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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

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

Thanks! Although both are "big ASCII worlds", URR is increasingly nothing like DF - I'm focused on a particular story, on procedural graphics, and on a particular unusual form of puzzle-solving gameplay, whereas DF is DF! Leave it until the next release is out, then I'd love to know what you think .

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve been continuing my plan of trying to finish Everything Else in the lead-up to finishing NPC scheduling and the like, so there have been four major developments. Firstly, a significant change to how delegates are represented in democratic nations, which is far more interesting and far more distinctive; secondly more progress on generating castles, which I will probably unveil in a fortnight, though conceivably in just a week, depending on how things play out; thirdly I’ve redone the sigils for lesser houses, and they look vastly better; and lastly a range of other general bug fixes, optimizations and general improvements which continue to clear out my list of unresolved problems, hopefully resulting in a stable game in which I can then return to working on NPCs. My goal remains to have Everything Except Conversations done by the end of December – it’s a big target, but I think it can just about be reached. Read on!

Democracy

I decided to return to what I mentioned last week about giving delegates special homes and make this a little bit more detailed and a bit more interesting. I’m always looking for things that make each civilization distinctive, and doing this for democratic nations in a little more detail was something that quite appealed. Therefore, in each possible delegate location, there is a different kind of housing. The diagram below shows this – the top row are for “district” delegates, and the bottom row for “other” kinds of delegates (who might of course be resident within a district, but the game counts them differently). Middle-class districts use standard middle-class district houses (but gives them flags outside) just as upper-class districts use standard upper-class houses (again, with flags outside to denote that they are special), whilst aside from those every other area does something slightly special to denote the housing assigned to democratic delegates (all have flags outside). Here’s the full set:

Huge image, so linked it instead: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/11/All-delegates1.png

These are, I think, pretty identifiable, and are another way to mark out differences between nations. It will also make it clear where delegates live, which might have use a little further down the line. The most challenging of these was for the “Bank” delegates who might live within the mint, and the “Religion” delegates who live within religious buildings, since those required me to return to buildings whose generation algorithms I thought I had entirely finished with, and add something new. With that said, though, I’m really happy with how all of these turned out, and they continue to add a little more depth to the more democratic of nations, and variation within democratic nations (since each nation distributes its delegates differently – one nation might have religious delegates and bank ones, another might have monastery and farm delegates, and so forth).

Castles

This week I’ve done a fair bit of preparatory work on castles. As I mentioned, I’ve been away this weekend, and will be away next weekend, but I’ve still had (and will have next week) a couple hours at the end of each day spare to get some coding done. As such I’ve tried to give myself something that doesn’t require sitting down and doing a huge amount of technical effort (since I like to focus on that kind of thing for long periods) but rather something creative which is primarily down to creating variations and having them generate correctly. As such, prior to this weekend I set up the system for the exterior generation of castles – they now generate according to national aesthetics, and of a size appropriate to the number of rooms they need to contain, and with various other things outside based on policies (severed heads on pikes, extra defences, homes for delegates, etc). This weekend and next weekend I started to work on their interior generation, which is complex and time-consuming but will look extremely exciting once concluded. I don’t think by next week’s blog entry I’ll have enough to properly show off a castle, but the week after that I suspect will be the big “castle generation” entry I’ve been working on for a while (I’m extremely pleased with how castles are coming together). In the mean time, here’s another little castle teaser:



Sigils

Given that I wasn’t happy with them before – and everyone who commented seemed, generally, to agree – I’ve changed the “lesser house” sigils for nations that have them to something that looks way better than the previous set. There are now 15 unique ones for each shape aesthetic that are far superior to the previous set. Here are some examples:

Again, huge image: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/11/Newminors.png

Fixes, Improvements, Minor Changes

- Vases now only spawn for religions, not upper-class families; I didn’t want to allow the colour clashing between a nation’s colours and those of the vases (which have their own large set of nice-looking presets). Since I want more and more to be tethered to national flag colour-schemes in the future (armour, books, etc), I thought this potential slight ambiguity should be taken out. (Admittedly incense stands and vases both don’t match with religious colour sets, but that’s because they look terrible if I try to force that upon them, so we just have to accept that and move on, and besides, they are more “decorative” than an integral part of the religion – like altars, vestments, etc)
- Fixed a few minor problems with certain river generation possibilities in middle-class city districts.
- Fixed a problem where the orientation of Officers’ Quarters did not transfer correctly from their exterior to their interior
- Stopped servants/slaves getting stuck in gates…
- Ensured that all the new aesthetic-based road layouts still keep all relevant NPCs pathfinding correctly
- Other stuff I failed to note down whilst writing this entry!

Next?

This week I want to continue castle generation, continue working through the list of small things and required fixes, and move closer to having everything except conversations and spawned-NPC scheduling done; then do spawned-NPC scheduling; then move onto conversations. I’ve decided I am definitely going to go for a big release, so I’ll be moving onto the conversation system as soon as January swings around. The majority of people voted in this direction, but I hope this is ok with everyone. I don’t want to release a world full of NPCs you can’t engage with, and although I don’t want people to drift away with the length of the release (hopefully constant blogging prevents this!) I do now quite strongly think it’s the right idea and will be a very impressive, and very comprehensive, release. As above, my target is to finish everything except conversations by the end of the calendar year, for which I have a month left. Yikes. See you next week!

(Next week’s update will also be a late Sunday/early morning, but after that, we’ll be back to the normal Saturday/Sunday updates)

[gimymblert]

ata ata oglo ulu !!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

ata ata oglo ulu !!

Always!

----

First, before anything else, I received some incredibly exciting news in my email inbox this week about the Secret Project I’ve mentioned a few times. Once the contract is actually signed – a phrase that itself perhaps gives a few hints – I’ll post what’s actually happening, but I’m very confident in saying it’ll be to the interest of every single URR follower. I’m hugely excited – it’s my first step into a very exciting and important area of my professional life as both a games academic and a game designer and I can’t wait to start talking about it! More soon.

Now, onto this weeks’ update. This week I’ve continued the great bug purge and I’ve dealt with a massive volume of bugs, even with most of Saturday and Sunday being lost to other commitments. At this point I’ve got through a good 70% of the bugs that have accumulated in the last few months (although new ones begin to bubble up from my quagmire of code), so by the end of the next fortnight I would expect to have them all done along with castle generation, and I can hen finish off clothing generation and conclude pathfinding and AI scheduling behaviour. I’m still aiming to have all of this done by the end of December, which remains in the category of “difficult but not impossible”, so we’ll see how it goes. Here’s a complete list of issues resolved this week:

Bugs, Glitches, Improvements

- Fixed a few minor errors with delegate generation in democratic nations and ensured they are always distributed correctly.
- The basement vaults and the upper-floor delegate quarters in Mints that have delegates present are no longer mysteriously switched around.
- Ensured that small officers’ quarters (spawning in military bases in towns) always generate correctly on the inside, and don’t sometimes appear devoid of all furniture.
- All delegate houses can now be entered, and look distinct on the inside from standard middle-class housing (they have ornate flooring instead of wooden flooring)
- A major issue where you could sometimes see through church walls has been fixed!
- A minor issue with rivers in middle-class districts sometimes being smaller than they should be depending on the placement of district gates has been resolved.
- Castle generation is now appropriately affected if a river goes through the district.
- Sometimes closed doors were not opaque and sometimes open doors were; this has now been permanently fixed.
- In lower-class districts buildings can only be placed either in areas without road tiles, or on standard rather than special road tiles, in order to prevent some weird AI behaviour when roads surrounding buildings meshed with special road tiles.
- A minor issue in middle-class districts where special roads were given priority over standard roads (it would take a while to explain what this meant) at certain points, and was producing weird AI behaviour; again, as above, this is now resolved.
- When you load the game, it no longer mysteriously advances one turn.
- Religious symbols actually blend correctly on prayer mats instead of blending in a slightly peculiar way.
- People who spawn in groups now actually have clothes…
- Doors to delegate homes no longer glitch out weirdly.
- Fixed a weird issue where mountains that spawn rivers could no longer spawn them correctly; I think this was a result of some under-the-hood changes to storing world data a little while back.
- Fixed a weird issue with religious buildings that have additional corner branches instead of “side” branches, wherein they were not generating perfectly on the inside (this was a small error I suspect nobody else even spotted, but it was bothering me).
- Fixed a bug where a few orientations of delegate housing in city centres spawned houses that were actually too small to correctly generate an interior!
- Sorted out an issue where town walls in isolationist nations would sometimes stretch to the map edge and make it impossible to enter without leaving the map grid and then going back inside at the right “angle”.
- Ensured that smaller middle-class houses have more room partitions on the inside and look rather less empty and bleak.
- Dealt with a final remaining issue with middle-class houses where the interiors were, STILL, sometimes slightly too large.
- Resolved the final few issues with Mints re: the number of guards that spawn inside them, thereby making sure there are never now too many guards or too few and spawned guards can always match up correctly with their abstract counterparts.

Next Time

This coming fortnight I’ll be handling all remaining accumulated bugs from the last ~6 months of development (that weren’t dealt with in the past fortnight) and finishing off castle generation. My expectation is that the update on the 12th/13th will be castle generation, then 19th/20th will be the final bugfixing/improvement entry, then 26th/27th will be clothing, and then 2nd/3rd of January should be the conclusion of all remaining pathfinding/scheduling developments. After that we’ll be moving towards the conversation system, which is beginning to take quite a solid form in my mind. See you all next week for, I hope, castle generation! It’s looking extremely impressive and I think you’ll all be very happy with how it looks. You’ll even be able to walk along the battlements (if you can find your way up there)!

Also next week will have pictures. Dozens of awesome procedurally-generated castle pictures.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

PROCEDURAL CASTLE GENERATION

At long last, castles are generating, and you will be able to visit them in this release!

So get some food and drink, relax, put your feet up, and sit back for a detailed exploration of how castles are going to generate, what you’re going to find inside them, what the player will be able to do there, how you’ll gain access, who you’ll find living there, and so on.

Firstly – castles are one of the only two districts which are barred to player entry in the current version of the game (the other being dockyard districts). I tried a few early models of castle generation in the present release but just couldn’t find something which worked relatively quickly, generated them in the detail I wanted, and ensured that they were aesthetically consistent with the rest of the nation – not to mention that I was redoing how all the ideologies work and I wasn’t quite sure how these were going to tie in (more on this below). So I decided to leave them until this release, and now that NPCs are almost “done” and the majority of the bugs created over the last few months have dealt with, I realized the time had come to implement castles.



What goes into a castle? Castles are located in cities and take up a full district in that city. As I’ve talked about before, policies/ideologies have been completely reworked to provide physical and structural changes to each nation, rather than more abstract things. Therefore, the “Zealotry” ideology has religious buildings spawn in all city districts; the “Conscription” ideology places a barracks in every town; the “Isolationist” ideology creates city walls; “Theocracy” always ensures a crypt beneath a cathedral; and so on. I’ve now extended this system to castles, meaning that the rooms you find inside each castle (aside from the standard halls, guard quarters, etc) are entirely dependent on the ideologies of that nation, and forms a kind of microcosm which reflects the city around it (and all the people in that nation, and its towns and settlements, and its citizens, and so forth).



So, a Monastic nation will have some monks resident in the castle, a Vassalage nation will have a hallway depicting the banners and armour of all its important houses and families, an Imperialist nation will have a room filled with trophies from past conquests, a nation which cares about Aesthetics will have an art gallery within the castle, one which believes in a Penitentiary justice system will have a dungeon, and so on. This therefore means that each castle can have a range of special rooms, from the smallest possible number of two (I think!) for a nation where almost none of its polices necessitate special rooms, to a grand total of sixteen rooms for a nation which happens to have chosen ideologies which necessitate something special (and everything in-between). As ever I wanted castles to reflect the aesthetic/geometric preferences of each nation (square, octagon, circle, diamond, cross) and also, of course, to actually look like a castle on the outside with walls, moats, and so forth. This leaves us with a “two part” castle system – generating the outside of the castle which is the “district” of the city, so to speak, and then generating the inside of the castle.



Here we have an example of a “castle district”. In the design of this generator I wanted to accomplish several things. Firstly it should look defended, aside from the city walls which interpenetrate each city and delimit one district from another. This means walls and/or moats depending on the particular policies of that nation. Secondly, it should fit with the rest of the nation: this obviously means the usual consistency in brick colour, but also in shape, so we see here the castle for a octagon nation (and there will be others shown elsewhere in this entry), and the moat and the walls both clearly reflect this aesthetic preference. Thirdly, of course, it needs to fill up the district – splitting cities into square districts is an acquiescence to various gameplay and technical requirements or decisions, and trying to get a singe building to fill up an entire district just wouldn’t work (cathedrals in city centres, for example, are massive, but only take up around 1/4 of the district at most). Therefore, what else do castles often have? Well, castles (and stately homes/mansions/manors more generally) often have expansive gardens, so I decided to take a leaf from the mansion generation system and add some rather snazzy gardens into the mix as well, behind the walls (these will have more detail once I redo plants in some later release). Some more of the district is then “taken up” by adding small shape-appropriate towers into the external wall of the district as well as the internal; I think this makes quite a nice visual effect, and helps the districts with smaller castles (as castles can vary in size depending on how many ideology-dependent rooms spawn within them) feel a little less empty and devoid. Ultimately it is tricky making the entire district full via a single building, and there is more variation I want to add in the future, but I think it’s working well enough for the time being (as there will also have guards on patrol and so forth to add more detail). Here’s another example for a cross nation:



We then come to handling the inside of a castle. As above, there is a significant range of possible rooms, *and* each possible room has its own layout, and these need to somehow be shoved correctly into a castle of a particular shape and size. Suffice to say, this is no easy programming task, but the game can now select from a range of preset “starting points” for castles, and then split and subdivide rooms in a number of ways, and then add in the special rooms (and the ordinarily rooms) in sensible locations, and do this for any number of shapes, sizes and permutations of important rooms. Like most of the most complex generators in the game this is a mix of PCG, handmade regions, and large databases of areas that are somewhere between the handmade and the procedural. This system took the best part of a week’s coding to complete, but now it works (I think!) for any value (within the scope of possible values). Castles always contain a great hall and guard quarters (and/or soldier quarters depending on ideologies) which are positioned in the parapets/towers surrounding the castle. All castles then contain a range of studies, dining rooms, bedrooms on their upper floors, and so forth, and then a throne room situated somewhere on the ground floor, although the precise nature and position of this throne room varies for democratic/ theocratic/ stratocratic/ monarchic nations. Alongside these are all the ideology-determined rooms, of which there are dozens. Rooms that might otherwise be similar – like quarters for monks, servants, soldiers, etc (how many ways can you make a room with a bunch of bed distinct??) – always have some variations, so they might have different floors, or different extra furniture, and so forth, so every kind of room will be distinctive. Also – you see those rooms below with just tables in? Those will soon contain books, maps, trophies of battle, tributes from weaker nations, etc, but for now,they’re just tables! So, here are two examples of what the bottom-floor interior of a castle might look like, taken from an octagonal castle and a cross castle:







Naturally, not all castles have an “open” interior section that leads back outside, it just so happened that the two I generated for this entry did! More important rooms means a larger castle and a lower chance of an open inside. Similarly, there are various things that can appear in corridors – banners showing the coats of arms of vassal houses, holy books on pedastals, placards noting arena champions, and various other things – but I haven’t quite got around to adding those in yet at time of writing (but they won’t take more than a few hours at most). Similarly, see the odd empty room? Those will be money caches soon. Also, if you see some unknown symbols… well, you’ll have to explore some castles to find out what those are! Next we also have some top floors, containing the master bedroom for the ruler (and potential space for a harem, or consorts, or multiple partners, if the civilization in question goes in for that), then various bedrooms for the various offspring of the ruler, guests, and so forth, again with a nice lot of variation for different shapes and sizes of castle – these are of course rather similar to the ornate quarters in mansions in officer quarters in military districts, but there is only so much variation one can give to a bedroom. There are also the upper floors of each tower on each side, which lead out onto the roof! I’ll get pictures of these up at a later date as I’m still finishing them off, but you’ve no doubt seen the bedrooms in URR’s mansions, for instance, so you get the basic idea. There are also various rooms that spawn underground too, and various secret rooms as well…

What about the castle’s inhabitants? Well, naturally we’ll have the ruler; we’ll have any assistants, clerks, eunuchs, partners/consorts, and so forth; potentially priests and monks if the ideologies suit it; lots of guards and soldiers, though again their number and placement vary for various reasons; servants and/or slaves; and any guests, though I’m not quite sure what guests we’ll have visiting rulers. The rulers will of course sometimes leave the castle to preside over parliament, meet foreign dignitaries, and that kind of thing, but that’s in the future. What about access? I’m not going to implement the key/permission system in this release, since most of the things that will be later required to gain access to areas aren’t implemented yet anyway! You’ll remain free to wander around the world for the time being and meet the people there and talk to them, but it won’t be too long until you’ll need the appropriate keys and permissions to gain access to the most important areas; for now, therefore, guards will let you wander.

So there we have it. Castles are now, I would say, as detailed and interesting as cathedrals, which certainly makes a lot of sense – these should be the two most impressive structures in the world (although I have an idea for some special massive buildings in the future, like rare one-off huge prisons, or asylums, or arenas, and so forth). Here’s a comparison pic of a generated castle and a generated cathedral (the two largest structures you can find) to give you a good idea of the similarities and differences. I’m immensely pleased with how these now look and I hope you like them too!



Next week I’ll probably post about the final removal of (hopefully) all remaining bugs, at which point I would hope that the game will be stable, or at least as stable as a massive release of this sort can possibly be because major wide-ranging playtesting by a community rather than an individual. Then, hopefully, I can finish off AI/pathfinding and clothing stuff before the end of the year. It remains a hugely audacious goal – I need to get all nomadic clothing and tribal clothing generated, and get every single NPC scheduling and pathfinding correctly on the “human” rather than abstract scale – but I… think it can be done before the end of December. See you all in seven days!

[ashen]

First off, the world building in this game looks stunning, well done!

However I'm unclear on what form the game-play will actually take.  Will we be controlling a single player avatar, exploring the world similar to say Ultima 7 or will we control a group of people or an entire nation in the mold of Crusader Kings 2?  Maybe you're going for both, similar to Dwarf Fortress?  (Sorry if it's already answered, this is a big thread.)

I think it would be great if there was a big focus on adding game-play features for a while. More specifically I mean adding features that require the player to manage the "health" of some entity (i.e. person or nation) by taking preemptive actions and reacting to actions generated by the game world.   

Adding these features to the game would have a big influence on how the world generation itself works.  For example there may be aspects of the world gen that you spend weeks creating but that very few people ever experience when actually playing the game.  I think Toady once said that the way people play the game continually surprises him but the feedback is essential in helping him evolve/tweak the world generation code.

Anyway, keep up the amazing work.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

First off, the world building in this game looks stunning, well done!

However I'm unclear on what form the game-play will actually take.  Will we be controlling a single player avatar, exploring the world similar to say Ultima 7 or will we control a group of people or an entire nation in the mold of Crusader Kings 2?  Maybe you're going for both, similar to Dwarf Fortress?  (Sorry if it's already answered, this is a big thread.)

I think it would be great if there was a big focus on adding game-play features for a while. More specifically I mean adding features that require the player to manage the "health" of some entity (i.e. person or nation) by taking preemptive actions and reacting to actions generated by the game world.   

Adding these features to the game would have a big influence on how the world generation itself works.  For example there may be aspects of the world gen that you spend weeks creating but that very few people ever experience when actually playing the game.  I think Toady once said that the way people play the game continually surprises him but the feedback is essential in helping him evolve/tweak the world generation code.

Anyway, keep up the amazing work.

Well thank you very much! I really appreciate it.

No worries - allow me to explain! Basically, the game is going to be about information. You are seeking to locate a very small number of items scattered around the world; to do so, the more the player understands the world, the easier this task will be. This means conversing with NPCs, examining books, coming to learn about the cultures/religions of that world, the history of various nations, exploring and gaining access to buildings, and plotting your path around the world map to "track down" these items. It's almost a... research game, one could call it? The world is insanely detailed (and only becoming more so with every release), and it's the close examination of the world and figuring out the paths these artefacts have taken, and who may possess them now, which will be key to success! But for this to work, the world must be in place first, hence the worldbuilding focus up to this point. However, this is the first major gameplay release coming up - with the procedural generation of hundreds of thousands of NPCs, faces, clothing, dialects, and a conversation system - which should give some idea of how things are going to look going forward . So nothing like DF, more like CK2, but more like a novel like The Name of the Rose or any of the Baroque Cycle books than either of the above.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Not technically fully a URR entry, but very relevant - for this week's blog entry here's that Secret Project I've been talking about recently. Enjoy!

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/12/19/the-unpredictability-of-gameplay/

[saluk]

That sounds fascinating. I'm currently reading Uncertainty in Games in fact, and for a second wondered if you would mention it.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

That sounds fascinating. I'm currently reading Uncertainty in Games in fact, and for a second wondered if you would mention it.

Thanks! I'm really happy with what I have drafted out so far. I'm going far more theoretical than Uncertainty in Games, less interested in incomplete information, and more interested in the *experience* of playing unpredictable games. Either way - I'll keep the updates slowly ticking over on that as it gets written

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

2015 in Review! URR and a million other things:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/12/26/2015-in-review/

[gimymblert]

damn it I have still to catch up the other article!

[BomberTREE]

I didn't realize you had a devlog here on TIG
Bout to brew some coffee and start reading!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

damn it I have still to catch up the other article!

Gogogo!!

I didn't realize you had a devlog here on TIG
Bout to brew some coffee and start reading!

Ha, welcome! There's quite a bit, though it's mostly a cross-post of my website .

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week's update is all bug-fixing, then we'll be back to new stuff (AI development, clothing, pathfinding) from next week onwards!

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2016/01/02/final-bugfixes/

[chiguireitor]

Didn't know you have been developing URR for already 4 years.... wow.... Now i understand why the scope and sheer size!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Didn't know you have been developing URR for already 4 years.... wow.... Now i understand why the scope and sheer size!

Ha, yep! Though in fairness much of the first year or so was just learning to code :\

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

For the last fortnight I’ve been working extremely hard on AI pathfinding and scheduling. It has been massively challenging – after two days searching for the conclusion to a single bug, only to discover that it was a single word misspelled in the 5000+ lines of AI behaviour code, something broke within me, and I need to take a break from the damned thing! So, for the last couple of days I’ve gone back to clothes and churned out all the remaining clothing for 0.8, and I feel intellectually rested enough to return to facing AI in the coming week. But back to clothing: nomads now have generated clothing, and tribal nations do as well, and these therefore now accompany the feudal clothing and the religious clothing styles that we have seen before. This entry will therefore talk about the nomadic clothing generation, the tribal clothing generation, and also small additions to feudal clothing to handle both lower-class and rulership-class variations in those clothing styles. With this done, almost all the graphics required for 0.8 are done, and it’s still just the pathfinding/scheduling stuff for important NPCs that needs finishing (as I say, I’m working hard on this in all my spare time at the moment, but it’s a huge task and by far the most intellectually challenging thing I’ve ever coded, without doubt). Anyway:

Nomadic Clothing

For nomadic clothing I wanted something fairly practical and rough-and-ready, but still visually interesting and distinctive, and something “modular”. The feudal clothing is less modular, in many ways, as there are clear archetypes that clothing will appear as a subset of, whereas for nomadic clothing I wanted to design it from the get-go to have more combinations – which is viable (unlike feudal) because it is a little less ornate, more pragmatic, and because you’ll simply see less of it in the average game, so you don’t have to “force in” quite as much variation in a single world generation. Each clothing generation selects three colour schemes, consisting of a plain colour (generally white, grey, some kind of pale brown), a pair of rich colours based on the flag of that nation (e.g. pink and purple, red and orange, blue and cyan, etc) and then a lighter version of the combination of those two colours (so a violet and red flag might wind up with a pale magenta as the third colour). Nomadic clothing is similar to the “robe” archetypes for feudal clothing, i.e. it takes up both the upper- and lower-body clothing slots when worn (unlike tribal clothing, as below) and consists of five layers – clothing shape, pattern shape, pattern pattern (you’ll get what I mean when you look at them), strap locations, and strap pattern, all combined with the various colour sets as described above. Here are some examples with illustrative flags that might be associated with the same nations, so you can see the colour-scheme similarity:



I’m really happy with how these came out! As you can see there, rather than two ranks – “normal” and “ruler” – that we have in the tribal clothes you’ll see below, there are three ranks here, each rank gaining an extra stripe. I actually really like this system as another visual way to denote rank within a single civilization. So, for example, normal people in a nomadic civilization get one stripe, people like merchants or caravan leaders or the ruler’s family and the like get two, whilst the ruler will be the only person to get three stripes. You’ll also notice the background fabric of these is simpler than the tribal clothing below; as above, I felt nomads should be a little more utilitarian than tribal people, and I thought the large blocks of colour on some of the nomadic designs actually worked really well, so I decided that I didn’t need to add in any more detail in that regard. Also, nomadic boots  – quite a bit simpler than feudal ones, but distinctive and a little more colourful (as the clolthing styles of many real-world nomadic peoples often are), so I’m pleased with how these look (also, feudal ones tend to be more vertical whilst these flare out at the top more, which for some reason makes complete sense to me for nomadic footwear). The little buckle shape reflects the shape preference of the nomadic nation.



Tribal Clothing

Tribal clothing proved extremely challenging. From the get-go I’ve tried to emphasize relativism in URR, a lack of technological determinism, and so forth, but it is tricky to create “tribal” clothing styles that are intriguing and interesting, without them appearing “primitive”, but still acknowledging that a tiny (or at least, small) tribal nation will not have the technologies of their colossal feudal neighbour, for example. I also, of course, needed them to look very different from feudal and religious clothing, whilst still having enough variety that the clothing of one “tribe” will look nothing like another. After a lot of thought and several full days of trial and error, I’m very happy with the system I came up with. When I was doing the research for these styles I tried to find as many styles of dress used by ancient people that didn’t necessary look “primitive”, and that looked nice and varied. I looked for things like ancient Mesoamerican dress, ancient Egyptian clothing styles, and so forth, whilst accessories (necklaces, bracelets, etc) will appear in later releases. In the end I wound up with ten total possible “styles”, and three rankings of the technological sophistication of the tribal nation. For those with the greatest tailors you get something like the “high” one below – a thick background colour and lines running down it; for those with middling clothing technology (if there is such a thing) get a pale background with a coloured pattern and running lines, whilst “low” technology clothing has no lines and pale/dark pattern. You’ll also note the pattern becomes less dense each time – there are no tiles between the pattern in the left-most, a one-tile gap in the middle, and a two-til gap on the right. I also, of course, had to think about leadership signifiers. Just like religions use silver and gold thread to denote high rank (abbots, inquisitors, archivists, etc) and the highest possible rank (popes etc), and feudal nations will use gold thread for their rulers (see below), there are various signifiers of a leadership position in these clothes. They either have a number of patterned “discs” hanging on their front; a pattern down the middle of their clothing; or a bar that rests in the centre of their torso (the patterns on all of these also, of course, vary).



And here we have various lower-body permutations, which will be similar in colour and graphics to the above set (the colour is always dependent on the flag of the tribal nation in question, as with nomadic clothes). These were far, far trickier to create than the upper-body tribal garments (although that was also the case for feudal clothing) but I’m happy with what I’ve come up with, most of which are (broadly speaking) kinds of skirts/gowns. As above, the most technologically advanced tribal nations have their colours inverted for someone that looks much richer, whilst each rank creates background double-line patterns that get denser as you go up in technical ability. As with the upper body clothing, there are equivalent variations for lower-body, so when you view a Chieftain, for example, both their upper- and lower-body clothes will be very distinctive with the appropriate leadership signifier. Naturally in all of these pictures any shape could be of any technical level – to reiterate,the high/mid/low distinction only applies to the detail and complexity of the background pattern on the piece of clothing.



I also in the process of creating these figured out how I actually want tribal nations to function in the game, at long last! More on this much later when I get around to it, but suffice to say the existing tribal nations are very un-varied, and adhere to very comparable “technological levels”, and it would be far more interesting to create nations that might resemble the Mayans, or Babylonians, or Hittites, or Aztecs, or ancient Egyptians, and so forth. I’d like to expand “tribal” nations to mean more than just what we would now call tribal nations, but rather to encompass civilizations that are smaller and more self-contained and inward-looking, but vary vastly more than those currently spawning in the current version. Either way, this is a future project, but I’ve already had some very interesting ideas for how this could work. Oh, yes, and as for shoes, tribes either go barefoot or have some fairly simple sandal-type shoes, which I haven’t got around to making yet, but I’ll throw those together on a spare day sometime before release.

Class and Clothing

I’ve returned to the highest and lowest class statuses for standard feudal clothing. I didn’t want to create a special clothing set just for rulers because the player will so rarely ever encounter them (although rulers do get unique crowns and unique thrones!), but I wanted something to mark out “ruler clothing” from “upper class clothing”, so I’ve gone with a similar model to the “pope clothing” of adding a special colour of highlights to upper class clothes. Therefore, “ruler clothing” now looks like this, with some nice gold/orange/white trim which varies depending on the other colours of the clothing (however, if the ruler is of a theocracy and therefore also a pope/godking/archcleric/whatever, they default to the religious clothing). Examples:



Meanwhile, lower-class clothing wasn’t looking particularly impressive and needed a significant overhaul, since there is only so much brown one can look at. I tried to build up a decent library of “standard” colours that wouldn’t require any kind of serious wealth – whites, greys, browns, etc – and then I’ve tried to actually make them interesting (though I admit, this was tricky). Here are some instances of lower-class clothing types with the upper/middle equivalents for the same nation next to them:



There is still one final thing to do for the lowest-class clothing, which is to make certain archetypes even less ornate (though you can see that the buttons are smaller, the belts less patterned, etc), because the 1st and 2nd on that list, for example, are still a bit too snazzy. Although, with that said, I don’t want to make the most common kind of clothing too uninteresting to look at, so there’s a balance to be found between realism and variety. I’ve also made the variety of colours possible for lower-class clothing significantly greater than it originally was, and hopefully you can see that in the left-most column. I’ll update this image later in the week once I reduce the complexity of some of the designs!

Final Clothing Thoughts

I’m extremely pleased with how different all four forms of clothing are. I feel confident saying that although the styles within each vary very significantly, it’ll always be fairly apparent when looking at an unknown person’s clothing whether they are wearing feudal, nomadic, tribal or religious clothing (and the armour sets I intend to develop later this year will obviously be highly distinct again). Here’s a rather nice image of some compiled generated clothing which illustrates this point better than I can, and shows very nicely the massive range of clothing you can now find on all the people you meet in the world(s) of URR:

Very large image: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2016/01/Hoi2-5.png

Next Up?

I’m very happy with how these are all looking, and with these finished all clothing except armour is done (though armour won’t appear until 0.9) so we’re done with clothing for now (at a later date I will also add gloves, necklaces, rings, crowns, etc – I am really looking forward to crown generation – but not for 0.8, and probably not 0.9). I’m now turning back to pathfinding and scheduling for the third week of work, and we’ll have a large update on this in a week’s time… hopefully with it completed, but we’ll see how it goes. The task remains massive, complex and challenging, and although I’m making progress, it’s a long way from done. If I don’t think enough scheduling and pathfinding is done by next week, I’ll probably post an interim update on some of the other small additions and changes I’ve been implementing into 0.8. Either way: see you then!

[gimymblert]

Saturation in colors, vivid and contrasty pallet with plenty colors, was a long used signifier of wealth with lots of ornament (feather, jewels, seashells), so less saturated, less colors and less contrast "low key" colors is a signifier along "brown". HSL is a greater tool than just colors. Tribal low tech don't necessarily mean less complexity in clothes, just different "fabric". Also tribal chief relied on imports to get stuff than commoner couldn't, being close is not necessarily being impermeable, tribal where more sensible to "trade" (whether it was merchant with a design interface, occasional pacts, or plain looting) even within opaque society, they seems to operate more on a "collection" the smaller they get and the less they have labor to create stuff.
- 2cts

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Interesting thoughts! Saturation is definitely something I've tried to reflect, but as for tribal clothing - you're very right in the real world, but it took me so long to find a generation system that I as visually happy with, I'm very disinclined to change it at all now! As ever, realism vs gameplay/creating-something-that-actually-looks-good always has to fall on the side of the latter rather than the former. But other signifiers of wealth will be added soon, like jewels and things!