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chiefnewo
May 21, 2007

nvining posted:

A cool thing that we currently have, thanks to our addled work on Raw Technical Majesty: for debugging and networking purposes, every step of the game's simulation is 100% deterministic and replayable.

I've always been curious about this sort of thing, does 100% deterministic mean there are no "random" events as such, or does it just mean you pick a random seed at the start of the game and everything follows from that?

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Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

nvining posted:

Too early to tell yet, but I know David is obsessing fervently over this. (the DF model is actually pretty good, though.)

Just caught up.

I'm really hoping that you spend some time making sure that this can be played by people don't feel the need to queue up a left sock then a right sock like df. I just can't get into df anymore because of how baroque it has gotten. As long as I can click on army men then right click on someplace or something, I AM TOTALLY SET. If this makes me one of the great unwashed masses so be it.

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

nvining posted:

Never looked at the X-Com LP's: am I missing out?


I'd say so, but im a man of questionable taste. :allears: The video stuff can be (mostly) glossed over, but do NOT skip anything even hinting of the words "operation blindfire", they are the best.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


chiefnewo posted:

I've always been curious about this sort of thing, does 100% deterministic mean there are no "random" events as such, or does it just mean you pick a random seed at the start of the game and everything follows from that?

Well, if you're using a pseudo-random number generator in the first place, there is no randomness full stop (barring whatever entropy pool you use to get the seed in the first place).

Procedural world generation of the sort likely to be used here pretty much requires PRNG use, so it's almost certainly the latter; given a game state (including the current PRNG seed), the same inputs will always give the same results. There are no hidden confounding factors like system clock or network latency.

quite stretched out
Feb 17, 2011

the chillest
You mentioned earlier a mad architect building a mad building that makes everyone a bit mad. Is it going to be so that it's only noticeable at a glance once you've reached a point of no return, so to speak, or will it start off obvious enough that someone who isn't actively hunting for signs of madness will be able to stop it before it starts spreading?

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:

BigSexyWill posted:

You mentioned earlier a mad architect building a mad building that makes everyone a bit mad. Is it going to be so that it's only noticeable at a glance once you've reached a point of no return, so to speak, or will it start off obvious enough that someone who isn't actively hunting for signs of madness will be able to stop it before it starts spreading?

This makes me wonder if it'd be possible to 'fake' the whole impossible geometry thing by making buildings look different from different angles, shifting and warping as you move the camera. Kinda like this video of a hypercube rotating.

That's probably way above the scope of this game, though. I don't even know if that's possible.

AmericanBarbarian
Nov 23, 2011
I just thought of another idea that would make generational games better. When you generate the headlines or stories for the newspaper which sums up past events, write those headlines or key event summaries to a text file.

A key part of generational games, at least on SA, is the way previous players write up and editorialize the events which happened in the forums. This includes screenshots and written summaries, sometimes from a perspective of the in-game character. Any effort from the game itself to lessen the time spent taking screenshots, annotating them, and presenting them in a forums format will allow the players of a generational game to spend more time on creatively making their write up better.

If you wrote a small tool so that when the player takes a screen shot, a line is added to a text file with a time stamp. The line of text could describe the major events that happen within 10 sec (or whatever time period) of the screenshot being taken. This could be something like, "Sergeant Ursit MacSteampunk is struck by an aetheric ray fired by Urist MacCultist! Sergeant Ursit MacSteampunk's left arm is disintegrated by the aether! 3min:25sec"

You could probably make this annotation tool pretty complicated in how it decides what is important to write to the text file, but even if it were simple the people who play generational forums games would be grateful.

DarkSun6890
Sep 16, 2005
The Magic Turkey Sandwich Box and I
You think we'll get a Mac beta this time?
(We're masochists too)

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

Expectations for this might be a bit on the high side to say the least. It is still an indie game, and it comes out in a year.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

President Ark posted:

e: Talking about Pharaoh reminds me - one of the things I liked about that game was how, when building a pyramid, you'd actually see workers running around digging out the foundation and leveling the ground and laying bricks and so on, as opposed to most RTS games having the building just magically assemble itself or rise out of the ground. It's not huge, but you've mentioned having megaproject/wonder-esque buildings and having that sort of animation on big important buildings under construction would be really cool.

If you look on the web page, you will see a small building part covered in scaffolding. They do, indeed, rise out of the ground with workers doing things and so on and so forth.

chiefnewo posted:

I've always been curious about this sort of thing, does 100% deterministic mean there are no "random" events as such, or does it just mean you pick a random seed at the start of the game and everything follows from that?

A random seed is generated at the start of the simulation. All players then share the random seed with each other. Per turn, all player commands are batched, and executed in order, then everybody runs the simulation. Because the random seed is the same for all computers and everything gets executed in order (and also because we're not using any floating point anywhere - ugh!), everybody gets the same output.

Science!

BigSexyWill posted:

You mentioned earlier a mad architect building a mad building that makes everyone a bit mad. Is it going to be so that it's only noticeable at a glance once you've reached a point of no return, so to speak, or will it start off obvious enough that someone who isn't actively hunting for signs of madness will be able to stop it before it starts spreading?

Madness effects tend to manifest themselves as a "roll versus failure" sort of deal. Failing a madness test when trying to do something tends to result in something ... interesting.


Dr.Spaceman posted:

I just thought of another idea that would make generational games better. When you generate the headlines or stories for the newspaper which sums up past events, write those headlines or key event summaries to a text file.

also words


That could be arranged, and is a pretty good idea, really. In general, I agree that there should be good annotational tools.

DarkSun6890 posted:

You think we'll get a Mac beta this time?
(We're masochists too)

Thanks to our new build system, this is a reality we are prepared to make happen.

Lodin
Jul 31, 2003

by Fluffdaddy
Will there be any system for deciding rules and laws in the town? Like in Tropico where you could ban cultists, booze or gay marriage for instance?

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

ten dollar bitcoin posted:

Expectations for this might be a bit on the high side to say the least. It is still an indie game, and it comes out in a year.

Perhaps. But if you're not going to try to go compete for the gold, you may as well just go home.

(I'm sure there will be the usual mad cycle of post-release content and patching and who knows what else too. One thing we're very big on as a company is standing by the software we make and fixing anything that's wrong. Dredmor is a *lot* better than it was a year ago.)

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

nvining posted:

Perhaps. But if you're not going to try to go compete for the gold, you may as well just go home.

Well, I'm just saying, people are already projecting all kinds of things onto a game that was just announced days ago, which seems like a recipe for disappointment to me.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

nvining posted:

Perhaps. But if you're not going to try to go compete for the gold, you may as well just go home.

(I'm sure there will be the usual mad cycle of post-release content and patching and who knows what else too. One thing we're very big on as a company is standing by the software we make and fixing anything that's wrong. Dredmor is a *lot* better than it was a year ago.)

And it's paying off. Dredmor is still a game I'm playing til today, right from the release.

Triskelli
Sep 27, 2011

I AM A SKELETON
WITH VERY HIGH
STANDARDS


ten dollar bitcoin posted:

Well, I'm just saying, people are already projecting all kinds of things onto a game that was just announced days ago, which seems like a recipe for disappointment to me.

Been down that road before. (Battalion Wars II :argh:) Not trying to say you can't pull it off nvining, but we have over a year of hype to go through. It might be wise for everyone to dial back their enthusiasm just a bit

Triskelli fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Aug 30, 2012

YOURFRIEND
Feb 3, 2009

You're an asshole, Mr. Grinch
You really are a cunt
You're as cuddly as a cockring
and charming being a shitheel

FUCK YOURFRIEND!

ten dollar bitcoin posted:

Well, I'm just saying, people are already projecting all kinds of things onto a game that was just announced days ago, which seems like a recipe for disappointment to me.

People always do this. Every time. I remember the red dead thread was notable for it. Just let them have their fun, it doesn't hurt anything and if they're content with being burned by every game they look forward to then let them.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

ten dollar bitcoin posted:

Well, I'm just saying, people are already projecting all kinds of things onto a game that was just announced days ago, which seems like a recipe for disappointment to me.

There is also a tendency as a developer to sort of want to make everybody happy, you know, rather than sticking with the internal vision that we as a company have for what the game is and how it'll go. So there is an internal vision of what we want to make - in fact, a quite detailed one - and we think it'll be a game people will enjoy a lot, even if it's not necessarily the game people have projected onto what bits of the design we have out there. ("ZOMG let's put Diggles in a Zeppelin with little goggles on!" - our version of Dwarves with Guns syndrome.)

At the end of the day - and I can only speak for myself here - game development *is* an organic process. The game will ultimately evolve to be what it is when we release it, and that game will be the best game that we can make. My feeling is that the trick to good game development is to embrace the organic process, rather than try to embrace a top-down imposed vision, and then to refine your game based on player feedback and seeing what is actually fun and what isn't. Nobody has the secrets to fun; the only way you actually figure out what's fun and what isn't is by actually letting players try your game, look at what happens, and then adjust things accordingly.

Still, that's my philosophy and I don't think it even reflects the philosophy of everybody else at Gaslamp, so... well, who knows. :D

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

YOURFRIEND posted:

People always do this. Every time. I remember the red dead thread was notable for it. Just let them have their fun, it doesn't hurt anything and if they're content with being burned by every game they look forward to then let them.

In a bigger context, isn't this the entire Kickstarter model? Some of the more recent building-games (Castle Story, Cube World, Starbound, etc.) seem to have huge heads of hype on them. Which, frankly, leads to more sales and is a pretty drat good trick if you ask me, and I'm definitely looking forward to trying these games too... I think it's just something that's out there, and it may be particularily endemic to sandbox games because everybody wants it to be their sandbox with their very own customizable bucket-and-spade; and people *still* want windmills in Minecraft.

This is all a bit of a learning experience for us; we literally ran silently on Dredmor until the day when the game released, at which point everybody saw it go to #1 on the Steam Charts (thanks to the Goon Rush) and went "Oh! We'd better pay attention to this, then." Having immediate publicity from launch is very, very weird.

That said: I'm being very careful to ensure we only give concrete answers to things that we have thought about, where we have a deliberate road map, and where we have internal tickets for art and programming on our JIRA tracker. We're mainly answering questions about what we have because, well, we're nice friendly people and we don't like doing game development in the dark, and if somebody is interested enough in what we're doing to ask a question, we should try to answer it, if it is possible! Part of the advantage of being an indie developer is that you can have participation in the development process, and you don't get that kind of thing working on Barbie Horse Designer.

Did you know that we all have life insurance in case we get hit by a truck while working on CE? That's *really* odd.

Anyhow, packing for PAX now, and then back to work, so it'll be radio silence here for a bit. Feel free to quietly speculate amongst yourselves on the information contained in the FAQ on the website - and nobody here has gone back and looked at the *massive* amount of teasers that we released from February to the present day. Nobody, for instance, is talking about the art contained herein: http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/07/05/conquest-of-the-wizardlands-august-1st/

Wolpertinger
Feb 16, 2011
The funny thing is, I had guessed something like this the second I saw the hint text that was decrypted from the patch. The lovecraftian vibes, plus the whole 'empire' thing reminded me of the clockwork knight and clockwork armor flavor text.

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

nvining posted:

There is also a tendency as a developer to sort of want to make everybody happy, you know, rather than sticking with the internal vision that we as a company have for what the game is and how it'll go. So there is an internal vision of what we want to make - in fact, a quite detailed one - and we think it'll be a game people will enjoy a lot, even if it's not necessarily the game people have projected onto what bits of the design we have out there. ("ZOMG let's put Diggles in a Zeppelin with little goggles on!" - our version of Dwarves with Guns syndrome.)

On the other hand, there is scientifically nothing cuter than diggles in a zeppelin with little goggles on so even if it isn't in the game, I expect to see art of it and I expect to be able to buy a print of it and I expect to be able to put it on my wall, mister. :colbert:

Woebin
Feb 6, 2006

neongrey posted:

On the other hand, there is scientifically nothing cuter than diggles in a zeppelin with little goggles on so even if it isn't in the game, I expect to see art of it and I expect to be able to buy a print of it and I expect to be able to put it on my wall, mister. :colbert:
This is an engraving of a diggle and a diggle in a zeppelin. The diggle is striking the diggle down. The engraving is encrusted with spikes of gears and cogs.

Daynab
Aug 5, 2008

The aforementioned FAQ, though it's nothing that hasn't been answered here - more assets though!

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/08/29/clockwork-empires-pc-gamer-interview-minor-faq-other-such-foolishness/

Woebin
Feb 6, 2006

Oh yeah, a thing that hasn't been mentioned at all as far as I've seen is the Settlers games. Settlers 2 is the one I've got on my mind because that's the good one, but maybe the rest of the series too. Anyway, Clockwork Empires sounds a lot like Settlers in how it handles direct control of workers and soldiers. Are you guys inspired by Settlers at all?

xutech
Mar 4, 2011

EIIST

As a brown person, I would like to say that I hope you don't make us suck.

We are happy to be in games but we have a lot to offer any new friends who visit our continents. We have cool magic, we throw your enemies in volcanos and we guard badass old temples. And from our point of view, you bring cool things like frockcoats, tophats and guns, which look cool mixed with our facial tattooes and nifty martial arts skills. Our women also wear very sexy coconut based clothes and guard magical treasure.

So please be kind, leave the polio blankets and fire water behind.

Your future colonial neighbours.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

xutech posted:

As a brown person, I would like to say that I hope you don't make us suck.

We are happy to be in games but we have a lot to offer any new friends who visit our continents. We have cool magic, we throw your enemies in volcanos and we guard badass old temples. And from our point of view, you bring cool things like frockcoats, tophats and guns, which look cool mixed with our facial tattooes and nifty martial arts skills. Our women also wear very sexy coconut based clothes and guard magical treasure.

So please be kind, leave the polio blankets and fire water behind.

Your future colonial neighbours.

We've been making bets on how long it would take before this came up. :) (And this was a very stylish response.)

Okay, I said I was going to PAX but this is too important to not talk about. Being on the receiving end of colonialism sucked for anybody involved in it. Steampunk, being primarily written by white nerds who don't know better or remain willfully in invisible happy bubbles, traditionally tends to gloss over this fact - as well as a lot of other inconvenient facts, like the treatment of women in Victorian society. The traditional Steampunk solution, therefore, is to pretend that everything was just wonderful for all parties involved. Of course it wasn't.

So, yes, aware of this and dealing with it, although - to be honest? - we're not totally sure how yet. But it's definitely on our radar. The currently agreed-upon convention is that there are other nations in the world, of other ethnicities, of the same level of technological development and advancement as the Empire; the world resembles somewhat more of a free-for-all land grab.

Of course, this isn't a problem unique to us - and I think that people are starting to look at this in the steampunk community and to recognize that, yes, this is incredibly problematic. I recently read a short story called "Pimp my Airship" by Maurice Broaddus which argues - convincingly - that "black steampunk" looks like the P-Funk mythology...

nvining fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Aug 30, 2012

xutech
Mar 4, 2011

EIIST

I have no doubt that you're going to handle this right; and besides, we have something we both can agree on, those Cthulhu cultists are JERKS.

The Easy Rider
Sep 21, 2006

Corn Dogs- Deep Fried Proof Of A Loving God
Will there be organizational/political rivalry in addition to the traditional us vs. them soldiers vs. cultists type problems? Will Captain Joe Cogsman of the Royal Steam-Constabulary have the potential to get into a rivalry with Chief Inspector Robert Steamer of the Electro-City Watch? There has never been a game that modeled petty bureaucratic rivalries, police pissing contests, political machine clashes and similar minor conflicts that inevitably sprout up in cities, and it seems a colonial backdrop would be perfect for this sort of thing. Essentially, can this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-vBJ8cS08U happen?

Darkrenown
Jul 18, 2012
please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes
About half the Paradox office is sperging over this, just so you know.

Chaz GELF
Mar 22, 2009

Mostly Harmless

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

Victorian Uzumaki

Oh my god yes. I fully support this idea. If the game engine allows for free rotation of buildings (Rather than snap-to-angle), I think someone needs to try building a city in a spiral organization, with the Junior Bureaucrat (Colonial Grade)'s office at the center, and all of these buildings spiraling outwards.

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

How will you handle knowledge for events? For example, if a fisherman comes across a band of angry looking natives near the town will the guards in the city know about it right away? Or will the fisherman need to return to the town to warn the guards? I guess it depends how deep you want to go with simulation, and how it would effect gameplay.

It would be interesting if the NPC's job, traits, and personality effected their reaction, and then how they communicated the information. For example, the fisherman could panic, run into town shouting about the natives, which in the simulation passes that piece of information to other NPCs in the area, who all react in their own way. For example, guards might start shouting warnings to the citizens, who would then react in their own way, be it running around in circles panicking, running towards safer areas of the town, or shutting up their shops and locking themselves inside.

The same system could work in a variety of circumstances, maybe a murder might occur, and if the witnesses aren't killed they might inform the guards, who put up wanted posters, and anyone seeing the wanted poster and the murdered would then alert the guards, unless they themselves were murdered when the killer realises he's been identified.

On top of that, if these chains of events could be recorded by the game and then reviewed by the player at a later date it would make an interesting story telling device. You could track the murderous rampage of the killer, seeing who knew what when, who told who, and so on.

Markovnikov
Nov 6, 2010

The Easy Rider posted:

Captain Joe Cogsman of the Royal Steam-Constabulary

I can't wait for all the puns that will come from this.

Darkrenown posted:

About half the Paradox office is sperging over this, just so you know.

I'm surprised they did't think of something like this first. I don't really like Paradox's simulation games as they feel like playing European history on an excel sheet; yet I can see why other would like them. Clockwork Empires seems more on the Sim City side than on the Paradox side.

I too am kind of worried that everyone seems to be getting a positive answer when they ask about X or Y being in the game; like maybe the game will try to be everything for everyone.

Edit: Also, has there ever been a simulation heavy, real time game with multiplayer like this?

Markovnikov fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Aug 30, 2012

DeepQantas
Jan 13, 2008

Ah, to be a Hero... Keeping such company...
Will talented urchins that are successful at urching grow up to become master thieves? What about professional beggars?

Daynab
Aug 5, 2008

FYI the devs are all gone to PAX so there might not be any new answers for a couple days unless they find some time while there.

Markovnikov posted:

I too am kind of worried that everyone seems to be getting a positive answer when they ask about X or Y being in the game; like maybe the game will try to be everything for everyone.

Edit: Also, has there ever been a simulation heavy, real time game with multiplayer like this?

While I agree this is something to be careful about, I think the reason it seems that way is that the dev vision is often pretty similar to what some people here have been wanting to play, more than a desire to get everything people want in the game.

KataraniSword
Apr 22, 2008

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

Daynab posted:

While I agree this is something to be careful about, I think the reason it seems that way is that the dev vision is often pretty similar to what some people here have been wanting to play, more than a desire to get everything people want in the game.

Yeah, so far, if you put it through the filter of someone who doesn't really "get" generational games, you hear something along the lines of "will this part be like Dwarf Fortress?" "Sure will." "Will there be Lovecraftian stuff?" "Yup!" "Do you have to put the cog in the squid?" "Only after the squid is in the deer."

Triskelli
Sep 27, 2011

I AM A SKELETON
WITH VERY HIGH
STANDARDS


Daynab posted:

FYI the devs are all gone to PAX so there might not be any new answers for a couple days unless they find some time while there.

Indeed, so lets change the subject: What sort of Industry would you develop in your Colony?


Me personally, I would like to try my hand at Salt, which would lead to the newly discovered science of pickling. Ultimately I want my Carib Colony to become its own Parris Island, where Marines are trained and pickled to be distributed across the Empire in Her Majesty's Service.

Phobophilia
Apr 26, 2008

by Hand Knit
Hopefully this works out properly, I'd like to see how this stacks up against other DF-likes such as Towns and Gnomoria.

Edit: That proc-generating buildings thing sounds really cool, especially when it has a gameplay impact in the form of different hardpoints to connect to your production chain. Therefore, to digress, can this kind of system be ported to spaceships? I loved Sword of the Star's custom ships fighting in RTS battles, but you were limited to a set number of designs.

Phobophilia fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Aug 31, 2012

Seashell Salesman
Aug 4, 2005

Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!
Will games have an end condition like a time limit, victory triggers, scripted event, or something else? Will the game go for as long as you can survive or until you get bored?

Massive_Idiot
Jun 21, 2007

Receiving data bursts, everything to do with it.
Game kinda looks like Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, which is a good thing. I was horribly depressed to see that kinda design aesthetic get buried under tons of overwrought steampunk poo poo that flooded the internet in the near future. Renaissance punk- now that's thinking with gears!

Nettle Soup
Jan 30, 2010

Oh, and Jones was there too.

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet, how much is this game gonna cost?

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grate deceiver
Jul 10, 2009

Just a funny av. Not a redtext or an own ok.

The Easy Rider posted:

There has never been a game that modeled petty bureaucratic rivalries, police pissing contests, political machine clashes and similar minor conflicts that inevitably sprout up in cities

There's a game called Europa 1400 that's basically entirely about this(maybe also called The Guild). It's somewhat rough around the edges, but probably the best town life simulator I played. I could see some ideas from that game making it's way to Clockwork Empires, like the law system or rivalries between big families.

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