36 replies to this topic

[phoebus]

I didn't like AOE 3, and still play AOE 2 occassionally. I forget about it -- and get amazed when I pick it up, by the fact that's there's still a community playing it out there (voobly instead of zone atm). I'd give it a try, but can't see how it'd work yet.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I'm installing the BETA now. I'll let you guys know how it is.

Apparently it is Build #5164. (4/13/2011)

Quote

The new build is here! We’ve completely overhauled the Greek campaign with new tutorials and brand new exciting missions in the early game. We’ve made big gains with cleaning up the UI plus better balanced items and stores. Also, we have greatly improved server stability for PvP!
In fact, there’s so much…we can’t fit it all here!

For more info, check out
http://forums.ageofe...ShowThread.aspx

[Ykkrosh]

Mythos_Ruler, on 15 April 2011 - 06:47 AM, said:

I'll let you guys know how it is.

As long as it's within the bounds of the NDA

[Pureon]

Can anyone get the beta now, or is it still selected?

[Mythos_Ruler]

I signed up for the Beta two months ago and just yesterday received my confirmation E-mail.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Okay, so the Home City is where you play from and you use it to store items and create new items. It's also used to send you on quests, which are new scenarios you can win and receive new items (like new technologies and things like that). You can choose to refuse quests and do other things though. And the game is open-ended, with no specific "single player campaign." This isn't bad, IMHO, because the campaigns in AOE have always been pretty craptastic. As you go along you Level up your home city and get new buildings and things, which in turn allow you to upgrade your units and things like that. You also collect items and resources on your various quests that you can use to build new things in your Home City or upgrade your troops. It's all very cool and RPG-ish, without losing the great AOE RTS feel.

As you expand your Home City you can change things and place buildings wherever you want, unlike the Home Cities in AOE3. Basically the HC concept has been completely revamped and made 10x better. You no longer have "cards" and "decks" but items you collect and acclaim you achieve through questing (agreeing to play assigned scenarios, essentially). I only achieved Level 2 so far, but I'll let you know how it goes.

One of the things I like is that the game essentially cuts to the chase and refers to you as a god. This is how most RTS games are played -- the player is a god-like being making every single decision for every entity in the game. A lot of RTS games pretend that you are a general or something, but RTS mechanics aren't like that at all. AOEO finally acknowledges that fact and acts accordingly, referring to the player as Zeus or whatnot. Pretty neat.

The Hotkeys are nothing like 0 A.D. I'm afraid, but it does have a hotkey editor. I quickly changed the camera movements to a 0 A.D.-like setup, so now it's all better.

A few other details:

There is an integrated marketplace in the game. Since the core gameplay is free, you can go to this market to purchase gameplay enhancements. I am not sure what will be available in the marketplace, but I assume additional factions, units, cosmetic improvements, things of that nature. As someone who would like to get into the game dev business, such a thing is pretty awesome (especially how seamlessly they've integrated this). But as a gamer I'm dubious about it. Why should someone who can pay more money than me get a leg-up over me? But it remains to be seen whether this will actually negatively affect gameplay in such a way.


Other thoughts so far:

- The game will also have an Online Manual accessible from the in-game Menu. This is something we plan to do with 0 A.D.

- Graphics are nice to look at. I look forward to seeing more advanced units and heroes and such. I am not so sure about the design of the buildings and things. Not very historical in that respect at all.

- The music is pretty good. It sounds a lot different than other AOE installments and oddly more "authentic."

- There is an ever-present chat room in the bottom left corner. It keeps the game feeling "social" and helps if you want to ask a question, but hopefully it doesn't fill up with XBOX Live-style chat with people swearing at each other all the time and using racial slurs. Time will tell.

- The UI art is good, but I don't like how everything is so spread out. The UI is disconcerting in this way.


http://www.ageofempiresonline.com/faq/

[k776]

I got my invite yesterday too, just managed to give it a go. It's not bad. I've only played for about 20 minutes, but so far, it's enjoyable.

I noticed some nice similarities between it and 0 A.D., namely the building construction fog when units are building something, and the player colored unit silhouettes when units are being objects.

Some points to take away from it:

* Construction planks, and buildings rising from the ground give a nice 'being contructed' feel and progress to building construction.
* GUI elements don't need to be set within a larger, solid bg element. Small buttons placed around edges aren't too unbearable.
* The GUI is a lot smaller than 0 A.D.s, which I think we could learn from, maybe same design, just smaller by about 30% ?
* 0 A.D. is lacking a decent settings editor, along with things like 'bloom, 'anti-aliasing', 'shader quality' and 'shadow quality'. I know we want the best, but it'd be nice to decrease them to increase speed.
* When a unit drops resources at a dropsite, an amount they deposited is displayed above their head, "+10". This could be quite handy.
* Animals can be captured and brought back to the town center. Perhaps we could have unclaimed sheep/goats in the game, and first to come near them gets ownership?
* Smoke is displayed when an enemy building is being destroyed. Could we use particles for this, in the same way we use it for construction?
* AOEO units stop attacking attackless objects (like houses) in favour of units. This would be helpful in 0 A.D.

The game has a nice, slow progressive feel to it, and it's persistence (operation after logging off) is nice. So can't compare gameplay between it and 0 A.D, but feature wise, some things we could use learn from :-)

[plumo]

About construction: many options possible.
In the settlers series, it sort of rises from the ground up in two layers.

Best example IMHO is knights and merchants , a game some people may never have played, since it is quite old and forgotten. The buildings are being put together in a more realistic way. First the framework etc. I hope 0 AD. will have realistic building process, with 3 or 4 realistic snapshots of how construction took place in that time. Not just a generic pile of building material on the side.

Edited by plumo, 16 April 2011 - 11:40 AM.

[Shield Bearer]

Cool! Thats essentially how I would want it to work If only we could do something like that for 0 AD

[Mythos_Ruler]

My comments in bold.

k776, on 16 April 2011 - 10:13 AM, said:

I got my invite yesterday too, just managed to give it a go. It's not bad. I've only played for about 20 minutes, but so far, it's enjoyable.

I noticed some nice similarities between it and 0 A.D., namely the building construction fog when units are building something, and the player colored unit silhouettes when units are being objects.

Some points to take away from it:

* Construction planks, and buildings rising from the ground give a nice 'being contructed' feel and progress to building construction. For the sake of simplicity, I think ours should just have the dust clouds, then when construction hits 25% or 50% the building starts rising up. Unless someone wants to make cool scaffolding and stuff like that for every foundation type, we should probably do it the way I outlined.
* GUI elements don't need to be set within a larger, solid bg element. Small buttons placed around edges aren't too unbearable. I really don't like the GUI in this game. Elements are strewn about the edges of the screen.
* The GUI is a lot smaller than 0 A.D.s, which I think we could learn from, maybe same design, just smaller by about 30% ? Our game has a lot more options for the player when it comes to our buildings and units. AOEO has only 2 stances and no user-controlled formations.
* 0 A.D. is lacking a decent settings editor, along with things like 'bloom, 'anti-aliasing', 'shader quality' and 'shadow quality'. I know we want the best, but it'd be nice to decrease them to increase speed.
* When a unit drops resources at a dropsite, an amount they deposited is displayed above their head, "+10". This could be quite handy. Hmm, maybe, but give the player an option to toggle this.
* Animals can be captured and brought back to the town center. Perhaps we could have unclaimed sheep/goats in the game, and first to come near them gets ownership? This has always been planned. It was actually implemented in Sim1, but has yet to see light of day in Sim2.
* Smoke is displayed when an enemy building is being destroyed. Could we use particles for this, in the same way we use it for construction? Yep. In fact it would be the easiest way. But it would take a bit more code to make it work.
* AOEO units stop attacking attackless objects (like houses) in favour of units. This would be helpful in 0 A.D. In fact, our units shouldn't attack buildings at all. Units should default to enemy units and siege should default to buildings.

The game has a nice, slow progressive feel to it, and it's persistence (operation after logging off) is nice. So can't compare gameplay between it and 0 A.D, but feature wise, some things we could use learn from :-)

[Wijitmaker]

Not sure if this works, but here is another opportunity to get into the beta.

http://massively.joy...gle+Feedfetcher

[Silver]

Wijitmaker, on 20 April 2011 - 02:22 PM, said:

Not sure if this works, but here is another opportunity to get into the beta.

http://massively.joy...gle+Feedfetcher

Also a giveaway on Curse apparently: http://www.curse.com/keys/ but I have not tried it because I've been in the beta for a while.

I've been slightly underwhelmed throughout the entire beta but it is a beta and it is an MMO so hopefully they will continue to add and make the game more interesting to me.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Quote

* GUI elements don't need to be set within a larger, solid bg element. Small buttons placed around edges aren't too unbearable. I really don't like the GUI in this game. Elements are strewn about the edges of the screen.
* The GUI is a lot smaller than 0 A.D.s, which I think we could learn from, maybe same design, just smaller by about 30% ? Our game has a lot more options for the player when it comes to our buildings and units. AOEO has only 2 stances and no user-controlled formations.

Maybe their spread out GUI isn't the way to go, but I'm not happy with our current GUI being all clumped up either. (What else is new? )

[Pureon]

Has anyone else noticed AOEO now installs itself to the C drive and not the drive originally chosen for the installation? This is totally unacceptable, it cannot sit on my computer's C drive.

Uninstalling it

[Ykkrosh]

That sounds inconvenient . You might be able to force it into a different location with something like Steam Mover (not restricted to Steam - it just moves files from one location to another, and sets up a link so that it still looks like it's in the old location).

[Pureon]

They released a statement a few weeks ago saying it was for security reasons. There are unofficial workarounds as you say, but those shouldn't be necessary.

[Ykkrosh]

The explanation here actually sounds pretty reasonable to me, and is quite similar to what we do for 0 A.D. . Installing in "C:\Program Files" is bad for various reasons (requires admin access to install and to update (some users don't have admin access at all, and the rest shouldn't trust dodgy insecure downloaded software like games enough to give them admin privileges), and it breaks in multi-user environments if one user is trying to play while another is trying to update), and %LOCALAPPDATA% is the best place that avoids those problems. Seems like the main difference is that we let users choose to install in a different location if they want, whereas AoEO apparently expects you to use standard Windows mechanisms to move the entire Local directory at once.