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I just read up on this yesterday and I am already looking forward to it! The multiplayer features in particular have me interested - Both the idea of four players either pitching together to make a wonderful city or waging war on each other for valuable resources, and I'm loving the idea of Round Robin mode, too. To that end, I have a few questions: With 4-player multiplayer, is a particular mode (Cooperative or Competitive) designated at the start, or will it be more of a tense, paranoia-filled situation like DEFCON, where players decide on their own whether they want to work with that guy on that hill over there, or stab him in the back and claim the resources for themselves? As for Round Robin mode, I'm assuming there's going to be a fixed length of time that each player runs the city (One or two in-game years before sending the game on to another player)? How many players can take part in a Round Robin game? How does changing between players work - is it like traditional PBEM games where we send a file to the next player, or will all interested players be able to sign up to a game and be notified via email when it's their turn to play, kind of like Frozen Synapse's multiplayer? I think that's all I have to ask for now, I will most definitely be keeping an eye on this game! Chaz GELF fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Aug 28, 2012 |
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Aug 28, 2012 18:25
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You had me at city builder. I can't wait!
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Aug 28, 2012 18:28
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Something occurred to me and now I'm curious. You've compared this game to both Anno and DF, which is nice - both games I love - but I was thinking and these games really have dramatically different crafting models. In Anno, every thing you can make has a specific crafting path (tools always need iron/coal and two specific workshops to process them, for instance) and items are produced in large amounts - having one of a high-end material isn't terribly useful because your citizens/workshops will eat that in about 20 seconds and you'll need more. DF, meanwhile, has a very open-ended crafting system - you can make almost everything out of almost any other material, and items tend to be easy to craft (I think the most complicated thing to make is a traction bench) - and yet has an immense diversity of items because the different properties of each material gives the end product different characteristics, from weight (silver is a lovely weapon material for everything except bludgeoning because it weighs a ton) to heat resistance (certain materials can't be burned by magma, so if you want any work done with it you have to make those workshops/devices out of those materials) to skill of the crafter. At the same time, this doesn't become frustrating because unlike Anno small quantities of items are very useful - 10 weapons in Anno is nothing; 10 weapons in DF supplies an entire military squad and they'll last forever. Very few things in DF really need to be produced in bulk. So what I'm wondering is - is production in this game closer to Anno or DF? These first articles definitely give the impression of something more in-line with Anno, but I could still definitely see some more DF-ey things coming in in some way - choosing different materials at a factory to use changes the quality/usability of the output; high-end machines (something that you'd only have a few of, like the engine running a big factory) might have different components causing different effects to the factory (faster/slower production, more/less raw material consumption, etc). President Ark fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 28, 2012 |
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Aug 28, 2012 18:30
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This is the first DF-like I've seen that /gets/ what's unique about Dwarf Fortress - it's never been the city building that really drives peoples passion for the game, but the emergent storytelling and the quirky lives of these little characters. Combine with Gaslamps track record. I couldn't care less about people whining about 'meme bingo' or whatever for the setting - these are the same people who cry foul whenever a game has zombies in it. It's irrelevant to making a good game and really there hasn't been that much in the way of Steampunk in strategy games.
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Aug 28, 2012 18:41
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Man, that Arch Diggle plush is just eating *all* the salad.Bash Ironfist posted: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? Not telling. I will say, as it's out there in the PC Gamer preview in the November issue, that one thing nobody is talking about is the transitive madness. Essentially, it boils down to this: suppose a mad architect makes a building. That building is a little mad because the architect made it, and therefore everybody who wanders through the building or interacts with it loses just a little bit more sanity as a result... President Ark posted:crafting models Some of this is still up in the air, but I think we're sort of between the two. You have factories, workshops, and what are called "artisan shops"; factories play a little more Anno style, artisan shops are more what you expect from a DF shop ("jeweller's"), etc., and workshops are somewhere between the two. Essentially, you never want to be in a position where you are micromanaging the raw construction of bulk goods (in DF, this mainly ends up being what, I believe, one Gemclod overseer refers to as 'Bad Munki tat') and that's where factories and the overseer system steps in. This is more something that David is thinking about right now, as opposed to yours truly. Chaz GELF posted:To that end, I have a few questions: With 4-player multiplayer, is a particular mode (Cooperative or Competitive) designated at the start, or will it be more of a tense, paranoia-filled situation like DEFCON, where players decide on their own whether they want to work with that guy on that hill over there, or stab him in the back and claim the resources for themselves? Unknown as of yet. Now that you mention it, I quite like the paranoia idea. quote:As for Round Robin mode, I'm assuming there's going to be a fixed length of time that each player runs the city (One or two in-game years before sending the game on to another player)? How many players can take part in a Round Robin game? How does changing between players work - is it like traditional PBEM games where we send a file to the next player, or will all interested players be able to sign up to a game and be notified via email when it's their turn to play, kind of like Frozen Synapse's multiplayer? We dump a zip; you mail the zip onwards, and it unzips. The guarantee is just that we can atomically store state and you can atomically load it. I think Bureaucrat turn duration is probably going to be one of those things that are configurable. I hadn't thought about having a dedicated PBEM server mode on the master server - we'll have a master server, yay! - so maybe there's a good case for doing things that way... hmm. Questions, questions!
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Aug 28, 2012 19:09
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Further to that, there is a bloody enormous interview with us here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/28/interview-gaslamp-games-mad-incredible-vision-for-clockwork-empires/ You can clearly see how much hair Dredmor save game failures have made me lose. Time for hats.
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Aug 28, 2012 19:26
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Whoever transcribed the interview misspelled "Gemclod". But speaking of DF LPs, I'm glad you guys are drawing inspiration from them, because they are amazing and just thinking of Boatmurdered/Gemclod/Headshoots makes me want to fire up DF right now. If anyone can deliver on this concept, it's Gaslamp.
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Aug 28, 2012 19:40
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nvining posted:I will say, as it's out there in the PC Gamer preview in the November issue, that one thing nobody is talking about is the transitive madness. Essentially, it boils down to this: suppose a mad architect makes a building. That building is a little mad because the architect made it, and therefore everybody who wanders through the building or interacts with it loses just a little bit more sanity as a result... I assume madness then will be a hidden stat on citizens/buildings/whatevers, so that I can sow ruinous seeds and then pass them on like time bombs in Round Robin play. Time bombs that explode into dead gods and ichor.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:00
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nvining posted:basically, pipes transport goods from the output stage of one factory to the input stage of another factory (without the immediacy of a stockpile.) Will this be all that pipes are used for or will they allow some fun tricks such as building a pig pipe into your enemies farmland to eat their crops, or drop magma into their city?
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Aug 28, 2012 20:02
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Saint Freak posted:I assume madness then will be a hidden stat on citizens/buildings/whatevers, so that I can sow ruinous seeds and then pass them on like time bombs in Round Robin play. The bas-relief sculptures of tortured forms and H.R. Giger-inspired building textures on the roof may be a bit of a giveaway.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:04
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On the uses of Leyden jars posted:DJ: Yeah, yeah. You could probably just even… Maybe the soldiers could throw them at people.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:18
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Are there any plans to offload some computation to graphics cards? It sounds like there will be a lot happening in parallel that might benefit from a CUDA-type architecture.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:24
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Veinless posted:Are there any plans to offload some computation to graphics cards? No, because of our networking. (Although we use it for the rendering whenever possible.) Essentially, our networking requires results of computations to be deterministic from machine to machine; video cards can't enforce that. We use it for skinning, render-quality water simulation, etc.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:28
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Everything about this sounds like it's tailor-made for me. Except the steampunk, which I have a gut reaction against in most contexts, but I can make an exception here.
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Aug 28, 2012 20:47
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gently caress this sounds incredible, I really hope you guys pull this off!
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Aug 28, 2012 21:06
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Yeah I mean the big problem with steampunk is not that it's inherently dumb-- it's a neat combination of aesthetics when properly applied-- it's that so often it gets hideously abused and overused in ugly ways to put gears that don't connect to anything on things and so on and so forth. Really it's well-suited to this sort of colonization game and I'm really looking forward to seeing more of it.
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Aug 28, 2012 21:14
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neongrey posted:Yeah I mean the big problem with steampunk is not that it's inherently dumb-- it's a neat combination of aesthetics when properly applied-- it's that so often it gets hideously abused and overused in ugly ways to put gears that don't connect to anything on things and so on and so forth. Steampunk is dumb because "punk" fiction is supposed to be about underdogs and the dregs of society while in practice most steampunk is about fetishizing upper-class Victorians (who were neither, and also terrible people.) All you have to do to fix it is recognize that any society built on the same model is inherently hosed up, and "Lovecraftian horrors" sounds like a pretty obvious way to suggest that. 
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Aug 28, 2012 21:21
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nvining posted:You specify a blueprint on the ground. You tag each wall with a "profile", which designates the building material and the profile of the roof. We then automatically extrude the building based on this. End result: you choose what the building looks like. (Then you stick decorations and gameplay elements on it, hook it to the Steam Pipes, etc.) This sounds pretty interesting. Will walls look the same, or are you varying details like brick layering, window placement and so on? Does this technique have a name?
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Aug 28, 2012 21:42
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FinalSin posted:This sounds pretty interesting. Will walls look the same, or are you varying details like brick layering, window placement and so on? a) Varying details. You can place decor, doors and windows, and choose various material types, or you can have the computer assign things for you if you're not that sort of a person. (Ditto factory modules.) b) "Procedural Extrusions." Here, have a paper: http://peterwonka.net/Publications/2011.TOG.Kelly.ProceduralExtrusions.TechreportVersion.final.pdf
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Aug 28, 2012 21:47
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So what's up with the hardware requirements? Is the simulation really computationally expensive enough to need 4/8 cores?
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Aug 28, 2012 21:49
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ten dollar bitcoin posted:So what's up with the hardware requirements? Is the simulation really computationally expensive enough to need 4/8 cores? I'm hedging my bets, let us say. A lot of this is based on my understanding of DF as opposed to what we're doing, but basically I worry that the simulation will get pretty bad if you're running a multiplayer game with four civilizations and NPC entities. We scale *really* well to multiple cores. I think you'll be able to get away with 2 cores, and you'll also be able to turn all the graphical shinies off if you want... so, I dunno, maybe I'm being too conservative? This is why we have betas!
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Aug 28, 2012 22:04
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nvining posted:I will say, as it's out there in the PC Gamer preview in the November issue, that one thing nobody is talking about is the transitive madness. Essentially, it boils down to this: suppose a mad architect makes a building. That building is a little mad because the architect made it, and therefore everybody who wanders through the building or interacts with it loses just a little bit more sanity as a result... It sounds like that's a great way to make for some dynamic stories. I'm picturing a painter who experiences something traumatic, a friend burns to death in lava. Most people have limited ways of dealing with that, they could talk to a friend or just drink away the pain. An artist can pour out those sad thoughts onto a canvas and feel a lot better. Of course, if he leaves the painting hanging in his house it'll probably just make things slowly worse over time. He'd be better off selling it and then some random aristocrat is going to have fun with volcano nightmares. The smart thing would be to export all those bad nasty thoughts back to the mainland.
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Aug 28, 2012 22:17
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:The smart thing would be to export all those bad nasty thoughts back to the mainland. ... not saying anything, biting my tongue...
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Aug 28, 2012 22:24
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:The smart thing would be to export all those bad nasty thoughts back to the mainland. I like this idea! More so because I can already think of some negative repercussions for doing so. Sure, you might be offloading some of the nasty madness-inducing stuff now, but the next ship full of immigrants from the Empire coming to settle in your town might be a little bit... off.
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Aug 28, 2012 22:38
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This seems a lot more ambitious then Dredmor. Have you guys picked up any new staff to handle the load?
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Aug 28, 2012 22:54
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nvining posted:Oh man you again? Great now I have to buy another game. 
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Aug 28, 2012 23:02
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Triple-Kan posted:This seems a lot more ambitious then Dredmor. Have you guys picked up any new staff to handle the load? Yep! The programming department now consists of myself, Micah J. Best (finishing his Ph.D at UBC), Christopher Whitman (formerly an engineer at Tiny Speck, working on Glitch, and also responsible for most of the code for Conquest of the Wizardlands), Ryan C. Gordon (http://www.icculus.org and responsible for most of your favourite ports to OS X and Linux; we have him doing an original title which is Weird), and Daniel Jacobsen (doing bits when CEO-ing permits.) The art department is now David, Chris Triolo (all the expansion pack monster sprites), and new members Sean Hamilton (environment art) and Joseph Nejat (character art.) This is Sean and Joseph's first game project, and Triolo's first 3D project, so this is fairly exciting. We also have an additional QA and build engineer working for us as a contractor for the next few weeks, getting us set up with automated builds and testing and stuff. Music and Sound is being done by the same guy who did our Dredmor OST, Matthew Steele. So, yeah. We got new offices and them promptly expanded to completely fill them. Again. AAAAAAGH! Everybody going to PAX, the entire Clockwork Empires team will be down there with the exception of Chris Whitman (and possibly Joseph, if he hasn't recovered from whatever kind of horrific British disease he has); come by the Indie Megabooth. We aren't showing CE, but come by and play some Dredmor and say hi. Heran Bago posted:Oh man you again? Great now I have to buy another game. Beware the Muscle Diggle!
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Aug 28, 2012 23:11
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nvining posted:Unknown as of yet. Now that you mention it, I quite like the paranoia idea. Awesome! When I first read about the simultaneous multiplayer mode I had wondrous thoughts in my head of up to four Colonial Grade Junior Bureaucrats working together to build a settlement, then breaking down into a mass of squabbles and backstabbing as each one tries to make themselves look good in order to gain individual recognition and favours from the Empire (After all, we can't just be handing out OBEs and promotions willy-nilly, can we?)
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Aug 28, 2012 23:20
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Can i route sewage pipes into the jar factory and make the worst throwing weapon ever?
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Aug 28, 2012 23:25
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This sounds fantastic, just as long as you don't spend three out of four of my cores simulating fingernail growth for all my inhabitants, the barometric pressure for every cubic centimeter of air on the map, and the material strength for each of the multiple fiber types woven into each individual urchin's rags.
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Aug 28, 2012 23:30
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Stanko-Prussian posted:Can i route sewage pipes into the jar factory and make the worst throwing weapon ever? ... posssssibly. Let's just say that routing things into other things involves unpleasant possibilities. (Nobody's even asked what Crimble is, or where it comes from.) Fintilgin posted:This sounds fantastic, just as long as you don't spend three out of four of my cores simulating fingernail growth for all my inhabitants, the barometric pressure for every cubic centimeter of air on the map, and the material strength for each of the multiple fiber types woven into each individual urchin's rags. But ... Tiny Tim needs those fingernails! (The model for the urchins, BTW, is the loveable Orphanbot from Futurama, whatever-his-name-is. That air of quiet optimism! So stoic!)
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Aug 28, 2012 23:33
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Fintilgin posted:This sounds fantastic, just as long as you don't spend three out of four of my cores simulating fingernail growth for all my inhabitants, the barometric pressure for every cubic centimeter of air on the map, and the material strength for each of the multiple fiber types woven into each individual urchin's rags. i'm presumin here and i doubt this is going in the official press kit as a term or anything but i get the feeling gaslamp are running with new "Spergy-As-Ya-Wannabe¸™" technology here
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Aug 28, 2012 23:35
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neongrey posted:Yeah I mean the big problem with steampunk is not that it's inherently dumb-- it's a neat combination of aesthetics when properly applied-- it's that so often it gets hideously abused and overused in ugly ways to put gears that don't connect to anything on things and so on and so forth. It's got a cog on it
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Aug 28, 2012 23:35
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Fintilgin posted:This sounds fantastic, just as long as you don't spend three out of four of my cores simulating fingernail growth for all my inhabitants, the barometric pressure for every cubic centimeter of air on the map, and the material strength for each of the multiple fiber types woven into each individual urchin's rags.  to hate but none of this is a joke. If Clockwork Empires runs well at all.... holy poo poo.
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Aug 28, 2012 23:44
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What's the moddability looking like for this game?
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Aug 29, 2012 00:09
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I'd like to throw away a year of my life just so this game will almost be out, but I guess I should spend some of that saving for a computer that will run it.
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Aug 29, 2012 00:21
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aldantefax posted:What's the moddability looking like for this game? - All your importers run from within engine; we take OpenCollada so you can use whatever 3D tool you want as long as it can write a (reasonably notbroken) DAE. - Profile editing happens in game. You can define your new building profiles in an editor. - Everything is XML, from the commodity lists down to the UI. - We learned a lot from Dredmor about how to load mods and make things compatible and not awful, and will be doing that. - There is some talk of scripting languages from Micah. So some portion of the game logic will be broken out to a script for editing and manipulation, but it's not totally clear what this looks like yet.
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Aug 29, 2012 00:22
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Here's a very important question: Can you make a town full of villagers SO FAT, that ground pork is just piped directly into peoples mouth? Or perhaps some sort of pork fountain. edit: That makes me wonder: Will the villagers of your town reflect how it's doing in some way? For example: A town doing poorly will have villagers dressed in ragged clothes, etc. edit 2: Or perhaps the other way around?
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Aug 29, 2012 00:24
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Dice Dice Baby posted:It's got a cog on it 
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Aug 29, 2012 00:26
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Wow, if you can deliver even half of the stuff in that interview, this will be the best game ever. Or at least the up-my-alleyest.
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Aug 29, 2012 00:31
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