Grautvornix

This is one of the many compromises to gameplay we have to make, I guess. Hmm. You are right. So no refund after destruction at all because the same principle applies to buildings, ships, siege engines? To provide a refund, - ships need to go back to the dock (done) - siege engines need to be manned (at least one unit) prior to destruction I believe we agree already on these two. There is no refund for buildings when they are at 100% (finished), ever. From the real world, I believe that old buildings (ruins) were often used as a quarry/resource for erecting new ones, hence I question the rule 100% built- 0% refund. The rule in game (0% built/100% back up to 100% built/0% back) certainly applies to the resources you had originally put aside to construct that building. After it has been built (100%) you spent 100% of resources, so destroying currently means losing all of it. Could refunding be exploited? Not really: You get a higher fraction back if deleting after finalizing it, but you had to invest the 100% before. The only cheat here is, that you benefited form the building's function (e.g. research a new technology) while it was working and still get a refund after its destruction.

@wowgetoffyourcellphoneTHIS IS PHANTASTIC! It is inspiring and providing an athmosphere well aligned with the situation. Could you try and regenerate some of the game's title screen art with such images?

OK, that is exactly what the mod already does (only the animation remains "delete" and does not show selling the ship) Side note: The mod does not provide store-specific credit (which I believe is ok), i.e. when returning a ship, you are getting back a fraction of resources for general purpose. Store credit would mean you get a reduction for your next ship. The remaining question is if a building needs to be garissoned with at least unit in order to allow deletion (mimicking arson). I still have doubts on that concept: burning down your building does definitely not give back much useable resources. Requiring a person to be in placed inside the building to be destroyed appears counter-intuitive to me (this is already strange with a manned tower or siege engine: the crew survives destruction, other than for a ship where they sink together).

Where do we get an arsonist actor with appropriate animation and a burning building animation? Same question regarding dismantling of siege engines. Which actor should we use to illustrate someone working on the siege engine? Frankly, I'd rather park these for a moment and instead generate a new mod version that provides the reduced amoutn of recovered resources and the slightly slower destruction. QUESTION: if destruction is not instantaneous but a process taking a bit of time, how would we deal woth an attack onto that object during that time? Is it not attackable while being destructed, or, probably better, could an attacking enemy grab part of the resources of the destructed building ? (sounds complicated but is probably an interesting gameplay aspect)

For me, in SP games, I sometimes have to move the storehouse closer to the next forest and I'd like to remove older storehouses and gain a little bit back. Same for fishing boats that I build but fish have been depleted or I don't find any (on some maps). I do agree that the default of 50% of resources is a bit too much and I propose to reduce it to 30%. Frankly, I have not yet seen any scorched earth move by a human player, e.g. deleting a large group of his buildings, but it would be nothing new and already be possible now, I believe. The mod does not endorse that particularly, except that you get a bit back when deleting your stuff. I do agree, though, that deletion should not be an instantaneous process as it is currently, but might take while. I'll investigate how this could be implemented. Requesting a unit to be nearby or inside the to-be-destructed building might add a bit too much of micromanagement (in my personal view), so I'd prefer not to require that. For a siege engine, this might be a good idea , resembling the near-a-dock requirement for ships. let me see what is possible.

If we change the buy-back price to 10% it would be much less rewarding. For ships this would work anyhow only near the dock. Should we add similar things to siege engines, e.g. near their depot/workshop? Or at the CC ? And whatr do we do for buildings? I would - personally like to have a little benefit, e.g. when destroying a storehouse I don't need anymore.

Thanks exellent news! Your are right - the GUI is a bit "fiddly" and appears overloaded will have a careful look and try and imporve. Used it to convert very nice older skirmish and scenario maps already that I was missing

Tried to implement this as a mod. Activating the recover-resouces mod below, the following applies onto entities you have constructed yourself and that are not under enemy capturing nor were captured by yourself: Whenever you self-destroy your finished buildings Whenever you self-destroy your finished siege engines Whenever you self-destroy your finished ship when it is near your dock (default 30m) you are getting back a fixed percentage of the construction cost (currently defined 50% as a default but the parameter can certainly be tuned . Note: the mod should work for both R0.28 and R.029 SVN. Please try and let me know if it works for you as well and what best parameters (percentage and ship distance to dock) you would recomment! recover-resources.zip README.md

Trying Atlas I found a few things I wasn't able to manage properly (or wasn't careful or patient enough) such as properly connected wall segments and turrets. I finally started to write (with heavy support by Anthropic Claude) a little map analyzer/checker/converter tool, written in python, able to check the maps created with Atlas and offer options to correct issues analyze existing maps , also from older game versions, giving statistics, finding and offering to fix glitches (resource placed underneath a building or wall, trapped units, gaps in wall segments etc.) add a (poor) map preview if not existing or convert the Atlas screenshot into a preview file. converting and fixing older scenario and skirmish maps using the conversion scripts by @Stan` (e.g. renaming persian objects/units to achaemenids) I was only able to test on windows, it should theoretically work on Linux or MacOS as well (Python 3.14, pyQT6, numpy and pillow needed, see documentation). No real guarantee to always work (definitely NOT on random maps), but I was able to successfully convert a few great maps from past I found in the forum and play them. Note 1: Below screenshots illustrate the GUI and its capabilities. (They may not accurately reflect the current version in all details) Note 2: I only started experimenting with maps so I haven't seen all pitfalls by far. Should you have observed further typical mapping issues, I'd be interested to know and try integrating these into the analyzing and fixing section of the tool if possible. post-atlas-1.9.2.zip CHANGELOG.md README.md

Awesome - please consider also merging a function like modiomod into your bundle.

@guerringuerrin Thanks! I was just confused with my keyboard settings and wanted to see where everything is...

Attached is a little mod that adds keyboard visualization of hotkeys including testing capability on your configured keyboard for both 0AD releae 0.28 and the SVn version 0.,29. It will be also available from mod.io once signed. show-keybindings-r28.zip show-keybindings-maintainer.md show-keybindings-r29.zip

@Atrik You are right, should 've opened a bug report officially. My point was, however, that I was not sure it really is a bug or if I tampered with my install too much. Thatt's why I asked for other observations. Thanks that you fixed it!!! Got to learn how to open git tickets, shouldn't be too difficult .

@ThalattaIndeed, that is a great idea! Regarding siege engines/elite engies should we limit the amount of reapirs to something, i.e. they can be repiare so many time sonyl ro by somany percent only? Just an idea to avoid creating a super siege that can be used to dominate the battlefield.

Looks like the latest SVn update solved this issue. Thank you very much!

Phantastic - it seems the latest SVN update solved this issue!

Just some very basic consideration (non historical of course): My first reaction was "Anorganic entities like ships or siege engines actually cannot learn, which is the basic conditions to move upwards on the elite training ladder", but the crews operating them can and these are in our case part of the virtual anorganic unit. Like, a good artillery or sailing/rowing crew can move quicker and aim and hit targets much better than newbies. Therefore it does make sense. I believe, auto repair (self-healing) is something that would realistically be feasible only ashore for ships, e.g. at a shipyard at best - and it does cost resources (wood and metal). For siege engines there were no depots, instead I guess they were built near the battlefield. So repair is done by other units.

@Asher darn! You are right! Walls can have gates, so why not have a gate under water for a ship to undercross the bridge? The animation could be challenging though...

I know this is a potential touchy subject most software developers don't like to see - but there are non-developers (like myself) who are not good enough in coding / SW developing to get a more complicated mod done: Now, If I specify and design and test a mod and ask an AI to code it - what does that mean? I'd like to discuss a few questions. Finally, it might be usefull to provide guidance to others what vibe coding implies in this specific case: The mod might be using some code of 0AD thus automatically inheriting the GPL v2 license. Do I need to tell which parts this refers to? The mod created by the AI should be checked by a tool like scancode (https://scancode-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html) to avoid using accidentally, and not knowingly, other IPR. (AIs are typically trained with anything they can get including all kind of code repositories on the internet with various license models.) @Asher kindly provided a useful link for consideration (https://seisan.com/ai-generated-code-intellectual-property-ownership/) but frankly, this leaves quite a few questions open. If a tool like scancode finds some infringement, what can I do? rewrite the code manually? Only use the "generated" code it for myself but not publish it? If I contributed to writing the mod by creating the ideas, design, specs and test scenarios and finally testing it - just not writing the code - does that justify a partial authorship? What does that do with the "right to use"/"right to publish"? Questions I'd also like to have your opinion on are these: Would such vibe code be acceptable at all as game mod? Under which conditions? (e.g. state how the mod was implemented, state any known dependencies etc.) Would it help offering instead of the actual code only its design documentation and a few screenshots as an inspiration to actual developers should they want to implement such a function? Would it make sense to provide issue reports of game code identified by the AI when implementing the mod ? Sorry for the long text, but I'd really appreciate your input and opinion on these subjects!

Oh no! Here I am again with another crazy concept how we could implement bridges (sorry I don't give up ) Bridges could actually be walls with the turrets being the bridges pillars (appropriate art still to be designed. Like building that surface during the build process, the bridge could survface from the water until it reaches a certain height above seal level. They can onyl be built in shallow and possibly medium shallow water. Building is done using fisherboats (animation needs to be invented). Bridges cannot be undercrossed by ships. Briges can be destroyed by siege engines and by war ships Now the most difficult and special thing: Bridges can be crossed by individual units one at a time if we garrison them onto the bridgehead, then they would automatically move "sideways" along the wall from position to postion (if I remember correctly, walls have garrison positions), from segment to segment, until they reach the other side where they are automatically ungarissoned. there could be simple wooden bridges (cheap) only for infantry and civilians, and more expensive/wider wooden bridges also for cavalry, and heavy expensive stone bridges (you would afford only in special conditions) able to transport also siege engines and elephants. I would like to do some testing using standard walls and sideways "movement". It will look clumsy initially but we might eventually find a way to generate the right animations. Gameplay-wise, bridges can serve as bridges, but also as barriers to protect a river mound or the space between islands. Their high cost may prevent unconditional use though. Again, I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this!

That would be awesome! My core interest in this it to get a tool running for myself, and if it works, I am happy to share it. I do hope this issue can be solved. I have more tools in the pipe (a simple keyboard visualisation mod, finished, showing to dudes like myself where the game hotkeys are on my particular keyboard also as a reference in-game), and I also have created a python-based map validator/converter (based on Stan's scripts and other infos I was able to gather) that takes a newly created Atlas map, or an old map, highlights issues and allows fixing them, and finally converts it into R28 or R29 (under test). I would also like to look into trying to introduce a mod testing sideways movement of garrisoned troops along wall segments to the point of attack, as well as a selling-back mod for ships/buildings and siege engines once you destroy them yourself. While I do acknowledge that real software development is a serious task and requires a lot of knowledge (I don't have) and certainly a lot of effort, vibe coding is fun as well (and it still needs a bit af creativity and energy in definition and testing). Hence I would really like to know if and how I can share such results safely (even without a license if needs be). The least we could probably use this for is to test mechanisms and concepts - so that we can obtain a spec and an "inspirational" design for real devs if they wanted to implement it in reality.

Thanks, will have a look! As the mod is re-using/modifying some of OAD's own scripts, shouldn't it inherit OAD's license GPL v2 anyway?

Well, I did the specification, guidance and the verification / validation testing, but as I am not a software developer, I asked Anthropic Claude to do the coding. How can I release that content to the public without using the word license? (I am new to this so please excuse my ignorance)

Fixed a few minor issues and updated the docs, and uploaded both modiomod versions to mod.io. they will be available once they are signed. modiomod-tools-1.4.7.zip modiomod-r28.zip modiomod-r29.zip