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[s0]

panda antivirus recognizes the exe as a virus. im guessing it's false positive?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Most definitely. Does it do that for both the .rar and the .zip downloads?

[s0]

yes, both versions.

[gimymblert]

it's a virus ... of the mind!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

it's a virus ... of the mind!

THAT MUST BE IT!

yes, both versions.

Well, that's very odd. Nobody else has reported any virus issues, so I can only assume that particular virus program has an issue with a procedurally generated Scientific Revolution

[gimymblert]

We know how it will end, procedural learning machine, aka sentient robot artist 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

We know how it will end, procedural learning machine, aka sentient robot artist 

This is basically the master plan

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Well, it took longer than expected and ran into a million delays (as these things also do), but I am very pleased to announce that from (roughly) now onwards, I will be working full-time on URR for approximately a year. This means my doctorate is no longer my #1 priority (it is effectively finished, and due to be bound and submitted on Jan 31st) and URR my #2, but they have been reversed – my academic work obviously remains important, but development on the game will take precedence for the coming year.



So, what does this mean in practical terms? Well, it should mean four releases this year. My plan is to release 0.7 (building interiors and major code optimization) in March, followed by 0.8 (NPCs!!) in July, 0.9 (strategy, coinage, travel) in September, and 0.10 (combat!) hopefully in December 2015, or just after the start of 2016 if not. It will mean the weekly blog updates will continue with the usual mix of URR updates (90%?) and general game design/history/criticism posts (10%?), and I’ll simply be able to spend significantly more time on coding the game and get through what I want to get through far, far faster than I have over the last three years.



However, there are some contingencies. There are currently several potential academic positions in the works for me, and if/when one of my applications is successful, and when that research project starts, will obviously influence the full length of this full-time development period. As much as I’d like to “guarantee” a full year, the academic jobs market – especially when one is trying to very suddenly change field! – is not to be trifled with, and I cannot with any degree of sanity consider extending to a full year and sacrificing a promising position I would otherwise had taken, if one comes up. As ever I’ll keep you all posted. The other contingency, of course, is that I cannot devote 100% of my time to URR – a significant portion of my time (roughly what I’ve spent on URR in the past few years) will obviously remain on my academic work, for there are a wealth of papers I intend to publish this year and close to a dozen conferences I hope to present at (including hopefully GDC Europe, if all goes well). Regardless, this is a major increase in the time I can commit, and the speed of development should reflect this!



So there we go. Coding development on 0.7 will begin in the next few days once I’ve finished planning out the technical improvements/optimizations, and March is the target for major coding optimization and the generation and storage of every single interior within the current game world (or at least the overwhelming majority, if some turn out to need other releases in place first before they can be designed). I have a few other end-of-year updates lined up for this blog, then regular updates will resume in a couple of weeks.



Last but not least, I just wanted to put up a brief summary of the last week’s 0.6 release. The download rate has been pleasingly rapid, and thus far I’ve had two very, very rare bugs identified, each only by a single person. Given that we hit 1000 downloads within just a little over the first two days (thank you all!) and they haven’t been reported more than once, I feel confident saying these are highly unusual rare bugs. One is in world generation and appears to take place when the game attempts to give a feudal civilization a hunter-gatherer religion (which should be impossible); and the second was a crash at a particular point of worldgen, but with no more information, so that one is sadly just too vague to pursue unless I can get an error log for it. If the person who reported the crash after the “C” and “F” of the worldgen screen is reading this, I need more information! There are a million different functions going on there and an error log is pretty much essential to hunt that crash down. As such, I’ve decided it’s not worth the effort to release a 0.6.1 (unless some major game-breaking bug appears or many more people report these same issues) and to simply push onto 0.7.0 and fix these bugs in the process.

Next week I’ll be posting an end-of-2014 summary of URR’s development (and a couple of other things), and then the entry afterwards I’ll be posting about where we go from here and the plans for 0.7! See you all then.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Today just makes me realize I should add some more procedurally-generated festivals to religious beliefs...

[gimymblert]

merry procedural christmas or whatev you are celebrating  (sorry don't know them all)

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

merry procedural christmas or whatev you are celebrating  (sorry don't know them all)

I am celebrating the Festival of Whirling Lights, as practiced by those who worship the Pale Goddess of the Crescent Moon (the official religion of the Ubburek Hagiocracy).

It's pretty good 

[gimymblert]

ata ata oglo ulu 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

ata ata oglo ulu 

INDEED

This week's update, cross-posted from my blog (www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk):

And thus, 2014 draws to an end. What did 2014 mean for URR, for my experience of making URR and everything that happened this year, and where does this mean this game and blog and all the rest of it will be going from here?

2014 began immediately after 0.4, my unwise attempt to introduce gameplay before the game was ready for it. Although I was reasonably happy with what you could do in Ziggurats, it lacked any real spark when the world was otherwise so empty, and I realized that it was time to finish off the worldbuilding before actually trying to add any more gameplay (only one release to go!). At this point I turned to fleshing out the detail of the world, and creating a space to interact with that should be every bit as dense, nuanced, and sometimes idiosyncratic, as the real world of a couple of hundred years ago.



From this work I released 0.5 in April, which gave us history generation, a vastly improved world map, religions, coats of arms and families, religion and civilization detail, and was the first release that took place after I finally figured out what the game was actually going to be about! I was very happy with this release, and a lot of people who had previously been sitting on the fence about whether or not I was ‘committed’ to finishing the game were persuaded at this point. Success!



This also pointed the way to the next release: making all these cities, towns, farms, settlements, fortresses and so on actually explorable, rather than just icons on the world map which told you “You can explore these in the next release!”. So, 0.6 began, and ended up being the longest release I’ve ever done, but also by far the largest. The amount of content in 0.6 is probably equal to, if not more than, all the other releases put before it (especially since 0.1/2/3, back in the day, were basically my attempts to figure out how to program a game whilst also programming a game, an approach which may have been a tad unwise). I committed to making every district unique, every fortress generate according to its own algorithm, and basically maximizing as best I could the length of time until players could/would become “used to” what they were seeing. This process isn’t finished yet, and 0.7 and 0.8 will both contribute heavily to this, but it’s a major development along the path of making URR as dense and varied a world as I want it to be.

Released a couple of weeks ago, 0.6 is the first release that I feel stands on its own, even as just a detailed ‘world simulator’ at this point. Although naturally the four planned releases for 2015 should be great and introduce some gameplay, I don’t feel the need right now to keep telling people “but just wait until the next version!” when they look at 0.6. It gives a good impression of the kind of world we’re dealing with, and something about the kind of game that’ll take place within it, and I’m very happy with that.



It was also during this year that I finally realized that Science and Technology Studies (STS), the field of my doctoral research of the last few years, was not where I wanted to be, and that game studies most definitely was. The first thing I ever did in this field was a presentation on the semiotics of roguelikes (which I am currently writing up into a full journal paper) which I gave at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, and the response to this (and my overall experience there) cemented for good my shift to game studies. As such, although right now I’m putting the final touches to my doctorate (submission mid-January, at long bloody last), all my other academic work is now on games. I’m incredibly happy that I’ve made this shift, that my early work has got such a positive response, and indeed that a number of people within game studies have shown an interest in URR themselves. I love the possibility of academic/creative crossover in my work, and we’ll have to see where this goes from here.

Lastly, you may notice a NEW BUTTON (www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/support) on the menu at the top of the blog. This is the first step towards redoing/reworking this website over the course of 2015, and is a response to the very generous comments from lots of people who want a way to directly support the game. That contains a link to a donation button, but more importantly, I note on that page that I would actually much prefer that people support the game by ‘spreading the word’ than direct monetary support (though I certainly do appreciate that immensely). So, if you like what’s going on at the moment, and what I’ve got planned for my year (roughly) of full-time development over 2015, please give it a look and see if you’d like to give me a hand spreading the word of this glorious Scientific Revolution world to every corner of the internet.

In the mean time, I hope everyone has a great new year – I’ll be back next weekend with a post about my plans for the coming year and, indeed, the coming five years, and then regular URRpdates and the odd game analysis piece will return to normal the week after that. See you then!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thanks to RockPaperShotgun for the "PC Games Of 2015: Those Wot Could Conceivably Be Good" mention!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/01/best-pc-games-of-2015/14/

[gimymblert]

Wait you understand the obscure reference of ata ata oglo ulu?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Wait you understand the obscure reference of ata ata oglo ulu?

I do not! My gamer cred is destroyed . Where's it from?

[gimymblert]

No it's so obscure that no gamer cred dies with this one, plus I'm sure you have more cred than me

It's really obscure I think it's cryo a famous french dev company from the golden era of french video game (the famous french touch: beautiful but boring, i'm french so that's helpt I know this). They kind of organize mock ritual to the goddess exxos (the former name of company of the founder of Cryo: philipe ulrich) chanting that ... I may have some detail wrong but that's more or less the story will you use it as a easter egg?

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Ulrich

Notable game from them is "captain blood" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game)

Since then and because of many mismanagement of "french touch" oriented company it had created a climate of disbelief about creativity in france who has directly spawn modern ubisoft (aka canned, controlled, repeatable and measurable "creativity").

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Heh, I see! Well, I am relieved - it really was damned obscure. But interesting though!

Easter egg... maybe, but the few eggs I have planned are generally ones which really relate to my gaming history more than other aspects/memes/references that maybe don't resonate as strongly with me. We'll see!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

A semi-URR semi-personal post this week, with normal updates resuming next weekend:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/01/03/on-being-a-workaholic/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I've now started work on 0.7, beginning with some of the graphics and new objects. 0.7 is all about building interiors, so this means all the obvious stuff - tables, chairs, beds, etc - and the rather more obscure and intriguing stuff - altars, thrones, etc. To begin with this week I've focused on two components of this, primarily the "mundane" household/building items, and also the floor tiles for the more expensive and up-market buildings (upper class housing, cathedrals, parliaments, etc). I decided to start working on the aesthetics first before moving to too much coding, as I wanted to have a good image in my head of the world (and the variation in the world) that I want reflected throughout building interiors before I thought about their layout. As with everything else in the game, all civilizations should vary - now, admittedly there is only so much you can do to vary a chair, but I think I've done a pretty good job:



As well as these I've also done tables and beds, and various designs on those too, bearing in mind furniture items are not "to scale" (i.e. they are designed to take up the entire size of the lookup window regardless of their actual relative size). The more up-market the location the item spawns, the more elaborate the decoration, and the choice of wood colour is naturally based on the biome the furniture is found in:





I also want to take this entry to point out a certain... hidden aesthetic consistency within cities. I don't know if anyone will have spotted this - and it is becoming more pronounced in the next version - but I rather like this. If you've ever looked at the gatehouses in cities, you might notice that there are several different shapes:



In total there are five - squares, octagons, diamonds, circles (as best as possible with a tiled square grid), and crosses. Each civilization picks one at random. It's a minor additional detail, but then if you look at shop signs, you'll notice that those also have different shapes:



The observant player would then perhaps also notice that the floor tiles in cathedrals, parliaments or castles have a range of different patterns based on various shapes (and also their colouring is dependent on the flag of the nation in question):



Therefore, in each civilization, the shapes throughout the civilization are consistent throughout! In this case, octagonal:



That's just a minor thing, but I think helps with just a little extra distinguishing between civilizations. Now I've done a very good portion of the new graphics for this release already in just the first week of serious coding (perhaps a third of new graphics?), my next task is the challenging technical task of hacking down saving/loading times, and changing the game to saving the map in chunked sections within a folder on one's computer, rather than in chunked sections within a single massive file. It's a hefty change, and one of those which will either be weirdly trivial and only take me a day, or drag on for the week. We'll see. Coupled with this is creating the new infrastructure for building interiors which is going to be handled in the same way, and from 0.7 onwards saving/loading times are going to be reduced to a fraction of what they are now, and  they will no longer rise the more of the world you've saved (which it currently does - a serious oversight). Either way, next week I'll be talking about these technical changes in a (rare) semi-technical blog entry - see you then!

And... some strange altars have been popping up.