Aeros

He means that we intend to impliment it but who knows if we'll have the manpower or time to do so, or if we'll even be capable of it. But then thats just bad PR, why hype people about something we may or may not include Anyway, to conclude and to stop dragging this discussion - I'll talk about some art techniques and styles and why we have them, what the direction of some of the art in the game is etc - and possibly have an article on the basic design ideas behind our editor. Expect those 1-3 months from now depending on when I'll have time to do them. Also, I'm sure other team members are planning to write some dev articles themselves but might be waiting for the inspiration or public interest to do so...

Well theres concept images I made to demonstrate stuff [though recently we changed plans and Atlas won't look like the concepts]- I guess I'll go for it. If it sucks I'll just send it to you personally - but most likely it'll have some pretty neat stuff, I mean I wouldn't want to make a boring text book article, it won't be like that. Or actually...tell me this - would something like this or this be interesting? (and why we're doing things like that/ what kind of power we think it'll have - though this is 100% likely to change and likely won't be the editor in the final game, but it atleast shows what we're aiming for)

Anyone interested in design and conceptual ideas for the editor and what it took to compile the 60 page (18,000 words) techincal design document for the Atlas [scenario] Editor? It talks (or will talk ) about what we have planned for design, what goals we want to meet, what the community (and ourselve) look for in an editor package, etc... Although I dunno, with nothing much to show besides ideas and concepts it might be boring (and probably will be for most). Unless you guys don't think so? I started abit of it a long time ago and kinda dropped it... Or would you be interested in the design and implimentation/goal aspects of terrain or the natural art in 0AD - or the same for the Buildings - this time there'll be plenty of pictures to show... I'd like to make a few articles like that but have been waiting for some free time to do so. It depends on how interested the public would be. I think it would be kinda cool for our fans. I mean we're kinda cracking down on releasing new screenshots since everything is so beta now and is/will be redone by a year from now. That and we want to concentrate on making gameplay work rather than showing some fancy new art every now and then (but then, thats all we had a year ago - so things are much different now)

And exactly why getting a myspace for the sole reason that everyone else has one is not living outside of the box.

Think about that - would you really like it if you're in a heated battle and you're trying to get your navy to the location of the battle in time to save your butt - but instead they get blown off the map, or randomly sunk due to high waves or they go the complete wrong direction because you fail to calculate the proper mast position. Would that make you squeel with joy when you loose your entire navy randomly and a ton of resources just for the sake of a realistic wind model? You can look at it this way: The captains and crewmen in the ship woud have been well educated in mastering the sea and how to make use of the wind to go to where you tell them, so decisions like that you won't have to make. However you can setup scenarios for yourself in the editor and use triggers to make such events possible to your own liking. The most "wind" you'll see in 0AD is possibly wind blowing through trees or grass etc.

Send me an email if you're looking for some good competition

Hmm, I just might have the perfect thing to show in a thread like this... and thats an OLD version of our deciduous tree, the new ones are still being worked on

We do too Points 1, 2 are what we are aiming for. Ships will be too scale and will function accurately to how they really did. Units will be portrayed on the ships. I like your 4rth idea too. The reason that not much information on naval battles in 0 A.D. isn't out there is because the way we handle naval gameplay is very expiramental. We'd like to test out things and see how they work before saying we'll have them. Perhaps someone from the design department could answer more questions about ships than I can.

Work on the mod was concluded maybe 4 years ago when we decided to make a "proper" version of Rome at War - called 0 A.D. Being able to edit AoK's unit stats won't be of much help to us now And on a further note, the very person who made that tool is also on the 0 A.D. team working on the game. We're pretty much set. Thanks for the interest though.

We'd like to say yes, but given that our own resource pool is not yet finished or finalized, I don't know how flexible the system would be. But yes we definately want to support mod flexibility like that and we sure can try to include it. Perhaps someone who knows more than I do about it can answer

I know someone in my school who likes to do this: Cut out the back of a T-shirt and sew it onto a jacket. He's got tons. Its a pretty cool idea if his style didn't suck so much.

Fractals own. I like the collection of fractal inspired art here http://dreamp.club.fr/gal1e.htm check it out

You can check the Vacancies Page to see what you can help with. However, its not likely you'll be able to get in unless you've got profficient skill in whatever you do and you can devote plenty of time and energy to the project.

Well, maybe you won't even have to "assume" given that you'l be able to see the unit(s) right there in the tower or manning the seige

That's certainly an idea. When we're finishing up with the more important parts of the game and are aproaching release we can try that and see what happens.

@Lord - I can't exactly say... To some extent it works like that (or we'd like it to be like that), like you can replace a file in the file system and when you go back to the editor the new files will immediatly take effect. However this is very complicated and we're unsure if we'll be able to support the feature through final release. Its definately something we want to do though to make the game more modder (and developer) friendly. @Caesar: Accourding to our Design Document, different terrains will provide different speed properties for units. We can make it so that units travel faster on roads or something along those lines, however details like that are left for testing. It may be possible that you can "build" roads in the editor for use in the campaign however I can't yet say whether that will have any impact on gameplay.

1. There is no way we can tell until the game is finished but it likely won't surpass 1 GB 2. Again, no way to tell until we're finished, but a midrange computer right now should be able to play the game fine. A 64MB graphics card will likely be minimum, but a 32MB one might be able to handle it as well. Again, this is only speculation. 3. Yup 4. Probably not, but you can impliment that yourself by modding the game (which will be very modder friendly) 5. Details like that we have yet to discover through playtesting, we're not quite at that stage yet.

And another point is that weapons are really ellaborate in 0AD, like for example you can tell a falcata apart from a gladus all the weapons are detailed (if you zoom in to appreciate the detail)

The idea behind random shields (and in some cases weapons) is that each militant in your army brings his own family shield with him to battle. Once again, we haven't finalized the details on exactly how the many many different shield textures we have will work since we're not at that stage in the game where we work in minute details like these, theres much more important work to do. Another option is to have all player shields be the same color but have different designs on them, that would work as well - however another thing we want to do is use as little player color for units as possible so that all art in the game maintains its historical acuracy and isn't dabled in Blue or Red or Green like in other RTS games.

We haven't finalized exactly how to organize units with their shields like that, but my idea is that all units in an army (ctrl+f1 to make your group), will all get the same sheild so that you can identify them that way just by looking at their sheilds.

No, because the key factor of the game is using strategy to win, not random luck.

You're a minority Randy Lemme guess, LOTR? For some reason I'm thinking theonering.net when I see your name. I really don't know where you came from. We joined on the same day btw, september 30th 2003

Check out this hilarious list, http://omega.med.yale.edu/~pcy5/misc/overlord1.htm I'll post a few to get you interested.

How does that work? I imagine there won't be much of a pheasant left after an encounter with a shotgun

Theres nothing stopping you from working on that About a year and a half ago I too wanted in on this amazing project but I didn't really have any immediate skills that could be applied to the game. I was lucky and got in under the premise of "scenario design" or something like that but what I really was interesting was was 3d art. I knew next to nothing about it when I first joined, but I practiced for many months and made alot of garbage when things finally started, literally, taking shape. Whats more is I'm still learning every day I work on this project even though some people mistake me for proffesional (Look at the trees, a majority of the flora, all the terrains and the romans in 0AD [plus more comming soon ] ) The real proffesional though is Wijitmaker, I can only follow in his footsteps... Find an inspiration and work towards it, before you know it you'll be doing things that not long ago you thought were impossible. My inspiration is the many talents and hardwork put forth by every member of the WFG Team, particularly Ken's, Stuart's and Jason's. The knowledge that there is someone out there working just as hard as me if not much harder striving for the same goal is what keeps me going. (By the way... is anyone interested in rants/stories like these? We could do some dev articles for the site - we've been searching arround for good subjects...grrr ) Indeed it is, everyone here should be proud to be part of this unique corner of the internet. Most of us comming from a common background at HG - this trully fits the terminology "Gamers making Games for Gamers". Its a unique thing, the development of this game being so integrated with the community. We have alot of fun with our liberty to be able to interact with our fans. Its just the right ammount for us to be able to pay attention and interact with each of you individually. Unfortunately as we aproach the release of the game I'm sure we're going to get alot of popularity and alot more forumers, great though that may be you'll probably see less of us on the forums since there won't be enough time for us to interact with all of them. Don't think your time here (so early in the development of the game) is wasted. When time comes for beta (Maybe even alpha), the oldest and loyal members of the community will be the first to get to play the game, as its their input that will be most valued. So enjoy the "nice little neat community" we have while it lasts, if you're still sticking arround 2 years from now you will have earned much respect and awe from everyone else having been in this community since the roots of this project Its something to look forward to.