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[gimymblert]

shortest update ever? I always block time to read this thread lol looks like I save my afternoon lol

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

shortest update ever? I always block time to read this thread lol looks like I save my afternoon lol

That's weird! That should be a full post. I'll try it again...

--

This week has been a week of consolidating everything that was in place so far, continuing to test and refine and test and refine over and over the speech generation and the flow of sentences, moving around some of the code so that it can be handled more efficiently, and thinking about handling sentence variables in the future, which is to say, the parts of sentences which are things like '[god]' or '[nation]', and therefore have to vary every time the same sentence is uttered. As such, here’s this week’s fairly substantial update:

- Thanks to some great suggestions left in the comments list in the blog post from two weeks ado, I’ve added in a number of new responses. If you’re asking someone about a potentially suspicious topic, and you’re in a region with guards, they might (if they really like you) say something like “You shouldn’t ask such things, the guards will think you’re a spy!” or something of that sort.
- Equally, if you’re asking a particularly “academic” rather than “practical” topic – the difference between “what is the nearest mountain range?” and “what is your religion?” – they will sometimes, very rarely, say “I don’t know, but you should go and ask [expert]”. I think these are both great changes, and again, add even more speech detail to the potential library of sentences the player will actually encounter. However, again, to prevent farming, there’s now basically a hidden counter, which varies significantly from iteration to iteration, and affects how often people will recommend that you go and talk to somebody else about the topic in question; equally, you need to be talking to people who both a) have the knowledge and b) have the inclination to recommend an expert, which will be a fairly small number of NPCs.
- I then spent quite a bit more time developing the above in order to maximise the detail that people can offer the player, the variation in the sentences the player will read, and integrating all of this will knowledge and mood modifiers. So, now, if you hang around in a shop, and then a random person comes in, and you ask that person about the currency of their nation, for example, if they don’t want to respond they will point you towards the merchant in that shop, knowing that a) they and you are in a shop and b) you are asking a question that it would be relevant to talk to a merchant about and c) there is also a merchant in this shop.
- These responses also vary depending on whether you’re in the nation or church relevant to the person you’re speaking to. So let’s say you ask someone something, and the relevant answer would be “You should ask a noble”. If you’re in the mansion of a noble from their civilization, they’ll say “You should ask a noble, such as the one in this mansion” or whatever; but if you’re elsewhere, they’ll say “You should ask one of our nobles, who dwell in accommodations like these”; if you’re right nation but outside and in the right district, they’ll say “You should ask a noble; several have their mansions here”, or in wrong distract, they’ll say “You should ask a noble; many dwell in our richest district”. Equivalents in a foreign nation would be “You should ask one of our nobles, who dwell in a district much like this”, or “You should ask one of our nobles, who inhabit the richest part of my home city”. The game can therefore now generate appropriate sentences both based on the player’s location – right building, right district, or just overall right region, or overall incorrect region – and the relationship between the person you’re talking to and the area you’re talking to them in (especially relevant when you run into people who aren’t native to the state they live in, for example).
- I have to be honest and say that I’m extremely happy with how this context-specific recommendation system has developed; I’m really hoping this will produce some strikingly specific procedurally-generated sentences for the player to encounter in appropriate situations, and as ever, just generally provide greater variety in the conversation system. There are also a bunch of sentence possibilities which might be generated that I know are currently impossible, but might become possible later once the potential actions and schedules of NPCs expands further.
- Going back to repeating questions, if you ask X, and then you ask X again, sometimes on the first repetition people will now be confused rather than annoyed or bothered; they’ll say “Didn’t we just discuss this?”, or “That’s strange, didn’t I just answer that?” or something like that; the potential mood drop will be the same, I think, but it’s just another little bit of detail for some NPCs.
- Thanks to an outstanding suggestions left on the Bay12 forums, there is now a little bit of extra conversation detail in there which I hadn’t thought of. If you ask something, and get a positive response (they answer your question), when you say the next thing you say, it’ll normally start your next question with “Thanks” or “Understood” or “I appreciate you letting me know” or things of that sort; equally, if they didn’t reply, your next thing will often start with “Apologies” or “Ah, okay” or things of that sort. This adds a nice little bit of extra flow to the conversations; naturally even more flow will be added once they can ask you questions back, but for the time being, putting these in 50% of responses definitely makes everything look a little more human once more.

Next week’s blog entry will be a little different: I’m in the final fortnight of the extension period on my first book, and this week’s absolute priority is finishing that off. Next week I’m going to have the first non-URR entry since development restarted and write up some reflections on writing such a long piece of work about games, what I’ve learned from it, my future writing plans, and so forth; there’s just no way I’ll have more than a little time in the coming week for programming, and I’d rather return with a blast the week after. See you all next week!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I’ve now started work on speech variables, which is to say the parts of speech – such as

For example, armyrole]” refers to what a particular soldier the player is talking with does in the army; and so on. Whenever anyone tries to say one of these, the game needs to be able to look up what exact phrase it should use, which means a unique set of look-ups in the game’s databases for every single one of these. It might mean checking something to do with that particular NPC – such as their age or simply what religion they worship – but it might also require the dredging-up of information from a religion, a culture, a geographical location, a series of historical events, and so forth. Given the central role of the speech system to the game and to the player’s abilities to actually gain access to the information they need, it was clearly going to be vital that these systems are detailed, comprehensive, and sufficiently varied to maintain interest over what can be a long playthrough. Equally, as above, almost all of these are going to need unique bodies of code designed to pull out the correct bit of information – and it is this I’ve worked on this week.

The most challenging task this week was, frankly, reminding myself of how the code for sentence generation works, and finding the right “place” in the code to switch out '[god]' for “the Grey Goddess of the Mountains”, or whatever. Whereas for all the last few weeks I have been primarily or entirely adding more content to (or on top of) existing systems, here I was developing some new systems. I had a bunch of comments, and most things have quite logical labels, but there was still a certain bemusement looking at the sentence generation code again and working out how everything actually slots in. Once I’d figured all this out, however, it became clear how I needed to implement these elements, and what elements should be stored and retrieved from which places in the code and the game’s data structure. Last week, I shifted the code that I vaguely call the sentence-converter, which is to say the code which takes a default sentence and then makes it sound different for each nation. This week I’ve also shifted the code which handles these new variables away from where it originally was, which didn’t make a huge amount of sense, and put it alongside the other. Now, when the game cycles through each word in a sentence to choose the correct cultural version, it will also find the sentence variables in the same process, and decide what each one should become at the appropriate time. This is a good foundation for building on next week, and I’ve already begun to sketch out some of the functions that will select the appropriate words and terms for relevant parts of sentence generation.

I have also decided that the system whereby an NPC looks at you and draws judgements about you – see this entry for more – is something that will appear in 0.9, not 0.8. This is because although one can add and remove clothing at this point, one cannot actually gain access to the clothing of other NPCs yet, because a) we have no shops or currency and b) there’s no way to ask people for clothes, have people give you other clothes, even attack people for clothes, etc. So, for now, everyone will just (correctly) believe you are from your home nation. I’ve therefore implemented a placeholder function with space for a full assessment of who they think you are, which can be easily expanded in 0.9.

Lastly, as part of this, some different NPC classes will also give you different greetings; this is part of the placeholder above, and will be expanded in 0.9, but there are now some variations in greetings according to what kind of NPC you’re talking to. A priest, therefore, is likely to comment on religion when they say hello; a servant or slave will be especially shy when they greet you; and so forth. Again, this will be expanded in 0.9 to integrate with the NPC’s judgements about who you are when you talk to them.

Next Week

Next week: with the system in place, I’ll start working on handling the variables themselves, and drawing on the appropriate information, in appropriate contexts, to complete these square-bracketed parts of NPC speech. See you all then!

[gimymblert]

shortest update ever? I always block time to read this thread lol looks like I save my afternoon lol

That's weird! That should be a full post. I'll try it again...

Matthew 5:39

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Just a short one this week, to say: my apologies for the silence over the last month. A combination of an unexpectedly high workload (five different paper revisions to complete in a short time-span), along with caring for an extremely ill relative, and preparing to move 4200 miles across the globe in around three weeks, has been quite challenging. I also managed to send myself on a trip to the Accident and Emergency part of my local hospital, which was all totally excellent, but has put me in bed recovering for quite a few days. And, to top it all off, a side-effect of the far more serious illness I got several years ago has just manifested; it’s not life-threatening, but it’s intensely dispiriting and depressing. I’m still alive (barely) but just absolutely swamped under everything right now; the injury and the new medical issue are both just extra things I could really, really, do without. I thought the past couple of months would be the proper restart on URR’s development, but apparently that isn’t going to happen just yet.

Nevertheless, I’ll be back to 0.8 as soon as possible. Things have to stabilise sooner or later… right?

[gimymblert]

Just don't kill yourself

[eclectocrat]

You are an inspiration! Amazing progress since I started following you years ago. Thank you!

[s0]

Get well Mark!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Just don't kill yourself

I shall do my best .

You are an inspiration! Amazing progress since I started following you years ago. Thank you!

Aw, thank you for those super-kind words! I really really appreciate them .

Get well Mark!

Thanks, my friend .

---

Hello everyone! It has been a little while since the first Interlude, so I thought it would be appropriate to post a sequel.

Firstly, thank you all so much for the amazingly kind words on the other entry (and which I’ve had through email, Facebook, etc) – they really mean so much to me, and they are deeply deeply appreciated.

Secondly, I’ve now successfully moved to Canada, found a flat (or rather, an apartment), signed the contract, and done the majority of all the admin and bureaucracy stuff that comes from moving to an entirely different country; I still need to get a mobile phone that functions in this country, and there’s one or two University-admin things I need to complete, but otherwise I’m settled, moved, I’m “in the system” in the Canadian bureaucracy, and I’m getting ready to officially begin this job just a couple of days from now. This has been a pretty huge task in the last fortnight, but it’s now coming to an end.

Thirdly, on the health front, the physical symptoms are improving, and the psychological symptoms are (more slowly) also improving. Things are still tough, but I’m making some good choices to improve the newfound psychological difficulties this complication from my older illness has dumped on me. In the short-to-mid term, I think things might be on the up (slowly), but it’s always so hard to know.

Fourthly, here’s the cover for my upcoming book with Bloomsbury. I’m so happy with the design! I should have more information soon about an exact publication date, but there’s lots of roguelike-y goodness in there to be had.



Fifthly, any of you folks who are interested in Twitch and live streaming might want to read this paper I recently published about it – you can find a paywall-free version here - https://tinyurl.com/y8adblsk. In it we explore the backgrounds of live streamers, the everyday work and labour of being a professional live streamer, and their hopes and fears about the future of their practice. This is part of a larger project on Twitch I’ve been developing alongside my colleague Jamie Woodcock in the last year, and we should have some more exciting stuff on this front to announce soon. Stay tuned.

So yes, that’s everything for now. I’ll hopefully be able to post more again once I have some kind of stability. I’ve also been thinking over some pretty fundamental questions about the website, how I blog, how often I blog, my general online visibility, these sorts of things, so there might be some big changes coming in the future (once I feel a little stronger). In the mean time, take care, everyone.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

After rather a long while, here's an update for you all...

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2018/04/08/april-2018-update/

[gimymblert]

As long you don't die, I'm fine, take care of yourself!

[Zireael]

I hope your health starts going up instead of down!

Working from home does have its positives in such cases, although after half a year I find the lack of live human contact is getting to me a bit (I was never a go-all-out person, but imagine not having seen a coworker's face ever)

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Thanks friends . Yeah, I do spend time with my partner, I've been teaching this term, and travel brings with it meeting people at conferences and such; but that's about the limit for me at the moment!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

After nine months away, actually did some programming. No deadlines, but a start. Posted a short blog entry with some more info: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2018/06/07/i-did-some-programming/

[xeeynamo]

Yay I am happy that you resume this project! I am very curious about it, I cannot wait for more updates!

[Josh Bossie]

I was just thinking about this game again, so lucky me that you chose this moment to resume work!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Yay I am happy that you resume this project! I am very curious about it, I cannot wait for more updates!

Thank you! See below for some new stuff...

I was just thinking about this game again, so lucky me that you chose this moment to resume work!

Heh, thanks . 0.8 is still inching forward. See below...

---

So I have some news! Firstly, I've now shifted over to a brand new website at www.markrjohnsongames.com, which will FAR better accommodate all the stuff I do, and was hand-designed for me to be something that that stand the test of time and allow me to fit everything I do into a single site.

As part of this, I'm also now resuming monthly blog posts! August's is now up on both the old site - http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2018/08/25/new-website/ - and the new - https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2018/08/25/new-website/.

AND, finally, I am still coding the final fragments of 0.8, slowly but surely...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Hello everyone! Long time no see.

Firstly, 0.8 is back in development, finally, and things are being finished off now! Just some tweaks to go until it's ready to release; been putting in consistent coding hours regularly for the past month or two, really "back into it", and things are coming together. I'll have more to say on this soon.

In other news, my book is out, where I talk about lots of PCG stuff! You can read about it here...

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2019/01/23/the-unpredictability-of-gameplay-is-out/



...including a sample chapter. It would be awesome to get any thoughts on this! A big URRpdate is coming next month, and I'll be back with that in a couple weeks . Hope everyone is otherwise doing well!

[gimymblert]

That post was unpredictable

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

That post was unpredictable

I know, right?! I've definitely taken a leaf out of my own book there.