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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Take your time. Other issues are more important, the audience can wait and it's a fine way to build up anticipation.

Anyway, it's looking great as always.

Thanks . Here's a cross-post of this week's update from my blog:

So folks, I’m moving house today and the internet might not be up for the best part of a week, so I’m probably going to miss the update this weekend. Therefore, I’m going to do a very brief update now, and then seek to update on the 13th. The plan at this point is:

December 13th - release 0.6 or announce the start of the full-time development year! For 0.6 two major issues remain, and approximately twenty small issues, none of which should be too significant. I estimate two to three days of bugfixing to conclude. As for full-time development, I am technically considering it to be tomorrow onwards, but I still want to officially talk about it on the blog!

December 20th - Whichever of the above two things I didn’t do on the 13th.

December 27th - A summary of URR development of the last year, followed by…

January 3rd - … detailed plans for the coming year of URR development, and a few other projects too, which will also be a slightly more personal entry that I’ve been wanting to write for a while about my longer-term goals for the game, games academia, the next few years, blah blah.

January 10th – regular, weekly, dense and detailed URR updates resume, working on the great palaces and humble houses of 0.7!

I will have vague phone internet access from today until our internet is connected (hopefully the 11th) so I’ll check blog comments and emails as ever, but I might not be able to reply for at least a week. See you all, hopefully, for release on the 13th! In the mean time, here’s a very zoomed-out image of city for you, approximate population ~300,000. Pretty nice, right?



City FAQ:

Q: Why so square?
A: A deliberate choice – districts in foreign cities cost cash to enter, and the selection of which districts to explore and which to ignore is part of the strategy-layer gameplay.

Q: What are the districts?
A: The dense districts are lower-class housing; the less dense are middle-class housing; the special district near the top-right corner is the city centre, containing embassies, a mint, a parliamentary building, etc; then the row of three special districts in the middle are upper-class housing (where the player will begin), a military district, and a market; the district near the bottom-left corner is a religious district with a range of religions represented, and the blank district is the castle, which is effectively an “interior”, so that is coming in 0.7.

Q: How big actually is this?
A: Each district is a single character on the world map, and 200×200 tiles, so the city is around 1000×1000 tiles across, and has enough housing to support approximately ~300,000 NPCs (coming in 0.!

Q: Will I be able to enter every single building?
A: In 0.6, no, in 0.7, yes, from 0.8 onwards, only if you have the right key.

[Retropunch]

That looks PHENOMENAL. Really, really painfully amazing. I am jumping up and down in my seat in excitement to play it.

The one issue I have is that farming districts look a bit jarring. I think it'd be great (for another time!) to have sort of 'lightly farmed areas' or 'farming villages'. These would surround farming districts and give a natural flow between those and general forest/whatever. These could have a few farming houses, some lightly farmed areas (vegetable patches and things), woodcutting shacks as well as possibly small shops.

There would be no need for these to be anything fancy (and the opposite is probably better!) but I think the key to having a really 'lived in' world is to have these sort of run-off areas which smooth areas together. To this end, other areas outside of main cities (like slums that you showed earlier) could have run-off districts next to them. I'd imagine therefore that when one of these other districts is placed, the 5 squares surrounding it would have these run off districts. For ease of generation, they could just be the same as the parent area with just significantly less buildings/plots/whatever. If this was tied to the actual cities you could have cities modifiers like 'sprawling slums' which would double the squares of these outlying areas.

Obviously something for another time, but just thought I'd weigh in before I become too light headed looking at that city. phwoar.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thank you sir! This is excellent.

Hmmm, good thought re: farming. Like everything else it looks way more organic when walking around it and therefore cannot see the "big picture", but at the same time, I get your point. I do have a concern though, and this ties into the kind of "clarity of gameplay" idea I've rambled about a little bit before. In a game of this size/scope it can become easy for optimal gameplay to become "explore every inch of every square", and I want to avoid that, since it is (obviously) not very exciting. By extending the clear square delimitation to everything else I manage to dodge that - it should always be clear what map tile you want to explore, then from other methods (prior exploration, talking to people, maps, district layouts, etc) it should then never be too tricky to find where you want to go. I don't want "blur" the lines too much. The run-off issue is the same thing - if I put markets anywhere except markets, you'll think "but what if there is a market in the surrounding places?", spend ages exploring, and find nothing (though I am considering the possibility of having some city centres spawn with a rare, huge, shop of one particular type). I just think in this case realism will have to take second place to gameplay, and ensuring a level of distinction/clarity to each area. That said, I'm sure I will iterate upon cities over the coming years, so that might change, but for now I'm not convinced by the blurring-areas idea (though I could try and get larger farms that spread across two map grids?)...

However - sparser farming patches makes a lot of sense and would make some totally trivial extra variety, so I'll implement that. I'll also be adding areas for farm animals along with NPCs in 0.8 (purely just for detail). As for slums, I really like that idea a lot - have a whole scale of slums from just the one up to slums hugging almost every wall! That could be very interesting, and as you say, really emphasize some more city difference. Makes me wonder if I could add some more "macro" things like that which affect the entire city as well as the ones currently there (brick colour, religious buildings, tower shapes, etc, and ones I have planned in the future like NPC clothing, the type of weapon guards wield, etc, which will vary each city). Hmmmm. Anyway, yeah, I'll definitely put in sprawling slums for this release, and maybe force graveyards into cities as well, or add the possibility of lots of small graveyards on the interior if there's no graveyard on the exterior. When reading your message I just realized if there's no exterior graveyard then there are basically no graves, and that should be fixed. Unless they eat their dead, of course.

[Retropunch]

Thank you sir! This is excellent.

Definitely agree that clarity of gameplay is absolutely paramount. My idea for things spreading/run-off were mainly for areas where the player wouldn't have any cause to really go there for quests, other than just to explore the scenery/immersion, and not make it such a sharp transition from wilderness to heavy farmland/slums.

As far as 'macro' things, I'd say absolutely the more the better. If you're going to wander around 5-10 cities per game (for example) then they need to be sufficiently different so that you can mentally tell them apart by their features ('oh, this is the garden city' or 'oh, this is the city with the huge slums'). I'd also suggest that each of the 'macros' be taken off the list once allocated, so you don't get 3 cities with sprawling slums or 5 garden cities just out of random-gen. Even though this might be a bit 'gamey' as many cities could have sprawling slums, it would help the player distinguish cities more easily. 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Well that certainly does make sense. I shall ponder it, though I don't think it will make it into 0.6 at this point regardless. In the mean time I've thought of several city variations to throw into the mix - many slums, many gardens (all districts have some gardens areas, inc. military), all lower-class (poor city, no middle-class districts, and maybe make even the upper-class district less impressive), all middle (i.e. wealthy city, no lowers), three or four military districts (pick one civ at random, sometimes, from all imperial civs, say?), many markets (so maybe 2/3), a moat around the entire city as well as just around the castle, and a large number of internal graveyards instead of an external one. That's the six so far, each could only gen once if at all in each world gen. Trying to think of some others too. And, also, there's a set of sixteen unique buildings that'll spawn in cities too, only one city ever, which are all plot related, but they'll be coming later, and not all of them will spawn each time you play (maybe 50% on average?). So with the above, I could add a "nickname" for some cities - the many slums might be "City of the Downtrodden", many military markets "City of Ten Thousand Swords", many markets "City of the Flowing Gold", etc (have the nicknames generated, obviously, but with a particular algorithm for each unique city aspect)

[Retropunch]

Well that certainly does make sense. I shall ponder it, though I don't think it will make it into 0.6 at this point regardless. In the mean time I've thought of several city variations to throw into the mix - many slums, many gardens (all districts have some gardens areas, inc. military), all lower-class (poor city, no middle-class districts, and maybe make even the upper-class district less impressive), all middle (i.e. wealthy city, no lowers), three or four military districts (pick one civ at random, sometimes, from all imperial civs, say?), many markets (so maybe 2/3), a moat around the entire city as well as just around the castle, and a large number of internal graveyards instead of an external one. That's the six so far, each could only gen once if at all in each world gen. Trying to think of some others too. And, also, there's a set of sixteen unique buildings that'll spawn in cities too, only one city ever, which are all plot related, but they'll be coming later, and not all of them will spawn each time you play (maybe 50% on average?). So with the above, I could add a "nickname" for some cities - the many slums might be "City of the Downtrodden", many military markets "City of Ten Thousand Swords", many markets "City of the Flowing Gold", etc (have the nicknames generated, obviously, but with a particular algorithm for each unique city aspect)

I love the idea of city nicknames, that'll definitely help to keep things memorable. I personally think it'd be a good idea to have all cities being variations/unique in the ways you described, as even though this might be slightly historically unrealistic, its much better to be on the side of uniqueness. This also pushes the player further in terms of decision making. If they want the top military resources they're best off going out of their way to the City of Ten Thousand Swords, but that might add on a substantial amount of time.

A few ideas I've thought up:
Slave cities - massive slums/poor housing next to walled off upper class districts.
Water cities - ala Venice.
Equality cities - all middle class housing (with a few exceptions), little opulence on display.
Industrial cities - many warehouses and workshops.
Religious cities - this has been mentioned before.
Desert cities - placed around a central oasis or river.

That brings you up to 12 variations, and then there could be capital cities for each religion which would vary it further. I think it just all boils down to making each city something you actually want to explore even if you've already played 20 games of URR and seen 10 cities in each game already. I imagine you're very close to that though, as these are by far the most impressive cities in gaming history I think (that's not just an idle compliment - think about how many games have had such detail in their cities?!).

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I like the slave city idea, with a slight modification - there are currently slave quarters buildings in lower-class districts, in this city I might just expand it to every districts and have a far larger slavery presence. Water cities, definitely, equality cities is an interesting way to put it, I like the industrial cities idea but not really sure how best to implement it usefully, desert cities... might be tricky, or might not, I'd have to think about it. Maybe add a new kind of "Garden" or "Oasis" district for this special city. Hmm.

As you say, it's about ensuring constant variety, and that means no more than a few of these should crop up every game - as ever, weighting things unevenly leads to a far better outcome than weighting everything equally, so that when you come across something rare it actually registers as being rare. I won't do these in this release, but I've put them on the 0.7 list. And my thanks for such praise! I do appreciate it. Now we just need even more variety! (Though, of course, a lot of variety will also come from inside buildings, the NPCs who wander around, etc). I think 13th *should* happen for release, the past two days I've been doing a lot of bug fixing, getting the list down to a very few now, but I keep finding more ridiculous and strange edge cases that demand my attention (and most of the remaining bugs are going to be a pain)...

[Retropunch]

As you say, it's about ensuring constant variety, and that means no more than a few of these should crop up every game - as ever, weighting things unevenly leads to a far better outcome than weighting everything equally, so that when you come across something rare it actually registers as being rare.

Whilst I definitely agree with that, I think as far as cities go, each one needs to be unique in as many ways as possible and as significantly as possible. Obviously, a lot of this will be down to NPCs and the cultures/religions that inhabit these cities, but I can't help but think that each city should be unique in some way.

An idea I had last night was to allow some cities (and this would only be a number) to be based around a 'theme'.
So for instance you could have the 'city of snakes' which may have winding streets, statues of snakes and a lot of other snake-themed motifs. Similarly, you could have the 'city of silver', which would be a great producer of silver goods, have many silver statues and so on. 

These would have to have a reason for it, like the 'city of silver' being built on great silver mines, or a city of snakes being due to the great assassins guild which was founded there, otherwise it'd become a bit strange. However, these sort of things wouldn't need to be overbearing (and would probably do well for being treated tactfully) but would allow for a really unique city and history without the need for massive city-design changes.

[Man of Paper]

The book you suggested was Cryptonomicon!! And so far I very much enjoy it.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

First off, all bug-fixing is complete! Unless some massive and horrifying bug arises in playtesting today, I'll be releasing URR 0.6 *tomorrow*!

Now, to replies:

Whilst I definitely agree with that, I think as far as cities go, each one needs to be unique in as many ways as possible and as significantly as possible. Obviously, a lot of this will be down to NPCs and the cultures/religions that inhabit these cities, but I can't help but think that each city should be unique in some way.

An idea I had last night was to allow some cities (and this would only be a number) to be based around a 'theme'.
So for instance you could have the 'city of snakes' which may have winding streets, statues of snakes and a lot of other snake-themed motifs. Similarly, you could have the 'city of silver', which would be a great producer of silver goods, have many silver statues and so on. 

These would have to have a reason for it, like the 'city of silver' being built on great silver mines, or a city of snakes being due to the great assassins guild which was founded there, otherwise it'd become a bit strange. However, these sort of things wouldn't need to be overbearing (and would probably do well for being treated tactfully) but would allow for a really unique city and history without the need for massive city-design changes.

I agree with emphasizing city variation, but I think these unique themes/nicknames/etc have a risk of "running out" very quickly if there are too many of them - the fewer there are, the more special they'll seem and the more they'll stick in the mind (not to mention that I don't think there's more than 20 or 30 themes I could conceivably come up with!). It's what I've done with coins - there's a lot of mundane/logical materials for coins, but very rarely (once or twice) per world a much more unusual material is chosen. I personally think that's the better way to go about it, but have enough systems that each city should have one unique thing, rather than making sure they all have a theme, all have an unusual coin material, etc. I realize that means cities will have fewer unique things than otherwise, but it'll keep the library of unique things going for longer and make it more noteworthy when these things are identified, and although it's not perfect, I'd say that's a good tradeoff. I like the statues idea a lot, I've thought of a few ways I can integrate that, and also some nicknames based on some of the very very rare coin types. I've added this nickname-ing/theme-ing to the list of stuff to do for 0.7, which despite the fact that 0.6 isn't actually out yet, is already twenty items long, and none of those are even to do with the core aspect of building interiors. Still, none are too massive. Today is just going to be a frenzy of finishing everything off, enrolling a few people on my super-secret bug-testing team (which I am potentially looking to expand...), disabling all the wizard-mode powers and that kind of thing, updating the welcome message, version number, etc etc!

The book you suggested was Cryptonomicon!! And so far I very much enjoy it.

Ah, excellent! It is pretty damned great. Whereabouts are you up to?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

After seven months of development, I am extremely proud to announce the release of Ultima Ratio Regum 0.6! This release allows you to explore every single settlement you see on the map: every feudal city, hunter-gatherer encampment and nomadic fortress, in addition to the towns and farms dotted through the feudal lands, are free to explore. You can download it at http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/, and read more detail about the release notes below.

This is the sixth of seven planned worldbuilding releases, which will conclude in March with 0.7′s creation of the interiors of every single building you see in this release, after which core gameplay will begin with 0.8′s NPC generation. Until then, look around the vast world, be sure to ‘l’ook at everything, consult the ‘E’ncyclopedia for information on the planet you’re exploring, and generally get an idea of the scale and complexity of the generated civilizations the game features.

- Explore massive and varied feudal cities (each able to support a population of ~300,000+), each with its own range of districts, architectural styles, and buildings influenced by the political and religious choices of its civilization.

- Discover nomadic fortresses in the desert, enclosed by walls and with an emphasis on strong defence and open-air markets.

- Farms and towns now also generate within the countryside, which in the future will be important stops on your travels, and sources of occasional markets and information.

- Hunter-gatherer civilizations now have settlements, laid out in complex geometric patterns, built from a range of materials, and containing cryptic shrines…

- A huge range of new ‘l’ook graphics for almost everything new in the game, and for a range of items/features/terrains which did not possess graphics in the past.

- Improved world map generation – now includes rare marshland areas, and a significantly overhauled polar biome, now featuring ice as well as snow.

- Introduction of strategic-layer movement around cities, a note on the pricing of city districts, and the unique coinage of each civilization, which will be activated in version 0.9.

- Significant expansion of variety of religion and civilization generation.

- A range of bug-fixes and optimizations on roads, settlement generation, coats of arms, line of sight, generating certain aspects of rivers, and more.

From this point onwards, developing URR will be my full-time occupation for approximately the next twelve months, and I will post in more detail about this next week. Until then, I hope you enjoy exploring this huge world, please report any bugs you might encounter and the crash log (either on this post or emailed to mark @ my domain) and here are some screenshots of the kind of variation you’ll find in an average generation:

[dennislp3]

Thank you very much for the awesome release! Checking it out now

[Retropunch]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

So, so good. Literally fantastic - I've been too glued to it to post anything.

The cities are incredible, and extremely fun to walk around. It really feels like a fully fleshed out world now, and I can't even imagine what it'll be like with interiors and NPCs

Whilst I hate to critique it after such a short time, I've a few ideas/things to report:
-The big issue for me was that there are a lot of streets/roads that just lead into walls. I feel like each road should lead to somewhere, as it's really confusing/annoying trying to find your way out of the district by following roads and constantly coming to a dead end - it also breaks immersion, as that wouldn't really happen in real life. Sorry to come down so hard on that, but it's been a big issue.

-Whilst wandering around, I really got the feeling that the players field of vision should be bigger. It's fine in the wilderness, but in a city it feels like you need a bit more situational awareness.

-I think it'd be great if the player could press escape to get out of any 'screen' (like the travel screen) and only go to the menu once back on the main wandering around screen. The guy who did sub-commander did a bit of a poll on this and it was overwhelmingly favoured by players.

-Small issue, you can't 'l'ook behind you/outside your field of vision - whilst this makes logical sense, it's a pain having to line your vision up sometimes.

-As the player starts in their home city, it's sort of strange that it's unexplored. I'd suggest for it to be all 'explored' or at least the district that you start in. This would also help new players orient themselves better.

-letters with umlauts/accents seem to be in a smaller font - this looks a bit strange in my opinion.

Sorry to come up with criticisms so early, I just felt that as you're probably wanting to move on to the next version it'd be best to flag these up soon.

Seriously, very amazing though - I've spent hours just wandering around!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thank you very much for the awesome release! Checking it out now

Excellent! Let me know what you think.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

So, so good. Literally fantastic - I've been too glued to it to post anything.

The cities are incredible, and extremely fun to walk around. It really feels like a fully fleshed out world now, and I can't even imagine what it'll be like with interiors and NPCs

Whilst I hate to critique it after such a short time, I've a few ideas/things to report:

Haha, thank you, this is excellent. Now, to your very good critiques:

-The big issue for me was that there are a lot of streets/roads that just lead into walls. I feel like each road should lead to somewhere, as it's really confusing/annoying trying to find your way out of the district by following roads and constantly coming to a dead end - it also breaks immersion, as that wouldn't really happen in real life. Sorry to come down so hard on that, but it's been a big issue.

Which districts? I assume you mean middle-class housing primarily? I had this pointed out to me by one of my super-secret playtesters (a cult which may be recruiting, if you're interested); they are definitely the trickiest districts to meaningfully navigate at this time, by a *big* margin (in my opinion). No other districts should really dump you into dead-ends, but MC districts can be quite misleading. I have several ideas for solving this which I've already put on the to-do list for 0.7! I guess they might make it onto a 0.6.1 release if people report some serious bugs that need fixing before then and I'll add in a few improvements into the mix, but if not, it'll be 0.7.

-Whilst wandering around, I really got the feeling that the players field of vision should be bigger. It's fine in the wilderness, but in a city it feels like you need a bit more situational awareness.

100% agree, it's way too small. Going to improve that once I improve the rendering function and it isn't computer-destroying to see more. Probably 0.7 also.

-I think it'd be great if the player could press escape to get out of any 'screen' (like the travel screen) and only go to the menu once back on the main wandering around screen. The guy who did sub-commander did a bit of a poll on this and it was overwhelmingly favoured by players.

Hmm, can you be slightly more specific about the screens? Do you mean returning to the main menu for the entire game? If you press Esc on the travel screen it should give you the Main Menu Y/N prompt? Perhaps this is just a question of "screen terminology" and I'm not sure which screens you mean!

-Small issue, you can't 'l'ook behind you/outside your field of vision - whilst this makes logical sense, it's a pain having to line your vision up sometimes.

I get that, but the facing-direction thing is going to be quite important once combat starts going, so I'm disinclined to do anything about the facing-vision per se, BUT I could do something like - if you try to look at something behind you which you could see if you turned around, pressing Enter to look also turns you around? That would be instead of doing nothing and having you leave 'l'ook, turn, and then look again.

-As the player starts in their home city, it's sort of strange that it's unexplored. I'd suggest for it to be all 'explored' or at least the district that you start in. This would also help new players orient themselves better.

Agreed, in 0.7 onwards all districts in your home city will start 100% autoexplored - it was on the list, but I just didn't have the time .

-letters with umlauts/accents seem to be in a smaller font - this looks a bit strange in my opinion.

Ah, really? I thought I'd fixed all those. I'll check the font files again.

Sorry to come up with criticisms so early, I just felt that as you're probably wanting to move on to the next version it'd be best to flag these up soon.

*Not at all*, best to figure out what needs changing early before I commit to 0.7 in any kind of meaningful fashion. I'll be starting development in the next week or two on 0.7, though probably not in any serious way until close to New Year, other stuff demands my attention for a week or two (I have a thesis submission deadline now, finally, for January, and I have a bunch of conference abstracts and other stuff to send off). I'm so glad you like it though! I tried a little "playthrough" this morning with all the wizard mode stuff disabled and just using the .zip file on the site, and trying to put myself in the mind of someone who isn't me and doesn't know all the ins-and-outs, and I feel it's the first release I am happy to stand on its own - even if it's a world of "ghost towns" - without feeling the need to keep saying "just wait until the NEXT release!!!" and stressing all the cool stuff that's coming. Purely as a world to explore, whilst I 100% agree with your dead-end road issue (I hope it is only MC districts, right?) I'm super-happy with how it plays as just a world simulator, right now.

Seriously, very amazing though - I've spent hours just wandering around!

[Retropunch]

Which districts? I assume you mean middle-class housing primarily? I had this pointed out to me by one of my super-secret playtesters (a cult which may be recruiting, if you're interested); they are definitely the trickiest districts to meaningfully navigate at this time, by a *big* margin (in my opinion). No other districts should really dump you into dead-ends, but MC districts can be quite misleading. I have several ideas for solving this which I've already put on the to-do list for 0.7! I guess they might make it onto a 0.6.1 release if people report some serious bugs that need fixing before then and I'll add in a few improvements into the mix, but if not, it'll be 0.7.

It's mainly Middle-class housing districts that are the big problem. As there isn't much to do in the districts other than explore it's not a big problem, but it does mean trying to get out of the district quite a problem.

I mainly have made such a big deal out of it as I think it has a wider impact on design. Firstly, whilst fast travel is great I think most players want to explore on foot (both me and a few friends feel the same) - you want to feel like you're inhabiting the world rather than just teleporting from place to place. Therefore it should be very easy to get out of each district - either regular signposts or some other more artificial (in terms of mechanics) way of finding the gates.

-Whilst wandering around, I really got the feeling that the players field of vision should be bigger. It's fine in the wilderness, but in a city it feels like you need a bit more situational awareness.

100% agree, it's way too small. Going to improve that once I improve the rendering function and it isn't computer-destroying to see more. Probably 0.7 also.

Great to hear!

-I think it'd be great if the player could press escape to get out of any 'screen' (like the travel screen) and only go to the menu once back on the main wandering around screen. The guy who did sub-commander did a bit of a poll on this and it was overwhelmingly favoured by players.

Hmm, can you be slightly more specific about the screens? Do you mean returning to the main menu for the entire game? If you press Esc on the travel screen it should give you the Main Menu Y/N prompt? Perhaps this is just a question of "screen terminology" and I'm not sure which screens you mean!

With this, I meant that you wouldn't get the main menu prompt by pressing escape unless you were at the 'main screen' (as in, the one where you wander around/play the game). If you were at any other screen - like the Encyclopaedia or travel screen - pressing escape would just exit you back to the main (wandering around/playing) screen. I feel this is the way that most modern games play these days, and the way that people are most comfortable with.

-Small issue, you can't 'l'ook behind you/outside your field of vision - whilst this makes logical sense, it's a pain having to line your vision up sometimes.

I get that, but the facing-direction thing is going to be quite important once combat starts going, so I'm disinclined to do anything about the facing-vision per se, BUT I could do something like - if you try to look at something behind you which you could see if you turned around, pressing Enter to look also turns you around? That would be instead of doing nothing and having you leave 'l'ook, turn, and then look again.

That would be a good solution. At the moment, I can't see any issues with it and I don't think it'd need a prompt or anything.
However, part of me feels that as 'l'ooking is something that only helps the player (the character knows what they can see - they don't need to LOOK at the tree to know it's a tree most of the time) then it should be a free action - you're basically just describing something to a player which they can't see themselves due to the limitations of ASCII. However, if looking does become/is planned to become more important later on, then I can see why you'd want it to be tied to movement/turns. Obviously, you can't look at anything you the character hasn't already seen, and when you're looking behind you, the player is basically saying to the character 'what was over there 5 paces ago?'.

Again, if you feel it's necessary to have it tied to turns/movement then by all means - I'm just not a fan of having to 'pay' for an action just due to graphical limitation (even if you do absolutely destroy those limitations!).