wraitii

As the guy who sorta planned to do this but completely failed to push through, I must say great work. This is a really positive accomplishment for the future.

I’m writing after reading a post in /r/truegaming about RTS : http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/3961xs/what_happened_to_rts_games/ This will mostly be an “idea rambling” that I post here so that I can have a written trace somewhere but I do have some key points to make. I don't really expect a discussion though I'd gladly take part in one. The reddit thread discusses the reasons why we haven’t seen any new “true RTS” in the vein of e.g. AoE2 in the last circa 10 years. Except for the last, all the big reasons have been stuff we have already stumbled upon when discussing the future of 0 A.D.: It is very difficult to get an RTS rightAn average RTS is not “OK”, it’s actually “bad”, which means you must get it rightThe RTS community was actually divided between those that enjoyed the micromanagement, strategy and pressure (aka starcraft players), and those that relished more the overall macromanagement and/or basebuilding (those play Total War, city builders, Anno)MOBAs took the remaining RTS playersThe obvious problem here is that it is simply very difficult to make a good RTS that will strike the right chords for both the starcraft and the TW players. This requires having competitive MP and fun SP. Something that AoE2 had, and that for example AoE 3 failed (arguably SP simply wasn’t fun enough. Campaigns were subpar for the standards and the AI was bad). My main addition to these points would be that indeed the TW/citybuilder crowd would mostly play SP/casual MP, whereas the starcraft crowd took over actual MP and made it competitive. So basically unless you had a few friends to play in LAN, playing MP means bowing to the starcraft crowd in a classic RTS. I do believe 0 A.D. is on the good path to strike those two chords fine. We have a solid MP game, which can get fairly competitive (adjustments pending). SP is still very subpar, but the AI had gotten considerably better to the point that it might be time to start thinking outside the box a bit. Campaigns with triggers are now a possibility, and I have no doubt we’ll get interesting ones. Now, the problem is that none of this is really new. This isn’t a huge issue because we don’t really have concurrence, but still. The big thing that people want/wanted 0 A.D. to have is realistic ship movements and realistic formations combat. My personal opinion is that neither is achievable/really desirable given the current format. So the question stands: how can you keep the classic RTS formula yet still bring new stuff? Well, I do believe we have all the ingredients, except for one: map size. Imagine for a minute absolutely no gameplay changes to 0 A.D., but all maps are at least 20 times as big as a huge map right now; Suddenly unit travel time is no longer irrelevant. Suddenly attrition can be simulated in a way that makes sense. Suddenly strategic economic position becomes a real thing. Suddenly the base building aspect can become as important as the fighting. Suddenly trading makes sense, suddenly raiding becomes closer to the real thing. Ambushes matter. Territory control matters. And all units suddenly get more realistic. Now this would probably require some changes. The number of different resources might need to be bumped up a bit (perhaps with “raw/manufactured” variants of each material?). The “global stockpile” principle might need some adjustments, but I don’t think you’d need to go full Anno (perhaps with dropsites having “range” and some possibility for trading to move resources internally). Resources would be less accessible on the map, more scattered, so terrain control and scouting would become more important. Strategic positioning of your buildings would probably become much more important (note that this fits well with a system where buildings would be costlier, and possibly need individual upgrades) . One could probably introduce a “maintenance” cost but it’s not certain that this is a necessity. This means much slower games, more on the scale of EU3 or RTW. You’d start with a very simple base, discover your surroundings, and develop slowly into a full scale civ with multiple bases/towns, while still trying to crush your opponent. Rushing would basically be ruled out, but you probably still would be able to strike at vastly different times depending on your focus. An hour attack or a 8th hour attack would become the new strategy. Clickfest is almost automatically out. Yet it doesn't get boring because things would always be happening as you could vastly increase the number of actions before you have a complete city. As for combat, this would make formations finally relevant because the scales would be right, and for the rest you could keep current simplifications. I think this could be a very, very enticing game if done right. The fun of building a base and the fun of classic RTS warfare. It would shift the focus from “basically all military” to “50/50” and that would imo be a very good thing. As a final word of conclusion, I am not suggesting this is the direction 0 A.D. should take, if only because it would be quite a dramatic departure and I am about 100% sure that we could never make it work (it’d be forever too slow with the current engine). I'm saying if someone ever wants to restart an RTS from scratch, this is the way to go.

I think we could get the bloom Post-proc effect to look better, depending on how you actually want it. Those gold-chrome pillars look excellent!

Hm, that's possible, I'll look into it.

Looking great! Still can't believe how good the water looks and I made it...

Wowgetoffyourcellphone: that's what I'm saying, yes. I definitely agree with you on the AoM-like screen, though it would be good to have all civs in one screen and no scrolling, so maybe have smaller shields. But that's implementation details.

Second option.

This is not true if you specify it separately in the JSon, you can just sort by group name directly.

I'd do the opposite, like Brythonic (Celts) Gauls (Celts) Ptolemaic (Egyptians) Spartans (Greek) Athenians (Greek) In the end we could have a selection screen kind of like AoM.

This isn't too complicated, and I would even suggest a last "billboard" level of detail, but it does require some technical changes. Since instancing isn't showing too much promise, I might try LOD first and see if instancing helps after. This is kind of technical, but OpenGL supports far more than "tiling", such as "mirror", "mirror on X axis", "repeat", "clamp", and is probably a better option. I don't get what you mean by "blend" and "order". See above. OK now I get what you mean... I think this should be handled in the material and the shader itself. You'd supply a "snowTex" and pass some sort of define "USE_SNOW" and it would load a custom shader. Perhaps for this we ought to multiply the number of shader files rather than just add techniques. It's up for discussion. I'm not sure what you mean here... There are actually three issues on reflections: what to reflect (skybox, environment map, real?), where to reflect and how (fresnel based or not). This could be added on top of the current shader code or in a separate file but that would need some reorganization (which I'd like to do anyway). Done tomorrow if you want. Per-model or per actor basis? Also not sure why you'd want that. Not urgent in my opinion and probably annoying to code. I don't think we'd need that for a translucent shader. Maybe. I had never thought of that but it should actually be codable without too many tricks.

Thanks Enrique. Updated it with bigger eye zones so you can make them out at normal zoom (doesn't matter beyond that). Redid the animation, I think it actually looks pretty good now but I've got some looping issues now and then. Posting the current .Blend for comments. Hyena.zip

Kicking Bird, for someone who claims to have known the game for awhile, you seem awfully misinformed. 0 A.D. simulates the time period circa 1 A.D. to 500 A.D. The concept of "phases" simulates the increasing resources a booming city will have. This is, to take a completely unrelated example, similar to how Cities: Skyline handles cities: you start with limited stuff and a small map and as you grow you have more "resources" (in a very general sense) and you have access to more features and a bigger map. We want our art to be as close to history as possible, not the gameplay itself, or we'd have to start coding in some latrines. I think re-evaluating what you are doing here would indeed be a good idea.

I utterly disagree with you that 3D stairs are a waste of memory. It's been proven time and time again that 2D stairs using normal maps look terrible. About the persian set not being instantly recognizable: you're taking huge shortcuts here, particularly as the silhouettes tend to be on desert ground and thus not that noticeable. The forum is instantly recognizable because of its center alley. The market is because it's got the most tents. The temple is tall and has all the columns. The only ones where there actually are issues are the fortress/special building/that other blocky one which I don't know of. Houses are voluntarily indistinguishable between themselves. I think your house model looks pretty good but looks too modern. This is not Tangiers. And unless we have some historical proofs for wooden roofs, we won't do it.

Well everything is feasible, the question is "how" and "can it be fast enough?". I'm not an expert in reflections and I don't think we can use what we do for water here, so I'd have to look into it. Could be driven by anything really. I was thinking alpha of the specular map or the normal map. Looking pretty good! It could be slightly improved though, I'll be working on that a bit. Do you use A18 or the SVN version? For your latest post: it is certainly possible to code a new component that does that, I'm not too sure about existing ones.

The obvious thing with bushes is that they're generally the exact same color as everything around them. Except in some rare cases: One solution would be to make them much darker. Another would be to have much redder, bigger berries (or berry packs) as currently this red color isn't very visible which really doesn't help (I mean bushes will generally have to remain green). Lighter bushes would make the green stand out more, or quite darker ones. We need to care about R/G daltonism though so playing on contrast would be important too here. My personal opinion is that it's actually a mesh problem as currently they're just round blobs and the edges really blend a lot.

That seems like a good idea.

We are using fixed-point numbers for anything that requires synchronisation, which fixes the issue.

Based off this: Hyenas are weird. I don't claim it's perfect, but it didn't look too bad to me. I'll check again tomorrow to see if I still like it.

What I got fiddling around: It's kind of a hack right now but if you like the effect I can make it work better and put it in-game after A18 is released. Current system can tint the skybox so it looks perhaps more realistic (could probably be made to only color rays that look towards the ground). I also use an optional fresnel so you can make it fully chrome or only reflective at sharper angles. Edit: yup. Can probably look right on maps where terrain won't change color much.

I changed the texture to be much brighter, more contrasted and use bigger spots so they are visible from farther away (also tweaked the model UV). I think it looks much better that way. I think I'll have to make the eyes bigger too. I've got some animations which I think are acceptable now, will work on them some more.

Except for the part where this is not a work environment but a public forum and work ethics have no place here. And that was an offensive comment. That was an offensive comment because it assumed that as a programmer I don't know @#$% about art, design, and things like that, and you didn't even have the guts to say it straight. You were even assuming I was only a programmer, which I'm really not. Now what you said there ^ is honest, literal, and likely true in general. I have no quarrel with that. Let's be straightforward. Also if you think no-one has noticed that our terrains were burned out or too bright, that our textures were sometimes ugly and hard to read, you're delusional. We just never got around to fix it. I personally think someone ought to redo all ground textures and make them coherent between biomes, but it's a huge task. That's what we aim for. And I'm not saying AOEO has a bad art direction or is incoherent or anything. It's great in that aspect. It's just that they chose the worst possible direction, in my opinion, and taking context into account everything is ugly about it. It's an extreme example of something very very bad done very very well. And well, the market agreed. And about those older terrains: dunno what happened, but if they're no longer here, it's probably because we lost the right to use them. I agree that the parallax grass doesn't really look good though. It was a proof of concept, but it's quite meh.

Yeah, I agree that the texture is too blurry right now, I'll work on it.

Undying Nephalim: I'll give it a shot this afternoon, I know the shader code fairly well and you ought to be able to do something cool.

That's not a game, it's a 3D render. Anno 1404 has a vibe that is quite similar to that, though it it obviously way less good looking.

I actually find that terribly hard on the eyes (not to mention ugly) ^