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Author Topic: Outer Colony  (Read 64454 times)

ollobrains

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #105 on: September 13, 2017, 05:48:11 am »

proper filters would reduce some of the tracking rage (or a seperate window with the last 100 events)
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ollobrains

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #106 on: September 16, 2017, 10:42:48 pm »

anyone else playing this ? ive been progressing here and there, waiting for the rimworld a18 update as well
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Asgarus

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #107 on: September 17, 2017, 12:51:22 pm »

Not right now. I guess I will make a new colony once the colonist management is a bit less of a burden. :P
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Paul

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #108 on: September 17, 2017, 11:08:20 pm »

Played around with it a bit.

Is it just me, or do workers randomly decide to skip a whole day or more of work to produce virtual media? Even when not assigned the job and with zero skill in writing?

I have a ton of data terminals and all my workers are constantly playing with writing virtual media instead of harvesting crops and producing stuff. One couple has been waiting for days to get a bed in their new house because both my consumer goods manufacturer guys are writing virtual media instead,

Work orders seem horribly inefficient too. I can't seem to find a way to differentiate food vs other raw materials. My food station is 1 step from the food stockpile, but all the meat and crops get brought to the materials one. Ordered 100 grennage rolls, the guy walks back and forth twice each time to grab small stacks of meat and grennage. Then produces one roll and does it again. Then another worker runs way across to pick up the single grennage roll and drops it, then runs back to the social area, then comes all the way back to grab another one.


... was just watching one of my workers. He finally finished producing virtual media, went and got materials to make a bed, started work on it, then decided it was leisure time. Then he ran around socializing and such a bit, then started producing more virtual media.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2017, 11:16:21 pm by Paul »
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VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #109 on: September 18, 2017, 08:55:33 pm »

Not right now. I guess I will make a new colony once the colonist management is a bit less of a burden. :P

I had a monster week at work last week, but this is the next feature I hope to tackle. I'm aiming to work on this a lot this weekend, and it'll probably be the last significant feature I take on before shifting my focus onto improving the isometric rendering framework.

And you're completely right, Paul - the workers are far too willful right now in blowing off orders, and it makes for a more frustrating gameplay experience than it should be. A lot of this comes down to tweaking numbers in how they weigh their goal selection options. One of the downsides of the way that the AI is designed is that it can be hard to get it to achieve a *specific* thing, and that makes it a little bit challenging from a game design standpoint.

Huge thanks for your continued testing too, ollobrains! I'm adding an improved event viewing interface to my stack of feature requests. That is another essential addition.

I appreciate everyone's patience here, and I'm sorry again for being so slow in hammering these fixes and features out!
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Asgarus

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #110 on: September 19, 2017, 03:58:18 am »

Don't worry ;) Most of us have jobs, we know it can be rather time-consuming at times.
Take as much time as you need.
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ollobrains

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #111 on: September 20, 2017, 07:20:10 pm »

Not right now. I guess I will make a new colony once the colonist management is a bit less of a burden. :P

I had a monster week at work last week, but this is the next feature I hope to tackle. I'm aiming to work on this a lot this weekend, and it'll probably be the last significant feature I take on before shifting my focus onto improving the isometric rendering framework.

And you're completely right, Paul - the workers are far too willful right now in blowing off orders, and it makes for a more frustrating gameplay experience than it should be. A lot of this comes down to tweaking numbers in how they weigh their goal selection options. One of the downsides of the way that the AI is designed is that it can be hard to get it to achieve a *specific* thing, and that makes it a little bit challenging from a game design standpoint.

Huge thanks for your continued testing too, ollobrains! I'm adding an improved event viewing interface to my stack of feature requests. That is another essential addition.

I appreciate everyone's patience here, and I'm sorry again for being so slow in hammering these fixes and features out!

nope thanks for making a good deep game, no rush on getting it going, real life first, enjoyable in its current state and will continue to test as each new update comes out
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Paxiecrunchle

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #112 on: September 22, 2017, 12:46:43 am »

So you said this was inspired by sim earth? You mean the graphics? Otherwise I see fairly little relationship?

VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #113 on: September 24, 2017, 08:11:21 pm »

Hi, guys, just a quick update this weekend! I had some free time last night to start properly working on the general colonist management interfaces. Some of the screenshots of Dwarf Therapist look tremendous, so much of my functional design draws on that. This is extremely early look at what I'm doing, but I've built a primordial version of an activity management screen:



You can flip on and off activities here for all your colonists' work shifts. Right now, turning the activities on will just set them at the default priority, but I'm going to make it so that you can specify priorities from this screen, too. I also have a plan for it to provide color-coded recommendations for which colonists should do what. Finally, if you don't want to manage any of it, I'll include a button that'll auto-optimize everything, just like the minister of labor does when he works. When you hit the button, everyone's activities and priorities will be algorithmically optimized.

I would've liked to have gotten further this weekend, but my girlfriend had a meltdown today about not spending enough time with her. My Sunday was spent shopping for autumn house decorations. A wreath was purchased. Disaster averted. Hopefully I'll get further along with this during the nights this week.

So you said this was inspired by sim earth? You mean the graphics? Otherwise I see fairly little relationship?

You're certainly right that the gameplay in SimEarth is quite different from Outer Colony! The inspiration I've drawn from it is much more conceptual. When I played SimEarth as a kid, it was really the first software I ever saw that attempted to comprehensively model a world. It just made me think about computer programs in a different way, and that's how it helped inspire Outer Colony. It might've even helped prompt my career as a software engineer. SimEarth and Will Wright's ideas were decades ahead of their time, and I think it's one of the most underrated games out there.

With any luck, I'll be able to post more screenshots of an improved colonist management interface next weekend. I'm hoping to have the update ready within a few weeks, and I really hope it makes the mechanics of playing Outer Colony much easier.
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se5a

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #114 on: September 24, 2017, 09:27:04 pm »

Rimworld has a similar thing where you can put it in advanced mode and instead of just on/off you can give each thing a priority of 1 - 4. (or off)
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Asgarus

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #115 on: September 25, 2017, 05:28:53 am »

Hi, guys, just a quick update this weekend! I had some free time last night to start properly working on the general colonist management interfaces. Some of the screenshots of Dwarf Therapist look tremendous, so much of my functional design draws on that. This is extremely early look at what I'm doing, but I've built a primordial version of an activity management screen:



You can flip on and off activities here for all your colonists' work shifts. Right now, turning the activities on will just set them at the default priority, but I'm going to make it so that you can specify priorities from this screen, too. I also have a plan for it to provide color-coded recommendations for which colonists should do what. Finally, if you don't want to manage any of it, I'll include a button that'll auto-optimize everything, just like the minister of labor does when he works. When you hit the button, everyone's activities and priorities will be algorithmically optimized.

I would've liked to have gotten further this weekend, but my girlfriend had a meltdown today about not spending enough time with her. My Sunday was spent shopping for autumn house decorations. A wreath was purchased. Disaster averted. Hopefully I'll get further along with this during the nights this week.

...


That looks very promising already!
I hope there will be tables like that for other colonist-related information, too.

But as always: Real life comes first. ;)
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etgfrog

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #116 on: September 25, 2017, 08:21:59 am »

Might I recommend putting the skill level of the characters to the left of the check boxes for each related task for the ones that are relevant?
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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #117 on: September 25, 2017, 10:13:20 am »

Rimworld has a similar thing where you can put it in advanced mode and instead of just on/off you can give each thing a priority of 1 - 4. (or off)

Ah yes indeed, and it's even better.
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The Scout

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #118 on: September 26, 2017, 11:56:18 am »

Island life is hard. The lack of resources is frustrating, but traders leave their ship and walk to the bottom of the ocean trying to find "A safe location". Maybe they're trying to walk along the bottom to the opposite shore?
Update: Two of them are missing, one is still journeying downwards and the ship left.
2nd Update: Migration request went smoothly. 2nd trade ship had 2 of the 4 plunge into the ocean immediately. After unloading half of the stuff I bought, the other 2 also walked off into the ocean. I swear they're all secretly deep ones.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2017, 12:37:23 pm by The Scout »
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ollobrains

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #119 on: October 02, 2017, 06:35:06 pm »

you can always assist by building deep down for them at least make them comfortable
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