Aeros

Was 12 then, 19 now Helps to look at someone else's map, to see their triggers - I finally had the curiosity one day, tried a few triggers to see if I've got the idea right, and thats basically all it took. Without triggers, or more specifically, scripting, the world is lifeless.

Yeah true, we definatly don't want to have any fences on the screen that players would have to look through in order to play. But what else could we do to get rid of ping? or...?

Our vision for battle lays in good strategy of formations conducted by the player =)

Ping's gonna have to stay in so far as I know, would be pretty difficult to remove that from multiplayer games

It's basically the sequal and our full vision of the 0 A.D. universe with 6 more civilizations and harder to impliment features we thought about, however for the sake of ever getting this game done we split our design document into 2 parts, 0 A.D., and 0 A.D. part 2. Whether there will be a part 2 depends on how successful we are with the first part, and whether we still have it in us to continue doing this project. For now all of them are very far off plans and theres no saying what'll go down, only that we've thought about it already.

If you type in Win, you'll instantly win the game. Pretty fun cheat I think What kind of cheats do you want?

Indeed salt and drying was one of the most important ways of preserving food in ancient times and salt was a very valuable resource. Perhaps we'll make it the 5th resource. Without it your food stockpile will decrease at dramatically increasing rates due to spoilage, making salt a very important resource to fight over. About the hygeine...i'm not sure, perhaps we should get more historians to research the topic. I wonder if it will be historically accurate to have soldiers construct an outhouse in their camp...or if they used simpler means. Can a historian answer this? Sorry XenoHeart...clearly we are a little jaded

Hmm the chef would also need a food supply wagon to follow him, you'd have to equip it with 500 food at your city center each time your army leaves town. However if the enemy finds and destroys your food supply it would effectively cripple the chef and your units would slowly starve to death, many of them dieing before they can retreat back to town to the local pub. So if you just killed the food wagon you could defeat a player's army. Since this isn't balanced we'll just make the food waggon have 10,000hp and it'll have a serries of armor upgrades you can research onto it to make it even harder to destroy. But how to we protect it from bacteria, the silent and invisible enemy?

Well Xenoheart, I can sympathize with you here, because I for one find it totally unealistic that in these RTS games, the units mining gold spend their entire lives doing so! Entire wars may come and go, their homes may be demolished and rebuilt, but yet there they are, constantly mining 24/7. You never see them go to sleep. You would think that realistically they would need to take breaks or even go to sleep and that the player would have to accomodate this for them. On the same topic, I find it totally unrealistic that units can conduct entire wars on empty stomachs, you never see them eat! Okay but maybe I'm being stupid, I didn't realize that when you train a unit, it always requires some amount of food resources, like 50 food and that this is the general resource required to sustain a unit and must be expended when you enlist the unit's service. But this is totally unrealistic, upon being trained the unit is given a lifetime supply of food? Wouldn't it spoil? Where does he carry it? If you research iron cuttlery as opposed to wooden utensils will he be fed more efficiently and be able to conduct battle better? This is totally unrealistic, why has no game considered this! As I think about this something dawns on me...poppulation is totally unrealistic. You're telling me that 10 houses can support a population of 200 people? 200 people who never even sleep...if they don't sleep what is the point of the houses? Something here is being extremely unrealistic.... And what about the actual battles themselves. Clicking on units and telling them to move somewhere else is totally unrealistic. Historically these orders and plans were written by politicians, communicated to a military commander, and then dictated verbally by the commander on the field. Simply clicking units completely bypasses this and is totally unrealistic. The point I'm trying to illustrate here is that within a video game, nothing is infact realistic. In an RTS game, models are designed to illustrate everything. You must ask yourself what you want to play, a simulator, a strategy game, The Sims, or a city building game. Upon deciding the experience you want to convey and what will be fun about it, in game design you then need to construct models that can create a gameplay experience that maximizes choice to the player - this translates to fun for the person playing the game. A video game can best be summarized as "a serries of fun and interesting choices". If you want to know why traditionally RTS games have gathered resources in such ways its because of the fundamental model of resource management choice the games incorporate. For example you have a maximum amount of units you can have, in addition to a certain amount of resource income that is based on how much of this population you designate to gather that resource. The strategy aspect involved here is how many gatherers should you have gathering what resource allowing you to construct an army that requires many different varieties of resources. The focus being you need to create this army as fast as possible and balance it as much as possible before your oponent does or you will be destroyed by him due to his superior management of resources. Thus at heart, many RTS games are at a core, a game of management through strategic decisions. Although not impossible to incorporate taxes as a source of monetary income (it infact can be a good idea if applied properly), this challenges this fundamental gameplay structure as a focus is placed now on an entirely different system of gathering a resource. Through fine balancing and alot of work it can be made possible. The way I see taxes as something that can work is if a game has an economic model where resources are not physically gathered but rather a steady income is acquired. For every unit you have in your population you get lets say 2 gold every couple of seconds. However there are dramatic and major problems associated with this, as game designers we have to think what kind of scenarios this situation will create -how can one player be better than another if they all have a maximum population cap and thus get gold at exactly the same rate. Also realism (which we love to represent) becomes a problem too - instead of fighting by destroying people shouldn't you instead capture them, and thus capture their tax income as well? That would be the model to defeat a player, by capturing. Ultimately, this idea starts to lean very heavily into a simulation type of game, (think Sim City or Black and White) and the more you try to integrate it the more you draw away from the experience we would like to emphasize in our game, which is battles done historically and acurately where a combination of good economic and civilian management coupled with military strategy of formations of balanced forces will yeild a superior player that can win the game. You would be very mistaken if you think that game designers don't consider any and every idea pertaining to the realism and immersion in their title. The art of being a game designer is not in just having ideas (anyone and everyone has ideas) but its about creating models and forseeing scenarios that will be fun for the player, and then testing and fine-tuning these ideas into a game that becomes fun. Your idea on taxes has been suggested atleast 3 times before on these forums, as well as discussed a full 6 years ago by our own development team. gamers and game designers are in different worlds gamers tend to all think that all you need to know how to make a game is how to play it, and they typically think they have the best ideas when usually in all cases they offer some of the worst and least thought-out ideas out there. Its not the ideas that are hard to find, but rather the sollutions to make them work and make them fun - and this is what game designers do. There is a reason why game designers are usually the people who have been in the industry or on the project the longest - because they understand how an idea will affect every other aspect of a game experience. In the case of your idea, it adds a slight element of realism (which is no more realistic than having units gather a resource by mining it, infact your idea would turn into untis just standing around as being the way a resource is recieved)...you get slight realism and you get 50 other problems that ruin the flow and balance of the game, hence we do not have a tax system in our title. So I hope you've gained some insight from this indepth response, we normally wouldn't go so indepth but...well, these ideas on tax simulations and "why don't you guys have lightning when it rains have it randomly hit units now and then as an easter egg because it would be realistic"...that whole line of feedback and suggestions can be rather humorous to us at how poorly thought out they are and how those are like the only ideas people have and for some reason think are cool. You will see something like this once, it might be slightly entertaining, and then in reality it will never be interesting again and infact be totally anoying and potentially stupid. There are games out there who have incorporated random "realistic" ideas like this...and most of them have been very bad and not fun. Do you want to click things and watch "realistic" stuff happen or do you want to immerse yourself in thought and challenging ideas?

There will be plenty of opportunity in the future for things of that nature, it really all depends on if we have the resources for the feedback, and for if there are easier ways of getting that feedback (which there are). But if we were at the stage of handing out demos, we actually would be too far along in the game for any suggestions or feedback that is given to be of any use at all

Yup, we've thought of that say, 5 years ago Very commonly suggested idea. But it all depends on whats fun to play in the end, what sounds good on paper doesn't always translate well in gameplay. Less so than individual units, there will be different formations you can choose in the game that we hope can give advantages or disadvantages like that, we really want the focus to be on military decisions and not unit micro management, which is what would happen for this kind of idea.

At the same time, the parent knows better than the child where it will be allowed to run. The parents know their game much better than the children

Looks good, I have only one nitpick this time - if you can thin the trunk on the last 2 sets of tree (in the back), shrink it maybe 50%, it should look pretty frail rather than bulky. I know you modelled the tree accurately and this is how it would look in the real world, but we've found that if you make a tree look how it really does, it somehow ends up looking awkward in-game, from a birds eye view. So hence we have to do little exagerations with its shape and the trunk, like making it smaller. You can keep the base of them slightly thick, as you've done with the other trees to imply roots integrating into the ground. Otherwise I say you're done good job. The flowered trees will especially look unique in the game.

Yeah, you're doing good, you're basically following our technique exactly - I made the directions vague to allow you creative freedom to try whatever you'd like, but this is good. You can keep the trunk texture separate and just use the one provided (unless you'd like to tweak it abit to be more characteristic of apple trees), and you can fit a smidget of 8x8 somewhere on the branch texture for the apples. Here is your tiling problem: Indeed the game does not tile the textures so everything that exceeds the bounds of the texture just uses the last pixel information it has, which in this case is total transparency - so its a clever trick that allows me to use triangles instead of planes, and lets me half the amount of polygons being used. If you want to get rid of that (Jason taught me this) go to the materials section and there is a checkbox that says "tile", uncheck them. See the attatched image.

What about some technical showcases? Lighting system, water, etc.. Prop system... Or what about the main menu

Saw these just now, I have to say, congrats Steven, you know you're doing well if the art looks better than what we had before. These are as good as we could've dreamed for, and you can see style wise they fit exactly into the game, that was the most important detail. Great work! (You can see the advantage to doing work like this instead of just misc assignments...we really are happy when we see good work! )

Lasagna Cat was very bizzare

Its also common practice that betas are in fact free, unless you bribe or something like that, but then that isn't common practice

Italian Spider man, this is a must see 1964 film

Some words on realworld scale vs the illusion of realworld scale we've cooked up. The details that make this illusion work is that the finer elements on a building, such as the lumber, wooden posts, windows, doors, window panes, props, etc - all these small objects should be in a scale that when placed next to a human unit, should be scaled so that it would look like a unit in the game can pick those things up. So for example a 2x4 of wood should look like a 2x4 interms of a unit's scale. The rest of the building ,like walls and roof and the things that take up the most space - those things are anywhere from 50-75% realworld scale. What people's eyes hover on though are the fine detail, and this is what makes the building "look right" given the scale its in. You have it right basically. I would scale the building up a tiny bit - the elements that stick out from the building like those wooden posts can touch the border or even excede the 2x2 tile limit a tiny bit, its the walls that we want to have some slack on. Scale the building up a tiny bit so it fits its tile a little bit more - we are keen in not letting any of that space get to waste. Unless you intended a small fence to go around, go ahead and scale it up abit and its spot on - You can extend that awning too if you wish, it might look better and leave more room for props. Perhaps make it look like its a part of the roof and extend it down further and add 2 bits of wood going horizontally at the ends towards the building to give the impression of support. Just some ideas Great so far though, there is very little to nit-pick about Those concepts you drew are spot on as well. One last detail that'll be necissary, on the building you have for refference - see those prisms extending along the lining of the roof? We'll texture in those tiles that give it that distinct roman villa look. Like: That sort of thing. We initially did the roman structures without that and though the texture was correct it just did not look right. See also: http://www.stallman.org/photos/peru/tipon/...-hacienda-1.jpg If you can scale those up so that they are the thickness and height of your reference building, thats about it for the vital tweaks we'll want. Also, thicken that space where the roof meets the wall abit so that it matches the reference building - you may even model like a hollow rectangle around it so it looks like the roof is supported on beams of wood that run along the perimeter of the roof. When we texture it that'll either be like a concrete curb or a lining of wood to create a contrast line between the roofing tile and the walls. That is a nitpick though and is not a vital detail, its acceptable as it is already Not too hard eh?

Comming this spring. More -> (warning, language )

Updated with Age and Occupation field since I'm tired of asking that durring interviews

Its not super critical whether its exactly taking up the entire tile, this can be disagreed on but what I do to my structures is I leave a tiny bit of slack between the boundary and the building's walls, enough room for a unit to take half a step in if it were next to it. This is to discourage clipping that might occur if a unit is too close to the building. I never ran into this in-game, rather I just do it as a precaution incase we have some animations or props on units that'll clip through the building's walls if the unit is pathfinding right around the building where an aspect of its animation could intersect with the structure . Also when we decorate the building with props - just imagine if there where barrels or crates put along the side of the building outside of its boundary - a little bit of spacing will discourage the more obvious situations of clipping that could occur - but the structure should still be within arm's reach of a unit. Here, this may help as reference and visual, I don't know if you have this dummy human model as a scale referance either. Like notice that just because a building is 3x3 tiles doesn't mean it needs to be a rigid square hugging that tile exactly - the tiles are just collision constrains for the engine, they take up a certain amount of tiles that units won't be able to move through. Also you want to make the building look like it fits into the game world naturally, strewing a bunch of props around helps tie it into the terrain and make it not look like its an exact square footprint, or that everything stops right after that boundary. Make the building look natural firstly, then constrain it to the tile boundary keeping in mind how things might clip and how much slack is needed for embelishment objects around the building. Short version: Good so far! Scale it down 2-3% to create some slack for props and to discourage units clipping through it if they are too close.

The closed beta and internal QA will elect as many people as we have the resources and time to manage, and will slowly add more as we find need or resources for them. We'll try and have this grow and grow until a good grip of people are playing the game, and then eventually will make it a public beta - 0ad 0.9 or the public beta will actually be the first release of the game, which we plan to polish up and fish out all the bugs in the comming months until it reaches version 1.0. The beta for us is going to be a very long phase, and a mostly internal one until the game becomes stable enough for the public. There is no bigger turn-off than buggy or unstable software. This is a very rough plan right now and is likely to change when we are actually there. Testing and fixing bugs for this will likely be a cumbersome phase since they will be plentiful and we don't have the massive resources like a physical studio with a publisher behind it to really do this efficiently in large scale.

Yeah I was thinking of doing something like this a few months ago, we've held off for now since we don't know just how accurate its going to be. Design and tasks are in flux constantly, but eventually we'll have some way of denoting progress. We used to have some of our revision (build) history on the site but that got taken down after a server move and some complications... Its not a bad idea to get it back once some of our resources free up.