Amazon: Total War 8.0 - Call for White Paper

[bibi g]

During the teleconference with Parthian Shot all section leaders of the mod project agree that the 7.0 series is doing amazingly well. With over 2,900 changes have been made with a team of eight developers and six campaign testers.
The problem is, with so many changes and corrections, our release history is getting longer and more difficult to read.

So Parthian Shot decided perhaps we should start a new 8.0 release. The first new feature of the release would be the mobile battling towers.

I am being asked to start the white paper thread for Amazons Total War 8.0 and an Amazons Total War 8.0 thread when the first release is out.

[bibi g]

currently envisioned changes

- Mobile Battling Towers
- Naval Battle in RTW
- Open Source Game Engine
- Infantry supported chariot units
- Allowing none Amazon agents to conduct guerrilla warfare
- high poly male units
- new strat map to reshuffle factions.
- re-evaluate auto-scripting

[wheeliepaul]

Maybe a change in the quest for 8.0. When you conquer a quest city now you destroy the Geoth faction and become all the high end units.
Change could be option 1:
after conquering the first city you become: finnic archer
second city: Geoth elite scout group and geoth foot archers
third city : all the high end units
option 2
after first city : finnic archer, geothe elite scout group and geoth foot archers
seconde city: all the high end units
option 3: same as option 1 without destroying the Geothe faction
option 4: same as option 2 without destroying the Geothe faction

[bibi g]

Maybe a change in the quest for 8.0. When you conquer a quest city now you destroy the Geoth faction and become all the high end units.
Change could be option 1:
after conquering the first city you become: finnic archer
second city: Geoth elite scout group and geoth foot archers
third city : all the high end units
option 2
after first city : finnic archer, geothe elite scout group and geoth foot archers
seconde city: all the high end units
option 3: same as option 1 without destroying the Geothe faction
option 4: same as option 2 without destroying the Geothe faction

That is very good! WP
That was why Parthian Shot wants to have auto-gen script to all players to selection their options.
Unfortunately the script is way too complicated to maintain and easy to break.
I am all for easy operations. so perhaps we can have one mod-file with four versions of scripts, that way, the players can pick and choose which option they would like to play.

[Celestial shuttle buddy]

Naval Battle For RTW Whitepaper

This is a detail proposal based on design by Parthian Shot and myself.

The premise of the idea is: RTW actually allows naval battle while in custom battle mode.
This is easily done by using the battle editor and specified a X/Y battle coordinate in the vicinity of an ocean.
However, the units will sink and drown within seconds.
Now if the units selected have the can-swim flag turned on, they can actually have a battle in the ocean.

Still the challenges listed below remain, and it is the scope of this whitepaper to present solution of the listed issues.

1. All the aforementioned battle exists in the Custom Battle, not during a campaign. While in campaign mode, the AI intercepts the battle location based on the map information and will not allow a battle to be fought over any X/Y coordinate that is on water.
2. One solution is to use a map with artificial water, meaning, the ocean surface is actually above the sea level.
3. In such scenario stated in #2, the fleet and the army units became intertwined. And without proper constraints, you can have a bireme fighting alongside of a cavalry unit.
4. Parthian Shot therefore came up with a unique idea, which will make all the tiles depicting ocean to be raised above the sea level and apply a special battle landscape for these tiles which is equivalent of river fords throughout the entire battle map. Meaning the entire battlefield is covered with water with a water depth of 3ft (~ 1 meter). In such fashion, the "ship" unit can fight without having to be labelled "can_swim" in the combat stat.
5. In addition, Parthian Shot required that special script monitor to be created, so the army unit onboard the ship at the time of a naval battle will disappear prior to battle or loading onto the fleet and re-appear when the fleet reached the shore. All the animation for RTW sea trade and loading plus offloading will have to be disabled or re-animated.
6. special monitor will be in place to disallow land units to march through the artificial sea water.

[er_smith]

Naval Battle For RTW Whitepaper #2

This version of the naval battle rests on the "premise" that Celeste's scenario for the battlefield filled with river ford will not work. And the entire naval battle would be conducted with "can_swim" units.

The same campaign limitation applies, that no land unit should be allowed to cross into the ocean, and the current embark/disembark functionality of the RTW will be disabled.

More to follow.

[er_smith]

That is very good! WP
That was why Parthian Shot wants to have auto-gen script to all players to selection their options.
Unfortunately the script is way too complicated to maintain and easy to break.
I am all for easy operations. so perhaps we can have one mod-file with four versions of scripts, that way, the players can pick and choose which option they would like to play.

BB,

I saw that you have recreated the 8.0 release for ModDB. And we are all in agreement that instead of using auto-gen script, we should use scripts with options like you and Wheelie were saying.

Are you working on it? and when is that going to be cleared out of the test server?

[bibi g]

BB,

I saw that you have recreated the 8.0 release for ModDB. And we are all in agreement that instead of using auto-gen script, we should use scripts with options like you and Wheelie were saying.

Are you working on it? and when is that going to be cleared out of the test server?

Waiting for call from Lizzie to decide the way to alter the options, otherwise everything is ready.

[parthian shot]

Can we add the latest fixes along with test mod file two and submit for download?

Thanks

[parthian shot]

Pea told me that the infantry supported chariot is on hold. The basic concept is published by me on TWC.

But the work for naval features with Cel and Er are taking a great deal of efforts.

We don't have resolution on either research topics in 10 days, we will have to re-schedule work.

[naftykid]

currently envisioned changes

- Mobile Battling Towers
- Naval Battle in RTW
- Open Source Game Engine
- Infantry supported chariot units
- Allowing none Amazon agents to conduct guerrilla warfare
- high poly male units
- new strat map to reshuffle factions.
- re-evaluate auto-scripting

About the Open Source Engine, I don't understand what are you going to do with it?. Of course I know what OSE is, but ATW is a RTW mod, if you use other engine, it will become an independent game, not a mod anymore.

[parthian shot]

About the Open Source Engine, I don't understand what are you going to do with it?. Of course I know what OSE is, but ATW is a RTW mod, if you use other engine, it will become an independent game, not a mod anymore.

It is an open source engine to run ActiveX on Linux. It won't be an independent game because most RTW files are still needed.

[naftykid]

It is an open source engine to run ActiveX on Linux. It won't be an independent game because most RTW files are still needed.

So you intend to make this mod linux compatible?

[parthian shot]

So you intend to make this mod linux compatible?

Yes, because some of members of the dev-team are seeing Windows as a developer unfriendly environment.

We can get the mod to run on Mac with documented procedure, thanks to prior mod migrations from other projects. and so we would like to make this available to Linux, with some help, of course.

We also would like to see if we can introduces plug-ins to replace buggy features in the game engine.

[parthian shot]

Re-post with permission from [FalconWatch]

Hey there parthian shot,

Just want to thank you and the team from the bottom of my heart for the incredible mod
Amazon: Total War you have made. To be honest I had followed the mod ever since its first
announcement as ATW: Reignited, it's amazing to see how the mod improved drastically from
the initial Subrosa visions, to something more immersive and of much higher quality.

You are the most dedicated modder I've ever seen, always keeping us up to date with the mod
and replying to all questions and suggestions people raised at the very first moment available.
It is through your dedication and hard work that the mod achieved it's number 1 spot on Moddb
and remained there, beating legendary mods like Third Age and others, ATW definitely deserves
this, and this is all possible because of you and the team's efforts!

However I'm having some troubles with the mod which I was wondering if you will be able to help
out. Basically would it be possible for you to release an optional download which will include
the unit textures in 256x256 resolution for those with less powerful machines?

The thing is I've been getting some serious lag with the mod lately, the game used to ran fine
for me before the RS2 landscape were implemented in, I was able to play battles with 3 stacks
or more just fine. However after that and as more and more of your amazing high quality units
are added in, the game performance dropped sharply. I'm now only able to play 1v1 battles but
not without some frequent stutterings as well.

So I was wondering if it's alright for you to release an optional lower quality texture units
for those who does not have very powerful machines, so we will be able to fully enjoy the
incredible experience this mod offers, RTW is still about large scale battles afterall.

The thing is the RTW engine is very old, it's still on dx8 and doesn't support multi-core or more
than 512mb of VRam. Therefore it doesn't take advantage of today's system to help improve game
performance. So it's best to save those extra performance whereever possible, I've already disabled
all shadows ingame to ease the CPU load. But having 512x512 texture resolution for those thousands
of units is still a heavy performance drain for me, while 256x256 textures works much better for
the engine.

So it would be great if you can provide an optional download which includes vanilla quality
textures as an extra option, both for those who have trouble running the mod smoothly or people who
prefer larger scales more than better graphics. While the official mod download should still use
the high quality ones as default.

Also, while looking at some of the unit texture files, it seems a few of them are arranged in a
way which is too "spread out", like everything should fit in a 256x256 res file just fine, however
a few parts like the head or sword are extended beyond the 256x256 border, making it a 512x512 res
file instead. This have negative impacts on performance as although the file wouldn't be more higher
quality than the 256x256 one, it is being loaded as a 512x512 texture which takes longer to load
and takes up more VRam. So it would be great if you can include some optimization on those for the
new 8.0 release, which I'm really looking forward to!

Anyway thank you and the team SO MUCH for your work on Amazon: Total War. It is amazing to see how
this fun and unique mod has improved over the years, to becoming the top Gem on moddb. This would
not have been possible without your hard work and dedication, and the great support given by the
team. So thank you all for this, and please keep up the good work!

Best Regards,
Falcon

[parthian shot]

Re-post with permission from [FalconWatch]

Dear FW,
It is very nice of you to send the encouragement letter like this one.
And I am very sorry to hear about the lagging and slow down of the game for you.


To be honest, while 512x512 texture tile causes some overhead, if not for some known problems with 3D models, the game should run fine with even 256VDRAM and 2GB of memory.


The real culprit, and I have to take the full responsibility for it, is the range rendering of the models. Range modeling goes like this,
if you have a unit which is viewed from the side, only those closest to you is rendered at full resolution, those 10-20 yards away should be rendered at slightly lower resolution, and 30-50 yard even less. By the time the model is 70 yards away, it really is just a stick figure with the same skin. And further on, it would use sprite, a small matrix of pixels to represent the model. So the real overhead of the mod is with polygon-count, or poly-count, not the 512x512 tiles. To speed the game development, we opted to skip the development of the low poly-count models and only render the high poly-count version.


This is because we are made of all volunteers, and the low poly-count work is a "thankless" job that no volunteer wants to do. It is also prone to errors, and visual effect problem, which is difficult to debug. Another reason is because we have been thinking of moving to newer game engine like M2TW or Rome II, so creating the range model seem like a waste of time, because to port the range models, the porting job would have to increase 4 fold.
Surprisingly, even with this arrangement, the game behaved amazingly well. The problem most lagging occurs is with the hit calculation mode called BP. If you stay away from the close range camera during battle, everything would be fine. If you move the camera closer, the hit calculation increases exponentially, and that is the main source of the problem. This is the reason we would like to move to new game engine, so even with less than average workstation can take advantage of the new hardware features, some of them already mentioned by you.


BB, our assistant team leader, has been trying to come up with a poly-count reducer software, so it is automatically creating the range model units that so many team mates dreaded of doing. We know for fact that deploying this range model technique (used by CA in their vanilla RTW) will solve your problem. In some other cases, it is know the Greek model in RTW vanilla has bugs (polygon mesh fault), so when you play siege battle in the Greek cities, sometime the battle will freeze due to the defective polygon mesh. This problem probably is inherited from the vanilla RTW, but if we move over the model files from the vanilla, this is against the copyright laws, and also increases the file size, so we would not be able to publish the mod on most download server with the current package.


Thank you so much for your encouragement, I hope I explained the problem on lagging, not confusing you.
For video interface card, I recommend NVdia GeForce 9400 GT or higher performance board. As these video card automatically skips redundant calculation for the range models with 1GB of graphics memory, and I think you can get it on eBay for less than $50 nowadays. You might also consider upgrade your current video drivers, as some drivers are also doing the optimization in software instead of in hardware.

[bibi g]

Hey, I thought I trademarked the word "thankless"!

I also received his follow-ups you forwarded to me, the Cruncher is one hundred twenty nine per license, and there is a multi-license discount but does not cover multiple locations. And I also did some asking and digging around, and was told a few times it is not what is billed to be on certain models. We have at least three other versions and some with source code, so I am not considering this suggestion the top choice right now.

[parthian shot]

Hey, I thought I trademarked the word "thankless"!

I also received his follow-ups you forwarded to me, the Cruncher is one hundred twenty nine per license, and there is a multi-license discount but does not cover multiple locations. And I also did some asking and digging around, and was told a few times it is not what is billed to be on certain models. We have at least three other versions and some with source code, so I am not considering this suggestion the top choice right now.

For your work, you have re-defined the word "thankless" to a new meaning, I was just trying to explain what is going on in an all volunteer team. I can't even ask Pea to do any of this stuff, let alone other teammates.

[Falconwatch]

Sorry I didn't send you the message directly BB, it is directed towards the team as well

And we DO appreciate everything you have done, especially organising the testings and many of the changes occured with the mod.
Wish you the best with implementing the poly-reducing software, as LOD models are really crucial to smooth performance of the game.
It is not a 'thankless' job, me and people who have trouble with performance will really appreciate this.

[bibi g]

Sorry I didn't send you the message directly BB, it is directed towards the team as well

And we DO appreciate everything you have done, especially organising the testings and many of the changes occured with the mod.
Wish you the best with implementing the poly-reducing software, as LOD models are really crucial to smooth performance of the game.
It is not a 'thankless' job, me and people who have trouble with performance will really appreciate this.

Falcon,

Thank you for the compliment!

Usually we prefer to get the communication through the team leader, I was acting admin only because Parthian Shot was away on field trips. I am actually very busy on my real job, so she should be the person you have contact with.

As far as LOD is concerned, this is not currently our high priority work, because we already have a set of performance standards, namely 4GB of RAM and 512MB-1GB of video RAM, so any player playing the mod on a less capable machine would naturally have to expect a performance hit. There are also other factors to consider, like changing the unit sizes and resolutions.

The only change I would make in this area would be for units with multi-layer skins, and there are only few.