wraitii

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:

Interesting development. Do you have any statistics on OSX version usage? I believe it's mostly a few reluctant users on 10.6 and the rest basically on 10.8/10.9

It's almost there, but if feels a little too mechanical. I get this weird feeling that all legs move one after the other and not together. Can't pinpoint why though.

We should definitely ask Zaggy fot the .blend files though, I don't believe they're on SVN. Great work on the animations though Enrique, feels pretty natural!

Some more reports: I run it fine in Xcode usually by rebuilding the workspaces after running the "build osx bundle" script. However in both cases I get a ""GL/glx.h" file not found" error in HWDetect.cpp.

AI overhead mostly comes from inefficient data storage as JS sucks at that. Filtering, pruning, iterating: all fairly advanced stuffs that could be done well with (a lot of, perhaps) work in C++ basically can't be done in JS beyond some basic points.

Gave it a shot. Can't run ./build-osx-libs.sh directly because the 10.7 SDK is removed in the latest Xcode. Changed to 10.8 and ran the script fine until the game compilation, which failed. Started XCode, had to re-switch all the schemes to Release (this is annoying, if it could be changed it'd be great). Tried to compile. Seemed to go fine but I've got an error on every project, "Command /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/libtool failed with exit code 1", which is somewhat odd.

Looks quite good, Enrique. I'm assuming this is one of the more recent armatures where you have the IK?