Well, I didn't design those technology portraits, I simply took farming_training.png and overlayed the numeral icon over the top right quadrant. Anyway, I reproduced those numerals in svg: You can then export to png with e.g.: inkscape -z -w 1024 -h 1024 in.svg -e out.png Then you get: Subsequently I applied the steps described by @Alexandermb in GIMP and shrunk them to 128×128: Although those certainly look better on their own, they actually look worse in game when shrunk by the GUI. As @wowgetoffyourcellphone pointed out, they could use a black border, but it has to remain visible when displayed as small as 16×16. In other words, adding fancy shadows was a nice experiment, but not really an improvement in this case. While the simple numerals I first posted are not perfect, they're good enough for me as placeholders. Besides, I don't really want to create art; modding the gui and simulation files is already more than enough work for me. Let's leave art to the artists. PS I'm still hoping someone would be kind enough to remove the background from range.png for me.

The minimap is actually a square produced by the C++ source code. Without any GUI textures it looks like this: Furthermore, I guess the idea is there will be flare button in the top left corner and a score button in the top right, eventually: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/ui/session/icons/minimap [EDIT]: In case you intend to redesign the minimap and selection panel, the relevant GUI files are under `gui/session/` and you can find the textures under `art/textures/ui/session/`.

Unfortunately I'm mystified by your answer. Most portraits are 128×128 pixels. The GUI displays them as 64×64 portraits in the tooltip and 32×32 icons on the right selection panel. One quadrant is 16×16 pixels. In the I guess the `gui.scale = 2.0` is applied afterwards, i.e. 128→16→32. Anyway, the numeral with shadow (viii) actually looks worse in the tech tree than the simple one I made initially (iii): So I suppose I should keep it simple and leave making portraits with shadows to more experienced people.

Do you mean working at a high size (e.g. 1024×1024) and then downsizing (e.g. to 128×128)? Here's the result: Better? That's what I did when creating those new selection markers on Monday (above). But those don't need shadows, portraits do.

Thanks for the tutorial! I managed to produce this: Unfortunately there is still something ugly going on around the borders. Any suggestions?

That's quick! How did you do that? That shadow is fancy, but there are some weird pixels to the left of the middle.

Unfortunately I don't know how to do that; my graphical skills are rather limited; creating those numerals in GIMP was already hard enough for me; defining geometrical shapes in a svg file is much easier. Anyway, feel free to improve them: Yeah, that's the idea, eventually, which is also why I requested icons with a transparent background. The portraits in the public folder are useless to me, because they have a background. For entities the top left quadrant is used for the rank icon and the top right quadrant for the upgrade icon. I intend to overlay a weapon icon in the bottom left quadrant. Understanding and tweaking the GUI js files is not always easy, though.

0abc updated, reverted buildable mercenary camps and created numbered gather technology icons:

It's a trade-off; I'm willing to sacrifice some time on a mundane task today if that means less errors for me when modding in the future. I still don't see why chariot is allowed but camel is not.

On the one hand it's a nice detail, on the other it's weird cloth ignores gravity.

It isn't difficult, but you'd be surprised how often I still encounter errors when modding because I forget about the `_m`—e.g. because I copy an infantry template and find-and-replace "infant" with "caval"—even though I know I should know better. I don't expect I am the only one. They're all three legit, but they're derived from the singular; and branch of army is not the same as a soldier. Fair enough. I suppose I could upload a patch for it on phabricator, but it would still need to be reviewed and committed. What do you mean exactly?

You can find artillery, cavalry, infantry in a dictionary, but not camelry, chariotry, elephantry—camel, chariot, elephant are the correct singulars.

Actually it is a complete unit, and includes both mount and rider. I don't really care how you organize files inside the art folder, but I do appreciate it the file name of the final actor specified in the simulation template matches the template name to minimize confusion; hence no `_m`. Using footman and horseman would be confusing, don't you think? Template file name include infantry and cavalry, but also chariot and elephant; preferably actors should do the same for consistency.

And another thing, what is most important for me: the art files specified in templates, e.g.: `athen_infantry_javelinist_b.xml` has `<Icon>units/hele_infantry_javelinist.png</Icon>` and `<Actor>units/athenians/infantry_javelinist_b.xml</Actor>`, which is logical. `athen_cavalry_javelinist_b.xml` has `<Icon>units/athen_cavalry_javelinist.png</Icon>`, which is logical, but `<Actor>units/athenians/cavalry_javelinist_b_m.xml</Actor>`, which is not. I'd highly appreciate it if the `_m` suffix could be dropped from the total actor, so cavalry etc follow the same format as infantry, as was the case in A22. Also, use (singular) camel, chariot, elephant instead of (mass noun) camelry, chariotry, elephantry for actor file names, because these are individual units.

Also, hyphens should probably be replaced with underscores too, but there are more files with those: [EDIT]: D1711 corrects map preview file names.

A few dozen art files still have spaces in their file names; you can find them with: find . -name '* *'

Drop the abbreviations; cc, fc, hc, mc, rc, tc, etc for civic center, farmstead, temple, barracks, storehouse, market, etc. is rather confusing and prone to misunderstandings. [EDIT]: minor edit to trac page

Fundamentally there are three attack motions for swords: hack (vertical) slash (horizontal) stab (forward) I think units armed with a double-edged sword (e.g. xiphos, gladius, jian) should stab and units armed with a single-edged blade (e.g. falcata, sica, kopis, machete, dao, sabre, khopesh, axe) should hack; having slashing animations (e.g. for Japanese samurai) as well would be icing on the cake.

Yes, I agree CitizenSoldier→Citizen would be better, but that would involve checking and changing more files; instead D2200 (Citizen→CitizenSoldier) is intended to be a quick fix, removing the one exception for consistency. CitizenSoldier→Citizen could be done later. On second thought the `CitizenSoldier` → `Citizen` correction is not a lot of work (only five auras and four technologies) and is indeed preferable; I've updated D2200 accordingly. Re-reading your posts convinced me, @fatherbushido.

Yes, I know, I believe there is a forum thread somewhere. Simply `center` would work too. Other structures that I think ought to be renamed: blacksmith (a person) → forge (a workshop) royal_stoa → stoa super_dock (the cothon) → harbor (or naval base or military port) theatron (Greek) → theater (English) scout_tower (art), tower_stone, defense_tower (simulation) → tower_large (Large Tower) wooden_tower (art), sentry_tower (simulation) → tower_small (Small Tower) workshop (too generic) → arsenal (ODE)