Author Archives: Nicholas

Earliest Access Status Update

July 18, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

The general consensus around the office is that today’s Earliest Access launch went better than any launch that the company has done in the past. People seem to be having a good time; while there are some crash bugs, they seem to be pretty manageable.

Awkward name for a military squad or sign of [REDACTED] infiltrating the highest levels of the Empire?

Awkwardly named squad or sign of REDACTED infiltrating the highest levels of the Empire?

Here are some Helpful Notes on some of the most common technical issues players are having:

  • If your game will not start, it looks like you have a computer that is running an international version of Windows; known examples that break the game are French and Polish operating systems. We are working on figuring out how to unbreak this (by which, I mean “trying to remember how I figured this out for Dredmor.”)
  • If your game suddenly stops displaying terrain, set the terrain quality back to “High” and restart the game (there’s no functional difference any more anyway, and this option should be removed.)
  • If your game is not displaying anything at all, you probably have an Intel HD3000 or HD4000, which are not officially supported yet. We will be working on these in the future. (The newest generation of integrated Intel hardware seems to work okay, which is surprising!)
  • If you have an NVIDIA card, and your terrain does not display, and your terrain quality is set to high: update your drivers. There seems to be a bad batch of drivers floating around somewhere.
  • In general, updating your drivers is a good idea.
  • If you get no sound: possibly, try running as Administrator? We haven’t quite figured this one out yet, but Top Men are Working On It.
  • If you are having problems with reclaiming your key, drop us a line at contact@gaslampgames.com and we will sort you out.
  • If you have any other problems, head to our forums ( https://community.gaslampgames.com/ ) and check the current bugs thread, and if it’s not on there, you can post about it there OR submit a report through the Clockwork Empires Portal ( http://portal.clockworkempires.com/ ).

There is a pretty good list of “known bugs” at this point, and we will be slaving away on a patch in the office this weekend with an eye towards pushing it to the public on Monday (July 21st). This should take care of a handful of random crashes, as well as some low-hanging UI fruit that players have been especially eager to have us fix.

We are then going to shoot for a more “content-y” patch on the following Friday (July 25th).

the_colonies_rumours

We have personal assurances from the Colonial Minister!

As always, we thank you for your patronage and we look forward to further delighting you with Colonial Incursions as we proceed from “Earliest Access” to “Early Access”, and then – at long last – “Finished Game.”

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Clockwork Empires: Earliest Access FAQ

July 17, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Some questions and comments about tomorrow’s Earliest Access launch:

Q. “When will builds go out?”
A. “Roughly 10AM PST.”

Q. “The game crashed, broke, or otherwise did a terrible and monstrous thing. It is now sitting in my living room and hogging the couch, throwing empty beer cans at the cat. It has given me Ghost Neck, and many other diseases that we read about on your blog. What do I do? Who do I complain to?”
A. “If you want to submit the bug quickly and get back into the game, your best bet is the support form, which can (as of some time this evening) be found at portal.clockworkempires.com.  Our forums also have a list of known bugs and we regularly check for new ones at community.gaslampgames.com.

Q. “Is there OS X or Linux support?”
A. “Not for Earliest Access, no. We have unpolished, internal ports that are not ready for prime-time. We hope to have this up for the first or second incarnation of Steam Early Access in August.”

Q. “What’s the ETA on save games?”
A. “Save games have a critical bug in them right now, which we are still hunting down. Micah has not moved from his desk for the past one hundred and sixty-eight hours and has now grown some kind of third eye in the middle of his forehead. Expect these to show up next week.”

Q. “In the eight hours since you invented it, Earliest Access has ruined PC Gaming forever! What IS THIS THING?! How do we know what to expect, and where should we go to understand what we’re buying?”
A. “An enormous project status page, clearly outlining all the work we have done in the past two-and-a-half years as well as the expected roadmap for everything going forward, can be found here.”

Q. “What are testers saying about the current state of the game?”
A. “The earliest build is best described as an occult cabbage-farming simulator with fishpeople.”

Q. “Are you fishpeople?”
A. “Blup. I mean, no.”

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Technical Status Update: A Young Lad’s Message From The Front

July 2, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Dear Father,

(We have an icon for this!)

(We have an icon for this!)

I am writing from the Trenches at Gaslamp. The final, long, hard push for Early Access is almost upon us; Major Jacobsen says we’ll go over the top any day now. At night I sleep with my keyboard as is Tradition, and think of home. How is home? Where is home? Does it still exist? Are the cats alive?

Will this war ever end?

The Horror.

The Horror.

The men tell me that they have assembled a Changelog; I have annotated it for you so that you may know that we are fighting the Brave Fight here at home, and that soon there will be Release In Our Time. I am pretty sure that Mr. Whitman now has Trenchfoot in his Shoulderblade, and will have to have it Removed with a Scalpel. Mr. Best seems like he will not last much longer; his delerium is fevered and he talks about going back to University and finishing his Doctorate. Meanwhile, they fight the good fight, and many small tickets have been fixed including the fact that doors claim to cost one plank, and do not. It is the duty of every man to care for his tickets, that we may seek victory over The [REDACTED].

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Modules, Interrupts, Memory Leaks

June 18, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

The Road to Early Access basically looks like the Road to El Dorado, except the musical numbers are worse. Right now I am still in a land where I have to actually sit down and do all the stuff I’ve been putting off for the course of the product. Two things that fall into this category are “putting modules in the corner of a building” and “interrupts.” Oh, and “fixing the memory leaks.”

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: "Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations".)

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: “Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations”.)

Putting modules in the corner of a building has been something that, since the start of the project, would blow up the game. There were a number of things causing problems here: first off, the code to actually handle the case of inserting the small “module footer” that forms the foundation of a module was blowing up if you put it in the corner of a map. This has been fixed. Second, when we finished a module’s foundation, we would delete the edges on the floor plan, and merge the leftmost and rightmost edges together. Obviously, this is not the right thing to do if a foundation piece is at the leftmost, or rightmost, edge of a blueprint – you end up collapsing two edges together that are at 90 degrees. So this has been fixed for the outside of modules. The inside of modules still breaks, because there is some funny business going on with how we construct interiors that I have yet to track down – but we’re making progress on long standing issues.

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Dodos, Buildings, and the road to Alpha

June 4, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Daniel suggested that I should pick out some of the juicier fixes and additions from the change log of our latest internal test build and talk about them; it’s also probably instructive to show some of the feedback. Our internal test build of Clockwork Empires is now on Revision 18. We usually do builds about once a week, but this week we had to do an Old-Timey Dredmor-Style Hotfix for Revision 18 because it introduced a bug where people kept spastically trying to pick up and put down shovels, and so now we are at Revision 18A. Some edited highlights:

  • The dodo is back in again. Yes! It now eats all your crops, but it doesn’t get stuck in a berry bush; additionally, hunting work crews will pick up any weapon that is suitable for them and will then go off and create a hideous, bloody dodo flesh massacre. This leads to enormous piles of dodo corpses lying around, including being found in houses and on the steps of upper class houses. Currently, you cannot do anything with a dodo corpse. (You now receive two Dodo Drumsticks if you butcher the corpse -David)
Dodos: The least dangerous game.

Dodos: The least dangerous game.

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May Technical Status Update: More from the Testing Front

May 28, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

David is on vacation this week, soaking up a little sun and visiting relatives in California before the last push out the door, so we’re working on a bunch of minor testing-motivated updates, which has mainly involved re-configuring internal stuff. Also, some UI work, which is always good.

First, we have added five new testers this week. Naturally, none of them can figure out the game! This is good, because it reveals all the hidden assumptions that you have been making, as well as the hidden assumptions that the other testers have now internalized. Then, you can fix those assumptions and get on with the next bit. Dredmor underwent a very similar process: if you go all the way back here in time, you can see early versions of the crafting system which we didn’t figure out was just totally awful until after we released the game. (There are some people, of course, who would argue that Dredmor’s crafting system is still awful, but oh well.) Getting a good game means fixing these issues.

For what it’s worth, player feedback has overwhelmingly been of the form “This is really good/promising/cool/great; here are fifty bug reports.” This is in line with our expectations, because Game Development.

Mr. Triolo has also been playing the game for the past half hour as I write this blog post in order to test some very special new animations for drinking in a chair. He has taken about seventeen screenshots of various things that are bothering him. This is also progress.

So what’s new on the code side?

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Polish!

May 7, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

I haven’t written a blog post in a bit; much of the glamorous work of Adding Exciting Stuff to the game has now fallen to Mr. Baumgart and his motley crew, while the programming department scuttles about behind the scenes doing things which are less obvious to the general public. Most of what I’ve done in the past few weeks has been a series of very small polish-y things. They’re interesting, and every time something goes in it makes the game better, but it doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to a glamorous blog post.

People doing good, solid, boring work. Yup. Keep on working, people. Good job.

People doing good, solid, honest work. Yup. Keep on working, people. Good job.

A few examples of polish-y things:

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The Fishman

April 2, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

THE FISHMAN

[set, roughly, to the meter of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”]

bedOnce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
having just returned from GDC a couple days before,
lying in my bed with con flu, none too happily sorting through
the impressions of the journalists who visited before.
“They struggled with the game,” I muttered, “having never played before.
These struggles I do so deplore.”

clickingAh, distinctly, I remember, it was in my warmest sweater,
as each JIRA ticket crashed like waves upon the ocean shore.
Eagerly I watched the replays, studying hard and searching for ways
to improve the user’s gateway into CE’s dreadful lore.
The mouse clicks were not working, as they once had worked before,
for putting things onto the floor.

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