feneur

Reasonably No links/trying to sell something + previous relevant posts in other topics + long time member = most likely not spam

On the other hand this is an issue for other units as well, so should probably have a more common solution rather than one specifically for traders or units going back and forth between a resource and a resource dropsite

No worries there It did take a few seconds to tell this wasn't a spam post though I guess I've become too sensitive for those signs by now =)

Hello and thanks for your offer, I'm sure we've got a lot of things you can do and we're certainly grateful for any help we can get in this specific area Now, I'm not a programmer, so I can't say much about the details I'm afraid, hopefully one of the programmers will have time to reply in more detail soon. The fixed/floating point issue, again, not a programmer, so, yeah... But if I recall correctly with floating point it's harder to get the exact same result on different OSs/computers, and for the simulation to work the game needs to be perfectly synced. There might be ways to make sure it's the same for all players etc, so again, we need a programmer to reply, but the general concern of course applies to all aspects of programming, we need to make sure the code executes the same on all computers or we'll have OOS (out of synch) errors In short pathfinding/formations is a real mess the way they are currently, as you have obviously seen. Philip (or Ykkrosh as he's known on the forums) did indeed spend quite some time working on the game pathfinding, and while I can't recall him posting any code (I might be wrong, in which case I hope someone else remembers where to find it.) he did at least post this document: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/export/11728/ps/trunk/docs/pathfinder.pdf which should at least give some basic information. For the command line reference see the readme.txt file in binaries/system And also, just so I'm sure you're aware of it, we do have quite a lot of information in the wiki at: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/

Then your graphics card is unfortunately probably not good enough to run 0 A.D.

Agreed, this, and the fact that you are the one taking the risk (the enemy just has to build a market while you have to protect your traders, or at least risk losing both them and the resources they are carrying), is what makes me think that at the very least you should benefit from foreign trade, if not to a huge degree at least some.

Now we're getting somewhere =) I do think the Tux logo should also be black and white if the others are though

To get a lower angle in Atlas just press the Ctrl key and press and move the middle mouse button to change the rotation/angle.No, I had to manually add the texture in Photoshop. The reason is that the texture information is not included in the model files but rather added via XML files tying the model/texture together (generally at least I saw it was once included in one of the models, but it still didn't work properly). And yeah, using Photoshop to do it is probably the hardest way. You might get decent results with importing into Blender, but then again that's another program to learn + since we don't include the texture information in the DAEs you have to manually add them.

Preserve the alpha channel? That would create an alpha channel rather =) But when I actually try it it's not producing as good results as I had hoped. The building itself works fine, but the semi-transparent area doesn't work as well I'm sure there are ways to make it work though, I'm just not an expert in that area Did a quick search and found http://www.wetzeland...GreenScreen.php , the color contamination part is useful. Read that page for a more indepth description, but in short you create a new layer, set it to hue mode so only the hue you paint with has any effect, create clipping mask so only the pixels of the below layer are affected and then paint with a color that is similar to what the one which is "contaminated", (i.e. still has some green in it if you used a green background terrain and so on) should look like and paint over with that one. Not sure how well that will work with areas with more complicated sets of hues, but on the other hand this is mostly relevant for shadows and decals which are generally fairly monotone in hue, so it should produce good enough results. If nothing else I'm sure searching for more info on how to work with greenscreens will yield more useful tips I tried to import a .dae and add the texture to it, and while that works really well in one way (the file imports as it should, and Photoshop reads the UVs fine so the texture is where it's supposed to be) it's still a lot of work to get a good result. First of all the model seems to be rotated in a weird direction (a small issue I know, but still =) ), second a lot of buildings consist of more than one .dae file, and a decal in addition to that, which is probably the main issue as that makes it a lot harder to deal with inside Photoshop. And third you need to do the lighting well, which should be possible to do, especially since you can add textures for e.g. normal maps which should allow you to mimic the in-game look somewhat. But overall that seems like a lot of work to me =) EDIT: Forgot to mention: to get huge screenshots from Atlas click the Misc hacks menu item and then Big screenshot. That can be useful if you want to have a larger image to use in some design

Which exact file are you downloading? Also, are you certain that the file is completely downloaded?

A nice improvement over the first version, and I think you cover just the correct amount of topics, it would be easy to go overboard and add info about everything related to unit selection etc =) (Shift key to add units to the selection etc, maybe you could create a later video with the more advanced ones? In other words, I think basic gameplay is more important for now, but it would be nice to eventually have another way for people to learn the other shortcut keys etc than by reading a manual as it's more likely that people will want to watch a video ) It would be interesting to see what this tutorial would be like if it was voiced, maybe you could try to record the text that is written in this video and maybe Brynn could add it to a new version if it's good enough?

From a historical or ideological or whatever point of view different ways to do things for the different civs might be desirable, but from a game development point of view it's better, or at least easier, to do things as similar as possible To me giving all civilizations the ability to capture buildings seems like the best choice, that way you as the player can choose whether to capture or destroy (you are after all playing as the god-like ruler who can affect all aspects of how your civilization acts, so why shouldn't you be able to control whether to capture or destroy ).

The distance also means that you are at a greater risk as the enemy is more likely to be able to kill your trader, so imho you should definitely benefit more from it than just your ally being helped. Sure, it's cooperative and all that, but we need to give the player an incentive to do it in the first place. I do think you have a point that the benefit shouldn't be too great compared to domestic trade as helping your ally should be part of the motivation, but should at least get something for it.

I think it would be a lot easier to just open up Atlas, paint a large area of the terrain with a single color (see the "Special" tab), put in the building, and then do a screenshot. Then it's just to Select-->Color range, or maybe even just use the magic wand if the building layout allows for it, and delete the selected area and you have the building on a transparent background

I think it's going to prove impossible to do everything in one screen, and while having an options box does mean that you can remain on the same screen while still giving access to more options there is a limit to how much you can put there as well. Imho we should probably start thinking about doing things in tabs at this stage rather than having to do it later when we have more options. An option is to have e.g. the map description in an overlay, but that of course doesn't allow for as much formatting/information, so I don't think we should do it that way.

Portforwarding only allows access to that specific port, as long as you have a firewall/antivirus software you should be safe enough. Especially since it's not very likely that something will target that specific port. It is not recommended to open up more than the specific port needed to host the game though And no, only the host will need to do the portforwarding, both players should make sure that any firewalls/antivirus software isn't blocking 0 A.D.'s access to the internet though

That's the thought here too, it's just a question of when/how/how much You should still get more resources when trading with an ally, just that you need to wait for the trader to return with that model. As long as you benefit more from trading with an ally than with yourself I'm pretty much ok with either model, though I prefer to only have the profit for the market you reach so to speak so that there is a greater risk combined with the greater gain for the foreign trade In other words, you'd have a steadier income rate when trading with your own markets as you'd get income at both ends, but it would not be as much in total as when trading with an ally's market.

That's already planned The health decay is just a placeholder until capturing is implemented Buildings which aren't in territory that is connected to the enemy's city center but are influenced by your territory will start to lose loyalty until they either are down to 0 and all yours or the enemy changes the situation again I don't recall what we said about buildings which are completely disconnected to any players City Center though. Maybe just have those decay in health.

Do you connect to the internet via a router? If so you most likely need to make sure the correct port is forwarded (see the document above for which, and just search the internet for "port forwarding" and then add the name of your router to the search), and make sure that any firewalls allow 0 A.D. to connect to the internet. We hope to have a lobby server later which will make finding and connecting to other players a lot easier, but for now it can unfortunately be a bit difficult to get everything set up correct.

So essentially it's the same principles as we have in the game now, but the player would have to spend an immense effort micromanaging the units It might be fun in some games, but in a game like 0 A.D. you don't want to have to micromanage units while your enemy is attacking you. To make this relevant we'd either have to simplify the war aspect of the game or make it a lot slower.

That's already in place There's a big symbol for the civ right in the middle of the top bar

I think battle sounds should be louder than gathering sounds/be heard over larger distances, but I would imagine that can be done via volume levels rather than specific behavior

Ah, yeah, it's definitely not a bad idea for some games, but not for 0 A.D. We're going more for a balance between war and economy, and then we can't go into too much detail in either area

That's been discussed a ton of times before, but just for the sake of discussion, can you give one good reason to do this? And I don't count pseudo-realism (this is a game, so full realism is impossible) as a reason, though you're of course still free to argue that it is

Very much intended indeed I guess you could perhaps gather apples from horseback, but in general being on a horse isn't very useful for gathering vegetables =) I know you have to get off the horse to actually get the meat from the dead animals, but in a more general sense it makes sense for cavalry to hunt but not e.g. farm. I guess it could be argued that only infantry units should be citizen soldiers, but for gameplay reasons that wouldn't make much sense (it's useful to have cavalry available for scouting early in the game etc).