Brief Frontier Simulation Update!

October 23, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

And now we present a Daniel Jacobsen News Update – delivered at the speed of one of those newfangled steam-trains! What an exciting Age of Progress!

Characters now form relationships with other characters!  Right now it’s sort of like speed dating.  When they talk to each other, they get a chance to compare their traits and determine whether they are compatible, and within the scope of about 5 seconds, they might just fall in love.  Or they might hate each other. The frontier is a complicated place, charged with emotion.

Two conversations with rather different results.

Two conversations with rather different results.

Upon creating these relationships, characters tend to prioritize any task that will involve their partner, and they’ll be extremely upset if anything happens to them.  And if something bad does happen, they actually have an option other than crying, waiting to starve to death, and being driven to a homicidal rage!  Yes: they can drink ale to make themselves feel better.  Sleep helps too, but they don’t know it yet.  One day they may even be able to talk out their problems, but not today.  Oh no.  Not today.

Characters can also create rival relationships and they’re similarly extremely quick to judge, though they’re not actually nasty to each other just yet.

The barber forments rivalry with the NCO while others discuss hats (or talk to no one and just think about being hungry).

The barber foments rivalry with the NCO while other colonists discuss hats. And a labourer standing in the tools stockpile thinks about how very hungry she is because this colony has no food at all.

I was going to write about how difficult it is to actually implement other emotions than happiness and sadness, but… it’s not actually that hard, thanks to our design.  Given any situation, such as a loved ones’ death, we simply say, yeah, that would make a character really sad, slightly mad, and quite angry!  This affects the choices that they’ll make by increasing the utility of venting in various ways.  Anger increases the likelihood that they’ll start a brawl (they’re frontier people, that’s how it’s done!), sadness increases the likelihood that they’ll need another pint at the pub and a good cry, and so forth.  Things are going brilliantly, this is awesome.

You’re awesome too. Thanks for reading.

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How to Debug an Exploding Building

October 16, 2013 by Nicholas Vining

Things are afoot. As part of these things, we have had to do a few things that we have been putting off for awhile now here at Gaslamp HQ. One of these things is fixing pathing so people do not walk through each other; the other, which is what I have been working on, is a thorough shakedown of the building code.

As long-time readers are no doubt aware, one of our interesting pieces of technology is the code for procedural buildings. In Clockwork Empires, you designate a building footprint, feed it some style information (“brick walls and gabled roofs, please!”) and the engine churns out a building to your specification. There is significant Technical Devilry in our building code to do this, as it is a fairly hard problem to take somebody’s blueprint and get a building out of it.

As part of upcoming Things, one of the things we have been working on is a rewrite of our code for procedural buildings. The new code has a few key features that were requested by our art department:

1. It should not explode. (See this picture, arranged by David Baumgart and sent to me, of roofs exploding, set against a backdrop of early 2013 art.)

big_book_of_british_rooves2. Support for other roof types. (Roofs come in a number of different styles, and we should not blow up when we handle them.)

3. Less fragility when handling cuts in buildings (for things like modules, doors, windows.)

4. “Good” edge beveling for roof flashing. What this means is that when a roof faces the player, and has complex geometry, we should bevel it appropriately.

5. A litany of other, minor artist complaints.

Accomplishing all of these things requires a certain amount of very tricky programming, and some very skilled debugging. How do you debug an exploding roof?

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No Rock Is An Island

October 9, 2013 by David Baumgart

(– Unless, of course, it is.)

Let’s talk about rocks. And let’s start with a screenshot from in-engine:

Have a happy little mine. (Note that we're still working on implementing happy little mining accidents.)

It’s a happy little mine. (Note: we’re working on implementing happy little mining accidents.)

I hope we’re all familiar by now with how excited about the mundane I can get, see: loading bays, trees, etc. Rocks are totally mundane. But getting the mundane things just right is super important because it ties everything else together. High-poly fancy fantastic amazing show-off hero models & apocalyptic effects and animations are impressive, sure, but they need to exist within an artistic context that supports the claims they make and gives them meaning which resonates beyond their superficial visuals. Rocks tie the landscape together; The landscape is the stage on which the dramas of Clockwork Empires take place. Together they tie the whole game together.

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How Many Particles Can Dance On The Tooth Of A Sawblade

September 25, 2013 by David Baumgart

— Not nearly as many as can be emitted by a small oven, it turns out, due to what is probably a quirk of rendering that needs sorting out. More on that in a bit.

Nicholas has talked about particle system before in terms of technical development and something about the spelling of “aurochs” which, yes, we should all be on the same boat about now. This point established, the particle system has had some tools built and was turned over to the art team who, it seems, have a great deal of enthusiasm for making everything in the game sparkle, smoke, and on fire.

People are sleeping all over the floor of this carpentry shop because there aren't, in fact, any other houses in the settlement because this was set up for a screenshot. Thanks a lot, simulated people.

Sparking sawblades! (People are sleeping all over the floor of this carpentry shop because there aren’t, in fact, any other houses in the settlement because this is a Potemkin Workshop set up entirely for making a pretty screenshot. You can thank our character simulation for ruining the set-piece by making people sleep in the only existing shelter they could find.)

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What have you done!? (or: Terrible Histories)

September 18, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Oh man are we ever busy with a bunch of awesome stuff. There are a still a few fundamental engine issues that are being worked out (last I checked we can still accidentally spawn 10,000 Lua instances and destroy the world), but the biomes are starting to really look great, the art team is cranking out fantastic looking machines, people, and now particles (woo!), and the characters in the game are starting to get really upset whenever we start the game up to test a new feature and neglect to feed them.

It's always something.

It’s always something.

Characters will start telling anyone nearby who will listen that they’re really, really hungry.  They start thinking about hunger instead of doing work, and then they keel over.  That is, unless there’s *some* food available, but not enough.  Then they subsist for a while being generally grumpy as they go about filling steam balls and farming cabbages.  Could be worse, they could not have beds.  If they’re not sleeping on beds (which you need to make for them) they start sleeping outside. They really don’t like that.  It makes them angry and depressed.  Eventually the sleep deprivation will get to them and, uh, well currently they only have one terrible option — We’ll talk over some feature by the whiteboard for a while, look back at the screen, and there are just … bodies everywhere.

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Down On The Farm

September 11, 2013 by Nicholas Vining

Lots of good stuff is wandering through the game this week as we finish a bunch more systems and lurch towards The Great Content-ing:

– Immigration is in – bands of migrants will arrive, ranging from people for your work crews to upper class capitalists and the wretched Aristocracy. (Not implemented yet: the jolly Population Dispersal Zeppelin.) This is implemented handily via our newly-finished event system from a few weeks back; other random events that can happen at present are wretched Novyrus peddlers and Invasions From The Deep.

– Various screens are being implemented, and David is sending them back to me with lots of jolly comments about how terrible they look.

– On the technical front, good progress is being made on the loading and saving front, using a plaintext save-file format (actually, more XML) which will hopefully alleviate some of the problems with the binary approach we used with Dredmor.

But what I actually want to talk to you about today is farming. Inspired by the fact that our citizens have had nothing to eat but berries and the occasional hunk of meat scavenged off of an auroch for the past eight months, we decided to implement farming this week.

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Steampunk Central America: Adventures in Sort-of Verisimilitude

September 4, 2013 by David Baumgart

Well, we just wrapped up a two-pitcher lunch at the Sewer Brew Pub with a fan (hi Kris!), so you  know that means: time to write a blog post! So Daniel has been cranking through biome stuff and asked- no, let’s start this over.

The sky above Vancouver was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. Daniel entered the gently cultivated chaos of the art room and recoiled slightly. The chaos recoiled slightly back at him. 

“After Steampunk Colorado, what’s next?” — Oh, well then: we could do a desert. Lots of bones, dust, salt, jagged rocks. No? Really? I thought it’d be pleasant. Then perhaps a swamp, something lovely; Lots of plants, molds, miasma, large insects, fevers. No? Not a swamp? If we must then, let us set our sights on:

Steampunk Central America

White sand beaches, tropical forest, volcanoes, cenotes, deforestation, strange statues buried in the sand at the low elevations and giant, scowling basalt heads at the higher; beetles grazing in tropical meadows before wallowing in warm streams. It’ll be lovely. And we still get those fevers in.

It starts with a palette of colours, the right colour for the right sub-biome from the top of the topology to the bottom. It’s all layered like some kind of terrible cake full of dirt and growing trees. Below is a quick sketch I did to give an overview of what could be going on in a roughly Central American biome set:

Literally the broad strokes.

Literally the broad strokes. (And with apologies to our Central American readers — this is all about capturing a certain interpretation of a feeling of reality without being much arsed to be real reality. Which is about what CE is doing in general but with more steam engines. Would it help if I said the word “verisimilitude” here and waved my arms around? Good. It made me feel better too.)

Erupting with enthusiasm.

I’m erupting with enthusiasm for top-down concept maps for biome generation. (If you enjoyed that, I’ve got more. So many more. Er, to clarify: I’ve got both terrible puns *and* biome concept art.)

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