Bay 12 Games Forum

Once again blown away by how sleek and beautiful URR is compared to most ascii games out there

Ty, ty

Thanks! As I say, I'm really crunching to get everything-but-conversations for this release done before the end of the year, as with this being such a big release I think it's really important to keep showing major progress over the long timespan we're talking (one month for everything else, then maybe three months for the conversation system?). Things are definitely moving along nicely though...

Before I started work on anything important-NPC-related this week, I came to release that I had stacked up a rather worryingly massive list of small bugs, issues, errors to fix, and so forth, which I should really try to round off before developing new, and which I should test extensively to make sure everything is currently stable before I start adding the next section (getting important NPCs to respond to their schedules when spawned near the player, as well as when physically abstracted out). So this week has been a blitz of smaller jobs, and here’s a brief list of some of the changes, bug-fixes, and refinements, some of which are slightly more significant than others and might get slightly more mention in a later entry. Firstly, the actually new stuff, and then the fixes and improvements.

New Stuff

Firstly, in nations with the vassalage ideology, we will now find that towns no longer contain town halls, but instead contain manors, each of which belongs to a specific noble family which rules that town and its surrounding area. These are naturally different in shapes according to the nation, and have some pleasant gardens surrounding them akin to (but smaller than) the gardens in upper class districts. These have three floors just like their larger kin, and now all generate correctly across all three floors. Also, you’ll note that they have clear gardens but they can be a little tricky to see when the colour match – once I redo plant generation and ensure visual variation across the world, this should be much clearer (and the same goes for all other buildings with clear “garden” areas. Here are some examples with the exterior on the left, then the floors from highest (with bedroom) to lowest (for servants/slaves):


Next up, delegates now have identified houses in all possible map grids. What I mean this is that whether a delegate in a democratic nation represents a city district, or a town, or a monastery, or whatever, they will now always have somewhere appropriate to spawn and to live. These are generally houses that stand out from the rest, but are not ordinarily of a higher status than “middle-class” (of the sort shown below). In an upper-class district they get upper-class homes, but everywhere else special middle-class houses will spawn. The one shown below is in a city centre with the “cross” aesthetic preference, and three delegates from the district. I recognize this looks a little artificial, but I’m content with how they look here (given that delegates in various democratic nations in the real world are naturally given special statuses of various sorts). Similarly, everywhere else, houses of this size that stand out will belong to a delegate.


There are now a suitable number of priests in each cathedral, and they know that they sleep there, and so when we move onto getting NPCs to physically follow their abstract schedules (the next major task), they will be able to retreat to their quarters at night when appropriate. The number of priests in the cathedral varies per cathedral, but they will always be found moving around the space and talking to others, or worshiping at the altars, or working at a table, and so forth.


Town halls also now have an interior, and some quarters where the mayor lives (I decided to combine those two roles into one), but as above, in vassalage-y nations there is no town hall and towns are instead ruled by a noble from their manor. Here are a couple of town hall interiors (they are all this kind of “star” shape, since I try to make every building a noteworthy and distinctive shape, and those happen to be a shape I haven’t really used anywhere else yet, and certainly not in towns). The rooms on the ground floors with tables will be where town records spawn once I’ve implemented books/scrolls/tablets/etc.


Training areas now spawn in city centre districts in nations which enjoy gladiatorial combat. This will be the standard “work location” for gladiators on days when there are no fights, and you’ll be able to watch them sparring once weapons get introduced. For the time being I’ll give them the same “meandering” code as NPCs get when they look around memorials or art galleries and the like. Doesn’t look super-exciting right now, I realize, but once it has gladiators training (and maybe things like training dummies?) it’ll be rather more noticeable. The shape of the layout is, of course, determined by the nation’s aesthetic preferences.


Improved/Fixed/Resolved Stuff

- Prevented market districts from spawning too many shops in nations with “forced shops” in their ideological preferences.
- Dealt with a bunch of issues involving sand, snow and ice terrain behaving oddly when certain structures are placed on them (since these are handled differently to “ordinary” land).
- Dealt with an interesting scheduling bug where monks really, really hated tending their vegetable gardens.
- Fixed an issue where guards for inside and outside mints became confused about their roles.
- Increased the colour contrast on prayer mats for certain religions to make them less painful to look at.
- Fixed a weird bug with segments being taken out of corner towers in certain districts.
- Fixed an issue with important guards (which is to say, all guards) not being corrected abstracted and returned when the player leaves their map grid.
- Random crowd NPCs will no longer go into a house that has been assigned as somebody’s home.
- Jailers, Mercenaries, Prisoners, Merchants, Innkeeps and other classes of NPC who generally wander around a given room/floor for most of their ordinary day no longer make a mad sprint for the exit the moment they spawn.
- The roads surrounding barracks, military bases and mansions do not override existing walls when spawned.
- Crowd NPCs in towns with foreign communities now only go into the appropriate houses from their culture when returning “home”, and NPCs from the other civilization present actually spawn and go about their day.
- Jail offices now contain, y’know… office stuff. Chairs and so forth.
- Roads in snow/ice/desert towns no longer sometimes appear at a strangely low z level.
- Towns in snow/ice with at least one edge of water no longer have edges that look strange and flat.
- The inside of monasteries always resembles the exterior, and are therefore no longer sometimes somewhat akin to the TARDIS.
- Houses in middle-class districts can no longer spawn, somewhat incongruously, in the middle of parks.
- Fortresses can no longer spawn on adjacent tiles to towns (I’ve only ever seen this ONCE, and should have been impossible already, but it is now doubly impossible).
- Fountains no longer look like delegates when they’re downhill. No, I don’t understand either.
- The quantum scheduling system no longer causes a crash at map edges.
- Fixed an issue that encouraged NPCs to run in circles in a particular form of middle-class district.
- The sex of NPCs is now chosen before they ever spawn – this allows them to spawn according to cultural preferences (only female priests, only male rulers, either in army, etc) and for people to talk about them with correct pronouns.
- Ensured that smaller upper class houses work again – since implementing something that assigns houses directly to families they had been riddled with bugs.
- Leaves are no longer made out water when they hang over tiles of water…

Next Week’s Stuff

At this point I’d say we’re at around… 80% completion on *everything* to do with NPCs and their AI behaviours (for now). We have crowds spawning, crowds pathfinding in every possible area, crowd demographics for nations and cultures, crowds entering/leaving buildings appropriately, important NPCs being spawned, important NPCs being tracked in the abstract, important NPCs being spawned when the player steps onto the appropriate map grid. All that remains is 1) to get important NPCs, when spawned, acting the same way they do when abstracted out, and therefore moving correctly around the physical maps, and 2) to add in the remaining important NPCs who don’t currently spawn (executioners, chiefs, and the like). Then I need to finish off the remaining clothing types (some of the lower-class clothing, and then all the clothing for nomadic/tribal nations), and finish adding in all the new ideological variation between nations, and then it will be onto castle generation and the conversation system! It’s hard to say what order this will be done in. Finishing off scheduled NPC movement is a very technical task and I like to leave myself clear periods of a day or two to work on that kind of thing – but I’m full-time employed now and I’m busy next weekend and the weekend after. As such, I’m probably going to focus on Everything Else for the next fortnight or so, and then come back to NPC scheduling to finish off the calendar year with. Therefore, I would guess that next week we’ll have my continued purging of the bugs and glitches I’ve stacked up (since only around 50% of the issues on the list have been resolved this week) and work on clothes, castles, or both. See you all then!

For this week's blog update I did a write-up of the ProcJam opening talks, and normal URRpdates will resume next week...

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/11/08/procjam-2015-report/

Amazing progress so far! I'm still watching this intently.

Thanks! This release is getting bigger and bigger, but it's going to be damned exciting to be in the game world once it's done.

This is now the fifth post in a row about handling the game’s important NPCs who need to be tracked in the abstract even when the player is nowhere nearby, and need to spawn when the player is nearby, and need to move appropriately when the player leaves map grids, enters them, and does anything else. In the last week I’ve coded it so that the game will correctly match up physically-spawned NPCs with their abstract “copies”, making sure that the right NPCs spawn in the right places; towns in nations with the “isolationist” policy now spawn with town walls, whichI think are *really* excellent and I’m very pleased with how they turned out; towns in internationalist nations also now reflect this preference; I’ve enabled the game’s ability to distribute important NPC information to a small number of a larger group of NPCs (if you read on it’ll be apparent what this means); NPC homes are now identified specifically when the player generates the map grid they live on and I’ve ensured that all abstract schedules now work correctly. In all honesty this is more of an “important NPCs and other stuff” update, but nevertheless there has been enough NPC progress to merit continuing the title. So: read on!

Matching Up NPCs

Now when any important NPC spawns, the game correctly matches them up with their abstract version. In some cases this can be slightly more complex than usual – for instance when spawning a priest in a map grid with a whole bunch of priests, it needs to spawn the right priest, or when spawning a merchant in a market district it needs to correctly choose the merchant who sells the particular type of goods in question (who will be stored in the game’s abstract information, so that they can be referenced at any point even if they haven’t yet been spawned). I know I’ve mentioned this several times in past entries, but I think this time it is *actually* full implemented, at last. There are some classes of NPC who do not yet spawn physically and therefore cannot yet be matched up to their abstract counterparts – for instance lords of towns in vassalage nations, or delegates for parliamentary nations (since I haven’t yet worked out where the heck they live!), but the system can be easily expanded to those when the time comes.

Town Walls and Diasporic Communities

In keeping with my plans to ensure that all ideologies have actual physical effects (akin, this is a blog post in its own right, which will probably appear in the next few weeks) I’ve added in the code for placing walls around the towns which exist in isolationist nations. Depending on the aesthetic preference of each nation – the standard square, circle, octagon, diamond, cross I’m going with at the moment – town walls generate according to a slightly different algorithm, and look quite different once constructed. Here are illustrative examples for each shape (square, diamond, octagon, cross, circle). At some point these will likely gain guards at the gates at the outside, either to check who turns up, or perhaps to charge those wishing to enter depending on economic policies…



Additionally, “Internationalist” civs have the reverse of this, and all of their towns contain what I’m calling diasporic communities. When such a town spawns the game will look for the nearest nation to that town’s nation which the nation actually has diplomatic ties with (so no nations they’re hostile with, and no tribal nations) and will then spawn a few of the houses (and some of the crowd) from that nation instead. Here’s an example of a town which had a community from another feudal nation, but sometimes they might even have a nomadic community living there, which would merit a different brick tile as well as brick colour:





(You’ll see some new shapes and things in the latter picture, which are the new “Barracks” and “Military Base” structures for various ideologies, with (of course) an appropriate shape for the nation in question). I am of course fully aware that this two-colour system is not how these things would look in the real world, but again, recognition/visuals/gameplay > realism in this case, since I want it to be very visually apparent that you’re living in a more varied town than normal. As above, all of this is part of the background objective of this release, which is making the world’s nations even more varied by completely reworking the ideology system. More on this later!

Prisoners, Farmers, Monks, and so forth

There is a particular category of NPCs where you have a number of the same kind of NPC in a grid, but only some of them are “important” and therefore need to be tracked. As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, a jail might have 80 prisoners, but only 3 of them might be particularly important. The game can now distribute the importance to a random three prisoners, whilst also storing the remaining 77 so that the player cannot leave, return, see which prisoners have “respawned” and thereby deduce which matter and which do not.



All Abstract Schedules Work

This is a small but crucial point – I’ve now confirmed that all abstract schedules work correctly for all important NPCs, and that when the game starts (now fixed to exactly midday on Jan 1st, 1700) they all start off doing the correct job they should be doing. Whether an NPC moves from tile to tile, or always stays within the same map tile, and whether they are exchanging guard duties, tending to vegetable gardens in monasteries, ruling a nation or shopkeeping, all schedules now (as far as I can tell, and with 2000+ important NPCs per world gen, this is tricky) seem to work perfectly. I haven’t had a crash in a long time, and I can look at the important NPCs sitting on any map grid and they all always appear to be doing the correct thing. It is of course possible there’s a bug hidden in here somewhere, but I’m actually feeling very confident about it now. This is a major step towards next week’s objectives (see below) and it feels really good to have it all functioning correctly. I’ve also worked hard on optimizing the time it takes for abstract NPCs to take their moves, particularly when the player is fast-travelling, though this inevitably takes a bit of time; but since the laptop I program on is ancient and garbage, and players won’t be fast-travelling during gameplay anywhere near as often as I’m doing it in testing, I think a tiny pause per step is acceptable (though I will still continue to improve it).

Home Doors

Now, when the player generates any map grid, the game looks over all the important NPCs stored by the game, notes those which have their homex/homey variables on this map tile, then looks over what kind of door they should be living behind – a standard house, a castle, a church, and so forth – and then finds an appropriate door on that map grid and makes that their home door. For buildings with multiple doors (cathedrals etc) it stores all doors in a list of “home doors” rather than just the one. For some NPC types this hasn’t yet been completely handled – inquisitors, sailors and explorers will probably lack any home tile, I’m not yet sure where exactly certain NPCs will spawn and act (e.g. blacksmiths), and so on – but the overwhelming majority now get a set of door tiles attached to them. This also means that once such doors have been assigned, random crowd NPCs will never go through that door. Again, we continue to build towards next week’s objective (see below) of getting all the important NPCs to always act correctly “in person”, as well as in the “abstract”.

Next Week

My plans for the coming week are to begin work on the most challenging part of all: getting spawned NPCs (i.e. those the player can physically see on their map tile) to act according to their abstract behaviours and schedules. This is a huge one, and it will likely take more than a week for the entire thing, but I hope to have significant progress to show in seven days. I’m also probably going to slowly continue work on things like castles and ideologies in the background, and continuing to add to town variation (I need to get manors spawning for “vassalage” nations, and military bases for “standing army” nations, for example), but ensuring identical behaviour for spawned/unspawned NPCs is the core goal for the next couple of weeks. See you then!

Quote from: Ultima Ratio Regum on October 25, 2015, 04:15:43 pm

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Oceanroutes.png

One way to make your ocean routes look a little more realistic would be to weight the deeper parts of it as more expensive to travel through for the purposes of ocean crossing. This will have ships hug the coast a little more realistically until they're ready to cross at nearer points.

This is a nice thought - I'll do that!

That tiny channel with all those sea trade routes going through would make a pirate salivate...

Ha, you said it!