MirceaKitsune

This is something I've been wondering for a while now. I had plans to play around with making custom factions, either using the models / sounds of the default ones in a custom setup or even unique assets from other mods if anyone has any to share. So far I've briefly played with modding to change a few default functionalities as a mod, I'm aware you do it by editing or creating json files for units. Of course doing so manually in a text editor can be harder and more time consuming... thus I was wondering: Is there a GUI to facilitate unit editing and creation? I was thinking something similar to the character editor in RPG Maker: You pick an unit (building, soldier, trooper) and have fields to easily edit all the basic features... icon, health, armor, upgrades you can research, unit cost and upgrades required, build restrictions, territory decay, etc. Same with aura and upgrade and such definitions. It could even be expanded to define custom resources or the parameters for random maps! I'm not aware of such a thing existing at this time unfortunately; Depends on whether anyone considers it worth it enough to make one, personally I'd find it very useful especially if it had stuff like previewing the models. It would probably be easy to do as a Python script since there's libraries for both Qt and GTK to define an UI... this could also be made into a component of the Atlas map editor which could make more sense, even editable from Pyrogenesis itself which would allow realtime previewing though this could be more complicated.

From what I understand as someone who isn't familiar with the engine code, the hard limitation was the engine not yet making it possible to define light sources attached to units or map props. Once Pyrogenesis were to support spawning point lights and spotlights, it's indeed a matter of adding it to existing assets. What we probably want by default a bunch of buildings (such as Civic Center or Temple) having one or two flame torches. Another great improvement would be lit windows, not sure if those should have light sources as an emissive window texture could be enough. Think I actually asked about that one: Another issue we have is night maps are rare, this will be most visible and useful on them. So a great additional improvement would be taking all the maps (especially random ones) and adding a night mode to them, currently only a handful have it instead of being something universal. A day / night cycle is also a relevant feature. PRB would be awesome but feels more secondary by comparison: Especially for a RTS where you don't see close detail it might be less immediate. Would definitely look nice if the helmets of guards had proper metalicity!

May I bump this to ask if any progress has been made since last time? Alpha 26 was released recently: A27 is about to be upgraded from OpenGL and feature a Vulkan backend. Given the new renderer, is the way paved for allowing buildings / units / map decorations to correctly have their own lights? I feel the lack of custom light sources is the biggest relevant limitation still left in Pyrogenesis.

Correct, the planet wouldn't be to scale obviously: It would be more the size of a small meteor technically speaking. That's the one bit of realism that wouldn't be possible... unless someone wanted to wait an hour for the map to finish generating then get 1 FPS if the system doesn't run out of memory in the process, we might get something the size of the moon in that case Then again this is an environment where an entire empire is built in 30 minutes as buildings and people are created and grow up in mere seconds, spacetime scale would never be accurate. That is fascinating to hear about! Is it going to be an open-source project we will all be able to enjoy? Any demos screenshots or videos that can be shared at this date? I always wanted to see a scifi RTS built on Pyrogenesis, the engine is great for it and other genres as well. Also a fun little fact: Part of what inspired me to consider this feature is a game from my early childhood. I believe it was called Populous, I'm sure there's at least one other person here who's heard of it and played that decades ago. It was the first fully 3D game I ever played and one of the earliest: It was a RTS where 4 tribes met and fought on different planets using shamans and magic. I don't think it had planet mapping for the world either, especially in that era I doubt they could have went that far even if they wanted... I do remember you chose a planet from the menu or something like that.

I know this is less likely to happen in practice, given it would likely require significant engine changes for something many might find too unusual to be worth it. At the same time, especially considering Pyrogenesis can be used for different products and genres including space / scifi, I definitely don't see it as something too wild to consider at all. So yeah, I was thinking about planet maps. Right now a map must be flat, circular though rectangular edges are also supported if I'm not mistaken. Were this idea to happen both custom and random maps would support an additional spherical format: When used the terrain is generated as a sphere rather than a plane. Obviously it could only produce unrealistically small planets you can easily circle around... even so it could be an interesting concept for sure. Such maps could provide both unique mechanics and visuals alike. Mechanically the biggest change is everything warps around, you can attack from different sides which would make the gameplay special. Visually it would also be an unique feat rarely done in an RTS: Apart from having an actual horizon where distant terrain covers while buildings have different inclination (think the effect in Animal Crossing), imagine being able to zoom out and see the whole planet from space! Obviously this would imply big changes to scrolling and movement: The camera would work differently as it pivots around the center point of the sphere, moving the view would also rotate it. All unit / building models will need to point toward the center of the sphere, otherwise just be aligned too the spherical surface and that should be it... not sure if pathfinding would have bigger issues getting adapted. Daytime and atmosphere would be a trickier one since we don't even have a dynamic day / night cycle for existing maps (although I think one can be scripted), seeing the proper time of day based on your camera position would be the cherry on the cake were the the rest to be implemented successfully. If supporting actual sphere mapped terrain is impossible, a simpler alternative would be allowing rectangular maps that are seamless and repeat around the edges. This would surely be easier to implement, main hurdle being a technique to render copies of terrain and models across seams while also allowing the camera to scroll seamlessly. However this method wouldn't allow zooming out so you can see the entire planet and manipulate it like Google Earth, zoom would have to be limited or you'll see infinite copies of everything.

Visually it does seem to look identical which is interesting. The guaranteed speed boost I'm seeing in that video is definitely welcome! Want to wait a bit longer seeing how new the Vulkan backend is, then I'll love to give it a try myself.

This will be such a massive and awesome change I'm sure! I'll likely wait a bit till it's more stable then help test when a new appimage is out later. I use Linux on the builtin amdgpu module, a somewhat rarer setup so if there's anything wrong I can hopefully catch it.

For now I'm likely going to skip this feature as it makes my mod more complex than where I wanna go. If the engine adds support for this on units later, that would be an interesting feature to have and play with. I also noticed something else: The game will break and print tons of errors if you add a negative value to resource trickle. This does feel like a bug to be fair and it would be nice to see it resolved. If anyone can't reproduce it let me know and I'll try it again and share what's happening.

Yes, it's how I found this inconsistency. The outpost has a customized TerritoryDecay but lacks the TerritoryInfluence: That makes sense in its case... for the Storehouse and Farmstead however, which I'll allow building anywhere for my mod, I would have liked disabling decay but still allowing the territory influence. Technically I could disable decay entirely and leave the influence instead, but then an attacker will have to capture farmsteads / storehouses manually even in their own territory which is kind of illogical. So for now I commented out the influence paragraph in the XML and the buildings do indeed work like the outpost, if it doesn't break anything important I can go with this functionality for the mod in the end.

While playing around with modding I found what must be a bug in the engine... or perhaps just functionality I don't understand, but I'd rather have it clarified just in case. I'm trying to make some buildings possible to place anywhere (both own and neutral territory) but only decay in enemy territory (not neutral). So I set <BuildRestrictions><Territory>own neutral</Territory></BuildRestrictions> with <TerritoryDecay><Territory>enemy</Territory></TerritoryDecay> but there's a problem: I must also remove <TerritoryInfluence></TerritoryInfluence> otherwise the building will still decay and fall to Gaia. It's worth noting that if I set <TerritoryDecay disable=""/> instead, the building will no longer decay even with the TerritoryInfluence field left there. The two only seem to conflict if I want to have decay but only for enemy and potentially ally territory. Is there a reason why you can't disable territory decay on neutral ground without also disabling territory influence? Why does the later cancel out the settings of the former?

Should be useful, will look more closely tomorrow, thanks. Does it require custom scripting or is the "consuming" field a builtin setting? I also found something called resource trickle in the defaults which I presume is an interval based decrease, may come in handy to at least simulate food getting used over time.

I have a question related to modding. Was thinking of making a simple mod to change the basics of how some buildings and units behave, possibly add new units or upgrades and so on. Looking at existing examples I'm happy with how easy this seems to be done by simply modifying simulation/templates/*.xml. Yet there are a few wishes I had in mind which might require custom code which I'm not willing to get into yet unless the necessary script would be simple. Wanted to ask if there's a builtin way to do what I was thinking via defs alone. Essentially I was pondering implementing a mechanic from Glest / Megaglest: Food as a resource is periodically consumed by living units. If food drops below a certain amount, organic units begin taking damage and slowly lose their health over time until they die. You'd thus have to keep producing food not just to create new soldiers, but also to keep existing ones from dying. It was a simple starvation mechanic which made things interesting and gave you something extra to look for. I guess there would be two parts to this question: First, can you make it so that an unit periodically consumes resources during its existence, so that the more units you have the more this small drain adds up over time? And second, can you make a stat offset with the amount of a resource you have... in this case regeneration, but have it go negative if food is below a given threshold so it drains the health instead? Ideally damage is random and you can hear the damage sound (scream, crumble, etc). I'm even thinking of going further and requiring stone to maintain buildings, having them lose health and eventually crumble if you're down to too little stone. Or catapults with metal, so you need to consume like 10 metal every minute to keep them in shape else they start breaking down. Could be a fun mechanic to experiment with, but only planning to bother if the engine already supports this as a capability... if not what would be the simplest script to add such a mechanic via new xml settings in units if it can be something basic?

Sounds nice but likely too complex for default. I can see this happening as a mod.

Ah... thanks! Will have to fix that sometime. I thought even trees meant for unreachable areas are still possible to harvest. I remember the problem was I wanted stuff like barrels or broken carts to be spawned around the map, but the builtin for that also spawns trees that can't be cut.

This is a change I've been meaning to request for some time. I thought about it several times and as far as I can tell, there's no reason why it couldn't be considered, nor any disadvantage to the method I'm proposing which should be a lot more pleasant to the player. At very least it could be offered as an option so players can configure it to their preference. Currently if you don't have enough resources to produce an unit, its button turns red and you can't schedule units or batches of that type till you do. This used to be less of a problem until auto-queue was implemented. Ever since you're put in the annoying situation where the production settings of a building are automatically cleared whenever you run out of resources to make units: Every time you have to wait until you have resources again, then go through the buttons and schedule unit batches on each building once more. My proposal: Don't deactivate a building's schedule and also allow the player to queue units when they don't have the resources for them. The building instead waits until you have enough resources, the last building that's been waiting will produce an unit of that type the moment resources become available. This exact behavior already exists when you're reached the population cap: Unit production doesn't deactivate but waits until you build more houses, you can also schedule as many units as you want till then as the button isn't disabled only production is paused... couldn't the exact same be done for lack of resources?

I've been noticing a rather problematic issue with certain biomes which appears to be generalized. I'm seeing it more with my random map Gaia given I configured a few extra decorations there, but the culprit appears to be one of the builtin biome functions (IIRC addDecoration and / or addProps). The problem is some biomes add trees that can't be harvested and act only as decorations, and those trees look identical to those that can. This causes many random maps to be filled with forests where you can't cut any trees: Apart from being illogical, it's problematic from a gameplay standpoint as you need to select units and hover over trees to see which give you the wood symbol. I believe this would make sense for dried up trees that can be distinguished, but not whole forests that look perfectly normal. Here's a screenshot from the Alpine biome to show my point: Believe it or not the pine trees you see in front can't be cut down or selected, only the trees in the back work. This makes no sense at all: They look exactly like the kinds of trees you'd expect being able to cut! Can anyone else confirm this with other maps? Or perhaps try mine and see what's going on that causes this? Maybe I'm using decorations wrong somehow, but generally I see no reason why an entity that looks like a normal tree wouldn't be registered as one.

I'd like to hear from others who try it. If you have a screen recording setup and do 0ad videos on Youtube, maybe you can show your play experience? I mostly play with it locally with AI so far, hasn't been much tested in multiplayer.

So is this feature confirmed for the upcoming 0.26? The link above seems to indicate so which would be wonderful

The map is now available in community maps master, thus will be in its next release I imagine: https://github.com/0ad-matters/community-maps-2

Decoration placement is a little generalized, it's only customized between bluffs and the main area. I had issues with structures floating sometimes but believe I managed to fix those. One idea was to allow trees / mines / animals on plateaus and mountains too, even if they can't be reached and mined they still look good.

Wonderful: Will do. I have the Git repo cloned, but always run into trouble when it comes to branches and that sort of thing. I'll give it a try later.

I wonder if it's too exotic? I'm not doing anything other maps haven't done though, just that this seems to be the first random map that does several things at once (roads, mercenaries, daytime, etc). I played several matches so far: Apart from a few areas being cramped and terrain casually being too rough to place buildings on, it plays very well and normally overall.

Do you mean Community Maps maintained by Arch Stanton? We play every few days and I'll probably suggest he adds this one too. I don't remember if his was a fork though. But maybe someone would like to play it a few times and if it's good I'd be happy to! In AI matches it plays very well now.

Yes: In terms of time 0ad is pretty much accelerated by 1.000 times at the least. But just as you can build a house in 10 seconds instead of 10 weeks, a tree can regrow in a day as much as it normally would in a hundred. And yeah, same: There are other changes that would be just as interesting. The idea of a way to capture enemy units alive and make them your own has intrigued me for a potential mod I might make sometime. Also 0.26 will have a new Han Chinese faction which is going to make things even more fun!

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/25940 Seems part of this suggestion is coming to 0.26: Fish and fruit trees will now regenerate slightly. I think this makes sense and was a good idea! I wonder if normal trees should also regenerate very slowly. It would make sense for realism; Any tree that isn't completely cut down will regrow in reality.