Author Topic: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)  (Read 252986 times)

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #60 on: July 06, 2015, 03:20:16 PM »
Looks great, as usual.

I've been going over old libtcod projects looking at the unique and interesting ones, and looking at this reminds me of Cult/Empyrea.  When the kickstarter funded effort was abandoned, he released the source, and people were all like "duh, no surprise, he has a 1 MB python script, WTF, trust me I'm an armchair expert".

Are you still fighting the good fight for one file Python scripts?  How large is it now?

Thanks! Ah, Cult, yes... the game we don't speak about... though I am glad to say I am still fighting the good fight! It's a solid 300k lines now (though at least 200k of those are string-based graphics). I still don't find it that absurd, truthfully, but MAYBE I'll add a new file in the future. Though I wouldn't count on it...  :-\

And how have you upped your game to counter the Kaduria threat?

In every way possible!

Paul Jeffries

  • 7DRL Reviewer
  • Rogueliker
  • *
  • Posts: 257
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
    • Vitruality.com
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #61 on: July 06, 2015, 11:15:18 PM »
Looks good!  I hope you saved the earlier 'dancing' code so that civilisations can throw street parties.

I'll stop boring everybody with "In Architectural Design We..."'s at some point I promise, but; in architectural design we use similar crowd simulations to help design routes through buildings etc.  There's a manual for our in-house software for that here; you might find the 'How Massmotion Works' section interesting and maybe it will give you some ideas you can use.

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #62 on: July 11, 2015, 11:07:46 AM »
Looks good!  I hope you saved the earlier 'dancing' code so that civilisations can throw street parties.

I'll stop boring everybody with "In Architectural Design We..."'s at some point I promise, but; in architectural design we use similar crowd simulations to help design routes through buildings etc.  There's a manual for our in-house software for that here; you might find the 'How Massmotion Works' section interesting and maybe it will give you some ideas you can use.

Heh, I didn't, alas, but I'll be coding religious festivals and things quite distinctly and differently afterwards, I expect. Anyway, that is an interesting link! I'll probably be working on NPCs in interiors... the week after next? I think next week will be expanding the crowd mechanics to all other settlements, then adding variations like day/night cycles and the like (er, by which I mean, the day/night cycle is already there, but the volume of spawned NPCs does not respect it yet), and so on, after which it'll be INTERIORS TIME, which... might be simpler? We'll see.

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #63 on: July 11, 2015, 01:31:05 PM »
This week I’ve pretty much finished off crowd mechanics for cities. I’ve also been working on the lower tiers of clothing, and the middle-class clothing looks great, but the lower-class clothing needs some work to be aesthetically comparable to the upper/middle equivalents, so I’ll show that off in a future entry. Right now, though: crowd mechanics are done (or cities), and that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

Permissions (and Guards)

Each tile of the human-scale in the game now has a variable called only_allow – this lists the permissions required to enter that tile (if the list is empty, than anyone can enter it). For example, we might have (“Religion”, 25) which means that believers of the religion with the “25” id can enter it, (“Family”, 6), and so forth. Sometimes I’m sure these will overlap, though currently they do not. At the moment these restrictions exist on upper-class mansions (where only that family and its allies can enter), warehouses in shop districts (so that random citizens don’t path towards them for no reason), religious buildings in religious districts (where only believers will enter them, though I suppose very occasionally someone from another hostile religion will…?), embassies in city centres (which are heavily guarded), and military districts per se. I’m sure some others will appear in the near future, but those are the only permissions in the city so far. As well as the existing crowd mechanics, I’ve also begun to write the code for guards who are tethered to a given permission, and are alerted if/when that permission is violated, and will act accordingly – but this isn’t a crowd mechanic, and isn’t finished, so we’ll talk about it more later. Here’s a simple example of a permissions diagram for an upper class district along with the outside of that district, where the areas inside walls for each of the major families is blocked for any outside that family (I will be adding in “lesser families” this release and giving them appropriately less-impressive crests). It’s simple, but effective (the other houses around the edge are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to merit guards, “territory” in the district, etc).





Irrelevant and Branching Roads

The NPCs on roads now avoid (for the most part) roads which go nowhere, and if they do go down a road which goes nowhere, they know that and will generally branch off and move towards their own target outside the road system. Equally, NPCs will no longer run in circles sometimes (a major improvement, as I’m sure you’ll all agree) and won’t branch onto tiny pieces of road. They can also cross each other intelligently without losing their sense of direction – in an earlier version two NPCs walking around each other would sometimes get “diverted” by the act of stepping around each other and wind up changing direction. Many of these irrelevant roads are also connected to permission-based areas as in the above section, and this is obviously a system I’ll be developing in more depth in the future as NPC/player relationships and factions become more complex. So this is the district from the above diagrams, where the light green roads can be walked by anyone, and the dark green roads either cannot be walked, or will only be walked by those with appropriate permissions or pathfinding objectives:



Moving Off-Road and On-Road

As above, NPCs can now sometimes decide to move off the road to find their own targets. They’ll do this if they see themselves approaching a dead-end road, and they’ll sometimes do this anyway regardless of what kind of road they’re on. In these circumstances they either select a region of the map where there is nothing in particular and path to there, and then continue pathing from there to elsewhere if the player is still viewing them (or despawn if they’re out of sight), or they will choose to path towards a specific door (which they have permission to enter) and then go through that door. As the below gif hopefully shows, this makes the movement of NPCs appear far more organic and stops NPCs looking like creatures just being channeled down the road with no ability for doing their own thing. We’ll obviously see how this works once we introduce important NPCs who have their own non-crowd objectives, etc, but you can see it pretty well in the gif in the section below…

Crowd Generation

The game can now generate appropriate “crowds” who might move around. For example, a civilization with the “Theocracy” and “Vassalage” ideologies might decide to have priests moving around their city, escorted by priests. A civilization with the “Monastic” (new to this release) and “Conscription” ideologies might enlist conscripts to escort high-ranking monks safely. Equally, there are some more general groups – groups of clerks and diplomats in the city centre, groups of general humans in any area, etc – who can also spawn in any nation regardless of their ideological preferences. Here’s an example of a priest and a few general citizen followers moving around a district – one will also note that certain skin tones are surprisingly hard to see against the road’s background colour. On the one hand, all roguelikes which expand their colour schemes a little bit (e.g. DF, CoQ, etc) will sometimes have certain colours which can’t be combined well, and whilst it’s annoying I’m not sure if there’s a solution; but on the other hand, maybe there is some solution? Change the road colour to make it more grey so it always stands out against all skin tones? I’ll ponder it. Either way, this gif starts with a priest (‘p’) being escorted by a bunch of soldiers (‘5′) moving around the corner around this religious building. I then just let it play on a little longer to see the slaves (since this is a slaving nation) wandering about. Note also that the game ensures the priest is “leading” the little convoy, since i had some problems with the leader’s escorts dancing around in front of the leader due to a quirk in the pathfinding system. Enjoy!



“Party” Generation

I’ve also implemented a system where “parties” (in the “group” sense of that word) can spawn more organically around certain areas – these include parks and gardens, around taverns, around markets, and in graveyards. In this case a number of NPCs from all over the map will path towards the area and then basically “hang around” for a while, before then making their way off. I’ve found around some places it gives an interesting feeling to these areas when you just sit and watch, and although I’m still working on exactly balancing the algorithm so that the ebb and flow of NPCs is exactly how I want it, this gif from a city centre garden is *fairly* illustrative, though it still needs some tweaking. And bear in mind, of course, one isn’t generally going to be waiting around to see the grounds form and un-form, but I’ve just stood here for this example so we could see groups forming, growing, and then disbanding.



District Demographics

I’ve also implemented a system for spawning appropriate demographics of NPCs (and their clothes, items, etc) for each NPC who spawns in each district. This comes down to three things: NPC type, NPC wealth, and NPC “distance”. To explain this slightly better, let’s have a look at this diagram, newly added to the in-game Guidebook (‘?’ to access). This is (currently) the full set of possible NPC types which will be able to spawn in the game:



So, NPC type is the “class” of NPC – we might want general humans to be spawning in lower-class housing districts, classes of soldier to spawn in the military districts (who I intend to give patrol routes to, but that hasn’t been coded yet), clerks and diplomats might be spawning in the city centre, and so forth. Capital letter NPCs will be specially tracked by the game, whereas lower-case NPCs make up the crowd. Also, nations which keep slaves will spawn slaves in the appropriate districts, just as nations which have eunuchs will spawn a very small number of those unfortunate individuals around the place. NPC wealth, meanwhile, means currently the quality of their clothing (and, in the future, the quality of any armour, weapons, bodyguards, jewelry, etc) – this is obviously closely tied to the district that the crowd NPC is spawning in, but with some variation. Middle-class districts spawn mostly middle and a few lower wealth NPCs, lower-class districts do the reverse, markets spawn an even mix, and so on. NPC distance, lastly, relates to whether the NPC spawning is from that nation and from its capital; from that nation and from a distant town or colony; or from a different nation altogether. Currently everyone who walks around in a city is from that nation (though I will of course later add groups from other nations) but might be from different regions, so you’ll see people who are culturally similar – clothing, hair style, etc – but physically different (skin tone, hair colour, eye colour, etc) as they come from different areas of the same nation. The game picks all of these according to a range of factors, and then spawns a mix of NPCs appropriate for the crowd in a given nation.

Bugs and Issues

In this process I ran into a bunch of bugs and issues. Firstly, for some reason, saving and loading the game would cause the AI for each NPC in the crowd, and the NPC itself, to become disconnected so they no longer referred to each other, meaning that when I tried to delete “self” from the list of NPCs when a given NPC no longer needed to be around, it couldn’t find self, and crashed. Weird. I tried to find a proper solution to this issue, but in the end I just changed it so that the scheduler only referenced the .npcid of each NPC, rather than the NPC itself, and that meant that even if some byte somewhere in the AI changed itself in saving/loading for reasons I could not divine, the npcid was always remaining the same (being a variable, not an instance of the AI class attached to an instance of the NPC class), and so the game could always identify the correct NPC and AI to delete upon reloading. Similarly, moving on the human-scale from district to district made some weird errors like massive groups of NPC suddenly spawning and NPCs from the next map tile teleporting into another map tile, but those were all quickly fixed. Some maps were also coming up with extremely rare tiles which didn’t have a .roadmarker variable, which denotes what NPCs are/aren’t allowed on it and whether it is a road curve which should be treated specially, but that was due to another bug I hadn’t even noticed involving the types of terrain spawning under trees (we had some trees spawning on road tiles!). This has all been sorted, and it all runs extremely smoothly. Additionally I noticed some unnecessary variables were still stored on every tile in the human-scale maps, so those have been removed, and save files have been reduced by around 15% as a result, with an attendant (very minor) improvement in load times!

Next up?

Well, the next things to do are to extend this outside cities. I need to get NPCs behaving sensibly in slums, graveyards, villages, fortresses and tribal settlements, each of which is going to need some unique changes to the algorithms I’ve worked on for cities. After that, we’ll be moving onto handling NPCs within buildings (and entering/leaving buildings), which is obviously extremely imporant. Then we’ll be moving onto unique NPCs who are specially tracked by the game because they matter (merchants in shops, rulers, nobles, etc) and who therefore need to be able to move around the world. These three steps are my three primary goals for the rest of July (it’s a lot, but I think I can crunch it), then in August I’ll be moving onto finishing off clothing styles (we’ve got feudal clothing almost finished, but I need to add military clothing, religious clothing, nomadic clothing, and tribal clothing, so there’s still a ton to do on that front!) and adding in a conversation system to the game. This system is going to be essential, so I really need to think hard about how the conversation system should work, what the balance is between the hand-made and procedural, etc. Then I need to redo how families and allegiances/associations work, fix a bunch of minor bugs from the last few versions which continue to stack up, and then 0.8 will (amazingly) be pretty much done. Aiming for a September release currently, which is around the time I’ll be starting a new job I can’t yet formally announce, and probably starting work on the other secret project I also can’t yet announce (both game-related, though!). Exciting times! Let me know what you think of this week’s development, and I’ll see you all in seven days…

chooseusername

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 329
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #64 on: July 12, 2015, 05:43:59 AM »
Your efforts are inspiring.  At worst, it'll be a magnum opus.

I used to work in commercial game development, and one of my coworkers was hired out of university on the strengths of his modding work.  This to me is the sort of thing, along with your self motivated productivity, that makes his "portfolio" look like tiddlywinks.  When you move onto the next thing, I'd be surprised if this and your blog of continued work didn't help you get it, if it's to something applicable.

Rev_Sudasana

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 175
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Armoured Commander
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #65 on: July 12, 2015, 06:59:26 PM »
Now I've got this clear mental image of leader escorts dancing around him as he walks down the path.

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #66 on: July 13, 2015, 07:16:55 PM »
Your efforts are inspiring.  At worst, it'll be a magnum opus.

I used to work in commercial game development, and one of my coworkers was hired out of university on the strengths of his modding work.  This to me is the sort of thing, along with your self motivated productivity, that makes his "portfolio" look like tiddlywinks.  When you move onto the next thing, I'd be surprised if this and your blog of continued work didn't help you get it, if it's to something applicable.

Well thank you very much! And that is strikingly astute - the academic game studies job I got a while back post-PhD, but can't announce just yet (hopefully soon, though!) I actually got largely on the back of URR, the blog, my visibility in the RL world, etc etc. Due to various reasons I didn't have a lot of publications, but I had a doctorate in a relevant field and URR, threw that out at the selection committee, and subsequently got the research funding. I'm now churning out papers like mad, but I wasn't when I applied for this job, but URR was absolutely what swung it/secured it. As games academia is my job now, and will be in the future, I'm confident that having a strong game development portfolio will only help me in the future. I think it's really good and a very positive development that jobs (academic and otherwise) in games take account of non-traditional CVs, having things to show in other areas of "gaming" (very broadly), modding and game development, etc.

Now I've got this clear mental image of leader escorts dancing around him as he walks down the path.

That is exactly what was happening! It looked wretched. Sometimes a follower got "stuck" in front and the leader would keep trying to move around, but then the best path for the follower would be to stay in front (as the other followers would follow behind), so you'd get something like:

fffLf

moving around the map, moving left to right. Very odd.

Rev_Sudasana

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 175
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Armoured Commander
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #67 on: July 14, 2015, 06:53:21 AM »
That is exactly what was happening! It looked wretched. Sometimes a follower got "stuck" in front and the leader would keep trying to move around, but then the best path for the follower would be to stay in front (as the other followers would follow behind), so you'd get something like:

fffLf

moving around the map, moving left to right. Very odd.

You could always adapt this in the future for a jester character. They could even follow the player and annoy them with witty banter as they dance.

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #68 on: July 15, 2015, 08:19:21 AM »
You could always adapt this in the future for a jester character. They could even follow the player and annoy them with witty banter as they dance.

Heh, very possibly!

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #69 on: July 27, 2015, 12:34:03 PM »
Well, it has been another very busy week – I gave a talk on URR’s PCG and AI systems at nucl.ai in Vienna (and spent an afternoon sitting the sun outside a rather nice vegan cafe working on the secret project I’ve mentioned a few times, which continues to inch closer to the point where I can actually announce something) and I’ve also had a piece the 35th Anniversary of Rogue published in Paste Magazine (which you can read at http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/07/before-spelunky-and-ftl-there-was-only-ascii.html) and another on the role of text and characters in classic roguelikes published in Imaginary Realities (http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-03/how-integral-are-letters-and-text-to-ascii-gaming/index.html), but nevertheless significant progress has been made (though I anticipate this next week to be a full week of coding with nothing else, so we should have a major update in seven days).

Towns, Fortresses, Etc

NPCs can now pathfind sensibly around other places which aren’t city districts – they know where to spawn and how to behave in the crowd in fortresses, in towns, in slums, and also in hunter-gatherer encampments. In these cases they generally don’t use the roads, because having people pathfind on a road until they get close to their target, and then move off the road, magnifies pathfinding complexity immensely – what if they get near the target, but then the actual path from the end of the road to the target is long due to a wall (so they are physically proximate but the path to that proximate location is huge), and the complexity of the problem of making sure they take an efficient road path, followed by an efficient off-road path, is massive – so we’re ignoring it. Besides, particularly in towns I think this actually works quite effectively when roads look more like a form of aesthetic/spatial structuring of the town rather than literally what everyone uses to walk around, and fortresses tend not to have roads anyway unless there’s a river cutting through them. The right groups of NPCs now spawn in fortesses and elsewhere, of course, so we see lots of soldiers in fortresses, the poorest of the poor in slums, ordinary citizens in towns, and tribal peoples in hunter-gatherer territories. This is, however, making it clear that I need to return to clothing generation at some point soon and really get moving on the other algorithms for lower/middle class feudal clothing, and other clothing types too – it’s a huge job, and actually bigger than I thought, so I’m going to devote a solid week or two to that once I’m back from GDC Europe (if you’re there, come along to my talk!). Here’s a town brimming with activity:



Inside/Outside

The big one – NPCs now actually go inside buildings (they previously despawned at the door, in essence) and if you then go into the building, you can then see that same NPC inside the building. If the building has already been spawned and exists, then the NPC will go about their business inside the building. Alternatively, if the building hasn’t yet been spawned, they are temporarily placed in “limbo” until one of two things happens. If the building is spawned (i.e. by the player stepping inside), then that NPC is granted a number of turns to move around in the building as if they had been moving around inside the whole time. Alternatively, if an NPC has “entered” a building that the player doesn’t spawn, then after a random length of time they will the leave the building and continue on their way. In this method we are left with no pointless NPCs milling around in “limbo”, ensures that the crowd is always centered on the player, and means that if you see NPCs going into a building, they will be inside. In this gif, an NPC has previously entered this tavern; we’ll now enter, causing the building to spawn, and then the NPC spawns and we see them take a seat, and then if we go outside, they’ll exit again after a certain point (at the end we then see another NPC enter). This basically means that regardless of the player’s actions and which parts of the map actually exist, the crowd’s actions always appear to make sense. A similar system will be needed once I start tracking the important and non-spawned NPCs around the world (rulers, merchants, etc).



Inside Behaviour

NPCs will now create a list of potential “targets” within a building and will hang around at those targets for sensible amounts of time, and then when those timers end, they’ll either leave or go to something else within the building. This process depends on the building and the nature of a given target. For example, someone who goes into a tavern and sits on a chair to drink for a while will not then get up and move to another chair – they’ll either just stay on the chair, or get up and leave. By contrast, somebody in a cathedral might spend a lot of time sitting at one chair worshipping in front of an altar, then move to study the holy texts at a desk, then talk to a priest, then leave, etc. I’m working at the moment on finishing off this list of targets, and then also adding a second layer whereby the list of targets is modulated by the time of day; so people will tend to leave as its gets near night, or people in this houses will head to bed, etc. Here’s a gif of some inside behaviour in a tavern:



As you can see, more people currently leave than enter; I’m working on balancing these two algorithms at the moment so we have a steady flow of entering/leaving whatever structure the player might happen to be in at the time.

Sorry also about the relative lack of images this week: a huge amount of this week’s work has just been improving pathfinding, improving how NPCs move and behave, a lot of technical improvement on saving/loading and managing buildings and floors and buildings which are/aren’t spawned, etc, so there aren’t that many pictures to show. I hope for more next time!

What now?

Making the interior behaviour sensible and interesting for all NPCs, giving buildings a “maximum” number of people they can hold, adding day/night differences, fixing the massive number of edge cases which are slowly building up… etc. More next week!

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #70 on: August 01, 2015, 12:02:02 PM »
This week I’ve worked on some new graphics, on a lot of the AI for interior behaviour, made some alterations to a district generation system I wasn’t happy with, fixed various bugs and minor issues, and moved closer to the point where I can confidently say all crowd NPCs are working correctly. First, though, I must give my appreciation to one James Patton for this extremely kind and very thoughtful write-up (http://james-patton.net/2015/05/29/the-world-is-a-found-object-and-we-are-imperfect-archeologists/) – he has (or “you have”, if he’s reading this) hit the nail on the head with my objectives, my design philosophies, and basically everything else, and that’s always very gratifying to read. Also, if you fancy some other roguelikey reading, I’m building up quite a number of roguelike pieces – I wrote for KillScreen about the demonic enemies in NetHack (http://killscreendaily.com/articles/demonic-properties-ampersand/), for Paste Magazine about the 35th Anniversary of Rogue (http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/07/before-spelunky-and-ftl-there-was-only-ascii.html), and for Imaginary Realities about the role of text, characters and letters in roguelikes (and URR) (http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-03/how-integral-are-letters-and-text-to-ascii-gaming/index.html). Hope you enjoy giving them a read… and now, onto the update, which is rather more substantial than last week’s paltry offering:

Prayer Mats

I took a moment this week to do some graphics, and decided to finally implement something I’ve been meaning to for ages: prayer mats. Some religions now use prayer mats in their religious buildings instead of chairs, and the design of these mats is dependent on both the religion, and the civilization the religious building is found within (so religions across many nations will have similar, and aesthetically comparable, but slightly different, prayer mats across nations). The colour scheme is based on the altar, as shown in the three examples here, and the shapes (squares, octagons, etc) are down to the nation, whilst the specific layout of shapes and symbols, and obviously the religious symbols, are down to the religion. Here are some rather nice examples:



And some prayer mats in a religious building and a cathedral (note that the colour of the maps vary based on the actual mat colours, though now ‘=’ can’t be used for anything else!):





Further Interior Behaviour

This week I’ve done a lot more NPC interior behaviour. There is still a little bit which needs doing, particularly with special cases – NPCs going into banks should talk to the clerks, for instance, just as NPCs in hospitals should go and sit by the bed-side of someone they know, etc, but a lot of these actions are now working very nicely. In a cathedral, for instance, I just sat by and watched as NPCs came in and prayed at the altars, sat on the chairs/prayer mats, looked at the relics, admired the cathedral’s decoration, talked to one another, sat down to study the holy texts, etc. Here is an awesome gif of this which is neat enough to watch to the end, I think, of various people in this cathedral (the one above) doing these types of activities:



Next up was the gallery. As with all buildings, I’m leaving the “permanent” NPCs until last – so worshippers will wander around a cathedral, for example, but there are no priests there yet, as they will be tethered to that building and a particular routine – but here we now have people coming in, admiring the paintings, and showing themselves out again. Painting generation will happen when I swoop in and redo the history generation from the fairly simple system there is now, to something which truly encompasses every piece of information in the world, and begins to lay the foundations for sneaking in clues to the game’s central cultural cipher. Anyway, the gallery:



By the end of next week I hope to have more interior algorithms finished, and by the week after, they should all be done (this week is GDC Europe and Gamescom, and I’m attending 100% of the former and ~25% of the latter, so that’ll be taking up a bunch of time). At this point I’ve implemented some general code for all buildings, and now it’s a matter of going into every building and checking the code actually works there.

Middle-Class Rivers

I suddenly noticed that under the new generation algorithm for middle-class districts, when a river goes through them, they don’t look very impressive at all, and we end up with something like this (with the issues ringed in red where multiple “bridges” seem to overlap:



This wouldn’t do, and it just looks rather dull, so I rewrote this algorithm into producing something rather more interesting, so here’s the same district using this new algorithm which encourages the river to flow around/past major roads, avoid smaller ones, and to then design the rest of the roads differently and place buildings/parks a little differently in order to accommodate the river. Here are two examples with a “corner” river and a “long” river, from the same city (note that the shapes of the corners and the roads sometimes change – I set it to randomize that aesthetic choice each time I generated an area so I could make sure the new system always worked):





Other Small Changes

A number of other minor changes have also been implemented this week:

– Colonies can now only be established with nations with the “Imperialist” ideology, rather than all nations which are not “Isolationist” (which it was until now).

–  An extremely unlikely edge case involving rivers and lower-class district generation has been fixed, ensuring you never end up with a part of a district that cannot be accessed without entering the district from another angle, due to the river’s location. See below:



– Each NPC’s face is now tinted fractionally to add further diversity within nations – everyone’s faces are tinted a tiny bit (between 0.03 and 0.06%) towards yellow, orange, red, white or black at random. That might sound tiny, but the difference is noticeable.

– Roads are now grey merged with just the tiniest bit of brown, and all skin-tones are now very easy to read on it. However, others do struggle on the “soil” terrain type, so I’ll fiddle with that too (probably make it a little more green, perhaps). Equally, chairs are made out of wood – with colours that range from light brown to dark brown – and therefore chairs, in some cities, do tend to blend a little with the populous. Again, considering solutions, but I might tint everyone’s skin tone a fraction to the red.

– Fixed a thrilling bug where chairs sometimes decided to spawn in the empty void of nothingness outside the map… and then NPCs wanted to sit on them.

Next Week

As above, I’m flying out tomorrow and returning in a week, and I’ll be doing lots of GDC stuff. So… expect either a shorter update, or a non-URR update, depending on how things go. See you then!

Paul Jeffries

  • 7DRL Reviewer
  • Rogueliker
  • *
  • Posts: 257
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
    • Vitruality.com
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #71 on: August 01, 2015, 03:03:24 PM »
– Fixed a thrilling bug where chairs sometimes decided to spawn in the empty void of nothingness outside the map… and then NPCs wanted to sit on them.

And thus the Ultima-Ratio-Regnum-Land Space Program was born.

"I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of sitting a man on the chair and returning him safely to the earth..."

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #72 on: August 04, 2015, 06:57:43 AM »
"I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of sitting a man on the chair and returning him safely to the earth..."

Alas, unlike Twitter, forums have no "favourite" button :(

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #73 on: August 08, 2015, 10:16:15 AM »
This week's post is a trip report on my time at GDC (talking about procedural generation) and Gamescom!

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/08/08/gdc-europe-and-gamescom/

UltimaRatioRegum

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 318
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • Username says it all, really.
    • View Profile
    • Ultima Ratio Regum
    • Email
Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)
« Reply #74 on: August 15, 2015, 10:40:38 AM »
This week, I wrote a detailed review of David Craddock's new "Dungeon H@cks" book about the history of roguelikes: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/08/15/dungeon-hcks-book-review/