Happy June! It’s a bit early this month, but let’s have a technical status update. After all, E3 only comes once a year. Thank goodness for that. Let us, therefore, scour our eyeballs with the contents of the programmer-taken screenshot-mobile* and look at some new features that have made their way into CE that are, in fact, not related to E3 at all.
* Sanity adjustments performed by art team; Programmers have funny ideas about composition. And everything, really, though I admit if you need a fine pair of shoes or a man’s hat, Nicholas can hook you up. -d
“Ah, the water — so sublime! So bracing! It’ll make beautiful feedstock for our steam-piped power network.”
This happy naturalist, for instance, is not going to E3. Your subjects will now tell you what they’re thinking via little floating bubbles above their heads. In this case, a naturalist is happy, probably because she’s knee-deep in ocean water. You go, naturalist. Character thoughts can include thoughts about what they currently want to do (eat, sleep, walk into the sea never to return, go to E3), or their moods (happiness, sadness, anger, at E3, etc.)
Character moods are slowly starting to be tracked, where people will be happy but will become less happy as their needs are not met. If your subjects are not happy, expect Unwanted Behaviour, including the sort of thing which may warrant a visit from the Anti-Paranormal Invigilators and walking into the sea, never to return. Also, E3.
Characters now also need to sleep. They seem to do this rather a lot right now, admittedly for testing purposes. Characters prefer to sleep in beds (currently next to beds, as Mr. Triolo has not yet devised the getting-in-bed animation due to being fully occupied with un-shoggothing the biped rig), and will be happiest sleeping in a bed that corresponds to their class (upper-class, middle-class, lower-class.) Failing that, characters will sleep wherever they can:
We all remember what The Hunger Games taught us about eating random berries, right? Good.
… or, in this case, underwater:
Heliotype provided by Brazenchock’s best-selling pamplet “The Azure Menace: A Guide to Unpleasantnesses of The Oceans’ Deeps”, under heading “Top Ten Signs That You May Be In Unknowing Association With Fish-Persons”.
(As has been noted before, we should probably fix that.) If an interior space is available without a bed, characters will do their best to make themselves comfortable:
(We shall also politely neglect to mention that these ovens have been incorrectly installed with their chimneys inside the building. What with the structure lacking any ventilation … But no, we assure you, things are probably all Perfectly Fine. I’m sure the oven is very warm and that just made him sleepy.)
– which can, of course, lead to everybody deciding to have a nap in your refinery.
Otis Rachetwright, gasping for breath, attempts to discover the source of the foul miasma which has felled his comrades. (Note sole properly installed oven on left.)
Artists have also been seen getting into the XML files* and adding new in-game objects, which is why the game now contains such wonders as smatterings of skulls and bones all over the place, additional trees, and cacti. All of these have been modeled for awhile, but it seems like now is a good time to start dropping them into the engine proper.
*Imagine this spoken in the tone which one would say “Beetles have been getting into the Crimble”-d
Combat! Combat is starting to fall into place. Your military will now shoot encroaching… things. Sadly, we cannot reveal the nature of the things encroaching upon your territory, for fear that your minds are not yet ready to handle the truth. Soon.
(The things, incidentally, can also kill people.)
To that end, your military can also build fortifications from which they can defend themselves. Right now, fortifications are limited to various types of walls (fences, brick walls, barbed wire fences, etc.), pointy stakes, and gabions (a sort of earthworks defensive thing that people can hide behind or shoot over as they see fit):
Pictured: A merry summertime earthsworks-building party.
Constructions that are being built but have not yet been built are now implemented as semi-translucent floating things. (Internally, the engine refers to them as “ghosts”) Here we see some gabions in the process of being constructed behind a barbed-wire fence, in order to serve as a crude line of defense against E3:
You must construct ghost-walls to keep ghosts out of your settlement.
Happy E3, everybody! Enjoy the madness and the horror. Yes, you see, E3 is part of the conspiracy. They’re all in on it. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo.
SOON YOU WILL ALL KNOW WHAT IT IS LIKE TO EXPERIENCE SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION. Soon you will all be Kinected to each oth… no, don’t drag me away from my keyboard! Give me back my special coffee, I’m on a roll here…
Nicholas has returned to the Code Abyss to … rest. Once he completes his regeneration cycle we can let him out again. -d
Are ghost-gabions made from ghost-earth? How rare is it?
I think it shouldn’t be all that rare, but it should use a fair amount of insanity or whatever the corresponding resource would be to make it.
I hope you are joking. The ghosts shown are just queued up buildings, not yet built.
Well, I see a big future in ‘tinderboxes’ then! I shall seek my fortune in not just cornering this market, but also taunting it and poking at it with a stick.
For your next construction project, please consider installing a Spackleby Model 11 Smoke Detector and Alarm System. This Ingenious Device not only detects lethal smoke, but emits an Ear-Shatteringly Loud alert via a steam powered whistle assembly. (Please note the Spackleby Model 11 is powered by coal and requires its own ventilation system, otherwise the device will detect its own exhaust and the aforementioned Ear-Shatteringly Loud noise until deactivated)
Do you have to have their moods above their heads sim-style? I was hoping for more of a, “what the hell is wrong with this guy *clicks on him, Oh, hes angry about a statue.”. All I’m really saying is, can it be more discreet?
I’d prefer this to be optional. I like having them pop up.
The moods are for very visible moods. The characters will have a lot of things going on to determine what they’re doing. You will want to inspect them to see, for instance, why they’re really unhappy. We’re trying to combine the two ideas 🙂
Ooooh, that sounds cool. Thank you for responding to my question/statement.
Glad to see a game with proper ghost protection. Good on ya.
I admit, when I first read the title, it went through my brain as “Moods, Sleeping, and Fornications”. While embarrassing, a question springs forth. Will there be children among the colonists?
Maybe.
If anything, they ought to be Creepy Children
Well there will be urchins.
But where do they come from, what do they want ?
So many mysteries !
“Un-shoggothing”
Its the little things that make me grin and bounce about in my chair with glee.
The sleeping thing brings up a question-
Do they have a ‘schedule’ for sleeping, or any sort of routine? Or is it more.. random?
Or based on how much ‘work’ they do?
Also, will the game have a day/night cycle of some sort?
Urchins are spawned naturally from orphanages. There’s none of this “fornication” nonsense going on.
Obviously, they’re spawned from E3.
The meadow is too yellow and not enough green in my opinion.
How the meadow lookswith more green:
http://i.imgur.com/hYGWBUr.png
Maybe I went a bit overboard with the green here but it still looks better, doesn’t it?
You’re in luck because immediately after firing this post off I spent all day redoing terrain textures.
I hope there will be a Dwarf-Fortress-like ‘diary’ view of someone’s recent experiences.
It included things like whether they’re feeling sick, and if they slept well last night.
This allowed you to cope with the fact that you could not be watching everyone all the time, and memorizing which of your characters was having which issue. It also helped when figuring out things like, “Why does Bill keep complaining that it’s hot, when we’re in the middle of a blizzard… Oh right, fever…”
I also just liked reading them. It made the characters feel more alive to see stuff like: “Played with Jyggalag, my kitty, today. I love my kitty. He tells me secret things.” 😛
I hope you understand that some sort of E3-related Great Work or Great Horror has to show up in the game now, right?
The Ethreeal Space is where hoards of loudly chittering yet practically invisible insects come from to feed on dreams. The Great Ethree Temple slowly turns worshipers into mannerless, slavering gluttons who aren’t going to take this supposed “food shortage” they’ve supposedly created seriously while there are still all these Perfectly Edible Urchins running around. That sort of thing.
I also want to know who let the Shoggoth into the biped rig. Tut tut. Such shoddy overseeing.
Also, awesome post and ‘coverage’ of E3. Always, always a pleasure.
I happened to notice that most of the soldiers in that screenshot have grey hair, and it made me wonder: what’s the passage of time like in CE? Do people age? Are there new generations? Et cetera?
With regards to the idea of people being happier sleeping in a bed that corresponds to their class I think maybe you could change it so that they will be happier sleeping in a bed of a higher class, but if someone from a higher or the same class sees them, they will get jealous and angry, with maybe the concept of jealousy being used for other things. Also with an earlier post about the combat system, there was a Q and A thing where David said that they wouldn’t have something so mundane a horses, I thought that maybe you guys could add in weird flying jellyfish things that players would be able to domesticate and get their troops to ride on it
Instead of flying jellyfish, you could have the jellyfish-strider things from Morrowind as a shout out. Alternately, you could have some sort of nightmare-jellyfish-machine thing powered by Nightmare Fuel, which could be generated in the Asylum
Good Idea, but I think for it to be true ‘Cavalry’ it has to be a sentient soldier riding a living thing around into battle