Clockwork Empires December Update: The Ghastly Tale of Amon Chalkbracket’s ELDRITCH TRANSFORMATION

December 17, 2014 by David Baumgart

It is the time of UPDATES. The game has transformed into v34, filled with new features and horrible Fun to discover!

CE_december_update_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

That’s not all: for your enjoyment we have a short, educational video about Current Issues faced by Colonial Science:

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

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MacOS and Linux users:

OS X users: There are still some graphical issues on various Macs, but it should run fine! Please let us know if you are having graphical issues, and (if so) what version of OS X you are running on, and which video card.

Linux Users: We are still working on Linux support, which (as always) is waiting on us to fix a million references in the code base to case-sensitive filenames, as well as setting up the build machine to correctly dispatch Linux builds of the game (which have to be built with a special, hacked-together compiler) to Steam. Your patience continues to be appreciated.

Patch Notes:

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Gamifying Synergy Through Delegation (Or: More Combat Design)

December 10, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

Uh, I mean, hey, we’re making a management sim!

We talked a long time ago about designing combat for Clockwork Empires, and there were a few things involved in our design that we’ve carefully been unpacking. The most important thing for us for the combat was the statement: “Combat should be slow, mostly positional, and have its outcome determined by supply and setup instead of tactical micromanagement.”

(Not representative of final game product.)

(Not representative of final game product.)

Which… we’ve done almost none of so far, BUT we’ve been setting the pieces in place for proper implementation. “Supplying and setting up” the feature, if you will.

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The Prestige (Menu)

December 3, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Every great blog post consists of three parts.

Whenever Nicholas talks just imagine Lord Palmerstoke.

Whenever Nicholas talks just imagine Lord Palmerstoke.

The first part is called “the pledge.” The blog author, working on behalf of the programming department, asks you to see a perfectly ordinary game. It has some quirks; it has some issues. Some of these issues are things that we are cleaning up this month as part of ongoing patch-work. In particular, I have spent most of this week so far adding the ability for buildings and modules to be removed and destroyed, and for zones to be removed and destroyed. (As part of this, farms are going to have a set up menu similar to those for buildings.)

The second part is called “the turn.” In this part of the blogpost, we mention that we finally figured out what’s going on with the Mac build and why it was throwing Lua errors all the time. This has been fixed, and will be pushed to the experimental build for further testing, once the next experimental revision goes up. We will also quickly note that Linux support is coming along as well – we are now mainly waiting on the additional work to get it building over here and not just on Ryan’s machine, but I think we now have all the pieces. Again, we’re sorry this is taking so long, for those of you on alternate operating systems.

The third part of the blog post is called the Prestige Menu.

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Gaslamp Never Rests: Office Moving & Gameplay Science

November 26, 2014 by David Baumgart

Once again the wheel turns. The Time of Change is upon us. Those who are unready will fall defeated while the once-humble may ride chaos to reign victorious! 

By which I mean we’re moving the Gaslamp offices again. That’s pretty neat, right? Let’s look at pictures of boxes. (There’s a changelog for the experimental build which should be coming out today at the end of this post, so if you want game-relevant stuff you’re going to have to look at our silly moving pictures.)

Daniel is so excited about this.

Daniel is SO excited about packing up all of our paperwork.

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Clockwork Empires November Update: BANDIT ATTACK ON ‘FIGHTIN’ VICAR ZEDOCK WOODBURN’S FRONTIER CHAPEL

November 19, 2014 by David Baumgart

It is time once more for the monthly update to Clockwork Empires! We are now at v33, or as we like to call it, Bandit Attack On ‘Fightin’ Vicar Zedock Woodburn’s Frontier Chapel.

novemberPromoIllustration_final_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

Important note: the Clockwork Empires renderer got a huge overhaul. We encourage you to update your video drivers for Queen & Country.

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game yet? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

MacOS and Linux users: 

OS X users: We thought we had it, but it turns out there’s one outstanding problem owing to having incorrect libraries being loaded – somewhere – for Lua. We’re still tracking this down, and will have this out as soon as we can.

Linux Users: We are still working on Linux support, which (as always) is waiting on us to fix a million references in the code base to case-sensitive filenames, as well as setting up the build machine to correctly dispatch Linux builds of the game (which have to be built with a special, hacked-together compiler) to Steam. Your patience continues to be appreciated.

Patch Notes:

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The Aristocrats

November 12, 2014 by David Baumgart

We have adorable foxes hunting adorable dodos in adorable little packs.

Adorable murder.

Adorable murder.

There’s some neat stuff going on under the hood. A fox that first identifies a valid target for pack-hunting will tag itself as “calling the pack to hunt” which fulfills a requirement for other foxes to “join a pack to hunt”. This also tags the target of the hunt as a “pack-hunting target”. The pack “leader” and “followers” all get tagged into a hunting pack which enables the action of hunting down a targeted animal. The target is then either killed or the pack can be fought off – the moment one of the pack members chooses to flee, all of the pack members will flee and untag their (adorable) pack hunting behaviour. Lovely!

Pictured: A poetical aristocrat. (As we all know, all poets are aristocrats because anyone who writes poetry can't possible have to do real work.)

Pictured: A poetical aristocrat.

As long as we’re implementing pack-hunting carnivores, why not do aristocrats as a two-for-one? Same thing.

So what, in fact, do aristocrats do?

The short answer is of course “nothing particularly useful” (to you). As any player of the classic Impressions city buildings knows, the upper class exist to make ridiculous infrastructure-expensive demands to create challenges and motivation to ascend the game’s building “tech”-tree and otherwise force the player to procure lots of fancy, extremely expensive stuff. It’s a good system.

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A Crash Course in Moving A Legacy OpenGL Codebase to Core OpenGL 3.2

November 5, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

I’m actually absconding from the usual subject of these blogposts this week to do technical writing which people might find useful – mainly because a lot of the information on this seems to be scattered all over the Internet. One of the issues with our Mac port of Clockwork Empires which has prevented it from launching when we wanted to is that we discovered – a bit late in our schedule – that we couldn’t fix all of the shader issues on OS X without porting the entire game from what we were using (OpenGL’s “compatibility” mode plus a ton of extensions, dating back to when this codebase was started ages and ages ago) to what is called OpenGL Core 3.2, which is part of the OpenGL Architectural Review Board’s attempt to remove all of the “cruft” that had accumulated in their codebase throughout the years. In the process of doing this, they removed a lot of the nice stuff about OpenGL that makes it a good teaching tool, which is sort of annoying; you can’t just throw together a program any more and get stuff up on the screen, not without doing large quantities of work. Oh well.

On OS X Mavericks, you can only get access to OpenGL features newer than version 2.1 if you create a core OpenGL context; they aren’t even accessible as extensions, which is just flat out weird. OS X’s OpenGL implementation has been charitably described as “a mess” by everybody involved for some time, as the issue seems to be that all the driver engineering teams at Apple are now cranking out OpenGL implementations for your iPhone (and these are quite good), while neglecting the desktop platform. The situation used to be *worse* before Mavericks, if you can believe it. The net result of this is that I had to take a legacy codebase, with numerous pecadilloes, and port it to what is almost, but not quite, a new graphics API.

Your Monday Morning rendering artifacts. (Sign up for our newsletter to see more broken stuff.)

Your Monday Morning rendering artifacts. (Sign up for our newsletter to see more broken stuff.)

Ugh.

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Afflictions, Jobs, Religion

October 29, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

I took a vacation last week. It was really, really weird. So here is a list of things we are working on this week around the office:

(This is what happens when Nicholas takes a vacation.)

This is what happens when Nicholas takes a vacation.

This is not part of the list, but it's cool.

This is not part of the list, but isn’t it cool?

Afflictions. Previously, we have a notion of “you get shot a bunch, you die.” This does not really convey the interesting damage model we were after. At the same time, we do not wish to start modelling individual colonist teeth like certain other games we know. The solution is afflictions, which I suspect has been inspired by our in-office game of Dominions 4. As units are damaged, they may receive afflictions. These afflictions may affect characters by giving them (currently) an equivalent to negative traits.

How do we fix these? Well, for now you don’t have a Physician or Doctor, so the local barber is what you’ve got. Or not so much what you’ve got, but, rather, the first stage of The Plan.

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