13 replies to this topic

[chaosislife]

I'm trying to dig around in here looking for data on how the new walls are made for the purposes of making a new one.....sort of. What I'd like to have is basically a wall made entirely out of houses so I could quickly lay out a line of them and set a team of builders to them without having to worry about half of my builders getting themselves stuck either inside or in-between the houses. Right now I'd probably be fine with a set of tents I could pop up in a hurry so I can build up a force. Problem is that it's obviously not as simple as replacing the (in this case) palisade walls & towers lines with the lines for the houses. That just got me a consistent wall of errors when I tried it. Anyone have any ideas on what needs to be done or where there's some useful info on this?

[vts]

The current implementation of the wall system works with a system of towers and three wall segments of various size ("small" for 2x the width of a tower, "medium" for 4x, and "long" for 6x). It allows the player to place walls across any arbitrary distance by allowing the wall segments to partially protrude into towers, and the amount they protrude can vary between set limits. As such, the towers act a sort of buffer space for the contiguity in the distance across which the player drags the wall.

This will probably illustrate more clearly: http://www.voetsjoeb...lacement_2.html (click and release and then drag to create a wall).

There are some mathematical conditions about the lengths of the towers and the wall segments and the amount of protrusion into towers that need to be satisfied for this to work, but I'm still working on writing them down formally.

Regardless though, I don't quite see how a wall made of houses would fit with this system. Your intent is to quickly place multiple buildings, presumably without regard for whether the 'wall' blocks unit movement across its entire distance (because I don't see what you'd use for 'filler space' if a user wants to drag a 'housewall' across a distance of 5 + 1/3 houses). This is an entirely different purpose than what the wall system was designed for, so you'll probably have to write your own implementation anyway.

[Geek377]

Pretty neat canvas dude

[WhiteTreePaladin]

It would be nice if you could snap buildings together. That is a feature from AoE3 that was nice.

[Geek377]

Better yet, that cool grid system I mentioned way back somewhere in the suggestions thread. Just for the neat freaks and urban planners But 0 A.D. is more of a war game.

[chaosislife]

Well honestly I'd expect it to not allow you to place less than a whole house, sort of like how the present system won't let you place a foundation in a tree. Once the line runs into an obstruction it shouldn't allow you to place any more houses. And they should obstruct unit movement, the houses themselves would act as a wall to keep the enemy from walking straight into town, they'll have to go around the houses or attack them.....and if they attack them that gives the defender a nice opportunity to take them out. It's like how we've got it right now, we don't have working gates so we can't properly block off enemy movement without walling ourselves in, so instead we just hinder their movement and direct them toward the bottlenecks where our towers can take them out.

I suppose what could be done with the present wall system would be that we basically trade towers for tents and remove the medium and long walls. Then it would just go tent=>short wall=>tent and every line would begin and end with a tent. Tho honestly I was really just looking for tent>tent>tent. Snapping buildings together like WTP was talking about would be great for this too, but I'm trying to work with what I've got......not with something that will probably never happen.

Edited by chaosislife, 21 May 2012 - 05:45 AM.

[Sonarpulse]

Geek377, on 21 May 2012 - 03:15 AM, said:

Better yet, that cool grid system I mentioned way back somewhere in the suggestions thread. Just for the neat freaks and urban planners But 0 A.D. is more of a war game.

DO WANT

[historic_bruno]

WhiteTreePaladin, on 21 May 2012 - 03:13 AM, said:

It would be nice if you could snap buildings together. That is a feature from AoE3 that was nice.

It's on the planned features list, I suppose we will have it

[Zeta1127]

historic_bruno, on 22 May 2012 - 02:58 AM, said:

It's on the planned features list, I suppose we will have it

Ah, just like Firefly Studios's Stronghold series as well, they were doing buildings snapping together (particularly certain structures like bakeries, breweries, and weapons production buildings to walls) back in 2001.

[fabio]

vts, on 20 May 2012 - 02:22 PM, said:

The current implementation of the wall system works with a system of towers and three wall segments of various size ("small" for 2x the width of a tower, "medium" for 4x, and "long" for 6x). It allows the player to place walls across any arbitrary distance by allowing the wall segments to partially protrude into towers, and the amount they protrude can vary between set limits. As such, the towers act a sort of buffer space for the contiguity in the distance across which the player drags the wall.

This will probably illustrate more clearly: http://www.voetsjoeb...lacement_2.html (click and release and then drag to create a wall).

There are some mathematical conditions about the lengths of the towers and the wall segments and the amount of protrusion into towers that need to be satisfied for this to work, but I'm still working on writing them down formally.

Regardless though, I don't quite see how a wall made of houses would fit with this system. Your intent is to quickly place multiple buildings, presumably without regard for whether the 'wall' blocks unit movement across its entire distance (because I don't see what you'd use for 'filler space' if a user wants to drag a 'housewall' across a distance of 5 + 1/3 houses). This is an entirely different purpose than what the wall system was designed for, so you'll probably have to write your own implementation anyway.

Nice. What about using two M segment rather than a L and a S one when the wall is not long enough? This way towers are better distributed. Or was it intentional?

[quantumstate]

fabio, on 22 May 2012 - 10:53 AM, said:

Nice. What about using two M segment rather than a L and a S one when the wall is not long enough? This way towers are better distributed. Or was it intentional?

When gates are implemented it will only be possible to place them on long wall segments. So that is why it is preferable to use a long segment where possible.

[chaosislife]

On the gates, when setting up a connection between two tower points, could it be set up to favor S>T>M/L>T>S as opposed to what I usually get which is something like M/L>T>M/L? This would make it easier to set up nicely placed gates where we actually want them. Presently I'm just trying to create my mandatory openings right in the center of paths instead of to either side of the path.

@Lion Actually we have gates now, they're just not very gatey. More like a gate shaped wall.

Edited by chaosislife, 26 May 2012 - 07:00 AM.

[historic_bruno]

chaosislife, on 26 May 2012 - 06:42 AM, said:

On the gates, when setting up a connection between two tower points, could it be set up to favor S>T>M/L>T>S as opposed to what I usually get which is something like M/L>T>M/L? This would make it easier to set up nicely placed gates where we actually want them. Presently I'm just trying to create my mandatory openings right in the center of paths instead of to either side of the path.

@Lion Actually we have gates now, they're just not very gatey. More like a gate shaped wall.

I'm sure he meant working gates that open, close, and lock My understanding is that there will be a button in the UI to upgrade a long section of wall to a gate, but because the wall placement is automatic, I don't see how you can guarantee for an arbitrary wall that every possible path will have a nicely-aligned gate. It may be worth discussing some tweaks to the wall placement once we get gates and see how they work together in practice.

[vts]

chaosislife, on 26 May 2012 - 06:42 AM, said:

On the gates, when setting up a connection between two tower points, could it be set up to favor S>T>M/L>T>S as opposed to what I usually get which is something like M/L>T>M/L? This would make it easier to set up nicely placed gates where we actually want them. Presently I'm just trying to create my mandatory openings right in the center of paths instead of to either side of the path.

@Lion Actually we have gates now, they're just not very gatey. More like a gate shaped wall.

This is a difficult requirement since there's no telling beforehand where the user might want to place, or indeed whether they want to place one at all. Perhaps what we could do is, instead of upgrading L segments, make gate placement working by dragging a 'ghost' ghate along a wall, and realign the segments/towers upon placement to fit the gate in there. No idea how feasible this is btw, just brainstorming.