wraitii

I think for smoke particles the game mainly needs a "Time.fade" option.

I think the only land units that would really need it would be running cavalry units. It would make cavalry charges much more strategic.

The comparison pic is really good (though of course for a perfect effect, the textures ought to be slightly corrected).

Steep parallax mapping looks great on those windows. I'm assuming the "flags" on the sides aren't affected?

I see you've added the "gatherer swap" function to qBot. Neat improvement, however, a few things you might consider adding when you find time: -distance is a factor, as is the duration of gathering. If you swap, and then right when each unit arrive at their new resource they're tasked to a third resource, you'll have lost the benefit of the swap. To avoid that, you might want to prevent the unit from being reassigned for some time when swapping, which you could roughly estimate as "distance/speed*2" or something. And prevent the swap if the cost would be too high (it would require 10 minutes to be actually profitable or something). BTW, this is my opinion, but I believe it is time to start adding difficulty levels to qBot. It's getting strong for beginners, economically.

I've always thought that it was "right-click = unit-action" and "left-click = selection/GUI interaction". Following that convention, the OP's proposition makes a lot of sense. I also think that it's a more logical convention than "right-click = actions which are done either directly/with the help of a shortcut key" and "left click = left click initiated button actions". Well, perhaps not more logical, but I find it simpler.

Agreed too.

Congratulations on the release, a lot of great work has been done since Alpha 9, for the better.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I think it's both the most realistic and the easiest way to institute a limitation on the number of workers.

A simple system would be to have markets resources slowly rise, and every trader would take from that stockpile. So if you have 10 traders, the first 3 would get resources, and the next 7 would not because the market has not replenished.

Terrain would definitely benefit from normal mapping and parallax mapping. Units, I still wonder because the camera is always fairly far away (though it could be used, of course). I think buildings could use it for the tiles/blocks of stone/whatever to a great effect. AO should be baked beforehand for units and buildings, to me. There's no real point in dynamically computing it in 0 A.D.

Interesting development tool, interesting to have in the game.

It works fairly well as long as the training follows... The hardest part is dealing with sudden needs (such as a fortress build) or with the aftermath of an attack, because you might want your females to chop wood or stuffs. Testing a very basic version in the early game against the latest qBot, it seems about 600/700 resources more efficient... Anyway, don't expect it too soon, I'm going to have a very busy week.

Allright, I originally intended to implement a complicated resource gathering system... Only, it's too complicated to be any kind of practical (because I need to plan for future unit creation, mainly). So, I'm changing my plans to a much simpler system: I'll assign my females to food gathering, and citizen soldiers to the rest. This won't change during the game, unless there is a particular need (fast collecting for a fortress) or a discrepancy (say, after an attack). It should prove efficient, as it's what most players do, with great success.

Yeah, the game is hardly balanced but afaik it was not a concern (or at least, a very minor concern) for the Alphas. Then again, 0 A.D. will have to come out of Alpha someday, and it looks like it could be soon enough (well, relatively). BTW, Mythos, I see you decreased starting resources to 300 each, that's probably something you want to put in the "release info" on the homepage.

Hence why I think, at least for the first age, it should probably be "5 buildings of the village phase or higher", aka "5 buildings".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it even weirder if you can't go to town phase while already having, say, 5 buildings from the town phase? Agree with the starting resources being lower. 1000 is a lot.

Is it really necessary for structures to be village structures then? It seems a bit counterintuitive to me.

Expect it within 2 weeks, perhaps 1. Apart from the many bugfixings, Alpha 10 features, as you said, neater walls, technologies, but also healing and AI improvement. And many many bugfixing.

Perhaps 2 could be implemented as "shift+ungarrison all" or something.

Well, removing "village" is a possibility, since you can only build "village structures" anyway. Perhaps "Requires 5 buildings" would probably be the most explicit/short. "Of any type" makes it looks like they must be the same type or something, it's kind of confusing. I still think 5 is a lot, BTW... I know 0 A.D. ain't much for rushers anyway, but perhaps it could be set to 3 or 4. Or perhaps as a civilization bonus.

The best thing is that Quantumstate implemented correctly something I was too bored to implement: counting how many gatherers work an any supply. I think i'll steal that code in return . I'll have to test the new qBot, it's probably going to be a great benchmark for my new economic implementation in Marilyn.

This looks very good already on buildings, I'm extremely unsure the game needs anything more for buildings, given the maximal zooming of the camera. However, Parallax mapping on the terrain could give a very cool effect for things such as grass, where it would be MUCH better looking, and I think you should focus your efforts on that.

Allright, following Pueron's advice, I'm revising the economic manager, and making interesting progress. The new idea is that I keep a list of resources that I want to collect from for each resource type (ultimately, perhaps subtype too), and then I'll assign the most efficient workers to each. Still much of a WIP, but I think it can be very efficient. And as it seems like Quantumstate added a way to count the number of entities working on a resource at any given time, I'll probably get some inspiration to do that from him.

Parallax mapping only really needs to be implemented for buildings and terrain, however, which considerably simplifies its adoption. This all looks particuarlry promising anyway, keep up the good work