real_tabasco_sauce

Also, I should nerf siege towers a little.

I suppose this could be done, but the tower techs are largely unhelpful/uninteresting save for crenellations. Crenelations currently only buffs garrisoned structures, while the tech is redesigned to be a more general-purpose damage buff. my approach was to try and re-purpose existing techs to be more applicable to arrows in general.

Ok the non-random arrows and ui improvements are working toward a building arrow overhaul. I've heard from a lot of players that because building arrows don't get much stronger as the game goes on, arrows are too strong in p1 and too weak in p2. So I came up with some changes to improve building arrows in general. Building prepare time 1200 -> 400. buildings get value sooner when a unit steps into range. The practical range of enemy structures is made more apparent when circling a structure. Tower and CC arrow damage: 10/11 pierce -> 8 Fort arrow damage remains at 10. Generally speaking: building repeat time increased (more so for CC, less for towers,fort), building default arrows increased (more so for fortress, less so for towers,CC) Fortresses gain a minimum range I added a new technology and restructured the existing tower technologies into something that will work for towers, forts, and CCs. Sentries: unchanged Crenellations: Towers +40% garrisoned arrows -> all building arrows +20% damage. available from the fortress too. Arrow Shooters: unchanged Sturdy foundations: made much cheaper Murder holes -> moved to the fortress, affects fortresses as well as towers. "Professional Garrisons" (coins above) supersedes crenellations in the fort, and is another 20% arrow damage for all buildings as well as +4 default arrows for the fortress only.

For the community mod, I can't change defaults, so I think players will just need to bind force-attack to something else if they want to control in all three means i discussed above. ^the behavior for both autogarrison and force attack being bound to the same hotkey (ctrl by default) just results in force-attack coming out on top. for a27, i think it would make sense to make force-attack 'f', since force capture is 'c'. Then follow unit could just be unbound by default.

they can work independently of each other if you use the hotkeys 'autorally' and 'force-attack' to control garrison and arrows respectively. But the default mode is for one click to set both since that is more common and easy to understand.

maybe its fine with the right sound.

In this implementation, without the use of hotkeys, targeting building arrows and the rally point are the same. So in the video, if i just click on the ram, both the arrows and the rally point are set to the ram. This is done because it is easy and intuitive and it works for 90% of cases. Hotkeys are needed if you want to separate the actions. Players that want fine tuned control can use the hotkeys more, but it takes a bit of effort. On its own, yeah it would be fine. I'd just prefer something short and really simple.

ah rally point. In this case, I think it should be silent, because we wouldn't want both the building targeting sound to play at the same time as the rally point sound. As is, its kind of nice that you get a visual for the rally flag and audio for arrows. It means when u just click on an enemy unit without hotkeys, both can occur nicely at the same time. If not for the building targeting sound, I wouldn't be opposed to it.

Wait don't we already have the order sound when a waypoint is planted or added?

Yes there are some that should be looked at. But there is some grey area: if the graphics give the user enough information, it may be good to avoid adding too many sound cues to avoid audio clutter. for example, aoe2 docks will make a lot of ding dongs and it can get overwhelming XD.

20240916-1553-07.9350148.mp4

I don't think any sound is used. I kind of like the idea of using https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/binaries/data/mods/public/audio/attack/weapon/arrowfly_02.ogg but with more volume. It's fairly quick sound and is the least monotonous of the arrowfly sounds. maybe even one of the old sling sounds could be good: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/binaries/data/mods/public/audio/attack/weapon/sling_22.ogg edit: I went with the second one since the first one doesn't sound very exciting.

@Stan` @wowgetoffyourcellphone any sound recommendations for telling a building to attack something with its arrows?

Ok so I have made some developments: 20240916-0307-49.9922231.mp4 In the above are some nice UI improvements: Instead of the arrow, a rally point cursor appears when a unit's destination is just to a particular location. When all a structure's firepower (building arrows AND degarrisoned soldiers) are to be sent to a particular enemy unit, the familiar sword icon appears. This is the behavior if no hotkeys are involved. If you press ctrl ("autorally" hotkey, for example used to garrison trained soldiers back into the selected building), the rally point alone is set to that enemy and building arrows remain untargeted if you press "force attack" (unfortunately this is also ctrl by default), you are in command of the building arrows and only the building arrows. shown by the red crosshairs. Also, the arrows now fire in sort of volleys or bursts, rather than a constant stream of arrows. This means they can be dodged to a degree, which is fun. Next steps: change force attack default hotkey (or find another appropriate hotkey). add some audio feedback for when the arrows of a building are being targeted. rebalance building damage according to non-random building AI. rework building technologies and/or change building damage with each phase.

Ok, there have been issues with OOS in the new version of the community mod. It seems many of these are related to install issues with version 12: For example: <p class="warning">WARNING: Technology "phase_town_spart" does not exist</p> In this case, a version 10 file called "phase_town_spart" remains after installing version 12, which is supposed to be deleted in version 12. How to fix (and hopefully this solves the OOS for good). uninstall all your mods navigate to your mods folder (For example, windows might be C:/Documents/My\ Games/0ad/mods/ delete the community mod folder open 0ad and re-install the community mod and your other mods.

yeah seems fairly flexible. I'd probably like to experiment with stuff like that in the future. Right now, i'm working on some random maps and the map placement options.

@Grapjas I really love the sandstorm! Its a really cool feature. It seems it might not be too hard to make a blizzard based off of the sandstorm. It could slow units down a little. How do these work, generally speaking? Are they baked into skirmish maps, or are they something you can enable in the json file for a random map for example?

Buena suerte!

yes, and it seems to be fixed in your recent mod.

version 12 is out with no crashes (so far)!

I'm inclined to think that this was a pre-existing error that was just uncovered by the building on trees mod. Maybe some amount of buildings had this issue, but the return false; was catching them.

recently, I tried another conditional return, only when totalBuildRate was NaN. This didn't help, because totalBuildRate presumably becomes NaN after commit(). if (isNaN(this.totalBuilderRate)) { warn("Value of builder rate is NaN"); return false; } I wonder if there is something we can check instead of totalBuildRate that will return false when we want it to. Maybe EntstoDestroy being empty or something else?

community-testing-5.zip these changes add @Norse_Harold's above suggestion to prevent entities from being deleted more than once, and includes the changes to only return false; if the building is not a wall or palisade. This prevented any crashes until we started building walls. We did a game where we only placed walls on completely bare ground, completely avoiding trees and decorative entities, and the crash still occurred.

the best way to do it is just to get in a 1v1, don't use gift from the gods, and start building a lot of buildings. I can't reproduce it by building any specific building in any specific place, I just build until it crashes.

Ok I can confirm it only seemed like a roman thing because lots of ppl were playing romans. I just reproduced it with other civs.