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Ok, question. We already know one feedback-loop you've designed into the game: a mad architect designs a building that slowly drives people mad, making for a madness spiral. Good, that mimics the tantrum spiral somewhat (Mechanic: Negative condition that causes infected to make other people move towards that same negative condition). But Dwarf Fortress has had more than one kind of spiral. Do you have any others planned? For instance, a Nolio style infection spiral? The key points of that would be that it is a negative condition that someone can try to remove from themselves, but in the process, infects others who are doing something completely unrelated. Any other spiral mechanics? Interlocking spiral mechanics (ie, one system feeds into a second that feeds into a third that feeds back into the first)? With each of the "feeds into" being preventable if you're careful, but potentially overlooked.
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Sep 12, 2012 16:13
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Alchemist who doesn't want to pay the dangerous-experimental-potion-disposal-fees and dumps it down the sink, infecting the whole city with weird ailments and illnesses. VV If the tear was in some poor sods cellar you might not notice it until something really terrible comes through... Nettle Soup fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Sep 12, 2012 |
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Sep 12, 2012 16:21
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A race of extradimensional horrors that can break in and mess things up. If left alive long enough, they worsen the tears through which they intruded on our reality through, opening the way for more/worse invasions later on.
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Sep 12, 2012 16:27
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I'd love to know anything you have set up or planned for the map. Sky combat has been mentioned already so I assume at least there will be at least 2 z levels but other than that will the game be any specific depth/altitude? What about travel or combat over/under water?
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Sep 12, 2012 16:34
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Iunnrais posted:Any other spiral mechanics? Interlocking spiral mechanics (ie, one system feeds into a second that feeds into a third that feeds back into the first)? With each of the "feeds into" being preventable if you're careful, but potentially overlooked.
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Sep 12, 2012 18:39
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Strudel Man posted:Uh, why on earth would you want this? The end of fortresses to 'everyone is sad' is one of the worst parts of Dwarf Fortress; cascading failure isn't really something to shoot for in a game. I beg to differ. And I would like to specify that UNAVOIDABLE cascading failure is not fun, but having things collapse and the struggle to fight against the collapse and to go to the very brink of failure, hanging on by your fingernails... that's fun. And if that CAN'T happen, it's not fun. For example, let me go back to Nolio. Nolio had no an unidentifiable vector for a while, so it built up rapidly, but if it's vector had been known, it could have been stopped early by forbidding the well/hospital area. Even when it had spread to everyone, it was still stoppable via the public baths (true, combined with a utility to actually make the stuff go away once not on an object, but the point remains). Those that still had some contamination left on them remained a risk, but that risk added to the fun. And those that never got near the contaimination remained safe, and could have started over from there, leaving the others to die of Nolio and creating a deadly ruin in the process. I think that's AWESOME. From my perspective, what you would prefer is the equivalent to a 2d platformer with no enemies in it. Possible, but not usually not as much fun.
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Sep 12, 2012 23:36
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Has Spacechem had any influence on this? It's the first game I thought of when you mentioned pipes feeding outputs from buildings into the input slots of other buildings.
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Sep 12, 2012 23:48
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Strudel Man posted:Uh, why on earth would you want this? The end of fortresses to 'everyone is sad' is one of the worst parts of Dwarf Fortress; cascading failure isn't really something to shoot for in a game. Cascading failures help games end, which is kind of the point in a theoretically endless sandbox game. Snowballing catastrophes is kind of a feature of the genre.
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Sep 13, 2012 12:07
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Markovnikov posted:The problem with Minecraft's redstone is that it's really clunky and anti intuitive, and I'm pretty sure it works nothing like what it's trying to emulate. It gets to the point where some people can barely connect two things with wires, while the electrical engineers run around building gigantic memories and RAMs and calculators and whatnot. As you say, Redpower improves it by giving you pre-built logic gates instead of requiring you to learn basic electrical engineering.
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Sep 13, 2012 13:01
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Ghostlight posted:Actually, from what I understand it works exactly like what it's emulating which is precisely why electrical engineers run around recreating computers and non-technical people struggle to create a pressure pad to open their front door. The thing is, it tries simulating both normal wires (just carrying a signal) and semiconductors (redstone torches somewhat?), and maybe diodes (redstone repeaters) and some parts of transistors at the same time. It's kind of messy. Anyways, someone mentioned Spacechem, and that one is a much user friendly system. You can easily try and do something that will solve the puzzle at hand, even if it somewhat brute forcey and not extremely efficient. Then someone can come by and make a Brainfuck interpreter (actually happened, check the competition the devs had a while back when they implemented free mode) with the same system.
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Sep 13, 2012 13:21
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Ghostlight posted:Actually, from what I understand it works exactly like what it's emulating which is precisely why electrical engineers run around recreating computers and non-technical people struggle to create a pressure pad to open their front door. Well, there would be nothing wrong with vanilla Redstone if it were just basic electrical engineering. The problem is that it's got a ton of obnoxious idiosyncracies like currents on north/south wires behaving differently than currents on east/west wires, vertical power transmission taking twice as much space or more than horizontal power transmission, etc.
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Sep 13, 2012 14:26
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Iunnrais posted:Ok, question. We already know one feedback-loop you've designed into the game: a mad architect designs a building that slowly drives people mad, making for a madness spiral. Good, that mimics the tantrum spiral somewhat (Mechanic: Negative condition that causes infected to make other people move towards that same negative condition). Oh, Nolio... Gemclod's finest moment.  Erm. Off the top of my head for spirals: madness spirals, rival nation spirals, various spirals concerning eldritch entities, various spirals concerning the Prime Minister's Anti-Paranormal Incursion Squad, hostile nations, mine disasters, laudanum shortages, failures to accede to royal/prime ministerial requests, failures to accede to aristocratic demands, Science Criminal, radioactivity, game-engineered megaprojects gone terrifyingly wrong, user-engineered megaprojects going terrifyingly wrong, and just plain running the thing into the ground yourself. So, yeah, a few. Yes, some of them spiral into themselves. Actually, most of them. President Ark posted:A race of extradimensional horrors that can break in and mess things up. If left alive long enough, they worsen the tears through which they intruded on our reality through, opening the way for more/worse invasions later on. May be hitting the nail on the head. SynthOrange posted:Has Spacechem had any influence on this? It's the first game I thought of when you mentioned pipes feeding outputs from buildings into the input slots of other buildings. I haven't played it, but I know David has, and the pipe system was his idea sooo... Shadowmorn posted:If your going to look at redstone mechanics for inspiration, for the love of the diggle devil, download technic and look at all the other crazy machinery in tekkit. We have at least one goon run (by me Will do. That sounds so beautiful. And yeah, Pozzo, I've got both you and StarkRavingMad on my "preferred beta testers" list for testing the round robin mode.
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Sep 13, 2012 19:30
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) tekkit server and some of the setups are already decending into madding pictures of pipes within pipes within pipes 
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I have one question. How big will the world be? is it ANNO size or waay bigger? Massive? How long will it take to travel across the world?
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Sep 13, 2012 20:04
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Carolus posted:I have one question. How big will the world be? is it ANNO size or waay bigger? Massive? How long will it take to travel across the world? Like Dwarf Fortress, you have a large world and you choose an embarkation site. So it's a bit of a weird question. Right now, and this is mainly for debugging purposes, the embark world is 122 x 122. The rendering representation of the embark world is 8x higher resolution - 8 units in rendering tile space represent one unit of game tile space - so you have a lo-res gameplay map and a higher-res rendering representation. That said, I'm pretty sure that 122x122 is too small for an embark site and that I'll be expanding this significantly in a bit. How big do people want their embark sites to be?
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Sep 13, 2012 20:06
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You mentioned piping pork into a brick factory, does this mean we can expect pork houses or just a very messy factory?
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Sep 13, 2012 20:08
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nvining posted:Like Dwarf Fortress, you have a large world and you choose an embarkation site. So it's a bit of a weird question. Without knowing what those units are, how big structures are, where resources are located, where interesting features are located, etc, that's kind of a meaningless question. If you expect us to build thousands of buildings, it might be kind of small. If you expect us to build like 50, it's probably fine.
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Sep 13, 2012 20:14
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Geokinesis posted:You mentioned piping pork into a brick factory, does this mean we can expect pork houses or just a very messy factory? You get SquarePig, the delicious Empire Treat.
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Sep 13, 2012 20:14
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nvining posted:You get SquarePig, the delicious Empire Treat. That is great! I hope that a lot of materials and buildings have amusing interactions like that when piping unconventional stuff into them.
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Sep 13, 2012 20:17
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nvining posted:Like Dwarf Fortress, you have a large world and you choose an embarkation site. So it's a bit of a weird question. Just make it the embark site large enough to have a decent subset of features. In DF some of the features are underground and can be expected to be found every game, but other features like haunted biomes, goblin/elf/human towns, tundra, ect can only be found at specific embark sites. You also can usually only find one or two of these features at a time. I don't think it has to be a condition that the player could encounter every feature in a single game, it's a better design to make a player experience multiple games to see all the features.
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Sep 13, 2012 22:30
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I'd love it if there was a possibility of specifying the size of the embark site as well, I love massive maps, absolutely adore 'em. I was wondering though, and I don't think I've seen it get asked before: But how do you draw / map the blueprints of buildings? Do you just draw them out pretty quickly by mouse clicking+dragging, or will there be some small tools, like Circle, square, straight line, etc, so that it's easier to make fancier buildings? Also, can you save those blueprints of the buildings, or just copy the blueprint from a building that already exists, if you're particularly fond of how it ended up, or just want to have a couple of identical buildings? ( I remember that Black & White 2 had a pretty decent way of making a lot of identical buildings, just lift up the building you want, and smack down the blueprint somewhere else. ) Also, you guys rock, I've played a decent bit of DoD, and am exited as all hell for this. 
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Sep 13, 2012 23:05
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SubNat posted:I'd love it if there was a possibility of specifying the size of the embark site as well, I love massive maps, absolutely adore 'em. There's some fighting going on here. David is a big proponent of having absolutely *everything* be in the 3D view; I want the ability to pull up a 2D viewport for a window so you can actually see/edit a 2D blueprint, possibly with layers. It remains to be seen who will actually win this fight. quote:Also, can you save those blueprints of the buildings, or just copy the blueprint from a building that already exists, Yes, in some form, but I don't know what yet. Building duplication and copying seems like a good idea, really.
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Sep 14, 2012 04:26
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This looks awesome. I think I'm really gonna enjoy this game
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Sep 14, 2012 04:52
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Count Clockwork posted:This looks awesome. I think I'm really gonna enjoy this game ... with a handle like that? Not surprised. 
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Sep 14, 2012 05:02
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This is going to own. Thanks for taking goon feedback so seriously and openly. I would also like massive embark sites. Massive. Really massive.
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Sep 14, 2012 06:42
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Strudel Man posted:Uh, why on earth would you want this? The end of fortresses to 'everyone is sad' is one of the worst parts of Dwarf Fortress; cascading failure isn't really something to shoot for in a game. This my friends is the wrongest person to ever grace a thread. The descent into failure is the entire fun part of the genre. Without it, you end up like a Sim City game where you either abandon it after hours of staring at your precious little creation, or you hit the disaster button and destroy it yourself. Yuck.
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Sep 14, 2012 08:12
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Sorry if it's been brought up already, but I'm hoping that this game will be like Dredmor in that you won't need too terribly beefy a computer to run it. My laptop isn't terrible or anything but it's sure not top of the line either. What sort of system requirements will this game demand?
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Sep 14, 2012 08:14
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SpruceZeus posted:Sorry if it's been brought up already, but I'm hoping that this game will be like Dredmor in that you won't need too terribly beefy a computer to run it. My laptop isn't terrible or anything but it's sure not top of the line either. What sort of system requirements will this game demand? So far they're recommending at least a quad-core for the simulation layer. Dual-core may sneak bye but it's being designer with quads in mind. Otherwise nothing really announced.
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Sep 14, 2012 08:20
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nvining posted:There's some fighting going on here. David is a big proponent of having absolutely *everything* be in the 3D view; I want the ability to pull up a 2D viewport for a window so you can actually see/edit a 2D blueprint, possibly with layers. It remains to be seen who will actually win this fight. 2D views are good!
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Sep 14, 2012 09:29
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nvining posted:There's some fighting going on here. David is a big proponent of having absolutely *everything* be in the 3D view; I want the ability to pull up a 2D viewport for a window so you can actually see/edit a 2D blueprint, possibly with layers. It remains to be seen who will actually win this fight. I think that having an optional 2-d map popout for designing buildings is the way to go. A case where all 3-d could fail is if you were blueprinting a building in the middle of a open space surrounded by other buildings, certain details could be obscured by the other buildings. You could of course make the surrounding buildings transparent, but that might be more complicated than a 2-d popup.
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Sep 18, 2012 23:24
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I don't dare make any suggestions, but I'll just say I'm really excited about this. I loved Dredmor to death (mostly mine, occasionally Dredmor's) and I can't think of a better group to tackle a Dwarf-Fortressy supersim. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
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Sep 18, 2012 23:57
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Dr.Spaceman posted:I think that having an optional 2-d map popout for designing buildings is the way to go. A case where all 3-d could fail is if you were blueprinting a building in the middle of a open space surrounded by other buildings, certain details could be obscured by the other buildings. You could of course make the surrounding buildings transparent, but that might be more complicated than a 2-d popup. In renderBuildings() simply draw everything with 0.1 alpha, problem solved. A 2d pop up would actually be more complicated, but some sort of auxilisry drawing screen from a ux perspective might be preferable.
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Sep 19, 2012 12:54
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A bunch of WIP engine shots are up on the company blog: http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/09/19/evolution-of-a-3d-engine/ showing the evolution of the engine in progress. The one at the bottom is fairly close to the current reality, although obviously we're a long ways away from done yet.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:11
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nvining posted:There's some fighting going on here. David is a big proponent of having absolutely *everything* be in the 3D view; I want the ability to pull up a 2D viewport for a window so you can actually see/edit a 2D blueprint, possibly with layers. It remains to be seen who will actually win this fight. You guys should take a look at Shores of Hazeron's ship creation. It's a nice hybrid. They don't show it in that video but if you hit backspace you switch to topdown view and switch between layers. It's really always 3d, but there is the wireframe and the top down view and bam, blueprint view.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:30
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Dev Blog posted:Here is an early terrain test. It menaces with spikes of blending. Looks like pretty fast development.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:33
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nvining posted:A bunch of WIP engine shots are up on the company blog: http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/09/19/evolution-of-a-3d-engine/ quote:Here is an early terrain test. It menaces with spikes of blending. Dwarf Fortress as gently caress.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:34
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Dr.Spaceman posted:
Looks like they've built an engine in the time it takes the Zomboid developers to (partially) fix one bug.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:36
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the black husserl posted:Looks like they've built an engine in the time it takes the Zomboid developers to (partially) fix one bug. The engine's been under construction for quite awhile; it stems from "the giant ball of code that every indie developer has who's been around for long enough", and also has bits of my Master's thesis codebase in it (and somebody else's Ph.D thesis. Yikes.) We also use a lot of open source stuff to hold everything together. Having revision control probably also helps.
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Sep 19, 2012 23:15
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I only just twigged about why you probably mentioned Project Zomboid: the isometric perspective. Comparing the Zomboid engine and the Empires engine is a little like comparing apples and oranges. Zomboid is a hybrid isometric engine. I think some things are rendered in 3D, and they have some good fake lighting, but fundamentally the game is 2D sprites and 2D props on more 2D art. Everything in Clockwork Empires is actually 3D, from the models through to the animation and the terrain. The main difference between CE and any regular engine is that it uses an isometric projection rather than a perspective projection; this is mainly to make the game a little easier to play (although it causes me nothing but trouble.) If we wanted to stop what we were doing and make, say, a first person shooter, we'd be well set up to do this. Just tooting my own horn. 
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Sep 20, 2012 05:38
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nvining posted:If we wanted to stop what we were doing and make, say, a first person shooter, we'd be well set up to do this. ...So you're planning a Dredmor Metroidvania and a Clockwork Empires FPS. When will you announce the obligatory kid-friendly party game? 
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Sep 20, 2012 05:59
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KataraniSword posted:...So you're planning a Dredmor Metroidvania and a Clockwork Empires FPS. DIGGLE PARTY 6, baby. It's coming.
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Sep 20, 2012 06:18
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