a22 review part 2: a12-a22 changes

[serveurix]

(part 1 is here,  it was about the a11 bugs)

Now first of all, I must thank you again for this awesome release. I have followed the development closely for years, I have taken a bit of a distance in the a19-a21 period, but now I'm back to it and I must say : a22 is one of the best releases I've seen in terms of changes. It's full of gifts, especially on the art side.

I've looked back at the changes from a12 to a22 and made lists of stuff I liked, disliked or did not understand, let's take a look at it.

Novelties in a12, a13, a14, a15, a16, a17, a18, a19, a20, a21, a22:

Good points (here is where I thank you for all the cool stuff you guys have done since a11) :

a12 and a13:

• the possibility to limit the pop below 300 was much needed, implementing it basically saved the user experience for all the a12-a18 period
• in a13 defining the performance problems as bug n°1 was the best thing you did

a14:

• thank you again for making the walls able to expand into unpassable

a15:

• thank you for the attack sound notifications, that was much needed
• also, congrats for all the new techs and auras in a14 and a15 : they greatly improved the gameplay

a16:

• the possibility to set trading routes waypoints and the trading window where you can choose the resources to exchange are features that make 0 A.D. stand out
• Kudos to Lordgood and Enrique for all their great models, textures and animations. I think we'll never thank them enough.
• Kudos to micket as well, his animals and animations are tremendous. I wish he comes back and continues to animate animals. We need MOAR animals ! \°□°/ Edit: there's even a ticket list for the ones that haven't been added yet https://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?status=!closed&keywords=~Animal&order=priority&report=18
• Also congrats for animating the birds, whoever did that. That ever-needed change suddenly brought life to the maps of 0 A.D., that was magical.

a17:

• thank you for bringing the long awaited copypasta tool into Atlas
• congrats for the rotating mill animated model. Again, this kind of details really brings life to the 0 A.D. cities.
• Also congrats to Omri and his musicians for the "Honor Bound" remake.

a18:

• The new persian textures make the persian cities a lot less dull, this is great. Similar texture enhancement has been done for all the other civs, but the persians were the ones that needed it the most.

a19:

• the new pathfinder is the best thing that happened to 0 A.D. since alpha 11. Thank you so much !
• congrats for the long-awaited latin voices. Implementing all civ voices is a must !

a22:

• I can't congratulate the artists enough for this release. Enrique and Lordgood (Edit: and stan) did an awesome job, the new stupa is breathtaking, the new standing units are superb, so are the new briton defenses, the new persian ram is miles above the old one, and every new music is more intense than the ones of the previous alphas. The new building variations (scaffoldings, destruction) are really encouraging.

Bugs and remarks (here is where I rant about all the rest) :

a14:

• 1: the new farming paradigm is meaningless. If putting two workers on every farm is the best why give us the possibility to put 5 ? Why allow a choice that we will never make ?
• 2: altitude bonus : how does this work with water ? is it consistent with raising water maps ?
  • - does this work with vision range ? it should, so the attack range is never bigger than the vision range
  • - does this work with damage ? I think you should get a damage bonus with the altitude, even for melee units, so the players are encouraged to exploit the terrain. when charge will be implemented, I also think you should get a charging distance bonus if you're running downhill. maybe some units could even have an altitude malus (for example pikes : weren't they more effective when fighting uphill than downhill ?)
  • - does the slope affect speed ? or do units move at the same speed no matter the angle of the slope ? I think units should be slower when climbing up, faster when running down, and that the bonus/malus should depend on the unit (the malus on fast cavalry trained for sprint should be more important than the malus on elephants or siege engine whose workhorses are trained for stamina)
• 3: We need a sound feedback for an action that failed (like training a unit but not having enough resources)

a15:

• 1: I don't understand why the lobby needs registration. Why not use a federated XMPP server ? One should be able to play a lobby-advertised game without having to register.
• 2: We need a script that checks if there are inaccessible resources on the map that can block units, for example a script that would check if a tree is unreachable due to terrain (some maps are still concerned) or partly unreachable (when 50% of the space around the tree is unreachable, 50% of the woodcutters will get stuck)
• 3: Notification minimap : we need an animation like animated circles or squares (some people are working on it already) and attacked units are blinking for waaaaay too long after they stop being attacked (true for both on the map and the hero button).
• 4: I'm skeptical about having a double restriction on the defensive building like fortresses and towers (they have both a restriction of the number of buildings you can build AND on the distance between them). Maybe one restriction is good enough (at a time I was really advocating against the double restriction but now I kinda got used to it, so I'll just drop that there to see what other players would think of it).
• 5: The ship garrison mechanism (embarking) is awful. When you ask a land unit to garrison inside a ship you would expect the game to draw a line between the unit and the ship, find the intersection of that line with the shore, consider it as a boarding point, and move the unit and the ship to that boarding point, and board when they both reach it. If the ship is already on a shore accessible to the land unit, it should not move (unless the players asks it explicitely to do so, for efficiency reasons).

Ships should have an ungarrison command that works like in aoe : you click the ship, you click "ungarrison command", you click on the point of the shore you want to ungarrison, and the ship moves to that point and when he reaches it, he ungarrisons all the units. The big difficulty here is to determine what "reaching it" means. I think aoe just defined a zone around the ungarrison point: if you clicked in the middle of an island, very far from any shore and then unreachable by any ship, the ship would move to the shore, trying to reach that point but would not be able to ungarrison. If you clicked on an unreachable point that was like five tiles away from the shore, however, the ship would move towards it, bump against the shore, not be able to reach that point, but consider it's close enough and ungarrison anyway (and a funny consequence of this is that if there was an other island right behind the ship, the ship could ungarrison some units on that other island, which was unwanted but sometimes practical).

(after a bit of testing) Actually, this is worse than that : currently the units don't even check whether they can actually reach the embarking point. They could both go on either side of a cliff by the sea and remain stuck there.

• 6: And sometimes ships don't react to embark order, when they have been targeting an enemy just before (even if that enemy is dead).
• 7: Maybe we should have a similar mechanism for repairs (ship moving to the shore).
• 8: Garrisoned ships should look different than non-garrisoned ones (garrison flag maybe ?)
• 9: The maurya trading cart zebus still have no animation and no shadow. I know there's some WIP on this.
• 10: Please give the possibility to pause the loading screen when loading is finished : maps load so fast now that we can't read the tips ! (I know there is a ticket for that)

a16:

• 1: the falcon is the only bird. We want MOAR birds ! \°□°/

(of all sizes : big ones, small ones, medium ones, sparrows, doves/pigeons, crows, seagulls...)

• 2: Last time I've checked (few alphas ago), buildings with water planes (persian wonder, ptolemaic market) inherited from the sea water mobile texture and it didn't look realistic (there were waves in what is supposed to be still water). I haven't my gaming machine here so I don't know if it's still present (I'll try to check this evening).
• 3: there are so many art files for which nobody knows where the sources are. Please make sure that every art file has a source available publicly. (Note: I would also advocate for a policy saying that all sources should be in an open format)

a17:

• the units on walls sometimes fail to auto-attack

a19:

• 1: we should have an option to have a confirmation to keep the recordings of the matches, like battle for wesnoth has. At the end of the match the game would ask us if we want to keep the demo file, save it under a different name, or not keep it. Or maybe we could have a system similar to hedgewars, whith a "save the demo" button in the summary screen.

The big problem is that 0ad saves every demos, even the ones of matches you launched just to test something or make a screenshot, and the interface does not make it easy to clean up your demo files. With a confirmation to save the demo at the end of a match it would be a lot simpler.

• 2: Units speaking latin : we need MOAR languages ! \°□°/ There were some people working on the sanskrit, hebrew, basque and gaelic recordings some time ago. What's the status of those projects ?
• 3: Btw, many people are wondering what the units say in the game. I think it would be really cool to add a dialog page in the civ description item of the main menu where people could see the dialog lines, their pronunciation, and what they mean.
• 4: We need a sound for when a building is captured or lost.
• 5: We need an animation for the capture on the building, like a raising flag or blinking models

a20:

• 1: a way to set cinematic path points in atlas by hand (not necessarily graphical, just a form with coordinates should do)

a21:

• 1: concerning the geographical maps, I have an idea about adding a feature that allows to choose the user starting position. It's a bit long so I'll create a new post for it.

• 2: Displaying the team bonuses in the tech tree would be nice. If they are present in the civ description screen already it would be nice to have it in the tech tree as well.

  Actually it would be good to consider that the tech tree screen is "the screen where I can know everything about a civ in terms of gameplay, quickly, and at any moment"

a22:

• 1: Current endmatch charts are not really useful. I do not know how to make them the most useful possible, but here are some ideas on how to make them better :

Currently the charts tab displays two charts next to one another, and by default they both show the economy score by default. One good starting point would be to display the two most relevant charts by default, like economy score and military score.

A second point would be to have units and graduations in the abscissa (time) and the ordinates (points, kills, units...).

Finally, it would be nice either to have them on top of one another instead of side by side, so we can compare them based on the timeline. Or, even better, we would have the possibility to display them as transparent layers and have each of them use a different line style.

There must be a better way to display charts though. Maybe some charts or combination of charts are more relevant than other, maybe some are totally useless. But I'm really not familiar enough with the game to know which one yet.

• 2: Although I fully support the proposal to rewrite a clear and exhaustive game design document, I'm quite satisfied with current balance, except for the "rams are lawnmowers" thing. And I also don't like the fact that it's more profitable to garrison your citizen-soldiers and put your women on attack stance than the opposite when you're being attacked.
• 3: Scaffoldings shouldn't be underpinnings. Current cart wall underpinnings are partly-built walls through which units can ghost and it looks awkward. Underpinnings must be very flat, like the ones we had before. The current carthaginian underpinnings should be used as one additional level of scaffolding instead.
• 4: New carthaginian walls look good, but they are too beefy compared to the towers and fortress models. Towers and fortresses should be redone/scaled up to look more beefy, or walls should be redone/scaled down to look thinner. Anyway, we should have a rule for all civs that says that towers should look at least as strong as wall towers or even stronger, and in any case fortresses and towers shouldn't look frail when put next to a wall.
• 5: The new capitoline temple looks fine, I wish the pediment painting looked better though. It's the most artistic part of the building, so the texture should be more detailed than other textures of the building.
• 6: The new persian ram is fine, however the player color is hard to recognise. There might be some sort of dark filter on the colored texture, it should be removed (or made brighter).
• 7: new animations : the new woodcutting animation looks weird (the left arm seems to deflate suddenly), and one of the spear hit animations looks weird as well (the arm seems to twist 180° in a split second).
• 8: other animations are good, although from the editor it looks like the speed is not always realistic (or some animations are mixed, like "jog" instead of "walk", etc.)
• 9: scythe units should not have the same animations as sword ones. You do not fight with a scythe like you fight with a sword.
• 10: The little piece of cloth at the bottom of the hoplite's shields should be animated like the capes. This is very important for screenshots and videos.
• 11: There are headless silhouettes, but I haven't spotted them all. At least the athenian women are concerned.

Gosh that's messy. If you managed to read it all that far, congratulations. I hope I'll be able to make one small post every release for the next alphas, rather than a big one like this.

Edited September 12, 2017 by serveurix

[Stan`]

You're welcome for the stupa and a few other stuff you mentioned

[niektb]

I miss the big work on the seleucid art in your overview though

[serveurix]

Yes the seleucid are well done graphically too, the buildings are well proportioned, easily distinguishable and transmit the proper feeling.

[Nescio]

18 hours ago, serveurix said:

1: the falcon is the only bird. We want MOAR birds ! \°□°/

(of all sizes : big ones, small ones, medium ones, sparrows, doves/pidgins, crows, seagulls...)

“pidgins” [sic]? I suppose you mean pigeons (columbidae); a pidgin is a language which develops amongst people who share no common language

(PS I fully understand the mistake, though; English orthography is simply horrible ...)

(PPS And I fully agree more birds would be nice.)

(PPPS And more other fauna as well.)

 

EDIT: Apparently (ODE) “pigeon”² could also be an archaic spelling of “pidgin” (but not the other way around). And “one's pigeon” means “a person's particular responsibility or business”. (English ...)

Edited September 12, 2017 by Nescio
another “pigeon”

[serveurix]

4 minutes ago, Nescio said:

“pidgins” [sic]? I suppose you mean pigeons (columbidae); a pidgin is a language which develops amongst people who share no common language

PS (I fully understand the mistake, though; English orthography is simply horrible ...)

I corrected that, thanks.

[elexis]

See also http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Changelogs