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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Released URR 0.7.0b! A few bug fixes, typos, a couple of crash fixes; I think that should be everything. Onto 0.8! http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

- I’ve just released version 0.7.0b: it contains several crash fixes, fixes for some smaller bugs, and then a bunch of truly minor stuff for typos, rare edge cases in a few generation algorithms, etc. If you’re exploring 0.7.0, I’d upgrade to the new version: rest assured, everything should be totally save-compatible since I don’t think a single new variable anywhere has been added – things have just been fixed, and as far as I know, it should be crash-stable now, but let me know if you upgrade to the new version and something goes wrong.

- This week I found myself giving two presentations, one at the AISB AI & Games Conference down in Kent, and then an invited guest lecture at the Psychology Department of the University of Bedfordshire kindly set up by an old friend; the slides for both, and a Youtube video of the latter, should be online soon! Also heading to this conference for another games talk this week, though I don’t know if this one will be recorded, but I’ll naturally add the slides for this one to the other bunch too once I’ve given the talk. Hoping to get some more “public” talks going this year (there could be a really exciting one in the works!) and I’ll post here whenever there’s another opportunity to meet some of you folks in person.

- Another reminder: I’m hosting IRDC UK 2015! We’ve got some big names talking: DarkGod (creator of TOME), the Curious Expedition guys, Darren Grey (of Roguelike Radio), me (if I may place myself in that illustrious company), Ido Yehieli (Cardinal Quest), Tommy Thompson (AI and PCG researcher) and many others, with also the potential for David Ploog (DCSS), Thomas Biskup (ADOM) and Kornel Kisielewicz (DoomRL)! You should click here to find out more, and come along!

- Work has begun on 0.8. I’ve actually been secretly working on the NPC face generation algorithm for some time and it is almost completed – I suspect I will unveil it either next week, or the week after, depending on how things go. It’s looking pretty glorious. I’m currently in the early stages of planning everything else and what order I should do everything; I think it’s actually pretty likely I’ll work on improving the rendering system for walking around outside first, and thereby extend the player’s line of sight, since a few people have rightly commented on that, and it really needs an upgrade now that I actually know how to code. Either way: I’m working on faces and improving the vision algorithm, and then I’ll probably be working on crowd/population mechanics, before storing specific NPCs. 0.8 is such a huge upgrade it’s hard to know where to begin!

- And that, I’m afraid, is all. See you next week for either some general games commentary or the first proper 0.8 update!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Procedural ANSI face generation is here!



Ok, so a little about the system. I basically wanted a system which adhered to four (five) major objectives. Firstly, it should be massively varied, and even if you spend a decent length of time just looking at the ordinary people in the street, it should take some time and under you see any two people who are identical. Secondly, it should be demographic – which is to say, each nation can have a set of preferred hairstyles, likely skintones, other signifiers (like turbans, tattoos, jewelry, etc), and these should be distinct in each nation. Thirdly, and following on from the second point above, there should be enough of these that (much like everything else in URR) you should be able to gain visual information: when you meet someone you’ve never met before, you should be able to make a reasonable guess about their nation of birth. Fourthly, any combination should be possible, as a means of undermining the idea that only “primitive” peoples will be found with certain cultural signifiers – in one game perhaps the people in the most technologically and militarily powerful empire all have extensive facial tattoos, for examples. Fifthly (I suppose), the objective was to make them look visually and aesthetically interesting, and striking, and distinct: as with everything else in URR, if I wasn’t able to make face generation look enough to meet my standards, I’d have just cut it.

I’m not honestly sure how many variations there are (since some variants cancel out other variants in the generation process, making the simple solution of just multiplying everything together inaccurate). Roughly speaking there are nine skin tones, thirty hairstyles for women, thirty for men, a dozen different forehead/chin/nose shapes each, a dozen hair colours (which are genetically placed around the world and are toned appropriately to reduce contrast with skin tone), four eye colours (likewise, genetically varied around the world), several dozens beards (for the gents), and then a massive range of other visual identifers. There are five below: paint/dye markings, turbans, brands (sometimes consensual/cultural, sometimes as identifiers of slavery), facial tattooing, collars (always denotes slaves), scarification, and a bunch I haven’t shown here. There are also some rare additions like scars, eye patches (like the lady at the top of this entry), and some other neat and extremely rare properties as well. These will always tie to that NPC’s history, so someone with an eyepatch will have a distinct event in their past where it was lost – you can sometimes, therefore, get a bit of “personal” data from someone’s face, as well as cultural/national/etc.



When you ‘l’ook at an NPC, you’ll get a new range of screens to cycle through in this coming release. If you’re currently in combat, it’ll automatically go to the screen showing their health; if you’re not (which will obviously be the case in this release) it will show you their face, and a little bit of data. There will then a list where you can scroll through everything they are wearing and bring up the appropriate attendant images for all of those (clothing, shoes, any holstered weapons, jewelry, etc). I’m going to remove anything you could not “physically” determine, until you know for sure: which is to say, an NPC’s lookup will never state their affiliations, unless you have explicitly talked to them and found out (though they might have lied…) or someone else has told you. Here’s a spectrum of the skin tones in the game, with a bunch of hairstyles and beard styles (where appropriate). Alpha Centauri players might also note the worrying but entirely unlpanned similarity of one of these nine women to a certain Sister Miriam Godwinson…



And that glorious image pretty much concludes this entry. I’m currently working on a bunch of optimizations for the game – primarily in terms of how data is saved, and the efficiency of the rendering and line-of-sight algorithm, since this needs some serious improvement so that you can see further than a couple dozens tiles in front of you. Once that’s done (which hopefully won’t take too long) I’ll probably get working on clothing generation, and then doing some major work on families, family trees, and how NPCs should be stored for remaining still and/or moving around the map, as an important precursor to getting them actually spawning. See you all next week!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I've just been doing a lot of work today on finishing off what each policy is going to do in cities, and figuring how to display everyone, and I'm currently looking at something like this:

[RujiK]

Nice faces. For ascii that is really impressive.

Dang thats a lot of upper class people in there. I hope you can steal/assassinate/tresspass/do something to make them mad!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Nice faces. For ascii that is really impressive.

Dang thats a lot of upper class people in there. I hope you can steal/assassinate/tresspass/do something to make them mad!

Thanks!

Ha - yes, rest assured, lots of madness-inducing will be possible, I hope. BUT WITH SUITABLY SEVERE CONSEQUENCES 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

In the mean time, another nice piece from RPS (though I think some people in the comments do not appreciate the challenges of procedural face generation within an ANSI grid...) http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/05/06/ultima-ratio-regum-faces/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

If you fancy reading a rather excellent (if I do say so myself) and detailed interview about URR, look no further!

http://videogametourism.at/content/massive-environmental-storytelling-interview-mark-johnson

[gimymblert]

I don't know James Joyce what's the context of that? (I admit I'm not much of literary educated, blamed my mother, she thought that reading too much books would make me mad, and I read a lot as a kid...)

[s0]

famous irish modernist author best known for writing 2 of the most complex novels ever basically, ulysses and finnegans wake (latter of which uses experimental language and no one even understands whats going on in it)

[PsySal]

This whole thing just amazes me, those faces are excellent

[kinnas]

You're doing some amazing work 

[jamesP]

I want to leave a comment but I really have no idea what to say. This project is huge, incredible, wildly ambitious, utterly beautiful (I love ANSI!) and staggering in its achievements. I am so bowled over right now.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I don't know James Joyce what's the context of that? (I admit I'm not much of literary educated, blamed my mother, she thought that reading too much books would make me mad, and I read a lot as a kid...)

famous irish modernist author best known for writing 2 of the most complex novels ever basically, ulysses and finnegans wake (latter of which uses experimental language and no one even understands whats going on in it)

Yep, that's about it. I'm no fan of Joyce, personally, though the most postmodern versions of his style of writing (Pynchon/Wallace/etc) I love.

This whole thing just amazes me, those faces are excellent

Thanks! That's awesome

You're doing some amazing work 

Thank you!

I want to leave a comment but I really have no idea what to say. This project is huge, incredible, wildly ambitious, utterly beautiful (I love ANSI!) and staggering in its achievements. I am so bowled over right now.

Well, thanks for this extremely nice comment! Very glad you like how things are looking and you like the ANSI style! It really emerged entirely by chance, but once I saw what I could do with generated ANSI graphics, and people liked it, AND I saw how I could integrate it into gameplay... there was no going back!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I haven’t been able to get any coding done, and the same will sadly be the case for the next seven days – I’ve been finishing off an academic book chapter due in very shortly, as well as doing some writing for various online game publications (links will be posted here once my pieces are published), and also writing three different conference presentations for three talks I’m giving at DiGRA in Lüneburg next week (so once I upload that, and my previous set of talks, I’ll be uploading six sets of slides for your perusal! I’ll get around to it folks, I promise). So, this week and next week we’re going to talk about some of the more abstract intentions/plans for 0.8 onwards, then hopefully after that we’ll be back to specific updates once I get working on 0.8 again upon returning from Germany (week of the 18th onwards). Two big abstract/worldbuildy changes in this release alongside the development of NPCs (!!) are policies, and nicknames, so let’s talk about these.

Policies

During the development of 0.7, I found myself making a major change to how national policies work. Originally the idea was for them to give abstract benefits to the player – one policy might yield a player who belongs to that nation extra strength, for example – but I found this increasingly uninteresting. So much of the game’s mechanics are meant to be about figuring out and understanding the generated world, and I realized it would be a lot more interesting if policies directly affected what spawned in each nation – so the macro of a nation’s political ideologies and policies then determine what buildings appear (or not) in cities, towns, within buildings, etc.



So, a pretty simple key. Green effects are policies which don’t relate to shops; yellow policies relate to types of shops which can spawn in that nation; which the red ?s, funnily enough, are policies I haven’t thought of a good effect for (any ideas?). Escort Cavalry is a nomadic-only policy, and Chiefdom is a hunter-gatherer only policy, but aside from those, any of these policies can spawn for any feudal nation (Monastic is in red because it is a new policy I haven’t yet added to the game or created an image for). At the bottom you’ll see two binary possibilities: from 0.8 onwards, nations will either be slaving nations or won’t be, and nations will either use gunpowder weapons, or won’t.

With this system policies will therefore seriously affect (I hope) a player’s path around the world and choosing which nations to visit, knowing that certain shops will only appear in certain nations, some will be more/less hostile to foreigners, some have different systems for payment (or not) when moving around cities, some nations will have different punishments if the player decides to commit a crime within their land, etc. Should add an interesting level of grand strategy to the player’s movement, and be a lot more interesting than “abstract policies” which affect the player, but fail to distinguish between nations.

City Nicknames

Credit for this idea must go to Retropunch on the Bay12 thread for URR. He suggested that I could add some distinguishing factors to cities which both make them stand out more from each other, and add the potential for nicknames. In this release I’m aiming to add this in over a dozen ways to make cities more distinct, and add in another “clue” – i.e. the nickname – by which cities might be identified. This means the generation algorithm for a small number of cities will be tweaked to ensure that something very noteworthy spawns in/around/throughout a given city, and then an appropriate nickname is generated. Some examples:

City with many slums: “City of the Downtrodden”, “The Evergrowing City”, etc

City with many gardens: “The Flowering City”, “The City of the Hundred Gardens”, etc

City near volcano: “The City of the Inferno”, “The City of the Red Mount”, etc

Slaving city: “The City of the Masters”, “The City of Shackles”, etc

City with many statues: “The City of Stone Watchers”, “The City of the Grey Men”, etc

And so on. I’ve got around fifteen ideas so far for feature/nickname combinations (you’ll be able to find the rest in 0.8!), so maybe five cities per playthrough will be granted some unique “overlay” (like lots of gardens, lots of statues, etc) and a nickname to go with it. So then the player will sometimes be told “Travel to [ City Name ]”, but will instead sometimes be told “Travel to [ City Nickname ]” – a small thing in gameplay terms, but something which’ll add some nice extra variety to the world’s cities and help the player remember which city is which. The idea of the nickname in general seems like something very promising, so I’ve also been working on adding nicknames to other things in the game, primarily rulers and important historical figures, and also noteworthy living figures the player will be engaging with, and it’s those I’ll be talking about next week!

[failrate]

Militia - Soldiers garrison in homes.  Standard homes have additional items that would typically be found in a garrison.  Barns converted into garrisions.
Escort Cavalry - Similar to militia, but garrisons are within and around paddock area.
Interventionist - Not sure what you mean here.
Imperialist - two or three upper class houses belong to nobles of different nations.  These nobles are treated well but are hostages used to maintain leverage over other nations.
Tribal Knowledge - Skald, a vocal storyteller.  Their dwelling is slightly larger than typical to hold an audience, or a dedicated place like a long house for socializing is where they work.  The oral tradition means that the stories will be randomized every time they are told.
Chiefdom - The "capitol" building is also the dwelling of the chieftain.  It is larger than normal, in order to hold court, and is made of materials on the upper scale of the civilization.  It is located near the center of the village.
Vigilantism - A building similar to a guild hall is located near the gates of cities.  Bounties are posted and awarded at this hall.  It possesses a small gaol for live bounties.  A gibbet is out front or at a near-by crossroads.

[Jondog]

Looks really interesting, posting to follow.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Militia - Soldiers garrison in homes.  Standard homes have additional items that would typically be found in a garrison.  Barns converted into garrisions.
Escort Cavalry - Similar to militia, but garrisons are within and around paddock area.
Interventionist - Not sure what you mean here.
Imperialist - two or three upper class houses belong to nobles of different nations.  These nobles are treated well but are hostages used to maintain leverage over other nations.
Tribal Knowledge - Skald, a vocal storyteller.  Their dwelling is slightly larger than typical to hold an audience, or a dedicated place like a long house for socializing is where they work.  The oral tradition means that the stories will be randomized every time they are told.
Chiefdom - The "capitol" building is also the dwelling of the chieftain.  It is larger than normal, in order to hold court, and is made of materials on the upper scale of the civilization.  It is located near the center of the village.
Vigilantism - A building similar to a guild hall is located near the gates of cities.  Bounties are posted and awarded at this hall.  It possesses a small gaol for live bounties.  A gibbet is out front or at a near-by crossroads.

I like some of these thoughts! I'm definitely going with the bounties one, and a few others I might incorporate (See below).

Looks really interesting, posting to follow.

Thanks!

Here's this week's blog entry, though you'll have to head to http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/05/17/policies-and-nicknames-part-2/ to get them! Just a short one this week.

--------

Well, I almost missed a weekend update for the first time in over a year, but in my current timezone (Germany) it is still Sunday, so here we are! Just a quick one this week, but I’ve got a few really long and interesting updates, and some more abstract discussions, scheduled for the coming weeks. However, since this entry is rather short, here are four of my most recent conference/lecture presentations, in no particular order. Enjoy!

Talk to AISB AI & Games conference on designing URR’s upcoming NPC AI:

Talk at a conference on literary dystopias about Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun

My main talk at DiGRA about Japanese arcade culture, danmaku games, high scores, and some other cool stuff (a full paper version is going to be published as a chapter in a book on Gaming and East Asia in 2016)!

My secondary talk at DiGRA about civilians in the original Command and Conquer

Remaining Policies

Thanks to everyone for their ideas on the remaining policies. I realized as I read through the suggestions that something had been a tad unclear: Tribal Knowledge, Chiefdom and Escort Cavalry are policies which can only appear in hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies, and are therefore rather like “placeholders”, so suggestions for those – although there were some great ones and I might integrate them as general buildings/NPCs/etc! – won’t be directly integrated into the policy system. So, without further ado, the Militia policy will result in citizens owning weapons in their homes; the Imperialist policy will allow that civilization to seize colonies (currently all feudal nations can do this, but this’ll therefore be changed); the Hegemony policy will mean that race (which is to say, skin tone) will directly affect citizens in that nation in some way, but I haven’t yet decided precisely how; and the Vigilantism policy will cause bounty offices to spawn, listing wanted individuals and the bounties on them. That means interventionist – by which I mean covert operations, spying, espionage – remains undecided.

Nicknames

So, as well as city nicknames, I’m working on nicknames for people. This means both historical figures, and living figures who the game considers important. Right now I’m splitting this into two categories: people from important noble families have a certain generation algorithm underlying their nicknames, whilst anyone else who isn’t high-born but has still become “important” will have a different generator. Firstly, if someone is from an important family, the game looks at the coat of arms for that family. If their coat of arms contains a “distinct” pattern, it will go to a unique generator for that pattern; if it doesn’t, then it will default to a more “general” generator. This generator can sometimes use words from the terrain of the homeland of this person as well.

So, for example, let’s say someone comes from an ice/tundra area, and their coat of arms contains the pattern of the dragon flying “upwards” (I’m sure many of you will have seen it). They might be nicknamed “The Roaring Breath of the Ice”, “The Adorned Wyvern”, “The Drake of the Hailstones” or “The Ennobled Dragon”. Alternatively, someone who hails from a temperate region and has a coat of arms containing a trident might be nicknamed “The Halberd of the Bluffs” or “The Invested Spear”; someone from a family with a harp on their coat of arms and who lives in the desert might be “The Singer of the Dust” or “The Sand Melodist”… and so on. Alternatively, if a coat of arms is generic or geometric enough to not merit any special words, it instead defaults to a name based on the policies of that person’s nation: “free trade” as a policy might yield “The Glorious Merchant”, “frontier” as a policy might yield “The Grand Marshall”, “theocracy” yields “The Sublime Conduit”, and so on. I still need to finish off some of the generation possibilities, but these are basically done.

And that, I’m afraid, is all for this week! I’ve been at a conference so haven’t been doing any programming this week, but there’s a lot of cool stuff on its way. See you all next week for probably a URR update, or a discussion of one of the many interesting game-related things this conference has got me thinking about!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Here's an interesting entry that I think a lot of people will have some comments on: "The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame"!

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/05/23/the-problem-with-the-roguelike-metagame/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Teaser for the next URRpdate: