Wijitmaker

I would suggest Westood's RTS capture model. Have a GUI command to "capture" on units that are given that capability. A 3 click process: select your unit you want to capture, select the capture button from the UI, then select the building you want to capture. This starts the processes of "capturing". During which the building starts flashing/pulsing (you can do whatever you want - this is what Command and Conquer games did. You could have an audio sound with it, you could have the pulse speed up the closer it got to completion of the capture... etc.) notifying both players that a building is trying to be captured/stolen. The duration of the capture is a function of the health points (and possibly the number of units preforming a 'capture action' - though, I seem to recall only one being able to preform the command at a time). So, weaker buildings are much more vulnerable it is to being captured. Capturing can only be possible if there are no units garrisoned inside, and no enemy units that have this structure/entity in their LOS. So, if you want to take a building, kill all the units in the vicinity. A decision needs to be made if you capture a Roman barracks as a Persian, are you able to train roman soldiers? I would suggest no... Or as Michael mentioned, do something with a tech choice. If you as a player hear that someone is trying to steal your building, you need to get a unit to that building ASAP - to eliminate the capturer. Similar logic can be used for female citizens, loose domestic animals, special structures in a "capture the flag" objective game, and probably others.

Wow, that is an awesome feature Philip. Oh how I would have loved to have such a feature 15 years ago back in the modem days. Who knows... I may have enjoyed playing on the internet in multiplayer games. Keep up the good work.

If I recall correctly the reason was because the "box" using the skybox textures (in the standard default viewing angle) was causing the edges of the map to inherit the colors of the skybox. So what you ended up with was various shades of blue around the edges of the map, not black. Philip modified the rendering engine to only show the skybox to the be reflected through the water textures. It was an easy "fix". I believe the correct fix would be to modify all of the skybox textures so that they were black from the horizon (prefect halfway point of the texture) down, and re-implement the feature.

Nice, good pic! Where did you find it? Do they have more?

Yeah I noticed that. I guess what I was asking was... can you do rectangles and ovals?

Looks very nice You have put a lot of thought into this. What would you suggest for an approach to non-round/square entities, such as chariots, elephants, and boats? Yes, the plan (as far as I know) is to have the ground deform when constructing most "structures" in the game. This would basically be taking the Z height of the vertexes in the grid that are under the structure's envelop and averaging them.

If you can export .dae files from Maya (and I'm pretty sure you can), you most certainly could use Maya. Setting up a bone/skeleton structure in Maya and replicating it in the skeleton.xml file is certainly doable. I would recommend some simple rigs to test an export and animation before you invest to much time, but I'm pretty sure any bugs could be worked out.

Hey Malte, glad to hear things are going well with you. It's always neat to hear about current stories of past members. Perhaps 0 A.D. made a small contribution in your education and career development. That was always one of my main intents Can you tell us what your doing at Google?

To further automate you could also waypoint the citizens to automatically rally at a specific building. If you want to focus in the early part of the game on food, move them to the farm center. If you need more lumber, move it to the mill. If you are ready to create some military, move it to the barracks. If you aren't sure yet what you want, just move it to a patch of ground near the town center. A commoner is good, I like that. In the game you wouldn't have to identify them as a commoner, citizen or a slave, you could just call them a roman, carthaginian, etc. Few more things to consider. Would advanced (in your model - units that were trained), elite (units that gain greater stats through experience) soldiers still have an economic purpose? Right now they do, just not as efficient as a basic citizen soldier (freshly created unit). I believe they should, as a fall back option. Or could a unit have multiple training - both military and economic? Would a generic commoner have any economic or military capability without any training? If the training wasn't done at a structure, and instead done by clicking on a single unit then doing the "training/upgrade" specialization from there - it would be a similar idea to Westwood Command and Conquer RTS games and later the same studio that EA bought and made Battle for Middle Earth. Basically your applying a tech through means of garrisoning a unit in a structure for a period of time.

I agree, not all civilizations represented in the game had such larger percentage of their population as slaves, such as the Romans and Persians. That was one reason why we chose to use the word citizen instead of slaves. So, I'll call them citizens. It could almost be implemented entirely with modifying lots of xml files. One might need some help setting up the auto generation of citizens. Also there is some logic needed to 'transform' entities when 'trained' in structures. Perhaps some GUI elements as well. It wouldn't be simple, but it wouldn't to laborious I think. I think the biggest hurdle one will have is convincing the team that it is a good idea, when in doubt the team tends to do things like the Age of Empires because that is mainly the audience that will be playing this game. It can be done though. I would suggest making a clear and objective list of pros and cons. Also create a little mini document that details all the effects this would have on the game inside and out. How would food effect technologies? How is food collected? What would the interface of the UI look like to train the citizens? What structures would it require and what actions would each structure take? How does it (or does it at all) fit in with game design elements like auras, citizen soldiers, trading, building structures, promotions, heroes... etc (see here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Design_Document & http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/XML.Entity - Note not all documents are up to date with the changes the team has made in the last several years - I'm sure they will correct you as you go). The output of this effort would give the team a good picture of what the risk/rewards of doing a system like this is and give them the ability to estimate workload for such a task. Good luck

That is a really neat idea! Very interesting and fits well with the citizen soldier concept. You could arm the basic citizen solder with a pitchfork and rocks or something if ever attacked (making them primarily a econ unit. Rather than battle experience to make the jump from basic to advanced, you could do just as you suggest. Make them pay for training at a barracks by "garrisoning" the unit there. Advancement from advanced to elite would be through experience still. Off the top of my head, the main gripe I could think of is that it would be a little tedious to micromanage. A game designer needs to consider what they want players to spend their time/clicks doing. Do you want players to spend their time tasking their slaves/citizens to a barracks to "train" or would you want them to spend more time engaging in other activities like battle tactics? I like the idea of specialist citizens. It offers the players choices on how to manage their economy and adds strategy and depth. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to have citizens/slaves to always appear automatically at a constant rate. Perhaps have a system similar to civilization. The rate at which food is collected would be linked to the rate your population would increase. Food would perhaps have to then be generated from resources that provide a constant regenerative source of food (farms, corrals, fishing). Though bumps in the rate might occur with hunting. Or, maybe food could solely be used to "generate" citizens/slaves. Perhaps every increment of 100 units of food collected, you automatically get a new citizen/slave (until you hit a cap - necessary for system requirements). Although... how would you "buy" a horse, camel, elephant. Maybe you could queue it and instead of 100 food automatically going to a human, it would instead use the next 200 food (for example) to purchase a horse that would be available for someone to train with at your barracks? Neat idea, just doing some brainstorming

Celts are supposed to be weak in siege (though have a sufficiently strong turf wall - Julius liked them so much he started using them)

Yep, that would work too

Looking good Hey, this graphical representation would be great for displaying a trader's path between a market/dock and destination. It would default to the shortest path. You could also perhaps allow the player to select a portion of the line to click and drag (creating a waypoint) if you wanted the trader to go another way besides default (kinda like google maps).

I like the assyrian ram, if it doesn't work for the persians it might be a worthy special unit:

ScEd (the predecessor to Atlas) had this functionality. I had a variety of images that I got years ago. I converted them to black and white height maps and saved maps as in the old .psm format (I think that is what it was? - atlas used to read this format). All those old real word maps were in a folder for years. Since your asking about them, I guess they are gone. Images were made from satellite imagery like the stuff found here: http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/data/srtm/ more options here: http://www.terrainmap.com/rm39.html

To play devil's advocate, the AoE design time has tried innovative things in the past (AOE3) and it wasn't well received. Bruce Shelly even calling AOE3 a mistake. I'll ask a hypothetical question: What is the balance between offering something new to players that is innovative vs. familiar? From reading the comments here, AOEO appears to be all too familiar (and in a reduced state) - AOE3 is too different. What does it take to make you happy?

Sarmatians are a pretty sweet civ. The Roxolani Cavalry was slated to be a super unit for the Dacians in Part II. Michael The Great, where does your interest in the Sarmatians/Schythians come from? Why do you think they would be a good civ to add in 0 A.D.? What makes them unique from the other civs?

Maybe your talking about LOD models and mip-maps on textures.

Ah, sorry - here you go: names.zip

Rather than re-inventing the wheel for the proposed entity editor (though it would be nice to have it integrated into atlas and works on all OSs), isn't there software out there (perhaps even open source) that is capable of generating forms that can open/save xml file? After doing a quick google search... for example something like this: http://www.orbeon.com/forms/orbeon-form-builder or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_InfoPath or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/XForms Would that be worth looking into?

5 of the 6 civs are already done. Example: http://www.wildfiregames.com/users/files/docs/celt_male.txt http://www.wildfiregames.com/users/files/docs/celt_fem.txt Taken from some research done years ago that can be found here: http://www.wildfiregames.com/users/files/docs/names.zip Carthage could be picked up from something like this: http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com/phoenician-names.html Names could be done in a few different ways: First Name <son of> Father's Name First Name, Last Name First Name <of> Town Name Historians would probably be better to say which is most appropriate for which civ.

I think that is a good idea. How many units were promoted to advanced and elite, that would be good. Another idea that kind of goes along with that... back in the day, we had an idea to randomly generate a name for each human in the game (to encourage players to form an attachment with their units, to personalize them, and not encourage using units as fodder - use them as a real good general would). If this was re-implimented, it would be fun to see which unit had the most kills in the summary screen. Perhaps it was your champion Cachamwri Ap Pwyll or maybe it was your opponents champion Antaeus Thetis?

Hi Sylvain. It looks like Philip is about to post, so I'll leave the technical analysis for him From a non-programmer point of view, I could see this working well in a static environment, but 0 A.D.'s world is very dynamic with entities moving, new buildings being constructed, trees being cut down... etc. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to update the areas? Here are some articles: http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html <= lots of links about halfway down the page Here are some old articles: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3096/toward_more_realistic_pathfinding.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3317/smart_move_intelligent_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2738/evolving_pathfinding_algorithms_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3137/profiling_data_analysis_.php?page=2 http://www.gamedev.net/page/reference/index.html/_/reference/programming/artificial-intelligence/pathfinding-and-searching/motion-planning-using-potential-fields-r1125 An additional resource is that we have had a former SSSI employee (Dan Higgins aka Major Glory) drop by the forums in the past and I'm sure he would be available to bounce some ideas off of. This was his last piece of advice to us:

To further distinguish player from resource entities on the minimap - would there perhaps be a way to draw different pixel shapes rather than have them all as squares?