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[Robsoie]

Seeing those nice doors leading into buildings, and so many different buildings in all those screenshots, how are you going to handle interiors with so many diverses architecture ? some kind of random corridors/rooms or hand made interiors ?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Seeing those nice doors leading into buildings, and so many different buildings in all those screenshots, how are you going to handle interiors with so many diverses architecture ? some kind of random corridors/rooms or hand made interiors ?

Long story short: a combination of the two. Once 0.6 is out (hopefully before the end of Nov!) I'll be moving onto 0.7 which is all about interiors. Most of them will have a huge range of segments from which to build interiors, and also interior decoration and layouts will be determined by civilization, so you should be able to get a general sense of cohesiveness and aesthetic similarity from exploring each nation. Dungeons and non-settlement regions to explore will be handled differently and uniquely when we get to them, but yeah, a large database of rooms and corridors, and a large database of decoration, and then the combination of the two!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Good news, everyone: Ultima Ratio Regum's *full-time* development year starts December 5 (ish)! And it will be coded from this building.

[BlindKitty]

I must say that it looks absolutely amazing. And rather inspiring, too, so I think the development won't suffer too much.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I must say that it looks absolutely amazing. And rather inspiring, too, so I think the development won't suffer too much.

My thoughts exactly - I have a thing for nice architecture and I think there could be serious inspirational value here!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So, having located somewhere to live, the intention is to move on the 3rd/4th of December. We can therefore say my full-time development year will be starting on the 5th of December! More information nearer the time. I’ve also been planning my travels in this coming year and there are potentially a lot of places I’m going to be visiting to give talks (including this year’s roguelike conference, unless it ends up in North America), so more on those as and when – I’ve loved meeting fans in the past, so it would be awesome if anyone was based near some of the places I’ll be travelling to.

More immediately, I’ve redone market districts. The playtesting I’ve been doing has shown a serious issue in the navigation of market districts above all others – it was very unclear what the boundaries of the district were, it took a long time to find all the shops, there wasn’t much else to look at within the districts, and (quite simply) there were just too many damned shops. Here’s what they used to look like:



As you can see, there’s a huge number of shops (the normal buildings) and warehouses (the enclosed/walled buildings), but it’s not clear if you’d have missed one or not without exploring the entire district because they are so spread out. That means optimal gameplay within a market district is uncovering the entire thing rather than having some idea where to go for the shop you wanted, and that’s just not on. Instead, I decided to blend market districts with some of the housing districts, to create something like the version below. In this model (there’s naturally a large number of variations) the markets and warehouses that service them are placed in a pattern in the middle of the district. All the patterns make it very clear when you walk around them when you have “exhausted” the shops that district has, and also, this new contained version allows me to simply have fewer shops in a market district. They can now spawn with 7-10 shops (towns have only 1-3 shops, heavily biased towards 1 or 2), and always spawn with a currency exchange (the diamond building) and an auction house (the flattened cross building).



These both look a lot better, and more importantly, play a lot better. As above, there’s never uncertainty once you’ve seen every shop there is to see, and the smaller number will make the variations in shops between market districts much more significant, as in the past most districts contained most shops, which doesn’t really fit the scarcity gameplay mechanics one is used to from roguelikes. Alas, that’s everything for this week, but we’re only about a fortnight to the release of the colossal 0.6. There’s a couple more graphics I need to make, and then it’s just onto bug fixing. Stay tuned!

[Retropunch]

Great to hear the move has gone well!

As far as market districts, I think it's a really good design and very insightful planning on your part. One thing I've always worried about with URR is the difficulty in actually finding everything in such a vast world. Regardless of how amazing your ascii is (and it's incredible) there's still only a limited amount you can do compared to full 3d in terms of making things easy to navigate (you can't see things 'on the horizon' for instance).

However, at the risk of market districts looking a bit bare, I think they'd be better without housing (or just with a few as trader households) and perhaps more warehouses to fill the gaps. This would be a bit more realistic as cities do need large warehouse districts as well, and it'd make it a bit more focussed on just trading. Secondly, I find the warehouse designs a lot more striking and obvious than the shop designs. The shops just look like big houses (and could be mistaken as such), whereas the warehouses are quite unique. I really feel it'd be an improvement to design the shops slightly different, or perhaps just swapping them round might be enough?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Great to hear the move has gone well!

As far as market districts, I think it's a really good design and very insightful planning on your part. One thing I've always worried about with URR is the difficulty in actually finding everything in such a vast world. Regardless of how amazing your ascii is (and it's incredible) there's still only a limited amount you can do compared to full 3d in terms of making things easy to navigate (you can't see things 'on the horizon' for instance).

However, at the risk of market districts looking a bit bare, I think they'd be better without housing (or just with a few as trader households) and perhaps more warehouses to fill the gaps. This would be a bit more realistic as cities do need large warehouse districts as well, and it'd make it a bit more focussed on just trading. Secondly, I find the warehouse designs a lot more striking and obvious than the shop designs. The shops just look like big houses (and could be mistaken as such), whereas the warehouses are quite unique. I really feel it'd be an improvement to design the shops slightly different, or perhaps just swapping them round might be enough?

Excellent! Yeah, re: finding stuff, of course some of the methods - maps, talking to people, etc - are not in place yet, but i do want a high level of visual recognition and logical placement on buildings to aid with that. You raise a very interesting thought on shops though: I'll try a few different designs for the buildings, probably shaving off the corners. It would be a huge deal now to change the design of the shops due to how the patterns for the "market centers" are made, but I can certainly "reduce" the design by, say, hacking off the corners (though shops do have signs outside, the '?' symbol). I agree about enlarging warehouses though, I will enact this, though I think some housing is necessary - there aren't enough shops to merit enough warehouses to fill everything. Equally... I hope the containment of shops "within" the central patterns (there's several dozen) should help with distinguishing, and size. Hmm. Experimentation will begin!

[varsovie]

Good news, everyone: Ultima Ratio Regum's *full-time* development year starts December 5 (ish)! And it will be coded from this building.

A: You're an aristocrat and own a castle
B: You're an hobo living in a terminal

 

[Retropunch]

I'll try a few different designs for the buildings, probably shaving off the corners. It would be a huge deal now to change the design of the shops due to how the patterns for the "market centers" are made, but I can certainly "reduce" the design by, say, hacking off the corners (though shops do have signs outside, the '?' symbol).

I think this would be fine, just something to differentiate them from regular housing. 

I agree about enlarging warehouses though, I will enact this, though I think some housing is necessary - there aren't enough shops to merit enough warehouses to fill everything. Equally... I hope the containment of shops "within" the central patterns (there's several dozen) should help with distinguishing, and size. Hmm. Experimentation will begin!

I agree that there wouldn't be enough shops to fill all those warehouses themselves, but I was thinking that other buildings/entities around the city might also use those warehouses (sort of wholesale warehouses if you like). Maybe you'd need to rename it a 'trading district' but this could make it a more distinct area, and also allow for future mechanics involving warehouses and shipping; say if you wanted to ship something to another city, or store some items.

It just seems as though you'll have a lot of housing elsewhere and so there's no need to have another district full of housing when it could be made more distinct.

Just an idea anyway.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

A: You're an aristocrat and own a castle
B: You're an hobo living in a terminal

 

Somewhere in the middle!

I agree that there wouldn't be enough shops to fill all those warehouses themselves, but I was thinking that other buildings/entities around the city might also use those warehouses (sort of wholesale warehouses if you like). Maybe you'd need to rename it a 'trading district' but this could make it a more distinct area, and also allow for future mechanics involving warehouses and shipping; say if you wanted to ship something to another city, or store some items.

It just seems as though you'll have a lot of housing elsewhere and so there's no need to have another district full of housing when it could be made more distinct.

Just an idea anyway.

Chopped off the corners, definitely makes them distinct enough (though had to fiddle with a few of the possible districts to ensure there was enough room for the interior algorithm to place items correctly inside). Anyway, I quite like the idea of extra warehouses for non-essential items (food, clothing, whatever) that aren't direc-... heh, in the process of typing that sentence, I think I should add a possible clothing shop as well as armour shop, since distinct clothing styles are going to be A Thing. Anyway, to finish that sentence, warehouses for "general goods" does seem like a very logical addition, I'll throw them in around the edges, maybe. HOWEVER, your idea for being able to ship things around... raises some interesting questions about how inventory size/space/weight is going to work. And I don't know the answers yet. But I will this year!

Meanwhile, I'm finishing off the final few graphics - adapted the algorithm for generating hanging wooden shop signs to also make snazzy metal signs, such as for this mercenary guild:

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

*Early draft*, ignore inconsistent shading, but here are the 9 lookup images for a (slightly stylized) URR catapult, which is nearly the last graphic needed for 0.6:

[Nighthawk]

Woah.

At first I didn't believe that was ascii art. Crazy awesome.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Woah.

At first I didn't believe that was ascii art. Crazy awesome.

Ha, thanks .

[Reyn]

With some minor modifications it can turn into a battering ram.

The weird shading seems to be because the right part is mirroring the left part(probably). If I'm correct, and if you haven't thought of a workaround(and in case this is easily done), you could put the shading on another layer(which won't be mirrored, but copied instead).

Pretty cool.