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Deep Thoreau
Aug 16, 2008

Dear nvining: I am looking fowards to this. I tried DF a while ago, but the interface is like being punched in the dick while the game screams 'go gently caress yourself casual' with spittle on it's lips.

This looks awesome as hell and I look forward to playing the hell out of it.


I'm also prepared to send rather...risque photos of myself to work for you. Just one thing: Rose clenched between teeth, or rose held up to my face, as if partaking in it's delicate aroma? Zebra-skin rug guaranteed to be in said pictures.

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MorphineMike
Nov 4, 2010
This looks like it's going to be amazing, and I'm especially hopeful as Gaslamp has maintained the Dredmor charm over the course of 3 expansions now. If they can bring that style and loving feeling across, this game will be so good.

Retro42
Jun 27, 2011


Really excited for this.

Combining two of my favorite things, Gaslamp and DF.

Ssthalar
Sep 16, 2007

A lonely DiggleCthulu has entered your DungeonCity - Kill it with Fire!Science! :science:

Looking very much forward to see the insanity this game will produce.

The Flying Milton
Jan 18, 2005

I will be very upset if there aren't diggles in this at all.

Thyrork
Apr 21, 2010

"COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.

:awesomelon:
Slippery Tilde

The Flying Milton posted:

I will be very upset if there aren't diggles in this at all.

Hopefully they will be a really trivial problem, like a small rat infestation. Any claims they are actually dangerous or have "gods" will be laughed at by everyone else, making every time you struggled with them in DoD all the more hurtful. :allears:

Rocketlex
Oct 21, 2008

The Manliest Knight
in Caketown

The Flying Milton posted:

I will be very upset if there aren't diggles in this at all.

I want an alternate game mode that replaces all the humans with diggles. Run a diggle city populated entirely by diggles with tophats and coats.

Ssthalar
Sep 16, 2007

Shadowmorn posted:

Hopefully they will be a really trivial problem, like a small rat infestation. Any claims they are actually dangerous or have "gods" will be laughed at by everyone else, making every time you struggled with them in DoD all the more hurtful. :allears:

This, oh so much this :allears:
(also, i actually find the Diggles cute in a strange way)
E: And i was suddenly reminded about the rat infestation in the Anno games where they would eat your cake, food, bricks and loving steel. At least this would make sense with a Diggle infestation.
E2: can't stop saying 'Diggles' now dammit!

Ssthalar fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Aug 28, 2012

Deep Thoreau
Aug 16, 2008

Rocketlex posted:

I want an alternate game mode that replaces all the humans with diggles. Run a diggle city populated entirely by diggles with tophats and coats.

If Gaslamp ever wants to make a million dollars, they can make this a facebook game. Diggletown!

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:
I see Diggles in this setting as more of something that would undermine a building by digging out the foundation (or digging out the underside of the foundation), necessitating some maintinence or perhaps rounding up some men from the constabulatory to kill the little buggers in their nests.

Fledgling Gulps
Jul 4, 2007

I'll meet you in Meereen,
we'll grub out.
Well steampunk is already pretty hosed out but I have faith in Gaslamp to Rise Above. Still, looking forward to it. By the time I heard of Dwarf Fortress it was already too obfuscated for my puny brain, but I do love me some city builders.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Oh my yes. You've got your mascot character right there Gaslamp. :allears: Diggles everywhere!

Rocketlex
Oct 21, 2008

The Manliest Knight
in Caketown

President Ark posted:

I see Diggles in this setting as more of something that would undermine a building by digging out the foundation (or digging out the underside of the foundation), necessitating some maintinence or perhaps rounding up some men from the constabulatory to kill the little buggers in their nests.

In the endgame your entire city suddenly sinks into a miles-deep crater of earth.

From a distant cliff, a single diggle looks on and nods quietly to himself.

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

Rocketlex posted:

I want an alternate game mode that replaces all the humans with diggles. Run a diggle city populated entirely by diggles with tophats and coats.

I would pay so much money for this.

Also for that diggle plushie that was on the website a while back. When are the diggle plushies coming, Gaslamp! :mad:

Ssthalar
Sep 16, 2007

neongrey posted:

Diggle plushie

Wait, what!?
I need this!

Markovnikov
Nov 6, 2010
I'm really excited for this too. I've always been able to play DF (you get used to the interface, just have to power on through), but for me it gets old quick (you either get a stable fortress, or you embark in the worst possible conditions and lose immediately).

Some questions:
Will our piping and cogging(?) designs affect the city we build? I see it as adding a sort of puzzly aspect on top of the city building, but I don't know how you ahve envisioned it.

Are the images in the OP just early mock ups? They don't look too good, and I worry it might be the transition into 3D rather than the nicer 2D of Dredmor/various Clockwork Empire concept art.

I know it's still really early to know, but will the requirements for the game be high? Seems like with all those extra dimensions and simulation it'll be a far more requiring game than Dredmor.

Finally, will there be more unknown games/DLC for Dredmor in the intervening year? A whole year without Gaslamp Goodiness seems like a lot.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Ssthalar posted:

Wait, what!?
I need this!


http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/07/13/dredmors-how-old/
:allears:

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance
Answering questions:

Will our piping and cogging(?) designs affect the city we build?

Yes. Piping, for sure; basically, pipes transport goods from the output stage of one factory to the input stage of another factory (without the immediacy of a stockpile.) So you can put raw resources into a system via pipes (lava, magma, water, pigs), and have output come out of another pipe (molten steel, steam, ground pigs, etc.) Now, what happens if a pipe breaks...? And what happens if pipes get rerouted and, for instance, you route pigs into the brick press?

Cogging is an interesting one, and David and I are fighting about whether or not it is actually necessary to have correctly modelled gear drive ratios, and that sort of thing. We'll see what it ends up being. You can also build dynamos, and harvest electricity to be stored in Leyden Jars, deployed in your Shock Troops, or to be run through various things. The plan is for there to be some system that supports logic through such a system via gates and inverters, so you should be able to make some interesting computing stuff. (An IBM document yields some clues - "Basic Principles of Vacuum Tube Logic" - although I'm a little worried about how much detail we want to go into here worrying about things like grounding and practical glassblowing.) There is also talk of doing logic through Steam Relays and Pneumatic Vents.

In general, yes, your cities will definitely affect things and will be very interactive. Layout will also be important; when you create a factory, all the machines on the factory go into the *outside* of the factory (because that's more Fun) and are plumbed into the plumbing and coggled... into the coggling... Er, yes. I look forward to watching people horribly optimize factory layout profiles for maximum efficiency, although the game will do that for you (and this is my current problem this week.)

Are those the real graphics? Yes and no. They are real, in-game artist assets; they are not actually in-engine, but are mocked up renders. We're aiming for a somewhat more painterly style, similar to what DOTA 2 (a big influence on the art department) is doing. The big problem we have is that we can't afford to go through and make high-resolution, normal-mapped cages for everything, so we don't have a good source of bump maps. You work with what you can.

We also have the interesting problem of trying to pick a graphical style that will handle loads well. If you have fifty citizens fighting an Invisible Geometer and its horde of Obeliskian Monolithic servitors, then you need to not get too bogged down in the details.

The engine itself is built, by me, in house. For those not in the know, I've built renderers for various games for the past eleven years, and it's also what I do in my double secret life as an academic. We'll end up with something good and fast. For the technical minded, it is a deferred renderer with HDR effects, post-processing including blur and SSAO, multiple point light sources, and PCF shadow maps. The main reason we ran with what we did is that it only just recently got all the pieces glued together in a semblance of style and running-ness. Minimum specs are a DirectX 9 graphics card.

The other exciting thing that we are doing is trying to solve the problem of getting bogged down in simulation, which Dwarf Fortress has a big problem with. Anybody who's ever opened Hell knows about this. The solution is to make the simuation layer span multiple cores efficiently, but this is easier said than done. To deal with this, we teamed up with the CASCADE research group at Simon Fraser University. Micah J. Best has joined us as a systems programmer, been working with us under the auspices of a MITACS Industrial Grant, and he and I have been building a very sophisticated message-passing and scheduling system. As a bonus, we get multiplayer, which would otherwise be impossible to try and send over a network. So we're being clever here.

Leading nicely into minimum spec requirements... This is the main reason why we are heavily pushing for quad-core as a minimum spec machine. Other than that, you'll need a DirectX 9-capable graphics card. (We use OpenGL, but it's a good baseline.) You'll get the best performance and visual effects if you have a newer graphics card, something that can support OpenCL or the OpenGL compute shaders that were just announced at SIGGRAPH 2012. You will also want a good chunk of RAM.

Diggle Plushies - interestingly, if all goes according to plan, the first shipment of Diggle plushies is arriving at a game conference in Seattle some time soon. Not sure how you'll win them yet, but we'll think of something.

Diggles in CE... oh, they're back. I think we're stuck with them.

More DLC for Dredmor: Right now, the focus is on getting CE in an alpha/beta state. With Conquest of the Wizardlands, we're happy to sic the mod community on the problem of additional content. FaxCelestis and some of the other modders involved with YHTNTEP are doing an "unofficial followup" to YHTNTEP, called the Vaults of Maslech; when it's done, it'll be worth checking out. There is at least one more Dredmor patch in the hopper before we move Chris Whitman to CE, and I'm sure there will be little balance tweaks and adjustments, but I think CotW is the last magical song of Dredmor for the time being.

But who knows...?

There's a very large interview coming up on PC Gamer's website tomorrow, where we'll be talking more about all of this.

nvining fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Aug 28, 2012

toasterwarrior
Nov 11, 2011
I didn't play Dungeons of Dredmor, but I've heard good things about the indie developer; and this:

quote:

Steampunk Dwarf Fortress meets Anno with Lovecraft Influences.

has drawn me like a moth to flame. Hopefully without the getting-burned part.

toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Aug 28, 2012

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

nvining posted:

Diggles and other stuff

Just take this, it's my bank account information, just take whatever you need. No, no. Whatever you want.

Seriously CE sounds sweet as hell and I will happy to buy five copies for me and all my friends.

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

I might give this a try despite the setting being meme bingo.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Holy poo poo you're giving me horrible SpaceChem factory setup flashbacks here. That's a good thing.

Cant wait to reroute pigs into brick presses.

7c Nickel
Apr 27, 2008
I am unabashedly a fan of good steampunk (It exists! I swear!) and Dwarf Fortress (or similar games). I can not wait to hear more about this project.

Gromit
Aug 15, 2000

I am an oppressed White Male, Asian women wont serve me! Save me Campbell Newman!!!!!!!
There's only one question I need to have answered: when do I get to see the Electric Doughnut Puncher?

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

Wow, that whole encoggling and pipelines thing seems really complex. How's the interface going to help new players deal with this?

7c Nickel
Apr 27, 2008
Actually I have a question.

Do buildings have interiors or are they kind of black holes that citizens go into to work and exit when they're done? If so, wouldn't that cause problems with trying to stuff underground or giant one building arcology type settlements?

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
If I get my poets off their tits on laudanum do they give me information about lovecraftian poo poo as they see through reality and write about the horrors plaguing their dreams?

Veinless
Sep 11, 2008

Smells like motivation
Just please, please don't let the DF forum idea of Accurate Dorf Feces Modeling infect what is currently sounding awesome.

KataraniSword
Apr 22, 2008

but at least I don't have
a MLP or MSPA avatar.
I am my own man.

endlessmonotony posted:

As long as it doesn't gently caress up / crash my system, I'm okay with the game failing hilariously.

Markovnikov posted:

I know it's still really early to know, but will the requirements for the game be high? Seems like with all those extra dimensions and simulation it'll be a far more requiring game than Dredmor.

Speaking of crashing systems - I have to echo the hope that it's going to be as poor-people friendly as Dredmor is. I'm not a hardware nut, I completely lost track of what the hell processors do around the time Windows stopped being a terrible operating system, I don't know how I make my processors more core-y. Here's what I do know.

I've got a low-grade $400 laptop that I got from Local Office Conglomerate that can run pretty much any indie game that's come out in the past few years (except Binding of Isaac because who codes a vector-based game in Flash), but still can't handle stuff that's made to run on the consoles like your Assassin Effects and your Mass Creeds. Will I be able to get in on the beta or even the official release without my computer catching on fire? As it is arguably more important to me than several internal organs and definitively more important than the rest of them, I'd rather not lose it.

Ssthalar
Sep 16, 2007


Yesss.


nvining posted:


:words:

Diggle Plushies!

More Diggles!

You have my undivided attention. :allears:

(Beyond the Diggles, the engine sounds interesting and I like reading about the technical details)

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

Here's a question, will you actively attempt to avoid any possibility of a Dwarf Fortress style "build a trench or wall to stop anything" type scenario?

aldantefax
Oct 10, 2007

ALWAYS BE MECHFISHIN'
Oh, you had me at "quad-core". :anime: Is this strictly build/Fortress mode only, and does not have an additional "adventurer" mode to explore your world? Also, is there going to be something going on with historical advancement in a generated world (abandon/reclaim, wars, historical figures, etc) or is each game going to be its own brand new generated everything?

immortal flow
Jun 6, 2003
boing boing boing

Diggles are much cuter in their egg-shaped interpretation, with no clearly defined head :shobon:

delta534
Sep 2, 2011

KataraniSword posted:

Speaking of crashing systems - I have to echo the hope that it's going to be as poor-people friendly as Dredmor is. I'm not a hardware nut, I completely lost track of what the hell processors do around the time Windows stopped being a terrible operating system, I don't know how I make my processors more core-y. Here's what I do know.

I've got a low-grade $400 laptop that I got from Local Office Conglomerate that can run pretty much any indie game that's come out in the past few years (except Binding of Isaac because who codes a vector-based game in Flash), but still can't handle stuff that's made to run on the consoles like your Assassin Effects and your Mass Creeds. Will I be able to get in on the beta or even the official release without my computer catching on fire? As it is arguably more important to me than several internal organs and definitively more important than the rest of them, I'd rather not lose it.

It might not be able to, I have a low-grade $450 laptop that can run Binding of Issac but will not be able to run CE. Deferred rendering tends to be slow on it, memory bound, and it is only a slow dual core.

Springtime Goddess
Sep 2, 2006

oh no i put a stupid title text here when i registered in 2006 please how do i change it i am not good with computer

immortal flow posted:

Diggles are much cuter in their egg-shaped interpretation, with no clearly defined head :shobon:

This guy begs to disagree:

Tendronai
May 7, 2008

My worst nightmare. It's a dream I have. I'm in a square cell, glass walls, just me and a little castle.
I never played DF but I'm still going to buy this day one. Glad to see more from Gaslamp, Dredmor was awesome.

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN
Welp I've been sucked in by the word 'Steampunk' as I always am. Throw in Lovecraft and Dwarf Fortress and I think I may be in love.

Deep Thoreau
Aug 16, 2008

Deadmeat5150 posted:

Welp I've been sucked in by the word 'Steampunk' as I always am. Throw in Lovecraft and Dwarf Fortress and I think I may be in love.

That reminds me: Just how much Lovecraftian stuff will be in the game? Will it be the occasional thing, or will you be able to accidentally open the gates to a terrible plane, filled with creatures man was not meant to look on?

Or maybe not by any accident at all? :zoid:

Scaly Haylie
Dec 25, 2004

I'm so excited for this. Finally, the zany depth of a Dwarf Fortress game without the need to get a loving MBA in how to play the game first.

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Darval
Nov 20, 2007

Shiny.
Whoa, lost for words. Reading that article struck all the right chords with me. I'm more optimistic than skeptical after playing Dungeons of Dredmor.

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