fyhuang

I save everything: 1) there's always books open on my desk, I never close them or put them away. 2) I almost never restart my computer because I don't want to open programs again. 3) in RPGs, I keep every little item, even if I'll never use it or it was related to a mission I did months ago.

Hey there Diego, have a great time here!

I use SuSE linux - they offer a bootable CD as well. In addition, their setup program will automatically re-partition your hard drive (that is, if your computer didn't come pre-installed with Windows XP) for you. The only problem, as mentioned above, is if your computer came pre-installed with Windows XP. Preinstalled ones come with a newer version of the NTFS filesystem - which's details have not been released yet. But you can still use the bootable CD . I personally wouldn't recommend Lindows. It's a unique idea, but IMHO won't work out well for you. They go by a monthly subscription basis, whereas I take Linux to be pay-once (to get your manual and tech support), then it's free for all time. Tech support is the best thing - you pay, you get it. Even the pro edition of SuSE's Linux (which includes development tools and all that - but if you have broadband you can download it for free from the Internet) only costs $80, and comes with tech support. On the other hand, Microsoft makes you pay $90 for each support 'incident'...

What if I run 2 OSs? Which one do I choose? I run a Win XP on my newer com, and a Linux on my older one.

Yes, video games and computers somehow seem to boost my reading and math abilities... "We multitask like you breathe."

Must have game now!

I think that a non-italic, smaller font and no background would look better for the text 'A modification for 0 A.D.'. Just my opinion...

I use it (Gaim's a miracle), but I'm not on much.

Well, I'm not trying to steal any of your source code or anything ... I was just wondering how you kept track of your files...

Seeing that 0 A.D. is such a large project and all, I was wondering what method you are using to organize the project and keep track of the files. CVS? And if you do use something like CVS, where do you host all your files? Just wondering, thanks!

Oh, I recently just bought Empire Earth, expecting it to be good... well, imagine my surprise at being forced to create 'Macemen' and 'Stone throwers'. I really don't care if they have hard-to-remember names, but really! Also the learning campaign is good and easy, but the real campaign is at least 500% harder. Gradual difficulty levels (and also adjustable difficulty levels!), please. Oh, and a couple more ideas: 1. It would be nice to 'macromanage'. You tell your builders ('villagers' is a fine name) to focus on, say, Military, or Economics and they accordingly build by themselves, concentrating on Barracks or Farms or whatever. Let the AI take care of the gruesome details. Of course, for veteran RTSers, you must include the option to micromanage as well . 2. Somewhat related to the previous one - many RTS games take a long time to complete - sometimes exceeding 2 hours. Now, for the people who have time to play games all day, that's fine, but I'm pretty busy, so you really must have an option to save multiplayer games, and also maybe an option, pre-game, to start out with a nicely built base. Nothing really advanced, just have, say a couple levels of pre-build ('Basic economy', 'Simple kingdom', 'World power'), with according pre-built buildings (Town center, some farms; Farms, barracks, some research; Barracks, archery range, stable, some more research, maybe a small expansion). 3. In the spirit of the game Galactic Civilizations, make small updates (patch-style) to add new content to the game. New campaigns don't have to come in expansion packs. 5 MB upgrades to the game, with some new campaigns and stuff, would be great. Considering this, you have to make your map format pretty effecient. Or use ZIPs. Either one works, the second's easier... 4. Don't parametricize (sp?) everything. Example: Infantry - 15 Attack, 12 Armor, 23% damage reduction. Damage reduction = Defense * whatever. Damage = Attack * damage reduction. That gets boring and too AD&D-ish. Make the units less effective as their hitpoints go down. The player shouldn't have to see all this (control panel: Attack: 15 - (23% of 15 for damage reduction) - (15% of 15 for damage) + (10% of 15 for bonuses) is not good). 5. Make mines (resource locations, ...) fairly abundant. For example, WarCraft III uses gold mines. They each have a fair amount of gold, but there aren't many. StarCraft uses mineral deposits. In maps, they are clustered, but you can make single ones or small clusters on your own maps. Also, don't be like Empire Earth and give lots of resource locations, each one having 500000 gold/stone/iron/etc. Farms should run out like AoK, and like the exp. they should be automatically rebuilt. Of course, the rebuilding should cost 90% of the initial cost or something. There is no such thing as a free lunch . 6. Garrisoning units is nice, but don't allow too much of that. For example, AoK let you put villagers in town centers. Unless you are the fastest AoK player in history, don't expect to rush a base within the first 5-10 minutes and win. WarCraft and StarCraft had pretty HP-fortified town centers, but they couldn't attack or anything. Rushes here were effective. Another game that I have, Star Trek: Armada, had starbases which could only be brought down by 4-5 of the main attacking unit (i.e. Battlecruisers, ...), because they could attack and did tons of damage. Rushes were still a strategy, but very ineffective. 7. Make some powerful units! AoK was a large-army game - you had many small units and amassed a large army. Not that that's bad, but you can put gods or something and you can summon gods during battle to do tons of damage or something. I am a defensive player, but I don't like sitting there for 1/2 an hour waiting for my army to form, when I know I have already won. 8. Relating to the first one (sorry!), the AI should be able to create villagers (or a less useful worker unit) when needed (i.e. you are running low on gold (in relation to the other resources), the AI should build some units to mine gold). Also to make bases look cooler, you can make lesser worker units and have them go around carrying water or food or something. On the same note, some kind of automatic water carrier and food carrier should carry stuff to the houses. If a house doesn't get food/water for _ time, it becomes 'abandoned'. This way, choking a base's supply lines is a viable strategy, and so even if the player has another resource mine somewhere else, they can't get them to the houses at that base, and it dies off. Well, sorry for the long list, but I feel inspired today .

Most definately!

Ah, we will. About the year 18,000 A.D., ...

You mean like Internet phone? Or VoIP or something? Anyone with slow internet (hint, hint - me) will definately prefer IM. Phone's too distorted, and you can give files and stuff over IM as well. Letters are way too slow, and typing is faster than writing (for most people).

Oh, about the Freewebs thing, I do believe that they have a WYSIWYG editor (i.e. Microsoft Word, ...).

"One sword to rule them all, and in the battlefields grind them!"

Great idea Argalius, you could, on Random Maps (if there are teams), not give every player an equal balance of resources, and force them to trade in order to get the resources they need.

Freewebs is nice - www.freewebs.com . They give you 100 MB of web space, and some other nice features, but you can't use images hosted on Freewebs servers in HTML tags. However, I think you can directly link to images, but I'm not sure (never tried ). Oh: 0 A. D. : 0 Annihilation + Destruction!

Probably all the other sentient life out there is thinking the same thing... Like, NASA once sent out a radio signal with a bitmap, being some symbolic representation of people, the earth, ... but how do we know aliens use the same method of converting a stream of data into a 2D image? How do we know they use pixels? How do we know that they don't use a compressed format for transmitting data? And even if they do, that image was too pixelated to tell anything from anyways. Either that or my memory is deceiving me...

Hmm, I remember seeing that screenshot somewhere... Also, I would go for Freewebs instead of Geocities. But that's just my opinion. The Deacon Warclan? Official 0 A.D. Warclan? 0 A. Destruction? 0 A. Domination? 0 A. Devils? (seeing a pattern?)

I'm not going to specifically arrange these... 11+: I hunger for food! 31+: Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. (check copyright for this...) We're doomed! Doomed, I tell you! Mwahahahahaha *choke* *caugh* *caugh*... Made you look! You blinked! (rush and then say this ) I know you are, but what am I? (considering how much people call each other gay over the Internet...) OK, so I'm not good at thinking up quotes...

Going with some stuff I read on the site about formations being more useful, unit speed should probably be more useful as well. Instead of just having speed to travel from one side of the map to the other, speed should also be used to dodge attacks (or call it agility, or whatever) or something. Also you may want to have unit AI that can be set to on/off/partial. On being advanced AI where you don't have to micro-manage, partial being standard RTS stuff, and off being for those who have memorized every hotkey there is and want to micro-manage everything. Anyways, I'll give you more as I come up with them .

Wow... I cheated somewhat like that through StarCraft... and even then, it took me maybe a month to finish the game... WarCraft III does have very good movies. I often do wonder what those guys' render times are...

I drink orange soda and iced tea actually... Live without my computer? Are you insane!?! My life is my computer! ...OK it's not that bad yet, but...

CVS would work as well - CVS is also a great version control system . The best security (IMHO anyways) is to provide a password-protected folder with an encrypted and password-protected archive. All with different passwords. Of course, if you turn off indexing and put the file somewhere like: http://www.wildforegames.com/8gh/38htas/q8.../2398hg/oad.exe That would be just as effective .