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If folks have any questions, I'm happy to answer what I can. Owing to the great success that the SA Goonrush Beta Test of Doom had for Dredmor, we'll likely do something similar again for CE, but that won't be for... well, a bit, let's say, owing to the fact that our codebase is basically on fire right now. 
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Aug 27, 2012 21:59
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Bieeardo posted:What does 'procedurally generated' mean in this context? 'We compressed these textures down so far that only MATH! can extricate them' is a lot less impressive than 'the shape and textures of new buildings are automagically tweaked to match the aesthetic and general griminess of the neighborhood they're being plonked down into'. 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.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhX79At0vng <-- this is not our system, but this is somebody else's implementation of the same algorithm we use. Ours does texturing, which his does not. So, yeah. Basically, if you want all your buildings to be octagonal Gothic Cathedrals, we'll accomodate you. If you just want to plunk down square megaliths, we got you covered. Want all your urchins to live in large, faux-Japanese pagodas? Got you covered. It's *very* cool stuff, and I'm really excited to be using it.
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Aug 27, 2012 22:05
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endlessmonotony posted:Normally this would trigger several alerts due to the sheer amount of buzzwords, but after Dungeons of Dredmor I am optimistic. More accurately, booze is used to keep the Madness at bay. It cannot cause a citizen to unsee what horrors he has seen, but for a little while the sweet release of alcohol can be his....
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Aug 27, 2012 22:11
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StarkRavingMad posted:I quickly scanned the OP and was like "Oh, another attempt to clone Dwarf Fortress and slap some graphics on it Welcome to loving Boatmurdered.   EDIT: Fixed. nvining fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Aug 27, 2012 |
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Aug 27, 2012 22:24
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Daynab posted:Nicholas said beta hopefully early 2013. For anybody who remembers the Dredmor beta, this will mainly consist of me - and now four other programmers - running around yelling "EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE!" And, you know, about eighty new builds per day. On a Dwarf Fortress style simulation engine. So, yeah. Good times but only for masochists. EDIT: re-reading this, I'm realizing that's probably not a deterrent. Alright then! nvining fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Aug 28, 2012 |
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Aug 28, 2012 00:51
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For those of you who missed it, there is a massive and hideous 20-page speculation pile-up over on our forums, which contains a bunch of backstory hint: http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/ominous-project-odin-speculation-thread.2147/ There is also a fairly menacing picture of a deer with something drilling into its head on our website, and a few other interesting pieces of Concept Art for the viewer who wishes to partake of such things. I'm much too lazy to round them up, though.
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Aug 28, 2012 01:25
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endlessmonotony posted:As long as it doesn't gently caress up / crash my system, I'm okay with the game failing hilariously. What, you mean none of them? :P (I think the appropriate achievement for this one should be "Suddenly, Dread Cthulhu" or something like that.)
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Aug 28, 2012 01:58
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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 |
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Aug 28, 2012 06:49
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Triskelli posted:(Any concept art for your airships yet nvining? That's always a good indicator of quality universe building.) Did you miss the poster? It's up at http://clockworkempires.com/
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Aug 29, 2012 02:48
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Saint Freak posted:Your poster says 'Orphan'. Are there Orphans and Urchins? We're supposed to be internally consistent; we fail at this miserably. Triskelli posted:Well, as an apparent airship connoisseur, it looks like an excellent trading airship. Personally I'd like any military airships to be more solid and armor plated, but I'm just a goon with dumb opinions. Oh, there's a bunch of that too. (The plague-mask constables represent the Prime Minister's Anti-Paranormal Incursion Squad. The cure, for such things, is often worse than the disease...) quote:Speaking of military though, how will warfare be conducted in multiplayer? Will you have control over the units; or will you assemble an army and send it off, and let the AI take over when it gets to the opponent colony? Or are you months away from figuring that out? Umm, less micromanage-y. Roughly speaking, our hunch is that Dwarf Fortress kind of does the right thing here with the assignment of tasks; you'll have regiments and things tied to specific barracks buildings, and the buildings themselves are control points for the military (no matter where they may be on the map.) You can then set patrol points for military groups, have them target specific problems, et cetera. Different units have different requirements; military zeppelins require a zeppelin tower, that kind of thing.
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Aug 29, 2012 03:02
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The plague-mask constables look kickass though
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Triple-Kan posted:Have you guys begun working on how combat and damage will be handled? Will it be super-detailed DF "you have split the flesh and torn 3 layers of muscle tissue" or "this unit has lost 24 of 50 HP" or somewhere inbetween? Somewhat up in the air. The biggest issue here is how you render people who have lost their arms and legs without getting all Left 4 Dead 2 up in that. I will note that we are in favour of health systems based around the traditional Greek humors, and that we are also in favour of bloodletting and leeches as miracle cures. Also, mercury tinctures. I will also note that there has been a lot of talk about how traditional healthcare was administered at the barbershop, rather than by competent Quacks, and this will probably unlock itself in the tech tree system at some point.
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Aug 29, 2012 07:37
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Mzbundifund posted:Will we have to struggle to escape the shadowy control of the Bolt Council? Nope. No Lutefisk God, no Krong, no Bolt Council, no Elves, no Dwarves, no Wizards, no Inconsequentia, no Dredmor, no Adventurer Licenses, and nobody shouting 'Fus Ro Dah' at you either. There's a *lot* of new writing that has happened. We've been working on this since October 2011. But some things are best left as surprises.
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Aug 29, 2012 07:43
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I think it'd be neat if your scientists could make discoveries that disprove the quackery of humorism and move to the state-of-the-art miasma theory. It is period-accurate, amazingly. Then again, there was also a belief that you needed to have a good stink about you to prevent disease, and that baths were unhygenic. All that water, yeuggh. There is a greater point here, which I'm going to make, and then I'll shut up for the foreseeable future... I think. It's all very well saying that we are inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and we are. We love it for what it is, and also for what it stands for; we love, in particular, the generative story and the emergent narrative that comes out of random systems and character driven elements. We're all for that. Making that work is our big, big focus at this point. We have the technical infrastructure in place for most of the renderer, the procedural building stuff, the terrain, the water, the skeletal animation, the networking, rag-doll physics, the UI code... you name it. CE sits on top of a pile of engine work that I've been poking at since, er, 2002, in various incarnations - this is why, as opposed to Dredmor, CE runs its own windowing system. (Yes, I'm insane.) Where our focus really lies right now is in making a game that has deep, emergent behaviour, and where this depth leads to you - as a player, or a group of players - having wonderful, funny, beautiful, doom-laden adventures in a sandbox you want to mess about in, and where you want to go off and play in the sandbox with your friends. These friends will soon be enemies for life. One thing I do want to make people aware of: we are not setting out to directly clone, say, the ten best DF features with an eye towards putting them in a nice package with 3D graphics, multiplayer, and multi-core acceleration. Some things that work really well in DF simply aren't things that are feasible for us, things that we want to do, things that we think will make CE a good game, or things that work in three dimensions. (The big one is digging. It doesn't work in three dimensions. Multiple selectable height layers are a crufty, awful mess.) Our big takeaway is that we want big screaming panicky doomed cities full of explosions and massive constructions and dubious secret projects and Obeliskian Death, and this is what we shall deliver at the end of the day. Other people are taking the DF stuff and are staying much truer to its digging and simulation aspects - and, well, more power to them. (I think it's easier with 2D art as opposed to 3D - the closer you get to photorealism, the more you have to deal with symbolic representations rather than visual representations, and this makes life interesting.) More than anything, for us DF is a good latch-word; people sort of go "Oh! It's like THAT." Well, yes. But it's also not like that. We hope we can do something different - that we can push things forward, that we can make something unique, and that CE will stand on its own two legs and will advance the state of the Steampunk isometric city-building people-destroying Lovecraftian simulator genre. (For what it's worth: we've been piecing this together since October, after Dredmor 1.0.3 shipped (remember that? Hint: it fixed your broken save games.  ) There are things cooking in Vancouver that we have been thinking about for a long, long time - and it's important to remember that we're basically insane, and it's been agony keeping things under lock and key for almost a year... so do pardon our enthusiasm!)That said, poets do expire in the street, as previously stated. There may be... vapours.
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Aug 29, 2012 08:13
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Deki posted:Are Megaprojects going to be mostly useless, or will they just have a huge risk-v-reward? As Daniel noted over on the Bay 12 forums (apparently, I'm doing SA, Daniel's doing Bay 12, and David is doing... uh, Quarter to Three?), we're still fighting over the exact implementation of megaprojects. For the most part, our design process is that somebody makes something, and we fight over it until we get it the way we want it; then we see how it hits users, we watch how it blows up, and we have another swing at it until it works. Design by iteration is the best way to do a lot of things; it's also why we went through ten iterations of the Dredmor UI before we settled on our current version, which is miles away from what we started with. Thank goodness. The actual question of citizens interacting with each other is a bit messy, but we can say that it ties into the memory and event systems. Citizens will form connections with each other, and with other things, and this in turn will weigh how they interact with the world (we decide citizen behaviour using heavily weighted, very large, utility functions.) Kazmirski, I can answer very few of your questions, save for the one about the embark site: yes, you can choose your embark point. Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games? The DF LPs over here seem to work best when people just shut up and play, and write about it, and I think the tools we put in place in engine and the structure of the game should be set up to encourage this sort of behaviour. (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. We wanted this for Dredmor, we didn't have it for Dredmor because we didn't design for it from the ground up, but now we've got it. The practical ramifications are this: didn't see something happen, or you missed it and want to take a screenshot? Back through your completed turn once it's up, and go back and look at it again! Debugging tool of the Gods.) nvining fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Aug 29, 2012 |
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Aug 29, 2012 09:16
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:In your interview you mention war trains. Can you build rail networks in the game? ... isn't that implied by the existence of war trains?
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Aug 29, 2012 09:37
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General pile of answers: - Yes, you can rename colonists. This has been an obvious thing from the get-go. Never looked at the X-Com LP's: am I missing out? - Hadn't thought about Building Renaming, but why the heck not. - Fallen London: Never played it, liked what I saw of it, not a direct influence. - Holiday 2012 Release: Bwahahahah no. Not even close. That said, we're big believers in "test things early, test things often", especially as far as user interactions are concerned. Again, this was a huge takeaway from Dredmor - we went into the beta over here with a game that basically sucked, and we came out with a game that was, apparently, pretty good. So the sooner we can get everybody janking about with rsynclauncher and complaining about their firewalls, the better. - Marriage: is in the cards. - Castle Story as example of 3D and levels working: they do a good job of it, for sure - and they look *great* - but if you look at any of the videos, any time they have a pit larger than about 2 units down or so you spend a lot of time fussing with the camera control trying to dig deeper in a pit somewhere. We'd like to avoid that - in fact, the goal is to avoid fussing with cameras when at all possible, because nothing is worse than a camera getting in the way of gameplay. I think they're also trying to be a little more Minecraftian than we are - which is totally okay! But it means that their user base is prepared to put up with camera jankery in a way that we don't think ours is. - Turn-based or real-time: real-time. It's slightly jimmied; the renderer runs at 60 FPS, the in game simulation runs at, I believe, 10 FPS? The renderer then interpolates the missing action between frames while the simulation layer grinds away to compute everything else and pass it over the network. (Most RTS games do this, too. I think Starcraft 2 internally runs at a simulation/net tick of 10 FPS as well, which is where I pulled that particular number from.) - Interactions between systems: Ohhhhh yes. You shall have them. - 2D or 3D: It's sort of hybridized 2.5D right now; things may change. - "Will there be a summary of your predecessor's rule before the start of your turn"? Mmm, vaguely. A well-meaning bureaucrat would do well to pick up a copy of the Empire Times before playing his turn, to better understand the state of the colony as reported by Unreliable Editors. - Current state of the codebase: We panicked a bit about it last week, then we wrote out absolutely where we need to be and what we need to do in order to get to a beta, and then we panicked a lot less. So suffice it to say, a lot has been done and we're on track. At some point, though, you just need to shut up and announce your game already. Basically, the renderer is about 85% done, the procedural building stuff mainly works and just needs debugging/a few extra features, the AI is currently running around harvesting resources, and I just got a first pass at the netcode from Ryan! Anybody coming to PAX should stop by the Indie Megabooth and say hi. We're not showing CE, but come play some Dredmor and maybe see something interesting.
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Aug 29, 2012 20:26
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A FAQ post is going up on the website later today. In the mean time:Iunnrais posted:nvining, I'd like to ask again... merging histories (that is, failed colonies) from other players into your game? Too early to tell exactly how this will work with other players. There's all sorts of interesting issues here - how do you handle merging, say, a colony from another set of geography and also *the future*? We do have persistent world generation, although nothing as elaborate as DF. Thank goodness. endlessmonotony posted:And this leads to a followup question: What will happen if the system can only run the simulation at 5fps and the renderer at 30fps? It'll be fine. It will, however, kill everybody else's performance on the simulation layer down to 5 FPS. (In answer to a question I failed to see and quote: The Empire Times is the unceasing journalistic engine of the truth! No madness can harm it. You may get headlines, however, like "We're All Going To Die")
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Aug 29, 2012 22:42
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Bash Ironfist posted:
This falls under the category of "things we are holding close to our chest until they become Awesome Surprises."
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Aug 29, 2012 23:57
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President Ark posted:Can you go into more detail into how the military is controlled? Probably the number-one thing that I hated in the old Impressions city builders (caesar I/II/III, pharaoh, zeus: master of olympus, etc) was how lovely the military controls were - they were slow, they were unresponsive (you had to issue orders from the barracks which might be on the other side of the city), tended to ignore anything that wasn't actively trying to stab them in the face (meaning they'd even ignore archers standing ~20 feet away), and gave very poor indication of being wounded/damaged. Dwarf Fortress' military controls I actually liked once you got past the brick wall that was the scheduling/uniform interface - the dwarves were intelligent, fast to respond assuming they weren't in one of the endless series of parties or drinking, and aggressive about attacking nearby hostiles. Too early to tell yet, but I know David is obsessing fervently over this. (the DF model is actually pretty good, though.)
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Aug 30, 2012 01:04
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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. 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? Thanks to our new build system, this is a reality we are prepared to make happen.
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Aug 30, 2012 05:17
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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.)
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Aug 30, 2012 05:38
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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.
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Aug 30, 2012 05:53
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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/
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Aug 30, 2012 06:03
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xutech posted:As a brown person, I would like to say that I hope you don't make us suck. 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 |
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Aug 30, 2012 07:59
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Still at PAX, so replies will be a little bit late coming (when I get back to Vancouver.) That said: 1. We got a few copies of the 6 page preview of CE in this next month's PC Gamer, and it looks really good; I don't think that there's any new information or anything that wasn't originally in the interview, but you might want to give it a read anyway. 2. We are still at PAX! I'm at the booth today (Sunday) with David from 2 until close, and we'll be happy to talk about CE. David will draw you a Diggle or a Holy Cog or something. (EDIT: Hmm. Okay, the hotel wireless ate half my post! Hurray.) nvining fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 2, 2012 11:00
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The Easy Rider posted:Thanks for the info on The Guild, I'll check it out off GOG. Super easy. Literally, you click around on the tile grid of the game level until you specify the building blueprint, and it creates a building. You can adjust how each individual side looks and what profile it uses, and how you want to decorate things (i.e. what material you're going to use, etc.) I think most profiles have materials attached to them so that Sean and crew can make everything look right; there's a bunch of UI decisions we need to make and experiment with before we can proceed, but we're not quite there yet. (We're recovering from PAX in our hotel rooms, which probably means it's a good time to ask ridiculous questions. Reactions on the floor were *really* positive!)
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Sep 3, 2012 05:42
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The Easy Rider posted:Here's a repost of my earlier question in case it got missed during the convention. To answer this question: no, originally there wasn't an intention to have a level for the simulation of petty bureaucracy. However, shortly after you posted this we had a conversation along the lines of: N: "So there's this goon on the SA forums who wants to know if we have a simulation layer for petty bureaucracy." D: "... we probably should!" So yeah. We actually like this idea a lot, although we hadn't considered it, and we will see what we can do. No idea what form it will take, though. quote:If there will be multiple groups vying for influence, how much of an influence will we have on them? Would we be able to appoint one group to hunting down cultists, while another does normal policing? If there aren't multiple groups, will certain individuals or groupings within organizations be able to fill similar roles? (Sorry for speculating based on my own speculations, but I'm already quite excited for this game regardless of whether this sort of content will be included within it, and if it is included, it's pretty much the game I've always dreamed of). The exact dispensation of influence between classes and trades is a little bit hard to speculate about right now, because it's still too early in where we are in implementing gameplay; I imagine most of this will resolve itself during betas. (Anybody who participated in the Dredmor beta can tell you that the game tended to suddenly rewrite itself on short notice every day, and everyone would stumble around trying to figure out what changed in a given build. I think we'll be a little more organized about changelogging, but still.) Most of this sort of depends on seeing what works best, you know? quote:Will there be unique items to acquire and award to your citizens? Or is the larger emphasis on mass-manufacturing, large-scale production items? Will the distribution of items effect citizens who weren't given them? For example, in the former case, if I gave a scholar some rare esoteric text, will it anger other scholars who weren't similarly compensated? Or in the latter, if better food stuffs are distributed to one section of society, will the others resent or organize against them? There will be unique items, at least for some definition of unique. They will mainly be acquired under horrifying circumstances. "Awarded" is probably too strong a word. That's all I'm going to say about that. With the food stuff or whatever, some of this is too hard to tell. You certainly want to keep people happy.
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Sep 4, 2012 20:10
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New post made, with some cultists and some zeppelins.
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Sep 6, 2012 23:57
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Phobophilia posted:You jammed the vending machine, didn't you? Which set off a cascade of events that resulted in the fight with Derek Smart. Nah, I just worked for him as a contract programmer for a couple of years, on and off. As a result, I had to sign somebody's copy of Universal Combat at PAX this year. I think I signed it "OH GOD IT'S ALL COMING BACK TO ME". Re: the military system questions - I can't answer this one intelligently right now, but we're aiming not to totally bugger it up.
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Sep 10, 2012 06:08
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Shadowmorn posted:So uh, nvining, heres an thought train of mine, thanks to the terraria thread: Would you ever do a block building game? Other than trying to pick up Terraria when it was originally announced that it was being abandoned... nah, it hasn't really been on the agenda. (I dunno, how do we feel about Worlds of Dredmor: the 2D block-based Metroidvania?) The only thing we're actually drawing influence from from Minecraft for CE is the redstone mechanics and that sort of building, although I'm not sure if we'll play it straight or not. I'm a dick and so I'm tempted to make everyone build everything with gears/punch cards/vacuum tubes. Phobophilia posted:Don't you dare put Minecraft mechanics into this game it's already starting to suffer from feature bloat and any more will eject all four balls straight off the cliff. Sam, please. We have families. nvining fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Sep 12, 2012 |
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Sep 12, 2012 05:01
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