2015: The Year In Review Clockwork Empires Style

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? We’ve released a major update each month – and periodic experimental patches to boot. Clockwork Empire has progressed steadily through development!

So let us take a moment this holiday season to reflect upon the changes of the last twelve months.

How, you ask? Why, through the power of vaguely consolidated changelogs! To soften the blow of an immense wall of text which is perhaps rewarding mostly to the development team, let’s first revue the promo art from January to December of 2015!

January

Here’s the last illustration where Joseph did the foreground characters and I did the background (which had been how the operation was run for these up ’til this one). There’s a noticeably characteristic style to each, though Joseph did a fantastic job integrating with my style using reference from concept art and all Dredmor illustration. Our efforts combined let us put a lot of detail into these illustrations. All the little sub-scenes here just make me smile. Especially that slightly deranged fellow with the crate of grenades.

February

I definitely went overboard with foliage rendering in this one. (I am, however, pleased with the pet beetle.) — and heck, I still dig the overall vibe and suggested narrative here.

As discussed, uh, in some previous blog post from the last year, the effort invested in the illustrations really comes down to is time — do I have time to do a sketch and composition pass before proceeding to full render? Generally, no. Does every hour put into these illustrations directly remove time that could be spent working on the game proper? Absolutely, yes.

So gotta get it right the first time. Doing it live and all that. Such restriction forces one to focus on what is important and to make decisions which matter. And such, perhaps, is the theme of the progression through the year of these promo illustrations – a continued focus on getting the job done as efficiently as possible (allowing for the obligatory indulgence that makes it work doing).

March

The suggestion that the player is double-dealing under the Empire’s nose is really appealing to me. (Plus it’s Historically Accurate! Just have a read about basically any colony anywhere and see what a mess of incompetence and corruption everything tended to be!) And this is certainly a continuation of over-indulgence in foliage rendering, but that’s just how I roll.

April

I put way too many characters into this one and regretted how much work it turned out to be. They are, however, rather delightful in my opinion. And I think Atlas Ironcog is particularly wonderful in a cheery Victorian blustering over-masculine sort of way.

(Ugh, and I redraw his arms so many times. Still not happy – but work must go on!)

May

Here I thought, man, we’ve portrayed so much conflict in these things, why not some love? Strongman/bandit, NCO/labourer, labourer/Vicar, man/fishman; it’s all good! We don’t judge.

Side-note: This was art was originally going to star Atlas Ironcog making out with a variety of figures. We figured this might do the character some disservice and lead to some questions of just what was going on in the game, so held back.

Side-note #2: Basing promotional art on hugging is not, it turns out, a hugely successful strategy. Gamers don’t like hugs!

June

Ah, now this one here is a recycle of some Joseph promotional art from quite a while back – no work from yours truly at all! (Except, perhaps, to balance the shade curves a little better.) Gives me more time to work on the game, which is good.

(Side-story: We used this art as the basis for banners for our March 2014 promotional push, but I made the shading too dark. The banners showed up at GDC and I’m like oh, crap, these aren’t going to show up well on camera. And they didn’t. But live and learn.)

July

Making a map take up a large portion of the space let me really cheese out on this; good timer-saver, that. I did, however, quite enjoy rendering the palm forest in the background.

August

For whatever reason I thought that the theme of smashing beetles would be brilliant. And drawing bubbles, I guess? Mundane-chic and all that. Turns out people don’t like mundane chic, much like hugs. Eldritch Horror always plays way better to the crowd. I suppose that is what people show up to Clockwork Empires for, isn’t it.

September

After the previous months, as said, it was decided that eldritch themes speak better to our particular audience.

I do rather enjoy the hidden symbols in this one. And the uncertain loyalty of the Fishperson is nice.

October

Here I was like, hey, it’s October, let’s go dark. So: Everyone’s dead! Almost everyone, anyway. And, of course, Azathoth was fun to draw – it really was a lot like doing foliage, a sort of meditative rendering of variations of the same form and colour with slight differences, almost fractal. As unknowable cosmic horrors are.

(Note also the suggestion of classical memento mori themes in the rotting fruit.)

November

Admission: I based on the background’s colour scheme on a screenshot of Monkey Island 1’s forest maze sequence. I regret nothing! I love Monkey Island! Skeletons are a pain to draw because they have too many little bones!

December

Original title “The Paperwork Must Go On” but I figured that “The Bureaucracy” could refer both to the institution and the paperwork itself, so it worked on at least two levels.

Quite happen with how quickly this one came together and, man, those quills eh?

(Note also my use of bright orange backlighting – also used in the original Dredmor splash background! This goes back further, too – back in art school I had a tube of this amazing bright-orange gouache that I used far more often than was properly necessary.)

You made it! It’s time for an enormous changelog!

Do note that this isn’t really meant to be read, it’s more about taking in the sheer scale of the thing. Just scroll down and take it in.

Changelogs for all of 2015

January 2015

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

February 2015

THE ENGINE / SCRIPTING

CPU side optimization to render backend; removed unnecessary matrix calculations etc
implemented brushfire search for moving characters into civilization
added fog of war
added internal Lua script debugging tool (for internal use only)
FIXED: save games do not load correctly (or, amusingly, save correctly, even though they seem to) on machines with Unicode path names
FIXED: various stockpile issues with load/save and replay
FIXED: game crashes in credits menu on OS X
FIXED: Crash when a job has a parent assignment, but the assignment doesn’t have a job as a child

HUMAN CHARACTERS

started implementing new madness/cult systems
balance: hunger time / crop growth time doubled
criminals immigrants have a chance to want to start a cult
criminals sent to your colony may now be slightly mad
colonists should no longer spawn in water at gamestart
added “drink curative” for curing madness (colonist will drink Laudanum or Sulphur Tonic to relieve maddening thoughts)
balance: reduced desire to drink booze across the board because it was impossible to maintain stocks
UI: work crew display now really displays # of idle work parties, not # of active work parties
drinking laudanum has a small chance of turning a character into a Laudanum Fiend
cults will announce their name in ticker upon formation
cults will announce new members to game ticker
cults will do recruitment at night, and only one initiation per night max
cultists who witness an occult ritual will be made happy
added alert upon cult formation
studying eldritch artifacts may increase madness and/or inspire cults
people invited to a cult will decide whether to join or not based on traits, madness, and relationship w/ cult leader
cultists who are invited to join another cult will become offended
cultists who are invited to join a cult they’re not in will become offended
Extremely long character family names shortened for legibility
FIXED: adding/removing workers to/from workcrews with special uniforms now properly adds and removes said uniform as appropriate
FIXED: sleeping inside on floor no longer creates memory for sleeping outside on ground
airdrop crate falling on people will no longer cause memories for “witnessed combat”
FIXED: Naturalists will show up and just do naturalist stuff rather than default workcrew stuff
balance: made return to civilization requirements a little less steep (now that civ works better)
FIXED: exploration beacons (were disappearing instantly)
made “butcher fishperson corpse” have way less range and be a less desirable source of food
beginning of rebalance of social jobs (gossip, emotive idles, etc)
added of new memories which tend the characters toward positive moods to offset external effects.
miscellaneous cleanup of memory database
instances of “Fear” changed to “Fearful” because grammar
added some more character names
changes to feeling tired and hungry for balance
changes to upper_class jobs to make them less… annoying, but just a little bit
inspect painting converted to a “social” job and modified accordingly
added memory for discovering a weird artifact
shortened text on some food memories

COMBAT & MILITARY

guns now require reloading
added ability to upgrade pistols to revolvers (which can fire more times before reloading)
all combat code rewritten to use state machine tiers to determine combat operations
FIXED: animals fighting animals will no longer trigger combat music
FIXED: bandits and fishpeople have to reload guns now, for real
characters will load their guns upon gamestart
added reload sounds
FIXED: ranged attacks will self-abort (then character will re-evaluate jobs) if target gets too far away (to stop endless retarget/follow cycle)
balance: increased damage of ranged weapons due to need to reload

NON-HUMAN CHARACTERS (ANIMALS, MONSTERS, VEHICLES)

added beetles & scintillating beetles for real (and made them give only one beetle steak)
fishpeople menacing should spam less alerts
balance: pushed bandit and fish attacks back to day 2 (as they’d appear in night 1, which is a bit soon)
FIXED: animal meat ownership (no more running into the woods to collect meat from animals killed by animals)
FIXED: bandit corpses no longer turn crops into clawbulbs (they’re mundane beings)
Foxes will now eat delicious, delicious gibs.
Real simple first pass on burrowing beetles.
FIXED: fishpeople using Wander (human) job

BUILDINGS & BUILDING CREATION

implemented real building material cost system
added “upgrade pistol to revolver” job
FIXED: standing orders of glass panes broken
added coal icons to smelting job tooltips (because smelting takes a carbon source now)
FIXED: an office w/ dead overseer displayed an alert with incorrect title text
balance: added more building materials to gamestart
added Stone/Brick/Iron Kilns for Charcoal & Ceramics, removed “Industrial Kiln”
FIXED: make gunpowder job & arsenal jobs in general
beds can be broken by overuse (but don’t explode)
FIXED: farm tiles becoming unfarmable after being destroyed by animals / other damage
added fuel requirement to smelting jobs (use charcoal, coal, or peat)
FIXED: mineshafts should no longer eat workers when you unassign them from the mine
FIXED: smelters should no longer play burning animation when not in use
made sugarloaf a “preserved food”
removing random nature objects (“clearables”) is now in the construction job category rather than the farming job category
buildings will automatically remove nature objects they’re built over
workshop jobs limited to range 100 & will use closest commodity rather than any (much improved efficiency, safety)
made science and chapel jobs less desirable at night
FIXED: crash when creating a stockpile and mousing over a building inadvertently when doing so
FIXED: disappearing decor modules

BIOMES & TERRAIN

balance: made stone nodes provide more stone
balance: made clay node clusters more numerous
balance: made trees take longer to chop down but give more timber
balance: made trees take way longer to chop (even longer!)
FIXED: problems with giving orders to remove saplings (and tree commands in general * received cleanup)
balance: adjusted tropical forest spawns slightly (more timber, fewer coconuts)
FIXED: gray box trees

EVENTS / METAGAME / OVERWORLD

“call favour” event won’t appear unless you have enough prestige to do anything with it
FIXED: calling construction materials via favour was broken
FIXED: airdrop crates will no longer drop into buildings (and contents of airdrop crates won’t drop into buildings either)
balance: made criminal vicars spawn less often
tweaked event timing so events are more likely not to trigger at the same time
balance: bandit attacks ramp up more slowly over time, won’t spawn armoured bandit in first few days, will never be more than one attack per day and they won’t spawn next to colony, will tend to attack from land
balance: fishpeople attacks ramp up more slowly over time, won’t see major attack in first few days, will never be more than one attack per day and they won’t spawn next to colony, will tend to attack from sea

MULTIPLAYER

(a bunch of backend work got done but you can’t see it yet! Details are in the development report.)

MUSIC & SOUND

FIXED: game immediately goes from battle music playing to pegging the discovery music and not moving
Added looping audio emitters

UI/UX

updated the starting tutorial slightly
added the first few contextual tutorial events (these will appear if you do not prematurely end the starting tutorial)
characters have nametags (can be toggled using button at top of screen)
artifact discovery now gives discoverers name in ticker
position of event window remembered between events
FIXED: some zoom-to alerts didn’t zoom-to
added madness/cult contextual tutorial
cleaned up the starting tutorial infodump now that we have some contextual tutorials
Colonists list now contains mood icons
Useful Icons appear above buildings when they need overseers, or have run out of jobs to do.
informative icons in Character Info window should update more often
FIXED: player will no longer receive notification if a fishperson hurts a bandit
added icon for dead fishperson, revolver; hooked up more variety to combat-related memories
module placement code improved
SHIFT-click now preserves module rotation
Moving a wall placed module directly up to a building, without actually moving your mouse into the building, correctly attaches it
Modules now display RED when not attached to a building and BLUE when they are. (This will be expanded upon later…)
FIXED: rotating a module will occasionally get stuck for no good reason.
minor edits to some alert strings for clarity.
modules will now send a ticker message when completed
FIXED: paragraph rendering UI widgets now support newlines
“building materials to be dropped off now show in tooltip
Crop Commodity Icon now displays in farm window
Use better button art for event window, farm window

March 2015

THE ENGINE

optimization: removed unnecessary matrix calculations from renderer backend
optimization: Rewrote all code for handling of static props to use flat arrays for cache efficiency
FIXED: zone decals (farms, graveyards, roads, ???) now correctly render in screen space as volumetric decals

HUMAN CHARACTERS

Added middle-class character skills:
- resource collection
- carpentry
- smithing
- cooking
- science
- farming
- construction & repair
added a skill progression system (though job time reduction based on skill level is not yet fully implemented – it’s on workshop jobs, resource collection, and construction & repair so far.)
related: a whole mess of profession-specific character models have been hooked up (these change based on workcrew overseer’s primary skill)
optimization: characters won’t attempt to fulfill dependencies they don’t need (stowing tools when they don’t need to, fleeing from monsters when none are around, etc.)
FIXED: invite to cult feedback said it was trying to form a new cult (+ made text description more informative)
cults: if a cult doesn’t have a shrine and has >= 3 members, it will attempt to build a shrine
colonists will now be woken up by gunshots, melee fighting, and explosions based on distance from source of sound (rather than damage target)
“embrace eldritch visions” action now plays a variety of animations
weighted down the appeal of “admire painting/fine machinery/implements of science” jobs
medicinals (Laudanum, Sulphur Tonic) have a chance to remove the desire to form a cult from maddened colonists
FIXED: colonists inspired to start a cult already in a cult won’t start a new cult
cults: cult will select most hardcore member to be a new leader if their old leader dies
cults: a cult will end if all members are dead
cults: cultists will attempt to worship at cult shrines each night
cults: non-cultists witnessing cult worship will become upset; cultists witnessing cult worship will become happy
cults: cultists will become irrationally happy if they do any sort of cult things
cults: a colonist’s religion description string will update if they join a cult (as minion or leader)
cults: occult murder re-activated; occult murderers won’t flee from justice (they serve a higher law)
cults: a cult will request permission to build a shrine the first time, allowing player to tolerate or persecute cult shrines
cults: shrines can be destroyed by any damage source & cultists will be angered if their shrine is destroyed (by any means)
added more character names (call me Ishmael)
FIXED: stockpile hauling jobs utility would tank due to distance calculation

COMBAT & MILITARY

optimization: improved speed of time soldiers spend checking alarm queries
optimization: improved speed of time spent checking for hostiles
balance: doubled reload time for characters w/o military training
made fishguns unusable by humans (because they’re both terrible and would ruin the gun economy)
soldiers will attack cult shrines if policy is set to persecute cults

NON-HUMAN CHARACTERS (ANIMALS, MONSTERS, VEHICLES)

overhaul of bandits in-progress (and yes, bandits technically fall under the “monsters” category)
- improved feedback for various decisions made by bandits (setting up camp, attacking player)
- bandits will form gangs (like workcrews, but for crime!); bandit gangs get their own names
bandit combat behaviour improved (won’t ignore gunfire to steal stuff, usually; entire gang will retreat if > 50% of squad is fleeing, etc.)
balance: made fishpeople less excited about attacking gabions
polished minor issues with fox pack-hunting behaviour

BUILDINGS & BUILDING CREATION

colonists using a stockpile will now always prefer the closet stockpile square
FIXED: characters would drop tools in any old stockpile
FIXED: game would crash sometimes when cancelling an assignment, cancelling jobs, and picking up a job that was cancelled on the same frame
balance: increased interrupt value of “repair module” and “gather building materials for repairing module”
balance: doubled output of farms, halved hunger/starvation time
added correct description to Chicha (an alcoholic beverage brewed from maize!)
FIXED: chalkboards now have a 1×3 footprint
the macroscope is no longer backwards
FIXED: modules not individually selectable after save/load
FIXED: modules sometimes not getting correct tooltips selected and still always displaying module costs
FIXED: modules not having correct bounding box set in object grid after save/load
FIXED: misspelling of “fibrous” in Flax Straw description
combined the Refinery, Arsenal, and Metalworks into the Metalworks building
added “Upgrade Musket To Carbine” job; basic single-shot weapons (musket, pistol) can now be upgraded to multi-shot weapons

MULTIPLAYER

work on determinism
work on tools to debug determinism

EVENTS, METAGAME, & THE OVERWORLD

balance: criminal favour gives random 1-3 criminals rather than always 3
balance: redcoats favour gives one fewer soldiers
added a number of new events based on population and traits, as well as a fun bonus one for mining
allowing too many cult shrines to be built may trigger an investigation
added “how to use a workshop” contextual tutorial
“Research Family Tree” event now has consequences
“Lord Palmerstoke’s Science Crate” event has been completely revamped and is ridiculous
“Ominous Dreams” event now actually fires and adds madness to its victim
FIXED: events w/o consequences (ie. many new memories made in response to player decisions)
balance: made supply drop really rare & take a long time

UI/UX

added icon for bottle of rum
added descriptive text of madness level to character info panel
shortened tutorial tooltips (they were overflowing their background)
added game website to title menu just because
added sound effects to a lot of UI elements
added line placer for clicking and dragging out gabions and other rows of elements
added feedback for building demolition orders (clicking the button now closes the UI, reopening it shows an alert that it’s slated for removal)
added new assignment beacon system for resource collection jobs
added “assignment zones “drawn around new assignment beacon areas when their control icon is moused over
added contact note on launcher
revised some icons to show ceramics kilns vs. smelter modules
finished the graveyard icon, finally

Have fun and let us (but not the Ministry) know through our portal or forum if anything goes wrong!

HOTFIX 37A

Oh hey, there’s a hotfix on Steam as of March 20, it does this:

FIXED: error in jobs/assignments which could break jobs system
FIXED: game crash when saving a job system thus broken

These are good things to have fixed. Carry on!

April 2015

The Engine

added flag to executable that should (hopefully) automatically select NVIDIA cards on Multi GPU (Optimus) laptops
FIXED: beacon/gabion/etc. placers now show up again

Human Characters

sight radius is lowered at night
Naturalists get increased sight radius
rebalanced idle/wander/gossip weighting
added more seed memories to characters upon spawn – should make combat morale/behaviour more stable for recent immigrants
Small grammar fix to memories while sleeping in a bed
angry citizens may occasionally smash a commodity in anger.
cultists will attempt to preach The Occult (and spread madness)
balance: higher class characters are much more persuasive when recruiting characters of lower classes for cults (class-relevant traits ie Communist also apply to this logic)
added ability to lose a friend (& associated sad memory)
added concept of rivals/enemies to characters (framework only)
added various means for cultists to decide to leave their cult
cleaned up cult leader death & selection (will end cult if no one is maddened enough to lead)
added more character names
characters can have origin stories related to their traits and/or class (and added many new possibilities)
added a floating starvation warning icon to starving characters
FIXED: starvation floaty icon will not remain over dead people
added dress version of “freak out” animation
Naturalists will go to any explore beacons, no matter how far away they are
colonists can tell what class of bed they are sleeping in, and have different memories depending on the quality of bed relative to their social class
butchering fishpeople creeps out (most) colonists
added Vicar job to deprogram cult members
gossip can no longer be interrupted for more gossip (should fix some of the weird socialization pileups)
tools can now be despawned in-place via Magical Stowing rather than requiring walking to a drop position and performing full animation
FIXED: issue in civilization calculation that caused erratic “return to civilization” behaviors
FIXED: various people getting items stuck in their hands
FIXED: occasionally grabbing a social job if you had non-social work you could be doing
FIXED: some nonsense with the job mailbox system
FIXED: broken nametags (& disappearing nametags on load)
FIXED: military characters will no longer use specially skilled civilian outfits if overseer has skill
FIXED: characters assigned uniform via office job should stick to those uniforms correctly
FIXED: militia NCOs no longer revert to civilian form if they have skills
colonists will now be slightly happier eating food in chairs rather than standing

Combat & Military

added an emote when military decides to retreat due to low morale
added new military idle: Stand at attention
alarm waypoints will self-delete if no enemies nearby (military should stop responding to alarms after menacing enemy is killed)
soldiers will grab gun instead of fleeing if both enemy AND weapon is in range and morale is high
tweaked how reloading animation was set so civilians who have a very long reload time don’t look like they’re idling
successfully retreating from enemies will make people … well, not happy really, but slightly less upset at least.
FIXED: militia was confused about what jobs to take in some cases
FIXED: invisible soldiers
FIXED: characters ending up with 2, 3, 4 or more guns fused onto their hands
added morale feedback to character panel (as it pertains to not fleeing from combat)

Non-Human Characters

FIXED: stuff getting really weird with corpses (particularly fishpeople corpses) after they’re moved to another position
FIXED: Bandits actually respect truce now!
FIXED: bandit drop/flee cycle

Economy & Buildings

added airship signalling mast to control airdrop position (only for supply drop right now)
flatten terrain job is now in “construction” job category ( & overseers can now take flatten terrain job)
gabion construction changed to a civilian job
farming time now correctly uses farming skill
standalone module construction / deconstruction uses tools & ‘construction’ skill
FIXED: Improved understanding of who owns what meat.
Work crew job filters now automatically flipped to “off” when a work crew is assigned to a workshop (except hauling). They can be manually re-enabled to allow work crews to work outside the workshop
farming: tweaked values for prioritizing the maintenance of existing plants over planting of new ones and removal of dead ones
FIXED: characters getting stuck in Ghost Modules
framework for containers, smart objects

Biomes & Terrain

balance: no (live) fishpeople should appear in (immediate) vicinity of a tropical gamestart
added clay & stone near-ish to starting spots

Events, Metagame, and the Overworld

implemented seven dwarves mode ’cause yolo
balance: reduced starting resources
added guaranteed muskets at game-start
all events now have a default choice “timeout” so will eventually proceed whether or not you react to them
attached all airdrop & immigration events to airdropmast, if player has one active
“Population Below 5” bailout changed to “Population Below 3” bailout because the previous system encouraged murdering people for free bonus civilians
Fixed script error in “Bandits Offer Plunder” event
Clarified effect in flavor text of in “Ominous Dreams” event
“Colonist finds overlooked supplies” event has ticker text for items recieved and other minor improvements
Small optimizations in a few events
redcoats favour NCO now always starts with a pistol
FIXED: an error in “Research Family Tree” event
events that give randomized items (plunder, etc) now tell you exactly what you got in the ticker
added event for bandit to defect to player’s colony
new event: Hale and Hearty colonist overcomes affliction
new prestige favour: Food shipment
new event: Gain rewards for hitting certain population levels
added event to give 1 prestige a day for surviving
new event: doing paperwork reveals extra supplies that weren’t recorded!
new event: commoners feel understood by sympathetic aristocrat
FIXED: Dead people will no longer send ministry investigators after you. (Or initiate any other events)
FIXED: non-deleting science crates (+ added fun icons to ticker reports for science crates)
balance: increased bandit event timers
FIXED: isDay wasn’t set to true on first day!

Multiplayer

backend for basic Steam integration (initiating multiplayer, joining a game from friends lists, Steam P2P communication)
proper multiplayer initiation
deterministic network world building
in-game determinism checking tools
non-deterministic ‘find nearby location

Music & Sound

added music cues to events and nightfall

UI/UX

added framework for cute progress bars for jobs! (first case: tree chopping)
added progress bars to farming
added progress bars to construction jobs
added new Daniel Nametag Zoom System
FIXED: the contextual module tutorial appearing more than once
upgraded the old food icon to not be all pixelated (THANKS CHRIS)
changing around size of Work Crew subpanels for more efficient use of space (in progress)
FIXED: slowdown in jobs menu with lots of gabion jobs
UI: workshop button removed from work crew job filters (assignment to workshop implies workshop filter active)
FIXED: pumpkin and cabbage stew icons! And yellowcup fungus bushel. And fixed some incorrect smelter icons
removing a farm now closes its control window if it was open
memories now use specified iconSkin strings (more icons possible for memories; will fix some invisible memories)
FIXED: laudanum (and other drinks?!) not showing up in commodities window
tutorial: updated refining tutorial to reference Metalworks as place to refine ore

May 2015

The Engine

autosaves are in, set to autosave every 10 minutes.
autosave now alternates between two files (stability improvement)
fixed some capitalization issues (linux compatibility)
removed water vertical motion (for now, ominously)
FIXED: buffer overflow crash in fog of war
FIXED: crashes when characters are deleted with emotions
FIXED: the invisible shadows of stacked objects will render after saving and loading a game
FIXED: construction costs for buildings do not increment after saving and loading a game
FIXED: cannot demolish buildings after saving and loading a game
FIXED: items occasionally turn blue
FIXED: crash bug when occasionally placing a module with SHIFT-CLICK mode

Human Characters

added first iteration of a new hunger system aka “the cascading cannibalism decision tree”
added new sleep system (day 1: sleep in bed, day 2: sleep on floor, day 3: sleep on ground)
balance: altered calculation of colonists’ willingness to take part in cannibalism
added new social jobs: “inspect food, inspect body, cower inside building”
social jobs have been rebalanced. (Many more are planned, as there is still a relatively small number of available options to characters until buildings are constructed & economy started.)
rewrote all friendship and rivalry-ship code to be stored in C++; added new requirements for checking if somebody is a friend or rival before doing something to them (enables lots of new (anti)social behaviours)
characters now use walk animations appropriate to their mood
added several new social jobs that allow characters to interact with each other (slap someone else, hug, etc)
characters can now punch each other and cause tantrum spirals of punching (and this is almost certainly under- or over-tuned)
fixed typos in laudanum-themed character history string
if really hungry, people will attack animals for their meat
if really hungry and mad/has certain traits, people will attack people for their meat
frontier justice is now only auto-applied AFTER a murderer hits someone with a weapon, not before
added terrible memories for very hungry/starving people
eating raw_meat now requires a higher level of hunger than other raw_foods
some traits are now restricted to certain social classes
fixed some cult prefix string typos
fixed minor typo in a hunger memory
added “Suck up to superior” job
added “Cower inside” job
added “Sleep due to sadness” job
added “Drink due to sadness” job
fixed lots of memory icons
minor fixes to Vicar jobs
colonists will now drop tools/guns when profession is switched (conscription/deconscription, assignment to laboratory, etc)
FIXED: labourers whose models changed cannot be selected (that is to say, they can now be selected)
FIXED: some memories not showing up correctly on bandits who joined your colony
FIXED some broken cult behaviour
FIXED: walk_to_nearest_position throwing a script error when the item being walked to is lost or destroyed
FIXED: minor nerve-stapling bug
FIXED: an insidious drop_item scripterror
FIXED: Corpses still wanted to be buried even after they were chopped up & eaten
FIXED: hunger/tiredness values in gossip topic calculation

Scripting System

(determinism stuff related to multiplayer, see that section instead)

Combat & Military

hooked up new ‘unskilled reload’ animation
fishpeople weapons now properly delete themselves when dropped
balance: greatly reduced gabion construction time
FIXED: long reload anim wasn’t properly set on militia
FIXED: a number of military stalling issues and incorrect behaviours

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

implemented big Fishpeople overhaul + lots of new content for Fishpeople (in-progress)
official policy toward fishpeople can be set in response to interaction events/crises
fishpeople now spawn in groups with goals/missions that they will attempt to fulfill (lots of infrastructure done for this)
fishpeople & colonists can interact in various peaceful ways if policy is friendly (note: this is far from feature complete)
colonists can attempt to non-violently intimidate fishpeople (and vice versa)
added fishpeople scout mission/event
added fishpeople beach patrol mission/event
added fishpeople friendly envoy mission/event
added fishpeople property destruction policy event
added fishpeople hassling crisis event
added fishpeople vandalism crisis event
added fishpeople assault crisis event
fishpeople combat logic improved
balance: replaced fishpeople in tropics w/ Deathwurms (note: deathwurm attack anim needs tweaking)
balance: boosted hp and aggressiveness of Deathwurms
changed armoured hit sound on animals (so it doesn’t sound like metal)

Buildings & Building Creation

Added deletion of individual models
Moving a module to an invalid location (say, taking a door and dragging it off into space) will now snap the module back to its original location and parent and not move it.
FIXED: handful of memory corruption bugs when moving modules
FIXED: cannot demolish the same house multiple times
FIXED: script error on building demolition (multiple script errors, really)
FIXED painting scripterror

Economy & Logistics

containers and stacking: stacks can now be created, and colonists will attempt to move things into stacks and then organize their stacks in stockpiles. Colonists w ll now also produce stacks of goods as the output of some workshop processes
stacked commodities now respect stockpile filters
moved a bunch of container and stack code to C++ from Lua (perfomance should be improved)
containers and stacks can now be merged by characters
balance: doubled output for cooked food based on farmed or foraged ingredients
balance: tripled output for cooked food based on hunted ingredients
balance: brick-making should actually make a bunch of bricks because wow, did we ever need a lot of them.
surface mining jobs are now a single job that selects the correct tool rather than two jobs, one for each tool
rewrote the code for handling jobs in assignments: we now actually store the jobs that are being done on an assignment on the assignment object, rather than just trying to add or subtract them. Consequently, this means that the bookkeeping of such jobs is accurate. The hope is that this fixes the bug where people will get stuck in an assignment, but we’ll see. (At the very least, it should give us more information.)
FIXED: “remove spoiled crops” now correctly given lower priority than “tend crops”.
FIXED: crash saving game after aborting a job targeting a stockpile object or container due to item being lost or misplaced

Biomes & Terrain

Vexing plateaus should no longer cut off player’s colonists from the rest of the world. Usually.

Events, Metagame, and The Overworld

FIXED: Incredibly generous bandits have been taught how to be greedy and will no longer give you their stuff every 8 seconds
FIXED error in “bandit wants to join colony”
Communists are now upset by upper class sympathy
New Prestige Favor: “Airship overflight”
Fixed bug with “ominous dreams” event
fixed typos in Bandit spawn event & tutorial
FIXED: memory leaks in events
FIXED: error in upper class sympathy event
FIXED: errors in ministry investigation event tree
accepting criminal goods may trigger an investigation
“Doomed” characters now much more doomed
added some defensive checks to avoid crashy bandit events if bandits are killed before the dialog is triggered by the player

Multiplayer

networking: restored engine determinism (with determinism safe script math)
networking: fixed cross platform world building (Mac and PC)
networking: fixed maximum message size problem when using Steam
networking: introduced command buffering to hide networking latency (and allowed clients that were behind to speed up slightly to catch up)

Music & Sound

day-night music transition will now start when the visual transition starts instead of when it ends
music now fades out Discovery/Productivity Tracks at night (Battle, Tragedy and Insanity are still things that can happen at night.)

UI/UX

FIXED: removal of factions from UI now works
UI: added highlight showing currently displayed faction to Factions Menu
Options menu is back, but the options which weren’t being used/tested properly have been removed. Currently only allows on/off for music and for autosaves.
emotes for conversations are back, but are now limited based on zoom level. (We’ll probably put in a keyboard command to disable all of these for screenshots)
FIXED: size of work crew portraits in work party UI now has no blank space
FIXED: selection of trees and other static props is now triangle-accurate
Clicking a module in the module placer mode now brings up a choice: move the module, or delete it. Modules that are built cannot be moved, and can only be deleted.
added “need_sleep” and “explosion” icons, redrew “propeller” icon.
selected objects in an assignment beacon now tint blue, highlight
mood icon now correctly displays character’s mood in character info panel
added “morale” and “sanity” icons to character info panel
(deep overhaul of fundamental UI system in-progress)

June 2015

THE ENGINE

various stability improvements!
windows: Screenshots are now saved into My Documents\Gaslamp Games\Clockwork Empires.

HUMAN CHARACTERS

butchered humans will now leave a skeleton behind
cults now form with a specific object of worship (“theme”) based on eldritch interactions & personality of cult leader
added a bunch of new actions for colonists experiencing Madness
morbid colonists are fascinated rather than horrified by fishpeople butchering humans
yield added to butcher corpse jobs (so they don’t get cancelled forever in certain cases)
FIXED: scripterror in “hearExclamation”
FIXED: scripterror when cult leader died under certain circumstances
FIXED: upper class should no longer bury corpses (it’s beneath them)
FIXED: confessions are no longer a hollow charade
FIXED: vicars no longer preach from unfinished altars
FIXED: “sleep due to sadness” now requires a character actually be sad (AND is now weighted correctly)
FIXED: all lower-class colonists are correctly auto-placed in workcrews after immigration
FIXED cults with no name will no longer be formed (39C)
FIXED: “Butcher Human Corpse” job should no longer be confused between Fishpeople & Human version (this led to problems)
FIXED: colonists don’t recognize airdropped item stacks as valid items

SCRIPTING SYSTEM

FIXED: crash in gameRequireToolUses if user not holding a tool
FIXED: crash trying to set up a nuked locked job instance

COMBAT & MILITARY

balance: slightly adjusted morale threshold for retreat jobs for military trained soldiers vs. untrained

NON-HUMAN CHARACTERS (ANIMALS, MONSTERS, VEHICLES)

added Obeliskian horrors (in-progress)
added 3 foreign factions: Stahlmark, Republique, Novorus
added foreign military characters, soldiers + NCOs
added foreign military squads w/ mission logic
bandits will now fight back against hostile animals
fishpeople leaders now wear hats
fishpeople will now eat dead bandits
butchered bandits will turn into skeletons
balance: reduced # of tents that bandits spawn with
balance: adjusted Foreign Military mission pathing to be less boring
FIXED: Stahlmarkians given correct uniforms
FIXED: foreign military units now reload like properly trained soldiers
FIXED: error when fishpeople groups are wiped out
FIXED: foreign military will properly retaliate against hostile animals & obeliskians
FIXED: allied military soldiers immediately bayonet each other upon arriving in colony
FIXED: friendly fishpeople will no longer attack your gabions for no good reason
FIXED: foreign military & bandit weapons will no longer show up in commodities window
FIXED: conscripted Vicars will no longer do vicar stuff
FIXED: fishpeople now spawn correctly with gifts/weapons depending on group’s mission (39D)

BUILDINGS & BUILDING CREATION

added volumetric blueprints
workshops: All workshop logic completely rewritten from scratch. Workshops are now evaluated as part of the C++ job loop; we create a workshop assignment when/if we can do the job, and we will now always actually obey the ordering in which jobs are given to the workshop by the user.
mineshafts will now output ore based on what oreNode clusters were nearby (mining the surface nodes doesn’t affect the underground ore)
balance: weighted mine output slightly more toward ores, if available
FIXED: smoke now consistently turns off when an oven is complete or a module has finished production
FIXED: a second, totally different issue with oven smoking not finishing; this time after a load and save
FIXED: demolishing a farm zone did not correctly clear the farm assignment
FIXED: stockpile deletion crash
FIXED: Brewery foundation texture set to bricks
FIXED: Beetle steaks now produce correct number of cooked output
FIXED: various issues when deleting a stockpile, including crashing
FIXED: workshop owners will set bad/good workshop names again depending on their madness

ECONOMY & LOGISTICS

general overhaul of jobs code for stability & optimization
also overhauled assignment system over to use flat arrays (this makes everything more stable, better, faster, stronger)
surface ore nodes will leave a mineralogical survey beacon which can be surveyed by a Naturalist to tell you what product it will output (this is pretty direct right now)
made ingot textures shinier
farms now output harvest in stack rather than two individual units
(most) starting items will now arrive pre-stacked
balance: moved “Make Gunpowder” from Metalworks to Chemist
balance: when a module breaks, it should become inoperative immediately rather than having an intermediate broken but still working state.
balance: tripled beer production (huzzah!)
balance: smithing forge now requires iron ingot rather than iron plate
balance: higher skill no longer changes amount produced in any workshop – just time to perform work
FIXED: memory leak when a job has a dependency which we later fail to do anything with
FIXED: game-side commodity count not being saved and loaded correctly (probably causing standing orders to go berserk)
FIXED: lingonberry preserves are now edible again
FIXED: workshop job counter not incrementing correctly for “Finish Production” jobs (in 39B)
FIXED: workshop job ordering buttons (in 39B)

BIOMES & TERRAIN

balance: Deathwurms on start position are now shoved to the side
balance: Deathwurms are now shoved much further
balance: Dearthwurm balance pass #3 – removed Deathwurms from tropical biome spawn (a handful are spawned via script now, well away from the start location)
FIXED: foragables (ie. Coconut Palms) can be cleared from any state of harvest

EVENTS, METAGAME, THE OVERWORLD

added foreign military intervention event to spawn foreign military squads
added “fishpeople butchered human” crisis event
fishperson crisis events will no longer fire if you’re hostile w/ fishpeople
bandit corpse decision event only fired if their bodies are in the bounds of your colony (near buildings & zones, basically)
colonists w/ certain traits can now object to fishpeople status quo & propose alternate policies
balance: fewer foreign troops will show up early in game (& now require it be daytime to arrive)
balance: immigration event has been revamped to reflect the value of colonists to the player
FIXED: scripterror in bandit joining colony event
FIXED: error in bandit_wants_to_join_colony
FIXED: some character events not firing
FIXED: various minor typos in events
FIXED: Script error during “Research Science Crate” event
FIXED: non-existent bandit gang attempts to give you stuff
FIXED: fishpeople marked for execution can’t trigger further crisis events
FIXED: incorrect ticker message sent when deciding to execute fishperson for assault

MUSIC & SOUND

animals can make more sounds now
made & implemented Obeliskian sounds
FIXED: some explosion sounds were only using default sound

UI/UX

workshop job currently being done is now displayed in the workshop panel
workshop output that the current work party will produce using the current equipment is now displayed in the workshop when mousing over the product
added icons for foreign flags & troops
added new icons for Xenophobe, Brutish traits
redrew Bucket of Raw Opium icon
some events will auto-zoom camera to their location (polishing in-progress)
FIXED: incorrect icon in recipe for Blunderbuss & broken icon for Musket
FIXED: various misspellings of words
FIXED: jobs not correctly removed from assignments in jobs UI window after saving and loading a game; can cause “jobs that are never completed”, “multiple people doing the same job”, etc.
FIXED: random autosave crash and/or memory corruption caused by machine expression timing error
FIXED: progress bars and nametags appearing through windows during gameplay
FIXED: emotions and speech bunch up when zoomed out, and all display at once when visible
FIXED: small typesetting errors in “wrapped text renderer” (putting a period by itself at the end of a newline, etc.)
… and the giant UI backend overall is almost done aside from some edge cases; we’re holding off making this available until after revision 40 so that we can ensure stability in the public branch.

July 2015

The Engine

moved occupancy, occupancy border, and a few other spatial maps to new unrolled pool linked list class (memory and speed improvements)
optimized all tests for detecting hostile agents and whether or not a character should raise an alarm or not
FIXED: save game won’t crash if you have more than eight thousand jobs (you should probably not have this many jobs)

Human Characters

characters now have desires
characters now have a record of their personal property
characters can now claim modules for their use (this is the start of the personal property system, though right now it’s still Communism; i.e. people will sleep in any bed, even a claimed one.)
mood penalties for characters going hungry have been increased.
mood penalties for background inter-character behavior have been decreased.
characters now forget negative memories of hunger if they eat, depending on how hungry they still are.
characters now appropriately forget memories due to drinking alcohol. Low concentrations remove less important memories, higher concentrations remove increasingly more important memories. (This will likely need balancing.)
added more names have been added to what will surely one day be the official unofficial Dickensian character generator
added “Prisoner” character type
all characters gained by prestige favours are now temporary and will depart after a certain number of days.
workers will wander near their overseer if idle during the day
cultists in a cult that worships a specific type of horror may now worship that horror if they see one
cultists in a fish cult will not hassle fishpeople because it goes against their religious beliefs
romantically inclined people will occasionally cry over graves.
optimized all tests for detecting hostile agents and whether or not a character should raise an alarm or not
balance: naturalist will prioritize mineralogical surveys & survey search range increased
balance: made colonists made less enthusiastic about Fishpeople hassling outside of civilization
FIXED: characters would stop animating when their model was changed due to skill
FIXED: some broken job requirements that locked maddened colonists into certain behaviour loops
FIXED: Naturalist will no longer avoid workshop duty if assigned to a workshop
FIXED: fishpeople hassling requires being in civilization
FIXED: sleeping people can no longer object to your policies
FIXED: characters will not make friends with themselves, either
FIXED: Colonists intending to hug fishpeople will no longer hug normal people. Just fishpeople.
FIXED: starvation icon not disappearing after people stop starving
FIXED: cultists who worship fishpeople will no longer flee from fishpeople (in non-hostile circumstances)
FIXED: favour naturalists should always properly do naturalist jobs. Always!

Combat & Military

soldiers without weapons and sufficient morale will use a knife or sabre or whatever they’re holding to fight in melee combat
balance: foreign troops stand up to combat better now
balance: lowered morale threshold for player soldiers to retreat (requires more negative morale to trigger retreat jobs)
FIXED: sabre used incorrect attack animation due to typo

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

bandits now walk from edge of map to set up camp rather than teleporting in
bandit camp size now corresponds to number of bandits in gang
bandit stealing logic made less dumb
performed animal job cleanup pass (should eliminate some instances of… weird behavior)
fishpeople will react (with alarm) to their friends receiving beatings/execution from colonists
fishpeople may become more aggressive if they find a fishperson corpse
neutral military scouts will now do survey action
groups doing attack/plunder missions will perform “search area” if they can’t find a target for attack/plunder
balance: Obeliskians made tougher
balance: made fishpeople slightly less enthusiastic about destroying your crops
balance: made humanoid combatants less enthusiastic about shooting fleeing targets
FIXED: various issues with agents carrying out missions freezing in place temporarily (mostly.)
FIXED: dead bandits can no longer be harvested by fishpeople for infinite longpork
FIXED: scripterror created by foreigner corpses
FIXED: various issues with despawned characters
FIXED: people’s heads popping off when you conscripted them into the colonial militia

Buildings & Building Creation

increased materials range on gabions
workshop missing overseer can now be given a reason other than “death”
added Naturalist’s Office (assign an overseer here to create a Naturalist)
balance: made mineshafts slightly cheaper (requires iron ingots rather than iron plates)
FIXED: broken modules should no longer be usable in workshops

Economy & Logistics

cleanup of stockpile handling code performed; prevents duplicate entries being put in the stockpile list
stockpile handling code optimization performed: do an early out from the job handling code once one goods job has been successfully evaluated
balance: musket is now cheaper
balance: pistol -> revolver upgrade is now cheaper
balance: landmine crafting output tripled
balance: food will no longer count towards The Empire’s opinion of your economic progress. (This will affect the rate at which you recieve overseers and the system has been rebalanced accordingly)
FIXED: when bandits/foreign soldiers/fishpeople drop weapons, they will be added to your commodities list

Biomes & Terrain

coconut palms will provide some lumber when removed
player can now directly order a mineralogical survey
animal herds appropriate to biome will randomly show up from edge of map
Giant Beetles will now, confoundingly, explode into smaller beetles when killed
balance: removed a ton of surface nodes, put in a bunch of hidden ore that requires surveying & underground mining

Events, Metagame, The Overworld

hooked up generated world to embark screen (hack! this will be done better in future)
added various selectable game-start loadouts to the starting screen
added “Ravenous Herd” event
added “Foreign Invasion” event
added major bandit attack event
added tooltips to bandit event dialogs
bandit gang selection for bandit attack event improved
the Ministry Investigation event has had some text clarifications and an alternate outcome added depending on character traits.
the Empire will now deliver population milestone rewards to an airship mast, if you have one.
added new event: A lower-class character may discover they are a member of the nobility.
“Call Favour” event will no longer appear if you can’t afford any favours
balance, prestige favours: prisoner favour now comes with a manager to oversee the prisoners.
balance, prestige favours: artisan favour now comes with high starting skills.
balance, prestige favours: most commodity-granting favours removed
balance, prestige favours: food favour now grants food amount based on current population
balance: Lower-class and middle-class immigration are now separate events. Lower-class will continue to be sent by the empire every few days. Middle-class overseers will come when you reach commodity production milestones.
balance: all starting guns are now pistols
balance: radar favour made to be more consistently useful
balance: bandits give gifts less often
balance: bandit, fishpeople, foreign attacks should no longer show up so early
balance: lowered chance of receiving aristocrats during immigration
balance: added 3 pistols to all loadouts that start with supplies
balance: the overseer allocation system will continue giving you additional characters after you have hit the overseer cap if some of your overseers have died. (Note: Temporary overseers are tracked separately, so you can’t game this for freebies.)
FIXED: scripterror when Upper Class Sympathy event fired
FIXED: first character in your list will not always be the person upset about illegal goods (and various other events will now also pick a character at random correctly)
FIXED: characters will no longer discover they are distant relatives of themselves

UI/UX

added option to disable tutorials to loadout screen
Bandits/Fishpeople/Foreigners now have proper tooltips which describe their state as neutral, hostile, or friendly
polished the ui a bit in many different places
removed the bit of the tutorial that said you must shoot fishpeople
mineralogical survey results will create an alert
did more UI tweaks to reign in some wandering elements that thought just because we rewrote the UI system they could take a break
adjusted work crew window scroll speed
clicking character portraits once again pulls up the character info panel.
reworked tooltip alignment and sizing to be more standardized.
FIXED: slowdown in work crews panel when colony has a high population
FIXED: temptools no longer show up in commodity window
FIXED: flax to cloth said it took more flax than it did
FIXED: various typos
FIXED: gabion deconstruction now displays a progress bar
FIXED: right-clicking to create a shortcut on Steam now actually creates a shortcut with the correct icon
FIXED: about 20 instances of “receive” are now spelled correctly
FIXED: scrollbar rendering
FIXED: gear for clicking on individual objects sometimes appears in the wrong place
FIXED: some objects cannot be interacted with after save/load
FIXED: issues with stockpile UI
FIXED: issues with office UI
FIXED: issues with scrollable list boxes.
FIXED: ore tutorial won’t fire when you mine clay (which is not an ore!)
FIXED: scrollbars use art for scrollbars!
FIXED: various issues with scrollbar sizing

August 2015

The Engine

FIXED: crash caused by runaway iterator in AI preference code
FIXED: infinite loop cancelling assignment jobs
OPTIMIZATION: fog of war rendering
FIXED: buried corpses becoming visible after save/load
FIXED: child jobs in an assignment would not be shown as being done in the jobs window after save and load, despite being done
FIXED: random crash deleting assignment

Human Characters

balance: Naturalists will prioritize player-ordered Mineralogical Surveying over player-ordered Exploration Beacons
colonists will abort hugging more accurately
added new desires for colonists to desire
added Prisoner character history backgrounds
balance: overseer immigration rate has been rebalanced based on player data
balance: slowed down middle class immigration.
balance: lower class immigration will give even fewer aristocrats (yes, we realize the contradiction inherent in this statement)
FIXED: people getting stuck returning to civilization
FIXED: favour redcoats won’t be demoted to militia anymore
FIXED: lower-class characters now properly inherit skills from their overseer for purpose of determining length of job time
FIXED: favour naturalists are now properly counted as temporary characters
FIXED: job dependencies to get new tools not being filled when a character has a tool, but it is stowed on their back (affects burial, probably some other stalled work crew stuff)
FIXED: characters now do not abort a raw food eating job to eat cooked food if the cooked food is locked by somebody else, or not owned by the player
FIXED: people no longer get memories for killing “Unnamed”
FIXED: temporary characters can no longer leave your colony without unlocking their jobs first (this could cause frozen jobs!)
FIXED: player-ordered butcher job filters aligned (it’s just “hunting” now)
FIXED: mundane seed memories for fresh-off-the-airship colonists work correctly now
FIXED: work crews would occasionally reset all their job filters
FIXED: corpses thinking they weren’t in the world and thus messing up burial jobs
FIXED: miners won’t return to stockpiles to drop their imaginary shovel/pickaxe (this will be more thoroughly fixed post 42)
FIXED: Aristocrats will never get “no workcrew” alert

Scripting System

character desires can now be fulfilled by having a memory of doing a thing
FIXED: if a tag can be filled by multiple objects with the same utility, we now pick one at random rather than just the last one. (This mainly shows up in the distribution of where people sleep, as well as other issues which hopefully won’t stick in loops.)
FIXED: if an object is deleted, don’t let it be used for a job (this should never happen anyway, but did in a save game we received so we’re handling it correctly now)

Combat & Military

added concept of training to barracks: assigned NCO will order militia soldiers to “get swole” so they become proper redcoats
added Barracks (assign workcrew to conscript them)
added military skill to replace “Military Training” trait (more work coming on this)
removed NCO option from middle class immigration (due to barracks)
balance: morale threshold tweaks for less scarpering
FIXED: NCO in military-themed loadout did not have proper military skill
FIXED: you will not longer see “Her Majesty’s 11st Regiment”
FIXED: case where soldier would use civilian morale levels to calculate choice to retreat

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

added “Idle Suspiciously” job for foreigners
FIXED: various issues with bandit gang retreating
FIXED: non-player ai agents will now correctly delete their carried weapons or items when despawned
FIXED: non-colonist ai_agents did not interrupt jobs correctly
FIXED: issues with bandits fleeing back to their camp
FIXED: bandit gang defeat scripterror
FIXED: bandit hostility state toggles for ALL bandits on the map whenever a decision is made about them
FIXED: scripterror caused by vermin
FIXED: dormant obeliskian hostility toggling
FIXED: dead things very specifically can’t become hostile now even if they try
FIXED: bandit scripterrors (due to groups not being removed from global list)
FIXED: former bandit appeared to re-join colony when dead and buried in grave
FIXED: Bandits killed while stealing your stuff will no longer leave commodities hanging in mid-air

Buildings & Building Creation

balance: Naturalist’s office no longer requires iron plates, Laboratory uses copper plates instead of iron
FIXED: very small, fairly unlikely crash building buildings and then loading them afterwards
FIXED: kitchen gets stuck on an assignment
FIXED: gabion deconstruction (and gabion deconstruction progress bar)
FIXED: logs/bricks recovered from airshipmast & gabions now properly set to owned by player
FIXED: infinite pickup/drop loop trying to build or repair modules that are inaccessible from the current worker position but NOT with invalid access points
FIXED: brewery description no longer claims that the brewery is a kitchen
FIXED: “Flatten Terrain” is now a construction job
FIXED: unbuilt gabions will no longer create rubble when “destroyed”.
FIXED: descriptions for metalworks and ceramics are no longer the same, and are now useful.
FIXED: repairing a module had a lower utility than anything else in the game; this is now fixed
FIXED: workshop could be broken by cancelling an assignment

Economy & Logistics

different edible crops now have different growth rates and yields. Try experimenting with them!
farm growth rates have been completely overhauled. You will have to pay more attention to ramping up you farming as your colony grows, now.
crops now (usually) output 1 item, dropped immediately to ground
farm field max dimensions doubled
stockpile max dimensions limited to 7×7 (in anticipation of stockpile mechanics improvements)
balance: cooking food no longer gives you 2-for-1 output.
balance: crops now only grow/spoil during the day (because Samut bugged us about doing this again)
FIXED: foraging can only be done during the day now
FIXED: item ownership for lots of items
FIXED: commodities will only stack with other commodities if they have a common owner (for now)
FIXED: planks were being calculated at 1/4 their intended economy value
updated crop descriptions to reflect balance changes

Biomes & Terrain

balance: foragable plants take longer to regrow
maize can now be grown in the New Antipodia biome

Events, Metagame, and The Overworld

ai_agent missions that target civilization will now aim closer to civilization
FIXED: increased ravenous herd hunger so they dont have to get hungrier before eating your crops
FIXED: rare scripterror in Fishperson Butchery Crisis
FIXED: various issues with Bandit attacks not finding their target
FIXED: favour troops will no longer perform all jobs
FIXED: airship flyer event no longer fails due to thinking north is south

UI/UX

added morale & health bars to nametag when a character is in combat
shift-clicking on a workshop +/- icon increments (decrements) the # of products being produced by 10
items may now be forbidden and claimed using the click-drag interface; forbidden items turn red
tooltips now offset to account for cursor size when set to follow the cursor
overhauled work crew window to remove unnecessary information, increase readability, oppress the lower class (in-progress)
edited faction and commodity window sizes
added “mysterious figures” icon to mysterious situations
assignment beacons now correctly display the work crew name and subtasks
tooltip over assignment beacon now tells you the name of the job, the work crew doing the job, and the # of tasks remaining in the job
improved tooltips for workshops
lower class worker cameos in Work Crew menu will highlight if doing job for the Work Crew’s assignment & display current job in tooltip – weed out idlers!
the Farm UI now shows descriptions of plants
conversations and thoughts that are sufficiently important and not just idle gossip will be displayed, regardless of zoom levels
various typos and incorrect descriptions corrected
OPTIMIZATION: game does not reload work crew tooltips from disk when regenerating work crew menu
OPTIMIZATION: only regenerate work crew window elements that actually need regenerating, not the entire window
FIXED: slowdown in work party menu with > 100 colonists
FIXED: tutorial for cooking will no longer launch 10 times in certain cases

September 2015

The Engine

gave some shaders a stern look

Human Characters

all farming actions now increase a work crew’s farming skill
added additional desires to Colonists
overseer immigrants will occasionally have random skills that aren’t terrible
clear terrain, clear stumps now considered a “construction” job + “Clear Stump” and “Clear Sapling” jobs are now part of “Clear Terrain”
characters now have a maximum total name length (fixes potential UI overflow)
began changes to workcrew naming (this step fixes potential UI overflow)
colonists who are happy/drunk will occasionally dance
occult murder added to death cults
colonists will be comforted by seeing soldiers do impressive-looking soldier things
added Prisoner trait for prisoners
prisoners have been given hats
prisoner overseers will now be identified as such
added holy book to some Vicar animations
colonists will now show up looking for a sermon if a chair is available for them to sit in at the chapel
colonists will also look for confessions if a vicar is in a chapel to hear them (note: confession mechanism currently uses the Cult Deprogramming code.)
cultists may use unoccupied chapels to do interesting things
added case for eating “starvation food” (to make a clear hierarchy of food colonists are willing to eat at various levels of hunger)
balance: massive madness balance done to fit with madness system revisions (madness attached to memories)
FIXED: weird tool handling with surface node mining is now not weird
FIXED: aristocrats will no longer attempt to order around sleeping workers
FIXED: Militia NCOs that earn Redcoat NCO status while assigned to barracks will correctly transform into an NCO
FIXED: unassigning a crew from a barracks will no longer leave the labourers acting like militia
FIXED: cults will no longer decide to build two cult shrines in rare cases
FIXED: despawned temp characters correctly remove their weapons & drop held commodities
FIXED: people no longer get unique memories for killing just beetles (why beetles!)
FIXED: epicurean colonists will no longer try to butcher fishpeople to admire their meat (and cause an error in doing so)
FIXED: error when a cult leader drinks laudanum and decides to leave their cult
FIXED: colonists should no longer get memories for killing vermin
FIXED: colonists will no longer attempt to interact in various ways with fishpeople meat as if it were a fishperson
FIXED: miners mining in mineshafts will no long leave a floating pickaxe by the door
FIXED: characters hunting an animal will attack it until it is killed rather than taking just one shot
FIXED: ranged attack would always send out a gunshot alert to sleeping characters upon completion even if a gun wasn’t fired
FIXED: building name change spam when mad & overseer switched
FIXED: characters occasionally being unable to do new work after they no longer belong to a workshop
FIXED: a bunch of weird business going on deep inside the vaguely Jungian collective memory system
FIXED: various issues w/ retreat jobs getting stuck (in short: now they shouldn’t.)
FIXED: people will actually listen to sermons that aren’t somebody preaching about the end times

Combat & Military

a number of military jobs have been flagged as military jobs so soldiers won’t appear idle when training/patrolling
soldiers will now stow rather than drop their weapons to train
hunting will no longer display character combat info panel
balance: civilians no longer pull out knives & sabres when engaged in melee combat (only soldiers will do this)
balance: militia requires more training
FIXED: if you build gabions with your military, they won’t try to collect more than one gun on their back, creating some kind of Ur-gun
FIXED: scripterror in some cases when an agent attempts to drop an item due to death
FIXED: if starting NCO was assigned to a barracks, soldiers wouldn’t train

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

added “Dissect Obeliskian” job (for naturalists to perform)
added “Dissect Fishpersom” job (for naturalists to perform)
added Obeliskian gibs
added Fishpeople Organs commodity
when a rampaging animal hurts a colonist, it will be marked as a military attack target
corpses left to rot will attract vermin
vermin will now make a nice “squish” sound when stomped
weapons dropped by non-colonist characters outside of town have to be ‘claimed’ by player before they will be used (aka ‘fix to the Dwarf Sock Problem’)
FIXED: foreign troops leaving map no longer subtract their guns from your weapon count
FIXED: if an assignment targeting an obeliskian is cancelled, it can be recreated
FIXED: a ghost bandit is not longer left behind after a bandit joins your colony
FIXED: in some cases, non-colonist agents would be unable to path to edge of map
FIXED: error when Fishperson would attempt to talk to a piece of human flesh
FIXED: foreign troops will properly interrupt going to mission goals to fight enemies (or friends, if they’re hostile)
FIXED: all factions will now properly update their UI description string to reflect whether you’re shooting them or not
FIXED: Bandits will now fight back when attacked by rampaging Aurochs/Beetles
FIXED: Foreigners won’t die again from splash damage after already dead
FIXED: fishpeople no longer attempt to intimidate or otherwise interact with human meat unless it’s to eat it

Buildings & Building Creation

gabions are now built using assignments
added “office jobs” that will be done by the office crew assigned to an office & office job UI display to chapel (with backend done, will be implemented on other offices)
clicking on a building under construction pulls up an assignment beacon; the building construction can be cancelled by clicking on that beacon
gravestones now use random models
balance: graveyards now pack in graves a little more efficiently
balance: the time it takes to construct a building is now based on its area
balance: reduced the time it takes to build modules
balance: changed material requirements to lots of modules and buildings
FIXED: aborting a Finish Production job, or an assignment with “Finish Production” in it, will no longer cause the module in the production state to be permanently unusable.
FIXED: cancelling a building assignment now removes the blueprint

Economy & Logistics

colonists now can be assigned workshifts, and players can now force them to work overnight, which makes them very unhappy
stockpile logic adjustment: when a character is free to do a hauling job, they will first check all stockpiles for
- mismatched filter objects, removing them;
- objects in the same stockpile which can be combined into a stack, freeing a square;
- filling any empty square in the stockpile with an object that can fill the square, which does not currently correspond to a stack in the stockpile square
stockpiles: characters now assess the closest stockpile to them at all times
stockpiles: if a character can merge an incoming item with a container already in a stockpile, they will do so rather than dropping and doing it en route (as it were)
added new “Basic Food” recipe to kitchens that merges stew, meat, and many other recipes into a single button (and removed recipes now made extraneous by Basic Food)
crops will now reach their “mature” model one stage earlier so you can actually admire them for a bit
crops will sparkle when harvestable
workshops: a character will now do the next available workshop job to them at all times, rather than waiting for the current product type to complete; this also strictly obeys the workshop job order on the production list
added warning when burial job cannot complete due to full graveyard (a common problem)
balance: slowed down growth/spoilage rate of, and reduced labor required to grow, cabbages and chillies
FIXED: containers would forget to go back in a stockpile after being removed from a stockpile
FIXED: animal carcass meat output, when butchered by a player-owned colonist, is now reported as being owned by the player. (And is forbidden otherwise – player must manually ‘claim’ to have colonists stockpile the meat.)
FIXED: you can click directly on a mine survey point OR drag a box around it to order a survey done (also gave the job a proper icon)
FIXED: The Fleshcube is now a valid ingredient
FIXED: optimized stockpile code when you have a lot of goods that need to be stockpiled
FIXED: bricks will now be stacked

Biomes & Terrain

deer will now appear in the New Antipodia biome
balance: increased starting exploration radius

Events, Metagame, and The Overworld

rewrote day/night cycle code to allow for different lighting options throughout the day
added a randomized welcome event for those with the tutorial disabled
“Call Favour” will only fire if you have 2 or more prestige, the minimum required to call a favour
added new “Quick-start” loadout
scholar Praise Event will now show how much prestige you earned
colonists Denounce Bandit Cowardice event now has an additional possible response
upper class immigrants have been removed from regular immigration.
upper class immigrants will now emigrate at a rate of 1 per available upper class house.
balance: fixed prestige cost for food favour
balance: throttled back beginning time & strength various attack events (bandits, fishpeople, foreigners)
balance: removed 21-colonist start. Because it was just way too good.
balance: Foreign Intervention event has slightly more stringent requirements (so you won’t get attacked super early)
FIXED: scripterror case in bandit_plunder_major event
FIXED: scripterror case in cultist_preach job
FIXED: airship overflights will now travel in the direction they claim to
FIXED: fishperson assault crisis scripterror

UI/UX

game now remembers the game window location on restart
completely overhauled character information panel to better display colonists’ rich inner life (note that this element is still in-progress)
- character window: emotions and madness now shown on a scale
- character window: mousing over a memory will show information about how that memory affects the character’s state
- character window: memories now shown with more detail, image fades as they are forgotten
split buildings into “workshops”, “offices” and “housing”; added support for subcategories to the module placer.
added ticker text when militia trains to soldier
workshop warnings are now zoom independent
added progress bars to workshop jobs
work crew display now correctly displays only the # of idle overseers. Idle artisans are moved to their own counter.
updated a number of tutorials to reflect the current state of the game.
FIXED: objects would occasionally correctly highlight themselves, but would not actually let you click on them or select them (or produce a tooltip)
FIXED: various typoes/grammatical inconsistencies/spelling errors fixed
FIXED: assignment beacons now disappear when an assignment is cancelled from the jobs menu
FIXED: assignment beacon “cancel assignment” X now works
FIXED: Broken memory icon for recruited bandits
FIXED: Tooltips showing the wrong name for stacks after items had been removed from them
FIXED: lingonberry pie icon was misaligned by 2 pixels and it was really important to fix this because otherwise it looked slightly off compared to the other pies

October 2015

OFFICES

added first iteration of Public House & associated jobs for workcrew operating the Pub
added Barber (to heal afflictions) & associated jobs for workcrew operating Barber Shop
added new step styles determined per-building
Offices can now do internal “standing orders” to keep the office running when it is not performing an office service (for instance, putting drinks in the Booze Vat for safe-keeping.)
Barbers, Vicars and Publicans now have “service hours” automatically assigned when they are assigned to the corresponding building, in order to allow better service for clients.
“office” type buildings display a more descriptive title to text ticker now

BUILDINGS/ECONOMY/STOCKPILES

“office” type buildings display a more descriptive title to text ticker now
buildings now have grayed out icons if player doesn’t have minimum construction requirements, tooltips with red text indicate what is needed.
workshop recipes can now be grayed out or hidden based on whether required modules are present in the workshop. Tooltip changes to reflect what is needed. (roll-out to other workshops in-progress)
graveyards now have tooltips, as do farms without a selected crop
balance: changed one overseer to a labourer in all loadouts
FIXED: engine would draw building shadow when mousing over it during construction mode
FIXED: modules placed in the corners of buildings such as ovens would cause problematic building geometry and geometry explosions
FIXED: people will stop trying to find closer crops to haul to stockpiles once they check their first stockpile
FIXED: issues with various job requirements (require_smart_object and require_container_object) causing various problems with stockpiles
Rewrote stockpile handling code again to more thoroughly fix everything

FARMS & FOOD

added “Basic Brew” recipe to breweries (this job ill auto-brew valid ingredients)
merged Brewery into Kitchen. They have become one! Power overwhelming!
Farms are now directly assigned work crews. A work crew can work on and operate multiple farms.
disabled farming Workcrew filter buttons to reflect new assignment control for farms.
added tooltip text to farm crop information icons
balance: eating cooked food now totally resets hunger (so you don’t have to climb out of a huge hunger deficit as soon as you start cooking food – when a player started cooking food, colonists would consume more than expected to get their hunger down, so cooking appeared to be an inefficient solution to hunger)
balance: farming made very slightly easier
balance: made small tweaks to how long it takes to cook things
balance: pumpkin is now a mechanically distinct crop from corn and has its own stats

COLONIST MEMORIES & RELATED UI

performed visual cleanup of character information panel layout & implemented some pretty new UI art
character ui: memories now have borders to show significance of memories relative to one another
character ui: made emotion bars longer
implemented “short term memory” functionality: the most recent memory will always contribute to overall emotional state even if less important than others. If another memory is created, it can push this memory outside of consideration if all other memories are more important.
balance: performed significant rebalance to the values of most of the memories in the game (includes emotional and madness values)
FIXED: some memory related bugs
FIXED: missing memory case for when Fishy individual is attacked by Fishpeople
FIXED: will no longer receive memories for “murdering” animals (TODO: unless vegan)

NIGHT-TIME, SOCIALIZATION, & WORK SCHEDULING

night has been made lighter (so you can actually see anything)
sleeping people given smaller sight radius
if objects are damaged near a sleeping colonist, the sound will wake them up
balance: sleep time reduced by 25% to make nights more Interesting
balance: characters now get 3 shifts off by default instead of 2 (to give them more time for non-work actions)
balance: characters get upset for overwork at 1 fewer subsequent workshifts to reflect the rebalancing of workshifts
balance: did review & rebalance pass on relative utility of all “social” jobs

CORPSES

colonist corpses should no longer try to initiate burial job there are still hostiles nearby (note: if hostiles leave and come back, you’ve still got a problem)
overriding auto-burial of a corpse with manual controls will make corpse will only respond to manual orders for burial/dumping from that point forward
bandit corpse policy event can have “no answer” selected & will fire no more than once per day
balance: (all) corpses no longer spawn infinite vermin
FIXED: performed overhaul of handling of all jobs that affect the corpses of all types of characters (burial, dumping, butchery, dissection, etc)
refactored details of death script for all agents so that common actions/tagging is all handled by base “agent” class; also cleaned up all searches/jobs looking for corpses to use consistent terminology

CHARACTERS, MISC

added ability to change character names; players may now subject their friends and family to The Frontier Life
workers in a workcrew will change uniform to match their overseer’s highest skill, if applicable
added more random names
Cultist vicars handle confessions … differently.
improved text parsing so eg. an event can parse text to be subjective to an involved character and sub in correct name & pronouns
custom character name length now limited to avoid Problems
colonist choosing to commit murder decision making made more sophisticated (& scripted process to move to this state is now cleaner)
added an alert the first time someone sleeps on the ground to inform you that you should build beds
balance: people recently involved in combat will be less inclined to stomp beetles to avoid character confusion during combats
FIXED: a colonist that attacks an animal due to hunger will attack it until it is dead, then will butcher it (rather than being non-committal about the whole matter)
FIXED: unclear status of longpork ownership after people are butchered
FIXED: people making friends or rivals with themselves
FIXED: people making friends or rivals with the same person multiple times
FIXED: tooltips broke for characters after they change class and get stuck (incorrectly!) on the same job
FIXED: characters with renamed names using old names in some events (other bits of game logic)
FIXED: dark and red UI portraits for characters (gamma correction)
FIXED: people trying to shoo vermin beetles rather than squishing them (again)
FIXED: errors in a number of memories that caused them to display the wrong character name
FIXED: some desires were unfulfillable & used incorrect icons
FIXED: added pathing check to require_gameobject to see if an agent can actually reach an object
FIXED: bug that was keeping afflictions from being removed by the barber
character name parsing now done as a step in sending strings to the renderer rather than baking it into stuff, to allow for better dynamic parsing once names etc have been changed.

FISHPEOPLE

added Fishperson nesting mission
thus: exotic caviar re-added to game (and given new, unique effects)
added Fishpeople Convoy event
added more response options to Fishperson Vandalism event
Fishpeople made much more likely to run when hassled by military, though there’s a chance they will become enraged & attack
added Fishpeople egg collection mission & event
if Fishpeople see humans near their eggs, they will attempt to scare them away
added Egg Collection mission for Fishpeople
made fishperson crisis events slightly more willing to pile up (to avoid lost crisis events)
FIXED: soldiers should no longer hassle fishpeople who are already fleeing
added various consequences to plundering Fishpeople nests, both in the act itself and if Fishpeople discovered plundered nests. Reactions can vary by individual Fishperson.

FACTIONS MISCELLANY

Foreigner military units may appear to attack bandits
when faction groups are destroyed the ticker will give a vaguely accurate cause for their disappearance
all foreign factions are now hostile to bandits and fishpeople
Novorusians now have appropriately gendered slavic surnames
Fishpeople may bring food to your colony if you’re starving and have good relations with them
item dropped by non-colonist agents outside of your settlement will be auto-forbidden when dropped
and if player claims items dropped by non-colonist agents outside of settlement, they will be added to commodities list
balance: Foreign invasion delay increased & given better notification
FIXED: items carried by non-colonist agents won’t show up in your commodities list
FIXED: items dropped by non-colonist agents as part of mission should properly set ownership to player if dropped near your colony
added additional info to ticker when foreign troops spawn in certain cases
balance: Foreign Invasion event is now less soul-crushing (ministry will send landmines, allies will send troops)

UI, MISC

added useful descriptions to most commands & modules in the build menu
added descriptions to all menu commands
FIXED: buildings menu category button could occasionally get stuck in the “on” position
FIXED: selections in the quick menu sometimes not appearing after click-drag
FIXED: enormously wide tooltips for workshop names
FIXED: colonists overview panel occupation text doesn’t just say “occupation”
FIXED: doubly doubled entry for Bushel of Orange Cup Fungus would appear in Commodities panel when it was foraged
FIXED: various typos

ANIMALS

Dodos now know when their nest is destroyed
added wall-mounted aurochs/beetle head building decor modules
handling of jobs that target animals given a big cleanup

EVENTS, MISC

added “Colonists want a chapel” event
Lower class Immigration event has been entirely rewritten! Expect more variety.
balance: lower class immigration now happens 20% more often
FIXED: dead and/or fleeing colonists can no longer raise objections to your policies concerning Fishpeople
FIXED: issues w/ “Colonists denounce cowardice” event

ENGINE/SCRIPTING/INFRASTRUCTURE FUN

script errors now should correctly throw their callstacks so we can find out where they are without guessing.
workcrew names are now no longer stored in a billion fragile places. :carlsagan:
lots of new abilities added to workshop/office code, including ability to query for modules in workshop
zones (farms, graveyards, etc) can now display “expressions” aka those little thought bubbles
major rewrite of requirement code to be safer & support expanded features for jobs/events/commands/puppies
added require commodity GEQ
cleaned up headers of project to reduce compile times by 3-5 minutes
a ton of work on a new decision tree system & decision tree editor
FIXED: bug in replay system meaning that replay determinism could (and would!) break when the game was paused

BIOMES/ENVIRONMENT

FIXED: logs from chopped down coconut palms now properly set as owned by player
removed some underwater junk that can’t be seen, but was still rendered

November 2015

Engine, misc

FIXED: OS X crashes when cancelling assignment via assignment beacon
FIXED: OS X crashes when crops are finished being harvested
FIXED: some leaking memory (what a mess!)
replaced dynamic allocations for moving tags about in the game space dictionary with a static pool of memory and a large buffer
replaced dynamic allocations of particle system VBOs and memory during the render frame with a pool of VBO resources to draw from; eliminates a memory leak and General Badness with drivers that do not like you creating/deleting VBOs on the fly all that much, and should also provide a modest speed increase.

Save/Load

FIXED: Display of work schedule data is no longer reset on load.
FIXED: environmental light values now set correctly after save/load

Combat AI / Decision Tree

added a bunch more code to the decision tree parser, specifically “enough code to make it work” and “enough code to unbreak the editor.”
replaced all old military logic with military decision tree code (it is smarter! also: should fix rallying)
FIXED: require_work_party_rally_point not firing consistently

Renderer / Lighting Rewrite

added dynamic point lights! they can be attached to a model placer for rigid body and skeletal models
lights can now be attached to/removed from placers; UPM version 2.9 created
the renderer now applies interior ambient lighting for objects inside buildings, and tracks it on the interior
renderer now does lighting in a completely different way for the two existing lights, but this will probably be invisible to the user. It is, however, necessary for everything else.
things can now cast shadows on farms (and other decal-type zones)
increased transparency of semi-transparent building walls.

Spectres

added Haunting Spectres
added Vengeful Spectres
added job for Vicar to confront spectre (+ticker message is created when vicar confronts spectre)
added spectre report event (spectres can be reported once per night)

Building Quality / Workshops

added Building Quality system! You will now have to balance the ratio of work modules to decor in your buildings. Nicer buildings mean happier colonists!
and added building quality display on UI for workshops/houses
buildings now robustly track modules they contain.
added 14 new decor modules
appropriate decor has been added to all buildings’ default module lists
many modules have been renamed
many modules have new descriptions
performed reorganization of our workshop edb to be actually legible
added icons for mounted aurochs/rhino heads
balance: build costs on all decor have been adjusted
FIXED: orientation/placement on a number of previously unused models
FIXED: script error when building clotheslines
FIXED: issue w/ some decor modules not deconstructing correctly
FIXED: footprint size on carpets

Madness

balance: added various eldritch means which help sustain madness levels
added evil book prop
added madness sustaining memory creation for colonists w/ cult_seed tag
added madness-sustaining effect for colonists w/ occult_mark_black_magic
made vermin corpses last longer to encourage Beetle Curses
Increased weighting on many madness jobs
balance: contact with Obeliskians made slightly more maddening & for longer (due to rarity)
FIXED: rare scripterror when attempting to spawn eldritch artifact

Cults

added ability to order shrines destroyed
added attack_object_until_destroyed.fsm
cultists will become upset if your order shrines destroyed, especially at whoever destroyed the shrine
balance: slightly increased chance to perform cult recruitment
added cultist madness-sustaining memories + new icons for some of them
balance: many more experiences can now trigger “cult seed” depending on character traits
balance: more strange/terrible events may now provoke cult formation
FIXED: possible error cases when cultist leader dies
FIXED: cult leadership now transitions correctly when leader dies
FIXED: cult group ending due to lack of sufficiently enthusiastic leadership scripterror
FIXED: cultist preaching was pushing memory to wrong party in conversation

Offices (Chapel, Pub, Barber)

Pub jobs cleaned up to be vastly more efficient at actually stocking and serving drinks
Barber/Pub/Chapel: if a colonist seeks treatment/confession/a pint of beer and can’t find a barber/vicar/pub worker nearby, they will abort waiting and create an alert
cleaned up confession fsm to not be a huge mess, and thus
FIXED: vicars giving confession will no longer permanently paralyze colonists

Religion

colonists will now pray at wall shrines
added access point to wall shrines
made praying at wall shrines something both Spiritually Inclined and Staunch Traditionalists can do

Murder

made significant improvements to how colonists decide to engage in murder
added Beetle Curse (murder)
added Tree Curse (murder)
added Occult Murder witnessed event
killing someone for the first time will now record their name in the memory
cleaned up memories for killing and killing memory creation
FIXED: murder due to hunger

Death

balance: corpses will only spawn vermin after being left out for a day
made a ForceDropEverything receiver in ai_agent.go which drops every damn thing being held; all agents now call this upon death
as such, removed a bunch of extra ForceDropTools calls from all the agent scripts
therefore FIXED: commodity drops upon character death
corpses will now only reset their burial job at sunrise rather than every 10 seconds (it was spammy)

Memories & Character

can now query LEQ or GEQ on happy, sad, angry, fearful (for internal scripting)
did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go
cleanup: moved creation of building quality memories into citizen.go
cleaned up defs for bunch of data back-end for memory events
balance: tweaked many some memory descriptions & values
did an audit of all memory icons and changed/updated/fixed where necessary
memories will now use greater range in icons
re-added conscription/de-conscription memories
cleaned up more food memories
cleaned up immigrant & bandit seed memories
re-jiggered all damage/murder memories & frontier justicing & murder witnessing
reworked food memory creation to more cleanly use makeMemory function
did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go; changed lots of previously hardcoded memory values to read from histories.edb
cleanup: removed a bunch of memory creation / justice tagging from ai_damage.go and put it in citizen.go where it belongs
FIXED: minor starvation scripterror in citizen.go
FIXED: some memories were not being triggered correctly
FIXED: some more broken memory creation logic
FIXED: some broken memory icons
FIXED: some broken icons in thoughticons.xml

UI Misc

removed all UI filters for military crews except for hunting (Hauling is not a suitable job for the brave troops of Her Majesty’s 40th Civil Engineering Brigade)
re-added friendship ticker notification
stockpile UI edited for better usability
added new code hooks for building UI windows
new Office UI code refactored to apply generally to all buildings
did framework code for skill progression info on character.
did fixes to various minor bugs in UI element sizing
did fix to tooltip searching in UI code
did fixes to icon -> tag lookup table
made gabions log warning refer to “logs” rather than “timber” and say it may be a range problem
polished up some icons, added some other new icons. Just a good bunch of icons.
FIXED: was possible to order dissection of an Obeliskians more than once on the same specimen
FIXED: various crashes in character info panel, hopefully without breaking anything
FIXED: various broken icons

Typos

fixed various event typos
fixed typo in memories
FIXED: various typos & grammar (farm text, immigration event)
FIXED: various typos

Events, MISC

audited and improved spawn locations for all fishperson events
added one-time bailout event if you have more workers than you can allocate to all of your overseers
below 3 chars bailout only gives overseers now and is somewhat rewritten
some events have been given more detailed descriptions for number of ai agents involved
doubled timeout length for all events
updated job filters tutorial
contextual tutorials will no longer fire if the main tutorial is still going
balance: reduced max bandits that major bandit attack can send
FIXED: scripterror in certain decision case of “Colonists Denounce Cowardice Vs Bandits”

MISC

Small code cleanup to Colonists Denounce Cowardice
increased log search range for half-size gabions (it was super low)
hunger incrementing moved to evening instead of night
balance: fishpeople made less likely to turn murderous when intimidated by soldiers
FIXED: aborting a “Gather Building Materials” job due to an explosive injury would put the job in the wrong assignment, causing it to be completed infinitely
FIXED: “isObjectInRadiusWithTagReverseMustOwnTwoTags” function never checked the second tag

????

added Grape Vine crop (commented out)
added Wine commodity & production (commented out)
drew grapes + wine icons, attached to commodities (commented out)
re-added poetic memories to use hearExclamation (Poets just don’t spawn right now)
cleaned up some junk code from bandit.go
started some defs for Obeliskian tech/commodities
adding infrastructure for obeliskian forge (not fully implemented)
added Nicholas’s new Arcane Symbols to the documentation on spacial maps (I have no idea what this means)

This game has come really far. Just as you have, with us, through this huge changelog.

So at that, Gaslamp Games wishes you a Happy Holidays, a Merry Fishmas, and in Indescribably Abominous New Year As The Stars Aline!

2 Responses to “2015: The Year In Review Clockwork Empires Style”

Jabberwok says:

December 23, 2015 at 11:46 am

I hadn’t seen the fishman in The Terrible Truth in quite this way until you mentioned it, but he really looks like he might just be saying hello.

Also, perhaps just because of DoD, but looking at these makes me think you have a passion for eyebrows.

Personally, I enjoy the hugs and floor scrubbing.

{ reply }
Thomas says:

December 23, 2015 at 2:28 pm

Wow 🙂
Its crazy seeing how much the game has progressed in just a year.
Also that warm, fuzzy feeling when you see that all of your crash and bug reports are actually helping.
Can’t wait to see how crazy this stuff gets next year!

Merry Christmas, Gaslamp Games 😀

{ reply }