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[Geen]

OY! GASLAMP PEOPLE! COME OUT OF LURKING! WE KNOW YOU'RE THERE, YOU REFERENCED US!

[lordcooper]

OY! GASLAMP PEOPLE! COME OUT OF LURKING! WE KNOW YOU'RE THERE, YOU REFERENCED US!

Just sent them an official invitation to chat.  I totally have that privilege.

[Dutchling]

a 747 cockpit medieval soap opera simulator

I think I am going to like this game.

[alway]

Radiation Spa

what?

This actually existed, or was at least tested. Using radiation sources like radon you could cure a number of skin diseases.*

*No Guarantee is made that the rest of your skin will survive
** We're not responsible for any radiation related diseases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_radon#Intentional_exposure

Bathing:
Radioactive water baths have been applied since 1906 in Jáchymov, Czech Republic, but even before radon discovery they were used in Bad Gastein, Austria. Radium-rich springs are also used in traditional Japanese onsen in Misasa, Tottori Prefecture. Drinking therapy is applied in Bad Brambach, Germany. Inhalation therapy is carried out in Gasteiner-Heilstollen, Austria, in Kowary, Poland and in Boulder, Montana, United States. In the United States and Europe there are several "radon spas," where people sit for minutes or hours in a high-radon atmosphere in the belief that low doses of radiation will invigorate or energize them.

Only major-ish issue I can see is the quad-core et al bits -- from what I've noticed a good chunk of their target audience tends toward older or weaker machines, which might lose them a bit of sales.

Any multithreaded program can run on any machine exactly the same. It's how your computer runs your OS at the same time it runs your 5 internet tabs and Minecraft all at the same time, even though you don't have half a dozen cores. The OS essentially does a scheduling thing, where it says to a thread: "Okay, your turn to run for X cycles" whereupon that thread either runs for that many cycles or it hits a 'sleep' command and ends its turn prematurely; at which point the OS tells the next process it has time to run, and so on. It's the same thing for multiple cores, except it has multiple things that can run processes at once. The process management of the OS takes care of everything, so it will run the same no matter the hardware without needing a change in the program's code.

[Bluerobin]

This interview is awesome. Their sense of humor really comes through, which is pretty interesting. Gotta give PC Gamer some credit too, apparently they have some good interviewer/transcriber/writer people.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Can you give me a sense of how much specializing I’ll be able to do within Clockwork? In Civ, for example, you can focus on religion. You can focus on science. You can build a great military. What do you see as those variations?

DB: I believe we have a list here…

DJ: We do have a list!

NV: A list?!

DB: We went through the types of players, people who like to explore, people who like to fight, people who like to build, people who like to optimize systems…

NV: God help me, the people who like to optimize systems.

DB: Or optimize logistics, like in German strategy games. Germans love logistics.

NV: You’re the only one in the entire company playing Dominions 3, David. Let he who is without sin cast the first spell.

[tootboot]

Any multithreaded program can run on any machine exactly the same. It's how your computer runs your OS at the same time it runs your 5 internet tabs and Minecraft all at the same time, even though you don't have half a dozen cores. The OS essentially does a scheduling thing, where it says to a thread: "Okay, your turn to run for X cycles" whereupon that thread either runs for that many cycles or it hits a 'sleep' command and ends its turn prematurely; at which point the OS tells the next process it has time to run, and so on. It's the same thing for multiple cores, except it has multiple things that can run processes at once. The process management of the OS takes care of everything, so it will run the same no matter the hardware without needing a change in the program's code.

It may run (assuming it doesn't check for the required cores before starting) but you're probably not going to be pleased with the results.  I'm assuming if they're looking at requiring a quad core they're actually going to use all 4 cores pretty heavily, otherwise there's no point in losing sales by setting high system requirements.

[Girlinhat]

The more I hear about the game, the more I'm convinced that the whole gameplay is going to be damage control mode.  Everything is trying to go wrong.  Your goal isn't to build up a thriving city.  Your entire goal is to make things go less wrong.  The little peoples will do things on their own, but as they do they go mad, and your whole job is to make them less mad.

I look forward to the obscene chaos.

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

Hey guys!  You will probably be able to limp along in single player or hotseat with the game on two cores.  Quad isn't really a necessity so much as it's a strong recommendation.  We don't have large enough simulations running in-house yet to know just how well different setups will play the game, so all of this is a bit speculative, but I'd suppose it will be difficult if not impossible to play multiplayer without 4 cores; Clockwork Empires really will just run better with more room to spread out the simulation.

In answer to why we beefed up our system requirements over Dredmor so significantly, aside from the fact that this type of game simulation is so hard on processors, we looked at massive hardware surveys (thanks Valve!) and projected the trend of quad cores out until our estimated release window of late 2013.  We found that most people will probably be running them, and the few that aren't will still have dual core machines.

[ScriptWolf]

Oh oh oh mr. Dev I have a question I have been dieing to ask.

You talk about madness and your scientists summoning demons and other horrible things,can we promote this and go down the path of madness and run a colony of cultist and have it be a feature and have it playable ?

I want to have a colony of mad scientists who have free reign on their research while I push them down a path of the occult


And will there be a alpha/beta maybe even a kickstart ? And can we buy into the beta like minecraft ?

[Levi]

Quad isn't really a necessity so much as it's a strong recommendation.

What if I've got a beast of a dual-core?    Although I suppose singleplayer is more where its at for me anyway. 

[Viken]

Thanks for posting into the discussion, Daniel. Its good to hear from devs who are actively interested in what their (possible) community is wondering about.  Other than that, the system requirements remind me alot of the more recent Anno games, which often require more processing power and cores than RAM, due ot the high level of simulation going on in the background.  I do hope you guys can find some way of optimizing the system so that it doesn't require totally high demands on the CPU, though.  Even I'm worried with my AMD x4 3.2Ghz core. 

[Girlinhat]

As usual, lower system requirements automatically means a larger possible audience.  But at the same time, at least you're allowing multi-core at all.  Seems too many of the "low requirement" games would run incredibly better on multi-core, Dwarf Fortress not the least of which.

Although at the end of the day, I'm running single core and I hate to see the trend of "the next game to come out is going to need a bigger system than the one right before it."  Yes, some people are going to be upgrading their systems, but I think most people are going to have the same computer that they had last year.

[Aklyon]

OY! GASLAMP PEOPLE! COME OUT OF LURKING! WE KNOW YOU'RE THERE, YOU REFERENCED US!

And then they did! Hello, Daniel!

[Sunday]

Ohmygodthislooksawesome. Like my perfect game (well. . .DF is basically my perfect game. . .and this is similar. . .so yeah. Day 1 purchase for me, assuming my computer can handle it).

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

You talk about madness and your scientists summoning demons and other horrible things,can we promote this and go down the path of madness and run a colony of cultist and have it be a feature and have it playable ?

I want to have a colony of mad scientists who have free reign on their research while I push them down a path of the occult

And will there be a alpha/beta maybe even a kickstart ? And can we buy into the beta like minecraft ?

It will be possible to play with a bunch of mad cultists, but the game is designed so that these influences are extremely unstable.  You will definitely be playing on hard mode, so to speak 

Regarding beta purchases, Kickstarter, and other mechanisms for fundraising: we don't like to receive money for anything other than a finished product.  There will of course be lots of testing though, and if you guys are interested we would love to have your input when we're at that point, but it will be a while.

Regarding the lower user base: yes.  It's really lame when you alienate players because they don't have beefy enough machines, and this happens with every game, including our software rendering in Dredmor, believe it or not (though obviously less so than CE).  We are tailoring the system requirements to the hardware that we think will be necessary for some of the features of the game which are core tenets of its design, which refreshingly have very little to do with the graphics.  In such a case, we can't lower the sys reqs without impacting our simulation layer, so that's where we set the bar.  We're doing everything we can to squeeze every last flop out of your CPU to make sure these requirements are as low as possible, but that will only get us so far.

I also want to mention that, as you guys have no doubt suspected, we are huge fans of Dwarf Fortress =)  We are really looking forward to contributing our own little piece to the story-centric colony builder genre.

(Hi!)