feneur

Just as a general comment: In my experience the important thing (unless you deliberately want to confuse the reader) is to make it clear that it's at an earlier point in time and another character (especially if it's a relatively close POV). Point in time isn't all that important to clear up immediately imho, as long as it doesn't e.g. feature a character that has died before or some other inconsistency (though that in and of itself is of course a way to tell that it's earlier in time, though I personally prefer a clearer notice ). That it's from another characters POV though, that should be obvious from the start for me to feel comfortable (Again, your intention might not be to make the reader comfortable, so it depends a bit on what you do with it as well ) That said, if you're just going to be telling the story from that other POV for these chapters you'd better have a good reason, otherwise at least I would be disappointed as a reader if you didn't come back to that POV later.

I'd say it should vary (i.e. if your units are part of the battle, the music plays, if not it doesn't), you should have to scout to know that other players are fighting a battle if you're not part of it. I don't think anyone is prioritising this above attack warning sounds. Attack warning sounds shouldn't need a whole discussion thread about when they should occur since the requirements for playing the sound are straightforward. Battles are a much more subjective idea and are more complicated to define. Agreed, it should be fairly straight-forward. And most of the questions, like how often should the sound play, what should the visual indication look like, are things which are best finalized when testing the game. I.e. make a quick mockup version, include it in the game and test it, does the sound play too often/often enough, is the visual indicator obvious enough/too distracting etc

When it's done It's hard to tell how much time the web developers will have, and even harder to tell when =) Hopefully within a couple of months at most, but summer could either be a good or a bad thing depending on what other things they will be doing

It sounds very much like an issue with either the drivers for your graphics card or the graphics card itself. Could you please look at http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths to find the log files and attach the system_info.txt to a post in this topic? Also, is it just the ground that is black? Does buildings/units/water look as it should? Perhaps you could take a screenshot? (Press F2 and it will tell you on the screen where it is saved, then attach that to a post here as well )

Just press Ctrl then right-click on a building and you will garrison the unit/units No need to click icons

As a general rule I don't think we want to complicate it more than peace/war music. That said I do think there should be audio/visual signs that other things happen, I just don't think it's worth creating new tracks for (And most definitely not complicating the programming even further )

Another thing we need to consider is "when not to stop" the battle. After all, the conditions for battle may be met, and then some units retreat or are killed etc and they are not, only to be met a couple of seconds later when new units join the battle. To make the risk of "bouncing" back and forth between peace and battle tracks lesser, something should be done. Perhaps just have the battle music continue for a couple of seconds after the conditions are no longer met, or have it fade out over a couple of seconds, followed by some seconds of silence before the peace tracks continue again. Something like the latter is probably what I would prefer, then it could be seen as the rising tides of war or something Might still be a bit annoying if it happens too much (perhaps an opponent withdrawing his troops often or something, would probably be more prevalent in part 2 though with e.g. the Huns).

Zoot, you have to remember that it works well for non-programmers as well For programmers it's one thing to "just" do svn up this or that, but for artists etc it's really helpful to just be able to use a GUI tool and just one at that Complicating the process is probably the biggest concern. I'm not too concerned with what system we use as long as it isn't more complicated than today, if anything it ought to be simpler if we should move to something else, to outweigh the costs of having to learn a new system.

Amazing Great work so far

Just using the Google Translator and translating I want you to Latin gives "Volo", so that may indeed be the inspiration

I would guess you haven't played Age of Empires? It's the sound the priests make when they convert units from one player to another (shown by the change of colors on their clothes, and that's the explanation for the joke above btw ).

Commented on the ticket, in short I didn't find a setting to change it. I did change it so you now can search for words in only two letters as well, have been a bit annoyed by that in the past, when there has been perfectly good reasons to search for e.g. an acronym or something, but one couldn't since it was only two letters. (I have obviously not been annoyed enough to try and find the setting before though )

Can't find a way to enable such settings. (You can "ignore" signatures if you go to your settings, ignore settings and check the "Ignore all signatures when reading topics" checkbox though, but that's not what you asked for ) I did however enable the custom user title for members with more than 1000 posts, it wasn't enabled before.

Agreed And we should definitely include the option to turn it (and the other things as well) off at will. Both for performance and so people who don't like it can turn it off (I'm not a fan of bloom myself, at least not that overdone as it was in AoE3 )

That looks great

Cavalry should be used to take out ranged units. I'm not saying it works perfectly yet, but just that using melee infantry to take out ranged units never should work well.

Well, since the turning radius should only be relevant for siege/cavalry (and naval units, but they're a different issue altogether) I don't think it's that much of a problem. They really shouldn't move very well in tight spaces in any case, so if they end up moving less than perfectly in those situations that is almost a feature It's only realistic for cavalry to be truly useful in plain open spaces, and I doubt siege engines fared all that well in forests either =) (Iirc most siege engines, at least the bigger ones, were built on the spot rather than moved with the army.) And that actually is a good thing, because that means that siege engines can be made more powerful. If they're hard to move and easy to destroy it's easier to justify that they can deal a lot of damage.

I think implementing spies well is one of the harder things in an RTS, either they're too powerful and you will have to focus on using spies a lot (and thus not spend as much time/effort on economy/war) or too weak and you will rarely use them at all. To some extent I think most of the espionage can be implemented as "technologies". Similar to AoKs spies technology, but maybe not as overpowered. Something like click the spy button in the fortress, click an area of the map where you want to spy and you get LOS there for a couple of seconds, then a cooldown period before you can use it again. The same with most of the other things. The only things I think are hard to do well as "technologies" are sabotage/assassination as they preferably should be possible to stop/avert.

Yeah, the thing to remember is that this is a game That means that a great many things will not be directly included, but rather symbolized through more abstract things. For example the things The Crooked Philosopher mentioned about capturing horses can be seen in part as symbolized by the loot that you get when enemy units are killed. Directly it might just be an increase of resources, but looking at what it means it includes everything from direct loot (i.e. stuff) to more abstract concepts like capturing horses and sending them home and quipping them again and putting units on them etc. you could of course abstract things even more and just have statistics, but that would not be a fun game Generally speaking, of course there are people who enjoy statistics and numbers as well I do think RTS is a good middle ground between the number crunching/knowledge heavy strategy games and tactics games (and further on action/adventure/FPS games) in that there's room both for thinking and action. It does mean that it's probably the genre where people disagree the most about how in-depth things should be though

They count as cavalry heroes

Many of these are planned features/known bugs. Do you mean it should only show the garrison icon over a building? I think it's useful to have the gray mouse pointer as well as that gives you an indication that either the unit can't be garrisoned in the building/object your mouse is over or that it can't be garrisoned at all. Nope. We do have the concept of citizen soldiers though. That means that some of our fighting units can do economic tasks as well (to symbolize that many soldiers in the ancient world were both working citizens and fighters). If we find people who are able to create the animations for the siege operators we do intend to include them. That should be up to the individual players. Some people probably want even fewer, while many want a lot more, so it would be bad to limit it too much in the normal game. However, it may make sense to set the default pop cap to something in the middle of the available options. Also, remember that horse units, siege units, and ships take up more population space, so depending on which units you choose to create you can quickly reach that limit. Depends on what you mean by citizens. Female citizens are better at food gathering, but not as good at wood/stone/metal gathering, also, they can't fight. So you have to choose which you want to train. If you only focus on resource gathering long enough for a resource cap to be meaningful it's likely your enemy will have crushed you by that time, so I don't think it will be an issue. Better to let people gather as much resources as they want for those who like to play long games and create massive armies, if you want to have a quicker game just use your resources as they come in There will not be any items, but apart from that heroes will indeed play a greater role. The intention is to have them give a bonus, most of them aura bonuses for nearby units. Increasing their armor against certain units etc. Formations will be both simplified and made more important. Some will indeed be selected automatically, some will be removed, and all remaining should be made more powerful. As it is now they're little more than a way to make the units move neatly towards their target, but they will have different bonuses. Many want us to remove the cap entirely. I don't remember if that's the case currently or we just have it set very high, it's been changed pretty often But either way it's probably better to have a high/no group cap as that allows for people to both have small groups and big depending on their wishes/playstyle etc We might end up enforcing one eventually in any case because of performance reasons. Pathfinding is currently being completely rewritten, and balancing hasn't yet truly begun, but thanks for your thoughts As citizen soldiers level up they get better at fighting and worse at economic tasks. Not very likely. (And I'm guessing you mean train as in improve? Train is often used as in "create" as well.)

No, there is a limit to 10 fortresses per player/map, and unless testing shows that's too many or too few that number is going to remain Also, note that the Celts doesn't have two fortresses, rather there are two Celts so to speak =) Gauls and Britons. Most likely they will be split into two proper civs as we've done with the Hellenic ones, originally they were going to be "sub-civs" of their main civ. I.e. when you got to the City Phase you were going to be able to choose either Gaul or Briton if you were playing the Celts, and either Macedon or Poleis (city-states) for the Hellenes. Now it's very likely that Celts will be split as well Why is it ridiculous that it can happen in a game? It might be ridiculous in real life, but even then it might make sense to more heavily fortify some areas. Also, remember that if you put all your forts in one place you're going to have less defense in other.

Even less reason to do it imho. Then it would be almost the same amount of work, but just used for a limited number of units.

Seems like you should be able to already, just go to Pureons profile page and click on "Send me a message" to send him a PM

You can't yet. (Though since it doesn't seem too likely that you are a spam bot I'll go ahead and enable it for you already Otherwise you'd have to post one more post to be able to use the PM function, we figure if you have posted five posts and not gotten caught for spamming you're probably not ever going to spam But we have had problems with spam bots sending PM spam in the past, so that's why it's not enabled for new users.) I'm not sure whether .odt/.doc is a valid extension, probably best to include it in a zip file in either case though