Suddenly an UPDATE appears! We’re on to v35, filled with mostly a bunch of completely random little things which aren’t easily summarized in a tagline. But we assure you, they probably won’t explode! Unless they’re meant to. Onward-
This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!
We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!
(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)
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Patch Notes:
Significant Features of Note:
- Dustier Dust!
- Mines and module maintenance!
- Lots of UI/UX improvements!
- A multitude of fixes, listed below, which embody a perhaps semi-successful attempt to make the “theme”, if you will, of this monthly update the fact that we didn’t focus on one easy-to-describe feature!
Engine
- FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
- job system performance improvement
- FIXED: save game crash caused by having dirty objects in the rendInteractiveObjectClassHandler cleanup list when you save (we think)
- FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
Events
- starting supplies now drop from the sky (look out!)
- balance: immigration and favour events fire less often
- FIXED: supply drop event will no longer inform you that you’ve requested zero items when you forgo a supply drop
- balance: made colonists less hungry on gamestart (unless they’re criminals)
- FIXED: when you call a Naturalist via favour, you actually get a naturalist now rather than an artisan
Human Characters
- FIXED: Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
- FIXED: starvation was checking a value 10x what it should have been
- FIXED: soldiers now actually move to rally beacons
- FIXED: colonists no longer believe that raw coconuts are a cooked food
- added Zzz particles to sleeping
- balance: removed starting naturalist (you must earn one via favour)
- removed extra pouches from the Scientist models (with apologies to Rob Liefeld)
- FIXED: “forage due to starvation” job wasn’t triggering
- started overhaul of job balance
- (added new internal tool for balancing job requirements and utilities; this is super cool for us and will ultimately mean a better-balanced game experience for you).
- FIXED: disappearing hair bug
- cleanup of character hair models & model defs (more varieties of hair will show up)
- unique macroscope use animations added
- FIXED: de-assigned science workers wouldn’t give up their uniforms
- FIXED incorrect icons for eating human flesh
- FIXED: hunger no longer goes negative after character eats when not very hungry
- Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
- made artisans less interested in doing paperwork at night
- removed “idle in chair” so that there will be free chairs for people to eat in, ever
- Naturalists will form work crews (though labourers assigned to naturalist work crew don’t do anything special yet)
Combat & Military
- All work crew filters are disabled when a unit becomes conscripted. Filters are then reset to the default when conscripting a unit.
- soldiers do pushups
- FIXED: colonists would beat up dead bandits, calling it a “melee counterattack”
Animals, Monsters
- balance: made animals less hungry on gamestart
- (started on burrowing animals but it’s not player-visible)
Buildings, Zones, Modules, Jobs
- FIXED: lag when placing buildings or creating modules.
- FIXED: civilization maps now computed correctly
- FIXED: Doors now render 1OU above the building footprint as ghosts, so they won’t clip through the building any more.
- FIXED: we now check whether we are in the same connected component (or not) as items when using them to fill gameSimRequireGameObject requests (this helps fix the case where individual units go nuts not being able to get to materials)
- FIXED: typo in “Make Gunpowder” job
- added sounds to airdrop crate
- renamed some modules to show clear progression of materials ( eg. stone oven -> iron oven )
- added bamboo farming (for timber)
- added module damage: after a module is used a number of times it will become damaged and require repair using a random material used to build the module
- if a damaged module is used enough, it will become inoperative and require repair before it can be used
- FIXED: “not enough logs to build gabions despite having lots of logs” bug
- added “walls down” building display mode
- FIXED: current building display mode now apply to newly created buildings
Biomes & Terrain
- FIXED: bamboo (in the wild) wasn’t using “small” variation
- balance: added more timber to tropical biome
- balance: reduced clumping of ore nodes in certain jungle biome
Multiplayer / Scripting System
- Ownership: objects can now be marked (internally) as being “owned” or “not owned” by a player ( or other group, i.e. bandits )
- FIXED: Slowdown with large numbers of characters testing for interrupts, caused by round trips to and from Lua system code
UI/UX
- added loading screen.
- Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Added debug messages to try and catch more save game issues
- Q and E now rotate the camera left and right
- SHIFT-Click now places multiple modules at once.
- clicking workshop icons in workshop window now zooms to workshop location
- FIXED: work crew panel slowdown, take II (the work crew UI should not slow down the game anymore)
- FIXED: colonist panel slowdown (related to above)
- FIXED: building grid disappears when switching between two building types
- FIXED: “Show all commodities” filter now toggles to “Hide All Commodities” as well
- FIXED: UI gets cut off in work party menu switching from all workers to military sometimes
- Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
Other Art
- dust particles effects made more dusty
- fix-up pass through particle effects done
HELLO
Have fun and let us know through our portal or forum if anything explodes that shouldn’t explode!
“colonists would beat up dead bandits, calling it a “melee
counterattack””
This only seems fair to me. Surely the best time to administer a “melee counterattack” to an opponent, it’s when they are unconcious/incapacitated/dead? And the best place to administer it is right in the voonerables.
Voonerables. Ha!
Are there plans for colonists to eventually move in more than the eight cardinal directions in the future?
What, like up and down? Or perhaps into and out of /Other Dimensions/? …
… come to think of it, I shouldn’t answer your question.
More along the lines of 360 degree movement. Its rather understandable since these are early days and it would be a cosmetic thing, but the limited directions they can walk in makes them look somewhat robotic whenever they change direction. Its always a sudden about-face rather than a continuous turn.
Speaking as someone who’s experimented with pathfinding AI before, operating in all directions is hard! That said, I did get an algorithm to make that happen. Though the improvement almost certainly increased overhead.
Let me preface this by stating that the basic AI I was using was based off JPS, an improvement of A* that uses graph pruning to reduce all nodes to locations where a change in direction might be needed. It works off eight-directional movement.
Anyway, the way I got the units to move along more directions was to have each node in the path check an arbitrary number of its neighbors to see if A) that neighbor was not already adjacent to it and B) run a simple math-based line-of-sight check to see if any obstacles were between the two nodes. If both were true, the nodes between the two were pruned.
I didn’t spend any time refining the code so there were some buggy exceptions, but in many cases it did result in more natural-looking movement.
But, I don’t think it has anything to do with making the characters turn more naturally as you say. That’s really an animation thing more than pathfinding.
Er… I mean if there WEREN’T any obstacles in the way. Of course.
Understood. Cheers for taking the time to help me understand how these things work!
The game had eating disorders.