ShadowOfHassen
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Posts posted by ShadowOfHassen
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Just now, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
Yeah, I'm thinking I should stop posting images here on the forum and start posting them elsewhere instead.
Both, please. I don't follow social media other than X and I want to see them
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14 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
Instead of Aleppo Pines (which use old and ugly actors) for Mediterranean and Aegean pine trees, I've been using Pine_Maritime, which look a lot like Aleppo Pines and other coniferous trees I've seen in Mediterranean basin photos.
For near the coast, medit_fan_palm, date_palm, and cretan_date_palm. Oak_holly is fine for some decorative or stragglers. Berries should be gaia/fruit/grapes.
Hills can be covered almost completely in bush_mediterranean and bush_mediterranean_dry.
You know we could usually use those screenshots and post them on the social media places. They look really, really good.
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1 minute ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
Which is the largest server?
I remember using it during the pandemic.
I don't know, 0 A.D. does have a mastodon account though
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1 minute ago, Stan` said:
A lot of PRs are not really accessible :/
Fair, but some things like game balance or unit name changes could have posts.
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9 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
I'm going to make a lot more of these, but I'm going to start using the 0 A.D. Instagram account for more promotion.
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.
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32 minutes ago, Vantha said:
I completed the topography and started painting the terrain and placing some vegetation. Here is the portion of the map I did so far:
That looks amazing!
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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.
13 hours ago, Wijitmaker said:I get the glory/honor of doing things from scratch - and I respect that. But at the same time I'm thinking... 25 years in development? I hope this thing gets to beta before I die
Well we were talking about just removing the alpha and put it in beta...
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20 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
well we want to make spamming accounts more difficult, but not at the expense of first time account creators. Having to register an account here to play multiplayer would probably stop lots of ppl from trying multiplayer.
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.
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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.
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1 minute ago, Vantha said:
Yeah. I'm still working on the map every now and then. My expectations might maybe be too perfectionistic, which is why it takes me so long. Of course, doing it all in one weekend was a bit too optimistic.
And I won't try to estimate when I'll be done since that has gone wrong enough times in the past. But once the map is finished we can get right into writing and scripting.
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.
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43 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
We need to make more noise on social media.
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
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How's the campaign coming?
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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?
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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.
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Quote
What are some of the future plans for 0 A.D.? Are there any upcoming features or expansions that players can look forward to?
Exciting developments are underway for 0 A.D. The biggest change is shifting from an SVN-based workflow to Git, making contributions easier for programmers but potentially challenging for artists. We’re also working on an in-game encyclopedia, player moderation tools like muting, and a new renderer that will boost performance—on macOS, switching from OpenGL to Vulkan can increase FPS up to fivefold.A
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.
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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.
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32 minutes ago, Vantha said:
Sounds reasonable, but I can't really speak on that since I'm not a native English speaker. What do others think about this?
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
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1 hour ago, Vantha said:
The long continuous marching doesn't really match the typical gameplay, right?
On the other hand it would offer a logical explanation for why you need to build a new city from the ground up in each scenario -> constructing fortifications along the route to defend against ambushes. And launching a grand attack against the city of Rome would make for a great climax.
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
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4 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
How do you balance that? If the Greeks can become athenians, spartans, thebans, corithians, and syracusans how on earth do you plan to play against them when any of their options can be completely different after a single phase-up?
That's a good idea. Hmm... well, I guess we'd have to do some brainstorming...
It's just an idea, if the majority of people don't like it when it's a fully developed idea we can not do it.
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2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
I also fail to see why completely reworking the civ design benefits campaign design.
Well the thing is the gameplay between single player and multiplayer should be reasonably consistent. Someone should be able to after beating the campaigns be able to jump right into the multiplayer and vice versa.
Currently, in the campaign discussion we shot down half the suggestions because we didn't have a civilization. Making a new one we didn't want to do because
A. of the work to make a visually distinct style, units, and bonuses like in the normal game, we'd have to make units that are reasonably work for a given civilization. The most effective way for that would be to make a generic civilization for each large group and base the civs off that, like a Greek one to cover Corenth, Thebian, etc.
B. We'd have to balance these new campaign civs for every update you do for balancing the multiplayer games. Granted we could do meta balancing, and it'd be easier but still. To do the civs we'd still have to do it.
So even after everything, in order to make this easier we'd have to practically make generic factions anyway.
2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:If you add on the massive detriment this would have for multiplayer in exchange for this supposed improvement to campaigns, and the work this would involve, it becomes clear that frankly this isn't a good idea.
I don't see how changing the gameplay effects the multiplayer determinately, it'd just be different. Yes, it'd be a lot of work, but at least this way the ton of work could benefit the multiplayer people too.
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13 hours ago, Genava55 said:
If it would be the case, there wouldn't have been so much reticence when we discussed the possible scenarios for the campaign. Currently in the editor, you don't really create a faction, but you create customized units and buildings with dependent technologies and other dependent buildings. This works, but the rendering and consistency are not equivalent to a faction. There are always elements that will seem odd.
Yeah. I know that Age of Empires 3 you played civilizations you can't get in the original game, but that just made me feel cheated (WHAT ABOUT MY HOOP THROWERS!?!) And it is a little excessive to have to design a completely new civilization for literally everything we'd want to cover.
On 06/11/2024 at 9:48 PM, real_tabasco_sauce said:-
1-click strategies (chosing civ specifications upon phase up) results in cheap gameplay. If the civ design itself depends on what option you choose then the game could be decided by clicking A when your opponent clicked B. The same thing goes for the "cards" you get in aoe3.
- additionally, it would mean each umbrella civ is capable of a massive number of strategies which makes trying to counter them or shape the game early on pointless. (an example would be denying metal when your opponent is likely to go for mercs)
We don't want to get too much like Age of Empires, but what if we limit the strategy that players can do before phasing up? If the player has to make a decision on what alliance they want to take within the first 5 minutes, then the other players would know and be able to change the strategy.
On 07/11/2024 at 6:03 AM, alre said:I'm kinda opposed to this. it's good to have this structure for art I guess, but I think that for gameplay it's bad. Why should two greek city states like Athens and Sparta play alike? One is a thalassocratic democracy with a stratified social system, the other one is a militaristic oligarchy with a frozen society and political system. They would have a similar military in many regards, but the eco should be different, and new players should not feel like they are the same at all.
Well, that's easy enough, we just design them to play different.
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1-click strategies (chosing civ specifications upon phase up) results in cheap gameplay. If the civ design itself depends on what option you choose then the game could be decided by clicking A when your opponent clicked B. The same thing goes for the "cards" you get in aoe3.
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This would be a LOT of work, but honestly, I'm for it. I agree with everything @Genava55has just said.
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20 minutes ago, Genava55 said:
Basically yes. This is a good analogy. Choosing between a city-state, a tribe or something else, with the idea that it's part of a strategy. In some cases it can be very specialized and in other cases a bit more general.
I'm kind of for that idea, I don't know if everyone would. At the very least genericing out the units would make it easier to do civilizations.
It would have to be something a lot of people would have to agree on. (I'd also probably require us to redo the encylopedia, but that's OK) if you want we could open another discussion forum post on it.
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10 minutes ago, Genava55 said:
I'm rather concerned to hear these comments. How do you imagine we'll ever be able to include the Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars or even the Punic Wars as playable campaigns, if we get stuck at the first non-playable faction?
Wasn't it simply a lack of vision at the start of the game's development? I'm thinking in particular of the split of the generic Greek faction into two factions with Athens and Sparta. I think we should have umbrella factions which should allow us to incorporate minor factions into the game and even take advantage of them to include them in innovative game strategies.
It's extremely difficult to bring variety to building design. Creating factions that are entirely dedicated to one people has a significant cost from a conceptual point of view. The risk is of producing uninspiring, sloppy content by having to vary the designs for the same cultural sphere, or of giving up on including certain peoples altogether because of this challenge. And multiplying the selectable factions by including lots of peoples from the same cultural sphere is simply going to make the UI less interesting and less user-friendly. If we have to add Thebes, Corinth, Syracuse and Massalia as playable factions, we're walking on our heads. However, these city-states are interesting and can bring in lots of units, technology and interesting bonuses.
I think that umbrella factions can integrate these minor factions in interesting and diverse ways. In the case of the Greeks, we can imagine starting with a generic affiliation to the Greek faction and quickly having a first choice offered in the civic centre building to move towards Athens or Sparta. Each brings different bonuses and different units that can be used quickly. However, the player can continue as a generic faction to unlock other choices such as Corinth, Thebes or Syracuse in the next phase.
This is just a rough draft to illustrate how it might work. But I really think it's a better approach to bringing diversity into the game without degrading the visual quality of the game and without bringing in too much art. Umbrella factions can also address the problem of balancing civilisations that are either too weak because of a lack of variety, or too strong because of too great a diversity of units and technologies. The fact that certain units are dependent on specific choices can lead to interesting strategies and counter-strategies.
This approach could also solve problems such as that of the Iberians. Which is still a faction implemented as a patchwork of three very different cultures. Introducing the option of choosing sub-factions or minor factions during the game would highlight the differences within the Iberian Peninsula without creating new, similar designs. I'm thinking in particular of the difference between the Iberians and the Celtiberians, who were culturally, politically and linguistically very different, but who had points in common in the architecture of their cities and fortresses. The aim of my proposal is to take advantage of the diversity of the ancient world without overloading the game with too many elements. But also to allow for diversity in the scenarios, and to allow for a respectful treatment of ancient peoples and cultures.
So to kind of reiterate you’re thinking something like age of mythology where you pick a different god , but instead you eventually just pick a civilization to allign yourself with?
that would drastically change the game but I kind of like it. That would solve some of our problems and make aging up a bit more game changing
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Narrative Campaign General Discussion?
in Gameplay Discussion
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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.