MirceaKitsune

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.

I'm happy to announce my first map and mod for 0ad! Gaia is a random map aimed at beauty and realism: It aims to provide beautiful landscapes and pleasant environments that are different every time, making use of all capabilities currently provided by the engine. You can usually expect plentiful resources and large forests with a lot of wildlife, may contain lakes and mountainous features alike. Supports all the default biomes and player placement formations. Roads connect player positions, longer roads will appear more worn out. You may encounter mercenaries and random buildings or camps you can capture. A time of day can also be chosen, night is supported as well as stormy days with weather effects (biome dependent). Games aren't guaranteed to be fair and perfect all the time: Due to how heavily randomized the map is, each player may start in a better / worse area nearer to different resources. I had several matches with AI and it feels fair and balanced overall. Give it a try and let me know what you think! gaia_1.0.zip Instructions: Since I didn't feel I should make a whole mod for one map I packed the map as is. Just unpack the zip in ~/.local/share/0ad/mods/user, don't know what the path is for Windows. It should then appear in the random maps section when creating a match.

Yes, they're the most painful games for me as well. I like how the different biomes make such a difference: There's at least one with barely any wood, and one with so many trees you couldn't run out for hours.

Is this still at an idea level, or is there even part of a playable faction implemented or expected to exist soon? The engine is so good and I'd like to see alternative games / mods for it too... something scifi would definitely work to complete the set.

Wow on this. I gave it a try last night and am legitimately impressed by what I saw. This is more beautiful than any FOSS game or 0AD mod I ever thought I'd see! Yet at the same time I'm also disheartened for a few reasons. In terms of development and completion: I'm seeing a very solid basis with some formidable assets, however mixed in with other assets that still look and feel really basic: Most factions have a very solid and consistent design between units and buildings... a few others are at the opposite end with simple looking buildings or animations. The GUI has many issues too and can be harder to understand, worst of all though there's a lot of lag and my screen is covered in error messages. I know those are things that can and likely will be fixed over time... till then this is unfortunately unplayable, but still gorgeous to experiment with hoping for the future. My biggest sadness is that this likely won't get anywhere in the long term for one simple reason: It's based on Zelda which is commercial IP, copyrighted to Nintendo which is also the worst abuser of content creators on the internet. They harassed countless developers who made Pokemon fan games, I don't see Zelda being different if they ever take notice of this. So much work was put in here still... I don't want to see it going away, of course they wouldn't care about wiping it all out. I wonder how many of the units are based on official Zelda characters... could anything be done to branch this into original IP without too much effort, especially if that will ever be needed at a later stage? This is an option I'd carefully consider.

Oh gods, Hyrule Conquest looks very impressive! I'll happily give that a try for sure. The latest trailer indicates they've gotten far with it at this point. The name Hyrule indicates it's a Zelda fan-mod though. I don't mind of course, just hope I won't have to see another good project go down over Nintendo-style Copyright trolling. It can probably be renamed in a worst case scenario, unless the units are also of IP characters in which case it may be complicated. I wonder how much of Stella Artis is playable at this point, seems to be a concept with some assets so far. Will definitely follow their thread too. Only other one I'm seeing is Byzen. It seems to be almost the same theme as vanilla 0AD though so I'll pass for now.

I've been meaning to ask this question for a while now. As we all know 0AD is its own standalone game, with its default factions and setting that takes place in the medieval age. Beyond that it's also a great RTS engine in general. In the mod selection page of the main menu I can see that "0 A.D. Empires Ascendant" (default game) gives you the option to disable it, presumably in favor of running alternative core games instead. So I wanted to know: Are there any other base games built on the engine? By game I primarily mean to custom factions, presuming any will work with existing maps and biomes granted resources are the same. The ones I'm curious about in particular are those in different genres from the default, meaning either fantasy or futuristic. As far as fantasy games go: I strongly see 0AD being a fantastic engine for something like Warcraft 3... used to play that as a child and loved the magical atmosphere and different races and factions you could play as. Glest / Megaglest covered this in the FOSS world for some time, its ancient engine is slowly dying and 0AD kinda seems like its replacement. For the scope of my question anything with magic and wizards counts... also other races like orcs or dragons, I'm also wondering if unit assets for these were ever made; Only one I know of is Ponies Ascendant which as a MLP fan I installed and am eager to try out once I find some time for that. As far as sfici games are concerned, I see this being a great replacement to another fellow FOSS project of 0AD: Spring RTS engine has a few futuristic RTS games available, I wanted to try them out at one point but for some reason its loader always messed up and none of the game packages worked... I prefer 0AD and its architecture anyway and would welcome an alternative here instead. So do we have any factions with computers and holograms and droids and rovers yet?

I find the elephant one cool myself... gotta love watching where people manage to place ASCII graphics like that Only issue I see there is that it's breaking the list formatting of the server list: Perhaps servers should have an optional description field for this sort of thing?

If you ask me, I also think attackers are a bit overpowered sometimes... sometimes. I'm mainly thinking of this change for realism as a very tiny boost, but it would be interesting to see how it could affect gameplay too.

I see. Are those icons free assets, or ones you can use if you created them? The general design is really good so I hope it can go in that direction. Doesn't sound like it has time to make it in 0.26 in any case, but hopefully at least 0.27 may have it.

That would be another idea if the limitation you mentioned could be fixed: Buff / debuff the walking speed ever so slightly, so you're a bit faster on your own territory and slower on an enemy's. That's one that should make little difference in combat and not throw off the balance noticeably, but on the downside it would look a little odd if units switched speed while walking.

I know. It just might be fun to allow it as an option for people who want to risk that. Am actually curious how a game with this would go... for the time being I figure a mod would be possible to test it out of curiosity, not familiar with modding game changing functionality though.