Vantha

Note: This has already been fixed on the release branch. The Germans will be actually playable in the next release candidate.

Please be more respectful and appreciative of other people's work. The addition of the Germans was certainly not rushed; the pull request was open since well before the release of A27 and being reviewed for a full year before merged. And that time doesn't even include much of the work of creating the content itself, like researching, brainstorming, making the 3D models, the portraits, and putting everything together. Creating a complete new civilization takes tremendous effort and we should all be grateful for the wonderful people who dedicated their free time to achieve it. And in my opinion the Germans are definitely up to the standard of other civilizations in terms of art, historical accuracy, uniqueness, and balance. Stuff like custom phase names are just the cherry on top and can very well just be added in the future.

It isn't witchcraft. You've done much already (creating the fork, clone, branch, and finally the PR) and I'm confident you'll figure out the rest too as we move along. Then I suggest that you create the PR.

I assume you mean that the civ is set to random by default?

@Atrik Apologies for only responding now. Considering that you have now set up a Gitea account and fork in the meantime, do you want to open a PR for this now? I'm still up to do the testing and reviewing. (If not, it's also fine, I can take care of all the git stuff for you, if you want)

I got an error like this a while ago too and the cause was that the compiler version was too old.

Very nice. It also adds the missing tooltip when the starting turret can't be placed. Do you want to open a PR? I can help with testing and reviewing.

You could either define it in the GUI globally somewhere and then pass it to every GuiInterface call, or just make it a member of the GuiInterface directly. The Engine.PickSimilarPlayerEntities method does not exist in the simulation scripting context, but the same thing can be achieved through the GetEntitiesByPlayer method combined some additional manual checks. That would also allow filtering entities by the "Tower" class instead of their template names (as you mentioned in the comment), if wanted. By the way, the GUI already caches entity states (in g_EntityStates).

I took a quick look at the code, correct me if I'm wrong, but for a PR it looks like you could directly move most of the logic to the GuiInterface.prototype.SetWallPlacementPreview method. I don't think length would be an issue since you largely rewrote the logic of that method anyway, which is itself already quite long. And I don't think anyone would mind having a bit more code for more desired behaviour. Also, that would make it even more performant because you wouldn't have to compute the entire entity state for each snap candidate and could pull values like the position from the simulation directly, which is a lot quicker. What do you think? I believe a lot of people (including me) would love to see this added to the main game.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/FAQ#what-shall-i-do-when-joining-multiplayer-matches-fails-with-an-error-message By the way, in the future (starting with R28) there will be a button on the error dialog that opens this FAQ entry directly.

Have you seen the map 'Cinema Demo'? It does something comparable, just no speech/dialogue (yet!).

Yeah, it's everything but ideal. But English just doesn't have the word needed.

I heard they plan to kick off the release process for R28 this month.

It's not linked to one of the civs? Not even the Britons?!? That's a crying shame! With the Germans added to the game, how about giving them Tavern in the Mist now?

The formation control feature in general could make sense for a tip, but using it outside of fights I'd say rather not.

Me too. And the game actually has even more soundtracks than those 26. A lot of new ones came with A26, they only haven't been added to the website yet. Here's a zip with all of them (61 in total): 0ad-soundtracks.zip

Yes, it can be packed into a mod. If you want and think it's worth it, I can open a PR on the community mod as well once the patch is ready.

Regarding voicelines, they would indeed be neat, but not being able to make them shouldn't be reason not to create singleplayer content. I too would be in favor of voicelines being spoken in ancient languages, that would also save the trouble of having to translate them into different languages. The only problem is that that will just work for Latin and Greek, many of the other languages are too incomplete to write (and then speak) full sentences and texts in them. I think there has been a misunderstanding. What I am currently working on and was talking about earlier is something like this mockup: When I wrote "dialogue" above, I was referring to speech, the possibility to make characters of a story talk. I think the game shouldn't be paused while a cutscene like this is running. What I settled with is to provide two options and leave it up to individual scenarios whether to disable hovering, selecting and giving commands or not, but always let the player move around the camera. And by the way, yes, the narrative overlay I opened the PR for already pauses the game behind it.

Pausing the game completely isn't really an option, unfortunately, because then the animations won't play, units won't move around, and so on. But what I'll do is add the possibility for map scripts to register callbacks, so that they at least can pause in the meantime, and wait with actions like triggering big attacks until the dialogue is closed.

Back to the unit dialogue overlay, do you think player inputs (hovering, selecting, giving commands, ...) should be ignored while the dialogue is shown? As it is done in full "cinema path" cutscenes (that's how it's called in the code) like the one shown in the "Cinema Demo" map?

I see. This might be surprising to hear, but the essence of this is technically already possible in 0ad. It is possible in scenario scripts to push basic decision dialogs to the player and then wait and react differently depending on what the player chose. Now, the system isn't optimised for showing a lot of dialogs in a single game, as the code can get quite cumbersome, but it is surprisingly versatile and works. The reason it's so unknown is because it isn't actually used in any playable scenarios right now, there's only a small demonstration of it in the "Triggers Demo" map (the yes-no dialog). Sooner or later, I'd like to write a full guide about embedding storylines in scenarios and campaigns, to show that features like this exist and how to use them.

Ok, I'll add a next button then. It might make sense to support maximum durations that each line is shown nonetheless; mainly for dialogue in time-critical points of scenarios, to prevent players from gaining an advantage by artificially stalling the game by just not closing the dialogue. At least I imagine it could help in some cases to better enforce a certain pace, in maps like Survival of the Fittest.

I want to implement a system for unit speech/dialogue in cutscenes next, inspired by that mockup. Should I add a "next" button (to the bottom right probably) for the player to click through the dialogue themselves? Or always switch to the next line after a set amount of time, like a predefined cutscene? How do other games do it? It would of course be possible to provide both options and leave the choice up to campaign makers. Could that be worth it? Or would one option of those two be always be preferred anyway?

Good news, folks! https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8318

Well, yes, in scenario maps custom victory conditions for each team are possible, even for each player. However, the code behind the victory condition "presets" (the ones selectable in game setup -- Regicide, Wonder, Conquest, etc.) is currently not designed to work on a subset of players only.