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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I find that losing focus is tough for me (with everything, both academic work and game dev) - I need to put myself in situations where there is nothing which can possibly interrupt me, then I'll work like mad for hours. With that said, I take your point about asking vs experimenting - but I've found, and I think this is due to how i learned to code, that I actually find explanations of programming methods very hard to understand terminologically, and experimenting makes me feel more liked I've "learned" something afterwards, too!

---------

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!

[bluwolfie]

PTW

[Scoops Novel]

I like. Seeing as you've got all the pieces separately, do you plan on showing full-body images of NPC's bedecked in all their gear? As for crowds, what do you think of showing a band pic of a posse, or a random selection of city faces to get a feel for the place?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

PTW

A wise choice you will not regret.

I like. Seeing as you've got all the pieces separately, do you plan on showing full-body images of NPC's bedecked in all their gear? As for crowds, what do you think of showing a band pic of a posse, or a random selection of city faces to get a feel for the place?

No - for reasons of size/scale, things are generated at different scales, ASCII/ANSI obviously can't then really be "scaled" well. What kind of thing do you have in mind for showing a selection of faces? My thinking is that upon encountering a new nation and looking at/talking to the people, the player should get a decent impression just from that (and from seeing the crowd move and noting what types of NPCs actually spawn in that crowd)

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

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!

[Scoops Novel]

What kind of thing do you have in mind for showing a selection of faces? My thinking is that upon encountering a new nation and looking at/talking to the people, the player should get a decent impression just from that (and from seeing the crowd move and noting what types of NPCs actually spawn in that crowd)

Sure. Still saves time to have a "faces in the crowd" popup vs "looking" at 4 or so people. Messages picking out trends (or the lack of them) in the crowd like "you notice a lot of boots covered in sea shells" could hint at wealth, religion, ghetto's, etc.

[guessingo]

It sounds like all the development is about building this incredible game world...what is the game going to be in the world?

[High tyrol]

Ptw

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

What kind of thing do you have in mind for showing a selection of faces? My thinking is that upon encountering a new nation and looking at/talking to the people, the player should get a decent impression just from that (and from seeing the crowd move and noting what types of NPCs actually spawn in that crowd)

Sure. Still saves time to have a "faces in the crowd" popup vs "looking" at 4 or so people. Messages picking out trends (or the lack of them) in the crowd like "you notice a lot of boots covered in sea shells" could hint at wealth, religion, ghetto's, etc.

Ah, I understand. Hmm. I don't think I'll do the pop-up idea, but the ambient messages idea is something I've definitely been intending to do once inside buildings, and I may well apply that to "the crowd" at large.

It sounds like all the development is about building this incredible game world...what is the game going to be in the world?

By the end of the next 12 months this will be very clear, but the best answer I've given is this one, which I will now copy/paste in. Basically, the game is going to be about information. You are seeking to locate a very small number of items scattered around the world; to do so, the more the player understands the world, the easier this task will be. This means conversing with NPCs, examining books, coming to learn about the cultures/religions of that world, the history of various nations, exploring and gaining access to buildings, and plotting your path around the world map to "track down" these items. It's almost a... research game, one could call it? The world is insanely detailed (and only becoming more so with every release), and it's the close examination of the world and figuring out the paths these artefacts have taken, and who may possess them now, which will be key to success! But for this to work, the world must be in place first, hence the worldbuilding focus up to this point...

Ptw

 

[DwarfOfTheLand]

Wow, it's grown a lot since the early days. Keep it up man, I hope it turns out awesome!

[Retropunch]

As always - fantastic!

Just a quick question - can you (l)ook or (e)xamine npc's to tell what they're doing? Such as viewing a painting or praying or whatever?
 

[Azazass]

The level of details of this game, it's simply amazing.

Best of luck in your development of Ultima Ratio Regum.

[Piotrhabera]

Will the super mega detailed and amazing prayer carpet be in my own home if I or my family are pious worshippers of a god? I'd like to have such an amazing prayer carpet besides my bed for foresleep prayers of dream safety

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Wow, it's grown a lot since the early days. Keep it up man, I hope it turns out awesome!

Thank you!

As always - fantastic!

Just a quick question - can you (l)ook or (e)xamine npc's to tell what they're doing? Such as viewing a painting or praying or whatever?

Thanks! Yes, that is the plan; now quite sure how best to do it though, given the existing NPC look-up windows. Possibly it'll be a message at the bottom instead when you look at somebody, though I don't like splitting it up between lookup and the message. So I'll try and fit it in the lookup, maybe below the nickname list etc, and make sure that list can't be so long? Alternatively, if I decide to go the bold route and have no combat whatsoever, then I can remove all the "damage" counters for clothing, and that'll free up tons of room!

The level of details of this game, it's simply amazing.

Best of luck in your development of Ultima Ratio Regum.

Well thank you kindly .

Will the super mega detailed and amazing prayer carpet be in my own home if I or my family are pious worshippers of a god? I'd like to have such an amazing prayer carpet besides my bed for foresleep prayers of dream safety

Ha, glad you like it - yes indeed, they will certainly spawn in appropriate houses instead of chairs (or as well as chairs if there's room for both)!

[guessingo]

It sounds like all the development is about building this incredible game world...what is the game going to be in the world?

By the end of the next 12 months this will be very clear, but the best answer I've given is this one, which I will now copy/paste in. Basically, the game is going to be about information. You are seeking to locate a very small number of items scattered around the world; to do so, the more the player understands the world, the easier this task will be. This means conversing with NPCs, examining books, coming to learn about the cultures/religions of that world, the history of various nations, exploring and gaining access to buildings, and plotting your path around the world map to "track down" these items. It's almost a... research game, one could call it? The world is insanely detailed (and only becoming more so with every release), and it's the close examination of the world and figuring out the paths these artefacts have taken, and who may possess them now, which will be key to success! But for this to work, the world must be in place first, hence the worldbuilding focus up to this point...

so its going to be an RPG and not a world simulator like Dwarf Fortress?