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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Wuuut? How are you funded? Is it just you working on it? Also what is THAT building?

As below! It's an ex-brewery renovated and altered to support lots of flats, one of which myself and my friend have secured, with the intention to move at the start of December (which is when I should be submitting my PhD), so that's when I'll be starting. However, although URR is 100% free, always will be, blah blah, since I am doing this from my savings, I'm going to make the donation options a little more prominent, since it's now my own money (rather than just coding on the side via PhD money!). I'm also going to add a rather nice special feature in the game for those who donate. Oh, and yes, just me making it, always will be, and same goes for any future games I make!

On a side note, I wish the blog had the usual archive links...it's annoying having only the sequential navigation...

I have the tags and categories! But I assume you mean the "Jan 2014", "Feb 2014", "March 2014" etc stuff? I try to put the most important stuff on the front page (that entry is there, I think!), and since the blog is largely a sequential "here's what I did this week" kind of narrative, I confess, compared to a blog which is more "essay" based, I haven't generally thought that looking back is crucial. At the same time, I take your point - I've been meaning to redo some parts of the site design in the coming year and I'll try and dump those on the sidebar, and also widen up the text field a little bit .

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So, having located somewhere to live, the intention is to move on the 3rd/4th of December. We can therefore say my full-time development year will be starting on the 5th of December! More information nearer the time. I’ve also been planning my travels in this coming year and there are potentially a lot of places I’m going to be visiting to give talks (including this year’s roguelike conference, unless it ends up in North America), so more on those as and when – I’ve loved meeting fans in the past, so it would be awesome if anyone was based near some of the places I’ll be travelling to.

More immediately, I’ve redone market districts. The playtesting I’ve been doing has shown a serious issue in the navigation of market districts above all others – it was very unclear what the boundaries of the district were, it took a long time to find all the shops, there wasn’t much else to look at within the districts, and (quite simply) there were just too many damned shops. Here’s what they used to look like:



As you can see, there’s a huge number of shops (the normal buildings) and warehouses (the enclosed/walled buildings), but it’s not clear if you’d have missed one or not without exploring the entire district because they are so spread out. That means optimal gameplay within a market district is uncovering the entire thing rather than having some idea where to go for the shop you wanted, and that’s just not on. Instead, I decided to blend market districts with some of the housing districts, to create something like the version below. In this model (there’s naturally a large number of variations) the markets and warehouses that service them are placed in a pattern in the middle of the district. All the patterns make it very clear when you walk around them when you have “exhausted” the shops that district has, and also, this new contained version allows me to simply have fewer shops in a market district. They can now spawn with 7-10 shops (towns have only 1-3 shops, heavily biased towards 1 or 2), and always spawn with a currency exchange (the diamond building) and an auction house (the flattened cross building).



These both look a lot better, and more importantly, play a lot better. As above, there’s never uncertainty once you’ve seen every shop there is to see, and the smaller number will make the variations in shops between market districts much more significant, as in the past most districts contained most shops, which doesn’t really fit the scarcity gameplay mechanics one is used to from roguelikes. Alas, that’s everything for this week, but we’re only about a fortnight to the release of the colossal 0.6. There’s a couple more graphics I need to make, and then it’s just onto bug fixing. Stay tuned!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Finshing off the final few graphics - adapted the algorithm for generating hanging wooden shop signs to also make snazzy metal signs, such as for this mercenary guild:

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

*Early draft*, ignore inconsistent shading, but here are the 9 lookup images for a (slightly stylized) URR catapult, which is nearly the last graphic needed for 0.6:

[jgrams]

On a side note, I wish the blog had the usual archive links...it's annoying having only the sequential navigation...

I have the tags and categories! But I assume you mean the "Jan 2014", "Feb 2014", "March 2014" etc stuff?

Oh, sorry. Yeah, some way to see the whole sweep of the blog's history. When I find a new devlog it's nice to be able to see how long it has been running, how many posts there are (can I read this all at one sitting? Or do I need to get some sleep in there somewhere?), and be able to skip around through the history to get a sense of the overall progress. I particularly like Blogger's setup, where it has links and post counts by year on the sidebar, and lets you drill down to see them by month.

Not that I want to take you away from writing the actual game or anything...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Haha, got it. I'll definitely try and add that on in the next few months once I have a moment to figure out how to add it

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

In the final week or two of PhD grind before submission, so little to show this week I'm afraid, though 0.6 hovers at only a few days' work from release. In the mean time, I give you (for those of you interested in high-level RTS play) a new game design/criticism blog post: The Kirov Metagame.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2014/11/22/the-kirov-metagame/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

In other news, I gave myself a day off from work yesterday and did some 0.6 bugfixing. Purged at least 30 bugs if not more, and hacked the bug list down by nearly 50%. 0.6 is nearly there!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Most annoying - after seven months of dev I have perhaps three days of work left on 0.6 at the *most*, but in the next fortnight I'm submitting my PhD and moving house, I just don't have the days to spare . I'm only just managing to keep ontop of this stuff by turning in late & waking up early every day. Bleh. The *moment* that thing is submitted and I've moved house, though, I'll just spend three days, blast the remaining bugs, and finally release these immense cities I've been sitting on for too long...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week's update:

This week I have been getting about six hours sleep a night (I’m an eight-hour person normally) and working like mad to both finish my doctorate, move house, and try to get 0.6 released. I’ve only been able to devote a single day to 0.6 whilst I was waiting for feedback on a chapter, but I managed to get a ton done. I don’t normally post long reports of bug fixes – though I will in future gameplay releases to denote balance changes and additions/removals and the like – but for this week’s entry I thought I’d put up a list of everything fixed this week. Some of these terms may be cryptic, but this is a direct copy-and-paste from my list. Obviously most days this blog is generally focused on what I’ve coded each week rather than how I’ve coded it, but I thought a little look into one of the URR text files that helps me keep track of everything might be amusing. Some are descriptions of the issue, some are descriptions of the solution, whilst others are just reminders to me, but here’s how I write the bugs that need fixing. In the mean time I’m aiming to release 0.6 on the 13th of December, assuming we actually have internet set up at the new place by then – if not, it’ll be a holiday present on the 19th!

Shops cannot spawn in one-religion exclusion places
 Lakes cannot end in cities
 Prechoose military stuff
 Force a gate next to a market if possible
 Redo markets
 Force a gate by a graveyard, IF they can path to a road
 Floodfill from graveyards, ensure you can access them!
 Place special combat NPCs, one per fortress no matter what
 Cannot exclude desert if desert, water if colonies? (religion!)
 When adding extra embassies, lines to other capitals, choose closest
 Tundra/ice plants are lighter
 Shops in towns are fixed beforehand, markets gen right
 Towns are not spaced well enough in world gen
 Lava on town doors
 CROSS + ROADS AND DOORS (+ road on map, doesn't align with gates)
 River markets
 River religious
 River centres
 *ONE DOOR* manor house, save 1
 Some weird shit with torches, walls...
 No infinite district knowledge, no 'S', no prints
 Dead family, not always ornate
 Stick can be placed on water... (no sticks)
 Some one-road towns are tiny
 Graveyards, gates, like road teats
 STILL the bloody shift bug when i press space bar
 Travel through cities is showing thre X
 Roads are slighlty going over city wall corners in farms
 Coast, delta ocean is too high!! IT's not going down the HILL!
 Lookups for catapults
 Flags of nomads double-size
 Some issue in military with a large parade ground???
 Tried to enter mil district, loading issue (because i'd S before?)
 Viewing gate bricks are on your level
 Darken ice
 Loading ontop of city causes loading failure
 Finding entrance door MUST be a gate, and height z level
 Sometimes wall blurs bottom/top, sometimes not
 Space & Tab whilst in city brings up wrong thing
 Those tiny edge fronds of road on city centers
 Saved next to city, moved, was able to break through wall?
 The blue from city roads doesn't vanish on the left when you travel
 Roof of uilding in town only 2 over highest terrain, walked up!
 Going south into centre failed to find an entrace
 Officer flags
 Double doors vary based on which SIDE of the building they are on (vert only)
 No door on barracks special?
 Snowtrees, plants in tundra/ice for cities... (centers only?)
 City, travel, tab, @ and X
 Right side of stable door on bottom,no doorpicture (hard to recreate...)
 Archery targets (should be like trees)
 Catapults (should be like trees)
 A corner wall when otuside a city and corners should be city tower (failed)
 Cannot move into docks/castles *on foot*
 Move into district via travel, then diag, then enter, places you corner
 Barley colour
 Rye colour/lookup don't really match
 HUNTER GATHERER SHRINES
 Graveyard, remove some ice near the core, add snow within walls + frozen soil?
 Upper class gates
 Moving diagonally into non-city tile will spawn you on wall edge
 Plants are "on top" of trees on farms, odd
 If a graveyard, limit up/down hills around graveyard on map grid
 WE ARE HISTORY (ignore for now?)
 Shrine issue
 Print_Districts, "you are currently in" vs "this is a"; foreigner detail
 Serious relig issue .png
 Roads in religious districts reset to the proper height going through walls
 Embassy gate
 Military gate
 Archery lookup
 All signs for courts/galleries/etc
 Correct door wood
 Single water edge, city, save 9
 Pgup On player lookuyp 1/4 goes to blank when 'l' at player
 Lookup message does not repeat
 Wheat doesn't show
 Block off docks
 This is not a courtroom, it only PRETENDS

I will attempt to access the internet on the 6th via mobile and have an entry already written, so hopefully we won’t go a week without a post, though it might be a very short one, or a non-URR one. We’ll have to see what I have the time to throw together. We’re so damned close to full-time development it’s agonizing, but thank you all for sticking with me through the past couple of months (I know I’ve been saying this a lot recently but I mean it, and my PhD has dragged on beyond all sanity) and the slow development pace I’ve been forced into. The places URR will go in 2015 will be amazing.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So folks, I’m moving house today and the internet might not be up for the best part of a week, so I’m probably going to miss the update this weekend. Therefore, I’m going to do a very brief update now, and then seek to update on the 13th. The plan at this point is:

December 13th - release 0.6 or announce the start of the full-time development year! For 0.6 two major issues remain, and approximately twenty small issues, none of which should be too significant. I estimate two to three days of bugfixing to conclude. As for full-time development, I am technically considering it to be tomorrow onwards, but I still want to officially talk about it on the blog!

December 20th - Whichever of the above two things I didn’t do on the 13th.

December 27th - A summary of URR development of the last year, followed by…

January 3rd - … detailed plans for the coming year of URR development, and a few other projects too, which will also be a slightly more personal entry that I’ve been wanting to write for a while about my longer-term goals for the game, games academia, the next few years, blah blah.

January 10th – regular, weekly, dense and detailed URR updates resume, working on the great palaces and humble houses of 0.7!

I will have vague phone internet access from today until our internet is connected (hopefully the 11th) so I’ll check blog comments and emails as ever, but I might not be able to reply for at least a week. See you all, hopefully, for release on the 13th! In the mean time, here’s a very zoomed-out image of city for you, approximate population ~300,000. Pretty nice, right?



City FAQ:

Q: Why so square?
A: A deliberate choice – districts in foreign cities cost cash to enter, and the selection of which districts to explore and which to ignore is part of the strategy-layer gameplay.

Q: What are the districts?
A: The dense districts are lower-class housing; the less dense are middle-class housing; the special district near the top-right corner is the city centre, containing embassies, a mint, a parliamentary building, etc; then the row of three special districts in the middle are upper-class housing (where the player will begin), a military district, and a market; the district near the bottom-left corner is a religious district with a range of religions represented, and the blank district is the castle, which is effectively an “interior”, so that is coming in 0.7.

Q: How big actually is this?
A: Each district is a single character on the world map, and 200×200 tiles, so the city is around 1000×1000 tiles across, and has enough housing to support approximately ~300,000 NPCs (coming in 0.!

Q: Will I be able to enter every single building?
A: In 0.6, no, in 0.7, yes, from 0.8 onwards, only if you have the right key.

[s0]

waiting patiently. good luck with moving house, hope everything goes smoothly! 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

waiting patiently. good luck with moving house, hope everything goes smoothly! 

Thanks! Using my mobile as a wifi hotspot for dial-up speed internet, but it's just about enough to post forum replies with. Release on the 13th remains my objective, but 20th might happen, we'll have to see

[RujiK]

300,000 people in one city?! How much memory is a save file going to take?!

Also crop fields look a tad small but it's hard to get a good idea of the size. Then again, a realistically sized corn field would be pretty boring...

Also a park district? Cool! Sounds like a good place to get mugged.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

300,000 people in one city?! How much memory is a save file going to take?!

Also crop fields look a tad small but it's hard to get a good idea of the size. Then again, a realistically sized corn field would be pretty boring...

Also a park district? Cool! Sounds like a good place to get mugged.

How much memory? Too damned much, though the majority of NPCs will be spawned/unspawned on the fly, aside from "important" NPCs who will remain consistent; but one of the tasks for 0.7 and 0.8 is to seriously reduce the size of save files, as they are becoming far too large at the moment! I think the farms are a pretty solid size at the moment, though in fairness they are there more for realism/logic than too much gameplay (though I guess rarely a fugitive might be hiding out in a farmhouse?)

[gimymblert]

Funnily I'm looking for a procedural way to fake dynamics NPC with local procedurality, complete with travel, genealogy, etc.

It's a thought experiment at that point, maybe I'll find some use in the future, current project don't allow it

Ie if you evaluate a tile for generation you wouldn't need to look neighbor, or past state, find the correct state, just solving with (x,y,z,t) with the global parameters.

For example let's look at how to do it to geography first. Let say you have a planet and it had x number of civilization randomly place on its surface. For each tiles you can solve its current event by computing the distance of the tiles to civilization weighted by time, so if the weight is below a certain threshold the tile is wild and have no civilization influences. By computing all the weights and using the filter and parameter of each civilization you can determine the exact events on a tile at moment t. For example, let's you have a tile under influence from civilization A and condition are solved into a fortified town, Civilization B is war like and its influence grew on that tile, the formula solve it by creating an increasing siege to full war over time. Another example is a tile is wild, a Civilization influence grew on that tile, so you see explorer spawning on the tile then settlers, etc ... over time. It had the benefit that you have not only the illusion of dynamism but also time travel and dimension hopping come for free. The main concept was to convert cause relation into correlation.

But how that would translate to dynamic npc that travel, meet people, have adventure with them without any need to bookkeeping. The trick is to find a function from which we can infer those things. The difficulty is that generation is tile local and character, through travelling, are not, and also having relationship make it supposedly non local. So the function must take as input a tile in a certain time and infer a character that is non local :/ kind of defeat the point ? Well that's what I'm investigating, what if we ties character to a procedural list generated at a bigger hierarchical level and use time to index that least based on character and tile parameter?

Another trick would be to separate time into frequencies, with lower frequencies state informing higher frequencies. Also character are kind of predictable, they need to sleep, eat and have some sort of occupations, they also ages predictably which give pattern for procedural solving. As environment impact character we can also infer his behavior and presence in a tile, and relation can be deduce from "collision" of character generation in the same tile (almost because we should be able to infer relationship without solving the tile, so relation is the hardest to solve with local procedurality).

I wonder if any people have idea to ameliorate the concept, the great thing with procedural generation is to see it as an implicit storage and virtual memory access.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Very interesting post. When you said the trick is to have a function from which we can *infer* those things - that puts it perfectly. So much of URR is done that way. No city districts are generated on world gen, for instance, but there is enough information that the game can infer what it should look like from data about the civilization, its religion, its foreign relations, etc. Likewise, most of the graphics are drawn for the first time when you look at them and draw on surrounding information to determine how they look. Your solution for connecting characters to things at a higher level is *exactly* what I'm doing in URR, really (and what I will be doing in a few months for NPCs) - as I say, it has worked amazingly well so far. With that said, it has necessitated slightly more careful data structures than I might otherwise have used, and I have also allowed for a little bit of data duplication so that the appropriate piece of data can always be easily accessed, but otherwise it has worked pretty flawlessly. "Implicit storage"... this is a very interesting way to put it, and I like this term a lot. I may do a blog/update post on this actually!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

All bug-fixing is complete! Unless some massive and horrifying bug arises in playtesting today, I'll be releasing URR 0.6 *tomorrow*!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

After seven months of development, I am extremely proud to announce the release of Ultima Ratio Regum 0.6! This release allows you to explore every single settlement you see on the map: every feudal city, hunter-gatherer encampment and nomadic fortress, in addition to the towns and farms dotted through the feudal lands, are free to explore. You can download it at http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/, and read more detail about the release notes below.

This is the sixth of seven planned worldbuilding releases, which will conclude in March with 0.7′s creation of the interiors of every single building you see in this release, after which core gameplay will begin with 0.8′s NPC generation. Until then, look around the vast world, be sure to ‘l’ook at everything, consult the ‘E’ncyclopedia for information on the planet you’re exploring, and generally get an idea of the scale and complexity of the generated civilizations the game features.

- Explore massive and varied feudal cities (each able to support a population of ~300,000+), each with its own range of districts, architectural styles, and buildings influenced by the political and religious choices of its civilization.

- Discover nomadic fortresses in the desert, enclosed by walls and with an emphasis on strong defence and open-air markets.

- Farms and towns now also generate within the countryside, which in the future will be important stops on your travels, and sources of occasional markets and information.

- Hunter-gatherer civilizations now have settlements, laid out in complex geometric patterns, built from a range of materials, and containing cryptic shrines…

- A huge range of new ‘l’ook graphics for almost everything new in the game, and for a range of items/features/terrains which did not possess graphics in the past.

- Improved world map generation – now includes rare marshland areas, and a significantly overhauled polar biome, now featuring ice as well as snow.

- Introduction of strategic-layer movement around cities, a note on the pricing of city districts, and the unique coinage of each civilization, which will be activated in version 0.9.

- Significant expansion of variety of religion and civilization generation.

- A range of bug-fixes and optimizations on roads, settlement generation, coats of arms, line of sight, generating certain aspects of rivers, and more.

From this point onwards, developing URR will be my full-time occupation for approximately the next twelve months, and I will post in more detail about this next week. Until then, I hope you enjoy exploring this huge world, please report any bugs you might encounter and the crash log (either on this post or emailed to mark @ my domain) and here are some screenshots of the kind of variation you’ll find in an average generation:

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Only two bugs have been repeated from 500+ downloads in the first two days, and neither of these can I recreate, or has reported by anyone else. One was a crash in worldgen around line 119086 (anyone else?) and the other is the ability to climb city walls (anyone else?). Otherwise, this has been a damned stable release.