oshron

hey, all. been a while, hasn't it? more than two whole years! i just thought i'd pop in and post something in the hopes of getting some constructive comments and other suggestions. though i haven't posted here in a long time, i haven't stopped thinking on this project. the biggest thing i came up with for it is a proper setup of civilizations based around the idea of properly-themed expansion packs. that also means that the roster of playable civs has expanded from twenty to thirty. the idea i came up with is, after the vanilla game, there's one expansion pack loosely connected to each of the original civilizations. i've even almost worked out which civs go to which, i'm just missing a few and thought i'd post about it here in the hopes of getting more ideas for what could be missing. to try to keep things simple, i'll post the original five civs (partly just to remind everyone) and the expansion civs that would correspond to each of them. Greeks: their expansion's theme is classical/Mediterranean Christians: the idea is essentially the same as before, but i'm changing it to just two Major Gods--God and the Devil, of course--with there being more significant differences between them where their mortal units are much more different from one another and, in place of myth units, God gets various crusader units while Satan doesn't get hero units at all and has all the myth units instead, but they "share" Minor Gods in a new way where i've decided to diversify the various pantheons where some of the more dichotomous civs will have more than three Minor Gods to a phase but still share myth units and God Powers where applicable, so God gets saints and archangels while Satan gets demons as their respective Minor Gods--for balance purposes, Christian crusaders and monsters both fill the roles of heroes and myth units Hittites: this one could go to either this pack or the Mesopotamian one, but i decided to give them to the classical-themed pack because i'm connecting them so heavily to Troy, giving them more of a connection to both the Greeks and Romans Iberians: i can tell i'm still gonna have alot of trouble with this one, but i'll do my darnedest to make them authentic; the advantage now is that i no longer need to give them three Major Gods and that simplifies everything Muslims: like the Christians, i'm whittling them down to just two Majors got representing God and the Devil as perceived in Islam, with God having prophets and Minor Gods and the Devil getting demons/genies/etc. Romans: pretty much the same as before, but now they'll be including a late-game option to incorporate emperor-worship as well, which will allow them to represent either the Republic or the Empire, and their more wide-ranging Minor Gods will be able to be made more specific by selecting one of several mutually-exclusive myth techs based on various cult names of Roman gods Egyptians: they get a "mysterious" theme based on conspiracy theories, including one in particular... Aethiopians: some solid ideas for a Sub-Saharan African civ occurred to me recently and i really warmed up to the idea; unfortunately, they're rather generic similar to the Mississippians but my goal is to base them as closely on authentic Ethiopian culture and mythology first, (based partly on "Ethiopia" being a historical name for the entire African continent and i'm using the archaic spelling to emphasize that) then on peoples and cultures most closely associated with the real-world Ethiopian people(s), and then on other African cultures only as filler (except for their myth units, which will come from all over the continent) "Ancient Astronauts": a mostly fictional civ, they'll be something of an amalgamation of OTL cultures subjected to the ancient astronauts pseudohistorical conspiracy theories, though they might be a bit superfluous since that theory will also be acknowledged in other civs, but it's also very tempting to use ancient astronauts and ufology as inspiration for another civ; it would probably include references to lots of public-domain sci-fi, maybe even War of the Worlds by having Martian tripods as siege weapons (or an organic facsimile of them as a myth unit) Aztecs: possibly redone as broader Mesoamericans to incorporate the Mayans as well--i'd already been planning to include references to them anyway by way of myth units Inca: i'd been considering either this or the Iberians for a while, but now that i'm expanding the roster of civs they'll both be included; i've also learned some about the Inca in the past few months so that helps the Egyptian-based pack is still missing one civ! Norse: based around cultures which came from far away, especially over the sea, to conquer/colonize new lands Atlanteans: only a possibility right now, i'd rather not include another fictional culture that will just be borrowing from the Greeks again, especially since the obvious choice of basing them on Age of Mythology with the Titans as their gods is already taken by the Cro-Magnons--it would require a good amount of research to find some "authentic" Atlantean gods to use instead, probably based on Atlantean pseudohistories Polynesians: unchanged, nothing else to say Semites: more or less unchanged, but the Hebrew faction will be getting its own set of Minor Gods mostly apart from the rest with one side allowing the player to represent Judaea (the ancestors of modern definitive Jews, and the reason why the religion is specifically called Judaism) by only selecting prophets and no other deities while the other allows representation of the Israelites (those who became the Lost Tribes of Israel) who still worshipped the Hebrew God but also started believing in some more polytheist gods due to intermingling with non-Jews Turuk: a possible addition to this pack, or else they'll go to the Celt-inspired pack; they're a generalized Turkic civ but their main inspiration is the Mongols, also encompassing other steppe nomads the Norse-based pack is still missing 1-2 civs! Celts: all the civs for this one are based on stereotypically "savage" and "pagan" cultures which are usually used as antagonists or which have/had demonic connotations in the past Cro-Magnons: they're reassigned from earlier in development but still have the Titans as their gods, though they might be renamed/re-themed as more generalized Antediluvians "Cthulhu Cults": this would be the only uniformly evil civ in the game, based on the Cthulhu mythos by H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and others; since this one is based on published fiction and not actual mythology, after all, i'm more than willing to drop this one if either a more compelling idea comes up or if it turns out that there isn't enough content to make a working in-game pantheon Mississippians: still the generalized Native American representative Slavs: still the eastern European civ Turuk: a possible addition to this pack, or else they'll go to the Norse-inspired pack, meaning that the Celt-inspired pack might be missing one civ!; they're a generalized Turkic civ but their main inspiration is the Mongols, also encompassing other steppe nomads Mesopotamians: a strictly geographic theme, all these ones are based out of Asia, and not just the Far East, either Buddhists: one of my more recent ideas, my current thinking is that their Major Gods will represent geographic centers of Buddhism, and they'll incorporate Himalayan culture in general, taking on some aspects originally planned for China; they could also be a "technical pacifist" civ, but then again Buddhist extremism and violence isn't unknown both today and historically, so.... Chinese: essentially unchanged, but maybe their Major Gods will be centered around various Chinese religions instead without going into the "good-neutral-evil" dynamics like originally planned; the alternative is that they solely represent Taoism but could still have content from other Chinese religions, particularly Confucianism; EDIT: it could be that the Chinese factions are based on the Three Kingdoms period more as an homage to Romance of the Three Kingdoms than anything else Hindus: more or less unchanged--i'm still deciding what i'll be doing with their Major and Minor God representation, would could be that each Major God only gets their own avatars and some others, or their avatars are omitted as Minor Gods but included as inspiration for either myth units or heroes Japanese: essentially unchanged, but i haven't decided who their Major Gods are beyond Amaterasu Persians: unchanged, they represent Zoroastrianism any thoughts on all this?

the implication with towers generally seems to be that a defender just comes with it--where else does its line of sight come from?

what i'd recommend is to take some inspiration from Empire Earth II, which also had a capturing feature (though 0ad's functions is much better). in EE2, when units (just infantry in that one) are told to capture a building, they walk up to it and essentially start saber-rattling, raising their weapons over their heads and shaking them as it looks like they're shouting (but there's no special sound for that). for 0ad, it could be done with cavalry by their horses rearing up, and units with shields could bang their weapons against them.

of course, it would still be even cooler--and probably alot more popular--to include some true dinosaurs just using Chaos Island that i mentioned earlier for inspiration would dole out Parasaurolophus, Compsognathus (or perhaps a larger but similar animal in its place--Coelophysis comes to mind), Pachycephalosaurus, Dilophosaurus (ideally at its full size and non-venomous), Stegosaurus, some large dromaeosaur in place of Velociraptor (i recommend Achillobator, personally, but other options for actual fossil species similarly-sized to the JP raptors are Dakotadon and Utahraptor, though the smaller Deinonychus might be good, too, as an expy of wolves for size and numbers), Triceratops, and of course Tyrannosaurus--the main expansion of that i'd recommend would be at least one sauropod

yeah, if nothing else some extinct proxies for the modern animals included already could probably be done pretty easily--the models could reuse the animations for the regular animals. going on that by itself, there could be short-faced bears, entelodonts, giant camels, Macrauchenia, Deinosuchus, mammoths and mastodons, Sivatherium, horse ancestors, American lions, horned gophers, woolly rhinos (Coelodonta or Elasmotherium, or both), saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves. they'd probably fit better with the whole setting than most dinosaurs, too, since while all of these would be extinct by the time 0ad is supposed to take place, they're still pretty recent (except for Deinosuchus, which is from the Cretaceous)

it was Alpha 20 before, now 21. i even checked on the map i play most often (Archipelago) and it's not there. the enigmatic thing about it is that i KNOW the lighthouse was available on that map before in 20 and then it just suddenly disappeared. whoosh. gone. pwfft. it just doesn't make sense.... thanks for the explanation in any case

i heard about Paraworld waay back when it first came out (the first online community i was really a part of was Jurassic Park Legacy, now closed down, so alot of the people there were paleo-nerds like me). never played it, but heard it wasn't exceptionally good--that was the impression i got from others, at least. probably what most people would think of in terms of dinosaurs in video games right now would be ARK: Survival Evolved, a Minecraft-esque game (in that you collect resources and build and craft things in the same way, but the graphics are "more realistic" rather than deliberately retro) where arguably the main feature is taming and riding dinosaurs, which itself provides a pretty good cross-section of prehistoric life mainly using just stock animals with some expansions that most people with a more than passing knowledge of fossil animals would at least vaguely recognize--ones like Diplocaulus, that boomerang-headed salamander, or Dunkleosteus, the armored fish with guillotine-like jaws, or the generic Terror Bird, a Cenozoic proxy for theropods. ARK also at least tries to be more accurate, taking current knowledge into account before stylizing their animals for the cool factor, but a more accurate one would probably be an indie game called Saurian, which iirc is being made specifically for accuracy. all three of those games would be a good example for what a 0ad prehistoric species list could include, but as much as i want to see dinosaurs in the game, let's not go completely crazy with it if it ever goes ahead my first thought when i hear "dinosaurs" and "RTS" in the same breath, though, is a JP game that came out to coincide with The Lost World: Jurassic Park called Chaos Island. in addition to all the protagonists from the movie (voiced by the original actors! ) you could also collect dinosaur eggs and hatch them into eight different species, all of which were featured in the movie it was loosely based on (plus Dilophosaurus, the spitting carnivore from the first movie). i'd love to try and recreate Chaos Island in 0ad if i could, and having even just those eight species would be a major boon to that. though for 0ad in particular, my hope is just to see dinosaurs included in general, ideally accurate to current scientific knowledge and not delving into stereotypes or using only stock dinosaurs: no spitting dilophosaurs, no six-foot-tall velociraptors (Achillobator instead--it even sorta fits with the theme of the game by being named after Achilles). failing that, recently-extinct non-dinosaur animals: dodos, giant Malagasy tortoises, moas, aurochs, thylacines, great auks (even Ubisoft got in on this one in Assassin's Creed Rogue), tarpans--which would probably be the species used for wild horses as fauna anyway--and, getting more out-there, (read: still-prehistoric but human-contemporary extinctions) megalanias, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, giant swans, and glyptodonts

for some reason, the lighthouse has disappeared from the Ptolemies in my game. it's still in the editor, but it doesn't appear on their build list. any help on this, or at least an explanation?

Based on a discussion in this thread, I thought I'd open discussion as to what people think about if dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals were included in the game, ideally as a default feature. This would be just for fun, entirely separately from the historicity of the game, and wouldn't even necessarily be present in the main part of the game--they could be editor-only units for custom maps that deliberately evoke a lost world feel. As mentioned in the eyecandy thread, they'd ideally be as close to current knowledge as possible, with most (but not all) of them being feathered and function the same as wild animals already in the game, so it'd really just be a matter of deciding which species would be included if people want them in. I've included most of my personal suggestions in the poll (and the one I'm most enthusiastic about is basing it on Skull Island--I want to try making a scale model of that island someday as a custom map) but one other idea I have is to base the species list on a book that I got in the past year, very outdated but with a good cross-section of dinosaurs in it, including both stock and obscure dinosaurs known from over twenty years ago. Another option would be to make the species list an homage to Jurassic Park, combining species from the films and novels for a decent variety, and then combining them with some Cenozoic animals. Yet another possibility could be to base them on dinosaur documentaries such as the Walking with... series. Separately from prehistoric fauna, another element of this in a similar vein could be to include Neanderthals, complete with some buildings where, if you capture them, you can train Neanderthal soldiers. Just a little fantasy-esque idea. Even if prehistoric animals don't make it in, some extinct animals wouldn't be out of place. Ones that went extinct during the Holocene like the dodo or aurochs would be nice, the former being exclusive to a random map of an island based on Mauritius--it's not too out-there that the ancient civilizations represented could end up there considering one of the random maps already included is set at the North Pole.

the unfortunate thing is that Dracorex is probably a synonym of Pachycephalosaurus in any case, i do have some ideas for exactly which dinosaurs and other prehistoric species could be included. you want i should post 'em here, or should we make a separate thread for the idea?

i don't know if this has been brought up before, but one thing i'd recommend is to put docks on the list of buildings that a civ can have and still lose--it's kind of annoying playing against AI players like i do and the very last thing a civ has, which is way the hell out of the way from where the central hub of their civ was, is a random dock that doesn't even have anyone depositing resources at it

personally, i like the idea that raptors could run up vertical surfaces by using their wings for lift, kinda like how some characters in video games can run up walls for short distances, and i've decided to include a righting reflex like cats for them in a book i'm writing this kind of ability would be great if they were a controllable unit, getting them over your enemy's walls kinda like the Anubites in AOM, but that's a different discussion entirely if you guys want, i could write up a hypothetical list of prehistoric animals based on all the civs currently in the game, or else compile a bunch of quasi-historical references for now-extinct animals which were still around at the time 0ad is set, since it seems like a popular idea

looking at earlier posts in the thread, i'd also like to put forward my support for zombies as a non-historical gameplay element, something a bit more unique to include just for fun it could even work by giving the zombies a special ability to "turn" other units by spawning another zombie next to them when they kill another unit as well as having spawn-points for new zombies at random places around the map, plus groups of them spawning in the map to begin with like fauna fantastical stuff aside, i'd also love it if some prehistoric animals were included so that there can be some "lost world"-type maps. to kinda-sorta keep with the themes of vanilla 0 AD, they could come from the countries descended from each civ, like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon corresponding to the Britons. some geologically-recent extinct animals would otherwise be pretty cool, like dodos for a tropical island random map since, while far-fetched, it would be believable for some ancient culture to have reached Mauritius

thanks for your help, guys

silly me, i didn't even see the direct download link! i'd been clicking on the torrent button near the top of the page i don't know how to torrent/don't have the tools for it (anymore) so i'll just go for direct download. i always play it single-player, anyway, so does hosting from Wildfire Games' servers affect that in any way?

i'm having trouble downloading the new alpha--every time i try downloading it, it's an unsuable .torrent file for some reason instead of a .exe (i checked--when i select it, my computer asks for the proper application to open .torrent files). i'm using Windows, so i don't know if it's unique to the Windows version.

though some explicitly pre-conquest Ancient Egyptian units would probably make good additions to the editor

i forget, which country is Wildfire Games based in? in that case, that would determine what the status of a hypothetical LOTR mod is (similarly, iirc Wikipedia is obviously a very international site but is subject to Floridian law because that's where its servers are)

i think that technically copyright only really becomes a legal issue if someone besides the rightful owner is profiting from it. you actually see this all the time in media--in trope terms, it's called Lawyer Friendly Cameo, Captain Ersatz, and/or Expy where a character, country, etc. is clearly intended to be a pre-existing character but can't be them for legal reasons. you see this pretty frequently in comics and animation, and can be as much an homage as it is simply getting around lawyers--examples of all three come up in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is a full-on crossover of fiction, particularly public domain characters (the original line-up of main characters were Mina Murray from Dracula, Alan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and the Invisible Man), and included some expys (new characters based on older/contemporary ones) of historical figures using fictional characters (such as Oliver Haddo, who's used as a stand-in for Aleister Crowley) and some fictional characters that Moore didn't have the rights to use so they're referred to by aliases, such as Fu Manchu in the first volume who is referred to only as "the devil doctor" and the like in theory, there should be no legal problems with a non-profit RTS game based on Tolkien's legendarium, just like (as i understand it) there's no legal problems with fanfiction as long as it isn't published (which interestingly HAS come up with an actual LOTR fanfic called The Last Ringbearer, published only in its original Russian because it'd be against copyright to publish it anywhere else) but i completely understand any reservations that WFG has against going forward with The Last Alliance--i myself am working on several writing projects which pay heavy homage to alot of media that i like and even if i don't end up publishing some of them i'm still being careful with exactly how i go about them

it's a stock sound effect that shows up literally anywhere and everywhere, so i'm absolutely certain it's free there's even a site which has an Instant Wilhelm Scream button! even if it technically wouldn't be, 0ad wouldn't be the first place that an unlicensed use of it comes up. while most instances you'd think of are licensed productions, there's plenty of instances fan-creations, etc., which use it in various non-licensed projects--off the top of my head, the Saturday Morning Watchmen video (which is another example of fair use that any such use of the Wilhelm scream would be covered under, as i understand it)

i actually wasn't aware hotkeys had been added and didn't know that the period key was used to find idle workers i used Tab in example since that's what i was familiar with via Empire Earth and i think Age of Mythology as well--just makin' a point

i agree. customizeable hotkeys are a must, in my opinion. it'll help macromanagement immensely if you can just press Tab, for example, and find an idle worker as to water, i disagree. if there were ever any other resource to be added, it should just be a generalized one for whole new features along the lines of Favor in AOM. though it WOULD be an interesting feature to make some other basic buildings only buildable within reach of water, which could also have Wells as a new basic feature granting the same bonuses as water. maybe farms can only be built within a certain distance of water, for example

another good feature for the minimap would be to re-orient the map to default with a single button

crap. thanks anyway. i guess i'll leave walls out of map, then

aah, thank you changing the player control would probably be easiest then err, how do i change the controlling player? ^_^"