ShadowOfHassen

My first RTS was Age of Empires 3 and even know the Knight's of Saint John campaign is probably one of my favorite stories in video games. (Nostalgia mostly, but it was pretty good)

So what if we had a kind of overview when you start the campaign, a section called historical background, then we have a description that shows up in the scenario selection area and during loading and finally there is some dialog/ objective information in game. I mean, in a single scenario you might have multiple objectives I.E. destroy the tower, build a civic center, train 10 hopilites, and you kind of need to get the player to realize they need to do that.

Well yeah, skipping it is useful. If I'm stuck on a mission, I don't want to have to read the beginning of the scenario over and over

In my mind, there are three ways to convey information in a video game (i.e. Plot) The first way is atmospheric story telling. I.E. there's a skeleton right next to a dark cave. The player then gets the impression that something dangerous is there. The second way is lore dumps. This could be a book or terminal in game, or the loading tip. They're nice to know information that flushes out the world. It's not necessary, though, and you can not look for it and ignore it. The final way I think information is given is direct information given to the player that is necessary for them to complete and/or understand the game. I call this dialog, though there could be a better way to say it. Basically, it's the thing that says. "Hey, Player, you need to get these elephants over the alps" Now, of course you could do this different ways. You could have a description before starting the scenario "One day Hannibal decided he wanted to take his elephants to go visit Rome, and to do so he needs to get over the alps" Or you could have direct dialogue (which is how you meant dialogue) like: "Hi Hannibal, what do you want to do today?" "Well, I've been thinking and I kind of want to take my elephants to go see Rome." "Well, first we'll have to get them over the alps" I wrote the examples rather silly, but I think you get the basic point. For scenarios for 0 A.D. We'll often need to make it very clear to the player what they need to do. And in those cases I think direct dialogue would be better. There's a rule in writing that isn't always right called show, don't tell. And I do think showing what is happening in cutscenes and dialogue is better than just telling with a text box that says. "Move the Elephants across the alps" I agree with @Lion.Kanzen with the translation. We wouldn't probably have voice actors, so that would give us a bit more wiggle room if we just have written dialogue to help address at least the silence problem. The only problem is you'd be brought out of the game whenever there's dialogue because you'd have to read it, so we'd probably use it sparingly anyway, mostly at the start and end of the scenarios.

Yeah, at least for the moment... It would take some coding, but it'd be the best thing we can do currently...

Something like that with the text would work, though it might be smart to do something like how Wesnoth has a press space to continue for the dialogue, for slower readers.

I was wondering how we'd do dialogue. We don't exactly have voice actors so the Age fo Empires narrative strategy of cutscene + dialog in game might not work.

Both, please. I don't follow social media other than X and I want to see them

You know we could usually use those screenshots and post them on the social media places. They look really, really good.

I don't know, 0 A.D. does have a mastodon account though

Fair, but some things like game balance or unit name changes could have posts.

That's a great idea. Also the X and mastodon accounts could be a bit more active. You know, post updates on PRs being merged, make funny memes about history, cool screenshots, that sort of thing.

That looks amazing!

I'm going to be honest, if AI starts to be openly used for art and stuff, I'd probably stop helping. I have too many problems with it. I could list them all but a big one is I want to be working alongside of a team not people trying to speed run and see if the game can get done quickly. With all due respect, If someone really wants to see the game out sooner rather than later, instead of suggesting/ using AI. They should do the best they can to help. Well we were talking about just removing the alpha and put it in beta...

Hmmm--- This might require some brainstorming. There's probably another topic for that, but another idea is the game Team Fortress has a kind of premium mode where you get better stuff if you buy a skin or something (Or soI've heard. Again I play very little online) could we do something like that except instead of paying require a forum link of some kind? You can give it a whirl, but you only get special features if you're verified. I don't know what the features would be, but it'd need to incentivize normal people creating a forum account. Another idea is requiring an email for the lobby, just to make it a little harder. I think the cool open source game Veloren was having some problems with bots recently, and that might've fixed it. (Bots are different from smurfs, but it's a little bit of an extra step) We could also talk to administrators for Minetest Servers and other open source games to see what they do. If a lot of them have the same problems, maybe we could pool our the brightest minds, and they could come up with some kind of open source method to help mitigate/ remove the problem. I think the ultimate solution is if we had a TON of players, then if there's one or two bad eggs nobody would notice.

Random idea that might not be possible. Could we somehow link the gitea 0 A.D. forum account and lobby? At the very least, making the online lobby harder to create smurfs would be useful. I don't know how though.

Great! I can help with writing-- I can also help with coding scripting if it's something easy like python or Lua, though some other people might be better qualified.

This is something as I said I have a few ideas-- I'll make a dedicated post once the encyclopedia is getting close to be merged

How's the campaign coming?

Oh, I forgot, the interview was very good. Good job! I didn't know the formations were based off my favorite RTS Battle for Middle Earth-- will the 0 A.D. formations get bonuses eventually like in the game?

The thing with AI is it's very very derivative and even if you do it for just planning purposes it's going to be very similar to tracing over someone else's image. (Those two pictures are literally colorized faces of coins) and those icons look like things I can download off opengameart.org I think the complaint of copyright by now is a lost cause legally, so there is no worry about being sued. But I do think we should think about the potential costs. It's obvious that having a professional artist draw it will be better than tracing over any AI. The thing is most artists and other non-programming creatives hate AI with a passion(and for good reason) I'm afraid that using AI for 0 A.D. would scare people away. And while we'd get half decent art sooner, we'd be losing the chance of more artists later. But artists aren't here right now!!! Be patient I think after this release things may be turning up, we literally have the coolest open source game here if Battle for Wesnoth can get artists we can too. (I have some marketing ideas we can try with the encyclopedia and I might be able to get a history Youtuber's attention, but I make no promises.) That said, I do think AI art might be useful for prototyping and stuff, but I don't think it should be used for anything that is shown in the main game. To the point of music, we don't need that we have an amazing soundtrack, and if we really need more songs I know some guys. It might not 100% real instruments, but we'd not be getting that if we use AI anyway. I said from when the Encyclopedia was just a GitHub on my profile that I wouldn't be accepting any AI writing for the encyclopedia. The number one reason for that is the same with Art and Music, if you know what you're doing, the AI created content is very obvious compared to proper English. Even if I couldn't 100% detect it as AI, I'd probably a ton of edits because it's just terrible. I don't know what Vantha's feelings on it and as he's a very big part of the encyclopedia he might have different ideas, but I know I wouldn't be accepting anything that I knew was AI. Additionally (and this is a potential problem with art too). We want to be historically accurate and AI doesn't know how to be historically accurate, an article or picture of a hopilite would have to be scrutinized to be sure it was right-- We'd have to do all the research anyway on how it looked, and we'd have to know what to do in order to fix a bad image/article so we'd need the skills anyway to do that which begs the point why we'd start with that anyway. Again I think the art is OK for prototyping for things like DE (which I really need to get around to playing) but I really don't think anything AI generated should make it in the base game.

You can't understand how crazy it is to see the encyclopedia listed as a feature for the game upcoming. It won't be in A27, but we'll be able to get at least part of the encyclopedia out in A28. We want to do some reorganizing after Vantha and the other smarties get the UI figured out, but after that we should be ready to set up the stuff we currently have and writing more.

I don't play online games, but I love this idea!!! it's too late this year, but we should remember this and work with WFG to make this a bigger thing next year.

Offhand "shade" does sound better and I think it's right. If you want I can dig around the mythology books and see which ones use which word. Soul does have a connation of Christianity, or Hollow Knight

I think that would be better suited for a higher level campaign instead of the tutorial. Having the final attack against Rome should be climactic in a huge sense and in my opinion better when the player already knows what they're doing