Bay 12 Games Forum

I didn't do a story log since time has been shorter lately, with all the extra email and Steam-adjacent work that's been floating about.  I saw that a few villain-led wars were started, but I didn't go through and investigate what was going on.  It's quite likely a ruler grudge, yeah, though whether that was due to past religious persecution or just because the villain was jealous over a lover or something, I didn't check, ha ha ha.

Clearly that means more wars, just based on the mechanics, but stuff like the upcoming alliances will be a counterbalance.  We'll see if scheming ex-lovers cause the end of civilization, I suppose, once I get my first zombie apocalypse rolling.  I do have to be careful in general, since a world gen that just ends all life on the planet is not exactly a playable world.  At least it shouldn't be the default!  And as with some of the other unbalanced parts of world gen, it might be the end state of all worlds now if necromantic secrets always arise; they just need to succeed one time, while the living need to win each war.  Will continue to test and ponder as we go.  But yeah, you might start more often in an atypical war now, due to the specific historical situation.

Hell yeah, thanks.

That's looking prety decent, but I feel the hills could use a bit more in-between hills to break it up a bit.

Also maybe a line of sand along the coastlines, unless toady's secretly working on coastline cliffs, which would be amazing.

Agree with both of these.
Maybe hills should get a tile backgrond colour that is slightly differently coloured from normal green grass. Or they should be touching each other like the mountains are.

(see for example, Orteil's NeverEnding Legacy)

I was just playing that some days ago. Here is what the map looks like there if anyone's curious:

It's all square tiles, but they blend into each other so well that you can barely notice it.

Edit:
Here is a fully scouted and explored world map from the game:

I think I'm most hyped about the ability to instigate wars between civs. Really hope that the player will be able to send out agents in fort mode with that goal.

Can you give a little example of a villain who instigated a war in your testing? What made him do it? A grudge with a ruler perhaps?
Because of this addition, will there be more wars in general than we have now or will it be balanced out in some way? Will it be possible (or more likely) that the player's fort starts out immediately at war with the humans for example?

Other questions:
It sorta came up before, but wasn't really addressed: Are there cavalry mercenary companies?
Also, when hist figs spend their funds to buy equipment, does that just mean items or can they also acquire pet animals or mounts?

... and I really like the part where people can escape.

Yeah, it will be pretty cool to read a random hist fig's legends and see they spent 10 years in someone's dungeon until they managed to escape. I think someone recently brought up Monte Cristo, too.

By the way, if anyone's interested, here's the list of changes in the villain update so far:
https://pastebin.com/gtMVUHDa

Bit of both?

Yeah, I agree. Though the latest Mayday mockup did already have a bit of that additional shading.
I also made a similar mockup some pages ago:

I just made a 5 second mockup of what the Mayday directional shading ramps would look like with an additional shading gradient:

I think this is the direction to go in.

I don't think this is going anywhere.

What exactly was negative about the directionless top-lit ramps? Did anyone misunderstand those; did anyone mis-read them as walls or confuse up with down?

We'll add the nice cyan/blue fog shading, and that's it. I even made a version that simply uses a shading overlay, without any new sprites. Mike I know you are putting a lot of work into the ramps, but I don't think they'll ever work with the directional shading, next to top-down terrain.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The problem with these directional-shading lacking ramps is that they don't look plastic enough. They look more like differently coloured, flat ground to me.

Kinda like this?

It does sorta make the inside corner tile look higher up than it actually is though.

Business is slow on the project forum for now, so I wanted to check your opinions on this solution:

Looks a lot better I think, but could you post mockups of single tile ramps?
I especially wonder what it would look like if the red tile here was the only ramp tile:

The Mayday ones look graphically fancier, but the Meph ones do solve this one problem I mentioned before:

I like the ramps a lot, but when you have them just on one side, then there isn't really much indication that you're looking at ramps:

I think the gradient from low to high could be more uniform though.

Current plan is to do hair/beard/skin for entities (dwarf, human, elf, goblin, kobold), equipped weapons/armor/shield (for everyone) and frankenstein FBs, Demons, Titans and Nightcreatures together (that will be a difficult one). Maybe equipped axe or pick for woodcutter and miners, since they are the only professions that requires tools to work.

One of the screenshots showed beakdogs with slightly different appearances. Are those not actually planned for the released game or are they an exception?

Some really interesting stuff here! How will items made of unusual materials be handled? E.g. artifact floodgates made of ruby? It seems a bit excessive to make sprites for every edge-case, but it would still be weird for them to have regular appearances when they're made of such an exotic material. Would applying some sort duocolor filter, with RGB values given in the raws work? For example, a "ruby floodgate" would look something like this:

I agree it would probably be best if there could just be a colour filter automatically applied to a thing's graphic sprite that depends on its raw file. Not sure how feasible this is code wise, but if modular sprites for proc gen'd creatures are feasible, then maybe this could be, too?