Romans sneaking through gap between wall and cliff

[McAllisterw]

A possible area for improvement. If you build a wall as close as you can get to abutting the base of a cliff, there is a still enough of a gap for infantry units to get though. I found this out to my cost after constructing a wall and deciding that if the Romans attacked this would buy me enough time that I could afford to send all my soldiers to gather resources. However when they attacked, they found the gap and started streaming through like ants. I was caught completely off-guard.

One suggestion would be that you simply have to continue your walls parallel to the base of cliffs, but this seems a but disingenuous. Alternatively the game could recognise that a wall has been built close to unpassable terrain and mark the gap between the two as unpassable. Visually it would be better if the wall also automatically abutted the cliff, but I appreciate this might be complicated as the engine then has to recognise the gradient of the terrain, work out whether simply continuing the length of the wall will work and how long to continue it for, or whether a tower is required to complete the wall (if the terrain is of a lower elevation than the wall); then of course walls didn't just disappear into cliffs, there would need to be some kind of texture along the abuttment to make it look realistic. I don't know how this was really done in ancient times.

While I'm on the subject of walls and gradients, it would be awesome if gradient walls existed so that walls crossing hilly terrain appeared to follow the contours (although I appreciate that getting them to follow contours exactly might be a stretch, it could be done with variations of the wall object at differing gradients and then to connect any two towers, the most appropriate gradient is selected).

[sanderd17]

I agree, getting them to "snatch" to the unpassable terrain would be great. But it's not that far.

Some tips for building closing walls:

Enable pathfinder overlay:

• Go to settings, and enable "developer overlay"
  
• There enable "pathfinder overlay"
  
• all impassable ground will be coloured red, so if there's still a gap left, you'll see it before someone comes through
  

As the rotation of the wall tower changes the passable squares, you should start building your wall from a free point (not connected to a mountain) en end it at the mountain. That way, your last tower will be oriented correctly, and you can aim better to leave no gap.

[Burzum]

Walls can't stop the Romans dude...

[wraitii]

I think this is a known issue with the wall placement things, which is (as you noticed) not too easy to fix. It is something that's on the To-do list of things to fix, though.

I'm not sure I understand your idea of gradient walls. Do you mean an automatic tool to create walls at a given height around a hill?

[McAllisterw]

With the gradient walls my thinking was walls which follow the gradient of the terrain rather than have a stepped appearance when you build a wall over a hill.

It might be a stretch to redesign walls to somehow match the terrain exactly, but could perhaps be doable if there were a number of models of walls at set gradients and the engine picked the closest match for the terrain between any two towers, based on the difference in height between the two towers.

Might not be a quick thing to implement, just an idea.

[Mythos_Ruler]

With the gradient walls my thinking was walls which follow the gradient of the terrain rather than have a stepped appearance when you build a wall over a hill.

It might be a stretch to redesign walls to somehow match the terrain exactly, but could perhaps be doable if there were a number of models of walls at set gradients and the engine picked the closest match for the terrain between any two towers, based on the difference in height between the two towers.

Might not be a quick thing to implement, just an idea.

Sounds like what they did with Age of Mythology. Just had multiple versions of each wall segment, each at different angles. Personally, I'd want something even more dynamic--something that would follow the contour of the terrain exactly, like so:

Would need to implement a way to dynamically skew the collada meshes along the vertical axis. This could be useful for implementing realistic farm fields as well.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Beautiful and useful , legendary if we implement 0AD can have more realistic wall, in whole rts world( for now)

[sanderd17]

In this documentation: http://zaynar.co.uk/0ad-pub/entity-docs.html#component.Position

The author says something about an Anchor of a building, which can be upright, pitch or pitch-roll (only roll should probably also be needed as an option).

Unless it means something completely else from what I thought, this option doesn't work. I know it's not original 0AD documentation, but the documentation has to come from somewhere. Maybe it's a forgotten feature with a bug in it?

It wouldn't be perfect yet (it follows the average slope over the segment, not the exact slope), but if this option could work, it would already be a lot better.

If I do a grep for that option, I see the following templates have it set (non of the separate unit or structure files have it):

$ grep 'Anchor' *.xml																																		   
template_entity_full.xml:    <Anchor>upright</Anchor>
template_entity_quasi.xml:    <Anchor>upright</Anchor>
template_gaia_geo_mineral_slabs.xml:    <Anchor>pitch-roll</Anchor>
template_gaia_geo_rock_slabs.xml:    <Anchor>pitch-roll</Anchor>
template_rubble.xml:    <Anchor>upright</Anchor>
template_unit_cavalry.xml:    <Anchor>pitch</Anchor>
template_unit_champion_siege.xml:    <Anchor>pitch-roll</Anchor>
template_unit_mechanical_siege.xml:    <Anchor>pitch-roll</Anchor>

But as you probably also know, non of these actually follows the terrain.

[wraitii]

I think it's a planned feature that never got implemented, but still should be someday.

[idanwin]

Whoa!!!

This is something that would definitely set 0AD apart from other RTS games.

[historic_bruno]

In this documentation: http://zaynar.co.uk/0ad-pub/entity-docs.html#component.Position

The author says something about an Anchor of a building, which can be upright, pitch or pitch-roll (only roll should probably also be needed as an option).

Unless it means something completely else from what I thought, this option doesn't work. I know it's not original 0AD documentation, but the documentation has to come from somewhere. Maybe it's a forgotten feature with a bug in it?

That wouldn't address the problem in this ticket or Mythos' suggestion, it would only be a minor visual enhancement. Wraitii is correct that it has never been implemented since the simulation rewrite.

Building placement is buggy all around, walls are maybe the worse case, because they need to reach otherwise impassable terrain to seal it off (not only cliffs but shorelines). And there's a ticket for it, so we only need someone to work on that http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1610

[serveurix]

Sounds like what they did with Age of Mythology. Just had multiple versions of each wall segment, each at different angles. Personally, I'd want something even more dynamic--something that would follow the contour of the terrain exactly, like so:

[...]

Would need to implement a way to dynamically skew the collada meshes along the vertical axis. This could be useful for implementing realistic farm fields as well.

This would be really cool, but the terrain should be flattened if you turn a wall into a door. And maybe we should imagine a case where the terrain is too uneven to be flattened (and remove the "turn into door" button for the concerned wall parts).