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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Many thoughts!

Fascinating thoughts (as always). I'm not sure to what extent I want to allow the player to build up relationships with anyone, and if the player CAN, then those should be focused upon those of rank/importance... I think. I'm not sure how much value there would be to that one, and I think it could be more interesting if the player character is a kind of many-faced one who never gets too close to anyone, moves around the world, learning and changing and adapting themselves and their own behaviour...

Ah, information spread. I've been thinking about this a lot, and intend to implement what, I think, will basically be a system of newspapers. I definitely want people turning up with different interpretations of the same events though! That sounds really interesting to me.

*Not at all* too invasive, I always appreciate the thoughts! I haven't had time to really do any coding in the next two weeks (hence the topic of the update I'll be posting in this reply), but it'll be good to get back to coding in the next few days and start working on the important/noteworthy NPCs.

You should still have a "Cultism" religion, but you should make it a secret

Oh, there are going to be secrets! Just didn't think it made sense as a religious *policy*, specifically/per se

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Normal service will be resuming next week: I’ve moved house, settled in, and started planning out the final push on NPCs, which is to say tracking all the important NPCs as they move around the map – a process which has required me to do a lot of thinking about how to code it before actually getting started (this will turn into what it is effectively a Travelling Salesman problem where the time values at certain points are unknown, which I’ll write about here in the next few weeks). Anyway, here’s a post I wrote a little while ago with some of my thoughts on the future of the Encyclopedia; next week we’ll have an URRpdate as usual.

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I’ve decided to remove the Encyclopedia from URR because I increasingly feel/fear it is going to end up doing the player’s “job” for them, and because my original conception of how the Encyclopedia is/was going to work is clearly going to be a programming nightmare.

Let me explain my logic. Right now, the Encyclopedia gives the player a full overview of everything in the world, though that’s only because the game is obviously not replete with gameplay as of yet. The intention was to – either this version, or more likely the version afterwards – fundamentally change the Encyclopedia so that it only starts off with information about your nation, religion, culture, histories, etc, whilst the others remain unknown. Then, each time you uncover a little nugget of information on your quest, the Encyclopedia would update itself. So when you first discovered the name of a nation, it would add in an entry for that nation, but all the information about that nation would be displayed as “?”s (or maybe just blank regions where text could be inserted) until you found those out, and then it would be added. Equally, were you to discover some piece of information that was meaningful, but you didn’t know which nation/religion/whatever it was associated with, there would perhaps be another list of entries in the Encyclopedia without names, noting that *some nation* somewhere has a given flag, but you don’t know which nation. When the player then encountered irrefutable evidence that Flag X belonged to Nation Y, the Encyclopedia would then “conflate” these two entries into a single entry, associating Flag X with Nation Y for ever more.



However, as in the first paragraph of this entry, I increasingly realize that there are some pretty major issue with this type of system. Firstly… surely this is doing the player’s job for them? Surely if the focus of the game is uncovering these cultures and how they interact and searching for the items you seek in the maze of heresies and histories and all the rest of it… surely we should be leaving these connections to the player, and getting the player to come to recognize the nations and cultures they encounter? I fear now that codifying this type of information in the Encyclopedia will run into several major issues. Firstly, it’ll “force” the player (or at least behaviourally strongly encourage) into constantly opening the Encyclopedia to check things, rather than remembering “ah yes, this is Nation X, I encountered some of their emissaries before”. Secondly, the player might not actually notice a useful bit of information, but if the Encyclopedia then updates, it tells the player that piece of information is useful! It seems to me this second one presents a major issue. Thirdly, there’s a question of what information the Encyclopedia should show. To stick with the nation example, should it show the national flag? The national dress? The national style of shoe? What vases in that nation look like? There has to be a line drawn somewhere, because if you want the Encyclopedia to potentially list everything about a given nation, you risk basically reproducing everything about that nation and leaving nothing in the actual game.

So, those are the gameplay issues. There is also a programming issue, which is that I increasingly realize this type of tracking – and perhaps most imporantly, getting the game to notice when a useful piece of information has been “seen” and then updating the appropriate Encyclopedia page – is (or would have been) a horrifying nightmare. This is a secondly concern to the gameplay, of course – if I still thought this was a good method I would certainly have done it – but it still matters somewhat.



What’s the alternative? Well, I think I’ll keep the Encyclopedia in for 0.8 and probably 0.9. Whilst the world is “open”, I think it only enhances the game to be able to see everything at the start and give new players some impression of the size/scale/scope/variation of the planet and the variation of its cultures. However, a little further down the line – shall we say 0.10? – I’m now 99% sure that I’m going to remove it permanently, and rely two things. Firstly, the player’s ability to become familiar with the interconnected world they find themselves in; and secondly, crucially, an alternative to the Encyclopedia (maybe a “Journal” or something of that sort) which records every piece of information the player character sees/hears/experiences, but not the significance of it. With this model you can once more view/read everything of note you have ever looked at/seen, but it doesn’t tell you *what does/doesn't matter.* So once you’ve read a book, you can forever “look up” the information in that book (so it basically as if the player character has an eidetic memory). Therefore, this will be a replacement Encyclopedia where you browse “books”, “clothes”, “paintings”, and the like, but you do not browse information about “nations”, “religions”, “cultures”, since that’s what you’re piecing together. Equally, I'll also work on a system whereby the player can "tag" certain items in their viewed history as things they think are relating to a particular riddle, and then browse according to tags and assess the data they have and what else might fit into that category.

Therefore: the Encyclopedia will survive 0.8 and 0.9, and then be replaced by this new version which records player character experience but leaves understanding up to the player – which is surely the whole point of the idea of the game and the riddle(s) hidden across the world’s cultures! For now, however, the Encyclopedia will remain to assist players as we go through the worldbuilding -> gameplay transition in looking around the world, getting some grasp on its detail/complexity, etc. See you all next week for the resumption of normal service!

[TinyAngryCrab]

Noice work! It looks like you are deleuzing the encylopedia heh heh heh

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Noice work! It looks like you are deleuzing the encylopedia heh heh heh

GET OUT OF MY THREAD

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I’ve planned out how important NPCs are going to be handled, and starting tomorrow (Monday) I’ll be working on this. If all goes well… I would expect this to take a week to get all the basics going, but then some of the activities for more complex NPCs (so rulers have to find their way back to their bedrooms in castles, for instance) might take a little longer. I know I rarely write technical entries, but here’s a rare semi-technical entry about how exactly I’m designing the NPC system. Enjoy!

1) The game looks over the entire world and identifies every location where a guard should appear. This means it counts up the number of guard-worthy buildings in each city centre (mints, parliaments, etc), in upper-class districts (currently always three major families, but I do intend to change that in the near future), and stores each guard in a list. It then also looks for an appropriate place for that guard to live – if we’re in a fortress, the guard will be stored in the same map grid (i.e. the fortress) and if we’re in a city the guard will almost certainly live in a nearby lower/middle-class district. Either way, it also stores where these guards should spawn. For non-guards the game assess how many other important people should be appearing on each tile based on the ideologies/religions/etc of each area (so we’ll have ambassadors, blacksmiths, chieftains, doctors, executioners, gladiators, inquisitors, judges, monarchs, lords, ministers, officers, other nobles, regents, abbots, archivists and mercenaries). For now they cannot spawn in the middle of what I’m calling a SCHEDULE event (see below) as this would quickly increase the complexity, but I don’t think this will be an issue, since the world will be vast enough that 99.9% of important NPCs will have begun doing things by the time you ever get to see them.

2) There is now a new dictionary called abstract_creatures, who are the important creatures (I assume only people, but I’ve named it “creatures” in case there are… I don’t know, noteworthy mounts or something later?), which all of these people are put into. For each guard it places a guard in their guarding area, a guard in the district/place they would live, and then has them both schedule a time at which they cross over. For everyone else it just places them in an appropriate starting location. Whenever one of these people takes a turn, it’ll look into this list (instead of the grid-specific lists) to get the person – and as for when it does this, we then look at the kinds of event I’m creating for these abstracted-out people.

3) The game then generates two kinds of “event” for the schedules of these guards, and for all important NPCs – what I’m calling “TIME events” and “SCHEDULE” events. TIME events are those which happen at the same *time* every day – get up, go and guard the thing, stop guarding the thing once the other guard appears, return home, etc. For those in governments it’ll involve going to the appropriate buildings, for rulers it means holding councils, for gladiators going to the arena and fighting and hopefully-not-dying, etc. Then they will sometimes gain SCHEDULE events, which are one-off occurrences: talk to this diplomat, check this town out for heresy, meet secretly at this location on this date, etc. The game will track whether an important NPC is going a TIME or SCHEDULE event, and if a SCHEDULE event, it will ignore all TIME events until there are no more SCHEDULE events to complete, at which point the NPC will look at the next TIME event it would normally have, do that, and from that point onwards behave within its normal list of TIME events.

4) The NPCs use the time “quantum scheduling” system previously described, and when they are heading towards a target in a grid which has not yet been spawned, they assume the highest possible time it would take them to reach it were it spawned – so if there’s a building that could spawn anywhere, we assume it takes 200 ticks to reach it (all grids are 200×200) – if it could only spawn in the left-most side of that grid and the NPC will be approaching from the left, we assume it will take 100 ticks to reach it, etc. After the grid is spawned, the game will actually create a list of all possible timings from each gate leading into that grid to each important location on that grid; this can never be exhaustive for non-city areas or for houses (as there are simply too many), but for NPCs moving to important doors (of which there might be a dozen) from one of four city gates, one can readily see it’s the work of a moment to have the same calculate those and store them for future use after the player leaves that grid and the grid becomes abstracted once more.

5) What then happens if the player steps onto a grid with these abstract people, or leaves a grid on which there exist people who need to be abstracted? Well, this (obviously) is the tricky part, and something I know Dwarf Fortress found challenging to program, and now I’m at this point myself I see why. If you step on and there are abstract NPCs, it will have them “rewind” to the start of their most recent action, generate/reload the map, and then have them play out that action physically. This will mean creating quite a static list of “Actions” and “What This Looks Like On A Spawned Map”, but that shouldn’t be a problem (creating rigid lists is often much simpler, if more time-consuming, than writing PCG!). When the player then leaves, the game will then track how far through their latest action each NPC was, and schedule their next action for either the standard time (if a long way off) or the shortest possible length of time it would take that NPC to start doing that action when moving on the spawned map… and then save the map and do everything else as normal.

6) This means – I think – that NPCs will never wind up doing anything faster than they possibly could if they were “walking it” on an actually present map, but they will sometimes do things slower, but this is simply unavoidable without spawning every single grid at the start of the game (in this regard this is vaguely akin to a Traveling Salesman problem where the travel-length value at each vertex is unknown and/or changeable based on the actions of an external actor). This means that whether or not a particular area has yet been spawned or not, the player will be able to track with great accuracy the movements of important NPCs, and guards will change their shifts irrespective of player actions, and so forth.

I’ll be starting coding this tomorrow. I’ll start with guards since I already have most of their code, and then once I’ve checked that I’ve got them going from their guarding place to their homes and vice versa at appropriate times, and changing over their watches, I’ll move onto the more complicated important NPCs who move between more districts, might move between cities, etc, and we’ll see how it goes. An update on important NPC progress will therefore be next week’s blog post – see you all then!

[gimymblert]

That NPC stuff looks complicated!

However I found that for dialog pile ignore  if not needed but it's the chatterbot perspective, I think there is a few concept explain here that could make it easier for the conceptualization and organisation of the speech data. Not that it's ground breaking (unlike versu) but seeing actual implementation would make your own surely easier.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6305/beyond_fa%C3%A7ade_pattern_matching_.php?print=1 (especially the suzette part)
I know It's NLP and that it is overkill for your project, but I thought some concept might still help in how they hadnle topic and various discourse handling. More like for inspiration and thought (mostly for procedural generation parts).

Optional read
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132155/beyond_aiml_chatbots_102.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTero/20130318/188686/Creating_Better_NPCs.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BruceWilcox/20110623/89684/Suzette_the_Most_Human_Computer.php


Also To add to the thought of the social aspects of my previous and explain the reasoning. The goal was to offer a basic gameplay loop to ease the player into the world as a progression mechanics, a short term goal loop with clear gating of the main currency (information and agency). Other game use trading or fighting, I thought a social ladder mechanics based on intel could be that and ease the player into the the broader hi level goals or exploration without getting lost at first, it's like a mechanical short term breadcrumb.

It's true they originate from a design which I'm working on and deal with more intimate interactions.

So while you don't have to be that intimate, you can substitute individual with group or more abstract concept, simplify the loop or adapt it to your purpose. But I want to raise the necessity for clear short term loop.

[gimymblert]

IRDC UK 2015 - Mark Johnson, Algorithmic Generation in Ultima Ratio Regum

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I am absolutely *swamped* with work and coding and everything else right now, but thanks for the extra resources! I shall get onto them shortly

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Some Updates

A couple things before we get started this week. You can now watch my talk (

) from the UK IRDC 2015 on URR’s general generation systems. Check them out! Also, I’ll be at this year’s ProcJam (http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/procjam-2015-kickoff-day-tickets-18723814433) opening talks (though not speaking this time) down in London, so you should all come and say hello, both to me and other excellent PCG folk speaking. Hopefully see you there! And if not, I recommend taking part in ProcJam – a lot of awesome stuff came out of it last year and I’m sure the same will be the case this year. Also, as mentioned previously, I’ve now started a job as a three-year research fellow; currently I’m therefore working on URR at weekends and in the evenings. Progress is speeding up again now, but it’ll inevitably be a little slower than it had been pre-move. As such, I’m now seriously once more considering releasing NPCs without the conversation mechanics as 0.8… but I might not. Basically, I’m going to finish NPCs, and then take stock; but that possibility is still on the table. I don’t want people waiting ages, and I do obviously want the NPCs to be tested, but at the same time I promised gameplay and the conversation system is going to be in-depth and exciting, so I want to offer that, even if that means a longer time between releases. We’ll see.

Now, onto this week’s update, where I am pleased to report that development has now resumed after around a fortnight of moving house and starting-new-job admin, and we have some initial progress in the handling of the game’s important NPCs. So, read on…

Placing and Counting NPCs

When a world is generated there is now a block of code which looks over each tile, examines what is in the tile and the ideologies of its owning nation, religion, and all this kind of data, and comes to a conclusion about how many guards there should be, what kinds of guards these are (Mansion, Parliament, Castle, etc), where they should rest (in that same tile, as in a Fortress, or in another city district), and so forth. It does the same for all other important NPCs, and then counts up the total. Here’s a map I had the game print out where each tile was coloured according to how many important NPCs it had. A black/grey tile had none, and then the colours/numbers went through the rainbow to denote numbers of guards from 1 to 10 – dark red, red, red/orange, orange, orange/yellow, yellow, yellow/green, green, light blue, mid blue. If there are 10 or more, it uses a ‘+’ symbol. One can see roughly where all the major cities are, and get some impression of where fortresses are, and for the time being nothing spawns in towns which would “merit” a guard (though this will probably change) and so those don’t show up (same goes for tribal encampments, though I might add guards to certain buildings there in the future). I think it’s quite interesting to note how different cities have different textures of how important NPCs are laid out, depending on their ideologies and so forth. Note also that some of the fortresses have different numbers, again according to their layouts/ideologies. Anyway, here’s an example of this map:

(Hyperlink due to size) http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Important_NPCs1.png

And some zoomed-in examples of cities with very different “important NPC textures”, where in most cases the +s are indicative of things like city centers and upper-class districts and military districts, whilst the common 1/2/3/s tend to be lower-class districts where the national ideologies vary what spawns and doesn’t spawn there:



As for these important NPCs: they are stored in two areas – if it is an important NPC who will never ever leave the tile they are currently on, it saves them in the potential_npcs list on that map tile; if it is an important NPC who will be moving around the world, it saves them in the potential_npcs list in the world overall; this separation is to avoid a situation where even NPCs who never leave their map grid were in the global set of abstracted-out NPCs, there would be no point scheduling them and going over their routines/actions, since those can just be modeled when the player goes near. At this point it also (though this is not fully implemented yet) creates a bunch of tags for each important NPC. This might be something mundane and overt like “Guards the mansion of Family X”, or something covert like “Intends to murder NPC X in a plot with [list of other NPCs]”, or “Once met a mercenary who knew where [secret item X] was buried”, or whatever, which one might be able to discover. This brings us back to the previous discussion a while ago of secrets NPCs hold: a jail might have 50 prisoners, most of whom might be mundane, but a few will hold secrets which might be of use to you in some way.



Spawning Important Folks

Until the player goes near to any of the important NPCs, they remain “abstract”. They are able to act and gain connections by possessing the list of “npc_info” stuff listed above (who they plan to usurp, their other secret agendas, etc), and this also means that a spawned NPC can talk about an unspawned NPC without that NPC having to be spawned, which means that all the important NPC information is set up before the spawning of any of those NPCs. When the physical version is spawned because the player has stepped onto their map tile (or they are a roving important NPC and they have just moved into the player’s map tile), the game looks for the “npc_info” which describes an NPC of that sort and then tethers that npc_info to the physical copy of that NPC and deletes the abstract copy. That then doesn’t change the abilities of other NPCs to reference the important NPC, but it just means they now reference the physical copy rather than the abstract copy, but either way the game knows the information relevant to that NPC, and that NPC can move around the map (whether “physical” or “abstract”).



Reworking Guards

When I worked on guards in the past few weeks, I hadn’t fulled realized that guards were, basically, an “important” NPC, and therefore would actually need to be tracked to their homes and the rest of their schedules just like all the others. This means I’ve had to undo a little bit of the code I wrote before for tracking guard pairings and so forth, but this didn’t actually take as long as I’d feared. Guards now still spawn correctly and match up with their “abstract” selves, but no longer exchange their positions, as that requires me to transform some abstract guards into real ones at appropriate moments, and then get them matching up whether or not all, some, or none of them are spawned – the next step is therefore to get them (and everything else) performing according to their schedules, which is the objective for the coming week.



Next Week

Important (and unimportant) NPCs remain permanently/temporarily spawned when they cross districts, so you can follow them; guards can exchange their patrols with one another at the correct times; TIME (regular) and SCHEDULE (unique) events work, or at least have begun to be implemented. See you then for more work on the important NPCs of URR![/list]

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Major progress on important NPCs this week! We now have all NPCs correctly linking up with their abstract selves, the game correctly listing and assigning historical and interconnected importance (if any) to all important NPCs before they are actually generated (from slaves to kings), the delegates/representatives for democratic nations being generated and tethered to a home district/town/etc, minor vassalage families are spawning, and early progress has been made towards even the generation of castles! Read on…

Importance of Important NPCs

Firstly, the game now selects a lot of new important things during world generation; or rather, it has always done this and then stored “keywords” and information so that specific areas can be generated later if/when the player sets foot in them, but this has now been expanded to every NPC who might be important. Therefore, the world at generation decides precisely how many servants live in a given mansion, for example, and how many mercenaries live in a mercenary guild in a certain city, and so on. The map I showed last week was partly complete in this regard but was lacking a bunch of other important NPCs I had actually forgotten about, but I believe the game now generates them all correctly. This means all guards are generated at world gen, along with all other obviously-important NPCs (like rulers) and a small number of other NPCs (like slaves, servants, prisoners, etc) who are then intermingled with non-important versions of themselves.

Since new important NPCs have been added, take a look at this new diagram – you’ll see that there’s now a bunch of important NPCs spawning in towns, settlements, more in cities, all over the place! Much more colourful and much more variety, and shows that not everyone who matters lives in a city…

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Important_NPCs2.png

Historical Importance and Secret Information

The game can now assign “notes” to each important NPC, notes which might be referenced elsewhere in the game and will determine some of the unique things you might be able to do with each unique NPC. Examples include whether that NPC is involved in a plot, is secretly a worshiper of another religion, has an unsolved crime to their name, fought in a war/wars, is corrupt or embezzling somehow, what other important NPCs they’ve met, where they traveled, and so forth (and also past-tense examples for all those I wrote in the present tense, so an important NPC might have been involved in an un/successful plot in the past, but is not involved in one currently). This will obviously develop far more in 0.9 onwards, but the basic framework is now in place for meeting a merchant in one place, who tells you about a plot he overheard involving someone in the next town over, then finding that person and encouraging them to give you information about the plot, and discovering it is being lead by a number of political delegates who all secretly worship another religion, and then finding out a list of delegates and trying to decipher who it might be, and finding out this plot may be attempting to put a particular person on the throne, a person who – as someone else told you – may just know the location of one of the items you’re seeking…

…and so forth.

Representation and Delegates

I turned back to the democratic ideology choices this week and added a nice bit of extra detail here. There is now a new NPC type, the “delegate”, shown for now with an “a”, and each democratic(ish) nation will have a selection, depending on how many seats there are in their parliament. Once the game knows this number, it then carries out a reasonably complex equation. The game counts up how many towns, monasteries, and districts there in a nation (say, 4, 2, and 18), and then attempts multiples alongside each of those (1,2,3,4) for how many representatives there might be from each town/monastery/district, and then attempts to get that as close to the target delegate value as possible. If it hits it directly: great. If not, then the game gets as close as possible to that value, and then adds in a few extra delegates which belong to the major families, the military, the national bank, the national religion, or some combination, depending on how many “extra” delegates are required. This obviously produces a lot of variety – in some nations each monastery has two delegates, each city district just one, and each major house two; in another maybe each city district has two delegates, but the military fields six of its own delegates, and the bank a couple too. Delegates have been given (temporary and very basic) schedules for me to test in the coming week getting them all moving correctly around the world map. Here’s an example map of nations with the “representation” ideology (in white) and their distribution of delegates, who will all be scheduled to come together to the parliamentary building once every X weeks/months/etc:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Delegates1.png

Road Aesthetics

A minor thing – I noticed that all road curves were curved, and that doesn’t really stick with the whole geometric-aesthetics thing, so road curves now vary, just like almost everything else, depending on the nation they’re found in. A truly minor detail, but once I realized it, I just had to fix it. The octagon and diamond inevitably look similar (the octagon just has less diagonal), but still:



Early Days for Castles

On evenings when I didn’t have enough time to sit down and really do a lot of this complex scheduling/technical stuff, I started work on castle generation and, although it took a long time to figure out how exactly this was going to work, I’m very pleased with the initial results, and I’ll definitely have something to show in this regard in… two weeks? Something like that. But here’s a little hint of some castle walls, a gate, a moat, and is that… is that something which might become a DRAWBRIDGE?!



Vassal Houses

The game now spawns an appropriate selection of lesser houses for nations with the “vassalage” ideology. There’s a longer blog post in the work for the future about how I’m reworking these for 0.8 and the new variation I’m trying to add to all the nations as a result, but that’s a future thing; nevertheless, these now appear, and each is given a town to rule; in the very near future I’ll be expanding this so that a “county” appears around each town which each family rules, and all the farms and whatnot within it, which is the area that vassal then controls. Still not quite sure how the mottoes for these lesser houses will generate, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something acceptable in the near future.



What next?

Well, by the end of next week I hope to get the important NPCs moving and scheduling themselves around the map, even if only in a very basic state, and to have significantly more progress on generating castles, and hopefully to allow you to follow and track important NPCs whether they are”abstract” – i.e. the player hasn’t yet gone close enough to them to pawn them – or “real” – i.e. the player has gone close enough – and these NPCs should carry out their schedules regardless of whether they are on the other side of the world, or directly in front of the player. That’s a pretty big ask, and I’ll be busy for much of next weekend, but I’d hope for the first steps towards it next week. I’m also drafting out in the background a few other improvements to the policies system (which is now becoming “ideologies”, as that is far more descriptive of what I’m after here), extra variation in each nation, and also some thoughts on ambient flora and fauna and making those a) more interesting and b) actually exist, respectively. I’m also now strongly leaning towards saving up both NPCs and conversations for a big release, as DF did that a while ago and it seemed to work out fine, and I know it would be worth the wait… I know I mention this debate every entry at the moment, and I still haven’t 100% decided, but I’m about 95% on the “save it up for an epic first release” side of things. Either way, see you in a week!

[Xonatron]

Mark, good to see you here. I did not know you had a DevLog here. Glad I stumbled onto it!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Mark, good to see you here. I did not know you had a DevLog here. Glad I stumbled onto it!

Hey! Yeah, I've been hanging around here for a while. You're here for the PS4 Score Rush (re)release?

[Xonatron]

Mark, good to see you here. I did not know you had a DevLog here. Glad I stumbled onto it!

Hey! Yeah, I've been hanging around here for a while. You're here for the PS4 Score Rush (re)release?

Exactly! I just started up a DevLog on it:
Score Rush Extended - DevLog

I thought I should start sharing my work. And I've always loved TIGSource.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Exactly! I just started up a DevLog on it:
Score Rush Extended - DevLog

I thought I should start sharing my work. And I've always loved TIGSource.

Awesome - hope it goes well!

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Lots of further work on important NPCs (this “Important NPCs” series of blog posts is probably going to hit at least eight or so in total). The major developments this week: the game now assigns nearby home districts to each important NPC, and in turn an actual house when their district is actually spawned; the game now adds in naval trade routes and creates a range of maps for optimizing NPC pathfinding around the world; and NPCs now move around the world map and take an appropriate length of time to make moves! Read on:

Homes are Assigned

Homes are now assigned to all important NPCs, and each NPC has a “work” location and a “home” location (although special events, like a gladiator being pulled away from their training to fight in any one of many possible arenas, will add another “work” location). In some cases these are the same districts – so the guards who guard castles are also guards who live within castles, and their work and home districts are the same, and the same goes for every guard in a one-tile fortress, town, etc – whereas other guards will live elsewhere. There are no homes in a city centre, but the guards who guard the mints or parliaments have to live somewhere, and so they now live in other districts, where the district depends on the NPC (so the guards of mansions are better-off and live in middle-class districts, whilst the guards of arenas will live in lower-class districts, and so forth). When the player then enters a district with homes in for the first time, the game will look over which important NPCs are housed in that district, and will assign actual doors and houses to those NPCs, and ensure that random NPCs in crowds will never enter these houses. Here’s a little output noting which guard in a pairing each guard is (“first guard” or “second guard”, their form of guarding, where they begin the game (whether on duty, or not on duty), and then where they work and where they live; and you’ll notice a range of living districts for the mint guards.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Homes.png

Ocean Trade Routes

The game now generates ocean trade routes. All settlements except hunter-gatherer encampments which “touch” the coast now count as being a “dock” (even if these do not physically spawn yet, but will soon), and the game now has an algorithm for attempting to piece them together in a reasonably interesting, efficient, and wide-reaching way. The player will be able to jump onto these shipping routes, as will important NPCs who need to travel very long-distance (which will be rare, and mostly for mercenaries, soldiers, ambassadors, diplomats, plotters in various schemes, explorers, inquisitors, preachers, etc). I’m very happy with the kinds of shipping patterns this produces, and is something I’ve been meaning to add for a while, since it connects up parts of the map not ordinarily connected and thereby allows important NPCs to potentially travel to places they couldn’t travel to before (more on this below). These routes will show up on the world map once you find them, and when you consider boarding a ship in 0.9 (probably) onwards, you’ll be told where that lane stops, how long it will take you to each location, how safe from pirates etc each part of the route is, and so forth.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Oceanroutes.png

Road and Off-Road Pathfinding

When an NPC is looking for a path between settlements, the NPCs consider two possible routes – one using any tile they’re able to use, whether something fast like a road or something slow like an ordinary piece of terrain, and another using only “special” forms of travel, meaning roads, naval trade routes, and (in the future) desert caravans and mountain passes. Whichever one is faster (and safer) will be the one the NPC selects. So in this first picture, we see the terrain of a given world. In the second picture we see “all valid tiles”, and we can see that oceans are excluded aside from shipping routes, deserts are entirely excluded (since caravans do not yet exist), mountains are excluded (since mountain passes do not yet exist) and rivers are excluded, except on tiles where a road crosses them. In the third picture we see the final map which only uses roads and shipping routes, which might take longer paths to a given location but each particular tile will be faster – and so the game will check them both whenever an NPC wants to move. I debated going even further and weighting every single tile and using some kind of A* with Bounded Costs system, but a) that would be a surprising nightmare, b) it’s very CPU-intensive and this multi-settlement pathfinding has to be done effectively instantly, and c) I actually think this can have gameplay value: if you are told Person X is travelling to Y, you can be told if they’re travelling by road, or not, and can try to catch up with them that way, rather than knowing they’re going by the absolute optimal route, which might be very challenging for a human player to deduce.

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Terrain.png

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Worldpathfinding.png

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/10/Worldroads.png

A final interesting note: we can see in both of these pictures that the area in the northwest is cut off from the rest of the world. That area happens to have no towns which are on the coast and therefore have docks, and same goes for cities, and it is separated from the rest of the world by mountains and desert, and cannot therefore be accessed by land (unless the player is willing to move through desert or mountains without caravans/passes, which will cause each turn to take many many times longer than normal; NPCs will not have this option). Therefore a future (but probably quite simple) system will be required to floodfill the world and to ensure that every settlement, no matter how obscure and hard to reach, can always be reached via land, road, shipping route, caravan route, or mountain pass, or some combination – something this particular generation doesn’t achieve.

NPCs Moving Around the World Map

Although this is all snazzy and important, the most important thing by far is that all important NPCs now move around the map on their standard schedules. They will not yet appear and spawn if the player enters the same tile, and they are not yet able to be given one-off tasks (“Come together in Parliament for a vote”, “Go to this arena for a fight”, “Present your latest artistic work in front of the King”, etc), but they all correctly make their way around cities and towns, they perform their actions at the right times, they get up and go to sleep, change watches if they’re guards, tend to vegetable gardens if they’re monks, and so on and so on. Now, naturally making sure that the player can physically see this happening is the next step – and a big one – but at any moment in time I can now check what every single important NPC across the world is doing, or in the process of doing, and when they’re going to stop doing that and start doing something else. There isn’t really a nice picture I can put up for this, but it’s happening, and that’s crucial and very exciting.

Next Week?!

The next two weekends are both free for me to focus entirely on coding (as well as ongoing evenings etc), so I’m hoping for a lot of progress. For next week I’ll be continuing to inch forwards on castle generation, hoping to get guards once more changing over their patrol timings with each other, and start to get all the important NPCs spawning when the player steps onto those tiles and being tracked whether abstract or spawned. That’s quite a lot, so we’ll see how it plays out, but I’m very pleased with my speed of development at the moment, particularly considering how many other professional (and personal) commitments I have at the moment. See you next week!

[RujiK]

NPC schedules are getting mindbogglingly complex

[crusty]

so good

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

NPC schedules are getting mindbogglingly complex

They are rather - hit a good milestone last night and I think I'm on the cusp of getting all NPCs moving around correctly in the abstract, and then we need to get them spawning and acting correctly when spawned 

so good

Heh, thanks!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This is now the fifth post in a row about handling the game’s important NPCs who need to be tracked in the abstract even when the player is nowhere nearby, and need to spawn when the player is nearby, and need to move appropriately when the player leaves map grids, enters them, and does anything else. In the last week I’ve coded it so that the game will correctly match up physically-spawned NPCs with their abstract “copies”, making sure that the right NPCs spawn in the right places; towns in nations with the “isolationist” policy now spawn with town walls, whichI think are *really* excellent and I’m very pleased with how they turned out; towns in internationalist nations also now reflect this preference; I’ve enabled the game’s ability to distribute important NPC information to a small number of a larger group of NPCs (if you read on it’ll be apparent what this means); NPC homes are now identified specifically when the player generates the map grid they live on and I’ve ensured that all abstract schedules now work correctly. In all honesty this is more of an “important NPCs and other stuff” update, but nevertheless there has been enough NPC progress to merit continuing the title. So: read on!

Matching Up NPCs

Now when any important NPC spawns, the game correctly matches them up with their abstract version. In some cases this can be slightly more complex than usual – for instance when spawning a priest in a map grid with a whole bunch of priests, it needs to spawn the right priest, or when spawning a merchant in a market district it needs to correctly choose the merchant who sells the particular type of goods in question (who will be stored in the game’s abstract information, so that they can be referenced at any point even if they haven’t yet been spawned). I know I’ve mentioned this several times in past entries, but I think this time it is *actually* full implemented, at last. There are some classes of NPC who do not yet spawn physically and therefore cannot yet be matched up to their abstract counterparts – for instance lords of towns in vassalage nations, or delegates for parliamentary nations (since I haven’t yet worked out where the heck they live!), but the system can be easily expanded to those when the time comes.

Town Walls and Diasporic Communities

In keeping with my plans to ensure that all ideologies have actual physical effects (akin, this is a blog post in its own right, which will probably appear in the next few weeks) I’ve added in the code for placing walls around the towns which exist in isolationist nations. Depending on the aesthetic preference of each nation – the standard square, circle, octagon, diamond, cross I’m going with at the moment – town walls generate according to a slightly different algorithm, and look quite different once constructed. Here are illustrative examples for each shape (square, diamond, octagon, cross, circle). At some point these will likely gain guards at the gates at the outside, either to check who turns up, or perhaps to charge those wishing to enter depending on economic policies…



Additionally, “Internationalist” civs have the reverse of this, and all of their towns contain what I’m calling diasporic communities. When such a town spawns the game will look for the nearest nation to that town’s nation which the nation actually has diplomatic ties with (so no nations they’re hostile with, and no tribal nations) and will then spawn a few of the houses (and some of the crowd) from that nation instead. Here’s an example of a town which had a community from another feudal nation, but sometimes they might even have a nomadic community living there, which would merit a different brick tile as well as brick colour:





(You’ll see some new shapes and things in the latter picture, which are the new “Barracks” and “Military Base” structures for various ideologies, with (of course) an appropriate shape for the nation in question). I am of course fully aware that this two-colour system is not how these things would look in the real world, but again, recognition/visuals/gameplay > realism in this case, since I want it to be very visually apparent that you’re living in a more varied town than normal. As above, all of this is part of the background objective of this release, which is making the world’s nations even more varied by completely reworking the ideology system. More on this later!

Prisoners, Farmers, Monks, and so forth

There is a particular category of NPCs where you have a number of the same kind of NPC in a grid, but only some of them are “important” and therefore need to be tracked. As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, a jail might have 80 prisoners, but only 3 of them might be particularly important. The game can now distribute the importance to a random three prisoners, whilst also storing the remaining 77 so that the player cannot leave, return, see which prisoners have “respawned” and thereby deduce which matter and which do not.



All Abstract Schedules Work

This is a small but crucial point – I’ve now confirmed that all abstract schedules work correctly for all important NPCs, and that when the game starts (now fixed to exactly midday on Jan 1st, 1700) they all start off doing the correct job they should be doing. Whether an NPC moves from tile to tile, or always stays within the same map tile, and whether they are exchanging guard duties, tending to vegetable gardens in monasteries, ruling a nation or shopkeeping, all schedules now (as far as I can tell, and with 2000+ important NPCs per world gen, this is tricky) seem to work perfectly. I haven’t had a crash in a long time, and I can look at the important NPCs sitting on any map grid and they all always appear to be doing the correct thing. It is of course possible there’s a bug hidden in here somewhere, but I’m actually feeling very confident about it now. This is a major step towards next week’s objectives (see below) and it feels really good to have it all functioning correctly. I’ve also worked hard on optimizing the time it takes for abstract NPCs to take their moves, particularly when the player is fast-travelling, though this inevitably takes a bit of time; but since the laptop I program on is ancient and garbage, and players won’t be fast-travelling during gameplay anywhere near as often as I’m doing it in testing, I think a tiny pause per step is acceptable (though I will still continue to improve it).

Home Doors

Now, when the player generates any map grid, the game looks over all the important NPCs stored by the game, notes those which have their homex/homey variables on this map tile, then looks over what kind of door they should be living behind – a standard house, a castle, a church, and so forth – and then finds an appropriate door on that map grid and makes that their home door. For buildings with multiple doors (cathedrals etc) it stores all doors in a list of “home doors” rather than just the one. For some NPC types this hasn’t yet been completely handled – inquisitors, sailors and explorers will probably lack any home tile, I’m not yet sure where exactly certain NPCs will spawn and act (e.g. blacksmiths), and so on – but the overwhelming majority now get a set of door tiles attached to them. This also means that once such doors have been assigned, random crowd NPCs will never go through that door. Again, we continue to build towards next week’s objective (see below) of getting all the important NPCs to always act correctly “in person”, as well as in the “abstract”.

Next Week

My plans for the coming week are to begin work on the most challenging part of all: getting spawned NPCs (i.e. those the player can physically see on their map tile) to act according to their abstract behaviours and schedules. This is a huge one, and it will likely take more than a week for the entire thing, but I hope to have significant progress to show in seven days. I’m also probably going to slowly continue work on things like castles and ideologies in the background, and continuing to add to town variation (I need to get manors spawning for “vassalage” nations, and military bases for “standing army” nations, for example), but ensuring identical behaviour for spawned/unspawned NPCs is the core goal for the next couple of weeks. See you then!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

For this week's blog update I did a write-up of the ProcJam opening talks, and normal URRpdates will resume next week...

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/11/08/procjam-2015-report/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

As I’ve mentioned a few times in recent entries, I’ve been working on how nations vary and how the game keeps track of the various beliefs of each nation. In the past we had a “policy” system, but that wasn’t really working how I wanted it to, and it was proving rather simplistic, so I’ve made a bunch of major changes, both to how the system works and defines itself, and also to the impact(s) which ideological choices have. Firstly, I decided to change them to “ideologies” instead of “policies” to move them a little bit away from the Civilization-esque model of a policy being something which affects a nation in an abstract way – greater taxation here, reduced freedoms there, etc – and rather use the term ideology to emphasize something which more structural, reproduced throughout the nation, and which has imprinted itself on many aspects of national life. So this week I’ve been working on updating these and in the process adding a huge amount of new variation to the nations in the world, and adjusting NPCs and their behaviour appropriately in the new nations. So, the impacts of ideologies on both the outside world, and the castle in the capital of that nation, are now as follows. I realize lists of this sort have appeared on the blog before, but I’m pretty confident now that this is the final system:

Religious
Collective Faith: churches spawn in towns, but not cities.
Organized Religion: churches spawn in lower- and middle-class city districts. Chapel spawns in castle.
Religious Freedom: capital city contains district housing all religious buildings; towns contain no religious buildings. Many small chapels for each religion spawn in castle.
Zealotry: churches spawn in every lower- and middle-class city district and every town. Chapel spawns in castle, and holy books spawn in many rooms.
Monastic: monasteries spawn outside cities. Monk quarters in castle.
 

Military
Conscription: barracks spawn in towns. Conscript training area in castle.
Standing Army: military bases (larger, and containing barracks and armouries spawn in all towns). Large garrison in castle.
Militia: many citizens carry weapons of some sort.
Pacifism: there is no military district in the capital city.
Vassalage: in towns there are manors instead of village halls, and there are a large number of lesser noble families (beyond those living in the city), each of which controls a town and its surrounding area. Hall filled with banners of lords/nobles spawns in castle.
 

Foreign
Exploration: cartographer shop spawns in market district. Map room spawns in castle.
Isolationist: towns have walls around them. Extra defensive walls spawn around castle.
Internationalist: towns contain diasporic communities from other nations. Foreign tribute room spawns in castle.
Interventionist: Spies and informers spawn in other nations. Secret vault/room with espionage information spawns in castle.
Imperialist: colonies owned by the home nation appear on the world map. Trophy room of captured items from other nations spawns in castle.
 

Intellectual
Traditional: biographer shop spawns in market district. Super-rare biographies spawn in castle.
Mathematical: architect shop spawns in market district.
Mechanical: mining shop spawns in market district.
Literary: bookseller shop spawns in market district. Super-rare books (of any sort) spawn in castle.
Antiquarian: historian shop spawns in market district. Super-rare histories spawn in castle.
 

Leadership
Representation: parliament spawns in city centre; delegates are assigned to an appropriate mathematical distribution across towns, monasteries, colonies, districts, families, religion, and the military (depending on other ideologies/factors). No throne room spawns, but rich quarters for current elected ruler spawn instead.
Stratocracy: barracks in every housing district. Military-focused throne room with heavy guard spawns in castle.
Monarchy: large graveyards with crypts spawn. Regal throne room spawns in castle.
Theocracy: crypt with archives spawns under cathedral. Throne room with altars and holy texts spawns in castle.
 

Trade
Free Trade: all city districts are free to enter. Well-guarded cache of foreign money spawns in castle.
Mercantilism: cities cost money to enter/exit (and towns if also with isolationist policy), but there is no cost for movement inside.
Planned Economy: each district in a city costs money to move through.
Protectionism: inferior prices for selling foreign goods; increased prices for selling domestic goods. Well-guarded cache of domestic money spawns in castle.
Barter: black markets spawn in lower-class districts and towns.
 

Cultural
Hegemony: racial background affects relations with NPCs and other nations.
Aesthetics: jeweller shop spawns in market district. Art gallery spawns in castle.
Venatic: fletcher, bowyer and crossbowyer shops spawn in market district. Hunting trophies are displayed in castle.
Wisdom: linguist shop spawns in market district. Super-rare philosophy books spawn in castle.
 

Justice:
Vigiliantism: bounties for wanted individuals are listed on posters, and may be acquired from a central bounty office in the city centre. Heads on pikes spawn outside castle and/or in castle grounds.
Gladiatorial: arenas spawn, both for entertainment and punishment of criminals. Information about champions spawns in hallway in castle.
Frontier: pistolmaker, riflemaker and powdermaker shops spawn in market district. Rifle armoury spawns in castle.
Ordeal: punishment is by ordeal, the nature of which varies from nation to nation. Torture chamber spawns beneath castle.
Penitentiary: prisons spawn in lower-class districts. Dungeon spawns beneath castle.


The idea here being that these aren’t “abstract” changes, but physical and structural changes that the player should see in each nation they visit, and which in turn will be reflected in the kind of people you meet in each nation, how they behave and talk, and so on. Perhaps one can learn about the ideologies of distant nations in other ways – a book about a nation would only mention a famous fight in an arena if that nation has the gladiatorial ideology, for example, or a painting would only depict a nation invading another if they were (probably) imperialists – and perhaps plan out one’s path around the world, at least in part, based on this; at the same time the player should be able to have a decent idea of what they’ll find in a nation before they set foot there. Here are some examples – some of these already exist in 0.7’s world generation, but some of these variations are very new. We have here a town with walls and various military facilities and a mansion (and no town hall, since a town with a manor is ruled from there instead), a city centre with a parliament, a town with a diasporic community, and a new marketplace of a sort redesigned for the next release:









Many of the ideologies are however smaller in scale – certain shops spawn, or people behave in a certain way, and so forth – and are therefore not quite as easily represented in a nice blog entry screenshot. Equally, I’m also going to add a new set of variations which aren’t really “ideologies”, per se, but rather things like: regular statuary at junctions and alongside roads in cities, gardens in every district, writing everything on tablets instead of books, having developed gas lighting for their streets, and another two-dozen or so ideas I’ve got along these lines (using prayer mats instead of chairs in religious buildings falls into this category of non-ideological variation). Just more and more stuff to be developed slowly but surely in the background to further add to the variation and difference in each nation.

Next week we’ll have a big coding update. It has become apparent that I’ve stacked up quite an impressive list of bugs and issues and small things requiring fixing over the last few months, and I think it is wisest to deal with all of these in the coming week before starting anything new (i.e. getting NPCs moving around correctly according to their abstract schedules in the physical world). It is reaching the point where I just have too many things 95% finished in the next version to really keep track of, so the focus before next weekend is in clearing up and optimizing a huge number of things coded in the past couple of months, in order to free up a bit of cognitive space to then proceed with finishing off NPCs. Equally, apologies for two not-progress-heavy blog posts in a row; coding is going on in the background, but there’s so much on my plate at the moment (full-time research, book proposals, papers, etc) that I’ve been inevitably focusing on smaller coding tasks than larger ones which require serious focus for several days on end. Anyway – see you next week, at which point a bunch of papers and other tasks will have been concluded, and so coding should accelerate once again!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Before I started work on anything important-NPC-related this week, I came to release that I had stacked up a rather worryingly massive list of small bugs, issues, errors to fix, and so forth, which I should really try to round off before developing new, and which I should test extensively to make sure everything is currently stable before I start adding the next section (getting important NPCs to respond to their schedules when spawned near the player, as well as when physically abstracted out). So this week has been a blitz of smaller jobs, and here’s a brief list of some of the changes, bug-fixes, and refinements, some of which are slightly more significant than others and might get slightly more mention in a later entry. Firstly, the actually new stuff, and then the fixes and improvements.

New Stuff

Firstly, in nations with the vassalage ideology, we will now find that towns no longer contain town halls, but instead contain manors, each of which belongs to a specific noble family which rules that town and its surrounding area. These are naturally different in shapes according to the nation, and have some pleasant gardens surrounding them akin to (but smaller than) the gardens in upper class districts. These have three floors just like their larger kin, and now all generate correctly across all three floors. Also, you’ll note that they have clear gardens but they can be a little tricky to see when the colour match – once I redo plant generation and ensure visual variation across the world, this should be much clearer (and the same goes for all other buildings with clear “garden” areas. Here are some examples with the exterior on the left, then the floors from highest (with bedroom) to lowest (for servants/slaves):



Next up, delegates now have identified houses in all possible map grids. What I mean this is that whether a delegate in a democratic nation represents a city district, or a town, or a monastery, or whatever, they will now always have somewhere appropriate to spawn and to live. These are generally houses that stand out from the rest, but are not ordinarily of a higher status than “middle-class” (of the sort shown below). In an upper-class district they get upper-class homes, but everywhere else special middle-class houses will spawn. The one shown below is in a city centre with the “cross” aesthetic preference, and three delegates from the district. I recognize this looks a little artificial, but I’m content with how they look here (given that delegates in various democratic nations in the real world are naturally given special statuses of various sorts). Similarly, everywhere else, houses of this size that stand out will belong to a delegate.



There are now a suitable number of priests in each cathedral, and they know that they sleep there, and so when we move onto getting NPCs to physically follow their abstract schedules (the next major task), they will be able to retreat to their quarters at night when appropriate. The number of priests in the cathedral varies per cathedral, but they will always be found moving around the space and talking to others, or worshiping at the altars, or working at a table, and so forth.



Town halls also now have an interior, and some quarters where the mayor lives (I decided to combine those two roles into one), but as above, in vassalage-y nations there is no town hall and towns are instead ruled by a noble from their manor. Here are a couple of town hall interiors (they are all this kind of “star” shape, since I try to make every building a noteworthy and distinctive shape, and those happen to be a shape I haven’t really used anywhere else yet, and certainly not in towns). The rooms on the ground floors with tables will be where town records spawn once I’ve implemented books/scrolls/tablets/etc.



Training areas now spawn in city centre districts in nations which enjoy gladiatorial combat. This will be the standard “work location” for gladiators on days when there are no fights, and you’ll be able to watch them sparring once weapons get introduced. For the time being I’ll give them the same “meandering” code as NPCs get when they look around memorials or art galleries and the like. Doesn’t look super-exciting right now, I realize, but once it has gladiators training (and maybe things like training dummies?) it’ll be rather more noticeable. The shape of the layout is, of course, determined by the nation’s aesthetic preferences.



Improved/Fixed/Resolved Stuff

- Prevented market districts from spawning too many shops in nations with “forced shops” in their ideological preferences.
- Dealt with a bunch of issues involving sand, snow and ice terrain behaving oddly when certain structures are placed on them (since these are handled differently to “ordinary” land).
- Dealt with an interesting scheduling bug where monks really, really hated tending their vegetable gardens.
- Fixed an issue where guards for inside and outside mints became confused about their roles.
- Increased the colour contrast on prayer mats for certain religions to make them less painful to look at.
- Fixed a weird bug with segments being taken out of corner towers in certain districts.
- Fixed an issue with important guards (which is to say, all guards) not being corrected abstracted and returned when the player leaves their map grid.
- Random crowd NPCs will no longer go into a house that has been assigned as somebody’s home.
- Jailers, Mercenaries, Prisoners, Merchants, Innkeeps and other classes of NPC who generally wander around a given room/floor for most of their ordinary day no longer make a mad sprint for the exit the moment they spawn.
- The roads surrounding barracks, military bases and mansions do not override existing walls when spawned.
- Crowd NPCs in towns with foreign communities now only go into the appropriate houses from their culture when returning “home”, and NPCs from the other civilization present actually spawn and go about their day.
- Jail offices now contain, y’know… office stuff. Chairs and so forth.
- Roads in snow/ice/desert towns no longer sometimes appear at a strangely low z level.
- Towns in snow/ice with at least one edge of water no longer have edges that look strange and flat.
- The inside of monasteries always resembles the exterior, and are therefore no longer sometimes somewhat akin to the TARDIS.
- Houses in middle-class districts can no longer spawn, somewhat incongruously, in the middle of parks.
- Fortresses can no longer spawn on adjacent tiles to towns (I’ve only ever seen this ONCE, and should have been impossible already, but it is now doubly impossible).
- Fountains no longer look like delegates when they’re downhill. No, I don’t understand either.
- The quantum scheduling system no longer causes a crash at map edges.
- Fixed an issue that encouraged NPCs to run in circles in a particular form of middle-class district.
- The sex of NPCs is now chosen before they ever spawn – this allows them to spawn according to cultural preferences (only female priests, only male rulers, either in army, etc) and for people to talk about them with correct pronouns.
- Ensured that smaller upper class houses work again – since implementing something that assigns houses directly to families they had been riddled with bugs.
- Leaves are no longer made out water when they hang over tiles of water…

Next Week’s Stuff

At this point I’d say we’re at around… 80% completion on *everything* to do with NPCs and their AI behaviours (for now). We have crowds spawning, crowds pathfinding in every possible area, crowd demographics for nations and cultures, crowds entering/leaving buildings appropriately, important NPCs being spawned, important NPCs being tracked in the abstract, important NPCs being spawned when the player steps onto the appropriate map grid. All that remains is 1) to get important NPCs, when spawned, acting the same way they do when abstracted out, and therefore moving correctly around the physical maps, and 2) to add in the remaining important NPCs who don’t currently spawn (executioners, chiefs, and the like). Then I need to finish off the remaining clothing types (some of the lower-class clothing, and then all the clothing for nomadic/tribal nations), and finish adding in all the new ideological variation between nations, and then it will be onto castle generation and the conversation system! It’s hard to say what order this will be done in. Finishing off scheduled NPC movement is a very technical task and I like to leave myself clear periods of a day or two to work on that kind of thing – but I’m full-time employed now and I’m busy next weekend and the weekend after. As such, I’m probably going to focus on Everything Else for the next fortnight or so, and then come back to NPC scheduling to finish off the calendar year with. Therefore, I would guess that next week we’ll have my continued purging of the bugs and glitches I’ve stacked up (since only around 50% of the issues on the list have been resolved this week) and work on clothes, castles, or both. See you all then!

[BlackseaOdyssey]

I'm definitely looking into this more! I checked out Dwarf Fortress, but the learning curve was too steep for my taste hah.