Ancient TW: GRAPHICS discussion

[dimitrios the samian]

They look very nice resolution & clarity wise , considering they are on the 640 Plate & supposedly lower in quality .
Nice work Mac & Yan !!
All the best for the New Year lads

[macsen rufus]

A little bit further along - correct palette this time, and with weapons added to the sagis:





Next job is to sort out the legionaries and some auxilliaries

[macsen rufus]

Got the basics done on the legionaries, just have a few twiddles left to finish off. I'm quite pleased with how the 1-2 attack animation with the shield then sword-thrust has worked out


And in the process of all this, I've made a couple of weird discoveries related to placing units in the startpos file. Seems the game can be a bit picky about unit names. First off I tried to give the Populares a couple of units of First Cohort legionaries (Legionary2 in the unit_prod) with a valour bonus....

ie MakeUnit ... Legionary2 160 1 (ie 160 men with 1 kill) >> killed the startpos - not available at main menu

so I removed the valour boost:

MakeUnit ... Legionary2 160 >> startpos loaded, but the unit came out as 2 men with valour 8!

Aha! I thought - even though there's no space in the name, the engine interprets the "2" as a quantity of the basic Legionary unit, so I changed the name of the First Cohort to LegionaryB, instead:

MakeUnit ... LegionaryB 160 >> killed the startpos again!

The game works fine with these units, with the sole exception of putting them in the startpos. Any unit that goes in the startpos cannot have a name that begins with the whole name of another unit. I think I have the fix, but have yet to try it - basically I need to rename the basic legionary unit to LegionaryA, so that LegionaryB no longer contains the whole name of Legionary. I imagine when the startpos file is parsed, it stops as soon as it sees the first valid full name, then anything that comes after is assumed to be the number of men.

EDIT: yep, works fine with LegionaryA, the Populares now get their two experienced units of First Cohort legionaries.

Anyway, enough of that - here's a few screenies of the new legionaries in action:

[macsen rufus]

More units are now working:

Auxilia classica - with suitably nautical shields:




Briton and Gallic auxiliaries:





Next will be revised Samnite and Batavian auxiliaries, once I have the spear animation sorted.

[Leith]

What can I say? I am in awe of your superior modding skills, Mac. By the way the shields look great. Thank you for all the hard work. Cannot wait to check out the Samnites with their spears and hopefully new shields.

P.S Thank you very much, YanBG for your great textures

[macsen rufus]

Thank you, Leith

No need to wait for the Samnites, they're here:



They share the shield with the British auxiliaries, as they don't both appear in the same scenario.

And for the refreshed Batavians, here they are trashing some Celtic swordsmen:




Indeed, YanBG's 3D modelling skills are a real boon for the ancient battlefield

[English_Bob]

These all look awesome, I better go back and read it all now :)