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Announcements => Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) => Topic started by: UltimaRatioRegum on November 26, 2012, 06:31:41 PM

Title: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.3.1 released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on November 26, 2012, 06:31:41 PM
Ultima Ratio Regum is a semi-roguelike heavily inspired by Jorge Borges, Umberto Eco, Shadow of the Colossus, Europa Universalis and Civilization.

****
Updated 3rd August 2013:
VERSION 0.3.0 has just been released, and can be read about and downloaded at: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/ (http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/)
****

VERSION 0.3 DETAILS:

- 16 hand-drawn languages, assigned to ancient civilizations.
- Ziggurats, containing fully three-dimensional dungeons (multiple staircases which retain coordinates between floors). - Procedural generation of riddle puzzles in ziggurats.
- Extensive graphical update for many items, accessible through the ‘l’ook function – stairs, doors, walls, stone blocks.
- Several secret items and hints towards future features and story.
- Over 100 tweaks, bug-fixes, and general improvements.

It seeks to generate realistic histories, though ones containing a few unusual happenings and anomalous experiences. Combat is rare and deadly – whilst these mechanics will be modeled in detail, exploration, trade and diplomacy factors will have just as much effort put into them.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/11/NewPic1.png)
A generated world – coastline, ocean, volcanoes, mountains, hills, biomes, rivers…

Worlds can be generated over a vast array of sizes, climates and types, but all ultimately with no fixed objective but a world full of civilizations and factions to be allied with or battled against. It aims for depth in character development and world events, but with stuff in the ‘middle’ – constructing buildings, city growth, resource management – abstracted out (as many other games exist which cover those). Political and social dynamics will be modeled via a complex system that aims to generate both a history for the world, and the current state of political affairs when your game begins.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2013/08/Zigplo.png)
Exploring a ziggurat; all outdoor areas change colour and shading according to season and time of day.

Fundamentally, URR aims to have several key aspects:

Art Generation: Ultima Ratio Regum will feature significant amounts of complex generative graphics, ranging from planetary atmospheres to ancient temple murals, landscapes to military rankings, and from sword designs to family coats of arms. The game aims to explore what can be done with ASCII graphics to detail and explore a deep generated world.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2013/03/Skull.png)
One of the many remnants of ancient civilizations...

Ancient Exploration: Set in the 16th/17th century, the game contains a number of relics of earlier civilizations, which can be explored. These temples and tombs will be full of murals generated according to ancient myths (see the art generation objective), but these murals serve not just an aesthetic purpose – they will give clues to the locations of artefacts, or catacombs containing great wealth. They will also contain procedurally-generated puzzles, mazes, and other challenges.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/Mountaingen1.png)
Some of URR's generated ANSI art.

Linguistics: Different civilizations – ancient and contemporary – will have different languages you may not necessarily be able to speak at the start of the game. Ancient languages can be learnt to give greater insight into murals or ancient texts, whilst contemporary languages enable you to communicate beyond your empire’s boundaries, trade with others, and handle yourself in other empires.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2013/07/What-lurks.png)
A procedurally generated door - runes, vines, bricks and everything else are unique to this door...

Multi-Square Units: Ultima Ratio Regum will include a large number of units that span many squares, a significant break from the roguelike norm of one-square-per-unit. Catapults, ballistas and other siege weapons take up around 5×5 squares and behave accordingly.

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/Guidebook21.png)
The ever-increasing Guidebook, full to brim with URR knowledge. Which is not to say there aren’t some secrets lurking out there…
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: getter77 on November 26, 2012, 08:27:21 PM
Congrats!   Certainly a significant leap forward over the initial release on various fronts.   8)
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: TheCreator on November 27, 2012, 06:28:03 AM
The font is terrible, especially those enormous spaces between characters. Almost unreadable.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on November 27, 2012, 11:15:51 AM
The font is terrible, especially those enormous spaces between characters. Almost unreadable.

Can't say I agree with you - I can read it fine. There are 8x8 and 12x12 fonts if you prefer? If a lot of people dislike the default 10x10 font, though, I'd certainly change it.

EDIT: Hmm... having asked others, you're not the only one who isn't a fan of the 10x10. I'll try some other 10x10s.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on November 27, 2012, 02:04:13 PM
10x10 is proving tougher than either 8x8 or 12x12 to make usable, but how about:

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/11/New10.png)
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: Kyzrati on November 28, 2012, 01:33:53 AM
The larger bolded letters do do a lot for readability compared to the original, if only because they bring letters closer together to alleviate some of the kerning issue.

In the end, though, reading chunks of text using square letters can be painful for a lot of users; even for those who don't mind it, it's still slower to read and requires a lot of getting used to since the human eye is trained to parse letter-based languages based on shapes of letters and words, not so much their composition.

I've dealt with this issue before (see post (http://xcomrl.blogspot.com/2012/05/tune-up.html)) and decided to create a hybrid console that supports both square fonts (for the map) and narrow fonts (for text). The main reason I wanted to go that way is there's going to be a lot of text in X@COM, and I'd prefer it be more pleasurable to read (though I still have yet to include better fonts--the current ones aren't that great). I would assume URR is going to be the same...

Unfortunately this isn't easy to do in libtcod since it's not a natively supported feature. Definitely worth considering what else you can do about this, though. Think about how much extra text you can fit into a given amount of space if you had narrower characters! More information, less scrolling, easier to read... so many benefits.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on November 29, 2012, 12:08:06 PM
Almost everyone has said bold > thin, so I've moved to bold.

As for non-square libtcod fonts, it's a very interesting idea. Your version undoubtedly looks nicer. I gave it a bit of thought last night, and I can see a solution to it and how it could be implemented. If the thinner font was, say, .75 the width of a normal font, then for each 3 squares of room you normally have to type, you now have 4, and so it just automatically readjusts the amount of allowed text and then switches to the other font file. I definitely might try it for a future release.

On that note, I've updated the development plan for the coming months - trying out new fonts isn't in there, but I will definitely be giving it a shot: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/development-plan-2/
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: Kyzrati on November 29, 2012, 02:48:59 PM
I believe other libtcod devs are exploring that method as well; hope it doesn't complicate things too much, but I think it'll make URR even cooler than it already is/will be ;p.

I went with 0.5 width just to make things line up a little more nicely, but it is definitely a pain at small font sizes--even my default 12x12 font size doesn't leave much room for nice glyphs when you have to squeeze the narrow letters into a 6x12 space (actually 5x12 due to the need for at least one empty pixel). Larger fonts will fare better.

Side note: Where's the gameplay on your roadmap? Is that on the 0.3~1.0 stretch that we don't see? Just curious when the game will become at least semi-"playable" in a game sense, rather than just walking around in awe at the cool scenery and generally awesome world you're building.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on December 02, 2012, 06:41:15 PM
I believe other libtcod devs are exploring that method as well; hope it doesn't complicate things too much, but I think it'll make URR even cooler than it already is/will be ;p.

I went with 0.5 width just to make things line up a little more nicely, but it is definitely a pain at small font sizes--even my default 12x12 font size doesn't leave much room for nice glyphs when you have to squeeze the narrow letters into a 6x12 space (actually 5x12 due to the need for at least one empty pixel). Larger fonts will fare better.

Side note: Where's the gameplay on your roadmap? Is that on the 0.3~1.0 stretch that we don't see? Just curious when the game will become at least semi-"playable" in a game sense, rather than just walking around in awe at the cool scenery and generally awesome world you're building.

Hmm, interesting; and thank you! I won't be trying it for 0.2.1, which I'm putting out on Monday, but come the future I will see if different font sizes can be made workable. It shouldn't be too tricky... I think...

I specifically thought I wouldn't do 0.5 for that reason; it just seemed too thin, especially since I want to package in an 8x8 font - halving that would be near impossible! When I do try, maybe I'll go for 0.75 for starters, and see how that works.

Many people have asked this :) - the 1.x.y versions will include everything to do with dungeons, tombs, ruins, catacombs and the like, and believe me when I say I have a *lot* planned for them. 0.3 is history/language/myth gen, but then we'll be onto some colossal ruins. Also got generated puzzles planned (a very wide variety) and non-combat dungeon "bosses"...
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on December 03, 2012, 12:47:20 PM
0.2.1 released! Bugfixes, resources map, .png exporting, a bunch of other nice little things.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: getter77 on December 03, 2012, 01:03:51 PM
Nicely done!   8)
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: Kyzrati on December 04, 2012, 01:53:40 AM
For your reference, the guy in this thread (http://doryen.eptalys.net/forum/index.php?topic=1500.msg8669#msg8669) has done multi-width characters under libtcod.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on December 07, 2012, 11:29:32 AM
Nicely done!   8)

Thank you, Mr Jeffears!

For your reference, the guy in this thread (http://doryen.eptalys.net/forum/index.php?topic=1500.msg8669#msg8669) has done multi-width characters under libtcod.

Ah, thanks - interesting. It does look workable. Hmm. I don't know what version I might try it for, but I will definitely try and give it a shot at some point.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on December 22, 2012, 04:09:43 PM
A quick little update: history generation is in the works, and I've got territories expanding on the world map. Currently, when the game starts at "Year 0" the world looks like:

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/IDB1.png)

Full size: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/Valid0.png

and ends up looking like:

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/IDB2.png)

Full size: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/Valid1695.png

This does not include civs at war with each other, nor crossing oceans to explore/colonize, nor one civ becoming a vassal etc of another, etc, etc - this is just civilizations expanding their borders along contiguous land. The rest I need to work on, of course, and that's the next thing to do...
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: AgingMinotaur on January 07, 2013, 03:59:14 PM
I just tried running it with wine, but get the following error messages: "Procedure not found. Could not load python dll" and "err:menubuilder:init_xdg error looking up the desktop directory". I did copy python27.dll to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.

Is it written in python? If so, would it be an idea to put out the *.pyc files for people like me? ::)

As always,
Minotauros
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on January 07, 2013, 06:06:42 PM
I just tried running it with wine, but get the following error messages: "Procedure not found. Could not load python dll" and "err:menubuilder:init_xdg error looking up the desktop directory". I did copy python27.dll to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.

Is it written in python? If so, would it be an idea to put out the *.pyc files for people like me? ::)

As always,
Minotauros

Darn. I really need to find out from people who do make it work on Wine their method. Although, as I think I say on the downloads page, loading times are a *big* problem in Wine. When I have a spare day, I intend to try and get Linux working on a spare laptop (people tell me this is easy, but I have no idea whatsoever how to do so) and hopefully that will be a stepping stone to an actual Linux release, which should fix a lot of the problems at the moment.

The problem with pyc files is that - unless I am mistaken - you can just open them up in a text editor. Unless there is some way to prevent that and make them closed, I'm afraid I'm not going to be distributing them, as I really care about the closed-source-ness :(. But, despite that, a proper Linux version genuinely is in the works! I think.
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: AgingMinotaur on January 07, 2013, 08:01:42 PM
When I have a spare day, I intend to try and get Linux working on a spare laptop (people tell me this is easy, but I have no idea whatsoever how to do so)
Well, the installation itself is usually handled by a wizard. There are a bunch of different distributions ("distros") (http://distrowatch.com), most of which come in the form of a boot disk that can be downloaded and burned to a CD. Some distros even come as "live CDs", which let you try them without installing, like Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora) or Ubuntu (http://ubuntu.com/download/desktop). (I personally use the Debian distro.)

The problem with pyc files is that - unless I am mistaken - you can just open them up in a text editor. Unless there is some way to prevent that and make them closed, I'm afraid I'm not going to be distributing them, as I really care about the closed-source-ness
pyc files are binary, and can't be read in a text editor. The actual script is the py file. When you execute that, Python spits out the pyc. This can in turn be used to run the application, but not to view the source. I won't swear there's no way to hack a pyc file to see what's going on in the source, but I can tell you Notepad won't do the trick.

As always,
Minotauros
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.2.1 (strategy/roguelike/4x/generative art) released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on January 19, 2013, 10:30:06 PM
When I have a spare day, I intend to try and get Linux working on a spare laptop (people tell me this is easy, but I have no idea whatsoever how to do so)
Well, the installation itself is usually handled by a wizard. There are a bunch of different distributions ("distros") (http://distrowatch.com), most of which come in the form of a boot disk that can be downloaded and burned to a CD. Some distros even come as "live CDs", which let you try them without installing, like Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora) or Ubuntu (http://ubuntu.com/download/desktop). (I personally use the Debian distro.)

The problem with pyc files is that - unless I am mistaken - you can just open them up in a text editor. Unless there is some way to prevent that and make them closed, I'm afraid I'm not going to be distributing them, as I really care about the closed-source-ness
pyc files are binary, and can't be read in a text editor. The actual script is the py file. When you execute that, Python spits out the pyc. This can in turn be used to run the application, but not to view the source. I won't swear there's no way to hack a pyc file to see what's going on in the source, but I can tell you Notepad won't do the trick.

As always,
Minotauros

Thanks for the info re: distros; I'm hoping to have a day free sometime next weekend to really give this a shot (hopefully, famous last words, etc). As for pyc files, that's weird, clearly I'm creating them in the "wrong" way, since it is trivial for me to open them in a text editor. I'll have to look that up. If I'm confident that pyc files cannot be easily read, then I'll happily distribute one of those instead!
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.3.0 released!
Post by: UltimaRatioRegum on August 03, 2013, 02:20:46 PM
Well, it's been a LONG while since 0.2, but I'm happy to say:

Ultima Ratio Regum v0.3.0 released, after seven months of work!

Head to http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/  (http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/) to read about and download it!

(http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2013/08/Skullo.png)
Title: Re: Ultima Ratio Regum v0.3.1 released!
Post by: getter77 on August 13, 2013, 12:10:46 PM
v0.3.1
Quote
Fixes:

- Doors are white/grey like staircases and therefore easier to spot.
- A number of ambiguous clue orientations have been removed.
- A number of ambiguous block synonyms have been removed.
- “Next to” and “adjacent to” have been changed to “opposite” – this should make it clear that correct blocks may face others from any orthogonal direction, not just left or right.
- Controls have been moved to the “Controls” section of the Guidebook and removed from Options.
- New inventory system added in anticipation of 0.4.
- Shift + numpad on the world map works.
- Stone blocks can move over downward staircases, removing a very rare bug where boss puzzles could be generated with an inaccessible component block.
- “You cannot grab onto…” message now prints correctly, instead of after a delay.
- Continued error messages after generating the [ More ] tag in the message log do not crash the game.
- New donators added to acknowledgements.
- You no longer need to press enter after a map grid has loaded.