Aeros

Being that we are using mostly open formats, so long as you have 3d modelling software, if you can make your own animations you won't have any trouble exporting them into the game. Whether you want bones or static animations can be up to you. As for "modding" animations, this is inherently impossible, you either have animation A or animation B. If you mean opening our animations and changing them, you will likely either not need to do that (due to the flexibility of our animations) or will have much better luck making a new animation from scratch. In AoM the bones are in the granny animation files, but granny is a big time format and is impossible to decompile to get at the animations, so yes you wouldn't ever be able to change them. You can research this in the meantime to learn about what format we are using for our models and animations. http://www.collada.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA

Being that many of our own staff were/are HGers or were even involved as staff at HG, we have a close relationship with heavengames. Talks of a 0 A.D. Heaven have been around for a long time, with some ideas and plans that were agreed upon. However a 0 A.D. heaven will appear at our discretion, we agreed its wisest not to launch such a powerful hype tool before having a game to base it on. If something like this were to happen, it will likely show up well into a stable beta stage of 0 A.D. @ Jonathan: www.heavengames.com Its a news/community centered around RTS games of common interest, and responsible for many cool things back in the day. This team and project arose out of a bunch of modders in the age of kings heaven modding forum many many years ago

This is hilarious, I had a good laugh Reminds me of when Circuit City unveiled a service called "firedog, which is the lamest name ever in my opinion, only one point higher than "watercat"

You're right, I was thinking the same. I've been training a small army of carrier pigeons in my free time. But no seriously, I'm sure some hot shot tripple A publisher will swoop in at the last moment, offer us millions, and we'll completely sell out Then you can bug EA about the release date

In short... a bunch The longer story is everything is kind of a sandbox, its also a process of finding out if our ideas are good in gameplay as well as on paper, thats why we're a little uncomfortable discussing features in specifics, though we'll tell you what we think and how we'd like it to be, so long as you guys participate in that process with us and recognize it as such and know things could potentially change based on whats fun and what isn't. That didn't have much to do with formations, but I felt like putting that out there

Working on the game itself is not difficult, but finding the time after so many years of already being here, and us needing to make a buck and lead our own lives is the difficult part, attracting motivated tallent to the team...people who want to hone their own skills will really help. But these people are rare, and much rarer than they were when the RTS community was larger a few years ago.

Yeah yeah, I totally rushed you first though, and if we had seige working in the game you would've been a gonner. Hellas Liberation faction is going down

We want weather to be an option you can choose, yes.

Try Company of Heroes. Excellent RTS, no ages or phases.

Thats why its on the backburner list Some things are much much much more easily said than done though. Theres reasons why you haven't seen that in RTS games, and its not because people haven't thought of it.

What if we want to add more features and it'll bring the bar back? It doesn't matter, let us make our game without asking us everyday when its done. There are better things to do I'm sure. We already communicate enough about what we're doing on the website, through the screenshots, and directly on these forums, and all that will be much more acurate than us saying some percentage since its not like we're going through checklists here, its a maleable open ended sandbox - the game creation world.

Yeah 2 years later, still hurts just as bad....mmphhh. Julius try not to bump really old topics with absolutely nothing to say

Yes how do you think the computer feels about that, knowing its inevitably doomed against superior humans.

Something like that, yes. And I'm with you on transports materializing 40 units in one second, you're right, a transport should be vulnerable when the units disembark, it should require time and space to set up so the player would need to defend it, since if the units came out one by one they would easily get slaughtered by a good raiding party. Thats something we definately could try out

Concerning the AI having game modes where it is difficult to engage the standard RTS wave, such as in your example having an tremendous force which you have to conquer over a long amount of time is something that interests me personally. We do have plans on many styles of game modes with different objectives, naturally some of these will be multiplayer first where we will explore what can be fun about those modes of play, we definately would like to translate them into a single player experience. Naturally the campaign should present the player with many such varied situations. Not really senseless "okay theres 900 guys, and they're gonna attack you over the period of 3 hours survive with these 2 gold mines GO", things like that would be presented in a logical and preferably historical way. In real life people never get fair starts on everything, and history is the same exact way.

Noxas, now these are the kinds of ideas we like hearing Actual historical events are of great interest to us as literal sandbox RTS experiences in the game. Feel free to share more details or events that particularly interest you along that line.

Would be a long stretch to compare us to crysis but yeah we have cast shadows and self-shadowing which adjust based on lighting position. What we don't have is normal mapping to make certain details in textures stand out based on lighting moving, since that would never really be noticed in our game. And we do compromise for that by burning in shadows into our textures to essentially get the same effect, it just doesn't move with the light source since in our tests its almost not noticable, not to mention we aren't an FPS environment with loads of lights changing.

I had a pretty high ping when I tried the skirmish mode in that game so I dunno, but you're right, using a level of detail system so things farther away draw with less polygons is a way to potentially lower pings and dings.

Or whether it actually is 0 A.D. at all, which I seriously doubt

Do you think that would be fun though, mrblack? Our lighting system supports a day to night cycle, how that will make it into gameplay depends on how anoying the lighting cycle will be (after the first couple of times you see it you really won't be that stoked about it) - at the very least it could be an option the host sets before a game starts, to enable or even weather conditions.

That was a very blunt answer but it is probably right. That isn't to say we don't have plans or dreams or ideas in place but honestly we're abit in the dark as to how all that will go down. A lobby / server system is something that naturally will be done towards the very end, so rather than hyping plans or ideas we don't know if we'll be able to do 1-2 years from now its safer to assume the honest answer given in the. Thats not to say we aren't going to be looking for options or sources, and I highly doubt we would be completely incapable of figuring something out ( ) but for now this all is stuff far ahead in the future. Coding our own lobby and menu/server system would take a very long time as thats one of the most complicated peices of UI in a game, in my experience I know a developer usually has a seperate small team of coders and scripters that exclusively work on an ingame lobby. Its unknown at this time whether we will have such an ingame lobby, unless ofcourse there are a handful of excellent experienced people willing to join the team and code one up for us, but programmers are rare, especially programmers willing to do this kind of serious work (which is very time and thought consuming) for no compensation, especially how other people pay for this kind of work - we can only do it for our selves and out of our own passion, and sadly, only in our free time.

We're using 3dsmax with a custom made script so we can export models in our own format (.pmd, for pyrogenisis model) that supports the propping/actor system of the game. Prop points are used to designate points and the orientation of these points on a model so that other objects (called actors in the game) can be attatched to them. This all is fairly straightforward and will likely be put out with tutorials when the game is released. Otherwise the modelling itself is mostly done in 3dsmax. Gmax would work too. If you're going to learn modelling I highly recommend mastering texturing and becomming profficient in photoshop too, as these skills go hand in hand and if they both are exceptional they seperate the excellent artist from the decent artist.

@ Mr Black Tolkein no, and under that premise is why TLA is allowed to exist. Something like star wars or pikachu or maybe even the flying purple hippo wouldn't be allowed. Unless we drastically change the way they are called and one small detail about then, muhuhua But overall I think we can be much more creative than that...for sure more than just some of these ideas of borrowing ideas from other sources and making them into units.

Well theres intellectual copyrights and we can technicallly get in trouble for representing someone elses intellectual property in a way they don't like.

Each civ has the standard buildings, as well as a few special buildings only it can construct.