Wijitmaker

Well done Stan. Pushing the game forward for over 12 years. That is an excellent contribution and quite an accomplishment. Take a minute and look over the before and after differences. You will be proud. That is 2x the length of time of what I was able to give it. I think it would be helpful for the team to push through a few more days and formulate some sort of a succession plan. Whether that be some sort of election process or maybe a search plan for nominations or recruits. Or perhaps it would be as little as helping to facilitate the conversation for the team, internally. Maybe formulating a helpful internal poll? The project still needs some sort of leadership to continue forward. As the last one to wear the mantle it would be wise to the team bestow it instead of allowing chaos to emerge in the vacuum... Unless the game is destined to have some sort of division/branch like when Alexander the Great died suddenly

Fun factoid from the past. The old website was attempting to collect articles that would later be used for in game historical articles: Factions :: 0 A.D. :: Wildfire Games (archive.org) History Articles :: 0 A.D. :: Wildfire Games (archive.org)

Ah, if we only had AI image generation 20 years ago. Cool pics. I see a little Braveheart / Mel Gibson in the eyes of one there I wonder if AI could be used to generate textures?

Yeah, I would guess somewhere around 2004-2005

The subject of this post caught my eye. A little 0 A.D. background for you. The concept of the citizen soldier was born out of a frustration with AOE series games. They had a villager unit and they had military units. The villagers would knife people and die easily but would construct and gather. Military units would only kill. It seemed to make sense to use at the time (20 years ago) that many of the ancients typically didn't support a standing army, they would fight during fighting season and then return home and gather/build during the off season. A hybrid of both roles. So, the idea of a citizen soldier was born. Champions and mercenaries were supposed to be excluded from economic capabilities. We understood it is just a game. Not all the nuances of history can be captured and communicated properly in a game.

I have a copy of the original vector. It should be on the website too in the press kit... Here it is: https://play0ad.com/about/official-logos/

Yeah, it all kind of started with Michael's dream to convert 0 A.D. into his dream game he was calling "Age of the Aegean". I think the Hellenes were the first generic civ that was broken apart and split into multiple civs. When you look at RTS games 15 years ago (I'm not sure what is out there these days) you usually find that they are either many civs/races that are slightly different from one another (Age of Kings), or few civs/races that are drastically different from one another (StarCraft). Each Civ was supposed to have a general theme and favor a certain playing style... Romans - Generic all purpose, Strength in siege Hellenes - Generic all purpose, Strong fortifications Persians - Cannon Fodder, Cheap infantry, Cavalry strong Celts - Aggressive and Offensive, Cheap/weak structures Carthaginians - Economy is based on metal/gold because of mercenaries, biggest variety of units, strong navy Iberians - Defensive, Small numbers, Tactical New civs were created and I'm not sure how they fit in or how they are distinct but I would encourage there to be a distinction to give players a reason to use them. For me - 0 A.D. was always a game first and wasn't ever intended to be a historical simulator. That was for games like Total War.

Probably a mute point... but this thread caught my eye. I had numerous discussions about this exact issue over a decade ago. There was a reason the original game design limited the number of civs. The civs were intended to branch as the game developed. So, for example - when you start the game you choose the generic civ of "celts" then when you reach a certain phase (city) then you are offered the strategic choice of either going with the Britons or the Gauls. Depending on what strategies and tactics you wanted to finish the game with (based on the sub-faction's strengths and weaknesses). Michael didn't agree and opted to separated them all into their own factions.... So... happy balancing guys

More on the scripting decision here:

Oh, and most of the old shield textures live here: https://wfg.itms.ovh/?dir=oldfiles/users/files/art/members/stag/shlds These originals were made in a much higher rez. You'll have to probably install one of these... Anything newer than v6 should work: http://www.oldversion.com/windows/paint-shop-pro/ You can export a .psd file if you'd like from psp.

Ah, yes - when making Buildings (and weapons) we thought it was redundant to make a unique building texture for each building at the time, when we were trying to be consistent in the theme and look of a building. Probably shouldn't have done that in hindsight, but we didn't know in the future there would be AO and normal mapping capability. Also had no idea that we'd be releasing the game 20 years later on "super computers" (or we would have thought at the time). Compare the textures of 0 A.D. with those of Age of Mythology - even our old textures were quite a bit higher quality.

Do you have an example handy? I'm guessing that merged textures were used for GUI applications? Shared textures were used with buildings. You got to remember that 15 or so years ago our minimum specs were: CPU: 1 GHz Intel or x86 compatible. RAM: At least 512 MB. GPU: Any supporting OpenGL 1.3 with 3D hardware accelerated drivers and at least 128 MB memory, e.g., Radeon 9000, GeForce 3, or similar. OS: XP, Vista, 7 or 8. Resolution: 1024×768 or above. I'd wager to guess that most all our phones today have 10x the computing power :p

Yep, we thought casual modders would find it easier to tweak textures than to tweak models. All you had to do was save your texture in the folder structure and make a tweak to point to the new file in the actor editor. Easy as pie

Ooo, sorry. Maybe someone can pull it out of archives so you can see it.

I like your eye candy. It reminds me of the original intent with the UI. I was intended to be very circular and orb like. We had planned to do lots of context sensitive commands that appeared around objects that we're clicked to minimize the mouse cursor travel all over the screen. It was annoying at 1024x768... I can't get imagine what it's like in 4k. Another:

Fun factoid... City phases (at one time) were planned to be associated with each territory. Not simply an upgrade that effected the entire map. So, if you managed to establish (or capture) a second CC in an opposite corner of the map, it would grow independently from your first original CC.

This was some of the back story of the 0 A.D. RPS (Rock Paper Scissors) Dynamics: Not sure if it is helpful at this point...

Yeah, we didn't have stables as part of the design document because... the designers at the time didn't want to blatantly rip-off age-of-empires games. We were trying to simplify the flow of the game and focus more on unit-to-unit interactions instead of building buildings. Less city building feel - more tactical. The codes for the buildings were just shortened to keep file paths and references shorter. Less typing, less bytes... etc. Nothing magical

Dnas made a lot of the helmets. For those that have access to this archived forum - see here: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/forum/177-dnas/ Looking good guys

Great maps, just need to get some shots with some improved graphic settings and they would be spectacular

Now you guys are rollin' Keep this line of thought going and I think you'll bring some more innovation and life back to the RTS genre Aside from being a good game design, it also would help distinguish it from be an AoE clone

I like that suggestion. Choice = strategy Your choices at the phase could bend you either toward a strength in military (perhaps sub divided in aggresion or defense) or economic (perhaps subdivided to favor certain resource types) It would also make it more interesting if the phases weren't globally applied to your entire civ on the map, but instead utilized territories and were localized to each town center. My view of phases are that they are gates players go through to unlock more capability: new structures, new technologies, new units. They also help measure the pace of the game. I belive AOK notified all players when they reached different ages. If you weren't in the castle age when your opponent reached it before you, it served as a good kick in the pants to say... you better age up, and fast! Just some random thoughts

Sounds like a great idea to me!

Thats really cool - I'd love to see them convert more of the 0 A.D. civs. It looks like a lot of his art is done in a 2D Editor. It would make his life a lot easier if someone painted the ground white, turned the 0 A.D. camera to isometric for him and gave him some screenshots. Or, better yet, showed him how to do it.

Nice work