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Author Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023  (Read 627758 times)

Knave

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3195 on: August 10, 2021, 08:40:29 am »

Man, the stuff you do with ascii is nothing short of art. Always looks so good!
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3196 on: August 10, 2021, 07:19:00 pm »

Man, the stuff you do with ascii is nothing short of art. Always looks so good!

Thank you so much, Knave! :)
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Dorsidwarf

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3197 on: August 12, 2021, 06:02:52 pm »

Great update, Mark! I'm overjoyed to hear that you've been having fun with this massive ol' project again coding for 0.9.

Do you have a "Feature plan" for what you want to achieve for that 1.0 play release? Or is it still too early to say as you work on .9?

Additionally with the addition of working currency and trading, It might be interesting to hear about coins, how they're generated, what kind of identifying marks specific currencies might have. (Like, do they have minting years/ ruler names on them? That's always something fascinating)
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3198 on: August 12, 2021, 07:56:33 pm »

Great update, Mark! I'm overjoyed to hear that you've been having fun with this massive ol' project again coding for 0.9.

Do you have a "Feature plan" for what you want to achieve for that 1.0 play release? Or is it still too early to say as you work on .9?

Additionally with the addition of working currency and trading, It might be interesting to hear about coins, how they're generated, what kind of identifying marks specific currencies might have. (Like, do they have minting years/ ruler names on them? That's always something fascinating)

Thanks so much Dorsi! Yeah, it's wonderful. Releasing 0.8, and all the feedback and enthusiasm, basically completely rekindled me. That, coupled with the fact that I am now going to do yearly releases *no matter how "finished" what I had planned is*, I think will also really help, and I've really reworked in my head how and when I do updates, and that's a big psychological help too.

1.0, basically: the key objective. To follow clues and trails in this cultural / religious world to a number of secret items hidden around the map. 0.9, however, will be the first to have a kind of "informal" objective, i.e. basically accrue as much money as you can! Later that will be one of several instrumental objectives to help you navigate the world and find what you're after, but it'll be the "objective" for 0.9. Essentially what needs adding now is all items, a completion of the speech system, all the remaining NPCs, and then the implementation of the core objective - and that, essentially, is it. Roughly speaking I am expecting a 0.9 (2021), 0.10 (2022), 0.11 (2023), and then a 1.0. Being *genuinely* realistic about my time, and the work required, I think that is a fair and viable schedule (assuming no further health crises, of course, and so on).

Re: coins, I love those ideas, though for now the coins are just staying how they look at present! I do not dislike that idea though, it's not impossible I might generate the obverse of the coins later on...!
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3199 on: August 22, 2021, 04:56:43 pm »

WIP for treasure maps!



Top set are for the "world map" (very zoomed out, rivers, mountains), etc, bottom set for "local map" (specific tiles, e.g. on a volcano's side, inside a building, by a coast, etc)
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3200 on: August 31, 2021, 09:42:14 am »

I just posted a huge blog entry about generating weapons and shields over at https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2021/08/31/0-9-august-urrpdate-procedural-weapon-and-shield-generation/, here's a quick teaser:

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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3201 on: September 25, 2021, 09:15:48 am »

A request for feedback!

What sort of "clock" should Ultima Ratio Regum have?

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2021/09/25/what-clock-should-urr-have/

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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3202 on: September 28, 2021, 08:41:29 pm »

Procedural armour generation begins! First, helmets, in low / medium / high quality. I estimate 2.2 billion permutations (excluding background colours for the soft and comfortable insides of high-quality helmets)!

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Dorsidwarf

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3203 on: September 29, 2021, 04:13:45 pm »

Interesting stuff! Left a comment on the blog about my thoughts on "clock types" and some sparse ramblings on ways in which they can interact with the player's actions without being infinitely extensible.
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3204 on: September 30, 2021, 12:33:30 am »

Interesting stuff! Left a comment on the blog about my thoughts on "clock types" and some sparse ramblings on ways in which they can interact with the player's actions without being infinitely extensible.

Thanks Dorsi! :)
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3205 on: October 10, 2021, 08:56:23 am »

Here are some procedurally-generated ANSI board games! Four archetypes (Go, Pachisi, Chess, Race Games), millions of possible boards in each, millions of possible rule-sets in each, and PCG names too. For now just trade goods, but later you'll be able to challenge NPCs to games with wagers!

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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3206 on: October 14, 2021, 03:45:46 am »

Some very exciting developments this week! Ships have been reworked for 0.9 and made about a hundred times more diverse, and more interesting, and have some actual gameplay around them now. So firstly, in 0.8 I created a system for establishing travel and trade routes that ships would use, as seen in the picture below (players would not see this directly in-game). The system was specifically designed so that whenever a new route matched up with an existing route, it would stop generating a new route, so that ships would travel exclusively on well-plied trade lines and so forth, which lead to something like this:



That was fine of course, especially as this was partly an under-the-hood thing that players didn’t percieve too strongly, and in 0.8 ships were free to travel on and simply served to help the player get from one part of the world to the next. Now, however, as we begin to implement mechanics around time, money, and travel, ships needed to be made a little more detailed. Firstly, of course, real-world ships in the sort of 1600s-to-1800s world URR exists in, did not all go with exact trade routes. You would get plenty of variation depending on winds, the seasons and the time of year, which way you were going, and of course sometimes ships travelling to and from similar directions might take different paths for political reasons or other causes. As such, I started by reworking this a little bit into a system that would still group ships in certain areas, but allow also for a diversity of paths to and from similar destinations. That yielded something like this:



So you’ll see this looks a lot more organic and realistic – there are still clear, most optimal paths that many ships take (in the real world these would of course be shipping lanes, essentially) but there’s also a lot of variation from ship to ship, even those working in the same sorts of areas. I think this is great. Now, if we transform this into a heatmap showing us how many ships go along a certain path, where red = one, yellow = a few, green = several, blue = lots and violet = a massive number, we get this…



…which I am very happy with! Some obvious and busy shipping lanes, some less plied routes, and some in the middle. The next step was to generate the ships themselves, give them images, personalities, names, histories, crews, and so forth (and of course speeds and prices) and thus make the selection of ships and travel routes something to actually think about and weigh into your movement around the world, instead of something that takes place instantly and requires no real consideration. I set about building a ship name generator, and after a little while, you can see some of the debug outputs from this generator here, as well as their coordinates, and the length of their paths. Keep in mind the world map is 250×250 tiles, so < 25 is a short journey, < 75 a middling journey, anything > 75 a long journey, and anything over, say, 125 or so generally means you’re really going to the other side of the world.



Would you sail on the “Red Kraken” or the “Grief of the Ocean”? I know I would! As part of this ships also now possess traits, some of which are active in this release and some of which will come soon in 0.10. Again, the goal here is to add more strategic depth to selecting which ships you go on, and I hope will actually get the player remembering and thinking about specific ships they’ve found to be especially useful: maybe a ship that goes between the two cities the player is spending much of their time in, or a ship that is especially fast or cheap, or a ship that gives a discount to a particular demographic the player is in, or a ship that is well-armed and helps the player travel through regions of piracy (coming later…), and so forth. Here’s the current list (you might need to open the image in another tab, depending on how you view this website), and their effects:



The availability of these traits is of course determined by the policies and other traits of a civilization, so for instance only a civ with the “Literary” trait can have the “Poetic Ship” possibility, only one with the “Theocracy” trait can have the “Holy Ship” possibility, and so forth. There are some really interesting combinations which should yield interesting strategic choices. You can see these when you go into a dock in a city or a town and look over the available ships. Whereas in 0.8 you just had a list of destinations and clicked on the one you wanted, the ship selection screen has now been massively overhauled! You can see the list of destinations and what ship will take you there; text (white if you can afford it, red if you can’t) showing you the price of passage, where the ship is now, and how long it will take you to reach that destination; who owns that ship, where it travels from, and so, and so forth; an image of the ship (procedurally-generated, naturally!); and a list of the ship’s traits, which are colour-coded depending on what they apply to (e.g. religion, armament, cost, ship-board culture, and so forth). In terms of ship traits I estimate there are around 150,000 possible ships that can generate with different combinations of traits, and I think that should keep things interesting for some time!



In docks, as elsewhere, you can now enter currency exchanges where you are able to switch currencies you possess for currencies you do not. Each dock will only accept the currency of its home nation for travel (though maybe I’ll change this later and have some cultural trait, e.g. “Internationalism”, allow you to spend any currency in that port?) and so one of the strategic elements of the game will come from building up stores of required currencies, and planning ahead. Whenever you trade currency you lose a little bit of overall value from the currency you are trading out of (as in the real world) and so you’ll want to exchange currencies rarely and in large volumes (again, as in the real world). Again, I’m sure I will add traits later on for slightly better or slightly worse exchange rates, and other things of this sort.



Once you’ve got your money (this next screenshot is obviously from a different world / port), some of your travel options will show up as white rather than red:



And then you select your ship and the game gives you a final confirmation you want to spend that money.



Once you say yes, you are given a little story about your time on the ship (as in 0.8 ) and you are ferried to your new location.



I have more to write about this later, but I have made massive optimisations to the speed of the game in 0.9, and thus travel no longer takes many seconds for the game to calculate, it is instead now (effectively) instant, as is travelling on the world map! But more about this at a later date. This was an update about ships and docks and currencies, and I hope you all enjoyed it. See you all soon for another update for what should be a (31st of) December 2021 release!
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Dorsidwarf

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3207 on: October 15, 2021, 05:50:05 am »

Really interesting stuff! You gotta love these ships and shipping routes, and im glad to see a fleshing out of the uses of money (And conversion costs!).


One thing I'll note about the ships however is that they seem to fall into "dwarf-fortress-itis" in their naming schemes. "The <adj> <noun>" and "The <Noun>'s <noun>" appear a lot in your examples. Is this just some coincidence from a small sample size? The names of, say, towns or people seemed a lot more widely varied / culture dependent.

I don't know if ships being named after people/saint(or godly) figures/places is plausible in URR, but its extremely common in real historical shipping, where a majority of ships often only have single-part names (Ie:Antellope or Messenger or Margaret rather than all being ie Fierce Antelope, Holy Messenger, or Solid Whale)

Food for thought, but I'm always excited to see your work anyway.
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 released after five years!)
« Reply #3208 on: October 17, 2021, 12:52:17 am »

Really interesting stuff! You gotta love these ships and shipping routes, and im glad to see a fleshing out of the uses of money (And conversion costs!).

One thing I'll note about the ships however is that they seem to fall into "dwarf-fortress-itis" in their naming schemes. "The <adj> <noun>" and "The <Noun>'s <noun>" appear a lot in your examples. Is this just some coincidence from a small sample size? The names of, say, towns or people seemed a lot more widely varied / culture dependent.

I don't know if ships being named after people/saint(or godly) figures/places is plausible in URR, but its extremely common in real historical shipping, where a majority of ships often only have single-part names (Ie:Antellope or Messenger or Margaret rather than all being ie Fierce Antelope, Holy Messenger, or Solid Whale)

Food for thought, but I'm always excited to see your work anyway.

Thanks Dorsi! As ever, I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback :).

Re: names, this is a fair point and an interesting topic. So I did actually debate having one-word names (there is more variety than that screenshot shows, there's a bunch of different archetypes) but thing is twofold. Firstly, there are LOTS of ships being generated, so we need something that can create a sufficiently large number, and secondly, I didn't want to generate confusion by one-word names potentially overlapping with generated people, animal species, places, these sorts of things. However I really like a religious ship name archetype, I hadn't thought of that and will add it in!
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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