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[Aklyon]

You forgot Wrath of Cthulhu in that problems list, Sensei

[Aqizzar]

‘We’re trying very hard not to outwardly or ostensibly label it as ‘Dwarf Fortress For Everybody.’ But that’s sort of our goal at heart, to try and take that experience and make it accessible,” says Jacobsen. “Two of the reasons why Dwarf Fortress isn’t for everyone right now are the graphics and the user interface. So we’re doing things that will allow us to try to get a lot of the functionality through while making it easy enough for people to pick it up.”

The knife fighter in me wants to get a crew together to snap our fingers in unison and start warning people about turf lest there be a rumble.

On the other hand, this game is pretty much everything I ever wanted in a city-builder, from a company that speaks right to my fucking heart.  And free publicity for Dwarf Fortress is still free publicity.

Come to think of it, I haven't sent Toady any free money in a while.

[Seriyu]

Eyyyy, so this is what project odin was (I think). For some reason I didn't see a colony builder coming. Looks neat though! I somehow doubt a quad core laptop will be enough, but we'll see when it comes out I suppose.

[Geen]

Thank you so much for visiting, I love it when devs reach out to the rabid masses. I have questions, but it's 12:30 and I should sleep now.

[Tilla]

edit:dp

[Tilla]

Expect to be disappointed.  Sorry.

This is extremely ambitious.  Enormously so.  Especially for a project which isn't showing off alpha code to the interviewer, yet is targeting a late 2013 launch.

Double especially if Gaslamp continues to release Dredmor DLC.

There's only so many hours in a day, only so many coders that can work on a project before Brooks' Law kicks in and you actually get negative progress.

Just saying.  Sorry about the downer, but keep your expectations in the lower atmosphere.

You're completely delusional if you think this isn't doable. It's not really more complex than a Sim City game and they've got a larger team than Dredmor on this (with one more patch planned for DoD IIRC over at Something Awful before the team is going full time). We also don't know how long it's been in the works.

It's always reasonable to keep expectations reasonable but honestly I found your post condescending as shit and needless. We're grownups, we can decide on our own when the game is complete.

[tootboot]

If the scope of the game is 'as detailed as Dwarf Fortress' then yeah, prepare to be disappointed, but I don't think they're attempting that. 

I'm much less concerned about the game hewing too close to the DF formula after reading this post at SA:

It's all very well saying that we are inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and we are. We love it for what it is, and also for what it stands for; we love, in particular, the generative story and the emergent narrative that comes out of random systems and character driven elements. We're all for that. Making that work is our big, big focus at this point. We have the technical infrastructure in place for most of the renderer, the procedural building stuff, the terrain, the water, the skeletal animation, the networking, rag-doll physics, the UI code... you name it. CE sits on top of a pile of engine work that I've been poking at since, er, 2002, in various incarnations - this is why, as opposed to Dredmor, CE runs its own windowing system. (Yes, I'm insane.)

Where our focus really lies right now is in making a game that has deep, emergent behaviour, and where this depth leads to you - as a player, or a group of players - having wonderful, funny, beautiful, doom-laden adventures in a sandbox you want to mess about in, and where you want to go off and play in the sandbox with your friends. These friends will soon be enemies for life.

One thing I do want to make people aware of: we are not setting out to directly clone, say, the ten best DF features with an eye towards putting them in a nice package with 3D graphics, multiplayer, and multi-core acceleration. Some things that work really well in DF simply aren't things that are feasible for us, things that we want to do, things that we think will make CE a good game, or things that work in three dimensions. (The big one is digging. It doesn't work in three dimensions. Multiple selectable height layers are a crufty, awful mess.) Our big takeaway is that we want big screaming panicky doomed cities full of explosions and massive constructions and dubious secret projects and Obeliskian Death, and this is what we shall deliver at the end of the day.

Other people are taking the DF stuff and are staying much truer to its digging and simulation aspects - and, well, more power to them. (I think it's easier with 2D art as opposed to 3D - the closer you get to photorealism, the more you have to deal with symbolic representations rather than visual representations, and this makes life interesting.) More than anything, for us DF is a good latch-word; people sort of go "Oh! It's like THAT." Well, yes. But it's also not like that. We hope we can do something different - that we can push things forward, that we can make something unique, and that CE will stand on its own two legs and will advance the state of the Steampunk isometric city-building people-destroying Lovecraftian simulator genre.

[Dr. Johbson]

Oh fine, sure, just this once =P  A lot of this is totally unanswerable.  I'm only answering the ones that I feel we can at this point, and then i'm getting back to work!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. How many colonists are we able/expected to have at any one time?

not sure yet, largely set by hardware and network

2. How difficult will it be to obtain new colonists?

depends on your starting scenario, location, how well you're doing in the game, but generally not terribly hard

3. The PC Gamer interview mentioned marriage, which implies all sorts of cool things.  Is there any chance of hearing the patter of tiny feet and/or screams of tiny mouths?

Possible but not certain.  There will be young folk though

4. Are resources finite or infinite?

Ooh, good question.  Subject to balancing.

5. That procedural extruding feature sounds pretty awesome.  Will we able to save/load and/or export buildings?

Yes, and share them!

6. Which single feature excites you personally the most?

Storyline and AI - they're what I'm working on right now =)

7. How large are the playable areas?  Is it likely or very unlikely that it could be mostly developed/terraformed.

not sure yet, dependent again on hardware

8. What non-combat options (if any) will there be for interacting with native sentients?

Trade, some basic interactions, the game is not combat focused.  No more information now

9. I can has now plz?

What we have now is a really awesome tech layer with very, very rudimentary gameplay.  We're working as fast as we can!

10. What won't be moddable?

AI, probably terrain gen, combat and other systems.  Things that will be: Objects, factories and probably their processes, things like building facades.  Lots of things are possible.

11. Can we dig/mine/build hills?

Very unlikely that there will be digging in any significant way.

12. Can buildings have multiple storeys/basements?

We're playing with this right now, it is very dependent on user interface; this gets very complicated very quickly.

13. Say I was to divert a river for some reason.  Could this have a negative effect on local flora/fauna?

Actually possible given the engine, but it depends on a lot of other design decisions and how much time we have.  I love these sorts of things in games but the most visible stuff is the most important.

14. Will there be robots?

Probably not "robots" as traditionally defined, but there are some... ideas in the interal wiki, shall we say.

15. What sort of needs/desires will colonists have?

This is still being written, so i'm going to dodge this one.

16. Can I pickle (or otherwise experiment on) living/dead creatures?

Pickling live creatures is a very effective form of transportation!

17. HP or limb based damage?

Likely HP, far from a firm decision

18. Do individual colonists have their own currency or is it a case of DF style Communism?

Currently, communism.  It's a colony of the empire!

19. Are those pictures concept art or in engine?

Renders of our assets, not in-engine.  We are playing with a lot of shader options right now to nail a feel for the aesthetic.  I'm not on art or rendering so I don't have much more to say here.

20. What can you tell us about megaprojects?

To be discussed.  There are a lot of knife fights ongoing in the office about this.

Thank you very much for answering, between this and all the stalking, my knowledge may yet be satiated.

[Thief^]

I've just read the whole thread, and I'm very excited. If I could put in a pre-order now I would.

(I pre-ordered Diablo 3 on 29/10/2008, which wasn't released for over three and a half years. I would pre-order it now)

[Scoops Novel]

Well there be post-launch updates? This is genius by the way. Thank you Gaslamp .

[0x517A5D]

Expect to be disappointed.  Sorry.

This is extremely ambitious.  Enormously so.  Especially for a project which isn't showing off alpha code to the interviewer, yet is targeting a late 2013 launch.

Double especially if Gaslamp continues to release Dredmor DLC.

There's only so many hours in a day, only so many coders that can work on a project before Brooks' Law kicks in and you actually get negative progress.

Just saying.  Sorry about the downer, but keep your expectations in the lower atmosphere.

You're completely delusional if you think this isn't doable. It's not really more complex than a Sim City game and they've got a larger team than Dredmor on this (with one more patch planned for DoD IIRC over at Something Awful before the team is going full time). We also don't know how long it's been in the works.

It's always reasonable to keep expectations reasonable but honestly I found your post condescending as shit and needless. We're grownups, we can decide on our own when the game is complete.

Sure, whatever.

Go read that interview again, okay?  Count the occurrences of "it (the game) will be" and "you (the player) will/can do" versus "we already have this working."  The whole piece sounds like a roadmap mixed with a brainstorming session.

Sounds like the engine is working enough to build things on it, but still needs development.  (Assuming they're not rewriting the experimental engine.)  Everything else?  2D art, 3D art, animation, detailed backstory, detailed NPCs, AI (oh God the AI this will need), UI, hotseat multiplayer, networked multiplayer, mod support?  Does any of that exist yet?  The interview indicates it mostly doesn't.

Hell, they even mention "everything and the kitchen sink."  (Quoted out of context, but still.)

You know what other game has everything and the kitchen sink?  Nethack.  You know how long Nethack was developed before the project went dark?  Twenty Years.  And Nethack is singleplayer, ASCII, has basically placeholders for backstory and NPCs, and has tiny primitive AI.

I want this to succeed.  I do.  And if they even meet a third of these ambitions, I'll buy my copy.

But keeping my expectations low?  Being realistic?  Being pessimistic?  Is not being completely delusional.

[ansontan2000]

PTW.

[Xinvoker]

Yeah this is pretty much a dream game.

If anything, I'm worried that since they are at an early stage, they may be overwhelmed and decide to scale back the number of features.
In this case, it would be better if they opted for beta-funding.

[Dr. Johbson]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Expect to be disappointed.  Sorry.

This is extremely ambitious.  Enormously so.  Especially for a project which isn't showing off alpha code to the interviewer, yet is targeting a late 2013 launch.

Double especially if Gaslamp continues to release Dredmor DLC.

There's only so many hours in a day, only so many coders that can work on a project before Brooks' Law kicks in and you actually get negative progress.

Just saying.  Sorry about the downer, but keep your expectations in the lower atmosphere.
[/quote]

You're completely delusional if you think this isn't doable. It's not really more complex than a Sim City game and they've got a larger team than Dredmor on this (with one more patch planned for DoD IIRC over at Something Awful before the team is going full time). We also don't know how long it's been in the works.

It's always reasonable to keep expectations reasonable but honestly I found your post condescending as shit and needless. We're grownups, we can decide on our own when the game is complete.

Sure, whatever.

Go read that interview again, okay?  Count the occurrences of "it (the game) will be" and "you (the player) will/can do" versus "we already have this working."  The whole piece sounds like a roadmap mixed with a brainstorming session.

Sounds like the engine is working enough to build things on it, but still needs development.  (Assuming they're not rewriting the experimental engine.)  Everything else?  2D art, 3D art, animation, detailed backstory, detailed NPCs, AI (oh God the AI this will need), UI, hotseat multiplayer, networked multiplayer, mod support?  Does any of that exist yet?  The interview indicates it mostly doesn't.

Hell, they even mention "everything and the kitchen sink."  (Quoted out of context, but still.)

You know what other game has everything and the kitchen sink?  Nethack.  You know how long Nethack was developed before the project went dark?  Twenty Years.  And Nethack is singleplayer, ASCII, has basically placeholders for backstory and NPCs, and has tiny primitive AI.

I want this to succeed.  I do.  And if they even meet a third of these ambitions, I'll buy my copy.

But keeping my expectations low?  Being realistic?  Being pessimistic?  Is not being completely delusional.

You're smart to be cautious and I do agree this is a very ambitious project, but according to the dev who is speaking about the game, down at the SomethingAwful forums-

Current state of the codebase: We panicked a bit about it last week, then we wrote out absolutely where we need to be and what we need to do in order to get to a beta, and then we panicked a lot less. So suffice it to say, a lot has been done and we're on track. At some point, though, you just need to shut up and announce your game already.

Basically, the renderer is about 85% done, the procedural building stuff mainly works and just needs debugging/a few extra features, the AI is currently running around harvesting resources, and I just got a first pass at the netcode from Ryan!

They've also been working on it since almost last year, as well, so while I do agree and understand your pessimism, I do think they'll be able to achieve at least 2/3 of their goals. Of course, like you said, even if they DO manage to only make 1/3, I'll still be happy and I'll buy that too.

Other things mentioned in the SA thread is that no more Dredmor DLC is planned while CE is being worked on (Although they still have one guy working on patches I believe) not to mention many other small details and questions answered. Read the thread here!
However, for those not aware, SomethingAwful requires you to purchase an account, so you will not be able to post unless you were to buy one. You can though, read most threads without an account. If you want to know more about this game at all, I recommend you read all of the developer's posts there, his forum name is nvining.

[BeserkNINJA]

PTW:

also i was wondering if its possible to trap that huge sea serpent in the screenie and then tame him for use against the natives?