Wijitmaker

Pureon, do you have a legend to that image? (what do each of the colors mean) It looks like it is only a 4 key animation, correct?

Hmm, I'm not thinking that would be a good idea. Wouldn't it effect all existing animations and require a tweak? I'm not familiar with how blender animation (key frames and interpolation) works, but in theory I would think it would the same as Max. What I always tried to do to get a perfect transition was clone my animation both before and after the frames I wanted to export. To use Philip's analogy, you want frames: ABC So, copy those frames both before and after, to be: ABCABCABC Then, export the middle bolded frames. This ensures that position/rotation/translation between frames A & C are consistent both at the start and the end of the animation. You want the bezier interpelation to be calculated the same for both the entrance and exit. Like this: Not like this: If you take the steps above, I think it helps with that. No guarantees it will fix your wheel problem though Though, I think that is what I did for the chariot. You would have to look at the file in the art svn to be sure though. Hope that helps.

Just out of curiosity, does the celt chariot have this same problem of wheels spinning backwards?

Wahoo! You got it! Nice work privateer

Sorry, R8... yeah I'm a bit old school. 2008 is what you have though right? From the website: "ColladaMax 3.05A: added support for 64-bit compilation and 3dsMax 2008." So it should work for your version. ColladaMax exports .dae files. The .pmd files are only exportable from R6 with a WFG custom plugin - so you don't even have to think about that. The .dae format is superior to the old .pmd format in that the vertexes during animation are weighted vs. 100% fixed to one bone or another. Your model looks like a great start. I typically didn't model details that could be done with a texture (like window sills), and the interior walls don't need to be modeled either if they are fully hidden by a roof Though I'm not sure what the current art department policies are anymore.

Rather than using the default FBX/DAE plugin that comes with 2008, try following the instructions here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ArtDesignDocument#a3dsMax Install the ColladaMax plugin. See if that works for you

Neat idea! Could you make it player color?

I payed the $25 annual IPB renewal fee today.

Hmm, that is very odd it would do that. I suspect the location of the prop point is what is giving you grief - not the difference in the models themselves. I bet if you put the roman blood to root it would work like the persian. I wonder though if there might be a better way to do blood though than using the prop system. Something more "hardcoded" because it is always going to apply to certain classes of units (unless you turn off blood in the game settings). Trouble with blood is that if the prop was based on the unit's prop point of the chest - the chest isn't always going to be parallel with the terrain. The root is, and will likely always look ok - unless your on a hill with elevation. Problem with that is, in the death animation, the unit doesn't always land on the center of his root (which may or may not be acceptable - perhaps close enough). I think other games use the feature Philip mentioned - http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14515 - Terrain decals. I would recommend that it could automatically be applied to the center of the bounding box of the mesh after death on the terrain.

Not sure if this works, but here is another opportunity to get into the beta. http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/04/19/snag-an-age-of-empires-online-beta-key/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Massively+%28Massively%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Thought of another feature... Cloud shadows, rolling slowly across the map. Westwood RTS engines do a nice job with this. Adds a tinge bit more realism to the player.

Current funds: $3,153.37 USD

Player color never looked so good Nice job Philip!

Cool idea, that would neat if a separate algorithm could automatically do it. Otherwise, the artist would have to set up each building, one at a time. A batch process would be much nicer. I'm not even sure how ambient occlusion would look with shadows. As you can tell from that screenshot you linked, we did the testing before Nicoli implemented the self shadowing feature. I guess W mapping isn't that significant. I thought .dae files was saving W data, but looking at them I think it is UV0, and they don't look like they store it. Nevermind Proposal #6 - Nice, I like it

You asked Here are some more you may consider adding to your list. Map folks are always interested in another plane of water for a lake or something... Perhaps this could be as simple as a special texture call that could be assigned to an exported pre-shaped flat lake? Then assigning it the attributes that our huge plane of water has? Dunno how difficult it is, but it is something I see mentioned now and again. Also, along with water, there is the 'waves' feature that would add a nice graphical touch. We have an old demo (with textures) of it somewhere that Daywalker made in the code pit. As you are aware... billboard sprites and a fixed orthographic camera view would be appealing to the 2D modding community. Here is another... sort of a graphics feature. There has been talk in the past of wanting a toggle to a larger minimap, that you could turn on and off during the game play. Another is, simple shaders that could be saved with the map. So, for example - on a snow map, if you wanted to desaturate the colors to make the world look colder... you turn the contrast down. Or, if your playing a tropical map, and you want the green colors to 'pop', you turn the contrast up. Bright/Contrast/Gamma - something that would be a global control over the environmental/lighting controls already in Atlas. There is several iterations of particle engines, even having one of them in the game. Remember the fountain that used to always show up in the lower left hand corner of the map? We just never had a good tool to control it - save files, and attach them to prop points.

I think hardcore players generally frown upon randomness. Though the degree of randomness could be controlled. Chance in the favor of the player can cause delight, and "bad luck" can cause frustration. Due to the volume of units participating in a battle, the early game designers didn't think you would notice randomness. An instance when you would notice it is when you take your lone scout out into the wild and get screwed by a lucky hit from an enemy. We wanted to emphasis tactical advantage. I'm not sure if the game still has this, but there was intentions to weaken a unit's defense if it was attacked from the rear (being occupied attacking another unit - when 2 units are attacking a single entity). This would place an emphasis on real life tactic of flanking. The other tactic we wanted to use, was the advantage of high ground. This was useful on battlefields in both melee and missile combat. So, in short, we felt that micromanaging position and terrain was adding enough degree of randomness that we didn't need to add anything further. If we continued to push the scales to the replicating "real life" the game would cease to be a game, becoming instead something more of a simulator (perhaps loosing the fun factor for a majority of players). Randomness in games is interesting though, here is a good article on it: http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane

I'm not sure I would recommend doing anything with global illumination because it would be to much of a strain on the art department. I was just curious, as it was something I always wanted to do. It would probably be just as easy to burn the shadow map into the diffuse map. If indeed the art department is thinking of redoing all the building artwork and making individual graphic files for each building and creating normal/spec mapping, then a unique (with burned in shadows) diffuse map wouldn't be out of the question. I think that all of these map types are 'future proofing/assisting' the graphics engine, so that it might be appealing to other developers that might take advantage of these capabilities, even though our current WFG staff might not have the resources to do so. An aside... W mapping has always intrigued me because it is a portion of UVW dataset that is rarely ever used (to my knowledge). Perhaps could be used to store vertex shading data - again you would be limited to the artist's ability to understand and harness/use the 3d program. So, with the combination of this thread here and this thread... are you looking at pre-configuring the graphics settings for the users? Dis-allowing graphical features that their graphics card is unable to render correctly? I like your proposal #2. Make a break - separate graphics for old hardware from newer, this would free you to make updates for newer whenever needed without having to worry about the old hardware anymore. Just need to make sure that playing in one config or the other doesn't give one player an advantage over another.

Would proposal #5 allow for pre-rendered shadow maps?

Today I made WFG's quarterly server payment. Current account balance is: $2,935.82 USD

Great marsha! I'd love to see your AI in action

Cool pic Pureon Nice tweaking!

Well after I updated SVN (didn't help) and deleted the terrain folder and re downloaded it, it finally recognized the missing files. It works - no bugs Nice work guys, it is really awesome. I love the pathfinding and new fog of war. Resource shuttling is fun too. I do miss the run/stamina and auras. Hopefully those will appear back in the game sometime

Sure, here you go mainlog.html

This looks a little more up to date crashlog.txt crashlog.dmp

Hmm, I agree, that doesn't look recent I'll investigate further when I get home.