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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Today is THE DAY where I begin totally reworking saving/loading in URR to improve times by 80%+ and, in turn, reduce file size by maybe 50% or more. Zoidberg exploding slinky gif on standby.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Now that's what I call progress! Updated the saving/loading system, now equally fast no matter how much of the world is generated; got the game handling/saving/loading all building interiors, generating them when needed, and storing them; and, best of all, got the interiors of religious buildings generating and I can walk in and out of the door and the game can handle any arbitrary input of door ID, building type, and generate something appropriate Or at least, the early stages of that are in place, and now all that needs doing is scaling it up to every type of building. Details in tomorrow's blog entry!

[Canned Turkey]

Can't wait for 0.7!
Hope you can get past all this technical stuff with relative ease, it's always been the hardest part for me.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Can't wait for 0.7!
Hope you can get past all this technical stuff with relative ease, it's always been the hardest part for me.

Thanks! Yeah, not coming from a CS background, I definitely find the technical aspects the most challenging; with that said, though, this alteration has proven weirdly easy so far. I've only done 1/3 of the optimizations that need doing, but I expected this one to be the trickiest, so I have high hopes for the other two...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve been working on two things – improving saving and loading, and beginning work on the technical aspects of handling interiors, keys, doors, multiple floors, and a million other things intricately related to interiors and handling all the appropriate amounts of data. Firstly I’ve made a major change to how the game is saved. Until now each work was stored in a single huge file – “World1″, “World2″, etc – which meant that each time a particular chunk had to be saved or loaded, that huge file had to be opened, examined, and shut. So, rather than a single massive monolithic save file which gets larger and larger with each area you explore, and therefore the computational load of opening and closing that file each game gets larger and larger, I instead present you with a new data folder:



Each file is for the coordinates shown (obviously) and contains both the outside map grid, and any buildings that have been generated within that grid. Therefore, that is all that needs loading and saving each time you move between grids, rather than adding something to the massive older file. This has made the initial loading times for the game low, but as more and more areas are generated, it never gets slower! There’s also a code in each of these files to ensure it relates to the correct game instance, to ensure no crafty people switch around the save files to advantage themselves…

This is the first of three stages to the game’s optimization. The second stage involves changing how each individual tile is stored. Currently, every tile has its full set of colours – dawn, dusk, night, in player’s sight, out of player’s sight, etc – stored in every instance. This is horrifyingly inefficient. Instead, it needs changing to numbers that refers to where in the colour database the appropriate colours are found, and which doesn’t save/load them every time. In turn, the third stage is to adapt the rendering code to reflect this. I’ll probably be working on that in the next week alongside more general interior work. As with this first optimization, I expect this to take some time, but if we’re lucky it’ll be just as simple as the file/folder change was! And should hack the size of each save file down by… 40%? Maybe more? We’ll see.

SECONDLY, I’ve started work on interiors. Naturally I want interiors to be as complex and as varied as the external world; you should have to walk around for a long time before you see things “repeating”, and the interiors should be heavily dependent upon civilizations, religions, factions, geography, etc. I decided to start with religious buildings. Just as each one is distinct on the outside and the layout is procedurally generated… so too (as I’m sure you’ve come to expect from me by now) is the inside. The inside is naturally broadly consistent across all religious buildings from a certain religion, but each interior across religions is highly distinct. Some may contain statues, some may not; they’ll have different layouts of things like tables and chairs, *very* different altars (see next week’s update, maybe?), different places for offerings, naturally different NPCs, and also different secrets (if any). So, a religious building from the outside:



And on the inside (early days, don’t be too judgemental!) with some chairs (the backwards ‘t’), tables (the tall ‘pi’ symbols), doors within the building and leading outside, statues (in each of the ‘wings’), an altar (purple in this casee) and a staircase leading to the second floor…



…where we find a corridor running around the outside of the building, and two more stairs leading up to the top floor… but we’ll have to keep that one secret for now.



My intention for the remainder of this week is to finish off all possible variations of religious building interiors, which should yield something in the high tens of thousands of possible interior layouts! I’m also having to plan ahead to think about what kinds of secrets should be potentially spawning in these buildings, and how they should be accessed if so, so that’s also influencing the development process. I might also try to finish off all the altar graphics this week; the variation I have so far is amazing, and I think you guys will love them when I unveil them (either next week, or the week after). And that’s all for now!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

PROCEDURAL HERESY GENERATION:

"Church of the Common Canonization", who believe worthy peasants should be elevated to sainthood.

"The Aron Dualism Heresy", who believe the god "Aron" is actually two gods, one good, one evil.

"Preachers from the Poor", who believe that the Theocracy of Hijjim has become bloated with wealth, and should distribute its money to those in slums and lower-class districts.

...and so on and so forth...

[gimymblert]

I'll join you when I can in the procedural revolution, still stuck in something else

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I'll join you when I can in the procedural revolution, still stuck in something else

Procedural generation is, truly, the future of gaming. And also... the past. And the present. It's basically pretty great.

[gimymblert]

it's a revolution it come back to where it start

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

it's a revolution it come back to where it start

Exactly!

In the mean time, for those of you in the UK (and US? Maybe?) the February issue of PC Gamer has a two-page spread on ProcJam, where URR is described as a 'giga-roguelike'. I am very, very comfortable with this definition.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Just added a new polytheistic religion archetype - say hello to the Pantheon of the Bloody Masquerade, and the Gods of the Divine Revelry...

[Uncle Scotty]

This looks like an absolutely outstanding game! Well done dev Stumbled onto your blog a while back and was really impressed. Maybe I missed it, but have you mentioned the language and/or tools you're using to make this?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This looks like an absolutely outstanding game! Well done dev Stumbled onto your blog a while back and was really impressed. Maybe I missed it, but have you mentioned the language and/or tools you're using to make this?

Well thank you! Glad you like the blog - I'm really happy with the kind of community I've built up over there in the last three years. I'm sure I mention it somewhere (though I honestly have no idea where!), so - I'm using Python, and the libtcod library, and shelve for saving/loading, and everything else is hand-made by me .

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve been finishing off the first set of interiors for the game – religious buildings. I selected these first because I know they’d be quite complex, and I figured this would be a good way to get down a lot of the appropriate infrastructures for interiors and generating/saving/storing/loading them, and then be able to apply those to other simpler buildings rather than simultaneously creating the data structures and the buildings as I went along. Here’s a nice shot of a religious building with the ground floor – the purple symbol is the altar, the blue symbol is a reliquary! – and the second floor, which has some private quarters for the priest (behind the locked door in the middle) and also a staircase leading upwards behind another locked door (on the bottom-left), which leads to who knows where?



Religious buildings have become highly complex and varied in a huge number of ways, but one of these ways which I’ve focused on this week has been in terms of statues within the religious buildings. Originally statues were going to be a binary either/or – either religious buildings had statues of appropriate important figures/deities, or they didn’t. However, I decided it would be much more interesting to add more possible details to this list as a way to both further enhance the variation of religious buildings, and give NPCs and information in the game more to talk about. Therefore: instead of statues, religious buildings may contain ceremonial gongs, vases, and incense stands. Rather than always hearing “The church with the statues that look like X”, you’ll get “The church with the brass gongs”, “The church with the vases that depict two dragons fighting”, and so on and so forth. These are all, naturally, procedurally generated. I’ve created all the graphics for the gongs and also worked on some more graphics for the rest of the ordinary furniture, and my intention is to next work on the vases and the incense stands whilst I move onto programming other building interiors in the coming days.



I’ve also implemented HERESIES. The average game will have between 3 and 6 of these generated in the game world, and they draw upon the data stored for existing religions to propose heretical notions “logical” (as it were) to the religion in question. Religion worships an animal-headed god? Maybe this sect believes that eating animal flesh insults the god. Religion consists of a pantheon of eight gods? Maybe the sect believes there is a ninth. Religion proposes a kind, benevolent god? Maybe the sect believes this god is actually evil, or at least inimical to human well-being. And so on. Just like all the flags and coats of arms and so forth, heresies have their own algorithm for symbol generation (there’s about 40 or so possible, so it’ll be many games until you see them all) and now show up in the Encyclopedia, where you can read a little information about the nature of that heresy, though this will be added to significantly in the future. Each heresy also has one of three statues – it may be TOLERATED by the dominant religion, SHUNNED, or be the subject of an INQUISITION, in which case that belief will be entirely hidden underground. Inquisitions will be worked on later, maybe this release, maybe next. We’ll see. As you can see, the screenshot below is very much an in-progress screenshot (information is not lined up nicely, there’s no leader data, some of the names don’t fit into the window, there’s an unusually large number of heresies in order to make sure they all generate correctly, etc), but you can see how these are coming along. Once I implement the leader information, there will also be a list on the left side of the information screen showing what settlements this heresy has been found in.



Lastly I’ve also fixed a bunch of smaller issues this week – there were some unusual edge cases with entering/leaving buildings I’ve sorted out, and some residual minor problems with coats of arms and a few tiny other things which nobody except me seems to have noticed (since I know what things should look like!), but those have been fixed. This next week might be a lesser coding week – my intention is to submit my PhD no later than the 30th, and probably on the 27th/28th, so I need to devote time to getting it formatted correctly, having it bound, handing it in, blah blah. Either way, whatever coding does happen will be focused on moving interior generation into other buildings (I think I’ll go for something simple like slum housing next after this religious complexity), and adding in the rest of the graphics for the vases, gongs, etc (statues, being highly complex, might have to wait for now). See you all next week!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

More religious building interiors! Altar (purple), reliquary (blue ohm), offerings (light blue pi), incense stands (small desaturated red symbol, I cannot recall the name of that character), two floors.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

My Roguelike Radio interview on URR is now live!

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2015/01/episode-96-ultima-ratio-regum.html

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Alas, I have little to report this week. I’ve worked on finishing off the graphics for procedural altar generation (there’s an incredible variety and I’m working up a really detailed entry on this, maybe for next week, maybe the week after), making sure that the player can correctly ‘l’ook at everything indoors, and sadly that’s about it…

… but this comparative lack of speedy development is because I submitted my PhD! After three-and-a-third years of work, one serious illness that left me pretty much out of commission for about six months, and another far more serious illness that actually threatened my life, I’ve got the damned thing in (if anyone is interested, I have updated my academic profile (http://www.york.ac.uk/sociology/our-staff/students/mark-johnson/) on the York site). I was expecting to feel profoundly nervous, but I feel oddly calm about the whole thing. I have a copy of the softbound thesis lying on my desk in front of me so that I can “revise” from it when the time comes to defend, but I’m having to make sure I’m not tempted into opening it and checking for typos or anything like that (though a pretty thorough typo search was conducted by both myself and two others). The next month or two have just opened up in front of me as wonderful blocks of time where no more thesis work is required (and it’s looking increasingly likely I’m going to have a game studies academic job on the horizon, but more on that as and when). I’m also going to start trying to write some more general games criticism stuff for some of the many games commentary sites out on the web, and when that actually starts happening I’ll naturally link to them here.

Anyway, this coming week, I’m therefore expecting major progress with a full seven days of coding – my intention is to finish off all the altar graphics, work on some more interior graphics, conclude everything to do with religious building interiors, and then move onto generating the interiors for some other, simpler buildings (maybe slums, lower-class housing, etc). I’m also going to submit the full 8500-word version of my roguelike semiotics paper (which I presented at a conference last year) to an academic journal at last, and I’m extremely happy with how it’s looking (http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2014/02/22/the-semiotics-of-the-roguelike/).

Lastly, I was also on Roguelike Radio again! I got interviewed for an episode specifically about URR, and it was pretty excellent (I think). I recommend giving it a listen (http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2015/01/episode-96-ultima-ratio-regum.html). See you next week, folks.

[happymonster]

Well done Mark on finishing your PhD!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thanks ! Now we just wait and see how the defense goes...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Procedural deity generation gets pretty weird sometimes. Pretty weird.



Edit: I know it gifts/bans the same thing, making those exclusions is just one item on the list of 8475719 things to do...