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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I'm sure Yule get around to it... 

Actually outstanding

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week's update, cross-posted from my blog (www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk):

And thus, 2014 draws to an end. What did 2014 mean for URR, for my experience of making URR and everything that happened this year, and where does this mean this game and blog and all the rest of it will be going from here?

2014 began immediately after 0.4, my unwise attempt to introduce gameplay before the game was ready for it. Although I was reasonably happy with what you could do in Ziggurats, it lacked any real spark when the world was otherwise so empty, and I realized that it was time to finish off the worldbuilding before actually trying to add any more gameplay (only one release to go!). At this point I turned to fleshing out the detail of the world, and creating a space to interact with that should be every bit as dense, nuanced, and sometimes idiosyncratic, as the real world of a couple of hundred years ago.



From this work I released 0.5 in April, which gave us history generation, a vastly improved world map, religions, coats of arms and families, religion and civilization detail, and was the first release that took place after I finally figured out what the game was actually going to be about! I was very happy with this release, and a lot of people who had previously been sitting on the fence about whether or not I was ‘committed’ to finishing the game were persuaded at this point. Success!



This also pointed the way to the next release: making all these cities, towns, farms, settlements, fortresses and so on actually explorable, rather than just icons on the world map which told you “You can explore these in the next release!”. So, 0.6 began, and ended up being the longest release I’ve ever done, but also by far the largest. The amount of content in 0.6 is probably equal to, if not more than, all the other releases put before it (especially since 0.1/2/3, back in the day, were basically my attempts to figure out how to program a game whilst also programming a game, an approach which may have been a tad unwise). I committed to making every district unique, every fortress generate according to its own algorithm, and basically maximizing as best I could the length of time until players could/would become “used to” what they were seeing. This process isn’t finished yet, and 0.7 and 0.8 will both contribute heavily to this, but it’s a major development along the path of making URR as dense and varied a world as I want it to be.

Released a couple of weeks ago, 0.6 is the first release that I feel stands on its own, even as just a detailed ‘world simulator’ at this point. Although naturally the four planned releases for 2015 should be great and introduce some gameplay, I don’t feel the need right now to keep telling people “but just wait until the next version!” when they look at 0.6. It gives a good impression of the kind of world we’re dealing with, and something about the kind of game that’ll take place within it, and I’m very happy with that.



It was also during this year that I finally realized that Science and Technology Studies (STS), the field of my doctoral research of the last few years, was not where I wanted to be, and that game studies most definitely was. The first thing I ever did in this field was a presentation on the semiotics of roguelikes (which I am currently writing up into a full journal paper) which I gave at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, and the response to this (and my overall experience there) cemented for good my shift to game studies. As such, although right now I’m putting the final touches to my doctorate (submission mid-January, at long bloody last), all my other academic work is now on games. I’m incredibly happy that I’ve made this shift, that my early work has got such a positive response, and indeed that a number of people within game studies have shown an interest in URR themselves. I love the possibility of academic/creative crossover in my work, and we’ll have to see where this goes from here.

Lastly, you may notice a NEW BUTTON (www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/support) on the menu at the top of the blog. This is the first step towards redoing/reworking this website over the course of 2015, and is a response to the very generous comments from lots of people who want a way to directly support the game. That contains a link to a donation button, but more importantly, I note on that page that I would actually much prefer that people support the game by ‘spreading the word’ than direct monetary support (though I certainly do appreciate that immensely). So, if you like what’s going on at the moment, and what I’ve got planned for my year (roughly) of full-time development over 2015, please give it a look and see if you’d like to give me a hand spreading the word of this glorious Scientific Revolution world to every corner of the internet.

In the mean time, I hope everyone has a great new year – I’ll be back next weekend with a post about my plans for the coming year and, indeed, the coming five years, and then regular URRpdates and the odd game analysis piece will return to normal the week after that. See you then!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thanks to RockPaperShotgun for the "PC Games Of 2015: Those Wot Could Conceivably Be Good" mention!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/01/best-pc-games-of-2015/14/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

A semi-URR semi-personal post this week, with normal updates resuming next weekend:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/01/03/on-being-a-workaholic/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I've now started work on 0.7, beginning with some of the graphics and new objects. 0.7 is all about building interiors, so this means all the obvious stuff - tables, chairs, beds, etc - and the rather more obscure and intriguing stuff - altars, thrones, etc. To begin with this week I've focused on two components of this, primarily the "mundane" household/building items, and also the floor tiles for the more expensive and up-market buildings (upper class housing, cathedrals, parliaments, etc). I decided to start working on the aesthetics first before moving to too much coding, as I wanted to have a good image in my head of the world (and the variation in the world) that I want reflected throughout building interiors before I thought about their layout. As with everything else in the game, all civilizations should vary - now, admittedly there is only so much you can do to vary a chair, but I think I've done a pretty good job:



As well as these I've also done tables and beds, and various designs on those too, bearing in mind furniture items are not "to scale" (i.e. they are designed to take up the entire size of the lookup window regardless of their actual relative size). The more up-market the location the item spawns, the more elaborate the decoration, and the choice of wood colour is naturally based on the biome the furniture is found in:





I also want to take this entry to point out a certain... hidden aesthetic consistency within cities. I don't know if anyone will have spotted this - and it is becoming more pronounced in the next version - but I rather like this. If you've ever looked at the gatehouses in cities, you might notice that there are several different shapes:



In total there are five - squares, octagons, diamonds, circles (as best as possible with a tiled square grid), and crosses. Each civilization picks one at random. It's a minor additional detail, but then if you look at shop signs, you'll notice that those also have different shapes:



The observant player would then perhaps also notice that the floor tiles in cathedrals, parliaments or castles have a range of different patterns based on various shapes (and also their colouring is dependent on the flag of the nation in question):



Therefore, in each civilization, the shapes throughout the civilization are consistent throughout! In this case, octagonal:



That's just a minor thing, but I think helps with just a little extra distinguishing between civilizations. Now I've done a very good portion of the new graphics for this release already in just the first week of serious coding (perhaps a third of new graphics?), my next task is the challenging technical task of hacking down saving/loading times, and changing the game to saving the map in chunked sections within a folder on one's computer, rather than in chunked sections within a single massive file. It's a hefty change, and one of those which will either be weirdly trivial and only take me a day, or drag on for the week. We'll see. Coupled with this is creating the new infrastructure for building interiors which is going to be handled in the same way, and from 0.7 onwards saving/loading times are going to be reduced to a fraction of what they are now, and  they will no longer rise the more of the world you've saved (which it currently does - a serious oversight). Either way, next week I'll be talking about these technical changes in a (rare) semi-technical blog entry - see you then!

And... some strange altars have been popping up.

[Scoops Novel]

I... did not expect tables

[ventuswings]

Any plans for secrets within furnitures? Victorian furnitures came to my mind almost immediately.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I... did not expect tables

There's a lot of lovely indoors stuff coming, of which tables are but a taster!

Any plans for secrets within furnitures? Victorian furnitures came to my mind almost immediately.

I've actually been thinking a lot about this, and I'll probably make a longer post on this in the near future. I want to move further away from traditional RL hack-and-slash gameplay and add more "mystery"/detective-work gameplay - discovering the world's civilizations/religions/cultures/cults/cities/etc, and having to deduce things to get ahead, rather than just stab things - and I think building that into objects would be an interesting way to make the images more than just decoration, but there's obvious concerns. If, for instance, any object could have something hidden, then optimal gameplay becomes looking at everything, which would immediately get agonizing. I think the best balance is that only features which are already rare - religious altars, thrones, that kind of thing - can ever have secrets in them. This, I guess, ties into some slightly broader thoughts I've been having (again, a longer post when appropriate) but I 100% intend to integrate the graphics into the gameplay with information "hidden" in objects, but I'm just working out the exact best way to do it...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Today is THE DAY where I begin totally reworking saving/loading in URR to improve times by 80%+ and, in turn, reduce file size by maybe 50% or more. Zoidberg exploding slinky gif on standby.

[Nighthawk]

I think you mean combusting slinky. It doesn't quite explode.

Reduced file size sounds nice, though with (awesome) roguelike graphic assets size isn't exactly a huge concern.
An 80% loading/saving boost, however, sounds fantastic.

I'm sure any issue that pops up won't be nearly as catastrophic as your computer catching fire.
... If it does, though, make sure you get a video of it.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I think you mean combusting slinky. It doesn't quite explode.

Reduced file size sounds nice, though with (awesome) roguelike graphic assets size isn't exactly a huge concern.
An 80% loading/saving boost, however, sounds fantastic.

I'm sure any issue that pops up won't be nearly as catastrophic as your computer catching fire.
... If it does, though, make sure you get a video of it.

Ah, yes, THAT'S TRUE! Amazingly few issues actually popped up; what I thought was going to be the hardest part of the thing turned out easy, then what I expected to be reasonably mundane stuff is taking longer than expected...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Now that's what I call progress! Updated the saving/loading system, now equally fast no matter how much of the world is generated; got the game handling/saving/loading all building interiors, generating them when needed, and storing them; and, best of all, got the interiors of religious buildings generating and I can walk in and out of the door and the game can handle any arbitrary input of door ID, building type, and generate something appropriate Or at least, the early stages of that are in place, and now all that needs doing is scaling it up to every type of building. Details in tomorrow's blog entry!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve been working on two things – improving saving and loading, and beginning work on the technical aspects of handling interiors, keys, doors, multiple floors, and a million other things intricately related to interiors and handling all the appropriate amounts of data. Firstly I’ve made a major change to how the game is saved. Until now each work was stored in a single huge file – “World1″, “World2″, etc – which meant that each time a particular chunk had to be saved or loaded, that huge file had to be opened, examined, and shut. So, rather than a single massive monolithic save file which gets larger and larger with each area you explore, and therefore the computational load of opening and closing that file each game gets larger and larger, I instead present you with a new data folder:



Each file is for the coordinates shown (obviously) and contains both the outside map grid, and any buildings that have been generated within that grid. Therefore, that is all that needs loading and saving each time you move between grids, rather than adding something to the massive older file. This has made the initial loading times for the game low, but as more and more areas are generated, it never gets slower! There’s also a code in each of these files to ensure it relates to the correct game instance, to ensure no crafty people switch around the save files to advantage themselves…

This is the first of three stages to the game’s optimization. The second stage involves changing how each individual tile is stored. Currently, every tile has its full set of colours – dawn, dusk, night, in player’s sight, out of player’s sight, etc – stored in every instance. This is horrifyingly inefficient. Instead, it needs changing to numbers that refers to where in the colour database the appropriate colours are found, and which doesn’t save/load them every time. In turn, the third stage is to adapt the rendering code to reflect this. I’ll probably be working on that in the next week alongside more general interior work. As with this first optimization, I expect this to take some time, but if we’re lucky it’ll be just as simple as the file/folder change was! And should hack the size of each save file down by… 40%? Maybe more? We’ll see.

SECONDLY, I’ve started work on interiors. Naturally I want interiors to be as complex and as varied as the external world; you should have to walk around for a long time before you see things “repeating”, and the interiors should be heavily dependent upon civilizations, religions, factions, geography, etc. I decided to start with religious buildings. Just as each one is distinct on the outside and the layout is procedurally generated… so too (as I’m sure you’ve come to expect from me by now) is the inside. The inside is naturally broadly consistent across all religious buildings from a certain religion, but each interior across religions is highly distinct. Some may contain statues, some may not; they’ll have different layouts of things like tables and chairs, *very* different altars (see next week’s update, maybe?), different places for offerings, naturally different NPCs, and also different secrets (if any). So, a religious building from the outside:



And on the inside (early days, don’t be too judgemental!) with some chairs (the backwards ‘t’), tables (the tall ‘pi’ symbols), doors within the building and leading outside, statues (in each of the ‘wings’), an altar (purple in this casee) and a staircase leading to the second floor…



…where we find a corridor running around the outside of the building, and two more stairs leading up to the top floor… but we’ll have to keep that one secret for now.



My intention for the remainder of this week is to finish off all possible variations of religious building interiors, which should yield something in the high tens of thousands of possible interior layouts! I’m also having to plan ahead to think about what kinds of secrets should be potentially spawning in these buildings, and how they should be accessed if so, so that’s also influencing the development process. I might also try to finish off all the altar graphics this week; the variation I have so far is amazing, and I think you guys will love them when I unveil them (either next week, or the week after). And that’s all for now!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

PROCEDURAL HERESY GENERATION:

"Church of the Common Canonization", who believe worthy peasants should be elevated to sainthood.

"The Aron Dualism Heresy", who believe the god "Aron" is actually two gods, one good, one evil.

"Preachers from the Poor", who believe that the Theocracy of Hijjim has become bloated with wealth, and should distribute its money to those in slums and lower-class districts.

...and so on and so forth...

[Nighthawk]

I do hope there is the possibility of generating an "Armok" deity in game...