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New Screenshots - 8/1/04


Aeros
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Wew, 2 new screenshots can be found on the 0AD Site to celebrate the completion of a 2nd batch of art. A "batch" is what the art department calls a massive collection of new art (in this case, about 100+ new art assets) that are completed and then put into the engine.

The screenshots are showing off some celtic buildings which are absolutely beautiful. I gotta hand it to Wijitmaker, he did a spankin fine job on them. They look just as good as renderings, amazing job.

The first shot shows a celtic village durring the afternoon, the second shows the same village durring sunset.

Check out the screenshots Here

If you've got questions or comments, post em here.

By the way, just slipping a note that you won't have to wait another 2 months for screenshots again :) Screenshots should be showing up faster. Infact we'll probably be showing off the rest of the celtic set later on, and we've already got another civ and it's screenshots comming in very soon.

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That looks very good. I really like the look of the buildings - better than anything in AoM or Empires. I also like the lighting effects, especially the lengthening shadows at sunset, although the sunset lighting itself does look a little bit cloudy.

It looks almost like a different game from those first few screenshots with greeks. The graphics are much more polished.

Why don't you mix in some dirt terrain under the buildings, though? You should show off your eyecandy skills :).

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Well, "stone henge" isn't quite stonehenge, the formation of rocks is abit different and obviously it's much smaller. No, it's a Celtic temple. I'm not sure what the backing or reference behind it is, so I'll let Wijitmaker answer that since he designed it.

About the sunset - we haven't had time to find the "perfect" colors yet, especially since this is really the only time I've been messing with lighting (which we've had for many months now, just haven't shown it).

Why don't you mix in some dirt terrain under the buildings, though? You should show off your eyecandy skills

I did at one point but changed it back to that "grass patchy dirt" terrain :). To tell you the truth, I'm not too happy with our alpha blending system. Though I'm disguising it fairly well with the choice of terrain I'm using.

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It looks almost like a different game from those first few screenshots with greeks. The graphics are much more polished.

Well, we're finally showing you more of the game now :) You can't judge a game just by seeing 3 greek buildings. I agree, the celts are looking great. We're going to revisit the Hellenes and change some of their art abit.

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Looks great :D

Regarding "Stonehenge":

Megalithic constructions weren't built by the Celts, they're a few thousand years older, built by meso- and neolithic people (mid and new stone age). It is possible the Celts used them for ceremonies, like they did with old oaks and such, but they certainly didn't build them. That's another Asterix legend :)

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Guys, what do you think of the trees? (in the most recent shot), I know you haven't seen them much, but I've had a few people tell me they're too pixely.

The ones in the previous 2 screenshots were, yeah, but I took care of that while making the trees look better at the same time (by that I mean, completely redesigned them).

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Hmm, about 'stonehenge' - it wasn't intended to be the actual stonehenge. Just a random megalith. Perhaps I shouldn't make it circular shaped?

Like Klaas said, the celts (from what we know by ancient historians) worshiped in oak groves. But, that is something you can't easily do for a game, because one can't distinguish one tree to another. So I thought I might go with a more 'stereotyped' approach. Maybe, that wasn't the right thing to do...

I'm open to suggestions if anyone has an idea for a different celt temple.

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To answer your question about the trees, Bobby, they do look a little pixelated, although so does the rest of the image, to an extent, so I figured that was probably the result of JPEG artefacts. :)

A little antialiasing in a future milestone should hopefully improve on that, but the tree meshes are definitely much improved over their predecessors.

And indeed, suggestions for a historically appropriate version of the Celtic temple would be much appreciated.

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You should be using PNG instead :).

Don't tell that someone who has got a 56k connection - he'll get some strange feeling that he want's to hurt you :P A PNG has at least 1 MB in that resolution, that makes about two or three minutes 56k downloading ... not that cheap... I'm as well sitting safely on my broadband connection and when I design websites, I always have to remind me that probably not everyone has a connection like me and I need to watch my filesizes... :D

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I believe Tacitus wrote that Germanics had wooden temples. I don't know how this compares to Celts, but probably they had them too. It should be quite possible, since some Celts lived in cities (cfr. Alesia), so it would be strange to have Oak groves in them for worshipping of gods.

I haven't read through it yet, but maybe some info could be found here:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/rac/

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Me has 56k, and the JPEGs are loading about 1 min. And I hate screenshots of, say, IDEs that are JPEGs, because you can tell that the frame is so distorted, and it looks horrible... I wouldn't mind a couple minutes download time, because that's what I usually get :D.

Also, with a few... tricks, I got a compressed PNG of the afternoon screenshot down to 563 KB. There is no perceptable (sp?) quality loss, except when zoomed in some 500%. And zooming in makes everything look really cool too :). On the surface, when zoomed out at 100%, everything looks almost identical, and without the JPEG artifacts, it might be more identical.

With PNG interlacing (far superior to JPEG's and GIF's, I might add), there will be no perceptable (sp again?) difference in the loading times.

Of course, it's all just my opinion, as I am a supporter of PNG, ...

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