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Author Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023  (Read 585476 times)

Little

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3120 on: May 12, 2019, 11:56:58 pm »

Always love reading the updates!
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Sebastian2203

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3121 on: May 21, 2019, 02:58:22 am »

Posting to watch, you are awesome btw.
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3122 on: May 21, 2019, 12:25:23 pm »

Always love reading the updates!

Thanks my friend!

Posting to watch, you are awesome btw.

Aw, thank you! So glad you like the project.

--

Welcome to May’s URRpdate! Things are still moving along, and rather pleasingly, it has now been a full month of coding since I discovered any more major bugs. Now, maybe that’s tempting fate, but I choose instead to read it as a very encouraging step forward. It does actually seem now that only small bugs remain, and many of these are not even crash bugs. Nevertheless, in the past couple of weeks I’ve manconqaged to resolve more issues, and I feel like we are very nearly now at the stage where I’m just polishing the front-end of things like menus tooltips and the like, in preparation for the final release. It’s all very exciting! But without further ado, here’s the latest:

– You can now properly talk to non-religious NPCs from all kinds of civilizations about their beliefs, and none of those conversations cause the game to crash. Individuals from “free religion” civilizations can also intelligently give different answers depending on their preferences.
– Priests no longer always spawn (for some reason) on the same tile as the altar within their religious building, thereby making it hard to find the altar unless you know the priest is standing on top of it.
– Prisoners can now properly tell you that they are prisoners when asked about their “job”.
– Prisoners can tell you everything about their past crimes, their sentence, when (if ever) they expect to get out, and so forth, without ever trying to generate a sentence they can’t figure out.
– Jailers no longer crash the game when you ask them about whether any particularly important or interesting prisoners are interred at their jail.
– Jailers no longer sometimes just decide they fancy a career change, wander out of the jail they are in charge of, and immediately crash the game because they have no idea what to do once they get outside.
– Entering a building which will (in a potential 0.9) house a regional representative in a democratic nation no longer crashes the game from time to time.
– Mints and Banks no longer sometimes crash the game when you enter them at night (I think?).
– Fixed a few more double-word issues (yep, I hadn’t actually caught all of these last time, but now I think I have… again).
– Handled a bug which made world generation, in extremely rare cases, get stuck in an infinite loop of trying to generate certain aspects of a civilization’s culture.
– Found an extremley rare issue where sometimes an NPC can sometimes find themselves off the road in a city district and fail to figure out what to do or how to get back onto the road. I’m not entirely clear what causes this issue and I’ve only encoutered it once, and this was just because the NPC in question was screaming in the debug log  while I was playing. As such, I’ve added in a new bit of “catch-all” code at the end of NPCs deciding where to walk next, which – if they somehow find themselves in that situation – will encourage them to walk back onto a road and resume normal behaviour. I also inserted a catch-all after that which states if finding their way back is also for some reason impossible, then once the player leaves their line-of-sight, they will just despawn.
– Handled a few more buildings where it is possible for furniture to spawn in such a way that someone sitting on a chair, for example, can block a door and then all the people who in the building can no longer find their way out. For any 0.9 I will definitely implement a more general solution here allowing NPCs leaving or entering a building to walk “through” someone sat in a chair, but this solution will do for the time being, and should deal with the issue.
– Removed a handful of special NPCs who were being generated at world generation but not spawned in the world; this shouldn’t have caused any issues (famous last words), but it’s better to be safe than sorry for the time being.

This is a slightly shorter update than last time because I have also been hard at work on a chapter for a forthcoming book (alongside a number of world-building luminaries!) about world-building. In it I talk about how important I think social, political, economic and cultural detail is to creating a convincing and “breathing” fictional world, looking at Ultima Ratio Regum but also other game series which have always stood out to me in this regard, such as the earlier Command and Conquer games (the Tiberium series, that is), many of Paradox Interactive’s games, the Deus Ex universe, and several others. Although I’m really enjoying writing this – and the book about world-building it’ll be a part of will, I think, be something quite special – this has taken up some of my coding time in the last fortnight or so.

Now, the rest of May is pretty busy at this end – I’m going down to Washington DC to talk at this year’s International Communication Association conference to chair a panel on live streaming and talk about Twitch and the games industry. As such, the next update will be some time in June. See you all soon – and the journey is nearly at its end!



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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3123 on: June 23, 2019, 12:07:45 pm »

Here’s June’s big update. The bugs and fixes continue to get smaller and smaller with each passing fix, and they’re generally taking less time, being more and more obscure, and often involving text or grammar for sentence generation rather than things which actually cause the game to crash. With that said, some new crash bugs around pathfinding have arisen, but – see below – I think they are now all fixed, and hopefully no more will appear as bug-fixing and tweaking continues. Without further ado:

– Fixed some more crash issues surrounding people not being able to tell you they are not currently wearing any jewelry.
– Monasteries can no longer spawn on rivers, thereby preventing some very strange generation of their local maps if the player decides to explore one.
– Fixed an issue where one of the guidebook entries was too long, and consequently “leaving” some of its text on screen even after the player navigated away.
– Non-religious NPCs can now definitely always correctly respond to religion-based questions.
– NPCs from a religion not based in the nation they currently live in no longer tell you their cathedral is in their current nation / city, rather than the place it genuinely is.
– NPCs without armour no longer sometimes tell you they have armour and then crash because they can’t find information about it, and NPCs with armour no longer sometimes tell you they don’t have armour. AND NPCs with armour no longer sometimes tell you they do, and then in the next sentence (from the same NPC) tell you they don’t.
– Asking certain NPCs for their perspectives on religious heresy no longer leads to a crash if they don’t really care about it.
– Fixed an issue with clerks who spawned at random in places like parliaments incorrectly thinking they were important, and thus behaving in a manner inappropriate to their station.
– Resolved another strange issue with banks at night and tellers appearing when they should be asleep, and similarly, an issue with tellers not appearing in the day time.
– A rare bug with NPCs attempting to leave the grid the player is on, while the player is also leaving the grid, has been solved… I think?
– Relatedly, fixed a very complex and strange issue where if two or more guards are moving off a grid at the same time, then sometimes they get confused about where to go because they look at each other as potential guard exchange partners (i.e. the guard they switch guard duty with), and then they freak out and don’t know what to do. Pretty sure this is fixed now.
– Fixed a timing bug which could trigger if you left a grid and then returned before the predicted time it would take, in the abstract, for an NPC to reach its next objective; this would cause the game to just lock up as it tried to figure out the NPC’s movement.
– Similar and related to the above, also resolved a problem where sometimes an NPC couldn’t make it to where they were supposed to be (hypothetically, in order to estimate how long a particular path would take), and now the game notices if they’ve got stuck one tile away from their target, and ends the counter there, just adding “1” to whatever the total was to represent what the final step would actually require (for example, if an NPC is currently blocking the way, but will not be in the future).
– Confirmed that a wide range of buildings – such as taverns, churches, cathedrals, jails, and others – do not crash when you spawn them in day then return at night, or in the next day.
– You can no longer travel into the ocean; I will shortly be adding quick alternatives for getting across the sea.
– Fixed a bug where an NPC already on their bed will try to find their bed, and without thinking to look underneath them, will cause the game to lock up as they search, desperately, for somewhere to sleep.
– Fixed a similar bug where sleeping people were sometimes being transported through walls; this must have been rather distressing.
– Talking to someone in a tribal civilization about religion, laws and money no longer leads to a crash.
– Fixed some name generation things which made certain items of clothing too long.
– NPCs now properly tell you what is special about their armour (which is to say, nothing, because I haven’t coded that yet).
– Added information about policies which haven’t previously had clear effects or impacts.
– Fixed a bug which I had not noticed until just a couple of days ago, but now I see it would have actually affected a huge number of religious buildings in city centres and potentially elsewhere as well: guards for archives are no longer selected at world generation if there is no archive beneath the cathedral, which is almost always the case, and so this bug would have applied to almost all cathedrals when the game later tries to find a place for this guard, only to discover there is nowhere for them to go…
– Removed a bunch of irrelevant chaff from the “Load Game” screen.
– Hunted down and resolved a pretty large bug where, again, guards might be sitting on top of each other and the one who was supposed to go home wasn’t sure what to do. I’m not sure why this bug was still sticking around, but I’ve put in some catch-all code in case this ever happens, and this should really never be a problem again.
– Fixed an issue where servants or slaves, in a mansion that had been spawned or previously visited at night, wouldn’t know quite how to get back to work in the daytime.
– Resolved a rather complicated issue, whose cause (again!) I don’t fully understand, where after walking around for a long period of time and then returning somewhere guards had previously been spawned, one of the guards was on the roof. Of a different building. I have absolutely no clue how this person got up there, but I’ve now implemented a system which checks for guards (or equivalents) who are on rooftops (???), and then looks at guard locations on that map grid, finds the empty one belonging to the appropriate civilisation, and moves the guard there before the player gets a look at their strange behaviour.
– Related to the above, the game can now notice any guard out of position and put them back in their rightful place, which should catch any potential future errors of this sort which I’ve never even observed (if they exist).
– Fixed a bug where certain conditions would try to remove a bed as an option for an NPC to move to, but if the bed wasn’t already in their list of valid movement targets, it would crash trying to remove it (since it wans’t there). Again, not entirely sure what caused this, but it has now been dealt with.
– Made sure that priests in castles which contains priests of multiple religions (with particularly open-minded rulers) all behave correctly at night and in the day.
– Servants or slaves in castles, when you have spawned the castle in the day but then return at night, now correctly spawn in / move to the appropriate beds instead of becoming paralysed with indecision on the ground floor.
– Handled issue with priests not turning up correctly in their beds in districts containing multiple religious buildings.
– Fixed a problem with buildings in hunter-gatherer settlements sometimes being spawned just a little too close to each other, and thus potentially blocking off an entrance.
– Handled an issue in religious districts with some random NPCs, at night, not really knowing how best to worship in the religious building they have selected.

At this point there are only two “major”(ish) bugs I haven’t fixed: one involving multiple ambassadors trying to sleep in the same bed (although one imagines this would do wonders for diplomacy), and one involving mints still crashing if you go back into them later. These both seem to be fairly big tasks, but I aim to tackle them in the coming days; I believe the former will be easier to deal with than the latter, but we’ll see how it goes.

So, that’s everything for this month. The rest of June is pretty clear at this end, aside from one academic paper I need to finish writing (about Super Mario Maker: this has become a rather exciting side project I’ve been working on for a couple of months now, particularly focused on troll and “kaizo” levels and the communities of players who both design and play these monstrosities / masterpieces). At this point, however, I’m really trying to push URR 0.8 out. There’s so little left to do now, so little left to check: of course I’m going to miss some bugs, and I fear, maybe even a couple of crash bugs, but I’m doing my absolute utmost to make this as stable, complete, and finished a product as I possibly can. Next update hopefully soon!









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Dorsidwarf

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3124 on: June 23, 2019, 05:07:40 pm »

Very nice. I liked the bugs about the piggy-back guards and the clerks who decided they were nobility.
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3125 on: June 24, 2019, 12:05:08 pm »

Very nice. I liked the bugs about the piggy-back guards and the clerks who decided they were nobility.

There have been some good ones recently!
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3126 on: July 23, 2019, 01:17:40 pm »

Hi everyone - I have some awesome news to share this month which isn't completely game-dev-related, but is pretty life-changing for me. More URRpdates next month!

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2019/07/23/new-job-new-country-new-continent/
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Muz

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3127 on: July 25, 2019, 09:52:17 pm »

Hi everyone - I have some awesome news to share this month which isn't completely game-dev-related, but is pretty life-changing for me. More URRpdates next month!

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2019/07/23/new-job-new-country-new-continent/

Congrats! I used to study at UNSW. Unisyd is pretty elite and full of smart people. Great step forward.
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mendonca

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3128 on: July 26, 2019, 12:10:36 am »

Wow, congratulations what an achievement and opportunity!

Nice one Mark, enjoy down under we’ll miss you in blighty.

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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3129 on: July 29, 2019, 10:59:54 am »

Congrats! I used to study at UNSW. Unisyd is pretty elite and full of smart people. Great step forward.

Wow, congratulations what an achievement and opportunity!

Nice one Mark, enjoy down under we’ll miss you in blighty.

Thank you so much, my friends! I appreciate it a ton :):). Hoping to move around end of September, start of October, all being well...
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3130 on: August 24, 2019, 01:09:26 pm »

Here’s the URRpdate of the last two months. A lot of travel and my laptop breaking while abroad has slowed things down, but a lot of progress has been made both on finishing off the last remaining bug-fixes, and adding the final small “feature” required for 0.8. The game is becoming increasingly stable, as well as increasingly polished, with each passing week. So, here’s what I’ve been up to in the last two months:

– Handled a puzzling issue where sometimes two general (i.e. “unimportant” and not saved by the game) NPCs would sometimes be on the same place with the same objective, and wouldn’t know what to do; if this happens, the game pushes one of them to one side, and then gives them a new objective.
– Fixed a range of grammatical issues with people talking about nations or cultures.
– Resolved a problem where certain kinds of buildings didn’t always generate correctly if they were building on ice as well as snow within a polar biome.
– Made sure that a few more buildings couldn’t possibly generate with furniture in the way of a door, which might therefore wind up blocking that door for NPCs who need to get through it.
– Altered and improved a few of the guidebook entries to make certain aspects of the game much clearer, and to stop a bug where looking at a certain entry caused a crash.
– Improved handling the names of relics, especially when people talk about them, and NPCs should no longer add in extra words at random times to describe them or their names.
– Put in some groundwork for future NPCs of classes that do not currently spawn in the game, such as inquisitors, royals and various other sorts of leaders, high-ranking soldiers / officers, and so forth. (This is a 0.9 thing if I develop a 0.9, but doing this also helped me clear up some of the code for existing NPCs)
– Resolved a weird and very rare bug involving saving the game at a certain point on the travel map after a particular set of moves, and then reloading the game, which would cause the game to crash when you tried to move again.
– Dealt with a problem where sometimes all the buildings required in a town didn’t correctly spawn if it took a while to place them intelligently.
– Handled a couple of remaining problems where wandering versions of certain classes, such as priests, would find themselves unable to talk about the things they should be able to talk about, by virtue of not being attached to a particular religious building (or equivalent for other NPCs)
– A couple of buildings which sometimes had weirdly high or weirdly low numbers of NPCs present seem to no longer run into this problem, although this is something I should keep an eye on.
– Without doubt, all problems around NPCs discussing the armour they might or might not be wearing have been fixed, and likewise all problems regarding NPCs telling you they are not wearing a necklace, nor any rings (as these have yet to be implemented in the game)
– Discovered that over time guards in certain districts tend to disappear, which I think must be due to some issue in how they move in unloaded areas when the player isn’t present. This doesn’t seem to cause a crash, which is great (and indeed it was coded precisely in this way, so it’s pleasing to see this works), but obviously this shouldn’t be happening. I’ve put in some new code to try to resolve this and “catch” guards before they somehow disappear into being stored in some place the game can’t retrieve them, and hopefully this will have improved matters.
– Checked a few buildings I originally missed when seeing whether buildings generated in one period (day or night) still work correctly and have the right NPCs when you return later, and I’m now very confident this is working correctly for all buildings (except embassies and mints, which I am aware of and need to resolve)
– Improved the grammar and listing when an innkeeper tells you about the (procedurally generated and region-specific) drinks they have on offer.
– Resolved a couple of remaining issues with certain questions being asked to either nomadic or tribal NPCs, who were unable to give sensible answers.
– Slaves and servants in castles were sometimes getting mixed up when the game tried to generate them, and thus causing confusion about which floors each should be sleeping on (the servants tend to sleep on the ground floor, but slaves sleep in subterranean floors) – this should now have been fixed.
– Very rarely a non-“guard” guard, by which I mean an NPC which isn’t of the “guard” class but was carrying out guarding actions (such as soldiers or knights in certain civilizations) didn’t function correctly, precisely because they were not “guards”. I believe I have fixed the last few places where this either caused a bit of NPC confusion (at best), or the game to crash (at worst)
– Fixed an issue with certain kinds of buildings in towns sometimes causing the generation of houses to stop weirdly early, leaving a strange eerie town almost completely devoid of actual homes and people, yet filled with roads.
– Spread out some of the loading symbols on the world generation page so it doesn’t look like the game might have crashed (when, in fact, it did not).
– Handled further issues with religious districts at night time, in particular people struggling to figure out how to worship, and priests behaving strangely when they can’t figure out how to get to a bed.
– I have also added some important new content! Since you can no longer, er, walk across the water, entering a “Dock” district in a city, or a new “dock” building in a town, now allows you to be transported to another city or another town! There are screenshots of this down below. This also causes time to pass – not much time right now, but that’s fine for the time being.
– Even better, when you get into a ship it now gives you a little story about your travel! This mentions something about the ship, the destination, your fellow travellers, what you see on the voyage, and so forth; these elements draw on a range of information about relevant nations, cultures, and locations, to generate a unique little paragraph for the player to read while the player is transported to their final destination, and while the required time passes for that journey to occur.
– For the time being you can reach any place with a dock via any other place with a dock, even if (as in the below map) there are different oceans; this will be changed later, but for now, it significantly helps with navigating the game world.

So: the last two months have brought much more polish, more bug-fixes, and some quality of life changes, such as allowing you to move quickly around the game world through the use of docks and the like. I’m really excited by how this is all coming together. Aside from URR updates, in the last couple of months I’ve also done almost all the remaining work for making my move to the University of Sydney at the end of September, finished writing a journal article about Super Mario Maker I’m excited to share in the near future, presented a whole bunch of work at this year’s Digital Games Research Association Conference in Kyoto, talked about Twitch and disability at the European Sociological Association, and spent some time with the family back in the UK. That said, though, it’ll be nice to get back to Canada for one final month to catch up with friends and colleagues before the move itself…

So: with all of this done, in a week from now I’ll be back in Canada and back to being able to work hard on the game, so I hope to have another solid update some time in September. The list of remaining tasks is pretty much only resolving two long-running bugs (involving ambassadors and mints), handling a few more issues around sentence generation, adding a little bit more polish here and there… and then… that’s it?! See you all soon!







« Last Edit: August 24, 2019, 01:12:45 pm by Ultima Ratio Regum »
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Dorsidwarf

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3131 on: August 26, 2019, 11:53:06 am »

Great to see that taking ships is added!

As a question, the screen says "Ships which are in right now", does this mean eventually you'll be able to book ships in advance? A timecrunch within a timecrunch if you booked an expensive passage, perhaps...
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Ultima Ratio Regum

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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3132 on: September 03, 2019, 10:08:14 am »

Great to see that taking ships is added!

As a question, the screen says "Ships which are in right now", does this mean eventually you'll be able to book ships in advance? A timecrunch within a timecrunch if you booked an expensive passage, perhaps...

Heh, yes! That was the longer-term idea; you could book ships in advance for low price, or the closer you book them to when they depart, the higher the price becomes. That is for if/when money is implemented and if/when 0.8 is not a final release, of course, so we'll see :).
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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3133 on: September 17, 2019, 11:44:42 pm »

cool update
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Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (0.8 back in development!)
« Reply #3134 on: October 13, 2019, 05:20:50 pm »

I want 0.8.
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