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[Nighthawk]

Real quick with Stamina and Falling: It's my opinion that you shouldn't regain Stamina during "flight". I figure Stam is usually regained when relaxing or not participating in much action. Hurtling towards the earth is far from relaxing, in my opinion. Maybe have Stam regen reduced while falling, or have stamina regenerate but have landing reduce stamina depending on the strength of the impact.

On the contrary, falling through the air provides (or should we say forces) more oxygen to your system. Definitely helpful for stamina regeneration!
Ah... no, but really. That was half a joke, and half serious. Falling, while not exactly relaxing, creates no stress upon your body (even less than standing since you don't have to hold yourself up) except the stress created by worry and fear.

Also, yes, Mark (Guy-who-made-URR  ), you can quote that bit I said about the menu. I would be honored.


EDIT - Kind of searching for secrets right now, but I don't know what qualifies. I found some funny text, though: "You suspect there will likely be far, far more information on this screen in later versions." I liked that.

[Neonivek]

Some birds can relax in the air while flying. It depends on their mode of flight.

[fred1248]

Will we be able to play as birds? 

[coolio678]

Real quick with Stamina and Falling: It's my opinion that you shouldn't regain Stamina during "flight". I figure Stam is usually regained when relaxing or not participating in much action. Hurtling towards the earth is far from relaxing, in my opinion. Maybe have Stam regen reduced while falling, or have stamina regenerate but have landing reduce stamina depending on the strength of the impact.

kind of as a knocking the wind out of you sort of thing?

[varsovie]

I think you removed the link to your blog (and download...) in your first post.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So URR it seems like you inadvertingly with your three stamina bars... created the three qualities of zombies.

Zombies that get unlimited 1 bar, unlimited 2 bars, or unlimited 3 bars.

Zombies as in... zombie zombies? No zombies in a non-fantasy game!

Real quick with Stamina and Falling: It's my opinion that you shouldn't regain Stamina during "flight". I figure Stam is usually regained when relaxing or not participating in much action. Hurtling towards the earth is far from relaxing, in my opinion. Maybe have Stam regen reduced while falling, or have stamina regenerate but have landing reduce stamina depending on the strength of the impact.

Whoops - you've just actually highlighted a glitch. Stamina was recharging according to each turn passed, not the length of that turn. Fixed it , though when fall damage is added, I will also add a loss of stamina when you land too.

On the contrary, falling through the air provides (or should we say forces) more oxygen to your system. Definitely helpful for stamina regeneration!
Ah... no, but really. That was half a joke, and half serious. Falling, while not exactly relaxing, creates no stress upon your body (even less than standing since you don't have to hold yourself up) except the stress created by worry and fear.

Also, yes, Mark (Guy-who-made-URR  ), you can quote that bit I said about the menu. I would be honored.

EDIT - Kind of searching for secrets right now, but I don't know what qualifies. I found some funny text, though: "You suspect there will likely be far, far more information on this screen in later versions." I liked that.

All good points - I think I'll just disable it whilst you fall, and leave it at that. I'll need to test that later along with a bunch of other stuff for 0.2.1.

Awesome - I'm not sure what context yet, but there are a few tremendously kind quotes I've had about this release I'd like to use somewhere.

Ah, the two secrets in question were actually the main menu picture generation, and the solar systems. HOWEVER, in the future, there will be other, much more well-hidden features I won't announce, which will have to be found out. There won't be any in 0.3 (history/myth gen etc) but there WILL in 1.0.0...

Some birds can relax in the air while flying. It depends on their mode of flight.

Will we be able to play as birds? 

Bird Mode is one of the 1.0.0 secrets, actually.

I think you removed the link to your blog (and download...) in your first post.

Whoops, thanks - added it back.

In the mean time, I've updated the development plan page! http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/development-plan-2/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

0.2.1 released! Bugfixes, resources map, .png exporting, a bunch of other nice little things.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/

[Leatra]

So, how's the development going?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So, how's the development going?

Very well! With 0.2.1 out, I'm now doing a lot of brainstorming and design work for the generation I want for 0.3.x. This week's (i.e. Monday's) blog entry is an in-depth list of all the changes I want for 0.3.x, but it's basically language, myth, history, civilizations, coats of arms and flags, all need to be generated! I'm also doing some advance work on dungeon/temple/tomb/ruin/etc generation for the first gameplay release coming straight after.

In the mean time, as 0.2.1 is stable (amazingly!), what does everyone think of the Exporting function? Made any particularly nice-looking worlds?

EDIT: once Monday's blog entry with the detailed goals go up, I'd love to know if people have ideas in any of the six areas, too!

[Leatra]

I got this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Reminds me of the map of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind

What are we going to face inside dungeons/temples/tombs/ruins? Also is there a short and general name for all these?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I got this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Reminds me of the map of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind

What are we going to face inside dungeons/temples/tombs/ruins? Also is there a short and general name for all these?

That is a fantastic-looking world! You're right, I see what you mean re: Morrowind, too.

Let's just call them all "dungeons" for the sake of ease. Well, there won't be any monsters, and other humans will be very, very rare, so finding ways to make them interesting is a major challenge I'm currently pondering. There will be a large variety of traps (not just one-square nethack/crawl things, but covering many squares, and of many different sorts), a lot of historical information in the dungeons, lots of murals and generated artwork, lots of treasure/loot of various types that can be accessed in different ways, bosses (though generally not "enemies", as such), and - maybe most centrally - I'm hoping to make the visuals of dungeons sufficiently interesting and sufficiently varied that they are simply interesting to explore in their own right. You will sometimes nevertheless bump into other adventurers, I think, or find a black market, a cult, or a couple of other ideas I've had too. But the graphics for dungeons I think will really matter, and I have some ideas of a kind of dungeon generator generator (as it were) that can create a vast amount of variety based on both visual and gameplay themes that different areas are going to have. Obviously I'll start producing screenshots and things nearer the time, but it's very much in the concepts phase at the moment.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Done this "academic working" nonsense for today - now doing the basics of language generation. Want to see if I can get something that looks nice by the end of the evening!

EDIT/update:

Not half bad. Got a lot of nicely distinct languages, and logical orders of letters/consonants/vowels. Some have connectors in, like ', -, or !, (click consonants), which add a nice bit of variety. I don't think I'm happy with them yet, but that's a surprising amount of progress for one evening. Also I've already implemented the way languages generate entire dictionaries bit-by-bit on the fly, so it will always produce a word for an english word without fail, and there will never be duplicates in the foreign language!

[varsovie]

. Also I've already implemented the way languages generate entire dictionaries bit-by-bit on the fly, so it will always produce a word for an english word without fail, and there will never be duplicates in the foreign language!

I'm concerned because: Lot of languages don't have the sames (number of) words. In Arabic you have lot of different words for different kind of sand, in English you must use adjectives, Inuits have more than ten word for Snow. In English you have a distinction between something you earn and something you win, will in French we use the same word for both. German have their "meta-f*ck*ing-huge-words that are in fact a butch of names/adjectives glued together. So how can you "create" languages while limiting yourself to the sames "words" than in one of them?

And I'm not even talking about some features languages haves that are different than in English, a third gender (neutral) or no gender at all, the agreement by gender, number or person. In German possessives determiners are gender and number sensitive by the possessor AND the possessed while in English it's by the possessor only, and finish actually sometime have them has an affix to the possessed.

And I'm not even talking about the alphabets (Chinese?), origin of the words, cultural links with the language, or the order of the words in a sentence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology).

So how "real" will you try to generate the languages and how will you deal with my concerns, the main one being I would rather have one language than a bunch of new word-by-word English.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I'm glad you've raised this question. I thought about this for a long time, and whilst you are obviously right - synonyms do not transfer perfectly, verb/noun/adjective/etc order differs, etc - I had to weigh two logics against each other.

Firstly, to make realistic languages, they would have to differ in this way. I could make them differ in word length (easy) but varying word order, whilst still preserving the meaning of the sentence, would be immensely hard without a way for the game to detect verbs/nouns etc, and then reorder them. Equally, you'd also have to have the generator detect possessives, cases, etc, and that would be damned difficult as well. However, I recognize you are right, and that this would be more realistic.

Secondly, to make languages the player could actually translate. According to your skills, who you talk to, what books you read, etc, your language knowledge will go up and you will be able to translate more words. However, I also want you to be able to make informed guesses at words, and test them out by checking it against a book, or talking to someone and using the word you think you've figured out. If you get it right, then that new word the player has actively worked out is added to your dictionary. If words are a 1:1 equivalent to English, that becomes doable - if they aren't, and orders differ, then unless one knows a lot about translation, it borders on the impossible.

*Crucially*, I don't think the difference between the two types of language will be noticeable to the player just looking at them, even someone who knows their linguistics. But, the second provides for far superior gameplay, I think, in that the player can actively figure out potential words. Obviously it's not 100% true to life, but not all alphabets in URR are Latin... but I'm not going to say anything else about that just yet . That adds a lot of variation, too, and some languages include 'connectors' like ', -, or !, which adds variety. I do intend to give different languages as well different preferences for the kind of English equivalents they'll use (basic words, obscure words?), whether they say long sentences or short sentences, which again will add distinctions between the languages. How does this sound? As I say, you are right, but I think gameplay/design need to be balanced carefully here, and I can't think of any other game that's ever tried something like this, and I do want it to be a workable part of gameplay, not just some... flair?

[Minstrel]

Man, this game looks so awesome and plays so nice... but there is so little to do currently. Can't wait until we can gather a motley crew of bandits to raid a village.