I've been working on 0 A.D. (a historical open source RTS) for a while, and recently discovered a serious problem with the game: It doesn't have any robots.

So I wrote a converter for .3do files that produces the format our engine expects (Collada plus some custom XML) and tried some units from BA:


(click for bigger view)

(Is there any way to extract animations as a series of keyframes? I've not looked in much detail but all I see is COB scripting stuff which I don't really want to touch. It'd be pretty neat if we could just get some basic walking and attacking and dying etc animations - currently I'm stuck with static meshes.)

Unfortunately I'm not sure what the point of this is. It'd be intriguing to reuse some Spring mod content for experimental 0 A.D. mods, but our engine isn't quite mature enough for that to be sensible yet. Maybe conversion in the other direction would be interesting or useful for some people (all our art is CC-BY-SA and we're happy for it to be reused). Anyway I think it's fun to play with this stuff, and it's nice to look outside of a single project occasionally, so that's good enough for me.

That's a fine looking elephant. Good stock. I wouldn't mind taking it off your hands.

The boat too.

Go Com Go! Go dgun that building!

I'm not sure on keyframes. I believe some 0 A.D. content, particularly static features, has made it into this community. You might want to wait for more responses.

It depresses me so much when models for Spring look that much better in other engines.

yeah.. these would make excellent Gaia units for some earth like maps.
i do not know much about that stuff, but does upspring have any animation support? if so, that could be used to generate key-frame

"We come in PEACE"

brilliant

Edit : now actually reading the post, I have been following 0AD for quite a while, and some of the engine features (especially some of the environmental rendering) look amazing.

Considering the style of game you are aiming to, I would expect 0AD to have a Total-War style unit management (i.e. platoons, correct formations, flanking, etc), which would be a great help to current unit organisation in spring (i.e. none).

some trees are used for some maps (posted in the art+model subforum)

Spring doesn't have animation data, it's all in the scripts. That's why our animations look so ugly.

Don't use models from BA. 99% of them are original IP owned by atari. For whatever reason atari has looked the other way with mods like BA and the other alphabet soup we have here using the original total annihilation content, but don't soil the waters for ad0.

There is a model database with free models (many of them textured) here, so there is already tons to choose from and I promise you that all of them look better than the 13 yr old OTA 3do content.

Little Forb if you dont eat the soup, you wont get any dessert, no evolution. So open your mouth, one spoon for mum, one for daddy, one for auntie muriel, one for granny, one for grandfather, one for your brother. Thats a good boi, there you go, eat it, eat it. Theres everything a good game needs to grow up, precious of ip in the lawyerlaver, loads of rare resent from the OTA-Comunitys, a very special water and even some vitamin P, although that is not good for the eyes.

Just eat it, nom, nom, nom. Now wasnt so bad, m i right?

Some kind of formation support has been part of our design since the beginning. Currently it's not implemented at all and the unit movement code is very primitive, so that's something I'd like to work on over the next few months. I'll have to spend some time looking at how other games work, and I'd like to end up with some documentation of our approach in case it's helpful for people who want similar things.

Yeah, I'm not planning to put these into the game for real - we want to be careful to stick with CC-BY-SA for all official content. I like testing with these ones since they bring back fond memories, but free models will be much more useful in practice.

I like how CA sunk to the bottom.

More density. Full of substance. :)

Scribes write into the flamewar chronicles of spring, that not every nonsense i post, has hidden meaning and detail to it.

i played a quick session vs com and i really enjoyed it, its a promissing open source game

I always wanted a game in which you can mow down 10.000 romans with mg fire.

Hey, a lot of the models in 0 AD are in pmd format. I have scoured the web and I can't find a way to convert those into something usable. Is there some way to do so, or is there somewhere that the original files are stored before conversion?

There's a script here that can convert some of the .pmd files into editable Collada format. Generally we don't have usable copies of old models that were exported as .pmd, though it's possible in some cases we might have .max files hiding somewhere or other. (Newer models are stored as Collada (.dae) files in SVN, which in theory should be editable.)