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Aeros

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by Aeros

  1. Are there any plans for glow (HDR, Bloom)?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    That's probably just me - it seems like I've seen too many screenshots where the bloom seems unpleasantly overdone and makes everything look blurry

    I agree, its horribly overdone in most games out there right now. If HDR is used correclty to mimick bright lights, you would not notice it unless you knew exactly what to look for. I don't believe there is much room for HDR in 0 A.D. (I'm speaking artistically), it would be more suitable for a game that has dramatic differences in lighting and contrast. Otherwise it would not be very noticable and we will feel bad for 50% of the processing time going to HDR and to compensate we'd want to turn it up alot so its very noticable....this is what ensemble did with AoE3 =P The swords practically look like lightsabers they are so shiny.

  4. System Req

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    We recommend a 64MB graphics card or higher. Whether that system will be capable of playing 0 A.D. or not we won't find out until later. I can tell you right now it might be a stretch to try and run the game on that laptop, we will have to see what kind of optimizations we can make.

  5. System Req

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    The system requirements will be more clear when the game is near completion and we finish adding features to it (that tax performance, it changes all the time).

    But it shouldn't be too different from other games being released at the time. You don't have to worry unless you have a really old computer.

  6. How stupid do they think I am?

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    Haha yes I get these all of the time... I decided to have fun with one of them. you know they'll actually respond back if you reply?

    I decided to mess with these guys a little bit, I told the guy I'd help him transfer his $65 million to my account only if he can help me transfer 4,000 Kilos of cocaine out of these docks in Colombia...

    but he keeps giving me stuff like

    Bobby Ognyanov,

    Thanks for your mail which i received and understood the content.

    I received your mail with thanks and wish to tell you that owing to the confidentiality of this transaction,i would not like you to involve any third party in this trnascation so as not to raise eyebrow.

    This fund is all i have got to boost of after so many years of hard work in the civil services without a tangible Pin.

    All you need do is to understand me and send the requested information so we can move forward and achieve the purpose of our transaction.

    I urgently await for the requested information so we can proceed with this transaction.

    Regards,

    Frank Williams

    So I'm gonna see if I can get him to agree on an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so that it can under law be a private transaction. He doesn't want to do that and seems to want photo copies of my drivers license and personal information like age, date of birth and occupation first.

    Wouldn't it be awesome if someone could scam one of these guys :)

  9. New Screenshot!

    in Announcements / News

    Posted

    Many improvements and changes have taken place with the graphics code in the past couple of months. Our shadow system has been updated so as to render self-shadowing in the game world. The team is proud to show this new graphical feature through a screenshot featuring an advanced Celtic village.

    Also we'd like to use this opportunity to reveal one of the Celtic special buildings. Upon researching all the technologies in the Husbandry line, the Celts gain access to the Genetic Engineering Lab. This economic building boosts the production rates of nearby farmsteads and enables the training of significantly faster and stronger cavalry. These improvements allow you to train cavalry equipped with a wide variety of enhancements such as horns to intimidate the enemy, scale skin to make them invulnerable to pierce attacks, or camel humps to prevent butt-rash.

    [img center]http://0ad.wildfiregames.com/~art/cheezy/screens/celts_genetics_lab_thumb.jpg[/img center]

    Click

    Here to view the screenshot

  12. More Information, please

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    We like to limit the screenshots to showing new stuff or to celebrate completions of new milestones in development...we could release tons of screenshots but we don't want them to get borring...rather we like to be able to go through our screenshots and see how we've progressed in the months that have gone by.

  14. My wishs

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    About your first suggestion to be able to store data from a scenario outside of a scenario - I already thought about this about a year and a half ago and planned it extensively. It works similarly to how quest vars in AoM work, just that these values which you can assign to anything will be called Logs and and you can call on them in any scenario to compare their value.

    Additionally I'm thinking of having some other event that can export all map statistics, like completed objectives, resource pool, population data, etc and assign them values that can be called upon on another scenario. We even had talks about saving an entire map state and being able to transfer it to the next scenario...It was rather complicated and I'm not sure if we'll see it happen, though with enough effort it probably could be done...

    #2...calling strings instead of integers...this is something inherently easy in programming so It shouldn't be too hard to do.

    #3 this is AoM and thats AoM's way of doing things, you don't have to worry :P

    By the way, I'm glad to see you here papaya!

  15. OK seriously, is this game going to happen?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I intend to convince the Halos to authorize a Heaven at HG for 0 A.D.

    This has been tried before and due to HeavenGame's business plan I don't think it will happen since we do not have $10,000 to give them to support a community for us as do the other game developers. Unless we really are a good game and have potential for a good community and HG is feeling generous, I'm skeptical about a 0 A.D. Heaven. If it happens it'll be close to our release time as right now we're ill-prepared for having that kind of a community.

  18. OK seriously, is this game going to happen?

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by CheeZy

    Stephen, I see you must be so anxious about playing 0 A.D. you're ready to play devil's advocate and bash us for being a different kind of organization than leading RTS game developers :D

    What I am hearing here is that there is no sort of intent after 2.5 years with it sounds like at least another year (which translates to 2) to insert this game into the RTS psyche...that it is a hobby, and there is no sense of urgency at all. That is not a very good message at all.

    I don't believe that is the message at all. There are none more excited about playing and releasing 0 A.D. than we the developers. We are the RTS psyche making this game. The history of many of our memebers go back 5 to 7 years to the Age of Kings community when the concept for this game first sprung into place as an idea for a mod. To say that we are openly competing with Age of Empires 3 or Rise and Fall or any new or upcomming RTS is obsurd, thats not why we are here. If I can give my personal opinion, contrary to what you say I believe the RTS genre is actually going down in the dumps more than ever. One of my main drives to join this team was because myself as an RTS gamer was fed up with RTS games that do not offer the experience or gameplay that I am looking for. That is another point - the team is made up of RTS die-hards who want to create their own RTS experience. Furthermore the team is largely made up of students in their early twenties, or students like myself who are still in highschool. This is why we emphasis the hobbyist, amateur, and independant part of WildFire Game's existance, so that people do not make unealistic expectations of this team, despite the quality and effort it is putting out.

    I'd donate cash right now today to this project if it looked like there was a serious intent to get the bits out there and start developing a community

    To make the judgement that we are not doing anything and basically idling our time would be quite an assumption to make. You do not see the daily posts in our staff forums (if you are wondering why all staff have thousands more posts than normal memebers, this would be the reason), you don't see the daily conversations that take place through IMs on MSN between team members, nor the weekly meetings on saturdays, or the 600 page long design documents, our new wiki with technical references integrated from the TDD, not to mention the technology itself that we use to update copies of the game and distribute it to the team so we ensure we are all on the same page at all times. 99% of the details in the work going on in Wildfire Games the public does not hear about.

    Basically I am not hearing anything from this team that is compelling in anyway...no offense, but it even sounds complacent

    We do not publish our 600 page design document detailing all the aspects of 0 A.D. and its gameplay because much of it will be subject to change durring testing, and furthermore we would like to be able to change things without having flame wars of outraged speculation erupt on our forums.

    We were aware this kind of reaction could happen. This is what happens when you create a website and a community for a game you just began developing. Proffesional companies don't even anounce that their games exist until they are ready for beta testing, regardless of the fact that they have been working on it for the past 3 years. It is natural for people who are following the progress to be dissapointed at how long things take, or to be dissapointed at the seemingly lack of initiative from the developers to reach out to the community.

    Thats not our intention, it should be clear that above all else our intent right now is to work on 0 A.D. and get it ready for you guys. That is how we spend our time. A community right now will be no benefit to us. We do not want attention right now, if we have alot of attention we get threads like this one, or we get so much feedback that we no longer can respond to it or debate it freely and openly in our own public forums here with our supporters.

    I think you underestimate the power of the internet dev community and the RTS community in general,

    Please look at our sister project, TLA. The TLA team is independent of the 0 A.D. team and is in the pre-production stage of development for their game which will be using the 0 A.D. engine. If there are serious projects that are committed to completing what they will start we can make acceptions and give them resources before they are fully completed. As a matter of fact, not long ago we were contacted by a proffesional that wanted to use our engine.

    If we are among the 3 out of some 115+ internet indy game dev projects that still exist after 1 year of being anounced (let alone 5 in our case), I think this does say something about the indy community. In the best interests of completing 0 A.D. we would like to complete the engine and make everything ready as we see fit before letting a dozen mod teams try to micromanage our features to their needs.

    I think this project has lost it's original appeal and inertia, severly underestimates how powerfull the marketing story was on what this game was supposed to be,

    I'm sorry, this is yet another misguidance. There never has been a marketting story. We do almost no PR or relations outside of our own community (...for now....keep an eye on gamedev.net B) ) The attention of 2,000 15 year olds telling us what to do is not what we want right now. The only attention we get are from people spreading 0 A.D. by word-of-mouth to their friends, or from the original RTS community that we emerged from. But when the game is released, don't worry, you won't have any problem hearing about it, I'm positive the news will find you rather than the other way around.

    As for "marketting".... The game is free, all you have to do is click a link to get it. Its not like we're trying to get you to give us $50 here. ;)

    I realize some of the community here may be feeling the same way about 0 A.D. hence the thorough and lengthy post with my opinion on the matter.

  21. Awesome Trees

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Photoshop my friend ;) I'll go into more detail on 0 A.D.'s natural art in the near future and you'll get to see how its made and what else we plan to do with our flora... if that'll be included in the upcomming article I mentioned. If not it'll go on our site as a developer article.

    I'm not sure about swaying animations or things like that, if do that I'd like it to be real and mimick real wind, which means they would have to sway directionally and not in random directions the way its done in other games, also I tend to favor still trees since if you have things like plants and trees and grass moving all the time, not only does it use up significantly more processing power than is necissary, but after a while it can make you dizzy or make your eyes hurt from seeing so many highly saturated / contrasted pixels moving, that and aliasing issues apply so it won't look fluid unless you're playing at a very high resolution. We might try it in the future if theres time, but its not something that'll make or break the natural environment in 0 A.D.

  22. Awesome Trees

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by CheeZy

    He's very proud of his work and always looking to improve things.

    I did maybe 4 drafts of trees over a year before we got to the model we use now, each time using less polygons and less texture.

    I'll hold off on details right now because I'm probably going to be talking about this in the near future when you guys will get a major update on WFG and 0 A.D. but to answer your question here, the trees have 5-10 times less polygons than a typical unit and use about 24KB of texture memory per color/shade. We have a clever randomising system that assembles the trees and picks their color. When I say clever, I mean its just that, we make use of the same randomising system that assigns random facial features and weapons/shields to units. If we had the art assets in place this system could be used to randomise anything as many times as you want, one idea was to have randomised props and eyecandy around buildings so it looks different each time, but for now thats not a priority and I don't think we will be doing it unless we (artists) have spare time to do so.

    The tree randomizations...Right now its not too dramatic, but that is due to the art assets, I want to go in for a 5th draft sometime and make the trees look even more random. Right now though, the variation and the branch detail combined with random rotation upon placement (and later on, random scaling) ensure you practically never see the same tree twice, aside from the fact that their assets look too similar right now for my liking ;) .

    So are those 2D trees, or are you billboarding individual leaves, or groups of leaves?

    We design the trees by creating a branch that is 1 face (thats right 1 face a triangle, not 2 faces, a square) and then build the tree by aranging these branches in 3d space the way you would see them in a real tree. Due to the way the branch texture is designed this looks very convincing. The true beauty in the trees is revealed when you are rotating the camera. They look like sprite quality in screenshots but imagine them spinning around in 3d. Because of this branch method the trees look extremely dense and 3d and use only 20-35 face per canopy. (+30-60 for the trunk/base)

    This is what happens when you get some artists to devote some time into their work rather than crunching them and making them turn out all the art for a game in a months time the way proffesional game developers work. B)

    btw...2d trees?! do you think we'd cheap out on you like that? :D

  25. I make music

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted · Edited by CheeZy

    the melody synth seems to have too much treble and not enough sound in the lower frequencies. I know psy trance is different though, and it seems like the bassline is really separated from the melody, where in progressive trance they tend to be more integrated and layered.

    That very well could be so, its very hard to get levels perfect without me dropping $200 on a proffesional sound card and $500 on proffesional monitors, I don't have that kind of cash, and if I did I'd spend it on some gear before replacing what I have now ;) Nothing is ever perfect but before uploading I go through and do the best mixing and mastering I can and periodically I like to go back and rework parts and remix the levels. About the lead - a trademark for psytrance right now (full-on style) is to use a highpass on the lead, I think its alright (lowband and highband) in the beginning but towards the end I have a different EQ on it lowering the lowband so that <1000hz can be heard better in other synths, such as that phaser-pluck/guitar. Again though, hard to get it "right" without pro monitors (speakers). As for the bassline, yeah, very low and full is again the trademark for a psytrance bassline, they are always used more as a ground for the music to drive the beat and emotion. But the bassline was nothing special in this song, same pattern all the way through.

    I believe this is good enough to get signed.

    Thanks man, that means alot to me, someone who's been wanting to make this music since I first heard it 4 years ago (Befoe that I used to be a progressive trance guy like yourself, but have since also found what I likes best :D ) I was talking with another friendly producer who's got some friends already with a label who might be starting their own psy label, and if that works out its very likely I could get a few songs out on a compilation or two...otherwise for getting signed, thats very hard and I don't think it will be happening for me for a while, I would need to be abit older, abit more independant, and have abit more time and cash and gear to start DJing or doing Live Acts or something like that to get noticed, Psytrance is a very party oriented genre and labels don't like to pick up people who aren't in the party scene. Once again thanks for the comments, getting something to happen with my music (and future music) is a long-term idea I like to have fun with, we'll see how it is 3-4 years from now :D

    As for more mixes, hell yeah, keep me informed B) I've got your last one you put up for download and am glad we've got a real DJ here at WFG :P

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