Matei

Rest assured that even if the engine is not open-sourced, the game will be very moddable, not only in terms of creating new maps, art or units but also in terms of gameplay logic through scripting. For example, one of my first tasks when I moved from working on the random map generator to the engine itself was adding hitpoint bars above selected units. I searched through the C++ code far and wide for "hitpoint" or "health", and could find no reference to anything resembling HP's. Yet combat had been in the game for several months! It turns out that combat was implemented almost entirely in our JavaScript unit behaviour scripts, and none of the parts involving hitpoints had ever had to be accessed by the C++ code. Of course I eventually learned how to access these things from C++, so there are now HP bars above units' heads, but this gives an idea of how moddable the engine is. Doing things like modifying the way damage is calculated, adding a new type of resource, adding a new spell (for our TLA friends ) or modifying the way the GUI looks should all be possible without touching the engine if everything works out as planned.

I've actually heard about this before. Also check out http://www.airliners.net/open.file/201517/L/ and http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=528889... it's pretty crazy but it makes for great photos.

Welcome Adam! We're hoping to make the AI powerful and also easily moddable (like almost everything else in the game), so hopefully you won't be disappointed.

We'd like to hope so . Most of the innovation in 3D engines is not huge changes to how the art is done or how the algorithms work but rather how many effects you can apply while still running at a decent speed. Stuff like AoE3's glow effects and even its reflective water can be added to any game with relatively little changes (I mean it would still be a few months, but it won't require a full rewrite of the engine). You can also see articles on Nvidia's website for example that explain how to achieve much crazier effects than anything yet seen in games. The limiting factor is really peoples' hardware. As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics side of 0AD is pretty functional already, and we're hoping to be able to improve it to keep up with new developments.

Alright, thanks .

Sorry for an OT post, but someone from WFG just MSN'ed me a while ago about random map scripting. I had to disappear rather abruptly, but can you please email me at matei@sprint.ca? Feel free to delete this post btw.

Rabbit, Sheep, Pig . The screenshot is very nice. What kind of filtering are you using for mipmapping though? I think it's not quite the highest one (GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR), although I may be wrong. And mipmapping is not something to be *that* proud of . You can generate mipmaps with one line when you create the texture.

Multiplayer, unless you guys come up with a really really smart AI . Multiplayer adds so much replay value, because human opponents adapt to whatever you're doing and come up with new strategies that the game designers may never have thought of. Plus, there's the social interaction from playing as a team with a friend, or, for other personality types, the satisfaction of smiting a live opponent . Since 0AD will be a web download, it should be targetted mostly at people that are quite "into" RTS games (the people who post at Heavengames for example), and these are also the people who really like multiplayer.

Taunt 999 from Age of Mythology. Except, replace "this is RTS 3" with "this is 0AD". It fits in perfectly!

Yes, he did. I'll probably do what he suggested, passing a "what to call next" function and an argument to the wait functions. Then I can just have a priority queue of currently waiting scripts. This should be easier to work with than general event handlers which would have to check what the object was last trying to do and then respond appropriately. I actually just sent you a private message about the game .

Berrys, I think Javascript should be easy to understand, perhaps more so than the AoK scripting language. (I just figured out after learning Scheme in university that the AoK language is a variant of LISP). Look at a tutorial on Javascript for webpages for example. It's also very similar to PHP, C++, Java, C#, so anyone who's programmed before is likely to know it. I know many people who started programming with Javascript or PHP. DarkAngel, I have a question about how you're using the SpiderMonkey engine. I'm planning to use Javascript in a game I'm making in Java (Mozilla also provides a Java embedding of JS). However, I'm wondering how you can implement "blocking" functions in Javascript while keeping the game single-threaded. For example, in the AI code for a unit, you might have a function like fire() or walk(x, y) which you don't want to return until the unit has completed that anmiation. Same thing might be true in a complicated trigger effect. But I don't see how you can do this if all that a user-provided JS function does is call your implementation within the same thread. Have you gotten that far with the SpiderMonkey engine? If I can't find a solution, I'll probably be forced to create my own interpreter which keeps a queue of some sort of currently waiting scripts. One solution to my problem is to make things event-driven, so scripters can implement functions onFireComplete(), onWalkComplete(), etc. It seems very inconvenient to work with for the scripter though, for complex scripts.

I use Windows XP, although I've installed Cygwin to have access to all the Linux tools. It's great for anyone who's used a Unix-like OS at school. You can even download software made for Linux and build it from Cygwin using make, and it's likely to run. I'm surprised few people voted Mac. I know several people with Mac laptops. Luckily, if 0AD works on Linux it will probably work on Mac too (Mac OS X is based on a Linux kernel).

I'm sure Celtic druids didn't live in groves, so they must've had some kind of temples too. Maybe you could make the building sort of L-shaped, with a (large) oak tree or megalith in the space left?

That looks very good. I really like the look of the buildings - better than anything in AoM or Empires. I also like the lighting effects, especially the lengthening shadows at sunset, although the sunset lighting itself does look a little bit cloudy. It looks almost like a different game from those first few screenshots with greeks. The graphics are much more polished. Why don't you mix in some dirt terrain under the buildings, though? You should show off your eyecandy skills .

I don't know about you guys, but after 0AD is finished, the first thing I'd do is play it!

AoM's was better in terms of special effects and different types of gameplay, and also in terms of "easter eggs", but AoK's was certainly pretty creative for its time. The main thing I disliked about AoM's campaign was the lack of a background story - if you look at Detailed Help on the units you see so much more interesting stuff about each one, but in the campaign it's "Hi Ajax, I'm surprised you're still alive" and then end of dialog. AoK did a lot better with the storyline. For example, I liked the Barbarossa campaign, where it turned out that the narrator was one of the main characters, and the Montezuma one, where the narrative started out as "passed down to you by Chuahtemoc, Eagle Warrior of Tenochtitlan" and ended as "passed down to you by Chuahtemoc, Emperor of Tenochtitlan". Both games unfortunately had mostly B&D scenarios, but then again, that's what the game is about and most players aren't people who play hundreds of Random Map games and thus are bored by B&D.

Happy new year everyone .

I chose "Other". What I like usually is multiplayer scenarios with different rules from the regular game that highlight its most fun features, such as the TTF racing map for Age of Kings, Cheezy's Rogue Wars for AoM, and "Bloodsport" by TwentyOneScore. In single player maps I mostly like a mix of build and destroy with fixed-force battles, like Ingo van Thiel's campaigns.

No, it's KClO4 (percholrate means chorate ClO3 but with one more oxygen atom). I don't think people making their own firecrackers is a good idea, and furthermore I don't see why they'd want to do this. Not sure if it should be illegal, but it should certainly be warned against.

I'm hoping to see it this weekend, it should be great .

Ok, thank you .

They seem to be gone whenever I log in. I think it's because you guys gave me access to the RPG forum. If I log out I can see them .

I can't see them for some reason, even if I follow the links from the two games' respective websites.

The computer, it can do everything by far and in most cases you need one for Real Life anyway.

They have to be English words recognized by Google's dictionary, and the one page Google finds should not be a "word list" page. androsphinx differentiation Creatures with the head of a man and the body of a lion weren't too good at finding derivatives I guess. flexographically atomizer Whatever that could mean. triskaidekaphobic promethean Some myth unit in Age of Mythology are very very afraid of the number 13. There are lots of them at http://googlewhack.com/tally.pl.