wraitii

Ever since I improved the water graphics I've wanted to play with a polynesian nation on 0 A.D., just going around the map, fighting gaia, things like that. So these last 2 days I've made a very quick Polynesia minimod. You can't really "play" it, it's mostly to fool around with the civ. I recommend you only play it on the Naval scenario "Polynesia", which is unfinished too because it's a little boring to just plot trees. The finished part looks nice though. No real enemy. Maybe I'll get around to adding actual gameplay to it (mainly, an AI that does things). It might be fun if I can get my core idea to work (check the text file). Features: -You can build polynesians villages in places where you could build docks, if it's in neutral territory. They act like CCs and are the only polynesian building -Canoes can fish if you garrison females in. They can attack if you garrison warriors in. -Warriors will switch between ranged/melee attacks based on distance. -Sharks won't attack you, but they are everywhere on the unfinished Polynesia map. You can kill them, if you can catch them. -Most islands are full of animals, both nice and not. Sanderd, you'll want to look at the components folder. I've attached the base art files (blender/photoshop) if people want them too. In particular I've remade the sharks, they might be better than the existing ones. The good thing is that I've gotten a lot better at understanding animation integration from Blender to the game. Screenies: polynesia.zip polynesia_art.7z

Interesting ideas generally. I fear the iberian ambush would make the AI weaker, but well we'd have to live with that. One general thing we could do to differentiate the civs more is change how they gather resources. Mauryans have the elephant, which is fairly nice. Perhaps we could make some civs more herding/corraling oriented and others more farming oriented (which would make those options actually different, too). I feel like fish could play a greater role too, but naval combat isn't perfect anyhow. This could be a way to differentiate britons/gauls from the others (or just the gauls), for example. It wouldn't be 100% realistic, but interesting enough. The roman army fort could perhaps give a very small territory radius, so very aggressive players might try to plot others things along when they've succeeded? I like the ptolemies differentiation. Perhaps they could be built in village phase (but cost more)? Dunno, might be too much of a gamebreaker. As per Carthage, making naval shipyard more interesting means making ships less useless, imo.

RC:

It looked weird on both ends... I might try only on one end though, that could work.

I think that's done, I just have deactivated shadows as a default setting on that computer (for some reason). Anyway if it's alright I'll commit whenever the bundles for A15 are finished.

Yeah, you both are right, it looks better. Made the baskets bigger, moved them a bit, made 3 small variations.

Now with 100% more better. (props are custom-made, though separate if we wanted to reuse them (they do use the boat's texture file though), used the nubian archer for the kicks).

Latest ship iteration (changed the textures ever so slightly, made the boats a little longer). Still no animations as I can't really animate the dude without IK. Model is currently still mauryan but that can be changed easily.

LordGood: to be honest, you work way too fast for anyone to catch you between "concept" and "finished model" It's certainly not a bad thing that we have buildings instead of "nothing". It's just that some models could be improved for A16. At least coming from me, certainly do not take it as a criticism.

Pureon: might you say which (or is it a tongue in cheek joke about MP?) Generally speaking I really like the warmth and the uniqueness of the design. However, it is by no means "grandiose", instead it looks very much alive, which is pretty good. More precisely speaking, I really like Lordgood's Corral here. Sure herethe beams aren't straight, but I don't think it looks cartoony. It just looks like not too much thought was put into it. However on the docks the beam are all over the place, and they look like they wouldn't stand the test of time (and my axe!). That's wrong. That looks cartoony. Some buildings I like less are the barracks (weird crenelation, weird support walls on the sides, weird slanted back; I like the design in Mythos' reference page 11 better), and the CC design isn't excellent for me (looks too much like the wonder). The granary is wunderbar, though.

Some buildings might feel a little over-decorated (mainly military ones such as the barracks or the fortress), but otherwise I think they look really good (and, not to mention, unique).

We should probably make it "reasonable" for units but absurdly high for buildings to discourage its use unless as a "so you're hiding your units" late game tactic.

Back in AoM days, I had actually modded the norse to never surrender, it felt better… But I digress. Anyhow, between players, it's my understanding that a not-stubborn player would surrender when defeated, so this is not an issue. A stubborn player will just have to be taught a lesson. I don't know if we have such a tech, but a "spy" tech like in AoE could serve that purpose.

AoM had a simple check like "if I've got under 10 units after 20 minutes, surrender" or something like that, which worked well enough.

French 60's song, "Mirza", from Nino Ferrer (one of the greater artists known for all the wrong songs).

This is actually because the AI doesn't ever surrender, when it probably should at some point. I'll try to see if something sensible can be added for Alpha 16.

COuldn't you use the new "elevation adjusting" props to make it look better? You might not need the "platforms" for each stand.

Mh, right, hadn't thought about the multiplayer issue. So that's settled. Depends on how slow copying is, this might work: we have a "Real state of the world" in JS which stores actual entity state (updated by JS or C++ listening to events), in the simulation Runtime, copied fully to the AI runtime each time a new turn happens. With a bit of luck, it's quicker to copy everything than reprocess it for big number of state changes. Another solution would be to process fewer "PositionChanged" messages (and similar very frequent/slightly informative), like only once every 4 turns or something like that. Obviously this implies that there is no warping. Beyond that we'll need to make our AI-side updating faster, which is closely tied to Entity Collections, which are slow. The annoying thing being of course that JS is generally slow for all those operations since they involve a ton of arrays.

Yves: wouldn't that almost defeat the purpose of multi-threading though? I like the stability it procures AIs, but it might not be perfect. On the other hand, I see no problem if the AI gives orders to units that have been killed in the meantime to just ignore those orders. The AI could also skip turns, it doesn't really matter. (obviously though scripts are far from taking over 200 ms except in really rare cases so the point is kind of moot, but it's to consider). The main issue with the current implementation is that we're actually having to process messages twice every time. the AIproxy/AiInterface get the messages and update their own state, and then the AI updates its state with those informations. That's done in JS entirely which is very slow and very inefficient.

Posting for future use: random maps might benefit from such a technique to draw cool coastlines: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/

My two (late at night) cents: I see no point in threading individual AI players. It'd be a pain to have the proper gamestate each time, and it wouldn't speed much up.

Fixed in SVN

Enrique: would you by chance have the commands.txt for that?

I'm fairly sure it can cheat, but I'm not sure you can plot buildings using this. However we could just add some cheats for that as a workaround.

I really dig the Warpaint one. An interesting video for a Bowie remix: