Age of Mythology

[CivOasis]

IMO, Tezcatlipoca looks awesome.
Not that the others don't, but still...

 

[Sneaks]

Updated page at 1040x720

Spoiler :

 

[dinobot386]

Tomorrow, i'll start looking for some other pictures of gods, also for some better pictures of some of the gods I already found

 

[Pouakai]

This looks like it will be a great mod. If you want, at some point I can provide what I hope will be a full pantheon & Myth units for a Maori civilization if you want, which could be interesing if you want an Oceanic Pantheon represented.

Other than that, if you want any wonders included, you know where to find me.

 

[OrsonM]

Though I'm pressed for time currently, I can offer my humble hand if you guys need it, you know, graphically.

 

[Sneaks]

Your expertise is far beyond mine own, if you want to get your hands into this. I can shoot you all my PSDs

 

[dinobot386]

ugh, sumarian gods are almost impossible to get decent pictures of

 

[Spatzimaus]

ugh, sumarian gods are almost impossible to get decent pictures of

I know. If it wasn't for the fact that they fit perfectly into the design, and I haven't found another pantheon that fits nearly as well, I'd consider replacing them.

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On another note, I'm attaching some images to explain how the six groups are placed on the Mandala. The shaded area is the valid area for one of the members of the group; they all rotate, so I only needed to show one.

In almost every case, you have to be WITHIN the designated area; being right on the line isn't enough. The "almost" is that for group 5, you CAN be on the X or Y axes and still be in the triangle. (This was necessary for balance reasons.)

I'm not going to keep the images attached forever, since they suck up a pretty nice chunk of my attachment limit, but it should give a better idea than the equations I listed before.

 

[Sneaks]

How do you feel about the new layout size? Work for your needs? Icons are a bit small but with a mouseover showing the larger version on the right, it feels reasonable.

 

[Pouakai]

I know. If it wasn't for the fact that they fit perfectly into the design, and I haven't found another pantheon that fits nearly as well, I'd consider replacing them.

This looks like it will be a great mod. If you want, at some point I can provide what I hope will be a full pantheon & Myth units for a Maori civilization if you want, which could be interesing if you want an Oceanic Pantheon represented.

I might be able to help, the Maori essentially have an almost Greek-style Pantheon (Less of the more modern gods - No messenger for example)

 

[Spatzimaus]

How do you feel about the new layout size? Work for your needs? Icons are a bit small but with a mouseover showing the larger version on the right, it feels reasonable.

If it can be shaved a bit horizontally to fit into a 1024x768 box with the usual borders, then it'd be fine. I'm still trying to figure out the mechanics of what needs to actually go INTO the window; that upper-right box will need to be less about which gods are available at your current position and more about the status of the Favor generation within your empire. If you've got good icons, then it might just be easiest to have a narrow separator between that upper and lower box, that just shows the icons of the Foci available at your current position; that'd save a little room. As you can see from the six images I attached in my previous post, it's not quite a question of which you're closest to; each one has a distinct area. (I updated the Mandala plots in the first page with slightly better-looking ones.)

The only other question I'm running into is what else I need to be DOING in that window. At the moment, all Favor is "passive"; you generate it, it allocates to the various buildings, the end. The thing I keep going back and forth on is this: should you be able to SPEND Favor? Take Heroes, for instance; I want the Heroic Epic to guarantee one Hero in your empire, and there are a couple Foci (like Justice) that improve that minimum, and many events will have "gain a Hero" as one of the options, but should the player be able to BUY a Hero if he wants to? (The AI for this would be rough, which is why my initial answer was No.)

If there's no need for any active control beyond adding a new minor god once you've gained enough Empire-wide Favor, then that upper area would only be a sort of scoreboard for which cities in your empire are generating Favor (although I COULD just move that to the City window instead, or the Top Panel). One thought was to add a second popup inside this one that shows the exact pantheons of the other players, sort of like how the Victory Progress window has subwindows for the space race progress.

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I've nearly got the start-of-game popup done, and the databases seem to be working correctly for Favor generation and tracking. I haven't quite got the "Add a god" mechanism in place, but that's not hard. Unfortunately, tonight is a SMAC night; I'm trying to solve the gamebreaking bug with water resources. So I'll be doing the Mythology stuff tomorrow, most likely.

 

[Sneaks]

You could even do a Christian pantheon with an interesting spin, using Patron Saints instead of Gods.

Another easy option: The Celtic pantheon.

Also, Orson is an excellent graphic artist, that might be willing to make portraits for the Sumerian gods.

 

[dinobot386]

Would it be ok with you if I found pictures that wern't nessisarially of the god, but are close enough to be a resonable representation? Such as pictures from RPG books

 

[Sneaks]

Personally I would like it if you could spend favor to add extra gods into the Pantheon at the cost of going less deep into the current Gods powers. A wide vs tall decision.

Anyhow, there is definitely room to add some very small borders on the edges.

As for favor levels, I think they go on a separate page.

I envision the religion screens being the one presented, then a second one that displays your current Pantheon selections, and the favor levels and unlocked powers of each god. I was thinking of makign that screen have a unique background based on religious type.

Examples:
Greek religion would have a marble background so the head icons looked like they were carved into the wall of a temple. Egyptian ones would look like hieroglyphs on a sandstone wall. Norse could be painted headshots on a wood wall, etc.

The idea is that when you visit the screen, it looks like you are visiting the religious building. There could be a scroll icon in the corner to bring you to the mandala screen (i.e. opening the scroll).

 

[Spatzimaus]

You could even do a Christian pantheon with an interesting spin, using Patron Saints instead of Gods.

Not going to happen. Besides the fact that I'd way up the chance that someone gets offended, the patron saints aren't even close to being major enough to justify making four Major choices and nine minor ones. And it really goes against the whole polytheism-becoming-monotheism mechanism I depend on, because it was pretty much the other way around.

Another easy option: The Celtic pantheon.

The Celtic gods were basically the Roman gods with a facelift. Or more specifically, they were so quickly subsumed with "equivalent" gods assigned among the Greek/Roman pantheon that there isn't nearly enough distinctiveness in the lore. This sort of thing happened in a lot of other pantheons, especially the Egyptians, but I need something that's DISTINCT from the beginning.


But really, I was mostly joking about dumping the Sumerians. Artwork is the LEAST important part of the mod; if I had to make the Sumerians distinguished by thirteen smiley faces of slightly different colors, I'd do that as long as the balance was good. And I looked into all of these other pantheons (yes, including several Polynesian ones, a few druidic-type things, half a dozen native american groups, and so on) and none of them fit well for one reason or another. A lot were too focused on one specific area, or overlapped too much with one of the existing ones, or didn't have major gods who covered the Foci that I really NEEDED to be covered.

The Sumerians are essential because of this; if I had to dump one Pantheon for not being balanced well enough, or not adding anything unique, it'd be the Norse or Aztec. And that isn't happening either; I need two battle-oriented pantheons, and who else is even close to their level of popularity?

Also, Orson is an excellent graphic artist, that might be willing to make portraits for the Sumerian gods.

If we can find source material to work with, then great. I'm trying to read up on the Gilgamesh epic for event inspiration, but it's not easy finding images.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Would it be ok with you if I found pictures that wern't nessisarially of the god, but are close enough to be a resonable representation? Such as pictures from RPG books

That's fine. I figured at some point I'd have to go to the D&D deities book, but as long as the images are somewhat consistent in style, level of detail, etc. then I'm fine with pretty much anything.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Personally I would like it if you could spend favor to add extra gods into the Pantheon at the cost of going less deep into the current Gods powers. A wide vs tall decision.

Well, that's part of the problem. Favor allocation is automatic, and it'd be good for AI reasons to keep it that way; adding more gods into your pantheon AUTOMATICALLY slows the growth by forcing the Battle and Building favor to be split one extra way, but there's no built-in way to make that tall-vs-wide decision.

But in terms of adding extra gods, I see it like Culture: you accumulate it, and when you hit a threshold, POOF, extra policy/god. No actual "spending" involved, just a decision to be made every once in a while. I was looking at aiming the balance to where you'd get minor god #1 on turn ~50, #2 on turn ~125, #3 on ~200, and #4 on ~300. (Obviously there's plenty of wiggle room there.) So the question is whether I should speed that up a bit, but give the player (and AI) ways to slow it down by buying Myth units or Heroes. Originally, I was going to have all myth units and heroes work this way, but between the religious buildings and the Events, I don't think I need to; as long as you can get Heroes fairly often through Events, it's better for AI reasons to make that be the only way.

By making it automatic, the only thing the AI has to worry about is which god to add or which answer to pick on the Events. And for that, even a simple random choice would work pretty well.

As for favor levels, I think they go on a separate page.

The issue I'm having here is a mechanical one: I need to put TopPanel.lua in the Base mod, because the Ascension mod needs access to it as well for a Neutronium issue. So while I can put Mythology-specific stuff in that panel (and I have) by sticking it inside an IF that only triggers if the Mythology mod is active, I've got only limited access to the Mythology-related game databases (including the Favor total). Which means I'm looking at having information be spread around three or four pages, and that starts to get awkward if I pile on even more windows.

I envision the religion screens being the one presented, then a second one that displays your current Pantheon selections, and the favor levels and unlocked powers of each god.

Slight issue: you don't unlock powers per god. You unlock powers per Focus, and it's handled per city (so when you unlock the level 3 buildings, it doesn't immediately move every city to level 3). The fact that the level 4 building can only be reached in your capital makes it a good benchmark, but it's not quite the same thing. Hence the comments about a detailed Favor status page. Sort of like the Great Person page, something that shows how close each city is to upgrading each Focus. (Actually, VERY similar to that Great Person page.) Clicking on a focus should show you what the level 1, 2, 3, and 4 buildings can do, but I can handle that through a simple tooltip easily enough. Or more specifically, through the four info tooltips for the four buildings. Like how mousing over a building icon in the Tech Tree shows you the building's Help page.

I was thinking of makign that screen have a unique background based on religious type.

I had the same idea, but I was putting most of the artistic flourishes on the back burner until I got more of the mechanics in place.

 

[Sneaks]

Well I'll answer more fully in the morning, but one thing you should know is if all you need is to add to the top panel, this can be done with a contextptr with zero need to touch the actual lua

 

[Spatzimaus]

Well I'll answer more fully in the morning, but one thing you should know is if all you need is to add to the top panel, this can be done with a contextptr with zero need to touch the actual lua

For the Mythology mod I'm adding something new, but the overlap with the Ascension mod is a bug fix in the base Lua code. Specifically, the two parts where it decides which resources to list on the strategic indicators need to be fixed to actually check the resource class instead of only seeing if it has Happiness or not. So I'm not sure how well pointers can resolve that, but I'll look into it.

 

[OrsonM]

I was interested to help out with the god images, one because it I feel all mods should have original images and two because it sounds like an awesome work to do. So I don't know, it seems like you guys choose a lot of images for artist Genzoman, I could try to shoot for similar images (maybe less manga though).


And I like Sneaks art, the mandala piece is good, I could help you a bit if you'd like, I'll send you a PM with my email.