feneur

Welcome to the forums! Here's a document which outlines some of the best first steps to starting programming for the game: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers

The current plan is something like: trade between a player's own markets give a basic amount of resource (when territories are implemented you'll only be able to build one market per territory, so this will be another reason making players expand ), trade between a player's market and another player's market gives a bigger amount of resources.

What role do you envision healing/healers to play if we use Lifepoints rather than Hitpoints? Also, in general one unit is meant to represent more than one unit, which makes hitpoints more realistic, I guess most people don't see them as anything but one unit though, so that's just a pretty minor point in favour of the old system in that respect. One case where I think something like the lifepoints would be really nice would be for rams attacking gates as that's something that could potentially take just a few hits, but where slowly tearing through hitpoints doesn't seem all that realistic. Speaking of being realistic, a problem I see with this kind of system is that as far as I know "one shot kills" were extremely rare, but that could be averted by giving all units at least a few Lifepoints and by the maths, so that's probably not a problem

Sounds good, I'll make those changes, and write some more text to make it harder for you to read through it all =) (That's not my motivation of course, but if nothing else it's easier to comment on something that exists/easier to improve on something that's there )

If nothing else you might take that as a reason to win quicker Seriously though, where would new resources be placed? In the middle of your city? That would not be too good, having trees appearing where your units are supposed to walk or your next building should go. Far away from your city? Wouldn't there already be resources there as you haven't expanded there yet, if not you'll most likely at least have a Mill there, and how would the "tree placing algorithm" know the difference? Where it's only one building? That might be a scout tower overlooking a good access route to your enemy which might then be blocked if more trees are added. If only around mills, then you might get trees where you don't want them. If only near mills which are far away from other buildings it may be a mill you built to gather metal or stone which could risk getting blocked by trees. The only resource I realistically see being renewable would be animals, but I don't think it's worth spending the time implementing renewable resources just for food which is something you should be able to get from farms by that time in any case.

Intended, they're meant to represent professional soldiers. Not implemented yet. The current AI is more of a test AI than anything else, expect better AIs to come in Alpha 5 and future releases. There will be a system of priorities, as well as unit stances (aggressive, defensive etc), that will help solve this and similar situations. Most units are/will be only either melee or ranged. To make the units garrison inside a building when you right-click, press and hold the Ctrl key before right-clicking. I'm guessing you mean that civic centres should have the ability to garrison units? They can, they do not fire at enemies at the moment though.

About the factions/time period: The game is overall meant to encompass the period between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The name 0 A.D. is chosen partly because it's in the middle of those two. Renewable resources are very unlikely, it's one of those things that sounds great in theory, but isn't all that great in practice. With trade you should never be in a situation where you cannot get more resources anyway.

It's not yet implemented, so currently it's not possible to save a game.

This thread will be a place to discuss the writing of the wiki manual here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0adManual , which in the long run will affect the in-game manual. Things like what words to use etc should be discussed here.

More info will come in the release announcement for Alpha 4 which should come any day now

Splendid, nice for eyecandy and "end-of-the-road" scenarios Great work

Ah, doing other things while you wait That's a good reason, and makes sense. Even if we go the route of having an in-game lobby you can always have the game window windowed while waiting for other players to join and make it fullscreen when actually playing (Alt+Enter toggles fullscreen/windowed).

Please add your input to the discussion of the future of the combat system here: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14516

Hmm, just to clarify things, can you explain why you both say that alt-tabbing is a mess on Linux and wants the lobby to be external to the game? It just seems counter-intuitive to me

It's an interesting idea, and it might help to differentiate 0 A.D. compared to other games, but I think we have to consider carefully whether this is adding complexity for its own sake or if it improves the game, most importantly if it makes it more fun. A couple of questions: Does the game currently support units having a direction? Does it support attacks coming from a direction? If directions aren't supported, how hard would it be to implement them? One of the reasons for the current design is so that things wouldn't be too random, therefore I'm curious as to what benefits this method would have in gameplay terms? Apart from perhaps being more realistic, does it make the game better/funnier? Adding randomness might make the game realistic, but what would you say is the benefit to the player? A combination of those questions: to me it seems a bit tedious for the player to do something about it, I mean it makes sense for a player to micromanage a formation so that it faces a certain direction, but individual units? Are you saying we should do away with hitpoints altogether? I.e. most attacks will not actually do any damage, but it only takes 1-5 successful hits to take out a unit? Also, if we change to your system, how do you suggest we do with siege weapons? All-in-all, an interesting idea, but I want more info before I can make up my mind about what I think about it

The things I personally think are the most important of those listed are (in order of importance, all of course imho): 1. Display obscured units: will improve gameplay, so definitely should be a high priority. 2. Particles: will add a lot to the feel of the game I believe, might be a steep learning curve to work with them, but things like fire, smoke etc will make the game world seem much more alive. Will probably be one of the more difficult things to implement as it requires so many different things, at least compared to something like Bloom which as far as I know is added "above" everything. Particles need to be able to do so many different things, and should preferably be both easy to use and complex. By easy to use I mean: one should be able to quickly add a predefined fire/smoke to a prop point or fire as an actor (or at least as a part of one) in a scenario. By complex I mean: it should support adding your own particles and how they interact/when they're triggered. The ticket talks about things like footsteps, but there might be other examples. (Weather is probably likely to make good use of particles as well.) Most of what I've mentioned is probably straight-forward or at least expected, but I guess most of it simply is to try and make the point about particles being one of the more complex things (other things might be more complex in terms of the actual functions/math required though ). 3. Decals: will definitely help in a lot of cases as you say. Automatically smoothen the terrain within reasonable limits (+ limits for how steep a slope a building can be built on) should preferably be implemented at roughly the same time. About billboards: would it be hard to have them always face the camera, even when you rotate? I believe this is often done in animations for e.g. architectural renderings of buildings etc when you just have a simple image of trees/people etc to give a quick idea of how things will look like. That should probably be a setting though, some billboards might benefit from it, some may not. For example, tufts of grass, or distant trees or similar would probably benefit from it, but if you had a billboard of an entire distant "vista"/view that would probably not work as well. Especially if the billboard would be big and in that case would intersect with trees/terrain/buildings

Fortress/siege: Well, I don't think it's going to be a problem, but ultimately this and a lot of other things will have to be finally decided in Beta, i.e. after a lot of playtesting.

Aviv is in charge of PR, so imho he's the highest power needed to sign-off this

Most of your replies were more useful than the ones I wrote though

Personally I'm not too sure about this, while it would make it easier to scroll (scrolling can be done via arrow keys/wasd keys as well + you can press either the middle mouse button or / and move the mouse, so scrolling is still possible), it would restrict the user too much imho. I'm guessing most of the time one is playing windowed is because one wants to interact with some other application, so trapping the mouse would counteract that imho. As long as it is an option trapping the mouse might be a good idea for those who wants to use it though. That's because there is no AI in Alpha 3 There is a basic one in Alpha 4 though, so I hope you'll find it less braindead (It's just a start though, so don't expect too much just yet) Implemented in Alpha 4. Yep, this will definitely have to be fixed before the game is finished. There are more buttons that will go there once the corresponding feature is implemented (things like diplomacy etc) They are To save space in the GUI this, and a lot of other information, is displayed when you hover over icons in the GUI. These are displayed when you hover your mouse over the icon that looks like a sword and a shield. Do you mean as in "why do I need to build a fortress to be able to build units which can destroy fortresses"? I fail to see why that is a major problem, after all it's the enemy's fortress/towers/walls/houses/etc you should use the siege weapons to destroy. It might seem a bit worrying to put them in such an expensive structure, but that shouldn't be a problem once trade is implemented I'd hope. Also, infantry and cavalry will be able to capture buildings, so siege will not be the only way to deal with buildings. It will have to be seen in testing whether all buildings should be capturable etc though.

Ah, sweet

A thought, since this is SVN, and thus the textures need to get converted (or whatever exactly it is they do) if they haven't been accessed before, can that affect these times?

Nice read

It certainly seems like an easier way to edit it, but I assume the in-game manual would have to support most, if not all, things the wiki would support. And that might be complicating things a bit too much. I do think the wiki is a good place to have a more in-depth manual while the game is being developed at the very least though, and have started creating one here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0adManual Btw, I do think this topic belongs in the Development and Technical discussion forum, but I'll leave that to you as you have the powers to move it and might have a good reason to keep it here that I just don't see

Sounds good overall I'd say. And added together it's not too bad, my math might be lacking, but as far as I can tell it's 30% faster after those changes, so a few more like this and the game is going to be speedy like a bullet =) (Then there's another feature added and it's slower again, but that's the continual battle )